(eng) Keri Arthur - Outcast 02 by Winter Halo

Author:Winter Halo [Halo, Winter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

I suppose it wasn’t really surprising that there were other false rifts in Winter Halo, especially when they had one inside the bowels of Government House.

But the sheer size of these two was terrifying; you could, literally, drive a truck through them.

And maybe that was the whole idea.

“Did you notice a freight elevator on that floor anywhere?” I asked.

It was a somewhat random question. While it wasn’t unusual for military bases to have industrial truck elevators, I wouldn’t have thought them necessary in cities such as Central. Not given that the VTOLs—short-hop vertical takeoff and landing vehicles—meant goods could basically be delivered closer to the required floor rather than to a catchall basement. Their size also meant landing bays could be much, much smaller. There were often three or four in most of the taller nonresidential buildings.

Yes, Bear said. There are exit points on the fifteenth and thirtieth floors. It appears there were also access points on the lower floors, but they have been sealed.

Which was understandable if what they were mostly transporting in and out of the building were stolen kids and vampires. It could also be the reason why Sal and his partners had chosen to infiltrate Winter Halo rather than the many other pharmaceutical companies that worked out of Central. Bringing in cargo they didn’t want anyone else to see would definitely be easier in a freight elevator capable of holding a sealed truck rather than a smaller, catchall VTOL bay.

I scrubbed a hand across my eyes. If things went according to plan, then I’d be promoted upstairs when I returned to work in two days. The only problem with that was the fact that I now knew I could be as affected by modern drugs as anyone else. Which meant I had today and tomorrow to get into Winter Halo and investigate those rifts. They surely couldn’t retune those two—not if they were using them to transport the children and Rhea only knows what else.

There is another problem, Cat said.

As if we didn’t already have enough. “What?”

Once again, she simply showed me. And what I saw was Sal. On a table, attached to machines that were pumping his blood and keeping his flesh alive, even as other machines dissected his body and his brain.

I didn’t know what to feel or how to react. The Humanoid Development Project—the project which all déchet had come from—had had a waste not, want not philosophy in place; those embryos that failed to develop into mature life were dissected and studied in an effort to understand what had gone wrong.

But I hadn’t expected Sal to fall foul of the same philosophy—which was stupid on my part, if only because Sal was a rare survivor. The in-tube death rate in the grays program had been even higher than that of the lures—only five had ever made it to full maturity. If one of his partners had been an HDP scientist, then it would be natural for him to want to understand why Sal had survived when so many others had died.

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