Family Betrayal

[l3wt]

Arland listened to the voice in his earpiece as he cradled his weapon, tensing as he gained a better grasp of the situation. He had no doubts that Austin would be able to handle the one mark, but where the blazes had the other one gone?!

The soldier wracked his mind for possibilities. If the spook wasn't in the bar, she hadn't used the entrance leading out into his field of fire... Which naturally meant must have used another route... But room 101 had only one entrance.

Unless...

He glanced up from his roost. Quite a few beams ahead of him, directly above the field he'd planned on covering, there was a ventilation grate, wide enough to fit a person into. Sudden and alarming like a stab wound, James felt realization dawn - he'd underestimated his mark, and there could be less than a minute until she'd bypassed him completely... And reached the package in 101.

Furious, he rose to his feet and raced across the beams with little regard for the alarming height which a misstep could easily cause him to tumble down, but rage and adrenaline caused him to disregard it.

When he reached the grate, he growled into his microphone.

"Austin, target is in the vent shafts, I repeat, the target is in the vents! I don't have time to climb down, and she'll just use the package as a hostage to make her way out if she gets to her first! I'm going to try and intercept her inside the vent system!"

As he spoke, he affixed a suppressor (to make sure he wouldn't deafen himself inside the confines of the ventilation system) onto his weapon, folded down its stock, and blew the rusty vent grate clean off with a few rounds.

Then, he clambered inside, keenly wishing he had brought a flashlight. He'd have to rely on sense of direction, hearing and touch inside the vent complex. If he remembered what he'd picked up from his days living on, and moving between varying stations in search of work correctly, most spaceborne facilities had a central chamber housing the main air-scrubbing and fan assemblies, into which all the varying shafts eventually converged.

If Amelia wanted to go down a level, unless she had intimate knowledge of the exact shaft layout, which he doubted, (he didn't, at any rate) then she would have to pass through that chamber, just like him.

That's where he hoped to intercept her, at any rate. Bumping into her in the dark of the shafts themselves would probably get very awkward and lethal for both parties involved. So James shuffled along, trying to keep his movements as quiet as possible, feeling out the path ahead with one hand and holding his compact weapon in the other. Finding the way to the central ventilation chamber would be easy enough, he just had to follow the direction the air currents came from...