Chapter 57
Kim
Per Spencer’s recommendation, they’d gotten the hell out of the garage and snuck back to June’s improvised HQ. In spite of her size, the other woman seemed shy, almost intimidated.
Kim smiled at her and switched to Afrikaans. “A priest, a rugby player, and Van Der Merwe walk into a bar.”
June blinked and let out a big hearty laugh. In Afrikaans June replied, “That joke was old when my grandpa was a small boy.” She switched to English. “Please, sit down. We have much to discuss.”
“We should find Mike next,” Tonya said.
Aside from Emily’s one sighting, nobody knew where he was. It killed her not having him at her side at a time like this. She’d spent her whole adult life keeping everyone at a distance, making sure nobody knew who and what she was. Back then, this need seemed like an awful weakness. Kim now knew that was wrong. It wasn’t a weakness. With Mike in her life she was stronger than she’d ever been. Even separated and in the middle of all this, she would never want to go back to what she was before she met him.
That didn’t make it hurt any less, especially because of what had to happen now.
“No,” Kim said. “We can’t go after him. He’s a grown up, he’ll have to take care of himself. Will has to be our priority.”
“You’re sure?” Tonya asked.
One look at the hope Emily tried to hide was all it took to seal the deal. “Yes. You know what he’s like.” She knew better than all of them. Kim had been around his host’s original owner, a man who moved like mist and murdered without conscience. Mike had never told her how much of Colque’s skill set he’d inherited, and she didn’t want to know. Mike could take care of himself. She’d seen it. They all had.
He had to take care of himself. And he better do a damned good job of it.
“So what’s our next move to get Will?” Spencer asked.
There was that. “We need to find a way into the portal room. But I don’t know how to get there from here.”
“I do,” June said. “But there’s only one way in. Anna will definitely have it guarded, not to mention she’ll have control of the one elevator that can reach it.”
Only if they did what people expected. That wasn’t how she operated. Kim spun up a schematic of the plant in the shared vision channel. “Where are we, and where is the portal room?”
“We are here,” June said as she drew a yellow circle around a room labeled Maintenance Space. “The portal room is here.” The map moved up and to the right, and she drew a blue circle around a grayed-out section of rooms.
That’s when Kim got another clue about the mystery pull, the weird obsession she’d picked up in Anna’s holding cell. It was coming from the portal. Sorting out that mystery would have to wait.
The map zoomed out so they could see their room and the portal room at the same time. A green line drew a twisted path to connect them. “The good news is it’s not that far. Half a kilometer if you take the shortest route. No more than a kilometer.”
So roughly a third to a half mile away. No more than ten minutes at a brisk walk. She looked at Spencer. “You guys overpowered how many guards in that cave?”
He smiled and reached into one of his pockets. “Four. Tonya and I have two of their phones.” He pulled the other two out. “I never leave spares behind.”
Spencer had used his own tool kit to compromise the profiles, so it was a simple matter to turn her and Emily into members of the green gestapo. It was a hall pass, but it wouldn’t get them past human guards with ID scanners and a list to check against.
Kim looked at the schematic again. There were other room sections evenly spaced on either side of the portal room. She zoomed out until she could see the whole area around what Spencer said they called the Hellmouth. There were two rings of them, one below the other. “June, did they leverage an existing structure where they built the portal?”
“Yes.” The schematic rotated so that they were looking at the front view. The grayed-out office space of the portal complex was different from the rest, which were little more than hallways connected to an elevator shaft. Those were all at the surface. Below, far below, was where the portal was located. “They built most of it inside one of the duct rooms to gain direct access to our convection turbines.” Smaller blueprints of various machines drew themselves around the wire-frame model. Mike would’ve spent hours going over every inch of them and then spent the next week’s worth of dinners explaining their inner workings to her. She never minded. Seeing things through his eyes was part of what made him so fascinating.
Take good care of yourself, Mike. Or else.
When the machines all flew into their spots in the duct room, Kim found an answer. It wasn’t a good one, but they never were. “You’re leveraging temperature gradients to create air currents and ducting them through turbines.” She highlighted one of the oval-shaped constructs that attached to the Hellmouth, far below the duct room level, and trailed her finger up as she followed it to the point where it attached to the portal room.
“June, highlight all the maintenance hatches you have on,” she read the label, “duct A113.” Kim waited for them to catch on. It always worked better when they figured it out themselves.
“Fuck me,” Spencer said. “That’s nuts.”
“Kim,” Tonya stuttered out, “you can’t be serious.”
It was nuts, but it was all they had. Kim repeated that to herself as she watched the turbines at the top of the duct spin in their housing.
Chapter 58
Mike
Finding Edmund, or rather Edmund finding him, was a stroke of luck. Edmund knew the layout, had a map, and a good notion of where Kim might be.
“They’re going to the portal room. It’s the only move they have.”
Mike had missed it all on his little trans-whatever-it-was jump. The thread he’d left behind was already coming back to life, switching from complete numbness to what he now knew was equivalent to the pins and needles sensation he got when a realspace extremity had, as humans so colorfully put it, fallen asleep. He might be able to communicate with Gonzo again in a few hours.
Assuming he had the time. “So how do I get there from here?”
“I had the notion that you could upload me into the other side of the air gap, and I would guide you in. Now that I’ve seen how you work, I think I’d much rather stay on your belt.”
The power plant’s security guards were professional but stretched thin. Moving past them was straightforward, and on the one occasion so far when that hadn’t worked, it turned out they weren’t all that well trained. They got too close, especially to him.
Mike stepped into a shadowed doorway as another set of students came down the hall. It wasn’t anything he thought about. He relaxed and pulled away from whatever was going on, a full-body experience that he still didn’t understand, while they walked past. The doorway wasn’t even that dark. It seemed that people wanted to ignore what they didn’t expect, and Mike’s motions somehow gave them permission to do so.
Wearing the right uniform helped. Rescuing Edmund had been a stressful detour he didn’t need, but by forcing his hand, Mike had acquired a useful disguise. It even had an inner, zippered pocket for the ring box.
“Do you have to be on the inner network to help me?”
“Not at all. It would have allowed me to access the cameras, but only at some risk. Frankly I don’t think it’s worth it. You move more quietly than a Welshman who has spotted a particularly attractive sheep.”
He had known Edmund for almost a year now, and the AI’s ability to tie basically any situation into the stereotypes of the UK never failed to bring a smile. The number of ways a Brit could imply bestiality by one subgroup or another was astonishing.
“So where do I go?” Mike asked.
“You need to head west. There’s another, smaller lobby there that is close to where we need to go. You should prepare yourself, though.”
�
�For what?”
“The entrance isn’t as crowded as the main one, but it’s got more than its fair share of granola-eating doomsday worshippers.”
That brought up a point that had been bothering Mike for some time now. “Do you think they all know?”
“That they’re less than twenty-four hours away from blimey why don’t we just bugger the whole planet without so much as a kiss? Probably not. Most humans couldn’t keep a secret this big even if God himself told them the consequences of blabbing. But I’ve read their movement’s literature. When it comes to optimism about working within the existing world order, these people make Robespierre look like a piker obsessed with a sharp knife. In other words, I don’t think they know, but I also don’t think they’ll mind.”
It was a puzzling aspect of human nature. Mike had emerged in realmspace and had been steeped in humanity’s contradictions, things they barely told themselves, his entire life. He had almost literally seen it all. Yet this desire to kill rather than compromise continued to elude his understanding. Maybe it always would.
It turned out Edmund was wrong, though. The side entrance was deserted. The only sign of the crowds that must’ve been here less than an hour ago were the overflowing trash cans. Even those would be cleared away soon. The sense that they were rolling up the carpets was palpable.
“I don’t like this one bit,” Edmund said.
“Can you tell if they’ve cleared the main entrance?”
After a pause Edmund said, “Not yet, but it won’t be long.”
Once the last of the students had arrived there would be no reason for Anna to hold off on pulling the trigger. “How much time is left in the overall deadline?”
“I’m not certain, so I suggest you move like a sailor who’s spotted his first brothel.”
“Do I have to worry about cameras?”
“You haven’t so far. Why start now?”
Outside it was a typical fall day: breezes rustling the trees, the smell of old pine needles and fallen leaves. Kim would want a jacket for a walk to the coffee shop. It would all be wiped out if he didn’t find her and stop this lunatic.
But there was, as always, a problem.
“Sentries,” he said. Two of them, standing outside
“Indeed,” Edmund said. “They do rather resemble guards. But then again, so do you. Why don’t you knock them about the head and neck? That would seem the simplest option.”
“If I do that and get caught, they’ll lock the doors. I’m not the one who picks locks, remember?”
“Then it would seem a distraction is in order.”
***
Mike peered down from the perch he’d found in a tree. “Now, Edmund.”
“Exactly why I put up with the absurd, utterly ridiculous excuses for ideas a human comes up with…and you’re not wholly human. Was Fee right about you? Am I being forced to do this by a flying spaghetti monster with delusions of grandeur?”
Spencer was right about one thing. Edmund would argue with furniture if the mood struck him. “It doesn’t matter. We need to get them out here. Now do it.”
“Very well.” Edmund cleared his throat, a ridiculous affectation. “Moo? I say, Moo?”
“Use the samples!”
The actual sound of a lowing cow came from Edmund’s speaker. The volume didn’t shake the rafters, but it was out of the ordinary. As planned, Edmund turned the sound plaintive. An animal obviously in distress.
A guard, safe-stop pistol drawn, walked down the game trail Mike had found. Mike dropped behind him, landing silently on the one patch of ground he’d cleared for the purpose.
The trick with using his host’s combat skills was adjusting the lethality. His reflexes wanted to break necks, stop hearts, and ram shards of bone into critical organs. Kim thought the hours he spent sparring at their local dojo was him trying to stay sharp. It was actually him practicing how not to tear the head off a dummy. He had to pay to replace two of them before learning the basics of accessing the deeper, less-used nonlethal skills. For reasons that made him a little sick, concentrating on the idea that he needed to get them to talk first did the trick.
Mike put his arms around the guard’s neck and applied pressure before the other man had time to react. He had to make sure the airway wasn’t blocked but the arteries were. It was all in the finesse of the grip. The guard relaxed, out but not injured. Then it was a simple stick with the safe-stop ammo. One down, one to go.
The second one was easier. When Mike fired the safe-stop into a tree trunk, the loud pop echoed through the woods. As planned, Edmund went silent.
“Did you get him? John?”
Mike coughed loudly while saying, “Oh my God, you’re not gonna believe this.”
John’s friend came bounding around a bend of the trail and went down as quickly as John did. Mike didn’t bother restraining them. When they came to, this would all be over, one way or another.
Now the problem was time. Mike removed the guard’s phones and ran to pick up Edmund.
“That was well done indeed.”
Compliments were nice, but Kim was still out there, not to mention the maniac trying to end civilization. Mike socketed the phone into Edmund’s case. “Work fast.”
The guards would’ve informed their bosses they were moving off their post to investigate a noise. Reinforcements would inevitably follow if they didn’t report back. Edmund had a copy of Spencer’s hack tools and now access to the guard’s phone. The case vibrated once, and Mike pulled out the first phone and connected the second. He walked softly beside the mound that made up the side wall of the entrance, well out of the way of the security cameras but in range of the area’s wireless network.
“And…” Edmund said in a sing-song voice, “that is that.” He connected the guard’s phone to the channel he shared with Mike just in time to hear HQ acknowledge their return after investigating the noise and finding nothing.
“They can see them on the surveillance cameras?” Mike asked.
“Right down to the occasional scratch of a crotch.”
Edmund should now be able to tap into the inner network. “Can you reach the portal room?”
“No. There’s yet another air gap in there somewhere. I can see the upper offices, though. The news there is reasonably good. Once you get past the garage that’s on the other side of this door, the space opens up into offices that provide many different ways forward. It’s inhabited but not crowded. That’s where the good news stops, I’m afraid.”
It always did. “What’s the bad news?”
“The portal room is at the bottom of an elevator shaft two miles deep. It is the only way in or out that we can reach.”
“But you can spoof the cameras.”
“Again, no. It seems that while the upper elevator lobby is part of the network I now inhabit, the elevator itself is not.”
“One thing at a time then. Can you open these doors?”
“No, but…”
“What?”
“Need I point out that I am not the only conscious AI currently wandering around the premises?”
Edmund admitting that he was conscious was a surprise. The fact that Mike had forgotten he was too was embarrassing. He’d been so involved in the moment, so deep in his host’s skills, that he’d let his real self relax almost to the point of forgetting about it. But there was still a problem.
“I don’t have a phone that can connect…”
He looked at the two they’d taken from the security guards. Oh right.
Edmund was not impressed. “That the fate of the world rests on my mistress’s shoulders is basically another Tuesday. That you’re the one backing her up makes me fear for the future more than when King George pulled a cannon into parliament and claimed he was in a small village in Kent.”
“Did that really happen?”
“Sources disagree. Now, if you don’t mind…”
Chapter 59
Kim
The maintenance lights
didn’t illuminate the entire duct structure. They only served to outline it, like Kim and the others were walking inside a full-sized version of the wire frame they used to plan this out. Made from the same sand-colored nanocrete as the main Hellmouth, it had a glassy finish, with giant seams where one slab met another. She had been through any number of megastructures in the realms—they all had—but that didn’t calm her jangled nerves or make it seem normal.
“How many of these things did you guys build?” she asked June.
“Counting this one?” June replied over their phone connection. “Twenty-four.”
The only way they could risk this at all was June’s access to the maintenance network. “You’re sure you’ll get advanced notice if they try to turn it on?”
“It takes twenty minutes to preheat the structure, otherwise the walls would shatter. The fact it’s still this cold means they’re nowhere close to activation.”
“How long would it take us to get to the next closest maintenance hatch if they did turn it on?” Spencer asked.
June’s pause didn’t inspire confidence. “You should have time. Don’t dawdle, though.”
“Wasn’t planning on it,” he replied, then turned to Kim. “Lead the way.”
Tonya and Emily fell in behind her, with Spencer taking up the rear. They had entered a third of the way from the top, but that still left a mile to hike, and then climb. The duct wasn’t a straight line from the bottom of the Hellmouth to the power section. It followed a complex curve to optimize efficiency without incinerating the structure. They were on the last flat portion. It would gradually curve upward until they were forced to use ladder steps molded into the walls themselves. Kim could see it bending upward in the far distance, and her legs ached at the thought of that much climbing.
The hike came first. As long as Kim concentrated on keeping her head down, she could almost imagine they were walking down a sidewalk or maybe the floor of a huge warehouse. She only got a stab of vertigo when she looked up and her flashlight barely picked out the slabs of the ceiling. It was too tall, too heavy.
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