Under a Killing Moon

UAKM — CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Eva stepped over the Chameleon’s dead body and pressed several times on the side of my chair. The retraints clicked open, freeing my hands, feet, and neck. I wasn’t sure what to do, but she had the gun, so I waited for further instructions. For all I knew, she wanted to kill me too, but was going to show some sportsmanship.

She straightened up and stepped back. The Chameleon’s tasc gun lay on the floor where he’d dropped it. Eva picked it up and handed it to me. Firearms had always made me uncomfortable, and I’d rarely carried one, but in this case, I figured I could make an exception. Eva motioned for me to stand over the dead body, and then she walked to the door. To my surprise, she let loose with a scream for help.

The door flashed open, and a burly security guard burst in, his eyes instantly fixing on me. Standing over the Chameleon’s corpse with a tasc gun in my hand, I suddenly realized the implications of my situation. The security guard pulled a pistol from his holster, and I raised the tasc gun. Eva, who was now directly behind the guard, stepped up and dropped him with a blow to the neck. Almost before he hit the floor, she pounced on top of him, grabbed his head, and wrenched it to the side, breaking his neck.

She jumped up, glanced quickly at her watch, and then gestured with her weapon toward the dead guard. “We have to hurry. Take your clothes off and put those on.”

I wasn’t about to argue — a painful kink had mysteriously developed in the back of my neck. It occerred to me why Eva hadn’t shot the guard — she didn’t want to mess up the uniform. I walked around the Chameleon’s body and began removing the security guard’s clothes. Eva tapped me on the shoulder with her pistol. “Take off your watch.”

Under more promising circumstances, I would’ve almost certainly insisted on taking her request the wrong way. As it was, I just kept my mouth shut, undid the watchband, and handed it over. Eva took the watch hungrily. While she examined it, I finished with the security guard and began to undress. Instinctively, I thought of how long it had been since I’d worked out. Damn this boubon belly of mine. Luckily, yet somewhat disappointingly, Eva wasn’t paying any attention.

As I dressed, I glanced around the room. Mounted high on the wall was a surveillance camera. I hadn’t noticed it before. A flashing red light showed that it was activated. It made me nervous. Eva must have seen me looking at it. “That thing’s patched straight into Percival’s private security station. No one sees it but him, he hasn’t had time to get there yet. We have at least a few minutes.”

With no choice but to be relieved, I finished dressing. The guard was a couple of inches shorter than me, though about the same build. The shirt, red and black with a strange rune-like symbol over the left breast, was a short-sleeve pullover, so it wasn’t a problem.

Neither were the stretchy black pants. The boots, however, were about half a size too small. I could get them on, but I wasn’t going to run any marathons in them.

I looked sadly at the pile of clothes I’d taken off. I’d worn my best and only overcoat.

The other items were expendable, except the fedora. It was like breaking up with my first love. After a moment of silence, I turned my attention back to Eva, who seemed to be intent on destroying the watch. A moment later, she twisted the rim around the face, and it popped open. A grim smile played across her lips. “Thank God.”

I moved next to her and took a peek into the watch compartment. Inside was a small piece of black plastic, about the size of a Chiclet. It resembled an old-fashioned RAM insert. Eva glanced at me. “You know what this is?”

“I think I do.”

Eva closed the watch face and nodded. “Good.” She dropped the watch into one of her boots. “We’re running out of time, but at least now there’s a chance. I hadn’t planned on meeting my contact under these circumstances. We’re going to have to wing it from here on out.”

Eva leaned over the Chameleon’s body and searched through his pockets. She pulled out a plastic card, then grabbed his legs and looked up at me. “Get his arms.”

I did as she told me, and we carried the corpse across the room, away from the door.

Reaching the far wall, Eva pressed one section of it, causing a small panel to spring open. Inside were several switches. She flipped one, and a bin-like contraption, with an opening about four feet square, separated from the surface of the wall. Following Eva’s lead, I carried my half of the dead body to the bin. We dumped the corpse into the opening, and then did the same with the dead security guard. Eva flipped another switch, closing the bin. Seconds later, I heard a faint hydraulic rush. Eva shut the panel and turned toward me. “Just two more pieces of galactic debris. With any luck, no one will notice they’re missing until we’re done.”

I felt a strong urge to ask what exactly it was we were going to do, but decided against it. We seemed to be hitting it off fairly well, and it didn’t seem like a good time to rock the boat.

Eva walked to the door, and I followed her out. Now that she’d killed the security guard, the corridor outside was blessedly empty. Apparently, Percival hadn’t thought it necessary to post more than one guard. It wasn’t the first time he’d underestimated me.

Eva glanced in both directions, then went left. We walked briskly until we reached an elevator, seeing no one along the way. A minute later, the doors opened, and we stepped into the vacant lift.

The menu of buttons in this elevator was different from the ones in the elevators I’d been in previously; this time, we could access levels twenty-four through thirty-six. Eva pressed the button for level twenty-eight, and we began to descend. We both stared up at the level display, not saying a word. I had no idea what was on level twenty-eight, but I was suddenly eager to get there. When the elevator started to slow down, and then stopped at level thirty-one, an urge to bolt out the doors and run wildly came over me.

Since there was nowhere to go, however, I clenched my teeth and glanced at Eva. She appeared unruffled. Looking straight ahead, she whispered fiercely. “Put your hands behind your back.”

I had the uniform, but still no bracelet. If anyone noticed, I’d be a marked man. The door slid open just as I put my hands behind me and leaned against the wall. A computer voice piped up: “Level thirty-one. Section A. St. Andrews. Augusta National. Sawgrass.

Pebble Beach. Fenway Park. Camden Yards. Wrigley Field. Candlestick Park. For information on tee times or holo-sim sporting events, go to the checkin area.” Two young men stepped inside, and we exchanged the customary greetings. Not wanting to invite conversation, I focused on the level display. I probably didn’t have anything to worry about. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the men ogling Eva.

Fortunately, their ogling was cut short. The elevator stopped at level twenty-nine, and the men exited to the accompaniment of the computer voice: “Level twenty-nine.

Section A. Zoological Gardens and Yellowstone National Park. For information on camping and hiking, go to the checkin area.”

Seconds later, we reached level twenty-eight, section A. The computer informed me that this was the “Aquatic Level,” featuring representative microcosms of the Pacific, Atlantic, Caribbean, and Mediterranean, as well as various bodies of fresh water. Eva and I stepped out of the elevator into a neat, sterile foyer. Directly across from us was a doorway leading to a checkin area. On the right were men’s and women’s restrooms. To the left was a door marked Authorized Personnel Only.

Eva walked to the door and pulled out the card she’d taken from the Chameleon.

Inserting the card into a slot just under the door handle, she grasped the handle and turned it. She held the door open and motioned for me to enter. Beyond was a stairwell, with plain walls and metal handrails. Stairs led both up and down. Eva closed the door behind us and took the flight up.

At the top of the stairs, Eva opened the first door we reached. At this point, I had no choice but to follow her, but she did seem to know where she was going. Of course, she could have been utilizing the old confidence smoke screen. It was a ploy I’d used many times, making people think you know what you’re doing when you’re actually baffled and completely at a loss. My motto has always been “What they don’t know won’t hurt ‘em.” Now, however, I was the one in the dark, and I didn’t much like it.

Regardless, I followed Eva out the door and into a long, featureless hallway that looked like an extension of the stairwell. We moved quickly, and every so often, we’d pass a door with a number or letter code stenciled on it. Eva increased the pace until we reached a door marked 28-A-41. She opened it, and I found myself stepping back into paradise.

Again, my sense of smell overloaded with the fragrances of grass and trees. Only this time, I smelled water — not the stinking, contaminated water of New San Fracisco Bay, which now had more pop cans, syringes, and rotten corpses than fish — but the clear, pristine liquid mirror of an alpine lake.

I wished I’d had more time to breathe it in. Eva darted down a small path into the trees. I was close behind, and within minutes we reached the shore of a large lake. In the distance, I could make out the tops of trees. Eva ducked off the path, and we slowly made our way through the underbrush, moving parallel to the shore. Eventually, we reached a clearing and walked to the edge of the water. Hidden in a thicket of bushes was a boat.

We climbed aboard, and Eva started the engine. She guided the boat out of the shallow water, turned it, and we sped off across the lake. I’d never been in a speedboat before, and it was a rush. Bouncing over the surface, with mist coating my face, I felt like we were finally making our escape. With the blue sky above us, it was easy to forget where we were. I moved close to Eva and spoke up over the noise of the engine and chopping water. “Where are we going?”

Eva kept her eyes ahead. “The computer center.”

“This must be the scenic route.”

Eva half-smiled and pulled a strand of hair from the corner of her mouth. “More like the back door. Our only chance of getting in is to use the service access. When they find out we’re missing, they’ll track me down by my bracelet. I hope that taking this route might buy us some extra time. It’s the long way around, but we should meet up with less resistance this way.”

“What do you mean by less resistance? I’m kind of partial to resistance.”

Eva shook her head. “Percival isn’t taking any chances. Security is pretty high everywhere. Luckily for us, he thinks he got the last Winter Chip. I doubt he even suspected you had one.”

“How many are there?”

“There were three. One was in the CAPRICORN building when it was bombed. Another one was found on a CAPRICORN agent and destroyed. Colonel O’Brien had the last one. He was supposed to get it to me before we moved up here.”

I’d always been a slow learner, but things were falling into place. “You were the CAPRICORN mole at GRS.”

The woman looked at me appraisingly, as if I’d unexpectedly identified her very rare brand of perfume, and nodded. I looked out across the lake, to where we were headed.

“How does Voorman fit into this?”

“He was an agent. When the Moon Child was in the last stages of construction, he infiltrated the operation, running a supply freighter to and from the station. He was our most valuable source of information on the cult’s activities. He was also supposed to find and deliver the Winter Chip to me when the Colonel didn’t come through with it. When I’d found out he’d been exposed, just before Sheppard’s speech, I was afraid the chip had been found on him. It was a good thing Percival never considered that you would have it.”

“So what happens with the Winter Chip?”

Eva glanced at me, then back at the water. “Theoretically, it will introduce a rapidly mutating computer virus into the Moon Child’s matrix. The virus is designed to change faster than a virus hunter can identify and delete it. Eventually, it should corrupt the data files to the point where they no longer function. And since all the satellite’s systems are linked into the computer — “

“The Moon Child crashes.”

Eva brushed a lock of hair out of her face. “Yeah. Theoretically.”

“I don’t care much for that word.”

“What? Theoretically? It’ll work. It just wasn’t practical to test it on a computer system comparable to the Moon Child’s.”

“I’ve heard the IRS has one.”

Eva smiled. “Not a bad thought.”

We were getting closer to the shore. I took a seat and left Eva alone as she guided the boat into a small cove. When we reached the shore, I jumped out and pulled the boat in.

Eva even gave me her hand and let me help her out. We went into the trees and walked until we reached an ivy-covered wall. I looked up and estimated the height at somewhere around a hundred feet. This had to be the outer wall of level twenty-eight.

Eva moved along the ivy-covered surface, inspecting it closely. A short time later, she found something in the wall that opened a door. By the amount of ivy, it seemed as though no one had used the door for quite a while. We stepped inside and found ourselves in another stairwell. Eva led the way, and we began to climb. After several dozen flights, my feet were in agony. The too-tight boots were like orthopedic torture devices. I gritted my teeth and kept my eyes focused on Eva’s shapely posterior.

After what seemed like an hour, we reached a landing and a door marked 31-D-07. If my addition was correct, we’d gone up three levels. I leaned over, hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath. My forehead was drenched with sweat, and my deodorant was exhibiting signs of vulnerability. Eva was a little flush, but other than that, looked like she’d just gotten up from the easy chair and gone to the kitchen for a can of Tab.

I tried to pant quietly as Eva leaned her ear against the door and listened. Apparently satisfied, she waited for my heart rate to drop out of the critical zone, then opened the door. Again, we were in a long, generic passageway. We hadn’t seen another soul since we’d been in the elevator, and it was starting to seem a little eerie.

“Where is everyone?”

Eva talked over her shoulder as she walked. “We’re in what you’d call the backside of the station. The only people who make it out this far are the maintenance crews and security personnel. They sweep this section once a day, and we’re in between shifts. We shouldn’t run into anyone until we get close to the computer control area.”

We continued down the passageway for some time. Eventually, we reached an intersection. A sign showed the way toward the command tower, and we turned in that direction. Gradually, I became aware of increased ambient noise and noticed that more doors were appearing on either side of the hallway. We seemed to have entered a busier section of the Moon Child.

A door up ahead of us opened, and a woman wearing a lab coat stepped into the hallway. She turned and began to walk in the same direction we were. Eva slowed her pace so we wouldn’t overtake her. Strolling now, I began to feel increasingly nervous.

Voices were audible beyond the doors, and we were clearly in danger. Beside me, Eva checked her watch uneasily. I imagined that she was wondering how much time we had left before we were discovered and the alarms went off.

Eventually, we caught up to the woman in the lab coat. She was waiting by a set of elevator doors. Eva said nothing, but also stopped in front of the elevator. The woman smiled at us and resumed waiting. The up button was lit, and Eva made no move to press the down button, so it looked like we were going the same way.

The lift arrived, and the three of us got in. I glanced at the button panel and saw that this elevator provided access to levels twenty-four through thirty-six. The woman pushed the button for level thirty-five. Ten seconds later, the elevator came to a halt, and the doors opened. The woman in the lab coat stepped out, and doors began to close. At that moment, from a distance, I heard a male voice ask to hold the door. I hadn’t planned on displaying any courtesy, but the woman who’d just exited was happy to oblige. The doors reopened, and two security guards hurried into the elevator.

The first was a slender young woman with blond hair and thin lips. The second was a giant of a man, at least six-eight, with a clean shaven head and a permanent scowl. Eva and the female guard seemed to be acquainted and began making small talk. I was leaning against one of the walls, hands behind by back. The behemoth stood rigidly across from me, his eyes focused squarely on me. I smiled at him and smiled politely, but there was no response. The doors closed, and I turned my gaze toward the level display, but I could feel the man continuing to stare at me.

Maybe he was wondering why I was wearing a guard’s uniform, but didn’t look familiar.

I had no idea how extensive the security staff was. A drop of nervous perspiration slid down the side of my face. I glanced back at the big guard. He was clearly suspicious.

Eva seemed unaware of what was happening.

A series of loud beeps startled me. There seemed to be three sources of the beeps, one coming from each of the security guards and one from a previously unnoticed device on the belt of my uniform. The male guard took his eyes from me just long enough to reach down and press the small device on his belt. “Attention all security personnel! This is priority one. Two intruders at large. Their last known location was on level twenty-eight.” The next few seconds played out in slow motion. I saw the big guard’s eyes widen as his hand went for the tasc gun in his holster. Before he could raise it, a flash went off out of the corner of my eye, and he crumpled. I turned to see Eva step back and pivot toward the female guard, who was backing into a corner. A second later, the woman was on the floor next to her partner. I’d never reached for my weapon.

The communicator continued, oblivious to the carnage: “First suspect is a female — five feet, eight inches in height, one hundred twenty pounds, medium length blond hair. Second suspect is male—”

Eva bent down and switched off the guards’ communicators, then reached over and did the same to mine. She turned and glared up at the level’s display until we reached level thirty-five. Then she raised her tasc gun and pointed it at the still closed elevator doors.

“Things are going to get a little more difficult now.”

The doors opened — no one was there. Eva led the way out of the elevator, tasc gun in hand. I followed her down the passage, fumbling for the weapon in my belt. We moved as quickly and quietly as possible, periodically checking to make sure no one was behind us.

At the end of the passage, we ran into a barrier: a door marked Top Level Security Clearance Required — No Unauthorized Entry. Eva brought out the card she’d taken from the Chameleon. “I hope this thing works.”

She ran the card through the reader an the door. Nothing happened for several secinds, then I heard a click. Eva pushed the door, and it swung open. Then she slid the card back into her pocket and barely smiled. “If they didn’t know where we were before, they do now.”

She spun around and sprinted back down the hall. I was a few steps behind her and running on pure adrenaline. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve been resting back at the lake and smoking a cigarette. As it was, my toxin-laced blood was pumping through clogged arteries at a rate not seen since my teens.

Ahead of me, Eva slowed down, then came to a stop outside one of the doors. She leaned against the wall next to the door and motioned for me to do the same. My damaged lungs ached, and I tried to control my breathing without bending over or passing out.

We waited as silently as possible for what seemed to be a long time, though it was probably only a minute or two. Then, behind the door, I heard a voice, which suddenly started to increase in volume. The door opened, and a middle-aged man stepped into the hallway, still looking back over his shoulder and talking.

Instantly, Eva had the man’s arm twisted behind his back and her tasc gun pointed at his head. Keeping the man in front of her, she walked through the door, and I followed her inside. The room was very white and brightly lit. It was quite large, but there were only seven people in it, at least as far as I could see. Eva moved her hostage roughly into the center of the room and raised her voice menacingly. “Everyone! Move together! Do anything stupid, and I’ll kill all of you!” The stunned group, five middle-aged men and two somewhat younger women, slowly clustered together.

“Get down on the floor! Hands behind your heads!”

Everyone complied in varying degrees. Some lay face down, others went only to their knees. Eva shoved her hostage toward the group and told him to join them. Then she turned to me and spoke so everyone could hear. “Keep your gun on them. If anyone moves or makes a sound, kill ‘em.”

I nodded and aimed my weapon at the center of the group. Eva tucked the tasc gun into her belt and walked off. I kept my eyes glued on the hostages. Behind me, I could hear Eva working on one of the computer consoles.

As I waited nervously, the men and women looked up at me with expressions ranging from terror to loathing. A part of me felt sympathy for them. These were living, breathing people like me, and I tried to keep from imagining myself in their place.

Technically, I’d already been an accessory in the deaths of three security guards, and killing had never been an easy thing for me.

Then I thought back to the things I’d seen at the penal colony. Whether these people knew it or not, they were abetting one of the most hideous schemes in the history of mankind. These cult members believed themselves superior to the innocent billions living unsuspectingly on the planet below. Somewhere on board the Moon Child were thousands of lethal satellites, waiting to be unleashed so they essentially eradicate the Earth’s entire population. As I looked at the faces before me, I thought of Louie and the mutated gang of regulars at the Brew & Stew. If the cult was allowed to fulfill its prophecies, my friends would die. I tightened the grip on my tasc gun and steeled myself. It was for the greater good that the people on the Moon Child die. Myself included.

Apparently, Eva knew exactly what to do with the Winter Chip and finished installing it within minutes.

“All right. It’s ready to go.”

I kept my eyes on the hostages. “So… what happens now?”

Eva glanced at her watch. “We get the hell out of here. There’s no telling how long it will take the chip to crash the system, but I’m planning on it being sooner than later.”

On cue, an alarm began to blare. I scanned the room quickly and saw lights flashing on most of the consoles. Eva was looking around frantically. Seeming to make a decision, she moved toward a corner of the room, where a tall filing cabinet stood. I backed away in the same direction, still keeping my tasc gun trained on the now-terrified group.

Glancing back and forth between the hostages and Eva, I saw her pull out the drawers to form a set of stairs. Standing on top of the cabinet, she could easily reach the ceiling, which I now noticed consisted of acoustic fiberboard tiles, laid into a grid of metal supports.

Eva pushed on one of the tiles,moved it aside, and then pulled herself up and out of sight. I backed up to the file cabinet and briefly wondered why we hadn’t gone out the door. As I started climbing up the drawers, one of the men got to his feet. I aimed and fired, knocking him down. Reaching the top of the cabinet, I set the gun on the fiberboard and pulled myself up, kicking the cabinet over in the process. At the same instant, I realized why Eva hadn’t taken the obvious escape route. I heard the door open, and several sets of boots scrambled into the room. The hostages began to yell.

I picked up the tasc gun and spotted Eva some distance ahead, carefully moving along a catwalk. The crawl space was about five feet tall and stretched out for hundreds of yards, maybe miles, in every direction. I crouched and ran as fast as I could manage. The bedlam below faded away.

I was about twenty feet behind Eva when a hail of bullets ricocheted past me. Over my shoulder, I caught sight of several guards in hot pursuit. I couldn’t look at them for long.

The catwalk was perilously narrow, and one false step would send me down through a ceiling tile, into God only knew what. There could’ve been just about anything below us, from an ocean to a desert. Eva and I were now moving at a recklessly dangerous pace.

To make matters worse, a wall loomed directly in front of us. Eva reached an intersection on the catwalk and turned right.

We continued at break-neck speed, zigzagging left and right along the narrow walkway.

We were quickly approaching another wall. Behind us, the gunshots echoed sporadically. When I turned to check our pursuers, it was clear they were gaining on us.

As I looked back to Eva, I saw her reach the wall, then drop out of sight, followed an instant later by a loud clang. I reached the spot where she had vanished and saw that she’d jumped down onto a metal-grate landing. I lowered myself just as a slug put a dimple into the wall right above my head.

Now on the landing, I saw that we’d arrived at an access point to the elevator shaft. Eva was leaning into the opening, craning her neck up, then down. She looked back at me. “I can’t tell if the elevator is above us or below. We’ll have to risk it and hope it doesn’t catch us in a bad spot.”

She backed into the opening and began to climb down. I waited a moment, then followed. The ladder rungs were built into the wall. As I climbed carefully down, I looked around and saw that there were no old-fashioned elevator cables in the shaft.

Instead, each of the four corners had tracks constructed into them. The elevator was probably run electrically. And with the ladder imbedded in the wall, I was willing to bet that there would be no appreciable space between the walls of the shaft and the exterior of the elevator. If we weren’t close to an access window when the elevator passed us, we’d have no choice but to go with it. Suddenly paranoid, I began looking up, then down, like a spectator at a tennis match.

We continued our descent for several minutes, passing access windows about every thirty rungs. Above us, the voices of our pursuers were now audible. Once they reached the access window, we’d be dead. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. And I’d be the first to go.

Then I heard the elevator. It was above us. Eva seemed to have heard it, too, and glanced up sharply. “Hurry!”

We moved even faster than before. A gunshot went off, and a bullet went pinging down the shaft. A security guard was leaning through the access window, cradling a rifle. I tried to pull my head in between my shoulder blades like a turtle, but it wouldn’t retract.

Below me, Eva had reached an access window and was crawling in. Another shot rang out. One of my feet reached the access window. A bullet ricocheted off a ladder rung just above my hand. A scream suddenly erupted and echoed down the shaft. As Eva helped pull me through the opening, a spray like red rain passed by, followed closely by the top half of a bloody corpse and a rifle. A split second later, the elevator flashed past.

I probably wouldn’t have reacted on my own. I felt Eva’s hands on my back, and then I was falling helplessly through the air. A moment later, I hit the top of the elevator, and then Eva landed on me painfully. I laid there, more stunned than hurt, as Eva rolled over and onto her knees. Above me, gunshots rang out, but the distance between us and the guards was increasing rapidly.

We continued to descend for probably twenty seconds, and the elevator slowed and stopped alongside another access window. Eva motioned for me to follow her into the opening. “C’mon.”

“Where we going?”

She flashed her grim smile. “All the way to the bottom. Voorman’s freighter should still be in the cargo bay. And if the life-support systems don’t shut down in the next few minutes, we might still make it out of here.”

“So why are we climbing out of here?”

Eva looked at me indulgently. “Because going up at this point would be a bad thing.”

Following Eva’s lead, I crawled into the opening. We waited breathlessly until the elevator moved. It was going down. As we jumped back on, the elevator shuddered slightly, and the lights dimmed, then brightened. I wondered how much longer we had before the Winter Chip’s work was done. Every breath felt precious. Eva leaned toward me. “We’re almost there. Get ready.”

I wasn’t certain what getting ready entailed, so I tightened up and gritted my teeth. The elevator came to an abrupt halt, knocking us off-balance. Eva rolled over toward the ladder. An access window was about four feet above us. “Hurry!”

Eva scrambled up the ladder and into the window. I was just a beat behind her. As I dragged myself out of the shaft, I heard the elevator lurch. I’d just pulled my legs in behind me when the opening was sealed off momentarily by the passing elevator. We waited for a few seconds and listened to the elevator ascend. Eva nudged me, and I lowered myself into the shaft and onto the ladder.

I went down the ladder as fast as I could, figuring that Eva would let me know when I should stop. As it turned out, the elevator had taken us most of the way, and we only had to climb down about another hundred feet before we reached the bottom. I was just about to jump off the ladder and onto the floor of the shaft when Eva shouted to me.

“Stay on the ladder! The floor’s hot! Go into the lowest opening.”

I did as she told me, and seconds later I was back in a crawl space like the one we’d been in up above. As I waited for Eva, an alarm started to blare. When she caught up to me, she gave me an amazingly calm look, and then darted down the catwalk.

Eva seemed to know exactly where to go. I followed her along the narrow walkway for several minutes until she came to a sudden halt. Getting down on her knees, she pried up one of the ceiling tiles and peeked beneath it. Apparently satisfied, she lifted the tile and set it to one side, then nimbly swung down into the hole and dropped. Not wanting to seem apprehensive, I followed her lead without my usual preliminary inspection.

Fortunately, the drop was only about ten feet, and I suddenly found myself in the midst of a women’s lavatory. I’d heard rumors about “the other rest room,” talk of luxurious daybeds and sparkling clean facilities, not to mention the strange compliment of dispensers. Even now, seeing it with my own eyes, I’d never dreamed it’d be so much nicer than ours. Of course, Eva had no reason to be awestruck. She moved quickly to the door and opened it. As she did, the lights flickered, then went out.

We left the restroom and stepped into a dark hallway. Some kind of emergency lighting had come on, giving the passage an eerie, greenish glow. Eva turned, and we bolted down the hallway. When we reached a door on the left side, she opened it. Then she led the way down an almost pitch-black stairwell. The still-blaring alarm echoed over the concrete. My lungs burned, and I realized that the air was growing warmer and thinner.

It felt as though the circulation function of the life-support system had quit working.

I was planting like a dog by the time we exited the stairwell. Following Eva, I stepped through a door and entered the cavernous cargo bay. The air here felt like a cool ocean breeze. The cargo bay was as dark as the stairwell had been, but there were searchlights constantly scanning the area. I traced the searchlights to a dimly lit tower that rose about forty feet above the floor. With the darkness, the alarm, and the wildly circling spotlights, the scene resembled the pre-tip-off extravaganza at a Bull’s game. I could clearly hear several voices as they echoed around the chamber. It didn’t sound like there was a lot of security in the cargo bay, but there was certainly enough to make me uncomfortable.

Eva pulled me close and whispered fiercely in my ear. “Where is Voorman’s ship?”

I squinted my eyes and tried to get my bearings. I’d only been here once, and I hadn’t been in a particularly observant frame of mind. After a minute of scanning and trying to catch sight of things when the searchlights hit them, I decided that our freighter was parked at least a hundred yards away, somewhere between ten and eleven o’clock from our relative position. The guard tower was about a hundred and fifty yards away and at the two o’clock position.

I pointed out the freighter to Eva. She waited for the searchlight to illuminate the ship, and nodded. Then she again put her mouth to my ear. “Can you fly it?”

I wasn’t sure, but I figured I could wing it. “You bet.”

Eva nodded. “I want you to get inside it and fire it up. Do you see that door?”

She pointed across the cargo bay to one of the exit doors for aircraft, and I nodded.

“I’m going to try to get that open. When you start up the freighter, that should get everyone’s attention and hopefully give me a chance to get into the control booth. The door is hydraulic and isn’t connected to the network, so I should be able to access it, even if the computer system’s down. Once it starts to open, they won’t be able to close it for at least thirty seconds. Hopefully, that’ll give you enough time to squeeze through.”

“What about you? I’m not just gonna leave you here.”

Eva smiled indulgently. “The important thing is that one of us gets out of here. Percival and some of the others undoubtedly have their own private escape pods and are probably already clear of the Moon Child. Someone has to notify the authorities and have the cult leaders picked up. And you know where to find the evidence that will put them away.”

I must’ve looked confused. Eva’s smile changed from indulgent to sympathetic. “I’ll try to make it back to the freighter, but you can only give me twenty seconds after the door opens. No more.” Her smiled disappeared. “After that, our window of opportunity will disappear. Literally. Once the cargo-bay door is open, fly the ship through it and into the vacuum tunnel. There’s another door at the end of the tunnel that will open as soon as the door behind you seals.”

Eva waited for me to acknowledge that I understood, then headed off toward the searchlights. I watched her for a moment, wondering if I’d ever see her again, and then began to make my way across the bay. The room was not unlike a speeder lot, with hundreds of vehicles and other pieces of machinery neatly arranged. Keeping my head low, I moved from one hiding place to another, careful to freeze whenever the searchlights seemed to be close.

It took about five minutes to reach the freighter. I waited for the searchlights to flash across the ship before opening the hatch on the underbelly. Scrambling inside, I climbed into the cockpit. Then I strapped myself into the driver’s seat and surveyed the instrumentation. It didn’t look too difficult to manage.

The windows in the cockpit wrapped around, and I could see both the escape door and the guard tower. Taking a deep breath, I turned on the pilot console and fired up the engines. Moments later, like a scene from an alien abduction movie, the cockpit was suddenly bathed in bright white light. The security personnel seemed to have noticed me and had focused the searchlights on the freighter. I glanced at the bay door, but it wasn’t opening. Looking toward the tower, I saw several dark shapes running straight for me.

I checked to make sure I was ready to lift off, then looked back toward the hydraulic door. It wasn’t moving. For the first time, it occured to me that Eva might not get to the control booth. Maybe she’d been discovered and killed. What if the door never opened?

I’d locked the hatch behind me, but the security guards would be able to blast their way in eventually. And even if they didn’t, the Moon Child’s life-support system would fail sooner or later, and being in the freighter would only prolong my fate.

Several light bursts flashed in the corner of my eye. Shots were being fired in the guard tower. I strained to see, but could make out nothing. Then everything went dark.

Someone had shut down the searchlights. A starry pattern floated in the darkness as my eyes slowly adjusted.

Beyond the stars, a vertical stripe of faint light appeared, then slowly widened. I squinted my eyes, trying to make out what was happening. After several seconds, I realized the cargo-bay door was opening.

Under the hull of the freighter, someone started banging on the hatch door, sending a metallic clanging through the ship. My eyes were now accustomed to the darkness, and I scanned the area between the freighter and the guard tower for signs of Eva. Then I began to count silently. Thousand-one, thousand two, thousand three… the cargo-bay was opening from right to left. When it was fully open, the doorway would be about thirty feet high and fifty feet wide. Thousand ten, thousand eleven, thousand twelve… the freighter was probably twelve feet high and twenty feet across. Thousand twenty, thousand twenty-one, thousand twenty-two… cursing under my breath, I shoved the freighter into gear and lifted off.

As I raised Voorman’s shuttle-cruiser off the floor, the cargo-bay door was fully open and holding. I accelerated and steered toward the opening. Pinging sounds told me that the guards were firing their guns at the ship, but that wouldn’t do any good. The only thing that could stop me was the door, which gradually started to close.

The freighter was slow to accelerate… and I was about three hundred yards from the door. If I didn’t get there in time, something told me I’d hit the door and crumple like a pop can. The ship was gaining speed, but not quickly enough — it was going to be tight. I angled toward the right side of the opening, my knuckles white on the steering handle.

Fifty yards away, I realized I wasn’t going to make it. At least not horizontally. I raised the elevation, then grabbed the balance-control stick and wrenched it hard to the left.

Immediately, the ship rolled. I heard and felt metal scraping along the floor. I tried to adjust the elevation, but the ship only veered slightly to the left, away from the opening.

I was seconds away from hitting the door. Using both hands, I threw the balance-control stick hard in the opposite direction. The ship rolled wildly to the right and veered in the same direction. The cockpit slammed into the opening. The force of the entry carried the freighter through the door, but the loud sounds of metal being snapped off and crushed told me that the ship had sustained considerable damage.

I looked out the window and saw that both sides of the freighter had been raked. Even worse, the rudder mechanism had been ripped off the back. The cockpit was untouched, but the freighter wasn’t in good shape. It was probably still capable of propulsion, but I wouldn’t be able to steer it.

As I was assessing the situation, I felt a giant shudder as the door behind me closed and sealed. Up ahead, the outer door cracked and began to slide open. I pushed the accelerator and felt the engine rev up, but the freighter didn’t move. I tried again, but it was no use — the ship might as well have been in neutral.

Helplessly, I watched as the gap in the outer door widened, the blackness of space seeping in like an oil spill. I was trapped, a scant few yards from freedom. Desperately, I began manipulating the controls. I tried everything, but could do no more than rock the freighter and raise the back end slightly. The outer door was now completely open. As my eyes searched the instrumentation frantically, I spotted a small panel marked Emergency. I tore it open and found a T-shaped handle. A sticked beneath it read Eject Capsule.

My speeder didn’t have an eject button, and I’d never used one before, but now seemed like a good time for a new experience. It wasn’t like I had anything to lose. I was about to pull the lever when it occurred to me that I might just be making a big mistake. I had to assume that the cockpit capsule would eject straight-off, which would send me into the ceiling of the vacuum tunnel.

But I had to do something. I glanced up and saw that the outer door had begun to close.

One of the things still working on the freighter were the rear elevation thrusters. I cranked them up as far as they would go, until the cockpit was almost face down on the tunnel floor. In front of me, the opening was half the size it had been a moment ago. I pushed the thrusters as far as they would go, then grabbed the T-shaped ejection handle and pulled.

What followed was a sensation I hadn’t felt since the final time I rode the Hammer at the state fair. In a blur, the cockpit jettisoned from the freighter and slammed into the roof chamber, just in front of the closing door. The force of the impact caused the capsule to careen toward and through the opening. The g-force had me pinned painfully against my seat, and the spinning motion blanketed me in a wave of nausea.

It took several minutes for me to regain control of my equilibrium. The capsule continued to spin out into the darkness. I checked the air pressure, and it was holding steady. Apparently, the capsule had survived the collision inside the tunnel. I searched for a set of capsule navigation controls, but there didn’t seem to be any. There were only two useful mechanisms on the console. The first was an oxygen-level display, which showed I had enough to last for at least as long as it would take me to die of thirst. The other was an SOS emitter, which I flipped on.

I leaned back in my chair and relaxed for the first time in days. Outside the window, the Moon Child was dark and dead. Minutes earlier, it had been the greatest threat ever known to mankind. Now it was a slain dragon, a massive, metal graveyard floating in the great abyss.

Lowell Percival had said he wanted to create a perfect world. Well, so do most people, but Percival tried to play God, and it wasn’t his call to make. A lot of people had died on the Moon Child. Their fate proved only one thing: There’s no easy path to Utopia. Hell, maybe it doesn’t even exist… but it made me feel good to know that Louie would be telling stories and slinging hash for years to come. Louie — and Chelsee and even Rook — all have as much right as anyone else to live long, happy lives. Even if they were Mutants.

As the gigantic satellite spun slowly out of my view, my eyes wandered down to a recessed handle on the underside of the console, which I hadn’t noticed before. I reached down and pulled the handle. It turned out to be nothing more than a glove compartment.

Sitting on top of an owner’s manual and a pile of receipts were a mangled pack of Lucky Strikes and a book of matches.

There were four cigarettes left. I took one out and molded it gently back into shape.

After wetting the end, I placed it gently in my mouth and lit it. God, it was good to be alive.