by Scott Baron
A mere twenty minutes had passed when the wiry tech opened the door a crack.
“Ms. Swarthmore? I’m Alfred Chu, chief technician for Dark Side.” He paused. “Well, actually the only technician for Dark Side, I suppose. The commander asked me to bring you some clean clothes. May I come in?”
Daisy rose to her feet. “Sure thing, Alfred, come on in.”
The man stepped into the room with a clean set of clothes in his arms.
“Please, call me Chu. Everyone else does. Here, these should fit you. I’m sure you’ve already found the decon shower in the back of the cell. Sorry it isn’t piped for a proper water shower, but they didn’t really design this section for many creature comforts.”
“No worries,” she replied. “I’m just grateful for something clean to wear.”
She began peeling off clothes.
“You’re just trying to get him flustered.”
Now why would I do something like that?
Chu blushed and turned quickly for the door.
Daisy noted there were no security guards waiting outside.
“Hey, Chu,” she called after him. “I know I’m in lockdown, but do you think there’s any way I could get something to read? I’m bored out of my skull in here.”
“We don’t have any books on Dark Side, and I know they wouldn’t allow a vid tablet in one of the cells.”
“Well, how about digital books? They only require the most basic of readers. You think you could load a few onto one of those for me?”
The technician pondered a long moment.
“I don’t think I can do that, Ms. Swarthmore.”
“Please, call me Daisy. Look, I understand they don’t want me having any high-tech devices, but what about a service reader? Those things are dumb as a rock and about as powerful, but you could probably put a few books on one for me. Come on, Chu, it’s not like I’ll dig my way through a foot of steel with a tiny, plastic shell tablet. I know they’re not made to be e-readers, but you have to be an exceptionally smart guy if you’re the head tech for the whole base. I’m sure you’ve got the technical chops to make it work.”
He considered her request, the competitive nerd in him suddenly motivated to live up to the technical challenge.
“All right,” he finally said. “Bare-bones, though. If I run a few books through a file compressor then transpose it into straight text, I should be able to load them into the core memory without impeding readability.”
“Wow, you’re really clever, Chu. That’s genius!” she lauded. The technician’s demeanor warmed marginally.
“Okay, I’ll be back in a while. We don’t have a lot of books here, but I’ll put what I can on it.”
“Thanks, Chu. You’re a rock star.”
A fun new technical challenge at hand, he wore a little smile as he stepped from her cell and closed the door.
“What’s that all about?” Sarah asked. “You going to try what I think you’re going to try?”
“Great minds, Sarah,” Daisy chuckled. “Now hush, I need to plan.”
Daisy sat cross-legged on her bunk. After the last several days, being in a relatively comfortable, safe, and quiet environment, she was able to slide effortlessly into a meditative state.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The tablet was worse than she’d expected.
Far worse.
Ancient. Slow. Terribly outdated.
“Thanks, Chu! It’s perfect!” she bubbled as he walked out of her cell. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this!”
“Still no guards outside, Daze.”
Yeah, I noticed.
“Hey, do you have any idea when they’re finally going to get me out of here?”
“Sorry, Daisy, they don’t keep me in the loop for that kind of stuff.”
“Okay, no worries. It was worth asking. But thanks again for this. I’m so glad to finally have something to kill time with.”
Chu flashed a friendly smile, then stepped out of the cell, closing the thick door behind him. As soon as it sealed, cutting her off from the rest of the base, Daisy carefully placed the tablet against the edge of her bunk, and with a quick stomp, separated the case from the components inside.
“Who needs a screwdriver when you’ve got a solid pair of boots?”
She began whistling a cheerful little tune as she pried out the pieces she was interested in.
“Ooh, yeah. Good idea,” Sarah said. “Though I don’t know if you’ll be able to access the hardwired bypass mechanism through a foot of reinforced steel.”
“Half a foot, actually. It’s mounted in the middle of the wall. It’s less reinforced there,” Daisy replied. “But I don’t need to access it.”
“No?”
“Nuh-uh. I’ve got a different idea.”
She set to work, stripping wires, carefully splicing them to seemingly unrelated components, then feeding them back to other low-power systems within the wrecked device. To a layman—or even a tech, for that matter—it would appear to be a complete waste of time, but Daisy knew better. How she knew better was something she’d ponder at a later date. For now, the important thing was escape and evasion.
Step one: Escape.
She lifted the metal stool they unwisely equipped the cell with and approached the door.
There it is, she said, noting the small, flush bit of conduit embedded in the wall to the side of the doorframe.
“Like I said, no way to get in there. And the Faraday shielding in the walls won’t give you any wireless access, either.”
“I don’t need total access. Just a teeny, tiny bit.”
Daisy then pressed a shard from the tablet’s case to the joint where the conduit met the doorframe and proceeded to smash it with the stool, using it like a tiny chisel.
“Soundproofing works both ways, assholes,” she muttered with a little chuckle.
It took several minutes, and scored Daisy a few bruised knuckles in the bargain, but eventually a small gap appeared. Nothing big, and surely not enough to access the internal workings of the security mechanism, but Daisy had other plans.
Carefully, she took the long, loose end of the wire she’d stripped and coiled before splicing it inside the guts of the smashed tablet and slowly fed it into the tiny opening. Once it was roughly six inches in, she powered up the circuit board and keyed in a quick series of commands.
“Even if that gets you the tiniest wireless connection, it won’t be enough for any real data streaming. Face it, you still won’t be able to override their security protocols with that thing, Daze. It’s way too slow and underpowered. Why, you couldn’t even begin to crack the security on the—” Her dead friend abruptly stopped when she realized what she was doing. “Oh, damn. Now that is clever.”
“Thanks. Let’s just hope it works.”
Rather than attempt to access and overcome the advanced security protocols keeping the door locked, Daisy had a far different plan in mind. Using the tablet as a power source, and the stripped wire she had fed directly into the door mechanism itself, rather than the security keypad, Daisy had established a very fine, but very real link to the brain of the door itself.
Fingers crossed they didn’t remove the fabricator’s safety protocols when they installed this thing.
She entered a tiny string of commands, then hit the enter key. The tablet hummed and fizzled, dying in her hands, but as it breathed its last, the door mechanism unlocked and the seal opened.
“Boom! That’s what I’m talking about!”
Quickly, Daisy slid the powerless door open and stepped into the corridor.
All clear.
She closed the door behind her, then took off at a quick, stealthy run.
“Used the life-support safety override to short out the master circuits and make the door think there was a power outage. Good one, Daze.”
“I couldn’t very well override their security, but all core-level systems are designed to preserve a breathable atmosphere, so long as
there hasn’t been a pressure loss venting into space. If you make it look like it’s just a power outage—”
“You trick the door into thinking power went out, and it opens automatically to keep the breathable atmosphere constant. That’s one hell of an oversight on their part.”
“Yeah, but in their defense, it’s installed at a factory core-code level, so even the facility’s builders likely didn’t know about it.”
“So how did you?”
Daisy ignored the question as she came upon a base access terminal. Her fingers flew across the access keypad, and once she was past the biometric recognition system—thanks to a painfully simple code exploit—she began to cautiously dig through the machine’s access files, using only the lowest level overrides to pull up a base schematic without triggering any alarms.
There it is.
Daisy smiled as she scanned the detailed facility map. Satisfied she had accurately memorized the plans, she reset the panel to appear just as she found it, then continued down the corridor. Daisy had a new destination in mind: the ship’s landing bay.
Just gotta steal that hopper and make it back to the surface. New York should be a good bet—opposite coast, and likely untouched by whatever happened to L.A.
“Then they come back up here and kick some AI ass.”
Precisely.
Quickly and quietly, Daisy took off in a stealthy jog, a new course firmly locked in her head. It would be a bit tricky bypassing the final set of codes to release the ship once she had made it through the hangar, but she’d just have to deal with that when she got there.
The first set of doors she encountered, while thick and sturdy, were nevertheless a snap, and she had them open in under a minute.
At this rate, I’m guessing three minutes till I’m in the hangar.
“Unless there are guards.”
Obviously. But we can avoid them.
“We? So I’ve been upgraded from a voice in your head?”
Shut up, you know what I mean.
Daisy paused as she slowly rounded a blind curve in the corridor.
No one there.
She increased her pace and soon arrived at the hangar doors, beating her estimate by nearly twenty seconds. She accessed the door terminal and ran a quick bypass protocol.
Locked.
Shit. They’ve modified this one. Something new.
Nimble fingers entered another string of commands. Again, the door remained locked. The clock was ticking. The longer she remained exposed in one place, the greater her chance of being recaptured.
“Is there another way in?”
“Yeah, but I’d have to pass straight through the mess hall to reach it.”
“So, what are the options?”
Daisy had an idea. Switching her scans from schematics and lock protocols, she tapped into the base’s life support status readouts. A series of red dots appeared on the screen, spread throughout the facility. None were in her immediate path, and the mess hall was completely empty.
“Everyone’s at the other end of the base. If ever there was a time to make a run through the mess hall, this would be it.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“You share my eyes. You saw the readout.”
Without another moment of hesitation, Daisy ran the twists and turns of the work-around route to the hangar deck. In less than a minute she stood at the mess hall doors.
Silence.
Of course, the doors were sound-proof, so that was to be expected. Nonetheless, she double-checked the life signs readout on the nearest display. No one had moved. The mess hall was clear.
She bypassed the door’s monitoring mechanism and eased inside. The room was unlit, an energy conservation protocol preserving base power when areas were empty.
Should just take a second for the motion sensor to light up the—”
The lights came on all at once, just as the door behind her slammed shut. Daisy spun on her heel, dropping to a low fighting stance. The burly military-types who had escorted her upon arrival stood in her path, blocking her escape, but made no move toward her. They were dressed in tank tops and fatigue pants, revealing more of their modifications.
“Check it out,” Sarah said. “Two metal arms, all the way up! Holy shit, this chick’s a total badass.”
Contrasting her deep ebony skin, the woman’s shiny limbs stood out even more than Tamara’s did.
Great, now we have two surly women with deadly appendages, Daisy griped. She took a quick look at the burly, crew-cut man as he shifted on his feet. Looks like he’s got two replacement legs, judging by the way he stands. Might even go all the way to the hip.
“That high? You think he’s got bionic junk, too?”
God, Sarah, you always go there, don’t you?
Daisy had the feeling her dead friend would have liked to reply with a witty comeback, but something else caught her eye. Vince was there, too, sitting at a table across the room next to Chu. He winked at Daisy, a mischievous little grin plastered on his face. The grin she had always found so attractive, before she found out what he really was.
“Told you she’d do it.” He laughed at the perplexed technician. “Come on, man. Pay up.”
Grudgingly, Chu handed over the pudding cup from his dining tray.
“Boom! Double dessert! That’s my girl,” he said with a chuckle.
“But it shouldn’t have been possible!” Chu lamented. “Those were triple fail-safe systems. There’s even a biometric security lock!”
“You’d be surprised what she can do. She’s far exceeded all parameters and expectations. At this point, we’re really just learning exactly what she’s capable of,” Captain Harkaway said from across the quiet room. A quiet room full of people.
Despite what the readouts had said, the entirety of her Váli shipmates were there.
Our entire crew, plus those two at the door, and Chu over there with Vince. There’s a door at the far end, so if the captain and Barry aren’t—
She shifted her gaze across the room, calculating her odds of making a run for it, but a mere glance at the battle-scarred man standing beside the captain as they watched her quickly silenced any further internal chatter.
The man at Harkaway’s side was older. Not as old as the captain, but salt and pepper liberally seasoned his close-cropped hair. What was so striking—what had taken her by surprise—wasn’t his haircut. It was what lay just below it.
His left arm was an outdated replacement, lacking most of the fancy bells and whistles the others had, but what really stood out was his shining, metal jaw, exposed where the flesh grew to meet it just to the left of the cleft in the middle of his chin. His nose was intact, but where the jaw curved up toward his ear, the metal carried on to his left eye, its servos whirring an almost inaudible hum as it focused on her and sized her up.
“Holy shit,” Sarah finally managed.
You said it, Daisy agreed, swallowing hard.
The rest of her crew was seated in the utilitarian chairs in the galley. Barry stood, as usual, and beside him was the other cyborg Daisy had briefly seen upon arrival. An obviously older generation. He looked human enough, but had that distinct, not-quite-right vibe to him the earlier models suffered.
Great. Two of them, now.
“It’s good to see you well, Daisy.” Mal’s voice echoed slightly in the chamber. “We were concerned about you, but all will be in order shortly. I will be standing by with channels open if you need me.”
“Thank you, Mal. And thank you for joining us, Daisy,” a disembodied man’s voice said.
“I recognize that voice. You’re the one who answered when we tried reaching the base.”
“My name is Sid. As you have likely deduced, I oversee Dark Side Base. You’ve already met Lieutenant Michelle Hawkins and Sergeant Omar El Manahi.”
“Shelly is fine,” the sturdy woman said with a cool glance. Omar just gave a cursory nod.
“What about me?” Chu griped.
“Of course you know senior technician Alfred Chu,” Sid said. “He was most certain you would not be able to escape the detention cell with something as primitive as a read-only tablet.”
Chu blushed.
“And I am Ash,” the cyborg said.
“Ash?” Daisy said, stealing a glance at Vince across the room.
He raised an eyebrow and gave a little ‘I know’ shrug. They’d both watched a lot of old sci-fi movies together.
“Seriously. Your name is Ash?”
“I did not choose it,” he answered.
Daisy didn’t know whether to be amused or distressed. She ultimately felt a little of both would likely fit the situation best.
“Commander Kirk Mrazich oversees military matters,” Sid continued. The metal-jawed man gave a little two-fingered salute. “Our pilot, and jack-of-all-trades, Donovan Welsh is out on a salvage shift with Bob, his ship, but you will meet them as well, soon enough.”
“Great, so now I know my captors. When are you going to tell me what you want with me?”
Captain Harkaway stepped forward.
“Daisy, we’re not your captors. There’s so much going on that you need to know.”
“So tell me, then.”
“We’re just waiting for the doctor to join us.”
Daisy’s glance flicked to Doctor McClain.
“No, Daisy,” McClain said. “The other doctor.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
The door to the mess hall slid open, and the older woman with silver-gray hair Daisy had noticed when she had first arrived calmly walked in.
Now that she had a better opportunity to see her, Daisy thought she looked like a mix of races more than one. Medium-toned brown skin with big almond eyes and full, wavy hair. She could have been from any one of a dozen cultures just as easily as she could have been a mix of them all. She smiled broadly when her eyes met Daisy’s.
“So glad to finally meet you properly, Daisy,” she said. “My name is Fatima. I’m sure you have a lot of questions for us, and believe me, there’s a lot about you we would love to learn as well.”
“Great. Let’s start with you telling me why the hell you all wanted to capture me and bring me here.”