Amid the chaos, no one saw Ahiro and his best two men slip into Presley Hall through one of the many back entrances and swiftly make their way down to the apiary. They’d received the alert via Morton’s silent signal, and while Ahiro didn’t know the details of what the situation was, Presley Hall’s chief of security hadn’t been ordered to carry a satellite beeper linked to Ahiro so he could call the Japanese man for trivial matters. The summons could mean only one thing: Something was endangering the apiary, and Ahiro could not allow that to happen.
When they glided silently through the main entrance to the secret laboratory, however, what they found brought all three to a halt.
Then Ahiro strode to where Michael Brangwen stood, staring down at the mangled remains of Damon Eddington. “What happened here?” Ahiro demanded, looking from the dead man to the alien squatting complacently within the holding area. “How did—wait! That is not the same beast!” Dismayed, he stared at the thing on the other side of the glass.
“No,” Michael agreed, “it’s not.” There was no question about it; the creature in Mozart’s cage was bigger and older, with a darker cast to his carapace that made it more midnight-blue than Mozart’s black color. Behind the bracket of some kind of muzzle, its teeth were long and yellowed with age, and its sinewy arms were held firmly at its sides by a series of mesh sheets that connected in a sort of harness. Three long poles were connected to the harness at various points, and a thin tube made of steel and plastic fibers was embedded deep into the rear of the alien’s lower jaw; at its opposite end, the tube terminated in a small gray box with a bright red button on it. Except for his steady hissing, the alien, which had a more elongated and scarred shell covering its huge head, was strangely calm.
Ahiro hooked a finger onto the material of Brangwen’s coat and pulled the bioengineer to face him. “Then where is Mr. Eddington’s alien?” he asked. Thoughts spun in his head: the need to find the alien, not for Eddington but for Yoriku; the mystery of how they would return the creature to its cage, since Ahiro knew only how to kill them, not capture. Most of all, a sense of burgeoning shame at his failure to keep safe one of the possessions that Yoriku treasured so highly. He had thought Eddington was through with his musical project now that the last of the five men had been sacrificed to Mozart. What insane thing had the artist tried to do that had brought about this destruction?
“I think Mozart’s upstairs,” Michael told him. The older man’s face was pale and covered with perspiration, lined with the ravages of fear and shock. He waved his hands at the composer’s mutilated corpse. “I don’t know how it got out—Eddington must have done that, but I don’t know why. I can’t even find Darcy. But the alien was upstairs in the concert hall, Ahiro—just… slaughtering everyone in its way. It was terrible, death everywhere, people screaming and dying. I-I ran, but I didn’t know where else to go except back down here to see what happened. When I was leaving the balcony, there were three men just going in…”
At the sound of clattering footsteps behind them, Ahiro and his men automatically whirled and raised their swords. He heard only part of Michael’s next words—“Yes, those three!”—before he dismissed the presence of the older bioengineer from his mind. Three against three, he thought clearly. But as Ahiro and his men dropped instinctively into a fighting stance and began to move forward to close the forty-foot distance between them and their targets, he also knew they would never win.
“My life for you, Yoriku,” Ahiro whispered. “My destiny, for my friend, and my savior.”
Sacrifice time.
* * *
“Hold it right there,” Rice ordered coldly. “Don’t move a muscle.” There were three of them, dressed in historical ninja garb and holding wicked-looking swords. Rice didn’t know whether to be afraid or to laugh now that he was actually seeing them… ninjas? What kind of a corporate covert security team was that? Then again, he had heard that Synsound’s CEO was a traditional kind of guy who still held to centuries-old Japanese customs. Never underestimate, he reminded himself as he remembered the dead alien watchdogs back in the secret lab at MedTech; these guys were probably handpicked killers. Come to think of it, their swords were just the thing to succeed against one of the Homeworld creatures. Slice and dice on those arm and leg joints and a man could dance a jig around an alien, so long as he stayed out of range of that nasty double-mouthed head.
Still, sword against firepower left a lot of room for failure.
In spite of Rice’s warning, the three ninjas began a soft, fleet-footed advance, knees bent and swords upraised. Rice wasn’t about to let them get too close—and the combination of a trained martial arts leap and the full-armed swing of a hand bearing a sword meant they had about… oh, eighteen inches leeway.
“I’m only going to tell you this one time. I am not fucking around,” Rice warned again. “Halt or we’ll fire.” He dropped the grenade launcher—reloaded on the way back here—into position from its strap on his shoulder but their three opponents kept coming, the two in the rear following at the heels of their hard-headed leader. Their stubborn silence was eerie; was it just in the antique movies that ninjas made those screaming noises when they attacked? As the leader took another step and tensed to leap, Rice decided not to find out.
McGarrity and Morez had learned through the years to follow Rice’s body language, and their shots were nearly simultaneous with their chief’s. With just under twenty feet separating the two groups, the swords were no competition for the MedTech team’s heavy firepower; had the laser beam and bullets not found their marks— and they did—Rice’s grenade would have finished the Japanese trio anyway.
A four-second burst of light and noise, and the distinctly one-sided battle was over.
“Now there’s a waste of your life,” Morez said in disgust as he lowered his LaserFire pistol. “What the hell did they fight for? We would’ve let ’em go.”
“Bah—who knows how those weirdos think?” McGarrity pushed the edge of one of the dropped swords to the side with the barrel of his Redsteine. “They’re living in the wrong time period, and still trying to fight the same way.”
Rice snorted. “You see how much good it did them. Technology wins again and they bite the big one for nothing.” He flicked the power switch on the grenade launcher to OFF and didn’t bother to load it again, then his gaze swept the room. It was full of dead bodies—the three fools who had tried to attack them, the other man several feet away by the entrance to the cage that they’d put ol’ Blue into. Given the choice, Rice thought he would have preferred to die the way the ninjas had—it actually looked more merciful. The dark-haired guy on the floor resembled a rag doll that had been turned inside out.
Standing silently a few feet away was someone Rice and his men hadn’t seen before, an older man with thick white hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. Dressed in clothes that seemed too young for him, his glassy, shocked eyes were wide above the grim line of his mouth. It was doubtful the guy had simply wandered in here, so he must know something about what was going on—who the dead men on the floor were, why this place had been constructed, and who had engineered it, who had stolen MedTech’s egg. Why, this man was the answer to a whole slew of questions that had been eating at Rice for quite some time.
As the man finally seemed to regain the ability to focus on his surroundings, Rice met his gaze and found himself beginning to smile.