“Do we know what we’re gonna say when we get there?” Spencer asked.
Emily’s reply came out in a growled whisper. “Give me back my son, you bitch.”
“Well, yeah, I figured that. Anything else, though? I don’t understand the end game here.”
Kim had been mulling it over the entire time. “You and Tonya are the muscle. They won’t think anyone can come in through that hatch, and June can open it fast. Most of the security will be on the other side of a locked door. Take whatever’s there out and keep the door locked.”
“And Anna?” Tonya asked.
“Anna’s my problem.” Kim replied. “I’ll hack the controls and lock her out.” Somehow. If there was a realm-based segment to their security, and there usually was, Kim would be in trouble. Her skills were all low-level stuff. Mike was the one who unlocked realms.
They had to get there first.
“And my role?” Emily asked, as if she needed to.
“You’re the only one Will knows and trusts. Find him and get him to safety.”
Except that wasn’t true. Kim was the only person who could physically grab him and get him out of harm’s way. The memory of that touch, of that essential contact, still haunted her. Now that Kim understood what she’d been missing all this time, she finally wanted to find out what was wrong with her. If they could find it, they could fix it.
She could touch Mike.
That kept her distracted as they made their way up the cliff. The rest of it was a study in concentrated agony. One of Kim’s hobbies was long-distance cycling. She knew what extended physical suffering was. But that mostly involved her legs. This was a full-body burn. They weren’t even trying to get to the top, which was literally a mile above them. No maintenance worker, regardless of condition, could do that. Their goal was a crawler platform three hundred feet above their heads. June said something called climbing frames would do the rest of the work for them.
Then they saw them.
“I’m supposed to trust my life to this?” Spencer asked as he pulled the spindly collection of wires and struts out of its case. “How does it even go on?”
“They’re stronger than they look,” June said. “The connections are color coded. Start with your left hand and work clockwise and down.”
The cartoon man putting his on in their shared vision channel made it look easier than it was, but eventually they got it figured out. Kim turned hers on. It felt like she had yanked an umbrella inside out and strapped it to her back, but when she moved her arms and legs, they felt almost weightless. Since they still had more than five thousand feet to climb, she wasn’t sure almost would get her to the top.
Spencer proved her wrong. “Fuckin’-A! I don’t even have to use the ladder!” He shot upward using only the bare concrete of the duct’s wall. “I’m your friendly fucking neighborhood Spider-Man!”
“Spencer, slow down!” Kim shouted, but he’d already gone out of earshot. Tonya and Emily weren’t worried. They were smiling.
“Am I crazy to think this might be fun?” Emily asked.
Spencer’s reedy voice wafted down to them. “Goddamn it! Move your asses!”
Tonya galloped straight up, shouting, “Wakanda forever!”
Emily went next; her giggles faded quickly.
Kim had her own take. “Everything is theoretically impossible, until it’s done.” She found her rhythm as quickly as the others, and then it was a race to the top.
It still took most of ten minutes to get there, which drained close to all of the suit’s charge. By the time they arrived, everyone was sweating and panting in near silence.
“When this,” Emily said, breathing hard, “is over…we should…do that again.”
“I gotta…get one of these,” Spencer gasped out.
“Am I…crazy…” Tonya said, “or is it getting…hot in here?”
It was. “June, have they started prewarming the duct?”
“Eight minutes ago. You were all concentrating on the climb, and it’s the closest exit now anyway. But Kim, I’ve—”
“Information later. We need to get out of here now. Open the door.”
The duct ended in a short, flat segment that connected it to the portal room. A set of floor-to-ceiling doors blocked the way. “Open the door, June.”
It opened with a loud hydraulic whine. So much for stealth. Then there was a clang behind her.
A second door, one that wasn’t on any of the plans, had closed between Kim and everyone else. It wasn’t solid. There were rectangular holes cut through it in regular patterns, dozens of them.
“June! What happened?” Kim shouted as she ran to it.
“I don’t know. That’s not supposed to be there. I don’t see it anywhere on the control charts.”
Tonya’s eyes appeared in one of the holes. “Kim, go! We’ll figure this out. Find Will!”
Spencer pulled his shotgun off his shoulder. “You take care of the bitch. Tonya, help me find the door motors.”
She could see worse news through the holes; the door on the other side had closed as well. They were trapped.
“Kim,” June said. “You have to move right now.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I know where Mike is, he’s close! But you have to move!”
Chapter 60
Mike
Mike put one of the guard’s phones on. It took a minute to synch with his spine, but when it did, he took a deep breath. He was well practiced at controlling his real self without a phone nowadays, but that didn’t make it easy. Having an explicit interface between the two was the difference between a narrow country road and an interstate. He didn’t need to worry about the security keyed to the guard. It didn’t work that way with him.
“I’ll never get used to that,” Edmund said, “even if I see it a hundred times.”
Edmund was a part of realmspace that was distinct from the way humans interacted with it. “What does it look like to you?”
“I understand my kind, even as I am now. We may evolve into something mysterious, but we were created. You…fill…space in a manner I cannot describe from my perspective. It is not often one gets to witness transcendence in person.”
“That sounds suspiciously like a compliment.”
“Oh, make no mistake, sir, your normal attempts at competence will always be overshadowed by your ability to cock up a situation so badly it flaps wings and greets the dawn. But making an entrance like that gives me hope that you may one day reach the point that I no longer have to worry about leaving you alone with a jar of paste.”
“Okay, it doesn’t sound like a compliment anymore.”
“As well it shouldn’t.”
Mike unlocked the front door and crept inside.
“And now,” Edmund said, “I have an introduction to make. Michael Gertrude Sellars, please meet our invaluable and remarkably tall assistant, Dr. June du Plessis.”
“His middle name is Gertrude?”
She had a deep voice and an accent that sounded vaguely but not exactly British. Mike guessed African. “It’s a long story,” he said. “Can you help us?”
“Yes, but you need to hurry. Kim’s on her way to the portal room with some of your friends, but from the other side.”
That didn’t make sense. This was the only way in. Mike stopped in an out of the way office so he could access the plant’s blueprints. When he did, he knew exactly what Kim’s plan was. Her very desperate, very bad plan. On the other side of the portal room was a massive duct that led to a shaft that was so deep it came close to the mantel. The temperatures down there were well beyond what was needed to melt iron. The pressure turned the air into a fluid scientists hadn’t fully described yet.
All that separated Kim from molten hell was a couple of hatches. “Tell her I’m on my way.”
“I can’t, not yet. They’re busy right now. But you need to get down there, fast.”
Mike let his threads extend throughout the in
ner realmspace of the plant to the machine space of the elevator. He opened an inventory list. Bingo. “Can you open this room for me?” He sent June its number.
“Yes. Can you reach it without being seen?”
“Dr. du Plessis,” Edmund said, “my mistress’s unfortunate obsession could sneak the crown jewels and the queen’s underwear from their respective fortresses without disturbing a hair on either of them.”
Mike smiled. “That was definitely a compliment.”
***
Edmund asked, “Why not ride down inside the bloody thing then?”
Mike made sure his safety harness was secured to the top of the elevator, then softly stepped on. “I can’t override the controls from the inside.” The set mounted to the roof was hardwired into the cab’s systems and took priority over everything except maybe a fireman’s key. He hadn’t spotted one of those anywhere—secret lairs didn’t need to pass code inspections—so this would have to do.
To ensure the elevator shaft didn’t turn into a mini Hellmouth, they had sealed and evacuated it. There were emergency air locks that could be closed for maintenance or in case of a leak, but he had no time for that. He donned one of the pressure suits stored in the machine room. That was one advantage of building for the apocalypse: they had to have all the tools they needed to maintain their structure on-site.
So now he was doing a spacewalk that would take him two miles underground. The lack of ambient noise was more than made up for by his heart thudding in his ears. He was in hard vacuum, had access to all the maintenance overrides, and needed to get to the bottom of it right now.
Mike pressed a button in his shared vision channel.
Security override. You have ten seconds to abort.
“You ready for the express elevator to Hell, Edmund?”
The warning lights on his virtual feed went out one by one. This was crazy. Mike pulled at the safety ropes attached to the roof anchors, even though they weren’t strictly necessary for this part.
“I believe,” Edmund said through the radio link Mike had established with the transport matrix on his belt, “you are trying to entrap me into a colloquialism that only Spencer would use. Under no circumstances would I ever say that I was born—”
The countdown reached zero. The clamps released with a thunk he felt through the suit rather than heard. Mike’s scream drowned out whatever Edmund said next.
The limiting factor on the speed of an elevator was the safety of the passengers. Go up too fast and people would fall over, sometimes breaking bones. Go down too fast and they’d panic that the cables had been cut. The designers of this system had put governors on the drive wheels to make sure it couldn’t accelerate at more than .55 g. The overrides removed those restrictions. They also removed the deceleration restrictions—he was in for a brief nap at the end.
The anchors didn’t suddenly jerk tight. That’s not the way physics worked. It was a slight bit of vertigo as his feet lifted off the roof of the cabin. The sensation was fun for a moment, but the features of the elevator shaft kept speeding up as they went past. Without air resistance, there was nothing to slow the descent even a little. It was pure mass times acceleration.
Mike used his anchor ropes to pull himself against the roof of the car. The weightlessness was an illusion, fake safety, a pause between realities. It was also getting him to the bottom of the shaft ten times faster than riding it normally would. That was the only thing that mattered. He had to reach Kim. Mike went spread-eagle over the roof. If he didn’t distribute the deceleration, he’d be the one with the broken bones.
“You’re sure you’ve calculated the braking distance correctly?” Edmund asked.
“Only one way to find out.”
When the timer he’d set reached zero, Mike pressed the emergency override.
Everything went black.
Mike held Kim’s hand as they ran toward a gazebo on a hill overlooking a river. Zoe, the unduplicate he had healed a lifetime ago, was there, sculpting something spectacular. He was at peace. She smiled and said…
“If you don’t wake up right now, you sheep-buggering sod, I will personally ensure whatever time we have left will be spent with me ramming my virtual foot into your Pastafarian backside.”
Edmund. Mike woke up and used the maintenance controls to close the last of the airlock hatches and opened the emergency rescue entrance just above the elevator to exit the shaft. On this end, the machine room was more modest, but he still had room to strip out of the pressure suit and put it aside.
Nothing was broken, and he wasn’t bleeding. That was the end of the good news. It turned out that a full-body bruise was a thing. He activated an analgesic app in his phone, and the pain faded away. “I’m ready, where do I go?”
“End of the hallway,” June said. “I’m trying to figure out how to open the door.”
Mike was ready for a fight, but this part of the lab was empty. He ran down the hall to a door. Through the small window, he could see a flickering light.
“June?”
“I can’t do it. I’m locked out.”
He wasn’t Kim; he couldn’t pick the lock. He was helpless. The door was heavy steel, thick. No way he could break it down. Mike looked around trying to find something that would work as a prybar when the lights dimmed briefly.
“Fok my.”
“June, what’s happening?”
“They’re activating the entire plant. We’ve never done that before. I can talk to Kim now. It’s bad. You have to wait.”
The connection cut out.
Chapter 61
Kim
“You found him?” Mike was back! “Where is he?”
“On the other side of the portal room, but he’s locked out, and I can’t open the door.”
“Show me where the lock is, June. I won’t need a key.” The duct exit was next to the ceiling, high above the floor. There was a catwalk on her left. The room below was huge, dominated by the portal that stood at the same end of the room she was in. There were rows of consoles on the opposite side, most manned by robots. Kim could see three pairs of guards, one set on either side of the portal and another pair by the door she assumed Mike was stuck behind. The duct’s loud opening had ruined any chance of surprise. All eyes were on her.
Anna Treacher was clearly visible standing at the far end of the room. She bent down toward a microphone mounted on a console.
“So now I finally meet the legendary Kimberly Trayne.”
The voice booming out of speakers in the ceiling was feminine but gravelly, spoken in a way that sent Kim right back to her days with The Machine. She’d built a life dropping people who talked like that into their worst, most helpless nightmares. For a moment she was seventeen, fearless in her rage.
But that was then, and her rage had gotten people killed. Mike was somewhere nearby. Will was too. Her friends were about to get incinerated. There was work to do.
“Stop the activation,” Kim shouted. “My friends are trapped.”
“You mean the saboteurs who have been wreaking havoc in my plant will suffer an unfortunate accident? That is a shame,” she said, with no shame at all. “Pity there won’t be anyone outside to investigate the matter.”
The two scientists who abducted Will stood next to Anna, whispering to her furiously while gesturing at Kim. Anna didn’t seem impressed. She was smiling, and why not? Everything was going her way. She nodded at the pair of guards stationed to the right of the portal. They jogged toward the ladder that would lead them to Kim’s catwalk. She was running out of time.
“June,” Kim said into her phone, “how do I get to the lock?” If it was a mechanical unit on the door, she was screwed. The guards had already reached the ladder, and there was no way to make it past them.
“They use the same ID system as the rest of the plant, but it’s on the other side of an air gap. I can’t reach it.”
Kim spotted a network junction at the end of the catwalk. “I can. Tell him to get re
ady.” She hopped across the space between the catwalk and the duct, leaned down, and plugged the end of her phone in.
There were lines of potential, and she couldn’t remember how to breathe. No locks all locks sequence random find open close open close open collapse and now…
The pain that set her ears ringing always made Kim close her eyes. When she opened them, the first thing she saw was the open door. The next was Mike dispatching one of the guards who stood next to it. Seeing him, whole and well, was everything. She needed him. They all did.
Kim forgot how fast Mike was in a fight. Each move went fluidly into the next so quickly it was hard to follow what was happening. Then she saw a side door open, with more guards rushing through it.
The two coming for her had stopped at Mike’s appearance but not for long. The catwalk shuddered under their boots when they started running toward her.
It was at least twenty feet to the ground. Kim was 5ʹ9ʺand had good reach. She had to risk it. She didn’t have her safe-stop anymore, and those guys weren’t going to use gestures. Kim took the phone out of the network socket, rolled onto her stomach on the catwalk floor, then pushed off into thin air.
She let her arms stretch long as she held onto the edge of the catwalk. It took an eternity that lasted two heartbeats for her legs to swing down, and then a precious second she didn’t have to face away from the wall. She knew her feet weren’t that far off the ground, but her head was a lot higher. It was a long drop. The guard’s heavy boots made the metal frame of the catwalk shake as they ran, loosening her already not-good-enough grip until it failed.
The air pushed her hair back, the brief weightlessness shot her heart up her throat, then she was down and rolling. Pain raced through her legs and back but nothing broke. She’d feel it in the morning, assuming there was one. Kim stood up and ran toward Mike in one smooth motion.
“Mike!” she shouted as she heard the guards behind her both hit the floor at the same time. They were too close. Kim zigged to the right just as a pair of safe-stop darts flew past her ear. A second pair went past her torso as she kept moving. Thank God for poor marksmanship.
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