The Black Tide (Outcast 3)

I frowned and glanced at Jonas. Keep calm, his gaze seemed to say. Or maybe it was a distant echo of his thoughts. Either way, it made me smile. Trepidation might be stirring, but I certainly wasn't going to react without thought or reason.

You want us to investigate? Bear asked.

I hesitated and then said, Yes, but keep together. If there's the slightest indication of anyone sensing your presence, get back to me ASAP.

Unless there's a Nuri in this place, that's unlikely, Cat said, and then they both intoned, before I could say anything further, but we promise to be careful.

I smiled as they raced away, their laughter briefly gifting the cold air warmth.

Our footsteps echoed on. After another five minutes, Jonas said, “How much further, soldier? The commander is losing a lot of blood with all this movement.”

“Three minutes,” the man in front said, without looking at either of us.

Jonas grunted and flexed his fingers—the only sign of the tension I could feel in him.

We rounded a corner. A bank of four elevators lay directly ahead, each one guarded by two armed men. It was the first indication that this place was more than just a storage facility for cotton and wool bales. No matter how valuable a commodity either might be, eight men guarding access to lower storage levels was certainly overkill.

As we approached the first elevator, one of its guards stepped forward and wordlessly offered a scanner. Our guard ran his RFID chip across it and, a second later, the elevator door opened. We followed him in and, as the doors closed, our guide said, “Med center one.”

The elevator swept us sideways rather than down, which was interesting. Maybe the laboratories we were seeking weren’t underground, as we’d been expecting, but rather somewhere on the top level of this vast building.

The elevator came to a halt and the door opened. The soldier led the way down another bright, sterile corridor. This one did at least have various doors leading off it. I scanned each one as we passed, but there was no indication of what might lie beyond them and no sound emanating from them. For all the physical security so evident in this warehouse, it seemed oddly empty and very quiet.

We finally approached a door with a simple red cross on it. The soldier stopped, scanned his chip and, as the door slid open, waved us inside. Neither he nor his silent partner followed us. Instead, they stationed themselves either side of the door. We weren't getting out without having to go through them first.

As the door closed behind us, a friendly voice said, “Jenkins and Wright, I'm presuming?”

I glanced around and spotted a stick of a man with a thick thatch of gray hair coming through a second doorway. He paused to thrust his palms under the sanitizer on the wall and then rubbed his hands together as he walked toward us.

“Security tells me you got into a spot of bother out in the Red Plains Desert,” he continued. “Sorry to hear that, of course, but gunshot wounds are certainly more exciting to deal with than the usual crap we get in this med center.”

“What sort of wounds are you usually dealing with?” Jonas stopped several feet away from me, his gaze doing a slow sweep of the room. Checking for security features, although at first glance, there didn't even appear to be camera

s.

“Oh, the usual stuff for a warehouse like this—torn muscles and crushed limbs, mainly. You'd think people would be more careful around automated equipment, but no, they seemed to think automated means risk free.”

Meaning either this doctor had no idea this place was anything more than just a warehouse, or he was a very good actor. I had a suspicion the answer wasn’t the latter.

He motioned me to move my fingers from the padding. The bleeding had stopped quite a few minutes ago, so when he gently pulled the pad away, it tore the clot and started the bleeding again. He made a soft clucking sound. “In and out wound, from the look of it. Why didn't you seal the front rather than use padding?”

“Ran out of sealer,” I said, aware that Jonas was now silently moving toward the second door. “How bad is it?”

“Have you full use of your hand?”

I nodded and wiggled my fingers.

“Then nothing vital was hit. But we'll put you on a medibed and see what that says.” He paused and glanced around as Jonas opened the other door. “Hey, you can't go in there.”

Jonas stopped in the doorway, preventing it from closing again. “I'm just looking for the bathroom facilities.”

“They’re over there.” The doc somewhat irritably waved his hand to a small corridor behind and to the left of where we were standing. “That's my private quarters, soldier, and I'll ask you to come away.”

Jonas gaze came to mine even as he obeyed. I knew then that, for whatever reason, we were alone in this place. “Sorry,” he said evenly. “Meant no harm.”

The doc grunted and returned his attention to me. “We'll get you over to the medibed and—”

The rest of the sentence died on his lips as Jonas knocked him out and then caught him before he could hit the floor. He heaved the man over his shoulder, walked across to the nearest medibed, and dumped him into it.