Hunted

Chapter 26: Discoveries

Haley had previously been in a place much like this one. If someone had told him he would have known two such worlds a month earlier, he would have laughed at them. Now a bitter wind that would have borne away any laughter he might have been able to muster howled about him, and for the second time in his life he viewed the barren, nighttime, winter landscape of a seemingly empty world. But unlike the planet where the odd little creatures had surrounded him and where Walker had eventually captured him, here he was perfectly aware of where he was, and here he still held the device, gripping it in his slowly numbing right hand and knowing it could whisk him away in an instant if he desired it. He did not.

Pulling his eyes away from an icy blue plain that stretched to the eastern horizon, he looked toward the production facility he had come to Oben to find. It sat alone in a valley surrounded on three sides by mountains, one of which he was currently perched upon. The facility was of average size, and there was nothing about the structures there that made it seem any different than similar places of business back on Earth. What was odd was to find it on a world in non-territorial space with no known indigenous life or particularly useful or valuable resources, poor access to the main corridors of commercial space traffic, and a hostile environment. The only thing someone might find attractive in the place was that it was so out of the way that it would draw little or no attention from anyone.

Haley stood with his feet freezing in a light layer of snow, fitting together the pieces of a mental puzzle made more complex because parts were still missing. After he left Chanos, it had taken him longer than he had wanted to find Oben, but he couldn't exactly stop the first person he saw and ask directions. Haley had finally managed to phase into Council Hall on a small mining world known as Lanar 8, after the building was closed for the day. There he had found, in some dusty room in the basement, space maps detailed enough to show the position of Oben. The map itself had provide enough information to make him think this lead might just go somewhere. Oben was in non-territorial space, meaning that no race currently laid claim to any of the worlds there. Everyone was welcome, so to speak, but no one came because there was little there of value, and the area provided a buffer zone between species that didn't, at this point in universal time, completely trust each other. So if what Ando had said was true, the people that had come to visit the Chanok years ago did so from a plant on an isolated, empty world, and the fact that building a facility there made so little sense-unless one was looking for complete privacy-made it all the more mysterious and intriguing.

Haley pushed the button on the device and moved to the base of the mountain, which cut his distance to the plant to less than five hundred meters. For a moment he stood frozen, not because of the elements but because of the small sign which hung over the plant's main gate.

It was the Syntek corporate logo.

"Calm down!" he told himself frantically. His breathing was becoming rapid, and his mind was racing too fast. He forced himself to think through one conclusion at a time.

Syntek was Universal Technology's biggest competitor. They were in herbicides, fertilizers, and pharmaceuticals, just like Universal, so what they had been offering to the Chanok certainly fit. They were also in the military weapons game-like Universal-and that made a lot of things fall into place. The device. The new pulse rifle. The only thing lacking was a definite link between this company and what had happened to him, and the answer to the final, vital question.

Why?

The wind gusted again, forcing Haley to close his eyes against a blinding eddy of blown snow. He knew one thing with certainty: he wouldn't find any more answers standing here.

Haley zipped through the plant three times before he felt sure it was deserted enough for him to return to "real" space. He did so on a second-floor storage area, which overlooked the main production area of the complex's largest building. He landed between two rows of meter-high barrels which held raw materials, and from there he cautiously peered out.