Gabriel: Zero Point Read online

  Chapter 2

  The high velocity cutter run from the Coral Sea in the Belt to Cielo in high Earth orbit took over seven hours. Seven hours of uncomfortable 1.9G acceleration and deceleration, during which time Gabriel tried to nap. One thing his relatively short military experience had taught him was to catch some sleep at any opportunity, including times when his body weighed nearly five hundred pounds.

  Captain Biermann had done the same, so the transit was mercifully quiet. The clank of the docking collar onto the cutter’s hull brought Gabriel out of his light sleep, and he opened his eyes to see Biermann floating in front of his acceleration couch, one hand holding a ceiling-mounted strap.

  “We’ve arrived, Lieutenant. Gather your gear and follow me.”

  Gabriel unfastened his safety belt and rose from the couch. He pushed off from the ceiling clumsily and floated towards his gear, strapped down against the rear bulkhead of the cutter’s transit lounge. He bounced off the bulkhead and grabbed one of the gear straps to steady himself. It wasn’t his first time in zero-G; all naval personnel had multiple sessions of weightless experience throughout their basic training, and he had even more during his twelve-week OCS stint. But this was the first time he had been under heavy Gs for several hours straight, and his muscles rebelled. It felt oddly like his drop capsule experiences, only instead of trying to adjust to standard gravity after high Gs when the capsules landed, he was trying to acclimate himself back to microgravity. He hoped Biermann wasn’t paying too much attention to his awkwardness.

  He looked up from the gear package to see Biermann’s back as he floated out of the open hatch. Breathing a quick sigh of relief, he unzipped the straps and pulled his bag free, then pushed off the bulkhead to follow.

  Cielo Station was a traditional Stanford torus design, resembling a spoked wheel rotating around a central hub that provided artificial gravity to the habitable spaces arranged along the near mile-long circumference of the wheel. Originally designed as a luxury space hotel, the NAF purchased it shortly before completion when private funding ran out and the owners sold at pennies on the dollar. The NAF completed the build and boosted it to high Earth orbit — over 27,000 miles in altitude — to keep it from prying eyes and the ever-growing number of LEO stations and geostationary satellites, as well as to provide an easier jumping-off point for naval vessels entering or leaving orbit.

  The central hub was reconfigured and extended by over a thousand feet in each direction, giving Cielo the ability to dock up to sixteen ships concurrently, from tiny shuttles up to Navy frigates. The planned luxury suites had been stripped and converted to research bays, most of which were accessible to any personnel allowed to dock. However, some bays were off-limits to all but the highest security clearance levels. Including an innocuous, unmarked gray door in Section Six.

  Gabriel followed Biermann’s retreating figure as they stepped from the transfer hub into the main corridor, and he gratefully felt the .7G pull his body to the decking. The brief elevator ride had given him a chance to steady his muscles, which still quivered from the heavy G shuttle ride. Now, as he walked along the brightly lit hall, his body relaxed. He checked his neuretics: eighteen-thirty on Cielo’s time system. His stomach growled. The nutrition bar and water bulb during the twelve-minute zero-G flipover on the flight wasn’t cutting it for a full day’s meal.

  “Captain,” he said, only to be stopped short by Biermann’s raised hand.

  “Dinner can wait,” he said over his shoulder. “Trust me when I say you don’t want a full stomach right now.”

  Gabriel was about to question what Biermann meant by that statement when the captain stopped at a gray door with a palmscan pad mounted on the wall beside it. He looked back at Gabriel, then gestured to the pad with a dip of his head.

  “They’re expecting you, not me,” he said.

  Gabriel approached the pad and glanced back at Biermann. “But they don’t have my scan information on…”

  “Sure they do,” Biermann interrupted. “You wouldn’t have gotten this far if we didn’t have everything on you we needed.”

  Gabriel looked back at the pad. The excitement he felt back on the Coral Sea gave way to more apprehension. Being recruited by Special Warfare was one thing. Feeling like his future was already laid out before him by someone else was quite another.

  He reached out and pressed his palm against the pad. It was warm to the touch, and lit up green behind his hand. He felt a slight electrical tingle in his arm. After a few seconds, the green light disappeared and the door slid aside, revealing a red-tinged room beyond. With a quick glance at Biermann, Gabriel stepped through the door.

  His eyes quickly adjusted to the dim red light, and he saw a dark-shirted woman on the far side of the room. She looked up from the table she stood in front of.

  “Ah, Lieutenant Gabriel,” she said. “You’re here.”

  The lights suddenly switched to bright white and Gabriel blinked several times. The woman walked up to him and extended a hand. Now that the lights were on fully, he saw her shirt was actually a light blue pullover, and was not the typical white lab coat he always assumed scientists and doctors wore. He couldn’t be sure if she was either, or neither.

  “Doctor Moira Knowles. A pleasure, Lieutenant.”

  Gabriel set his gear bag down and shook her hand. “Ma’am.” Doctor it was.

  She smiled. “Ma’am. How formal. You Navy types are all alike. Call me Moira. Or Doc, whatever you prefer. Just not ma’am. That’s for my grandmother.”

  Gabriel pursed his lips. “You’re not Navy?”

  Her smile turned into a laugh. “Oh, hell no. I get paid far better as a private researcher. I moonlight here because this project is my baby. And for better or worse, it can’t be worked on anywhere else.”

  “Captain Biermann said…” Gabriel started to say as he looked over his shoulder, but stopped short when he saw Biermann had not entered the room. The door was already closed.

  Knowles released his hand. “Captain Biermann will meet us when the procedures are complete, Evan.”

  Gabriel turned back around to face Knowles. “Procedures?” His apprehension returned, and he missed the fact she used his first name.

  Knowles scrunched up her brow. “Yes. Didn’t Biermann explain them?” She frowned when Gabriel didn’t answer. “Of course he didn’t. Damned spooks are always too busy. Dumps it on me. I get it.”

  She turned and walked back to the table where she had been working. Gabriel looked left and right, scanning the lab, as he thought of it. His neuretics showed it was forty-two feet wide, the width of all of the bays along Cielo’s wheel, and just under two hundred feet long with a slight upward curve to the floor in each direction. One end of the lab was taken up by a wallscreen; the opposite end, closest to where Gabriel stood, held a bank of smaller screens, all blank. In the approximate center of the lab was a massive state-of-the-art holotable, also switched off. The only active equipment, it appeared, was on Knowles’s work table: several open flexscreens, a large device that resembled a 3-D medical nanoscope Gabriel had seen years ago in his boot camp clinic, and dozens of electronically sealed specimen containers.

  But the most prominent item in the lab, and the one that gave Gabriel the most apprehension, was the large plastic structure he had walked past to join Knowles. It was a rectangular box with rounded corners, around eight feet long and three feet across; the same three feet in height. White in color except for a glass lid, it sat horizontally on four thick steel pedestals, one at each corner, and reminded Gabriel of a coffin.

  The lid was open, swung vertically on a hinge at one end, and Gabriel glanced inside as he walked past. The inside was also smooth plastic, though unlike the bright white exterior, it was matte black with several small holes on the bottom and dozens of studs along each side. A claustrophobic spa therapy tub, a part of his mind said, but the more rational side of his mind overrode that. Stasis capsule.

  Gabriel pulled his gaze from the
capsule and walked up next to Knowles. She was peering into the top of the nanoscope, apparently unconcerned with her guest.

  He cleared his throat. “Procedures?” he asked again.

  She glanced up from the scope. “Sorry,” she said, turning from the table to face Gabriel. “Just making sure my machines are synced and ready to go.”

  He watched as Knowles picked up one of the specimen containers and carried it to the capsule. She tapped the container against the surface, the soft click echoing in the quiet room. “This is the heart of the augmentation program. And no, it’s not a coffin.” She smiled. “I can see it in your eyes, and the others that have come through here thought the same thing. No, Lieutenant, this is not your final resting place. On the contrary, this is your zero point.”