Zero-G

Book 2: Outer Earth

by Rob Boffard

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

Outer Earth is a giant space station, orbiting the dead remains of our planet. It is humanity's last refuge.

Riley Hale may be the newest member of the station's law enforcement team, but she feels less in control than ever. When a doctor bent on revenge blackmails her, Riley has no choice but to give in to his demands and break a dangerous prisoner out of jail. But this is not just any prisoner - it's someone capable of bringing the entire space station to its knees.

With time running out, Riley must break her own beliefs - and every law she's sworn to protect - if she has any hope of saving Outer Earth from destruction.

Experience the excitement of Outer Earth in Zero-G - an action-packed thriller set in space from Rob Boffard.

The Outer Earth novels: Tracer, Zero-G and Impact.

Release date: January 19, 2016

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 480

Sample

Two days earlier

“We’ve got hostages.”

Royo’s voice echoes around the narrow entrance corridor. The big double doors to the Recycler Plant are behind him, shut tight. A rotating light spins above them, casting flickering shadows on the assembled stompers.

“Roster says twenty sewerage workers were on duty today when it happened,” Royo says, jerking his thumb at the double doors. “It’s our job to get ’em out.”

“How many hostiles?” I say.

A few of the stompers look round at me, as if they can’t quite believe I’m actually wearing one of their uniforms. I can’t quite believe I am either. Six months ago, I’d be doing my best to get as far away from the stompers as I could. I’ve never liked cops.

Royo glances at me. His bald head reflects the spinning light perfectly. “We don’t have any intel on the situation inside. That’s the problem.”

“What about the cameras?” says a voice from behind me.

I turn to see Aaron Carver jogging up, the top half of his black stomper jumpsuit tied around his waist, his perfectly styled blond hair swept back. He’s wearing a bright red vest, exposing his toned upper arms. Behind him is Kevin O’Connell, a head taller than any other stomper here, with a closely shorn head and dark stubble across his cheeks.

All three of us used to be tracers – couriers who took packages and messages across the station. That was before Royo got us onto the stomper corps.

Royo shakes his head. “Nice of you to join us, Carver.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Cap.”

Royo turns back to the group. “There were two working cams on the floor, but whoever did this shot ’em to pieces the second they got in there. Locked down all the exits, too.”

Carver comes to a stop alongside me, breathing hard. “Was over on the sector border when I got the call,” he says to me between breaths.

“Worried about us starting without you?” I say, out of the corner of my mouth.

He puts a hand on my shoulder, uses it to pull himself upright. “Only worried you’d make us look bad. Lucky I got here when I did.”

“You got something you want to say, Carver?” Royo shouts. Heads turn to look at us. My stomper jumpsuit is made of thin fabric, but right then it feels too tight around my shoulders.

Carver gives a huge smile. “Not at all, Cap. Carry on.”

“What are their demands?” says one of the other stompers, a heavily muscled woman named Jordan, leaning up against the corridor wall. Her ponytail is pulled back so tightly that it looks like her hairline is going to tear her face apart.

“Before they killed the camera,” Royo says, “they held up a tab screen with a name written on it.”

“A name?” says Jordan, her eyes narrowing.

But I know already. We all do. I grit my teeth, without really meaning to.

“Okwembu,” says Kev. His voice is quiet, but it cuts across the hubbub in the corridor.

Royo gives him a crooked smile. “Big man gets it in one.”

Janice Okwembu. Our former council leader, who nearly destroyed the station in a twisted attempt to gain more control for herself. A lot of people want her dead. More than a few have tried to break into her maximum security prison to do just that.

I guess whoever took the plant got tired of waiting.

Royo raises his voice. “We don’t negotiate with hostage takers. Never have, never will. But, right now, what we don’t have is – hey! Get those people out of here!”

I look back towards the entrance. The corridor leading to the Recycler Plant backs out onto the main Apogee sector gallery, an enormous space with multi-level catwalks running all the way up the station levels. This much stomper activity has attracted a crowd, blocking up the entrance to the corridor. They’re craning their necks, looking for action. I see workers in mess kitchen uniforms, tech jumpsuits, a few people with tattoos who look like they run with a tracer crew. One man on the side is covered in filthy rags, holding on tight to a pushcart full of gods know what. Three stompers break away from our group, shouting at the crowd to fall back.

“As I was saying,” Royo says. “We need intel. That means we need people inside. So while Jordan here takes point on the assault, I need our new tracer unit—” he points at us, and I feel a nervous prickle shoot up my spine “—to get inside, and see what we’re dealing with.”

“All right,” says Carver, rolling his shoulders. “About time we had some action.”

“Wait, hold on,” I say, raising my hand. “You said they locked down the exits, right? So how do we get inside?”

Royo smiles that crooked smile again. A few of the other stompers are sniggering.

“That means the only way in…” I trail off, and, as one, Carver, Kev and I look down at the floor. The metal plating is perforated, and just then I realise what’s below it.

Pipes. Conveying human waste from every hab in the sector to the plant. Pipes which we’re now going to have to pull ourselves through.

Carver raises his eyes to Royo. “You have got to be kidding me.”

Morgan Knox stands on the edge of the crowd, watching Riley Hale.

Everybody gives him space. Nobody wants to go near the man with the crippled leg, the man wrapped in filthy, stinking rags. Knox barely notices the sideways glances, the muttered insults. He just stands and watches Hale, with his hands on the handle of his cart, his knuckles bloodless and white beneath the dirt.

It’s not the first time he’s seen her – he’s been thinking about her for months now – but it’s the first time he’s had such a long look. He’d gone out to get supplies, and was surprised to see Hale running across the gallery in front of him, sprinting for the Recycler Plant, where the rest of the stompers were assembling.

She’s got her back to him. Her dark hair falls to her shoulders in ringlets. Her black stomper uniform is a little too small for her, like it was made for someone else, and he can see the tight contours of her toned shoulders and upper arms. The bottoms of the pants show a flash of ankle above her off-white tracer shoes.

She turns to say something to one of her companions. For a moment, he sees her in profile, caught in the corridor’s flashing light. Not for the first time, he catches himself thinking that she’s quite beautiful.

No, he thinks, and squeezes the cart handle even harder, as if he can pulverise the thought itself. You’re not beautiful. And you never will be.

He spits, a giant gob of saliva spattering across the ground. He feels the crowd moving further away from him, as if he’s infectious. Fine by him.

He hears shouting. He looks away from Hale, to see stompers pushing the crowd back, ordering them to move along. It jerks him back to reality, and he spins his cart, using his good leg as a pivot. The cart’s wheels are old and rusted, and they squeak as he pushes it across the gallery floor. He glances upwards, at the catwalks silhouetted by the vast banks of ceiling lights, and keeps moving. He can’t get distracted. There’s still a lot of work to do.

The noise in the corridor has gone from loud to deafening. Orders are being shouted, weapons checked, tab screens sought out. Royo strides towards us, ignoring the disgust on Carver’s face.

“There has to be another way,” I say, glancing down at the metal grate.

Royo shakes his head. “There isn’t. It’s like I said. Exits blocked off.” He keeps walking, heading back down the corridor, and we fall in behind him.

“How do you know they haven’t shut off the pipes, too?” I say.

“We don’t. But, right now, it’s the only way in we haven’t tried yet. Which means you’re up.”

“Cap, come on,” says Carver. “You are not thinking of sending us down there.”

Royo stops at a metal plate at the side of the corridor. Black lettering across it reads WASTE PIPE ACCESS AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY, with smaller writing in Hindi and Chinese below it. There’s a keypad on the door, its numbers faded with age. Royo crouches down and keys in a code, the beeps drowned out by the noise from the other stompers.

“You’re going to get in there, you’re going to get to a vantage point, and you’re going to report back,” Royo says. He taps his earpiece. “I want regular contact at all times, understand?”

I’d almost forgotten about my earpiece. Every time I think I’ve got used to it, I realise it’s still there, clogging my ear canal. The earpiece is moulded plastic, designed to fit snug in my right ear. It links me to SPOCS: the Station Protection Officer Communication System. The stompers had it before we joined up, but it was a badly maintained network, full of glitches and dead spots. Carver’s big mission over the past few months has been to fix it – his first big contribution to what he calls his straight life.

“Send someone else,” Carver says, folding his arms. “I didn’t sign up to crawl through shit.”

“I second that,” I say.

Royo gets to his feet. “Tracers go where other people can’t. That’s the whole point of your unit. That’s why we recruited you.” He taps the metal trapdoor with his foot. “And by the way, try and remember that we have twenty people being held at gunpoint right now. Let’s help them out. What do you say?”

Carver and I glance at each other. After a long moment, we both nod.

I look around, and something occurs to me. “Where’s Anna?” I say.

“Miss Beck is currently on a staggeringly important mission further up the ring, my dear,” says Carver, imitating Anna’s accent perfectly, adding the twang that people get when they grow up in Tzevya sector.

Royo glances at me. “Some punk group of tracers are getting themselves into the drug trade. She’s getting dirt on them for me.”

My anger flares at his words. Not too long ago, we were a punk group of tracers, too. But, secretly, I’m glad she’s not here. The fourth member of our little unit is the last person I want to deal with right now.

“We’ve already stopped the flow into one of the pipes,” Royo says. “It’ll back up nasty down the line, but Level 3 is just going to have to deal with it.”

He reaches down and hauls open the trapdoor. The space beyond is as black as space itself. A second later, the smell nearly takes my head off.

“Gods,” says Carver, his nose and mouth buried in the crook of his elbow. Kev makes a strange noise, half retch, half disgusted groan.

“Tell me you’ve got some full-face filters,” I say to Royo.

He shakes his head. “Those are back at HQ. We’re only supposed to break them out for emergencies, not bad smells.”

I close my eyes, willing the contents of my stomach to stay put. Royo calls out for a tab screen, and another stomper brings one over. As he passes it to Royo, I catch him staring at me. I meet his gaze, and he looks down, disappearing back into the chaos further up the corridor.

Six months on, I’m still the woman who had to kill her own father, plus the leader of her tracer crew, to save Outer Earth. Six months on, people are still treating me like a freak, or a saviour, or both. That includes other stompers. I don’t mind the stares – I’ve got used to them. They’re part of the job, and the job is what takes my mind off what happened. It’s what makes going to sleep easier.

I turn back to Royo. With a few taps on the screen, he calls up the schematics of the plant.

“There are access points for maintenance here, and here,” he says, pointing at the outline on the map. “My guess is the hostage takers won’t know about them, but it won’t stop them from spotting you if you get careless. I want to know how many, their approximate positions, what they’re armed with. Once we’ve got that, we’ll hit the door with shaped charges and come and get you.”

He snaps the tab screen off. “Carver, Hale, get going. O’Connell, you come with me.”

“Wait – what?” Carver says. “Since when is Kev exempt from shit-pipe duty?”

“Since he’s too big to fit in the shit-pipe,” Royo says. “Besides, we don’t want him getting an infection.”

“Oh come on,” says Carver. “His op was months ago.”

He jabs at Kev’s midsection, aiming for the spot where the scar is. Kev dodges back, smirking.

It took us a while to recover from the insanity of a few months ago. We were all injured – cuts, bruises, deep muscle strains. Carver’s shoulder was dislocated, and it took quite a few physical therapy sessions before it was back to full strength.

Kev got it the worst. The ligaments in his ankle were torn, and while the surgery to fix them went OK, there were complications. Pulmonary embolism, Kev told us – a blood clot that originated in a leg artery and travelled upwards, lodging itself in his lungs. He collapsed a few days after the first op, spilling a cup of homebrew all over the floor of his family’s hab. Emergency surgery, followed by months in hospital – that was his reward for helping save the station. It’s only in the last few weeks that he’s been back at full strength.

I was worried about him for a while – and not just because of his physical injuries. His closest friend, Yao, died last year. But he’s thrown himself into his new life. Out of all of us, he’s the one who’s settled in the best. It’s like he was born to be a cop, and being a tracer was just an interlude. I actually heard him telling some of the other stompers a joke – when we were tracers, he hardly ever spoke unless you asked him something first.

Royo looks Carver and me up and down. He steps in closer, lowers his voice. “I send any of my guys in there, they’ll get caught. You’ve got agility, you’ve got speed, you’ve got your stingers, and you’ve got each other. We’ll be right on the other side of the door if things go wrong.”

I nod, suddenly aware of my stinger, the small pistol holstered on my left hip.

Royo claps his hands. “O’Connell. On me.”

Kev fist-bumps Carver, squeezes me on the shoulder. “Stay in touch,” he says, tapping his ear, and then jogs off after Royo.

“Riley,” says Carver quietly, as soon as they’re out of earshot. “I can take this if you want. You don’t have to go down there.”

I look up at him, surprised, thinking he’s suggesting I can’t handle it. But there’s nothing but concern on his face, and my irritation drains away.

“Not a chance,” I say, forcing a smile. “If I’m not there to help out, you’ll make us look bad.”

He returns the smile, then digs in his pocket and hands me a stomper-issue torch. Its grainy metal surface is ice-cold. I click it on and off, and he winces as the light flicks across his face.

“Want some after-market gear?” he says.

“Like what?”

He digs in his pocket, and hands me a small box. It’s a good thing the bottom is covered with sticky adhesive, because I nearly drop it when I realise what it is.

“I can’t carry a bomb,” I say. Carver raises his eyebrows, motioning at me to stay quiet. I look over his shoulder, but nobody appears to have heard me.

I thrust the box back at Carver. When we were tracers, he was the one who built us gadgets, who designed our backpacks and shoes. And, occasionally, he’d make something a little more deadly.

The box is a sticky bomb. It’s palm-sized, modified from a small plastic food container with a tight-fitting lid. Inside the lid is a sharp spike, tipped with chemicals. Just below it, on the other side of the box, is a wad of explosive putty. Slam your hand down on the box, and you’ve got four seconds to clear the hell out.

“Relax, Ry,” Carver says. “This one’s self-assembly.”

He holds out his hand. The explosive putty is in his palm, a shiny blue glob. “Totally inert,” he says. “Until you combine them.”

“And what exactly do you think we’re going to need these for?”

He gives me an evil grin. “Use your imagination.”

I shake my head, but I know he’s not going to take them back. I put the box in my left jumpsuit pocket, and the putty in my right, as far away from each other as possible. The gunk has left a little residue on my hand, and I wipe it on my leg, which does nothing more than add a thin layer of lint to my skin.

Carver nods at the pipe. “Ladies first.”

I lean away from the smell, taking a last breath of cold air. Then I slip down into the darkness of the tunnel.

Prakesh Kumar takes the stairs two at a time, his arms pumping.

Suki is screaming at him to hurry. He can see the intense lights from the Air Lab ceiling through the open door at the top, and he raises a hand to his face, shielding his eyes.

He takes the last step and explodes out onto the roof of the control room complex, jogging behind Suki. Her hair – green this month – flares out behind her. Prakesh still has his heavy lab coat on, and he rips it from his shoulders as he runs, letting it fall to the ground behind him. They’re running down a narrow canyon, bulky air-conditioning units on either side humming quietly.

“This way,” Suki says over her shoulder. He can see the tear tracks down her face, gleaming under the lights. He nods, trying to control his breathing.

They sprint out of the mouth of the canyon. There’s an open area on the roof, and Prakesh sees that there are other techs there, huddled in a small group off to one side. Prakesh doesn’t know all of them, but he recognises Julian Novak from genomics, and the new guy, Iko, from maintenance. Prakesh isn’t particularly fond of Julian. The man’s lazy, prone to taking shortcuts in his work. He gives Prakesh a guarded nod. His dark hair hangs down over his face, and he’s chewing something, his mouth moving mechanically.

Suki comes to a clumsy stop, pointing to the other side of the roof, beyond another bank of aircon units. “He’s over there. We found him when we…” She trails off, doubling over and clutching her side.

“It’s OK,” Prakesh says. But it doesn’t feel OK. Not by a long shot. He can feel his heart pounding, the sweat soaking into his shirt. “Do we have a name? Do we know who it is?”

“It’s Benson,” says Julian, talking around whatever he’s chewing.

Prakesh’s eyes widen. James Benson. Quiet, cheerful, hard worker. He’s been at the Air Lab forever – Prakesh remembers working with him on some project years ago.

“Did he say why he’s doing this? Did you talk to him?”

Julian shrugs.

Prakesh’s anger flares. How can the man be so calm? He has a sudden desire to tell him to handle it, see if he keeps that smug look on his face then.

But he can’t. He’s in charge of the Air Lab now, and that means this is his show.

“How long’s he been up here?” he asks Suki.

She takes a moment to answer. “Twenty minutes,” she says. “I think.”

Prakesh grabs her shoulder. “I want you to get a Mark Six and jack it all the way up. Make sure he doesn’t see you doing it.”

“It’ll never work!”

“Just do it, Suki. And do not put it in place before I tell you.”

He strides off without waiting for her to reply. The aircon units run right up to the edge of the building. The control room complex is in the corner of the hangar, six storeys high, and Prakesh can see the Air Lab stretching out below him. He can see the enormous man-made forest dotted with algae pools. From up here, it seems like every square foot of extra space has been given over to growing food. Prakesh sees dark soil, brown climbing frames, the emerald green of the plants, the blinking lights of the hydroponic systems.

He looks down at the edge of the roof. There’s less than a foot of space between the aircon units and thin air.

Prakesh takes a deep breath, holds it, then lets it out through his nose. He puts one foot on the edge, slipping his body around the aircon unit, his hand hunting for a hold.

Benson is a little way along. He’s middle-aged, with the lean body and huge arms of someone who has spent years carrying heavy sacks of soil and fertiliser. His face is ashen-grey, his eyes closed. He’s facing outwards, his hair buffeted by a stream from the aircon unit, and beyond him, a single step away, is a sixty-foot drop to the ground below.

The smell in the drained pipeline is like a living thing. It crawls into my nose and squats there, prickly and burning. I almost gag, manage to keep it down. The floor in the pipe is uneven, criss-crossed with ridges and bent metal, spotted with puddles of soupy water.

I’m on all fours, a few feet into the tunnel, when I hear Carver come down behind me. I flick on my torch as he lands, illuminating walls stained with gunk.

“Well, Royo was right,” Carver says. “Kev would never fit down here.”

I look back, playing my torch across his body. For me, the space is tight, but for Carver it looks as if he’s been squeezed into the pipe, his shoulders bumping up against the roof.

We start forward. As I push myself around a corner, forcing my body into the wall for balance, my hand slips. My forearm slides into the muck, which soaks through my jumpsuit. It takes every ounce of willpower I have not to start hammering on the walls.

“Everything OK?” Carver says.

“Couldn’t be better,” I say through clenched teeth.

Another right turn, then we’ll be in the plant itself. The next T-junction should have a grate which we can lift up.

It doesn’t take us long to get there – the patoosh-patoosh of the machinery in the plant is coming down into the pipe, more felt than heard. The smell has grown stronger, too – something I didn’t think was possible. The inside of my nose feels scoured.

There’s a crackle in my ear. Royo. “Tracer unit, come back.”

I look down at my wrist, at the thick flexible rubber band with the small digital display. It’s the companion to my earpiece – each stomper unit gets its own dedicated channel on the system, and ours is 535.

I touch my wrist, keying the transmit button. “Copy. Loud and clear, Captain.”

“Report.”

I keep my voice low. “We’re getting close. We should be inside the plant in two minutes.”

“Good. We’ve got a team standing—”

There’s a burst of static on the line, fading and vanishing inside a second. It’s loud enough to make me wince.

“—static, Carver. When are you fixing it?” Royo says. If anything, he sounds even more annoyed.

“Gimme a break,” Carver say from behind me. “I’m still trying to find out why it’s even there. The frequencies on SPOCS are supposed to be discrete, so we don’t pick up any radio—”

“Carver.”

“Fine, fine,” he mutters. “Hope you and Kev are having fun up there.”

I crawl round a corner, and suddenly there’s a grate above my head, sending thin strips of light down into the pipe.

“We’re here,” I whisper. “Gotta go.”

“Copy that,” says Royo.

Someone walks across the grate.

The light blinks out. I see boot soles, and footsteps boom down into the tiny crawlspace. I wait until the owner of the boots recedes into the distance, then keep crawling.

I can see the exit up ahead – it’s another grate, with pinpricks of light leaking in. I look back over my shoulder as I get close; Carver catches my eye and nods. Very slowly, I put a hand on the grate and push.

The metal grinds as it lifts up, and I freeze.

There are no shouts, no running feet. I lift it up the rest of the way and haul myself out.

I’ve come up behind one of the waste vats. It’s an enormous metal cylinder, one of dozens dotted around the walls of the room, gleaming under the spotlights in the ceiling. The vats form a loose U-shape around an open area on the plant floor. The smell here is a little better, the stench of waste cut by the tang of disinfectant.

I pad to the side, moving on the balls of my feet, and Carver slips out of the grate behind me. He gets to his feet, hugging the wall as he moves into the shadows.

I rest a hand on the cold surface of the vat. I can feel it humming and vibrating as it churns the wastewater, separating out the good and the bad. They mix the water with bacteria to eat the waste, sending the oxygen produced back into the system. When the water’s clean, it recirculates, flowing to water points across the lower sectors.

I sneak a peek around the side of the vat. I don’t see the hostages. What I do see is a man with a stinger coming right towards our hiding place.

For a terrifying second, Prakesh doesn’t know what to say. If he startles Benson, the man could slip right off the ledge.

Benson saves him the trouble. The eyes in that grey face slide open, and he looks over.

“What do you want?” he says. His voice is calm, as if he’s asking Prakesh to deal with a routine lab matter. But Prakesh can’t stop looking at Benson’s feet, the toes already out over the edge.

“Hey, James,” he says, going for nonchalance and failing. “I was, um… I was hoping I could talk to you.”

“Oh yeah? About what?”

About what? Prakesh almost laughs. He can feel his palm sweating against the metal aircon unit. There’s no manual for these kinds of situations, no step-by-step procedure you can rely on.

“Let’s talk about why you’re up here,” Prakesh says. “How about it, huh?”

“Do you know how long I’ve been at the Air Lab?” Benson says, looking out at the vast hangar.

Prakesh’s mind whirs away, trying to remember. “I don’t—”

“Twenty years. I was here when old Xi Peng was running the place, long before you came along.” He says it without malice, as if it’s just a fact he’s learned to live with. Prakesh supposes he has.

“Twenty years,” Benson says again. “And I’ve hated it for nineteen and a half of them.”

“We can change that,” Prakesh says. He can hear noise on the ground below. He has to keep Benson’s attention. If he jumps before the Mark Six is ready…

“Really?” Benson actually laughs. “How? You think changing my role or putting me at a better time on the shift roster is gonna make me happier?”

Prakesh starts to speak, but Benson talks over him. “I got nobody. Never had nobody. Didn’t think I needed them, neither. But it wears you down, you know?”

He jabs a finger outwards, pointing at the hangar wall.

“They,” he says. “Them. They take us for granted. We give them food, all of them, and they treat us like dirt.”

“James,” says Prakesh. “You have to listen to me. We need you. I need you.”

Benson ignores him. “Even you. Especially you. With that genetic breakthrough of yours, they should have put you in charge of the whole damn station. How do you stand it?”

“They made me head of the Air Lab,” Prakesh says. “That’s enough for me.” He’s feeling embarrassed somehow, like he shouldn’t be talking about his success. He desperately wants to look back over his shoulder, hoping against hope that a stomper or a councillor or someone will appear on the rooftop, ready to step in.

“I always respected you,” Benson says. “You seem like a decent guy. But I don’t want to do this any more. You can’t make me.”

And before Prakesh can do anything, Benson closes his eyes and steps forward off the roof.

The man is my age, his face pockmarked with acne scars, wearing an old flannel shirt under a khaki jacket. When he comes round the side of the vat, Carver and I are pressed up against it, deep in the shadows.

The man stops, looking back over his shoulder. The stinger in his hands is homemade, cobbled together from spare parts, but perfectly capable of ruining your day.

I feel Carver tense beside me. I’m already working out the angles, the fastest and quietest way to take him down. If he gets even a single word off—

“We don’t need any heroes here,” someone says from across the room, out of my field of view. The man in the flannel shirt turns, striding back across the floor. I breathe out, long and slow.

The voice is faint, but I can just make out the words. “Everybody just stay on the ground, and we all walk away.”

I sneak another peek round the side of the vat, taking in the floor of the plant. I can see some of the hostage takers, their backs to me, and a few people lying face down on the floor, but I can’t get a clear look at the whole plant. Carver slips past me, placing a hand at the small of my back, moving silently to the next vat along.

I hear another voice – one of the hostages, I think. There’s a muffled thump, followed by a groan of pain.

“Ivan,” the first voice hisses.

“Sorry, Mikhail.”

Carver puts up a closed fist: Wait. He takes a look of his own, scanning the plant, then pulls back into the shadows.

I catch his attention, pointing in the direction of the hostage takers, then hold up six fingers, three on each hand.

He shakes his head, quick-quick, then holds up a fist and two fingers. Seven.

I risk another look. There he is: he was out of my field of view, standing off to one side, over by the far wall. I can’t pick out his features from here, but he has a massive beard, falling all the way to his stomach.

Carver taps his ear, looking at me questioningly. I nod, then key the transmit button on my wristband.

“Captain Royo,” I say, keeping my voice to a low murmur. “This is Riley, come back.”

“Copy, Hale. What do you see?”

Carver has moved further along the back of the vat, and is peering round the far end. He looks back at me, flashes seven fingers again, then a thumbs-up.

“We’ve got seven of them. They’re carrying stingers, homemade. I don’t see any other weapons.”

“And the hostages?”

“They look OK for now.”

Mikhail s