Embry.
Above him Adan stilled, blood dripping down from his temple onto Gage’s chest. Abruptly he was snatched back by a couple of soldiers who’d climbed into the ring. Another pair roughly jerked Gage up by his arms.
“What the fuck, man? We weren’t finished,” he complained, eyes searching the room.
The crack of a fist on flesh drew his attention to Mackey. Another soldier reeled back from where he’d been struck, and Gage recognized Embry’s escort to the bathroom. Had he just discovered her missing? Or had they actually found her elsewhere in the base?
“Find her,” growled Mackey at a nearby group.
Well that answers that.
The sergeant gestured and the pair of meatheads trying to cut off circulation in his arms hauled him out of the ring and forced him to his knees before Mackey. “Who are you?” he demanded.
Gage put on his best outraged celebrity face. “I’m Cade Shepherd. What the fuck is this about? Let me go.” He jerked experimentally against the hold on his arms. He could shove to his feet, get loose, but he wouldn’t get far.
“Your little… manager has disappeared.”
“So what?” Gage asked, trying to interject boredom in his voice. “She probably just got lost on the way back from the bathroom. This whole fucking place is a maze.” Please, dear God, don’t let them find her. He nodded at her escort. “I thought he was supposed to bring her back.”
As Mackey’s reddened face turned toward him again, the soldier took another step in retreat. “I… I was. But she was mighty sick. Throwing up. Said she’d be a while and didn’t want me to miss the fight.” His cheeks reddened as he realized he’d been taken.
“Fucking idiot!” snapped Mackey. “Take them to the detention level. Pattenson, Rictor. Take your teams and make a sweep. Find that woman.”
Gage was hauled to his feet and marched toward the same doors through which Adan had entered. “What the hell, man!? I’m a U.S. citizen! You can’t do this to me! I have rights!”
Nobody paid a bit of attention to him. Their contingent had eight guards. Gage noted that they hadn’t taken the time to put Adan back in his shackles and chains, and clearly they weren’t worried about him personally. He cataloged the route as they marched. Down the corridor, into a large elevator. Down more than ten floors below.
How the hell were they going to get out of this?
* * *
Embry’s heart slammed into triple time as the alarm blared. Fuck. Clearly her absence had been discovered. But she didn’t slow the fingers that flew over the keyboard. She checked the video feed of the security camera just outside the lab. No one yet. She’d made it through the first three firewalls and was beating her head against the fourth.
“C’mon. C’mon,” she chanted.
She was almost there. She’d almost cracked the security around the information on Level 36. It was an awful risk she was taking, banking that this was where her father was being held. But there wasn’t time to search the entire system, certainly not now that the soldiers had been alerted. It was a calculated risk.
Her eyes went to the video feed again. Still nothing.
Just another few minutes…
There! She was in.
She accessed a separate video feed for Level 36, and the widescreen monitor was swallowed by a grid of cameras. Each one focused on a different room. No, not rooms, Embry realized. Cells. It was a detention level. Even from the tiny images, she could tell the walls were iron. There were narrow cots in some of the rooms. A metal toilet. And prisoners. So many prisoners. “Oh my God.”
Conscious that she could be found any minute, Embry scanned each cell, searching for a familiar broad shouldered figure. And though she saw many Mirus species represented—Christ, they even had a banshee— her father was not among them.
“Damn it!” Her fisted hands struck the table and rattled a rack of test tubes further down.
She didn’t have any more time. There was no telling how they’d reacted when the alarm was triggered. No telling what they were doing to Gage. Her heart clenched at that, terror for his safety weakening her limbs. She needed to move to get that power grid down.
Resolved, she closed out of the cellblock video feed, intending to upload the virus and get out. Then she saw the folder labeled Project Prometheus. What have we here? She opened the folder and clicked on an icon.
Of course the files were encrypted. That could wait for later. She dragged the lot of them onto a portable hard drive, fidgeting impatiently as they transferred at a snail’s pace. You’d think the government would have something faster than USB 2.0.
She checked the video feed to the hall again and thought about killing the lights. But here, a dark room would be more suspicious than one with every light burning. As the files continued to transfer, she went over the schematics she’d pulled up for the rest of the base. A main power generator was one floor up. If she could take it out, they might have a shot. Assuming none of the bunker doors sealed as a result. Blowing through iron would take more time than they could steal. And there was the tiny matter of not knowing where either Gage or her father were at this moment.
The files finished transferring. She dragged the virus file onto the desktop. Taking one last look at the hall on the monitor—still empty—she snagged the hard drive, stuffing it into one of the pockets of her cargo pants, and double clicked the virus. The entire network would crash in minutes.