Sykes tied his wrists behind his back with plastic zip ties, and they moved on.
Moments later the PA system chimed again, and the same voice came over the speakers. “Huit minutes.”
Mercer flashed eight fingers for Booker’s benefit. They were seriously running out of time.
A door opened behind them. Mercer turned to see a man emerge from a cabin followed seconds later by two more. It was too far and too dark to tell who they were. He watched them for a moment longer, trying to determine if they were a threat, when one of the men spotted him in the hallway. There must have been rules in place about where personnel should be during the final critical moments before the experiment, because he shouted and suddenly the three were reaching for their weapons.
Mercer fired two quick shots that forced the other men back into the cabin.
“Go!” he shouted to Book. “I’ll hold them. Stop the test.”
Sykes took off running, presenting a remarkably small target for such a big man. Mercer flattened himself against the wall behind a six-inch pipe stanchion, his pistol extended and ready.
The corridor exploded in a riot of hot lead and muzzle flashes as a machine pistol on full auto was unloaded in his direction. The onslaught was terrifying, and ricochets careened down the passage, but nothing came close to hitting him. He loosened another pair of rounds to tell the guards they’d missed, but his position was untenable and so he withdrew. Mercer ran through a door that led to a ladderway. He scrambled down as fast as he could and jumped into another hall one deck down.
An alarm started to wail.
Mercer hoped the commotion would make them postpone their experiment until the threat had been assessed and neutralized — but at the moment he wasn’t even sure where it was being conducted. The hallway in which he now stood was more utilitarian than the one upstairs. Not designed as living or recreational space for the crew, the hall was a steel tube with a metal-grate floor that looked down over some machinery. It was sweltering. Steam hissed through a relief valve somewhere. To Mercer it felt like he was in some mid-twentieth-century factory.
He took a second to swap magazines, even though the first one was only half used up. Then he passed through the veil of steam. A shadow moved at the limit of Mercer’s vision, and he fired a snap shot. Ducking and then peering back, he saw he’d holed a plastic sign hanging on a string from some overhead piping.
But that mistake attracted the attention of one of his pursuers, who’d taken an alternate route to this deck. Lead filled the air, and Mercer dove flat behind an unused generator. He slid across the hot deck, dropped down an open section of grating to a subdeck below, and doubled back to a spot below where the gunman stood. Mercer raised his pistol so the barrel was between the grating slats and fired twice. One bullet entered the man’s thigh, tearing through the femoral artery so that a dark pulse of blood erupted out of the exit wound. The other bullet went straight up through his groin, emasculating him before ripping into his gut and eventually pulping his heart.
Mercer had to jump sideways to avoid the rivulets of blood that dropped through the floor grating.
“Sept minutes.”
Mercer swore. They weren’t stopping the test.
He climbed back up and out of the machinery space and saw a figure farther down a dim hallway. The figure ducked around the corner. The steel passageway curved as it wrapped around the enormous structural pedestal supporting the main receiver dish that dominated the Zhukovsky’s stern.
Mercer aimed at the concave wall and triggered off four quick shots. One of the heavy slugs gouged into the steel bulkhead, but the other three ricocheted around the corner and kept going until they hit something. Mercer could hear the slap of one bullet striking flesh.
He ran after his shots and saw one guard lying on the deck and another farther down the passage. That guy was running away but he was still armed, and Mercer wasn’t in a forgiving mood. A single shot caused the guard’s back to arch at an almost impossible angle, and he fell flat.
Mercer flicked his attention to the first guy he’d hit. He, too, was facedown, with a bullet wound to the back of his thigh. Rather than reach down to turn him, he kicked at the man’s hip with everything he had. The guard had been expecting a cautious flip and had his pistol ready to come around when he was rolled onto his back. The kick caught him by surprise, exposing the weapon before he could shoot at Mercer. Instead, Mercer fired one quick shot that put him down.
Mercer took off running. Now that he had his bearings once again he knew how to reach the control center. He passed several open rooms where men in lab coats or crewman’s overalls loitered in the doorways, looking confused about the continuing alarm bells. Mercer shouted in French that they must remain at their posts, pretending to be one of the guards for their benefit. No one challenged him.
“Cinq minutes.”
He ran around a corner and almost got cut in half by Booker with the Kriss.
“Shit, man. Don’t scare me,” Sykes whispered.
“I’m the one who needs to change his shorts now, Book. What’s going on? We’ve got five minutes.”
“Other side of this door is the control room,” Booker said. “They got it closed up just as I got here. I managed to get a few rounds in before they locked me out. We need to find another way.”
“There isn’t time.”
Mercer looked around the antechamber. It was a dead end. He checked the walls, the floor, the ceiling…
He took just a moment to consolidate his two half-empty magazines before turning to Booker. “Give me a hand.” Mercer pointed to a large ventilation grille embedded in the ceiling.
Sykes shouldered his weapon and made a stirrup with his hands. Mercer stepped into it and was nearly crushed against the roof when Booker lifted.
“Easy!”
“Sorry.”
Mercer pulled off the large grille, pulled his sidearm, and wriggled up and into the duct. It was filthy and, he assumed, laced with Legionnaires’ disease and God knew what else, but it passed through the bulkhead separating them from the control room.
The thin metal buckled and popped with even the slightest movement, so all Mercer could hope was that the sound was hidden by the klaxon’s shrill cry. There was light in the floor of the duct just ten feet ahead, which meant there was another vent. He slithered to it and tried to peer down, but the louvers were angled so he couldn’t see anything but the control room’s wall directly beneath him.
“Trois minutes.”
Mercer was going to have to do this blind, and there was no point in waiting. He hammered at the vent with the heel of his hand, and when it popped free he dove through it headfirst, widening the stance of his legs so his outer thighs caught on the duct’s sharp edge and stopped him from falling all the way to the floor.
He hung upside down from the ceiling, supporting himself with his knees, and must have looked like a half-formed moth emerging from its chrysalis. His inverted position meant his head was beginning to fill with blood and in seconds his vision would dim.
The control room on the old Soviet vessel was vast, with banks of computer stations designed for a time when the machines were the size of shipping containers. And it was tall. Mercer was suspended at least twelve feet from the sunken floor. One wall was dominated by massive display screens with the continents shown as a Mercator projection. These would have traced the paths of the Soviet space shuttles. Another wall was mostly a large glass partition. There were only a handful of people there, most in lab coats. They were already on alert because of the alarms and the reports of gunfire, although someone had had the sense to mute the klaxon in this space. As a group they startled at the bang of the metal vent grille hitting the deck, and they were all turning to see what had fallen.