The man ran along the corridor, his breathing labored, his pace beginning to yield imperceptibly to the insistent demands of his muscles for more energy from his bloodstream, energy which would not be forthcoming.
The walls of the corridor were uniformly gray, unbroken except by the consistently spaced access panels that were standard on all space-based stations and vessels. The deck was formed of the usual non-slip surface found in such corridors and hangar-decks everywhere, its engineering designed to provide shock absorption for falling bodies while guaranteeing high traction.
The lighting was dim, like a person might set just before retiring for the evening or upon awakening at an especially early hour. There was no discernible light source, and no shadows cast even by the onrushing figure of the man.
The man's exhaustion finally caused a misstep as the toe of his right boot failed to rise above the deck enough to prevent catching as he brought it forward for its next placement. The deck's high traction surface designed to prevent slippage kept the boot from sliding forward, and the man's exhaustion kept him from recovering.
His body tumbled forward to the floor, his palms bracing his collapse and abrading against the deck. He turned his head to protect his face, and he caught himself enough to slow his descent so that his cheek came to rest lightly against the floor instead of crashing against it. The burn in his palms momentarily replaced the heaviness of his limbs as his brain's primary sensation.
Pain was a welcome relief, a comforting familiarity after the numbing weight of fear, after the blood, after the death.
He inhaled deeply to replace the out rush of air that accompanied his fall.
He turned his palm towards his face and saw the evidence of the highly engineered deck design : the tissue of his hand was flush with blood, but the surface of his skin was not broken.
The thought of blood made him cringe again.
He closed his eyes involuntarily and his face grimaced in mental torment as the image passed across his mind.
The brig security office was drenched in blood. The bodies of the duty staff lay across the consoles and floor, their faces and limbs contorted from the violence of their deaths.
The man shuddered.
His body stilled and he prepared his muscles to push up from the deck back to his feet.
The sound arrived in his ear canal as if it was only inches away, without an echo to indicate distance.
His eyes opened and he snapped his head around the corridor but saw only gray walls.
He heard the sound again, and he surged his body upwards to his feet and resumed running, consciously lifting his feet to avoid another fall.
It must not catch me.
Vainly his eyes scoured the corridor, searching for a panel that identified what deck or section he was in.
The hangar. A ship. Escape.
The equation of a problem fluttered across his mind briefly, its solution following it with mathematical precision, yet he couldn't remember ever solving the equation to provide the solution : hangar, security codes, guards, launch clearance.
He strained to hear the mechanical sounds of hydraulics operating - lifting, rolling, towing fighters from touchdown to maintenance and back again.
The rhythmic pounding of his boots against the deck was the only sound he detected.
Suddenly the corridor's unyielding walls were scarred by a doorway.
He shifted his weight with his next stride and lurched to a stop just past the entrance. He turned and stepped toward the door. He saw no keypad or scanner that would grant or hinder entrance. The door was formed of two panels joining at the center, a nondescript surrender to utility over style.
He reached his hand toward the center of the door, and heard the sound again, from his left, his right, and behind him too.
He twisted around just as his hand brushed the center joining of the door panels and felt them separate.
The empty corridor was all that was behind him and to either side. He felt the emptiness of the open area behind him beyond the door and spun around to gauge the threat.
The area beyond the door was neither dark nor light, yet all his senses were consumed by the voice he heard, as if the sound itself blocked his mind's ability to process what his eyes were seeing.
He knew the voice immediately, the recognition coming not from his memory but from as if he was already in the midst of a conversation with it, and was simply hearing the next spoken word.
The voice froze him, as it always did every time he heard it.
"You cannot hide from Midnight."
It was spoken as a whisper, but the whisper resounded like a clarion in the silence of the corridor.
[align=left] The man reached up and grasped for a handhold in the rock.
He could only find one within reach, a narrow jagged edge no larger than his palm which jutted out and upward from the cliff. The edge was sharp and serrated, and dug into his hand as he pulled himself up. The blood seeping from the cuts it made in his palm made it slippery, and he lost his grip just as his foot found the spot his other hand had been holding to keep him from falling.
He reached upward again.
And again.
And again.
Every breath was one more stretch upward, one more desperate scramble to find a surface that he could use to pull himself up, one more risk at slipping, one final mistake without a chance at salvation.
He reached upward, and pulled himself up, and over the lip of the cliff.
He ran.
The dense foliage of the forest alternated between crackles and crashes and cushioned silence as he passed.
He paused near the base of a tree that was three times the diameter of his own height.
He sensed no animals. Not even insects buzzed near his face, when they should have been attracted to his heaving exhalations of carbon monoxide and the waves of heat coming off his body.
He looked up towards the sky but could only see the canopy of the dense forest, a horizon of green instead of blue.
He pushed away from the trunk of the tree.
He ran.
He felt it now, although his senses told him nothing.
He saw no movement.
He heard no footfalls.
He smelled nothing but his own sweat.
But he felt it.
A hunter knows what it is to be hunted. He was being hunted now.
The hairs on the back of his neck rose up off his skin, and his adrenal glands pumped out their final reserves.
It was there, just beyond his senses' limits, pacing him, measuring him, calculating the moment of his final weakness, preparing for the fatal lunge.
He knew, because he had been a hunter too. He knew that the only chance of a prey that could not outrun, outfly, outclimb, outburrow, or outfight its hunter was to outwit it. Prey that could do the unexpected could escape.
He had seen it many times : a fleeing deer that was about to be overrun by its feline adversary instinctively felt the final leap of the predator and suddenly changed direction, leaving the snarling cat to sink its claws and teeth into empty turf, unable to overtake the deer's new lead.
But he couldn't maneuver fast enough to escape that way.
He was left with only one other choice : to become the hunter again himself.
He had no weapons.
A human's claw and tooth had been left in the distant past of survival once man learned to wield a club or sharpen it into a spear.
He had no time to fashion a weapon, and he had not even seen a stone jutting above the leafy matting of the forest floor.
He was left with only one option, the final recourse of a desperate animal that could flee no longer.
He spotted another giant tree and angled his course towards it.
He slowed as he reached its base, and turned to face the direction he had come from.
He slowed his breathing to listen.
The silence of the forest was deafening. Not even a breeze stirred the leaves. The forest absorbed all sound like the void of space dissipated heat, leaving nothing in its place.
He waited, counting his breaths, looking intently back the way he had come, forcing his body to lean forward, his shoulders rounding and his back slumping, his hands relaxed in the perfect image of exhaustion and defeat.
He breathed in as deeply as he could and held his breath, forcing his lungs to take up all the oxygen they could from that one breath.
He let his left leg tremble and buckle as if his body was finally giving out. At the last second before he lost his balance he forced the air from his lungs in an explosive exhalation and spun his body to the right while pushing off from his left leg.
He hurtled through the air towards the hunter turned prey, the forest's silence split open by his scream of rage and murderous intent.
The scream echoed off the bulkheads of the small room, reverberating back and forth like a coin tossed into a small bottle.
He lurched up instantly, his forehead striking the low ceiling of the sleeping alcove with a crack that knocked him back down into his mattress.
The searing pain even drove the ability to curse out of his mind.
His open eyes searched the darkness, but the only source of light they could find was the two dim buttons of the comm unit set midway up the wall beside the bunk near his head.
His right hand went to his forehead, massaging the shallow tissue gingerly.
He could taste the scent of death in his mouth, the biting, bitter taste of blood that drove carnivores wild with hunger, and the rest of the animal world wild with fear.
I am the hunter.
In his mind he said the words to himself several times, his personal mantra against surrender.
Fear was the predator's most awesome weapon.
Fear triggered the body's fight or flight mechanism, causing the adrenal glands to pump tremendous amounts of stimulating hormones into the bloodstream. Those hormones supercharged the body, letting it do what it normally could not.
But it was also short lived. The heightened rate of activity drained energy away faster than it could be replenished.
Ultimately, without an avenue of escape, fear paralyzed, immobilized, pulverized the will to fight or run until the prey lay trembling, helpless, as the predator approached salivating.
He would not run; not from man; not from beast; not from dreams.
He tried to recall the predator, but there was no memory.
He felt the lunge. He felt the collision. Then nothing.
He couldn't remember fur, or hair, or bare skin.
All he could remember was a vague sense of its eyes focused on the kill, transforming into startlement, then fear, then nothing.
He stopped massaging his head and inhaled deeply, smelling the hot sweat evaporating off his body.
The room was cool, but he was perspiring like he had been running.
He closed his eyes and his breathing immediately deepened in his practiced routine of falling asleep within seconds.
His mind slowed to enter sleep.
The voice echoed around the room, shattering the stillness.
"You cannot hide from midnight."
He jerked to the right, throwing himself off the mattress and onto the deck to land in a crouch, careful to avoid the low ceiling above him this time.
The darkness was nearly total, but his eyes were adjusted to virtually no light and there was nowhere in the room to hide.
The door was shut. He was alone.
The green light on the comm panel blinked into blue, catching his eye.
"Mr. Quatermain, you asked to be awakened at midnight, Sir."
His eyes narrowed.
"Acknowledged, Ensign."
He rose from the crouch, reaching out with one hand to grasp the corner formed by the sleeping alcove's recess into the wall. He leaned against his outstretched hand and flexed his legs.
He leaned down and picked up his pack from the floor, passing the harness over his left shoulder.
He crossed the room in two steps and waved his hand over the activator.
The door slid open, and he stepped through.
He walked briskly down the corridor to the head, where a quick shower removed the remnants of sweat left by his night's dreams.
He opened his pack and surveyed the standard Order uniform that he had bought upon his arrival to Planet Toledo. He noted its preference for efficiency, as well as its nondescript style. He put it on and carried his now unnecessary LSF uniform to the disposal chute, wadded it up into a tight ball using the sleeves to knot it all together, and chucked it inside. He held the chute's lid open for a moment, straining to hear the incinerator, but it was obviously far removed from his location.
He checked himself in the holo-reflector before exiting.
He checked his chronometer : 0013 Toledo standard.
He frowned.
No time to waste.
He headed for the civilian mess hall.
Only when he reached the mess hall did he realize that at that time of night it should be deserted, the staff off duty. He paused at the door and shrugged, then stepped through, the door automatically opening at his approach.
He was mildly surprised to see several small groups scattered around the room at tables. Most were only drinking steaming liquid from mugs, but one was eating a meal. None even glanced his way when he entered; none were attracted to look by the sudden pause of a new arrival stopping just inside the doorway, because he didn't pause. Long habit had taught him to behave like he fit in, even if he didn't. The mind sought out discreet differences to focus on, while uniform normality was casually ignored.
He passed a few yards from the table where the meal was being eaten, and noticed that it was composed of ration packs that had been heated.
He surveyed the room, noting the empty serving line and lack of staff. He saw the ration dispenser near the end of where the line would be if there was one.
When he reached it he looked for a scanner to make a purchase, then realized that there was none.
I guess anyone desperate enough to eat rations doesn't have to pay for them.
He touch-selected through the options, choosing a high-protein meal, heated, with a stim-drink.
He moved three tables down from the dispenser, far enough away not to be directly noticed by anyone using it, but not so far away that it became obvious to the rest of the room's occupants that he wanted to avoid notice.
The ration pack came in a sealed package which was composed of three cells, each containing a different item. He paid no attention to their contents, but methodically finished each one without seeming to rush.
When he finished he carried the package to the disposal chute, but didn't pause to listen this time before heading for the exit.
Just as he reached the doorway, a loud noise erupted from one of the groups in the room, causing him to glance in their direction. He immediately noted it as laughter at an apparently uproarious joke, but the momentary distraction prevented him from seeing the man entering the mess hall through the doorway just as he was exiting.
The other man sidestepped, but Quatermain's pack brushed into him
They apologized and Quatermain continued down the corridor, oblivious to the tiny device that the other man had stuck to the bottom of the pack he was carrying.
Upon reaching Planet Toledo after escaping from New York subsequent to killing Joshua Crews, he had been vectored to the civilian section of Cape Hope Station.
The hangar where he had been directed to land his Nephthys was at the far end of the outdoor complex, which was composed of multiple bunker like hangars that were below ground with an entrance sloping up to the launchpads. After a brisk walk he arrived to find his fighter refueled and ready to launch. He performed the preflight inspection and thumb-printed the mechanic's flight order.
"Would you do me a favor?" Quatermain asked the mechanic.
"The stim-drinks here must have something I'm not used to because I need to let off some pressure before flight. Can you stow my pack onboard while I hit the head?"
The mechanic nodded.
"Sure thing, Sir, but you'd have to go all the way back to the control center to find a head. We all just fertilize the foliage behind the hangars."
Quatermain nodded and headed outside the hangar.
The mechanic slid his right arm through the strap of the pack and hefted it over his shoulder.
He climbed the ladder to the cockpit of the fighter, and reached behind the seat to trigger the access panel where he could stow the pack. As he shifted his weight, the pack slid off his shoulder and caught in the crook of his elbow, the pack colliding with the side of the ship.
The proximity sensor attached to the underside of the seat was constantly transmitting a low amplitude signal that dispersed beyond three feet from its source. The signal immediately bounced off of the passive ultrasonic reflector attached to the underside of Quatmain's pack, and the proximity sensor detected its own signal being reflected back on itself.
Two microseconds later it switched from passive to active.
Quatermain reached the rear of the hangar and noted the lack of foliage.
I guess not even regular fertilizing gets anything to grow on this desolate rock.
He leaned against the hangar with one hand and finished his business. Just as he was about to turn to go back inside, he felt a vibration through the wall of the hangar, like a concussion that flexed the entire wall a single time.
His eyes narrowed, and he trotted around the hangar to the side door and entered.
He immediately saw the mechanic lying on the deck below the fighter, the pack a few feet away.
He rushed to the man and felt for a pulse.
Nothing.
There was no blood, and his body was not contorted in any unnatural ways to indicate broken bones.
His gaze traveled back up the mechanic's body to his face. Quatermain leaned close.
The man's eyes were clear white around the irises. The minuscule capillaries were empty of blood. Quatermain blew gently into the man's eye, and the eyeball's surface rippled like water.
He dashed for his pack and ran up the ladder to the fighter's cockpit. Inside, there was no visible sign of violence or disorder, but Quatermain knew that was only on the surface.
"Sonic mine," he muttered to himself.
Years ago he had seen first hand the deployment of sonic mines, and their subtly devastating effects on flesh and technology. They operated at a frequency lower than the human ear could detect, but the concussion wave was easily discernible within a radius determined by the mine's power setting. They killed by causing vibrations of the body's millions of capillaries that resulted in massive hemorrhaging throughout the body, and virtually instantaneous death. Mechanical systems suffered no damage from them, but the delicate bio-neural components of advanced technology was disrupted beyond repair.
The Nephthys would not fly without a complete retrofit of its bio-neural components.
But that was a moot issue for him.
He was obviously supposed to be dead now, and dead men didn't requisition repairs.
He slid down the ladder and exited the hangar.
I need to disappear, and I need to do it my way before somebody does it their way.
Quatermain carefully peered around the corner of a hangar. He studied the man who was crouched at its opposite end using an optical sight to watch the hangar containing the sabotaged fighter that narrowly missed killing its target. Moments earlier Quatermain had watched two men enter the hangar after waving in this direction, unwittingly indicating to him where he could find their accomplice.
Years of field craft had presented Quatermain with a dilemma after surviving the assassination attempt : should he assume the assassins were pros or amateurs? Given the terrain and layout of the landing field, he knew that an amateur would make very different choices than a professional would. Working alone, without anyone to provide even the most basic support, Quatermain knew he stood little chance against a professional team, but if he was going to get off the planet alive he needed to know something about who was hunting him. He could easily rate himself in the top ranks of professional hunters, assassins, and spies, but he quickly decided that it was more than his superior competence that had just saved his life : the assassins had made a mistake by only watching the hangar's entrance long enough to see him enter it and had then failed to see him exit, thereby activating the sonic mine too early and only killing the mechanic. That was clear enough evidence of amateurs at work. Quatermain's ability to leave the hangar after the mechanic's murder apparently unnoticed by the assassins and then position himself to observe them entering it was further proof. No professional team would have let the hangar's only entrance go unobserved for even a moment until the kill was confirmed.
Now, five heartbeats after the door to the hangar closed across the landing field, Quatermain sprung up and sprinted for the crouching man. Only the balls of his feet touched the ground as he ran, dramatically reducing the surface area of physical contact that could cause noise to alert his target. Regardless, five meters from contact the man heard him coming and turned his head around. Definitely an amateur, Quatermain thought to himself. A pro would have launched his entire body to the side of his crouched position while spinning to face the oncoming threat with weapon drawn, but the man only reacted like any civilian would. Even after seeing Quatermain coming, the man was frozen in a moment's shock before starting to react defensively, but it was already too late. Two meters apart, Quatermain dived headlong from a dead sprint, his forearms crossed in front of his head and his hands grasping opposite elbows, turning his body into an enormous battering ram aimed at the man's mid-section.
The man's body pivoted back from the impact, driving his head into the hard ground and rendering him unconscious, while Quatermain quickly tucked his arms and torso in a downward curl towards his waist, while drawing his knees up so that he struck the ground like a ball and rolled before stopping himself by swinging his arms out to brace against the seemingly spinning ground beneath him. Without pausing, Quatermain pounced on the unconscious assassin, grabbing him by one ankle and dragging him like a sack around the hangar and out of view of his accomplices if they came back out into the open across the field.
Quatermain glanced around and saw the hand-held comm device dropped by the man when he was hit. Quatermain snatched it up and switched it to mute. He quickly patted the man down but found no weapons or other devices. He examined the comm device and realized that it also had a multi-function datapad. He knelt by the unconscious man and pressed his thumbprint into the pad's scanner to gain access. He quickly scanned through the list of entries, finding nothing of interest. Then his eye locked onto one that looked familiar. He stared at the combination of numbers and letters for a moment trying to figure out what was familiar about them. Suddenly he realized that it was an entry code for one of the hangars on the base, just like the one he had received when he arrived. Quatermain looked up across the field to the hangar where his ruined fighter was housed. Thank the gods for amateurs, he mused to himself.
Using the designation embedded within the code, Quatermain logged into the base's map grid and located the correct hangar, which fortunately was just a few buildings down from his position, and on the same side of the field. He sprinted to the side of the hangars away from the field and used them as cover in case the assassins exited the hangar and looked his way. Briefly he wondered why they hadn't exited yet or used the comm, but smiled to himself at the thought of the two of them arguing with each other over who was at fault for letting him escape death. Twenty seconds later, the comm went active and he heard an angry and nearly hoarse voice.
"Davis, have you seen anything?"
"Davis?"
"Davis!"
Quatermain allowed himself a slight grin as he listened to the would-be assassin pointlessly berate the unconscious and unresponsive Davis over the comm. He reached the assassins' hangar and entered the entry code from Davis' datapad into the keypad next to the hangar's side door. As he entered the hangar, the motion detector activated the overhead lights, revealing three civilian Arrow fighters. He glanced around the hangar and quickly headed over to the maintenance station. The service logs were protected with the same code that he had used to enter the hangar, and within seconds he was perusing the Arrows' flight status. After a minute of considering the logs, he selected a fighter for his escape, climbed into the cockpit and, discarding all but the most essential items on the pre-flight checklist, he quickly prepped the Arrow for launch. Three minutes later he activated the hangar door, and ignited the engines. After 20 seconds of a warm-up burn, the Arrow rolled out of the hangar onto the launchpad, fired its vertical thrusters lifting it off of the ground, and engaged the main engine propulsion sending the fighter into a forty-five degree climb into the atmostphere towards Toledo's orbit.
From across the field, two men gaped at the Arrow exiting their hangar. One of them kicked the groggy Davis in the side.
"You fool, now he's stealing our own ship to escape!"
The two men dashed towards the hangar leaving the third man clumsily attempting to regain his feet to follow.
They reached their hangar thirty seconds later and fired up the remaining two Arrows without any pre-flight checks. Two minutes after the first Arrow left the hangar, the other two lifted off. They activated their targeting systems and immediately locked onto the fighter receding into the clouds that conveniently possessed the same transponder as their own. With their engines powered up past red-lining, the two fighters steadily gained on the ascending Arrow. When they were nearly within weapons range it suddenly seemed to notice their presence and increased power and began evasive maneuvers. But suddenly it returned to a straight ascension course, making it an easy target for the pursuers. Flashpoint laser bursts shot out from the two Arrows, quickly nullifying the shields. Another burst blew the right wing off of the ship, and others danced lethal steps up the fuselage and into the cockpit. The two Arrows pealed away as the shredded fighter tumbled out of its flight path. They completed their turn to prepare for another pass when the tumbling fighter's wreckage exploded.
"Hmph. Not a bad payday after all" one of the pilots transmitted.
"Especially when you split it two ways" the other replied.
"Two ways? But there's three of us."
"No, there's two of us with transportation to go collect it, and one dunce who is stranded on this rock because he let the target take his ship."
The other pilot smiled broadly and moved into formation as they accelerated upwards through the atmosphere to reach escape velocity from the planet's gravitational pull.
Moments later, the remnants of the destroyed Arrow struck the planet's rocky surface and disintegrated.
After easily observing from the ground what was more appropriately termed an execution than a fight a man stepped away from the edge of a building at the spaceport, and jogged over to the hangar from which the three Arrows had launched. He stepped through the open launch door and accessed the maintenance station. After he terminated the actively transmitting comm uplink and made minor alterations to the service records, he exited the hangar and headed towards the public embarkation terminal. He located the automated ticketing station and inserted an identification card. He selected a destination and after inputting a coded account number, he verified his agreement to the charge against his account. He took the routing ticket produced by the station and then headed to the designated departure gate.
After a wait of precisely 72 minutes, the shuttle's seating for departure was announced. The man rose from his seat and took a place in line. When he reached the gateway leading to the shuttle, he handed his ticket over to the attendant, who scanned it for authenticity and then handed it back. The man proceeded to the shuttle, boarded, seated himself and strapped in. He studied the faces of everyone on board as they took their seats, and after the shuttle cleared Toledo's atmosphere for its flight to Freeport 11, he laid his head back against the headrest and appeared to doze for the remainder of the trip.