Gabriel: Zero Point (Evan Gabriel Trilogy) by Steve Umstead Read Free Book Online

and apparently whatever Knowles had injected into him prevented the bulk of the pain from reaching his nervous system. Interesting . He crouched and wiped his hand off on the fallen gunman’s sleeve. The pulse rifle Gabriel used against him lay against the bulkhead wall near the doorway. He reached over and picked it up, palming the trigger pad to arm it. Shit . Neuretics code locked. He was an unarmed target on an unfamiliar space station, still recovering from a full day under sedation.  
    A neuretics threat alert buzzed in his head. Another warm body was on its way down the corridor. He stood and squeezed the disabled pulse rifle in frustration, and an icon popped up in Mindseye.  
    OVERRIDE COMPLETE
    The pulse rifle clicked and he felt a tingle in his hand, signaling the weapon was armed and ready to fire. A feral grin creased his face. Thanks doc, wherever you are.
    He glanced down at his sock feet, then looked across the room toward his boots. No time, he thought. And maybe quieter without them. He pressed the stock of the rifle into his shoulder, raised the barrel, and stepped to the doorway.

Chapter 7

    Cielo’s corridors were relatively narrow, and their smooth walls afforded no cover whatsoever, as Gabriel remembered from his arrival the day before. The only exceptions were the elevator bays. Around Cielo’s 4,750-foot circumference were eight elevators that led “up” into the central docking hub, and each of those took up half of the corridor’s twelve foot width. The vertical steel tubes offered a natural defilade every 600 feet or so along the sloping hall, and Gabriel knew the opposing force would use them for cover.  
    His neuretics pulled a schematic of the station from Cielo’s security system and projected it into his Mindesye, then plotted the position of the most recent threat. He pushed the image off to one side, not wanting a full HUD at this point, and sent out a more powerful passive scan.
    The flashing icon was behind the closest elevator bay, as Gabriel himself would have been, and in the direction of the transmission origin. He quickly popped his head through the doorway. Without the steel walls and bulkheads in his line of sight, his neuretics were able to “see” into the corridor. His passive scan pinned down the likely transmission source as a small room about halfway around the torus, on the same side of the hallway as the lab. He had nearly 2,000 feet to go, past three elevator bays, and at least one hostile in his way, most likely more.  
    He pulled his head back into the lab, lowering the pulse rifle, and glanced down at the unconscious gunman slumped against the bulkhead. His modern plate-on-fabric combat armor appeared to be NAF-issued, but the weapon most certainly was not. The boots didn’t match the armor, the armor bore no insignia, rank, or name, and his unkempt hair stuck out from under the ill-fitting half helmet. The helmet was a combat-rated generic model used by dozens of third-world armies with rudimentary electronics and communications, no HUD visor or face shield, and no direct neuretics link. He was a walking contradiction, or in his case, a sleeping one. Who the hell are these guys?
    He rechecked his data. It was 163 feet to the first elevator bay, and his first obstacle. He debated sending an active scan to fully plot his route, but again dismissed it as being too risky. Wait. The security system. He pulled up the station’s security program and went through the system packages visually in Mindseye, like flipping the pages of a book. He stopped at a folder marked AV and requested access. The sentry algorithm only gave token resistance before his neuretics breezed through.  
    He found the video monitoring systems for the corridor and began searching. Within seconds, an image seen from above of a man in combat armor crouching behind the gray steel elevator bay popped up. Gabriel flipped through more vids and found two more hostiles, both taking cover behind