“I’m Chief Phillip Rice, MedTech Security. I think we need to have a little conversation,” the security officer said. His teeth were very white and in perfect, enviable condition as he smiled. There was nothing friendly about the expression. “And there are some minor matters that need to be cleared up, Mr—” He looked at Michael pointedly.
In Presley Hall, the thundering of the weapons discharging as Michael had fled had been swallowed up by the crowd, simply more big noises amid the screams. There the weapons of the white-suited men had sounded like airhammers and the whine of the laser bullets ricocheting off the walls had made Michael’s teeth ache until he’d escaped the frenzy and fled back here.
But the nightmare wasn’t over; now it faced him in the form of this brawny black man with the commanding voice who was wearing what Michael ultimately recognized as the power uniform of MedTech’s Elite Security Force.
“Brangwen,” Michael finally managed to choke out.
“Brangwen.” The smile was already gone, replaced by a look that would have frozen boiling water. “We can start with the identity of the person who stole the alien egg.”
Michael wasn’t going to be senseless enough to pretend he didn’t know what the man was talking about; instead, he decided to try a different tactic. “Do you have jurisdiction here?” he asked uncertainly. “You’re from MedTech, not the metro police—”
“Anything involving an alien—from the egg to the jelly to the creature itself—is considered a drug investigation and falls within our purview. So you can answer our questions here or… let’s just say I can make life really miserable for you. If I decide to let you live.” The flashing smile reappeared, then dropped off his face again with alarming swiftness. “I’m getting pretty fucking tired of all these games. It’s your choice, old man,” he said frostily. “What’ll it be?”
When Michael looked at him helplessly, the man nodded and folded his arms. “I thought so. I’ll keep it simple and to the point.” Suddenly the MedTech security officer was right in his face, and Michael could hear suppressed fury in the man’s voice as his hot, heavy breath washed over the bioengineer’s face. A few feet behind their chief, the other two men looked absurdly amused.
“Who stole the egg, damn it?”
Michael started to point at Damon Eddington, then realized that doing so wouldn’t be entirely truthful. If he lied now, he would be as guilty as any of the dead men, and it wasn’t his fault that the egg had been stolen; he was just a Synsound employee, one more flunkie worker in the hive. When the assignment to work on this project had come to his desk, he had packed up his materials and gone, the age-old employer/employee connection automatically coming into play: You want me to jump? How high? As far as he was concerned, the egg had been “procured.”
“He—they did,” he finally answered, his damning finger moving from the direction of Eddington’s corpse to the blasted remains of Ahiro and his ninjas. “They were the ones who brought it here, anyway.”
Rice’s gaze flicked from Ahiro to Eddington. “And who wanted it? Him?”
Michael nodded. “He was going to make music from its screams—a symphony. He—”
Rice waved his hand impatiently in the air and Michael shut up. Apparently this man didn’t care about the details, and who could blame him? With nearly everyone dead, the information Michael could fill in was limited anyway. The chain of command pretty much ended here with Ahiro; above him was Keene, but Michael would bet that slippery son of a bitch would simply point right back at the dead Japanese man and say that personally he’d known nothing about it. Any paper or computer trail would be obliterated—hell, it probably already had been.
“And what about those people? Who were they?”
Michael jumped, then flushed deeply when he realized that Rice was standing at the window to the alien enclosure, staring past the new alien to the scattering of bones inside. There was no disguising the fact that many… well, most… of the bones that were still recognizable were human. It was strange to see a Homeworld life-form sitting so quietly, not the slightest bit interested in its surroundings; Michael hadn’t realized they could be controlled like that. “I-I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “The first man was a jelly cultist who volunteered to hatch the egg. I was told the rest were drifters and addicts, people like that. I didn’t like it, but there was nothing I could do. I’m just an employee…” Michael heard himself starting to whine and closed his mouth abruptly. There remained the question of the identity of the man who Michael clearly remembered had claimed to be a MedTech executive, but what good would revealing that do now? The project had already blown up in Synsound’s corporate face and the responsible parties, most of them at least, were dead. Who was left to prosecute for being involved in this—and there was no doubt that MedTech would prosecute if it discovered that one of its own employees had literally been fed to Mozart in some secret Synsound laboratory—besides him? Darcy perhaps, but he made himself believe that she was probably at home and knew nothing about what had happened here tonight. Anyway, why should the two bioengineers, the grunts of the whole project, take the fall for the high-powered businessmen? On the other hand, if the man questioning Michael found out later that he had lied…
“Interesting,” Rice muttered. His eyes glittered as he looked at Michael, then back to the grisly contents of the cage. The older man’s heart thudded painfully. “It could be anyone in there. Maybe we should—”
“Maybe we should give ol’ Blue in there another dose of dope if we’re going to stick around here much longer,” one of the other MedTech men suggested. “Before he starts to come out of it.”
Rice glanced at the alien thoughtfully, then turned away from the glass with a shake of his head. “Nah—forget it. Let’s just pack him up and head back to MedTech. Listen to me carefully, old man.” He pointed emphatically at Michael, then at the dead men at their feet. “See what fucking around with MedTech and its property got these fools?” His hand went to his helmet and he pulled down a dark blue visor that covered half his face, but Michael could still see a hint of his dangerous gaze. “You tell Synsound not to try this kind of shit again unless it wants a full-fledged war. If they do, I’ll be happy to oblige.”
* * *
Rice and his men were gone quickly, after less than three minutes of grappling with the guidepoles on the harness that was strapped around their alien. Now the apiary lab was empty and silent, the only sound the quiet hum of the computers that were never powered down and the fainter noise of the air circulation units. It had been a long time since this place was this hushed, without even the sound of alien hissing to cut through the stuffy room.
Where was Darcy, anyway? Michael had speculated earlier that she’d gone home, but that couldn’t be—they were still under orders not to leave Presley Hall. A scarier, sadder possibility was that between Damon’s madness and her fixation with the alien’s behavior, she might be one of the butchered lumps of flesh within Mozart’s now-empty enclosure that Michael couldn’t bring himself to examine more closely. It was a cruel end for a young woman, and she didn’t deserve to die for being, like himself, another of Synsound’s foolish, dedicated puppets. Wandering from one piece of equipment to another, loath to stay but afraid to leave, Michael’s mind craftily filled in the voices that were missing from the room, all of them—from Damon Eddington, Ken Petrillo and the other dead subjects, to Darcy’s and that of the overbearing MedTech Security Chief who had just left. Payback on this project was going to be heavy, and this was a room full of ghosts; among the guilty, he was the only survivor.
Michael wasn’t sure, but he thought the next step was to call Keene, but he decided to leave that mess to the two Presley Hall security men who were still alive when he checked them. They could handle that end of things when they came around—no doubt Rice and his men had injected them with something to keep them out of the way. Pacing around the room and going from body to body with a sort of undeniable morbid fascination, Michael stopped by Ahiro’s corpse and stared down at the Japanese man. Alive, Ahiro had worn a perpetual slight frown that had accentuated the scar across his eyebrow and made him look continually ominous and unapproachable, definitely someone you didn’t want holding a grudge against you. In death, his face was smooth and surprisingly unlined, as if he’d had little to worry about during his lifetime beyond whatever orders were issued by… who? Michael couldn’t see Mr. Keene as having that kind of hold over this man who had been simultaneously unconcerned about Keene but passionate about fulfilling Eddington’s every wish, and he still remembered Eddington’s puzzled look when he and Darcy had first mentioned Ahiro. Obviously, Ahiro had acted on the orders of someone much more elevated in the Synsound hierarchy; Yoriku, perhaps, but at this point, Michael would probably never be sure. He thought briefly of going through the man’s pockets on the auspices of looking for the name of someone to call, and even started to bend and gingerly pat the side pockets of Ahiro’s black slacks. Abruptly Michael dismissed the idea; doing so would obligate him to do the same for Eddington, and frankly, that was Synsound’s job. They’d gotten themselves into this situation; they could handle the dirty work of notifying family members themselves. Before he straightened, however, Michael saw something white clipped to the inside of the right pocket of the dead man’s pants, a plastic card that would have been invisible when Ahiro was walking around. Curiosity wouldn’t let Michael ignore it, and a closer inspection showed it to be a computer keycard with a MedTech logo on it. Across the bottom in Ahiro’s spiky writing—Michael recognized it from the signatures on a hundred work orders and disbursements—was the name “Eddie McGarrity.” The name sounded familiar—had he seen it somewhere recently?—but he couldn’t tie it into anything. Perhaps among the blameworthy in this death-soaked project, there were even those at MedTech.
It was time to leave this place. Surely the orders to stay on the grounds were moot now that the project had been destroyed. The smell of blood crawled up his nose like wet metal and permeated the room, and Michael decided he might as well get out of here before it settled into his clothes and forced him to carry this ordeal home. He was still hearing voices in his head, whispers of blame as he remembered himself not, perhaps, protesting enough when all those men were fed to Mozart as part of Eddington’s experiment. As he gathered up the few personal items he’d brought in, he thought he could hear Darcy’s voice, too, unaccountably louder than the accusing murmurs in his own head. It wasn’t until he’d swept his belongings into a bag and stopped for a final look around that he began to think it wasn’t his imagination after all. Standing suddenly still and silent in the center of the bloodied lab, clutching his paper bag by its edges to halt the sound of crumpling paper, there was no mistaking it—
“Help…”
Faint, but there—somewhere.
When the cry came again, Michael dropped the bag and ran through the gaping entrance to the alien enclosure, his heart suddenly pounding painfully inside his chest. Was it Darcy? It sounded like her, but it was so faint it was hard to tell, and he didn’t trust his overactive imagination not to lie when it told him that it was his companion bioengineer. Stepping into Mozart’s cage was like stepping into a portion of hell and the smell of decomposing flesh made Michael gag outright, temporarily blotting out the nearly inaudible call. It was little comfort knowing that the slowly disintegrating piles of… meat around him could never have talked; he was half-afraid that any one of them—or all of them—would sit up and grab at his ankle as he scurried past.
“Please…”
He hesitated at the mouth of the escape tunnel, fighting a sudden bout of claustrophobia. The voice was definitely feminine—it had to be Darcy. But how on earth had she gotten in here? If she’d gone in after the alien was freed, there would be no reason for her to be trapped. The only other way Michael could think of for her to end up inside the enclosure was—
Eddington!
Heart thudding, the older bioengineer scrambled into the tunnel, gritting his teeth against a concentrated smell that was ten times worse than it was in the larger outer chamber. He was shocked to see the walls of the tunnel encrusted with dark, gooey resin in deep, circular ridges that were clearly the instinctive setup for future nesting. Climbing over a corpse with sticky locks of blond hair showing above the whitish strands of cocoon material was like seeing a nightmare with his eyes wide open, and Michael hoped to God he found the source of the cry for help soon—
“Here…”
—because he really didn’t think the overloaded heart in his aging, pudgy body could take much more of this.
Finally, the side tunnel; too small for Mozart but Michael could fit—barely—and he inched his way along the steel-gray length, bruising his knees and elbows, banging his head too many times to count as he realized he was following a trail of sticky blood. He could see the other end of the tunnel where, true to Eddington’s cruel nature, it intersected the larger tunnel that had easily accommodated Mozart’s oversize body. The opening was clear, which meant that only one place could’ve held Darcy undetected for this long: the small escape hatch that Michael had nearly forgotten about. When he finally pulled himself to its edge and peered over, his mouth dropped open. Darcy was there, all right, her face pale and bloodless and seeming to float in the darkness below. He reached for her instinctively, finding her hands and wrapping his fingers around hers; her skin was moist, waxy, and frigid, the fingernails blue. “Darcy,” he managed, “are you hurt? Can you climb out?”
“Can’t,” she whispered, “he… got my ankle.” Her eyes were dull and barely open. “Listen to… me. Have to… tell you.” She fought to keep going, her voice fading in and out like the poor reception of an antique transistor radio. I was… right about… establishing a… bond, Michael. Remember? What I told you… before… what we talked about? Mozart, he… hesitated. Just for… a moment.”
Her voice dropped away and Michael reached for her, frantically checking for a pulse. He found one, but it was erratic and thready, and he didn’t dare try to drag her out of the tunnels by himself. Clambering his way down to the opening at the opposite end, intent on the telephone in the outer lab of the apiary, he couldn’t help but marvel about the fixation that still existed in Darcy’s heart for this project. Lying there, too weak to reach the alarm and nearly dead, perhaps not expecting to survive as she forced herself to tell him about it.
Michael could have sworn she was smiling.