Free Deathstalker Honor by Simon R. Green Page B

solid steel door, blunt and functional, with a state-of-the-art and then some lock. Hazel immediately moved in close, studying the lock with almost hungry intensity. Hazel and locks were old friends. Or enemies, depending how you looked at it. Owen put his ear to the cold steel door and listened carefully. After a while he slowly made out the measured repetitious sounds of grinding machinery, and the hissing of gasses under pressure. Owen straightened up and frowned thoughtfully. He’d kept nothing in his Standing that would have sounded like that. And David hadn’t added anything either. What new horror the Wolfe had introduced into what used to be his home? He looked down at Hazel, who was still studying the lock.
    “Any luck?”
    “Yeah, all bad. Without my tools we’re talking half an hour at least. Maybe more.”
    “Too long,” said Owen flatly.
    “I know that!” said Hazel. She stood up and scowled at the steel door. “We could always shoot the lock out.”
    “Too noisy. Even if it didn’t set off a whole mess of alarms, which it probably would.”
    “All right,” said Hazel impatiently. “What do you suggest?”
    Owen smiled at her, stepped forward, and kicked the door in. The lock shattered, the solid steel denting deeply under his boot, and the whole door tore itself away from its hinges and fell to the floor of the room beyond with a satisfyingly heavy clang. Hazel looked at Owen.
    “Show-off.”
    They stepped over the door and into the lab, guns in hand, but there was no one coming to meet them. The only occupant of the vast room was a technician in a grubby smock seated before a computer terminal, the jack plugged into the back of his neck. Owen and Hazel lowered their guns. The cyberjock was so lost in his own world they could have shot him and he wouldn’t have noticed till he unplugged. They looked around them, trying to make sense of the masses of tech and machinery that filled most of the laboratory.
    The room was huge. Owen thought vaguely it might have been a wine cellar once. Unfamiliar machinery was bulked together in groups, taking up most of the floor space, their tops almost brushing the ceiling. None of it looked particularly subtle. It was mostly crude mechanical constructions (hence the need for a jack-in rather than using comm implants) designed for crushing and grating and sorting the materials presented to them. Owen turned slowly around, tracing the path of the materials. Tubing led away from the larger machines, stapled to the stone walls, crisscrossing each other in a riot of color coding. They delivered whatever they were carrying to a complicated filtration system, which in turn steadily dripped its end result into a series of unlabeled containers. Everything else was straightforward computer-monitoring equipment. He looked across at Hazel, who shrugged, which was pretty much what he’d expected. So, when in doubt, ask someone. Loudly.
    Owen strode over to the lab technician, happily communing unawares with his computers, ripped the jack out of the back of his neck, spun him around in his chair, and stuck his gun up the man’s nose. It took a moment for the tech to realize what was happening, dazed by his sudden exit from the computer systems, and then his eyes focused on Owen’s face and he looked even more upset, if that was possible. Owen smiled nastily at him, and the tech actually whimpered. Hazel moved in from the other side and gave him her best menacing glower, and the man all but wet himself. Owen began to feel like he was bullying a puppy, but ruthlessly suppressed the thought. This was one of Valentine’s people, and therefore guilty by association.
    “Hi there,” Owen said to him, not at all pleasantly. “I’m Owen Deathstalker, the nightmare made flesh to your right is Hazel d’Ark, and you are in deep doo-doo. Answer my questions fully and accurately, and you might just live long enough to stand trial. Nod if you’re with me so far.”
    The technician