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

the elevator bay closest to the transmission origin. No other vids picked up anyone in the corridor; it was completely empty. Again he wondered about the identity of the attackers, as the security system showed no elevated threat levels anywhere on the station. Yet there they were, and the station seemed devoid of any other personnel. According to Cielo’s standard operating manifest, dozens of researchers should be on duty at any given hour, not to mention the regular comings and goings of Navy personnel. Something was seriously wrong with the entire situation, but Gabriel put that thought off for now. He had a more immediate threat — three armed hostiles in his way.
    He was about to step into the corridor when a thought hit him. With three hostiles along the shortest route to his target, the longer route may be undefended, and it was a circle after all. He enlarged the station schematic, then frowned as he scanned the data.
    According to the station plans, Cielo had four heavy carbotanium blast doors along its circumference that sealed off a quarter of the corridor in case of atmospheric breach or accidental release of materials from one of the research labs. The security schematic showed the one to Gabriel’s left, or in the direction of the long route around the station, was closed. He sent a signal to the system to check the door’s status, and it showed hard-locked, meaning manually dogged, apparently from the other side, according to the readout.
    They were leading him.
    The station was empty, only one route was available to him, and it led through armed gunmen. It was most certainly a trap, but why? Gabriel looked back at the locker on the far side of the lab, where the bloody shirt lay. If someone wanted him dead, the easiest way would have been to do it while he was under sedation, fast asleep in a pool of goo in a sealed container. Something else was going on here.
    A memory nagged at him: the assault on the pirate hideout on the asteroid a few weeks back. He and his team had rooted out and captured or killed a dozen pirates by going door-to-door through the makeshift surface station the pirates had built using leftover or stolen prefab units tied down to the dusty asteroid with steel cables. And now here Gabriel was, about to embark on an eerily similar door-to-door mission with a singular target, only this time, he was alone.
    His thoughts were interrupted by his threat assessment pinging him. The security system video feed image, still projected into a small corner of his Mindseye like a holovid picture-in-picture, showed the nearest gunman edging around the elevator bay, and the other two starting to move as well.
    He took one last look at his boots under the table and sighed. Bringing the rifle back up to his shoulder, he turned and stepped into the corridor.
    The limpet mine was unexpected.

Chapter 8

    After the fact, Gabriel would come to realize that what saved him from the explosion was not his upgraded neuretics, or his augmented body, but his natural reactions — and his memory of the asteroid mission. His memories, as he thought later on, while painful, had saved his life.
    As he stepped into the corridor, a flicker of memory from that mission flickered. He and his team, in microgravity, made their way between two of the prefab units. Gilly was point man, and Gabriel was a few dozen yards behind, with the gap growing. Gilly’s quick pace stirred up dust into a cloud that hung in the airless environment. They were maintaining comm silence, so Gabriel had no way to tell Gilly to slow his movement. He wanted to push forward, grab the young seaman by his shoulder, but his own heavy boots and reverse retro thrusters, designed to keep the team grounded in less than .02G, slowed him.
    He was about to send a point-to-point neuretics burst when he saw a lump on the side of the prefab Gilly was passing. It was most certainly out of place; the color was whiter and the area was cleaner than the rest of the