Terminal White by James Axler

Author:James Axler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Worldwide Library
Published: 2014-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

Communiqué to Ioville Magistrate 620M:

Check corridor 4-76, Delta Level. Food spillage may result in loss and personal harm. Please respond to protect citizens until cleanup crew arrives.

Message ends.

Chapter 16

The operations room at the Cerberus redoubt had taken on a solemn quality. It had been five hours since anyone from CAT Alpha had made contact. In itself, this was not unusual—a field mission might see an agent out of touch for an extended period. However, what made it a source of worry for all concerned was the fact that the biolink transponders had ceased to register, which meant that not only did the Cerberus ops team not know where Kane and his crew were precisely, but also they could not confirm if they were even alive.

“Time since initial loss of signal?” Lakesh asked, one eye on the clock as he paced the large operations center.

“Five hours and oh-seven minutes since LOS,” an ops member called Farrell replied emotionlessly from his desk. Farrell had a shaven head, goatee beard and a gold hoop earring in one ear, and had served with Cerberus for a long time. He was skilled in surveillance and the operational procedures of the mat-trans among many other disciplines. Like most of the Cerberus staff, he was used to multitasking.

“Donald? Any progress with the transponders?” Lakesh asked, turning to his red-haired colleague.

“Nothing yet, Doctor,” Donald Bry replied from his terminal desk, shaking his mop of unruly red curls.

“Brewster? Any success with the satellite imaging?” Lakesh asked as he moved to stand behind Brewster Philboyd’s unruly desk.

Philboyd shook his head, receding blond hair slick with sweat. “I can’t penetrate the cloud cover of that blasted storm,” he admitted. “Heat imagery and triangulation are negative. It’s a bust, dammit.”

“Reba? Extrapolation from last received readings from the transponders?” Lakesh requested, turning to Reba DeFore where she sat at her own terminal to the side of the room, close to the doors. “Are our people still alive?”

“Nothing to indicate otherwise,” she confirmed. “They should be fine, despite the cold. Their shadow suits will protect them.”

“From the weather, yes,” Lakesh mused grimly, “but what I really want to know is what else is out there. Did they run into something that has blocked our signal just as effectively as that snowstorm is blocking our view of the site?”

A youthful woman spoke up then from the back of the room, where she lounged catlike atop Lakesh’s own operations desk, bare legs raised as she cleaned her toenails with a six-inch combat knife with a serrated edge. The woman, whose name was Domi, was a strange sight in any environment, and perhaps more so here where technology and uniform dominated. Domi was an albino, with chalk-white skin and bone-white hair cropped in a pixie style, along with bewitching, bloodred eyes. She was a petite woman, barely five feet in height and built like a ballerina. Unlike the rest of the personnel in the room, Domi did not wear the white jumpsuit associated with the Cerberus staff.

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