Gabriel: Zero Point (Evan Gabriel Trilogy) by Steve Umstead

Smells were the most powerful triggers of memories, he had been told once. He’d just as soon get rid of the memories as well as the smells.
    His right arm began to throb, and he felt something sticky on the right side of his face. He wiped the blood off his cheek and rubbed his hand on his pant leg to clean it off. He felt the sting of several small cuts, but no major damage, and his vision was no longer impaired. Glancing at his bloody arm, he wasn’t as confident, but for now it still worked, and he had two more targets that knew where he was now.
    The ringing in his ears subsided to the point where he could hear the air recyclers whirring above him. The smoke had all but cleared, and he could now visually see the fallen gunman down the corridor. He was sprawled face-first on the floor, another M-74 copy lying a few feet in front of the body.  
    With a quick check of his pulse rifle’s charge, he took off at a run towards the gunman’s body when the lights went out in the corridor, plunging it into darkness.

Chapter 9

    Gabriel froze in mid-sprint and waited, listening. No sound but the overhead air recyclers. He tapped into Cielo’s security system for the video feed, but was greeted with static feedback. The system was offline along with the lighting. He was blind in more ways than one. But so were the remaining two hostiles. And he still had his heads-up fed by his own scans.
    He pressed his back against the wall and reached out with a passive scan. He detected the signs of the two hostiles. They had stopped moving when the lights went out; they appeared to have been caught off-guard as he was, or perhaps it was another part of a larger orchestrated plan. Orchestrated . He rolled that word around in his head for a few moments. The dogged hatch, the limpet mine, the gauntlet of gunman, the security feed outage. Even the blood drops in the lab. All were pointing to a set strategy. But by whom or why, he had no idea. He only knew he had a missing doctor and captain. And a target.
    His heads-up showed the location of the room where the remote wipe transmission originated. No activity or electronic leakage from the room, and no sign of life inside, though he dismissed that as inconclusive. The thick steel walls of Cielo prevented much of a passive scan from seeing through, and the target room was no exception.
    The other two hostiles hid behind the next elevator bay, so they were still over a hundred yards away. He cautiously moved up the corridor, hugging the wall, and approached where the downed gunman lay. Suddenly Cielo’s backup lighting kicked in, and strips along the walls inches above the floor lit with a light blue glow.  
    The gunman was a woman, he saw as he kneeled down beside the body. Her lifeless face was turned towards him, eyes open. The blue lighting made her skin appear ghostly white and her eyes black. Her close-cropped hair showing from under the half helmet was unisex, almost military style, unlike the two men in the lab, but there was no doubt it was a woman.
    Gabriel rocked back on his heels and set the pulse rifle across his knees. A woman. He knew she was a combatant, someone tasked with killing him, and had even fired first, but something deep down inside of him hurt. He had killed before; had actually become quite good at it in the past few years, even received a commendation as an enlisted man after an operation in South Africa after singlehandedly taking down a particle cannon nest manned with four gunners.  
    But none of them were women.  
    No one he had ever faced and defeated in combat was a woman.  
    It made a difference.
    The body had three burn holes in the back of the armor. His shots were straight and true and had dropped her immediately. Quick and painless. A twinge of discomfort from his right arm coursed through his system. Maybe not completely painless .  
    He took one last look at the woman’s unseeing eyes, and thought back to the bloody pullover in the lab. He