Free The Far Shores (The Central Series) by Zachary Rawlins Page A

turned
off.
    Wan-Li spun around in
his chair, the squeak of the bearings painfully audible, opening his mouth to inquire
angrily as to the problem, to direct resources to the immediate correction of
the situation. This left him face to face with a woman in black who had just
stepped out of the feeble shadow created by the fluorescent bars overhead to
survey the room with a ghastly smile.
    “Hello, leeches! My name
is Alice Gallow…”
    The guard assigned to
the elevator had admirable reflexes. He had his sidearm out of his holster
before she opened her mouth, firing half a magazine worth of armor-piercing
rounds toward the Auditor’s back before she finished her sentence.
    Not a single round
connected. With anything, the target or otherwise. Wan-Li, an avid reader of
enemy dossiers, assumed that they had disappeared into Gallow’s own shadow. He
was flabbergasted at the level of intelligence the Auditors must have had on
the facility to be so precisely aware of the arrangement of the lighting in the
room – as Alice Gallow stood a meter away on the raised podium of the command
center, directly beneath a large bank of lights that cast a cluster of slight
shadows in a half-circle behind her. He wondered where the bullets had been
sent.
    Alice Gallow spun
around, firing an automatic shotgun from the hip Judging from the destruction caused
by the thunderous volley, she was using buckshot, emptying her magazine in her
attacker’s general direction. The guard was hit in a dozen different places, and
collapsed in a bloody heap, along with several other unlucky staff and
virtually all the equipment that occupied the space between them. Wan-Li’s ears
rang, and the air stank of gunpowder and burning plastic, while staff fled or
scrambled to aid the screaming wounded.
    The Auditor casually
surveyed the room while she ejected the fat plastic magazine and replaced it
with another from her belt, scanning for any remaining potential interruptions
in the room. Wan-Li remained perfectly still, not bothering to reach for the
pistol he kept in the top drawer of his desk. He was well aware of the futility
of trying to outmatch the Chief Auditor. He was an administrator, not a gunman.
    “…and I am here in
regard to an ongoing Audit, the subject of which is classified,” Alice Gallow
continued calmly, as if she hadn’t just killed someone, “but that probably won’t
come as any surprise to you assholes. I bet you’re wondering what happened to
your little apport interference machine, right?”
    Wan-Li nodded. He would
have agreed with anything she said, but in this case, he was legitimately
curious. The device had multiple redundant power supplies, electromagnetic
shielding, and two centimeters of composite armor housing protecting its
innards, so sabotage seemed near impossible.
    “You got some smart boys
out here in Shandong. Build all sorts of clever things, including your little
toy. Guess the Outer Dark doesn’t have much of an industrial base, or they’d do
that sort of thing in-house.” Alice Gallow shrugged and sat down on one end of
Wan-Li’s desk. The remainder of the staff moved toward the perforated elevator
in fits and starts, torn between the desire to flee and fear of being noticed.
“Did a pretty good job covering your tracks, I have to say. Distributing
production between a number of firms, so that none of them could figure out
exactly what they were building, that was a good move. Killing off three of the
project engineers and two industrial designers so they couldn’t repeat the job
was even better. All you left us to work with was a bunch of broken little
pieces.”
    One staffer made it as
far as the elevator console, extending a trembling hand toward the call button.
Alice whipped the combat shotgun around to point in his direction, gesturing
him away from the elevator with the muzzle. The staffer took the hint and scurried
away from the elevator to hide behind an intact desk.
    “’Course, if you