Free Gabriel: Zero Point (Evan Gabriel Trilogy) by Steve Umstead Page B

stain where blood had pooled. A maintenance worker walked over with a bucket in his hand.
    “Excuse me, sir,” he said as he edged past Gabriel and knelt to work on the stain.
    The civilian looked back at Gabriel. “Hell of a mess. Hard to believe anyone survived.”
    Gabriel turned away without answering and headed down the corridor, lost in his own thoughts. Yes, he had survived. Survived a test, which still gnawed at him. Was he that expendable that the Navy could throw him into a meat grinder of armed convicted felons? And a limpet mine to boot?
    The walk back to the lab was over a third of a mile. In his mad dash to the target, it seemed to take merely seconds to cover that distance. Now, as he walked slowly past another cleanup crew — a man scrubbing blood off the floor in front of the elevator bay and a woman patching a mag pistol round hole in the wall panel — that same distance seemed to take days.  
    This had all been a test. A test to see if he was good enough to become a weapon, as Biermann had termed it — a weapon in the hands of the Federation. Jesus, that sounds ridiculous . It seemed like only yesterday he was graduating OCS in Newport, with DePalma and Cristoff at his side. Within months, they’d be dead, and he’d be reassigned. And now here he was, the product of some top-secret military procedure, walking back to the lab to get his shoes. Past the evidence of his handiwork.
    The body of the woman — Erika Bustos, Biermann said her name was — was gone, but he could see where she had fallen. The cleanup crew hadn’t yet gotten this far down the corridor, and bits of burned armor lay in the middle of the floor. The remnants of his precise three-shot burst that had ended her life. He knew Biermann was telling the truth; he hadn’t needed to look up Bustos’s history. Something in the way he’d rattled off the names and crimes struck him as genuine.
    So here she had fallen. A serial killer of over twenty men. Someone who was running at him firing an energy weapon, trying to end his life so she could extend hers. Could he blame her? No, not for the second part. For her crimes, she deserved the punishment. But for her efforts, did she deserve this fate? He wasn’t sure. He only knew that he was responsible for the very end of her life, and again deep down killing a man felt different. It was something he couldn’t quite put into words or even a concrete idea, it was just… a feeling.  
    The two walls outside the lab were complete wrecks. The wall where the limpet mine was attached was shattered and cracked, but the wall on the opposite side of the directional charge was completely destroyed. The panels had warped and snapped, and the heavy steel bulkhead beneath them was exposed and blackened.  
    He walked up to the mess and ran his index finger along the edge of one of the burnt panels. If he hadn’t reacted to the memory of Gilly’s death on the asteroid and recognized the mine for what it was, his upper body would have suffered the fate of the panels in front of him.
    The steel bulkhead was peppered with pockmarks, evidence of the force of the charge. It wasn’t meant to scare, or injure, or maim. It was meant to kill. He’d been tested throughout his life, from grade school through high school, from Basic through OCS, in the field and in the classroom. But never had a test been this… deadly. He gave thanks to whatever god was watching over him, or whatever nano machines were running through him, that he passed.
    He turned and walked into the lab. The initial attackers were gone, as the civilian informed Biermann, and the lab appeared just as it had before the assault. His boots were under the lab table, and his water bottle sat placidly where he left it. The tank’s lid was still raised, and his soggy briefs sat underneath it where he’d thrown them. But the steel locker he left open was closed, the one with Knowles’s bloody pullover in it. She was in on the whole thing, and