THE ESCAPE

She got on the gurney and let them strap cuffs back around her wrists and ankles, securing them to the gurney frame and giving her only about fifteen centimeters of play. Then they wheeled her out the door and into the hall, Shaw and his aide at her head, the marines following about a meter behind. Nova watched their eyes, and they remained alert, weapons up. At least they weren’t wearing combat suits, but they would not be surprised easily. If she had her normal teek abilities, two armed marines would have posed little threat, but she had no idea what, if anything, she had left. It was one thing to decide to escape, but another to actually do it, and she began to wonder whether she would be able to seize an opportunity when the time came.

The medical unit was on the same level, and they reached it quickly. Shaw directed them to the center of the room, where surgical lights and equipment were already set up. The aide locked the gurney wheels in place while the marines took up positions at the door.

Shaw came around and touched her forehead, smoothing away tendrils of hair in a pantomime of fatherly tenderness. “We’ll make this quick,” he said, his eyes glittering. “The machine will administer two drugs. One will further dampen your psionic abilities, while the other will render you immobile. You’ll be conscious and will have some sensation, but your limbs will be paralyzed. This way we can ask you questions as we go and make sure we’re not too … deep. The brain is a delicate organ, you know, and the neural implant is difficult to remove. Once we begin, you can answer by blinking once for yes, twice for no. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

He’s enjoying this, Nova thought. He’s keeping me awake for the shock value. The idea made her furious, her heart beating faster, blood flushing her skin. “You’re going to regret this,” she said. “I promise you that.”

Shaw blinked and swallowed, then quickly recovered. “Agent Terra, I’m surprised at you. Threatening me could make me nervous, and that’s a bad thing. I wouldn’t want an accident to occur during surgery.” He smiled and motioned to the aide, who instructed a robot arm with a saline drip bag to deploy. “I’m just going to open a vein,” Shaw said, busying himself with the plastic tube and needle, sliding it smoothly into her arm and taping it off neatly at her elbow. Then he took three leads and attached them to her forehead. “I grew up on Tarsonis, you know,” he said, checking with the AI readout to make sure the flow was operating. “My parents worked for yours, actually, at your apartment building. Mother helped clean; Father cooked for you. They were there the day of the attack. The rebels didn’t hurt them, but you, and your … mind blast, it killed them both instantly.”

Nova remembered how he had looked at her when she first woke up after the incident with the zerg on Altara, how he had thought the word murderer. He’d managed to hide the rest of it from her somehow, but it all made sense. “The terrorists killed my family,” she said. “Shot my brother right in front of me. I was just a girl. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

“Ah, yes,” Shaw said. “Of course not. We never mean for the worst to happen, do we? That’s the sad part. But we’re all responsible for our own actions.” He held her gaze for a moment. “Me, for example. What you did to my family motivated me to join Bennett’s team. Now here I am, after all these years, face-to-face with their murderer. I’ve been waiting for this moment. I have to say, I feel … vindicated.”

Nova stared at the saline bag hanging on the arm, then at the silver steel tray holding the surgical instruments Shaw would use on her. They looked like torture devices. Just beyond was the monitor that showed a running list of vital signs, brain-wave activity, and other data. This was the computer that would begin pumping the drugs into her system any minute.

She had the sudden, terrible feeling that regardless of what Bennett and Tosh wanted, Shaw did not intend for her to come out of this alive.

“I’ll be right back,” Shaw said, holding up his hands. “A bit of a scrub, and we’ll be ready to go.” He motioned to the aide, and they disappeared through another door.

Nova glanced at the marines, who still stood on either side of the door and stared out into space somewhere above her head. Now was her chance. But when she narrowed her focus to the shackles around her wrists, nothing happened but a faint tinkling of the chains. No. She took a deep breath and tried again. Still nothing but the slightest movement. She wasn’t strong enough.

She was so preoccupied with her efforts that she didn’t notice the change in the monitor at first. But finally the blinking drew her gaze, and she turned to find that the running data summary had been replaced by a repeating line of text: NOVA TERRA.

Nova glanced back at the marines. The monitor’s screen was angled away enough that she didn’t think they could see it.

Nova, it’s Lio Travski.

How could Lio be communicating with her through a computer? And how would she be able to talk back?

The answer came quickly, scrolling across the screen: The electrodes are connected to this monitor. Just think what you want to say and I can read your brain waves.

But how are you here?

I live inside the data stream now. I can be anywhere, access any data set inside any system known to mankind. And some alien systems as well.

You’re helping the spectres, aren’t you? Nova couldn’t ignore her feelings of dismay at the thought, even though she’d suspected it earlier: Lio had been responsible for taking down the Dominion’s communications center during the earlier attack on Augustgrad. If he’d infected their entire network like a virus, the spectres could control everything else. He would have to bypass Dominion firewalls and gain access to the mainframes, which was no easy trick. But once he got inside that system, it would be mutiny by machine. All marine communications, nuclear launch codes, power grids—everything would be at their mercy.

This world you live in is flawed. The xel’naga, a culture I have studied carefully, left it behind long ago. Terrans and protoss and zerg battle for the remaining scraps at the table. I am interested in expanding terran consciousness. It is time for a revolution, and I had thought terrazine could be the answer. But its side effects are significant, and my alliance with Tosh is of growing concern. There is little control to this experiment.

Experiment? People are dying. Many more will die, if Bennett has his way.

If that is true, so be it.

You can’t believe that, Lio. I know you. You can’t possibly believe that what Gabriel has done is right.

There is no right and wrong for me. Not anymore.

A soft hiss brought her back to reality with a jolt: the drugs were being dispersed into her system. She tried frantically to reach the needle in her vein, but the shackles did not have anywhere near enough play. Lio, they’re about to operate on me, open up my skull. I need your help. Can you stop the injection?

Nothing.

Lio, please. I don’t have time to explain. But this isn’t right. Shaw’s going to kill me and make it look like an accident. Nova flashed back on the battle with Lio for control of the academy’s Sparky computer system, and the young ghost trainee Colin Phash and his remarkable skills at astral projection, the memories flooding back, powerful enough to make her gasp. The terrible loss at Lio’s apparent death hitting the team hard, hitting her harder than she could have imagined. She squeezed her eyes shut and sent every ounce of her will through a single, focused thought: If our friendship ever meant anything to you, trust me now.

For a moment she thought he had left her, but then the hiss of the machine’s hydraulics stopped. She sighed with relief, but it wasn’t enough, not yet. She still had to get the shackles off and deal with the marines.

A moment later Shaw and the aide returned. They had donned surgical gowns and had masks hanging around their necks. “The moment of truth,” Shaw said, approaching the gurney. He was smiling again. “You can hear me, I’m sure, but you won’t be able to move now. The succinylcholine acts quickly.”

He paused, glancing back and forth between the machine and the IV needle as if confused, then leaned over her, his breath hot on her skin.

Even with the shackles holding her down, he was close enough to touch.

She grabbed his wrist in her right hand and yanked him down on top of her, grabbing his throat with her left hand and clamping down hard. Shaw gave a strangled yelp and thrashed his legs until she squeezed even harder, and he froze.

The marines had leveled their weapons at her, but she was partly protected by Shaw’s body. “You move a muscle, and I’ll rip his Adam’s apple out,” she said. “I have enough left in my tank to teek a bullet right back at you, so don’t even think about firing those weapons.” It was worth a shot; she just had to hope they believed her. Then she glanced at the aide, who was standing just about a meter away. “Open these cuffs,” she said. “Do it. Now!”

The two marines, big, meaty men who were not used to losing control to a woman, even a ghost agent, looked at each other. The aide was paralyzed with fear. Nova looked down at the top of Shaw’s head, and the part of his face that was visible to her. Shaw’s eye was wide and red, and he kept making choking sounds and trying to swallow against her grip. “They don’t do as I say, I’ll kill you,” she said. “Understand?”

Shaw squeezed his watering eye shut and gave a slight nod. “Do it,” he croaked to the others.

The aide came to the gurney, fumbling with a release key, close to panic. “Good,” Nova said when she had popped the cuffs. “Now back away; that’s right. Take those weapons from the marines and place them on the floor.” When she’d done that, Nova sat up on the gurney, keeping her grip on Shaw’s throat and ignoring the pinch of the needle as it shifted and then fell from the crook of her arm. “I’m going to walk out of here with him,” she said, “but first I’m going to have to ask you to cuff these marines to the gurney.” She stood up and shuffled away, giving the aide access to the shackles.

But the marines, apparently deciding that this was the moment to make their move, went scrambling on all fours for their weapons. Nova threw Shaw roughly aside, where he spun and hit the wall with a thud, tumbling to the floor. She was on the marines in an instant, delivering a solid, barefooted kick to one’s face, snapping his head back, then chopping down hard with the heel of her hand on the other’s neck. The blow drove his face into the tile with a crack, and his head bounced back up, spraying blood from his nose. He slumped back to the floor, unconscious or dead.

The second man scrambled to his feet, pulling a small knife from a sheath strapped to his ankle and waving it through the air. He smiled at her through bloody teeth, but she could sense his uncertainty. “Don’t do this,” she said. “I don’t want to kill you.”

“She can’t teek you!” Shaw shouted from somewhere behind her. “Take her, for God’s sake!”

The man lunged, and Nova sidestepped neatly, caught his outstretched arm, and used it as a fulcrum to flip herself over his head, landing on the floor behind him. She took his head in her hands and twisted it violently to the left, feeling the crack of vertebrae and the sudden looseness of a broken neck. She let his body gently down to the floor.

The aide had squeezed herself into a corner of the room, clutching her legs to her chest. Nova could sense her thoughts growing steadily louder, almost incomprehensible through her terror. “It’s all right,” she said, taking a step closer, her hands out. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

The aide’s eyes went wide, focused on something behind Nova’s back. She sensed a terrible rage projected at her and spun to find Dr. Shaw coming with a scalpel held high in both hands, a guttural scream escaping his lips and a look of pure hatred twisting his features into an ugly grimace.

A surge of adrenaline flooded her body, and instinctively she lashed out with her mind. Shaw’s face registered a brief moment of confusion as his limbs betrayed him and he thrust the scalpel violently down into his own belly, ripping upward and spilling coils of intestine. Then he sank to the floor with a sigh, clutching himself as blood wet his scrubs in a quickly spreading pool.

It was a fatal wound, and he knew it.

She picked up one of the marines’ needle-guns, checking the action. It was loaded and ready for use. She knew she didn’t have much time before others came. But a plan was formulating in her mind. It would take cooperation from an old friend, but it just might work.

She looked down at Shaw, who stared up at her and coughed wetly.

(you can’t stop them it’s too late you’ll never make it out of here alive)

“We’ll see about that,” she said. “One thing I know for sure: you won’t.”

Then she turned and walked out the door, leaving Shaw and the bloody operating room behind.