Winter Halo (Outcast 2)

If it was happening here, in Central, then it all but confirmed that at least one of Sal’s partners had been a scientist working on the déchet program. There was no other way they could have gotten to the extraction point so quickly.

“Were there only six of them?”

On the tables, yes, Cat said. There were five others in holding cells.

“Alive?”

Yes, but they looked drugged. And there was one empty cell.

Which meant those five were probably awaiting their turn for dissection. It also explained the somewhat random pattern of attacks. They obviously only went after a fresh subject when there was space freed either in the cells or on the tables.

“What about the rest of that floor? Any more horrors?”

More laboratories, but none of the machines that helped make us, either on that floor or others.

Meaning no in vitro equipment or incubators. And that meant if they were creating new beings, they were doing it off-site. Which was damn frustrating, but not unexpected. Nuri had already theorized as much.

“So, what was on the rest of the top floor?”

Once again, they didn’t reply; they just showed me.

The rest of the floor was empty, except for the existence of two not-so-minor items.

The biggest false rifts I’d seen yet.

Chapter 9

I suppose it wasn’t really surprising that there were other false rifts in Winter Halo, especially when they had one inside the bowels of Government House.

But the sheer size of these two was terrifying; you could, literally, drive a truck through them.

And maybe that was the whole idea.

“Did you notice a freight elevator on that floor anywhere?” I asked.

It was a somewhat random question. While it wasn’t unusual for military bases to have industrial truck elevators, I wouldn’t have thought them necessary in cities such as Central. Not given that the VTOLs—short-hop vertical takeoff and landing vehicles—meant goods could basically be delivered closer to the required floor rather than to a catchall basement. Their size also meant landing bays could be much, much smaller. There were often three or four in most of the taller nonresidential buildings.

Yes, Bear said. There are exit points on the fifteenth and thirtieth floors. It appears there were also access points on the lower floors, but they have been sealed.

Which was understandable if what they were mostly transporting in and out of the building were stolen kids and vampires. It could also be the reason why Sal and his partners had chosen to infiltrate Winter Halo rather than the many other pharmaceutical companies that worked out of Central. Bringing in cargo they didn’t want anyone else to see would definitely be easier in a freight elevator capable of holding a sealed truck rather than a smaller, catchall VTOL bay.

I scrubbed a hand across my eyes. If things went according to plan, then I’d be promoted upstairs when I returned to work in two days. The only problem with that was the fact that I now knew I could be as affected by modern drugs as anyone else. Which meant I had today and tomorrow to get into Winter Halo and investigate those rifts. They surely couldn’t retune those two—not if they were using them to transport the children and Rhea only knows what else.

There is another problem, Cat said.

As if we didn’t already have enough. “What?”

Once again, she simply showed me. And what I saw was Sal. On a table, attached to machines that were pumping his blood and keeping his flesh alive, even as other machines dissected his body and his brain.

I didn’t know what to feel or how to react. The Humanoid Development Project—the project which all déchet had come from—had had a waste not, want not philosophy in place; those embryos that failed to develop into mature life were dissected and studied in an effort to understand what had gone wrong.

But I hadn’t expected Sal to fall foul of the same philosophy—which was stupid on my part, if only because Sal was a rare survivor. The in-tube death rate in the grays program had been even higher than that of the lures—only five had ever made it to full maturity. If one of his partners had been an HDP scientist, then it would be natural for him to want to understand why Sal had survived when so many others had died.

And while part of me believed Sal had gotten exactly what he’d deserved—in both the manner of his death and what was now happening to his body—the part that had mourned the passing of a friend wanted to stop it.

But there was also a practical reason for doing the latter—none of us could afford these people unlocking the secrets of Sal’s success in reaching maturity and apply them to their own creations.

I glanced at the time and swore. It was already close to eleven. Given that I was supposed to meet Charles at one thirty, that didn’t give me a whole lot of time to report back to Jonas and get things organized. “Could you two go back into Winter Halo and see if you can uncover the entry point into the freight elevator? But for Rhea’s sake, be careful.”