Kaiden Page 9

  Another pause, then finally, “I’ll buzz you in, sir.”

  Kaiden stepped inside a lobby littered with chairs. Oversized, colored blocks had been piled in the rear corner of the room in the child’s play area, and a dormant holovision set dominated one side of the waiting room.

  Taking in everything at once, he noticed two armed men awaiting him at the center of the room. One had a bottle in his hand, and both looked like they meant serious ass-kicking business.

  “You can take this,” the soldier told him.

  Scanning their weapons as well as their armor for weaknesses, he moved forward while they assessed him in return with appraising, intelligent eyes. One was jumpy, filled with anxiety and adrenaline, the other calmer with a calculated and cold demeanor. He was the one with the drugs in his fist.

  “You don’t look like a fixer,” he said accusingly. “Got money to pay for this?”

  “How much you want for it?” To his right, Kaiden saw a nurses’ station and check-in window, a thick pane of glass separating patients in the lobby from medical staff beyond. Floor-to-ceiling shelves of folders had been shoved over, their contents on the floor.

  “Five hundred quid and it’s yours. You look like you can afford it.” The guard dropped his eyes to Kaiden’s jacket.

  “Fine.” Kaiden reached beneath his jacket and squeezed the warm grip of his gun, every sense both cybernetic and natural telling him to remove it and shoot them dead.

  Each second of eye contact between him and the guards stretched long as an hour, until finally the guy with the drugs jerked back. “It’s D829!” he shouted. He threw down the drugs and raised rifle to pull the trigger.

  Kaiden ducked to the side. The bullet carved a shallow furrow in his arm, but he was more pissed about the ruined jacket that had been a gift from his mother. Damn. Thankfully, he knew a girl in engineering who did leatherwork. If he smiled at her, she’d probably sew him a whole new jacket.

  Two more guards swarmed in from a back room, both unaware of the silent figure dropping from the ceiling behind them. Nisrine took down the nearest with a single thrust of her phase sword. The blade burst through his chest from behind, covered in seared flesh and human viscera.

  As bullets sprayed the lobby, he dove to his right and flung a chair at his assailants. Between the chair’s weight and the force behind his throw, the guard stumbled into the wall and his shot went wide. Armor-shredding rounds in Kaiden’s hand cannon perforated the other attacker and filled him with three neat holes in his chest. It could have become a scene from a Wild Western flick, but Nisrine made short work of the men distracted by their cybernetic intruder. A head rolled from its shoulders, the phase sword cleaving it with the ease of slicing fruit.

  After killing the second guard, Nisrine dashed in for the remaining member of the squad. Kaiden moved faster, rising to a knee from where he’d fallen to fire at the guard he’d bashed with a chair. It left a round hole in the center of the man’s faceplate. He dropped to the floor, unmoving.

  “They were prepared for us, but they weren’t expecting you to bypass security and come down behind them,” Kaiden said.

  “They recognized you, even in disguise,” Nisrine said.

  “Aye. He knew my patient designation.” A mystery he’d have to solve later. “Are there more of them?”

  She shook her head. “No. The only guy in back charged out when they began firing.”

  While Kaiden shrugged out of his jacket to inspect the damage to his left arm, Nisrine crouched beside one of the dead guards and tugged off his armored gauntlet to scan for his identity chip. Every piece of equipment covering the men was military-grade armor, the good stuff given to their combat troops on the ground.

  “Kaiden… you aren’t going to like this.”

  “Like what? Who is he?”

  “Have a look.”

  When she removed the corpse’s helmet, Kaiden’s recognition program provided the answer. One by one, he scanned the other three men and came to the same conclusion. “They’re all British Army.”

  “But what are they all doing here? This isn’t a military facility.”

  “They’re all assigned to the same orders: security. No location available.”

  Nisrine frowned. “What command?”

  “Doesn’t say. Files are redacted.” A trace of bitterness seeped into his voice as he said, “Probably special forces or some secret group created for this purpose. Much like me. They liked creating new projects, you know? They chose a handful of us to participate, all psychics trained to be one-man reconnaissance teams. That’s what I was doing when I was taken seven years ago.” He rubbed his face with one hand.

  “But you were taken mid-mission, the only man on your squad to disappear. The rest all came home.”

  Kaiden shrugged, having no answers for her, and steered the subject away from himself. “We need to find out what they were doing here.”

  Without lowering their guard, they used a keycard from the fallen guards and left the lobby behind. A narrow hallway led to patient examination rooms, another door to the right identified with ADMINISTRATION in bold letters. Within seconds of entering, Kaiden stumbled over a motionless body sprawled across the floor in blue nurse’s scrubs. Three more corpses leaked over piles of manila folders soaked in fuel. The sharp odor infiltrated his nose and burned his eyes.

  Behind him, Nisrine spoke up in a quiet voice. “They killed the medical staff. There’s a dead doctor in the first examination room, too.”

  At first glance, the clinic appeared to be a legitimate medical facility with all of the technological equipment necessary, from a cybernetic neuro-osteogenic imaging machine to a small outpatient surgical theater. Things changed as they approached the next security station, which Kaiden deactivated by habit as Nisrine raised the card to the slot.

  “Sorry,” he apologized.

  “No, you’re all right. I forget someti—”

  Movement rippled across his senses, the scrape of metal against fabric picked up by his enhanced hearing. “Got someone in this next room,” Kaiden cut her off with a sharp whisper. Quieting, Nisrine traded her sword for a gun and prepared to go in first.

  “One, two, three.” Kaiden threw open the door and Nisrine rushed through, sweeping to the right with her gun raised. He followed, taking the left.

  Sterile gray tiles covered the walls and floor, and a three-celled cage ran the length of the back wall. Kaiden followed Nisrine’s horrified gaze to the rightmost cell and froze.

  A woman—at least, she’d once been a woman—hurled herself against the metal bars, reaching out with scaled hands and curved talons in a futile attempt to reach them. A vertical, reptilian slit ran across her pupils and chestnut fur grew in uneven patches across her canid face. The mixture of so many DNA markers in her appearance twisted Kaiden’s stomach and made her only partially recognizable as a human. She could have passed as alien; some newly discovered race of creatures found across the cosmos.

  “There’s another one here. Dead.”

  Nisrine shook off her shock and crossed over to a nearby gurney with a corpse strapped to it. The man’s entire left arm had been replaced with cybernetics, grafted to a body covered with mottled brown and copper scales. Three bullet holes, sticky with coagulating blood, riddled his chest.

  “They murdered him because they knew we were coming. Have you ever seen a splice like this?”

  She shook her head. “No. There shouldn’t be physical characteristics like this if they followed established protocols. One trait, maybe two if it wasn’t an optimal DNA union, but never something like this.”

  “I’ve only met a couple splicers before. Small-scale stuff, like Thandie with her enhanced eagle vision or this guy from my old squad who had a nose like a wolf. He could sniff out a days’ old trail like it was just made. What the hell were they trying to achieve here with this dude, though?” Radical changes to the man’s bone structure made it impossible for Kaiden to identify him by facial rec
ognition.

  “Patient 638. That’s all this chart says. Any idea who he might be?”

  After Kaiden lifted each of the corpse’s hands and studied his fingers pads, he leaned over and scanned the disfigured face. “No. Haven’t a clue. They even scorched off his fingerprints. Impossible to put a name to him.”

  Initiating facial reconstruction sequence. A ghostly blue silhouette arose from the man’s cheeks, creating a stronger brow and a slim nose. This changed and adjusted several times as if Kaiden were molding a face with virtual clay each time he discovered a new identifying mark. Moles, blemishes on the neck, and tiny scars on the naked body’s knee and knuckles told a story, and within seconds, another face stared up at him like a semi-translucent mask.

  “Matthew Lyons. Royal Navy specialist medically discharged three years ago. Age thirty-two. Separated from his wife of five years following an incident of domestic abuse.”

  “And her?” Nisrine gestured to the growling figure in the cage.

  The sequence initiated again. “Jiani van Garten, age forty-three. Tallulah native. She was reported dead four years ago after coming in for a high fever. Reports state she was a victim of the Grenian Plague that swept through these slums.

  “They incinerate bodies afflicted with the plague. It’s too contagious to risk.”

  Kaiden rubbed the bridge of his nose. His head felt stuffy, congested with sinus pressure suddenly. “Easy enough to hand someone a pile of ashes while they kept her locked up in here. But why?”

  Nisrine took the woman’s chart. “My guess is they determined she was compatible for the procedure, but stealing her away like this, faking her death, it’s sick.”

  “Now what?”

  “There’s a basement,” Nisrine said.

  “Everything terrifying is always in the basement. They treated this woman worse than an animal. What more could they have?”

  Prepared for the worst, they descended a quiet stairwell lined with immaculate tiles. A single gurney with a bloodstained sheet obstructed their path to the double doors of a surgical hall at the end.

  The smell reached them before they even opened the doors leading to Operating Theater 03. Eyes squinted against the pain of what Kaiden recognized as psychic overload, Nisrine moved ahead of him. Just then, he became aware of the life support machines in the adjacent room.

  The astringent smell of antiseptics and medical fluids flooded the hall. His reluctance to enter intensified when Nisrine doubled over and vomited, staggering a few steps to the side.

  God, he didn’t want to enter that room. Though he already knew what they’d find, he didn’t want to see it with his own eyes and witness the horror that twisted a seasoned operative’s stomach. But he had to, because this was his mission, and he’d known what he was signing up for the moment Admiral Scarot asked if he was prepared.

  Overcoming his fears, Kaiden stepped through the doors and into a small pocket of hell. Black spots edged in on his vision, his pulse pounded in his ears, and a nauseous sense of vertigo threatened to make him sick. Behind him, he heard Nisrine retching.

  Chop shop was too mild a term for what they found. It was a slaughterhouse.

  At some point within the past day, a doctor had split Subject C89’s sternum with a saw and opened the chest like a pair of French doors. Life support functions produced a viable heart rhythm while an operating team of programmed droids misted the open cavity with saline. On the adjacent table, a body missing the top of its cranium lay with electrodes sticking out from an exposed brain laced with cyber chips and a glistening weave of nanofilaments.

  More bodies and parts littered the many counters and operating tables, each in worse condition than the last.

  It could have been him. But for some reason, he’d been deemed valuable to the corporation.

  While his heart slammed inside his chest, Kaiden moved further inside the room with his handgun raised. The hairs on the back of his neck raised, a cool tingle raising goosebumps over his skin.

  “Room’s clear of all hostiles,” he said to Nisrine. A white boot came into his view, protruding from behind a tool bench. As he moved around for a better look, he found their Doctor Frankenstein lying in a puddle of his own blood. The body hadn’t yet cooled.

  Kaiden crouched beside him and checked the name on his badge. A. Moore. “Doctor’s dead. Looks like one of our security guys got to him first.”

  Nisrine joined him, shaky but under control. “In this case, I say he deserved it.”

  Upon backtracking into the sterile corridor, they returned to the offices and found the one assigned to Doctor Moore. The desk had been cleared, cabinets emptied beside a cardboard box filled to the top with documents marked confidential.

  “Whoever killed the doctor cleared out the desk.” Nisrine pulled over the box and flipped through its contents.

  “Anything of interest in there?”

  “I didn’t want to believe it.” Nisrine’s voice trembled. “These are official military records, dated and stamped with approval from High Command. No authorizing name attached, though, but the seal is legitimate.”

  Pressure blossomed behind Kaiden’s left eye, building despite his attempt to ignore it. What had initially felt like the onset of a bad allergy attack became worse, pounding in his head.

  “Don’t want to believe our government could have its fingers in so many pies?” he asked, gripping the edge of the desk. He gritted his teeth against the sudden discomfort.

  “What they’re doing is outlawed—by them. The queen would never support this.”

  “What she doesn’t know—gah!”

  Nisrine’s eyes snapped from the documents to his face. “Kaiden?”

  A miniature explosion of agony detonated behind his temples. He staggered back from the sudden pain as it sent ripples through his skull. Sharp, throbbing stabs continued at consistent intervals until he could barely open his eyes and he was forced to squint at Nisrine through tears.

  The room in front of him blurred in and out, like a poorly focused camera lens. After he staggered to his left and caught his balance against a desk, he saw Nisrine hurrying to him. Wet warmth dripped down over his lip, and when he instinctively wiped with his wrist, he left a red smear on the back of his hand.

  “Your nose is bleeding.” She grabbed a wad of tissues from the desk.

  “Don’t feel so hot suddenly.”

  “That’s an understatement. We need to get you out of here.” She ducked under his arm and used her body to support his considerable weight, but he didn’t think she could hold up all three hundred pounds of him.

  “M’sorry,” he slurred. “Don’t know what’s happening. Never felt…”

  No, no. Can’t fall unconscious. Can’t make her responsible for me.

  His body didn’t want to cooperate, limbs sluggish and movements difficult. He couldn’t see where she led him, blind, deaf, and helpless as blood continued to seep from his nose.

  “Kaiden? Kaiden, stay with me.” Even the sensation of her fingers on his shoulder began to fade, and then Kaiden knew nothing more.

  Nisrine closed out her call with Joaquin after filing her report about the facility. Common sense and loyalty had warred when it came to disclosing Kaiden’s disabled state, but in the end, she had withheld the information. If she’d mentioned it, her companion would no doubt find himself recalled to the Jemison or admitted to some military hospital where he’d face an uncertain fate. His dedication and defiant warning to the mysterious listener in Watson’s mansion told her he’d sooner die than lose his sole opportunity for revenge.

  Behind her, Kaiden lay where she’d left him on the bed after taking his vitals. He’d been stable by the time they reached the ship, although it had taken all of her willpower to follow protocol rather than rush him to the nearest base and demand for some cyberdoctor to deliver care to him. Xander was too far away, days of travel between Tallulah and Albion.

  She waited and kept a close physical watch on him while s
orting through documents taken from the clinic. Occasionally, she twisted in her seat and studied him, even touching his mind with her psychic senses to guarantee a feeble sense of him remained.

  He hadn’t died. Her friend—she’d grudgingly come to call him a friend, rather than a mere partner and fellow agent—was somewhere locked inside the listless body on the bed.

  To pass the time, Nisrine showered and donned fresh clothes, then nibbled a snack from the fridge. She needed the calories to replenish what she’d lost when tapping her telekinetic powers and lifting her companion off the ground. He was a heavy man, and some time had passed since she’d utilized them for an extended exercise.

  “Calm. I have to remain calm,” she muttered to the quiet kitchen. So she did. Panic helped nothing, but silence and meditation soothed her frayed nerves until she brewed a cup of tea. She had long ago reached the point of exhaustion, but she didn’t dare sleep until he regained consciousness.

  Kaiden groaned in the next room. “Nis—Lieutenant?”

  “I’m right here,” she called, hurrying back to him.

  He sat with the sheets pooled around his waist. She’d stripped the bloodstained shirt from him and washed his chest, determining propriety could go to hell.

  “How did we get back?”

  “I took you out the front door in plain sight.”

  “Huh? Without anyone noticing?”

  She smiled and smoothed her fingers over his brow, pleased with the lack of fever. “A gurney and a medical jacket make a lot of eyes look away, especially in a slum.”

  “Ballsy move.”

  “But it worked.” The moment she dropped her hand, Kaiden lurched to his feet and stumbled before he made it to the door. He blinked his green eyes, which had already watered over in pain.

  “I’m fine,” he lied, jaw clenched and eyes half-slitted.

  She hurried to his side and slipped an arm around his back. “Hey. Don’t rush to get on your feet again. We don’t know what happened to you yet.”