by Jenn Lyons
defenses had been activated. More burn marks and smudges guided me to where someone had used a maser to burn through the weapons arrays. “Uh, never mind. I don’t think your AI friend can do much to me right now.”
“He’s very rude.”
“They can’t all be Cerberus.” I made my way carefully up the side of terraced hedges. “Merlin, I think I’m following Zaladin in. He’s cleared a bit of a path for me.”
“Be careful.”
“I will. There’s something strange—”
I came around a corner and saw a Sarcodinay guard lying on the marble and gold floor next to an open doorway. The door lock was melted through, and dripping hot metal marked where the controls and latch would have normally been.
“Why didn’t he use the Master Commands?”
“What?” Merlin asked.
“Check Medusa’s feed. I just came to a door that was brute forced. Zaladin shouldn’t have needed to do that.” I bent over and checked the Sarcodinay guard. She was still alive.
She was asleep.
“What—?”
I placed my hands against the woman’s forehead and tried again. Reading the mind of someone who is sleeping isn’t at all like reading the mind of someone who is awake, aware, and active. Sometimes a sleeping person just isn’t thinking in the traditional sense at all, and I wasn’t yet skilled enough to do more than flounder helplessly in the mind of such a person. Still, I tried.
She moaned, disturbed in her sleep and thrashing her head to the side as if in the middle of a nightmare, and I gained a little better access to her memories. She had been doing her job, watching for any trespassers. She had shoot on sight orders and she knew there had been assassinations. Anyone, human or Sarcodinay. It didn’t matter. She paced, looked to the side, felt a tug on her mind....
Blackness.
“Weaver, what’s your status?”
“Merlin, hold on a minute.” I stood up and ran to the end of a long columned promenade, stopping at the end where I could see another Sarcodinay guard. Before he could turn around and give the cry of alarm, I reached out to his mind and brushed it with my own.
I watched him collapse in a heap.
“Son of a bitch,” I muttered. “Merlin, Tirris Vahn’s guards have been...I didn’t even know you could do that!”
“What have I told you about finishing sentences? Tirris Vahn’s guards have been what?”
“They’ve been programmed? Trained? I’m not sure, but at the slightest touch of mental contact they fall unconscious.”
“Why would Vahn want that? That doesn’t help her cause.”
“No, no, it’s clever. Damn, that’s clever. It means no intruder can control them. Medusa tells me the computer here is a very unfriendly AI. What if he’s a very unfriendly AI who Tirris raised illegally? Medusa couldn’t be controlled by the Master Commands—Zaladin tried on Keeper’s Island. If this AI is the same, Zaladin would have to mind control guards to get them to open the doors. Except—”
“Except he can’t. So he’s burning his way through. That’s not going to stop him though. It just slows him down.”
A group of Sarcodinay guards came around the corner, saw me, and started shooting. I ducked behind a pylon. “Hold that thought.”
I concentrated, reached out to the two guards with my mind, and heard two thumps as they fell to the floor. “Shit, no wonder Sarcodinay are so scared of High Guard,” I muttered. “Okay, so she must realize—”
“Uh, Mallory?” Vanessa’s voice came on the line.
“What is it, Nessa?”
“Um, I have good news and bad news...we’re at the reactor...” Vanessa had an odd tremor to her voice I didn’t like at all.
“What’s going on? Campbell, you there?”
Campbell replied. “Yeah, I’m here. So the only bit of good news is that getting in was easy. All the human technicians here are dead, and the Sarcodinay ones are missing. The power station’s wide open.”
“Missing? What do you mean, missing?”
Campbell’s voice was snappish, “I mean, they’re not here. And every alarm is going off, so I don’t think you were the first person to have the idea about faking a reactor leak.”
“Why aren’t the alarms going off all over the City?”
“Stewart, let me talk to her.” Vanessa said to him. “Mallory, the general alarms won’t go off if there’s no point in evacuating the general population. Stewart was wrong on one very important point: this emergency isn’t fake. We’re having a real criticality event in the antimatter reactor. I can’t stop it. I can’t even slow it down.”
Real fear spiked through me then. “What do you mean, no point in evacuating?”
“In thirty minutes, when this reactor explodes, it’s going to destroy FirstCity. All of FirstCity. We don’t have enough time to get away. Mallory—” Her voice fought back a choking sob. “If Zaladin did this...”
“Zaladin didn’t do this,” I said. “Tirris Vahn did. What does she care if sixteen million humans die as long as she kills Zaladin? That’s why she’s just trying to slow him down. Keep him trapped.” I started to run. “I’m on my way to your location.”
Her laugh was a bit rough around the edges. “Mallory, unless you know more about antimatter reactor physics than I do—and here’s a hint: you don’t—there’s nothing you can do.”
“Oh, and who’s always saying that I’m the cocky one?” I paused, and cursed at myself for the wasted time as I was forced to re-build the electromagnetic tunnel.
“You are. What you going to do?”
“I’m an optimist. You never know what will happen.”
“You sound just like your brother!” She didn’t make it sound like a compliment.
“Not much of a planner, I take it?”
She laughed. “No, not much. I honestly don’t know how he made it through some of the messes he walked into.”
I paused then and reached out with my mind. [Zaladin?]
[Do you mind? I’m a little busy at the moment.]
[Zaladin, it’s a trap.]
[I’m aware, thank you.]
[No, damn it. She’s sabotaged the main city reactor. The whole city is going to be destroyed. You need to go NOW.]
I felt him hesitate, and then he tore his mind away from mine.
I slipped through the tunnel and didn’t bother to take the time to pull it back with me. “Medusa, can you override the computer guidance controls on one of those transports?”
“Ground or air?”
“Oh I love you. Air if you can handle the flying. We don’t need to deal with street traffic right now.”
“The silver green car at 3 o’clock is now unlocked and keyed to your biometrics.”
I sprinted to the car and hopped inside. “Vanessa, Campbell, are you two in a large open space?”
“Reasonably open, yes,” Campbell replied. “5 meter ceiling, although there are girders at the top you would do well to avoid. The room is a circular shape, 25 meters in diameter, with a 10 meter area filled in the center.”
“Anyone else in the room but you two?” I started up the electric engine and pulled the car up for lift-off. I wasn’t a great pilot and this wouldn’t be graceful or pretty, but it would be fast, and fast was what I needed most.
“No one else alive.” I could tell he was fighting panic and winning—for the moment.
“Medusa, I need you to empty all the smuggle balls we have in storage and send them to Campbell and Vanessa’s location. Campbell, Vanessa, this is very important: I need you to lie on the ground right now and do not move until I say it’s safe.”
There was a pause, and then: “We’re on the ground. Now what.”
“Medusa, your turn.”
I smiled as I heard a grunt of surprise from Campbell and Vanessa’s coms.
Merlin said: “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Have the shuttle ready. If we have to, Medusa can pull an emergency landing just outside the reactor control room.
”
“We’re not going to just leave, are we?” He didn’t sound like he approved of that idea.
“And let Tirris murder all these people? Not a damn chance.” I floored the accelerator and let Medusa steer the car towards the reactor.
“So, just curious, mind you...why were we just pelted with large mechanical beach balls? And how did you do that...?”
“Questions later, Campbell. First we save a whole lot of people. I need you to gather up those mechanical exercise balls and start placing them equidistant around the reactor core. Hurry!”
Vanessa said: “What are you doing?”
“Magic. Now let me concentrate on this so I don’t kill myself.” I focused my energy on a nice even landing that didn’t result in a crash. Then I felt the throttle ease in my hands and realized that Medusa had come to my rescue.
“Thanks Deuce.”
“What would you do without me?” She brought the car in gently, so it touched down with ballerina-like precision. I didn’t waste any time, throwing open the car door and sprinting for the reactor.
“Medusa, bring the Aegis in,” Merlin said. “There’s no sense waiting until the last minute.
As I ran inside, I could see what Vanessa and Campbell had meant.
There were people here, but they were fresh corpses on the ground, killed by masers or more brutally by pure physical violence. They were all human, and I wondered where the Sarcodinay technicians and engineers had gone. This post was too important and too vulnerable to sabotage to have ever been staffed by a purely human crew. Even with the evacuation, not all the Sarcodinay would be gone.
When I reached the control room, Vanessa and Campbell were positioning the round mechanical widgets in a circle around the central