The Travels of Scout Shannon Books 1-3

Chapter 22

22

The buzz from the sugar and caffeine made for a very different sort of numbness. Scout sipped slowly at each bottle, not really aware of how much time was passing beyond the count of the empties she lined up against the wall. After ten bottles, she felt like she really ought to eat something—her hands were shaking from all the caffeine—but she was too tired to get up and find food.

She had gotten up earlier to give each of the dogs an MRE’s worth of beef stroganoff. They had licked the trays clean, but as per usual with dogs, they had pushed the trays all across the floor while accomplishing that. One was in the corner near the empty jolo bottles, but the other had slipped under one of the ovens, and from time to time one or the other of the dogs would sniff under the oven, smelling that last bit of rich gravy they couldn’t quite reach. Scout was sure it was maddening but couldn’t work up enough interest to get up and retrieve it for them.

She had just popped open an eleventh bottle and brought it to her lips when the lights went out. There was a long moment in total darkness, then a red light appeared over the doorway between the kitchen and the pantry. There was another red light on the other side, Scout could tell from the pattern of the inky shadows. She stood up and crossed to the hatch, trying to listen through the door.

At first it seemed far too thick to hear anything, and Scout’s hand moved to the bolt to open the hatch enough to peek out. Then she heard a crash, followed by more crashes, then complete silence.

Scout strained her ears to hear more—a voice, footsteps, anything—but the silence stretched on for minute after minute. At last she could take it no more. She slid the bolt back as quietly as she could, then turned the wheel until the hatch swung ever so slightly ajar.

“Come, dogs,” she whispered, pointing at her side. Shadow was there in an instant, but Girl was still cowering next to the chopping block. Scout let the door swing open anyway, stepping back a bit in case anyone was about to charge inside. But there was no one there.

The common room was also lit by red emergency lights. There was a burnt smell in the air that made Shadow sniffle, then whine. Scout thought at first that it was the remains of the smoke grenade, but it was too strong for that. She crossed the floor to where Warrior still lay on her side and knelt to take the light from Warrior’s belt. She shined it around the room, but there was no sign of anyone there besides her and Shadow, and now Girl hovering in the kitchen doorway.

But there was smoke curling in from the communications room.

Scout started to rise but then knelt back down again. She was going to need more than a light. And she was sure Warrior would want her to have whatever she needed. Especially if the alternative was Liv or Clementine having it. Scout took a deep breath, pushing back the voice in her head that said she was only telling herself what she wanted to hear, and reached for the clasp on Warrior’s belt to snap it open. It took a moment to get it out from under Warrior’s hips; she had forgotten just how heavy Warrior was.

When it was at last free, she belted it around her own waist. At first it hung too low on her hips, threatening to slip down to the ground around her feet, but then it started tightening, much like the cuffs had done around Ottilie’s wrists. Scout pulled the gun from her waistband as the belt settled around her waist, then tucked it into its holster at the back of the belt.

She looked down at Warrior’s still face. The broken lens was probably useless, but she might end up needing the other. She touched the edge of it, worried that she was going to have to claw it free, to dig into Warrior’s face with her nails, but it popped free at the first brush of her fingertips and she slipped it into one of the belt’s many pouches.

Light in hand, one loyal dog at her heels, she crept up to the communications room. The smell was definitely from an electrical fire, the noxious odor of melted circuit boards and wires. She saw the legs of one of the chairs thrusting out from the bank of monitors toward the center of the room, then saw where the seat was embedded among the smashed screens. Not a single screen was unharmed. But this wasn’t why the lights were off, Scout was sure. Why would either Liv or Clementine cut the lights, then stand here silently for so long before destroying the equipment? It made more sense that the electricity had been cut to the entire station from somewhere else, then whichever one of them had done it had walked or hovered here to make sure no one could get a signal out even if they restored the power.

There must be another place from where someone could control the power. A utility room of some sort.

Scout gasped aloud as a horrible idea struck her. Was the airflow off too? She looked around, found a vent, and put a hand in front of it. She could feel a faint stirring of the air and breathed a sigh of relief. It made sense; the emergency lights were on, there must also be emergency power to the air systems. Still, she wanted everything back on as soon as possible.

But where could a utility room be?

That could have been where Liv was heading when she traversed the hangar. In fact, the only other door Scout hadn’t gone through was the one on the other side of the barracks, the one to Viola’s private space.

Scout signaled for Shadow to follow her as she pressed on, past the communications room to the barracks. Girl whined for a moment, then ran to catch up, not wanting them out of her sight. Shadow glanced back at her, then turned his focus back to the corridor between the bunks. This room also was empty, save for Ruth’s corpse wrapped in a sheet in the bunk under where Scout had tried so briefly to sleep.

The only other way out was the hatch to Viola’s rooms. Scout wasn’t sure if it would be locked or not. There was a panel next to the door, the sort that controlled locks and room climate in the nicer places Scout had been. It was unsmashed but completely dark. Scout grabbed the handle on the door and gave it a push. It swung open and she stepped over a threshold into a small sitting room, just two chairs on either side of the hatch turned to face each other. Next to one was a basket filled with balls of wool and an assortment of knitting needles. Next to the other was a table that held a cup and saucer half filled with a brown liquid that smelled like tea.

It only took two steps to cross the room through another open hatch to a room dominated by a large, poufy bed. Perhaps the mattress was hard as a rock, but the comforters piled on top of it were each puffier than the last, and Scout had no idea what any one person could even do with such an enormous number of pillows. There wasn’t room enough to step inside without climbing up onto that bed. Definitely no room for anyone to be hiding, although she poked at the pile of comforters just to be sure.

Then something mewed. Girl immediately began making her I-want-to-play-with-that whining noise, wagging her tail furiously as she attempted to force herself between Scout and Shadow and charge into the room to find the mewler.

“Girl, stay!” Scout said, grabbing her collar to pull her back. “Stay!”

Shadow sat down in his best erect posture like a soldier at parade rest, but Girl just kept squirming.

Scout leaned into the room and found the cat tucked between the foot of a bed and the side of the room opposite where the open door stood. He looked up at Scout, tail flicking imperiously back and forth as he regarded her.

“You’re probably fine where you are, Tubbins,” Scout said to the cat. “We’ll leave you be.”

She was about to lean back out of the room when something caught her eye. Something was resting on a little shelf over the head of the bed, something like an electronic tablet. Viola, living alone, was likely a voracious reader, but what if it was something else?

“Dogs, stay!” she said, then climbed up onto the bed. Her knees sank so deeply in the pillowy mattress that crawling was awkward, but she managed to stretch and reach for the tablet without straying too far from the doorway where Girl watched intently, looking for any opening to rush in and seize the cat.

Scout sat cross-legged on the bed and looked over the tablet. It was a very old model, clearly designed for rough use, as it was heavy but durable. She found the on button and pressed it. She had a brief glimpse of a menu screen before an alert window popped open. No network connection. Given the state of the communications room, that wasn’t exactly a surprise. She cleared the alert and went back to scrolling through the menu.

The tablet definitely wasn’t designed for reading fiction. It must have belonged to the stationmaster originally, as the menu listed items for controlling payroll, expenses, inventory, travel logs, and other similar bits of bureaucracy.

Then Scout found the link to the station schematics. This was perhaps too much information, a screen full of overlapping colors designating plumbing, electrical conduits, emergency systems, and more things she couldn’t even name. She summoned a submenu and began unchecking boxes until all she had left was an outline of the walls of the facility with little labels on each room.

There it was, off the hangar, just as she had suspected—and frustratingly close to the room she was sitting in, if she could just bust through walls. She reached out and touched the wall in front of her. Nope, far too solid. She was going to have to take the long way around.

“See you, Tubbins,” she said, giving the cat’s ears a scratch before clambering back out of the bed. She pushed Girl back with her knee before the dog could hop up on the bed and also give Tubbins’s ears a go. “Come, dogs,” she said, drawing Warrior’s pistol and heading back through the red-lit rooms to the maintenance door to the hangar, tablet in hand.

There had been other doorways, once. The schematic showed doors on most of the walls of the octagonal rooms, but when Scout reached through the shelving to pass a hand over the walls, she felt no sign of a door. Over time things had been sealed off, she guessed, although she couldn’t imagine why. Viola said she had customers, but given the state of the hangar, they clearly weren’t entering from there. Did everyone come through the long tunnel they had taken from the emergency beacon? But that required crawling on hands and knees through an all but invisible tunnel to the almost entirely blocked doorway. That didn’t seem very customer-friendly.

And yet, the door was only almost entirely blocked. Did the wind really create that pattern, the emptiness within the hill? Scout doubted it. Someone had worked to keep that open, but only just. Now that Viola was gone, it hardly mattered. At some point after the storm her customers would discover she was gone. And even if they were as standoffish and secretive as Viola, eventually the word would get out that all of this was just waiting here for the taking. Looters would follow.

Scout ducked through the maintenance door into the hangar, the dogs close at her heels. They were off-leash this time but not anxious to run on ahead. Shadow sniffed at things as they passed them but was careful to stay close to Scout’s light. Girl padded along, uninterested in any of the mountains of junk around them.

As they drew nearer the utility room, Scout hear a soft clang, then someone whispering a curse. She gripped the pistol tightly, tucking Viola’s tablet into the back of her belt to keep her other hand free. Shadow was sniffing the air like crazy, but Girl still seemed unconcerned.

They wormed their way around another stack of abandoned supplies and Scout saw a faint light streaming from the doorway to the utility room. She kept her own light low on the ground just in front of her feet.

There was no disturbance in the thick layer of dust in front of her, only her prints and the dogs’ behind her. That, plus Girl’s continued calm, told her who she was sneaking up on.

She stepped into the utility room, pistol raised to just above hover chair height. “Hello, Liv.”