It took damned near half an hour for ol’ Blue to sniff his way through a maze of dimly lit staircases and sublevels, but Rice refused to believe his watchdog was taking them on a useless chase. Something had the alien’s attention, and it wasn’t the normal influx of alien pheromones that generally mixed in the air of a place like this. As long as they were far enough away, those scents, diluted, impossibly scrambled, usually succeeded only in making an alien confused and vaguely hyper, unlike the concentrated assault that ol’ Blue had launched against the jelly dealer and his customer the last time Rice had taken him on the street. Now that he was inside the Presley Hall Building, ol’ Blue was clearly onto a specific scent, and the only indication that the smell was an old one was his tendency to change direction almost ponderously.
Finally, they stood in front of a closed door painted in garish orange and guarded by a keypad that required a security code. Nothing else about the door indicated that it was anything special; the floor-level announcement they had seen on their last elevator ride had said LEVEL 1A in innocuous letters. Rice could see the surprise in his team members’ eyes; the men had climbed up and down so many staircases, sidetracked on more than a few elevators, then twisted through so many halls that they had all been convinced they were considerably farther below ground. Now, however, it looked like they were no farther down than a regular basement, but damned if it wasn’t a hard place to find. Ol’ Blue was getting downright jittery and Rice felt the palms of his hands beginning to dampen around his unyielding grip on the guidepoles; finally, after all this time, he and his team were going to get their hands on the elusive egg thief. Frankly, he wasn’t surprised to find it was one of these Synsound slugs… he’d suspected Synsound all along, although he still couldn’t fathom what the music company would want with an alien or an unhatched egg.
Higgins and Morton stood to either side of the orange door uncertainly, their expressions mirroring each other’s indecision. Well, well, well, Rice thought smugly. Special little secrets in here for certain. Aloud he said, “Come on, guys, let’s go—open it up. It’s way too late to back out now. Besides, you know that MedTech’s private investigations rarely result in prosecution. We go in, clean out the jelly, and skedaddle.” Rice gave Morton a toothy smile that made the men on his team smirk. “What better service can you get?”
For the first time, Morton looked over at his subordinate for support, but the younger man avoided his boss’s gaze, fixing on a spot on the floor somewhere in the vicinity of his right shoe. “I really should check with someone,” Morton managed. “This is a highly restricted area. I—I’ve never been in here before.”
With ol’ Blue as jumpy as a scared fly, it was a risk for Rice to firm up his grip on the guidepole with one hand and unholster his laser pistol with the other. “My patience with this is about worn out, Chief Morton. If you don’t open this fucking door, I’m going to burn it apart and then you and everybody else can explore the other side to your heart’s content. This is your last chance; punch in the code or step aside.”
Surrendering, Morton angrily jabbed four keys on the pad. Without a sound, the bright orange door slid aside, exposing a short, wide hallway without the benefit of light. From its other end a rectangle of glowing fluorescent light beckoned, and it was in that direction that ol’ Blue suddenly began lurching, nearly dragging the team members off their feet in his eagerness to get to whatever was inside.
“Whoa!” McGarrity exclaimed as he fought with the center guidepole of the alien’s harness and dodged a reflexive twitch of the creature’s tail. It was the first time the Irishman had spoken since their arrival back at the Presley Hall loading dock. “I’d say this ugly son of a bitch is getting right passionate about our expedition, Chief.”
“I’ll give him a mini-squirt,” Rice said. His thumb found and pressed the button on the box that controlled the Surgealyn; four more seconds, and the alien’s struggles melted away and he stood among the five men, docile and nearly silent as he swayed gently like some huge, hand-trained tropical parrot. God, the Surgealyn was so powerful—Good thing, too. When they stepped through the brightly lit doorway, it was obvious that sometime in the recent past, the room had been occupied by one of Blue’s own kind.
“Well, guys, I think it’s safe to surmise that the stolen egg has hatched,” Rice commented dryly. Standing with his men and the two Synsound security workers, they all stared at what was left—and it wasn’t much—of a dark-haired man lying on the floor next to a shattered electronic keyboard. Most of the man’s chest and abdomen were gone and the ragged edges of his broken ribs showed as stained white around the bloody hole in the center of his body; traces of scarlet dribbled down the sides of the nearby keyboard and splattered the floor around the corpse. “Any idea who he was?”
Morton cleared his throat, a sick expression on his face. “I think his name was Damon Eddington. He was a musician, or a composer. Something like that.”
“I’ve heard of him,” Higgins piped in. “Seen his picture on the Syndisc covers, too. Most people thought his music was kind of… weird.” No one seemed impressed.
“Looks like somebody’s pet got real pissed,” Rice said flatly. A blood-splashed empty jelly vial was partially jammed beneath the body and he pointed at it. “And here’s why.” Rice’s keen gaze tracked an intermittent trail of alien saliva away from the corpse until he nodded at another open doorway. “Anyone know where that leads?”
“I used to know this place fairly well when I was working city security,” Morez spoke up when neither of the Synsound men seemed inclined to volunteer the information. “The trip down here got me kind of turned around, but I think that might be another way to the stage.”
Silence followed Morez’s response as the three MedTech specialists considered the possibilities. The air in the large room stank of death, and to their left was a wall of quartz glass that showed an expansive area filled with the remains of humans and animals alike. Cracked human skulls were scattered amid the splintered and picked-over skeletons of larger beasts that could no longer be identified. The creature that had lived in there before tonight had obviously been well fed; taken into consideration with the door and stairs leading to the other levels of Presley Hall, the gaping, unguarded entryway to the enclosure promised more dark events before the night was over.
“Your ticket holders are gonna get a real show tonight,” said Rice. He nodded toward the opening. “Put ol’ Blue in there and give him a triple dose from the box before you close it up. That’ll hold him for a good three hours, until we can come back and pick him up.” McGarrity and Morez moved to do as Rice instructed, expertly steering the oversize alien through the waiting entrance.
“What does this mean?” Morton asked Rice as he and Higgins watched the alien being caged. “Are you saying there was an alien in here?”
“Here”—MedTech’s chief of security smiled placidly— “let me explain it.” He stepped closer and his hands snapped forward. “Dream time,” he said simply.
“Wha—hey!” Morton and Higgins both yelped as Rice pricked them simultaneously in the upper arms with lancets of Surgealyn. “What was… was… wha…”
Neither managed a complete sentence before they slid to the floor.
Rice held up the uncapped tips of the anesthetic vials for McGarrity and Morez to see. “They’ll be out for hours,” he announced. He tossed the used lancets at a nearby trash can, then carefully adjusted his gloves. “Hopefully this won’t take longer than that.” He motioned to his men to follow him into the waiting stairwell.
“But what if it does?” Morez asked worriedly. “What if ol’ Blue comes around? There’s no telling what kind of smells are in that enclosure. We didn’t even check it.”
Rice glanced at the cage’s window wall and saw ol’ Blue, crouched quietly on the other side, massive head hanging low from the effects of the anesthetic. He shrugged. “Well, the missing alien should be one of ol’ Blue’s own hive, and besides, Blue’s still fully harnessed. If he goes a little crazy, we’ll be all right as long as we can get close enough to grab the Surgealyn control.” He paused at the bottom of the stairs, listening. From somewhere deep in the building, the three of them could hear the throbbing of a concert in full swing on Presley Hall’s main stage.
“I hope you boys are ready to rock and roll,” Rice said softly as he grabbed the banister and took his first step. “I got a feeling the time has come to get down to the serious hunting.”