Read Online The Darwin Elevator by Jason Hough - Free Book Online Page B

across the cluttered hall. Crates and boxes of every shape, size, and color lined the walls, lashed in place with mesh netting and elastic cord. He let his fingers brush across the containers as he floated along, pleased with the progress in stocking the facility.
    Enough supplies for five hundred people to survive six months, his goal. Plus the gear needed to operate a private security force.
    All because of Tania and her theory. A theory he’d spent years cultivating in her. Subtle hints and suggestions, dropped casually. The idea had to be hers, and she’d finally come to it.
    The whole business was a gamble. An epic gamble. Neil knew this. He’d accepted it and moved on, driven not by her innocent speculation, but by the possibilities of what came next. His imagination fueled the rest.
    He stopped once, at the door of a crewman who’d begged out of the card game due to an upset stomach. The poor bastard had floated from the common room with both hands clutched around his waist. Neil found the door to be locked. “Okay in there?”
    No response came, only the muffled sound of retching.
    Poor sod. Satisfied the man would remain in his room, Neil continued his drift along the main corridor.
    On reaching the airlock, he opened the circular door and coughed three times, loudly. He swept his gaze, and his lamp, along the direction he’d come, and saw nothing. The sounds of inebriated men at cards had faded to silence. Neil heard nothing but the ever-present hum of air processors.
    Kelly Adelaide emerged from the airlock door like a specter.
    “I was worried you forgot about me,” she said with mirth.
    Neil offered his arm to halt her momentum. The tiny woman, dressed in a skintight black outfit, declined his help. She floated to the far wall of the corridor, flipping in air to land feetfirst. Her fluid movements spoke of decades spent in orbit.
    With one hand she steadied herself. “Dark, no spin. I give up. Where are we?” she asked.
    “This is Hab-Eight,” Neil said. He handed her a small flashlight.
    The woman turned it on, glanced around. “I didn’t realize you’d pressurized it.”
    “If anyone asks,” Neil replied, “I haven’t.”
    “Who else knows?”
    “A skeleton crew. My brother, Zane, though he doesn’t know why I’m stalling. And I told one of my scientists, Tania Sharma, that it is ‘close’ to completion.”
    She cracked a wicked grin. He knew she would. The woman, now in her early fifties, had led a checkered life. A daughter of missionaries, her childhood a checklist of every third-world hellhole on the map. She’d learned to be resourceful, to survive. At eighteen she joined the Army Engineering Corps before shifting to Special Forces. After that, a brief stint as a contract assassin, which brought her to Neil. She’d been paid to kill him.
    She would have succeeded, he knew that, but SUBS broke out and the world changed. All contracts null and void. Instead of completing her mission, she asked Neil for a job—a life in orbit. His bodyguard, or spy. Whatever he required.
    His gut said to take her on, and so he had. He’d learned early in life to trust such instincts.
    For the last year she’d spent most of her time sneaking around Gateway, providing Neil with regular reports on everything that went on there. She knew the maintenance tunnels better than the workers who used them, and even played little pranks on them out of sheer boredom. Turning the odd dial, disconnecting random pipes. The people on Gateway spoke of a ghost, and Kelly swelled with pride when she first heard the nickname.
    Once a week Neil arranged to have her come up to Platz Station, where she trained select members of his staff in self-defense and basic tactics. For recreational reasons, as the story went. “I should have brought you here much sooner,” he said.
    Kelly studied the boxes lining the wall behind her. “You’ve been busy.”
    “I have at that.”
    “Show me.”
    He led her to the second