Soulminder by Zahn Timothy

Author:Zahn, Timothy [Zahn, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Guilt by Association

They came at her out of the dark and gloom of the night shadows: ghostly and indistinct, walking with an almost-normal gait that was somehow more chilling than an exaggerated, movie-monster lurch would have been.

They were the walking dead, and they were coming for her.

She had turned away from them, and was slogging slow motion through something that felt like waist-deep ice water, when they inexplicably began buzzing.

The dead froze for a moment, as if they too were listening to the buzzing. Then the nightmare shattered, and with a jerk of taut muscles Carolyn Blanchard was awake.

For another long moment her mind spun dizzily as it tried to fit the feel of the thin mattress beneath her and the dim features of the room around her into the pattern of her apartment. Then, from beside her head the buzz came again, and with that the disorientation finally cleared. Levering herself up onto an elbow, heart thudding hard in her chest and neck, she poked at the flashing button on the tabletop intercom. “Yeah—Blanchard,” she said.

“McGee,” the transfer supervisor’s voice came. “We’ve got a floater, just came in.”

“Right.” Blanchard sat up and swung her legs off the cot, waiting for her head to adjust to the sudden change in altitude. A floater. Such a wonderfully innocuous term, she thought bleakly, for someone who’d just died. “Have you woken up Walker yet?” she asked, reaching down to pull her shoes on.

“He’s being prepped,” McGee said, and this time she was awake enough to hear the mid-level tension in his voice. “He was already down here when the trap triggered.”

Blanchard glanced at the clock on the Soulminder MiNex console beside her cot. Three thirty-eight in the morning, yet Walker Lamar had still been awake. Awake, and roving Soulminder’s halls. “Swell,” she grunted.

“Yeah,” McGee agreed grimly. “We’re in Transfer Five. If you want to see him before he goes under, you’d better hurry.”

“On my way.”

She got her shoes fastened and hurried out of the room, breaking into a fast jog. The corridors, so busy during normal working hours, were practically deserted, with only an occasional office worker or armed guard visible.

It was an illusory sort of emptiness. Even at this hour two to four of the transfer rooms would be fully manned, as would the satellite monitor stations that watched for the emergency signals that could pinpoint a newly dead Soulminder client. At the center of the building, in the Core, there would be a full complement of highly-placed managers and techs making sure that the Soulminder computers and software and traps performed with their usual flawless efficiency.

And if Blanchard never saw any of that elite cadre, it was for sure they were always watching her.

She almost made it in time. Almost, but not quite. Even as she pushed through Transfer Five’s swinging doors Dr. Wilkom Ng was already lifting his hypo from the man laid out on the padded table in front of him. Blanchard moved forward, eyes automatically flicking

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