第26页
"Follow me." Ackerson moved out the open doors into a narrow corridor. He led Kurt through three intersections.
Many Naval officers passed them, but none saluted. They kept to themselves for the most part, eyes down. And while a few nodded to Kurt, no one so much as even glanced at Ackerson.
Kurt's unease at this odd situation grew palpable.
They halted at a pressure door guarded by two marines who saluted. Kurt crisply returned their salute. Ackerson gave them a causal half-salute gesture.
The Colonel set his hand on a biometric reader and face, retina, and palm were simultaneously scanned.
With a hiss, the door opened.
Kurt and Ackerson stepped into a dimly lit twenty-meter-wide room filled wall to wall with monitors. Spectroscopic signatures, star charts, and Slipstream space pulses strobed across the screens. There were several officers and two holographic Als consulting with them in whispered tones.
One AI was a gray-robbed figure without a body. A wraith.
The other was a collection of disembodied eyes, mouths, and gesturing hands—what Kurt vaguely recalled from one of Deja's art lessons as an example of cubist art.
Ackerson whisked him across the room and to another door. A second biometric scan and they entered an elevator.
There was downward motion, then a moment of zero-gee free fall, and the sensation of gravity then returned. The doors opened to a catwalk that extended over inky darkness to a blank wall.
The Colonel approached the blank wall, a seam appeared, and then the two sections pulled apart.
"This room is called 'Odin's Eye' by the junior staff," Ackerson said. "You have been temporarily granted a code-word top-secret clearance to enter. Whatever is said inside is similarly
classified and you will reveal none of our conversation unless the proper code words are provided. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir," Kurt replied.
Kurt's instinct, however, was to not enter this room. He, in fact, wanted to be anyplace but in that room. But he couldn't refuse.
They entered.
The doors closed behind them; Kurt didn't see the seam.
The room had white concave walls, and Kurt's eyes had a hard time focusing.
"Your classification code word is Talcon Forty,'" Ackerson said. "Now, speak freely in here. I certainly will." He gestured to a black circular table in the center of the room and they both sat.
"Sir, where am I? Why am I here?"
His words seemed to evaporate as he spoke them, deadened by the too-still air in this strange room.
"Of course," Ackerson murmured. "Your recovery is not complete. I had been warned of that." He sighed. "We have gone to considerable trouble to extricate you from normal NavSpecWep operations… from your recon mission to Station Delphi."
Kurt remembered the explosion on his T-PACK; he blinked and saw for a split second the dizzying blur of stars in his faceplate.
"My team," Kurt said, "are they—"
"Fine," Ackerson replied. "No injuries."
Kurt inhaled, feeling his cracked rib. Not quite no injuries.