by William Oday
A mechanical nervous system.
A system that required channels to transmit information.
And the thick layers of rock separating the levels made a wireless connection impossible. Which meant there had to be a physical connection. Data cables that connected this room to every device on every level that it controlled.
I retraced my steps through each aisle, sweeping the flashlight along the bottoms and tops of the shelving units, looking for something specific now.
In the last row in the back, a sliver visible above and behind the stack of servers, the thing that had to be there was there.
I climbed up the stack, jamming the toes of my boots into the narrow crevices between the shelves. I reached behind the top machine and yanked the ceiling panel down.
Yes!
Our way out.
Maybe.
It would be tight.
For me, at least.
A conduit channel containing thick cables rising up through the ceiling. Presumably those cables ran to every level.
I scooted over the top machine and looked up into the channel with the flashlight.
The light got swallowed in the black distance above.
The cables were bundled and secured against the side of the channel. There was just enough space left to accommodate a repair technician.
A smaller repair technician than me.
“Crypto! Come over here!”
He appeared below, looking up with a frown plastered on his face. “You aren’t seriously thinking—”
“Yeah. I am. And you’re coming with me.”
He shook his head. “No thanks. I prefer to take my chances here.”
I climbed down. “You’re going. It’s not a request.”
“Are you insane? You have no idea where that goes! Or for how long! What if you take a wrong turn and end up falling thousands of feet to your death?”
I shrugged. “Then I’ll be dead.”
“Then we’ll both be dead!”
“Did you find out where they’re keeping her?”
He shook his head. “No. No other messages came from or to that ID tag. Must’ve been cooked up to be untraceable. Smart.”
A gentle hand touched my shoulder.
I spun around, fist tight and cocked, ready to level whoever it was.
Doctor Tanaka.
It required conscious effort, but I forced my fingers to uncoil and lowered my hand to my side. “What?”
“Scout,” he looked up at the hole in the ceiling, “you can’t go up there. Your body is ready to shut down as it is. And now you’re talking about climbing however many hundreds of feet. The exertion will kill you.”
He wasn’t lying. Even knowing Martinez was alive and knowing I would do anything to get to her, I couldn't ignore my body. The warnings telling my brain that its commands would only be followed for so long.
I was weak. Drained. Depleted. Done.
“Do you have anything in that bag that can help?” I asked.
“Only rest can heal you.”
“I’m not talking about healing. I’m talking about something to keep me going for a while longer. To give me what I need to do this.”
Tanaka pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose as he frowned. “Something like that would only be temporary. And the additional strain on your system would probably kill you once the effects wore off.”
I held out my open palm. “Give it to me.”
He shook his head. “You’re asking me to sign your death warrant. I can’t do that.”
I grabbed him by the collar and slammed him against a wall of servers. “I’m not asking. Give it to me. Now!”
His eyes reflected equal parts fear and sadness. “You have some of your brother in you. I hope not more than you can handle.”
I stared holes through him, ready to exert as much force as necessary. Ready to break bones, if it came to that.
“Are you going to hurt me?” he asked.
“Only if I must.”
The sadness overshadowed the fear.
“Come.”
I released him and we returned to the front aisle and his medical bag. I shined the flashlight into it as he dug through the contents.
He pulled out a dark orange translucent bottle that contained a few pills.
He opened the cap and dumped out the contents into his hand.
Four pills. Red and shiny. And large.
I reached for them and he snapped his hand shut. “These are synthetic anadone epinephrine. A type of manufactured adrenaline. One will give you a huge boost. Two will make it feel like lightning is crackling through your veins. Three will probably cause cardiac arrest. Four definitely will.”
His fingers slowly opened. “Don’t do this.”
I scraped all four pills out of his palm and popped two into my mouth.
“Don’t,” he repeated.
I swallowed and put the other two in my front pocket. “How long before they take effect?”
“Minutes.”
“How will I know?”
He frowned. “You’ll know. Try to keep your respiration under control. That will help keep your heart rate from spiking and going critical.”
He kept talking, adding other precautions and warnings, but I’d already moved on.
I picked up Crypto as I returned to the back aisle and set him on top of the server stack. “Go.”
He looked at me like I was crazy.
“If you fall, I’ll catch you.”
“Yeah, and what if you fall?”
“Then we both die.”
“How reassuring,” he replied before turning to the pillar of bundled cables. He found purchase in the uneven spaces and began climbing up.
In seconds, his boots disappeared into the hole.
With the flashlight on and tucked pointing up in my pants, I started up after him.
Within minutes, I felt it.
The effects of the exertion. The weakness.
But also the growing effects of the pills. The jagged energy arcing through my chest. The hot blood rushing through my limbs in surging waves.
Crypto’s voiced echoed down the narrow channel. “Where are we headed?”
Since we didn’t know for sure where they were keeping Martinez, it was a guess. But hopefully, it was an educated one.
CHOICES:
1. She was obviously injured, so they would take her to the Infirmary level. General Curtis wouldn’t be able to question her if she died. So she must be locked up in a room there.
2. General Curtis would take her to where he felt the most secure. To where he was surrounded by people of unquestioned loyalty. Other Grays. And that meant he was holding her somewhere on the Security level.
The group chose #2 and this is what happened next…
50
I continued climbing, using the recessed holds hewn into the rock every eighteen inches. They’d begun several feet above the entrance to discourage any casual explorers from entering the shaft. They made ascending the claustrophobic space doable, but doable didn’t mean easy or pleasant.
This was a long ways from both.
I counted them as we went to find out how many it took to reach the next level up, Administration.
The air was cool, but sweat streamed from my brow, down my cheeks and clung in annoying drops along the edge of my jaws. They slid along the line of the underhang as I moved until a gathered accumulation grew large enough and fell away. My heart beat faster than it should’ve. Faster than was comfortable. Not dangerously fast, not yet. It thumped in my ears. A hollow sound that seemed to echo in the tight space.
I reached up toward the next hold, pushing up with the opposite foot until my fingers latched onto the ridged lip of the recess. Like a machine. A climbing machine.
Left hand. Right foot. Right hand. Left foot. Over and over in an endless robotic cadence.
My spine scraped painfully against a metal bracket securing the bundled cables. Either I was larger
than the typical repair person or whoever created this corridor was more interested in getting it done than ensuring it was comfortable for future repairs.
Most likely both.
An electric tightness grew in my chest, sending out pulsing waves of energy to my limbs. The two red pills were coming on strong now. My legs wanted to sprint. My arms wanted to feel the thrill of tossing around heavy weights. It required constant focus to constrain them to the simple strain of ascending one more step.
I swallowed and found my throat dry and tongue thick. My fingers tingled like the rock carried a low voltage current and touching it completed a circuit.
A line of hot fire traced down my back.
I pulled closer to the hewn steps, straining to look over my shoulder to see what had happened.
A few feet below, the jagged edge of a deformed bracket was tipped in red. It had cut through my shirt and skin. I hadn’t noticed while it was happening. The pain competing with the other sensations inundating my conscious mind.
Crypto moved with an easy grace above. I’d worried that the distance between the holds would cause him problems, but my concerns had proved unfounded. He moved with a natural ease and economy of movement, like a fish in water.
They didn’t think about swimming, about moving their fins this way and their tails that way so that they would go in the desired direction. No. They just did it.
Just as he did. He wasn’t hurried or frantic, but the smooth mechanics of it kept him comfortably ahead even with the pills rushing through my system.
“I see something a little further up,” he said.
His voice echoed down with a hollow, far away feel. Making the small distance between us feel incongruent. Like hearing a voice calling from across a large room and turning to bump into the speaker.
He paused some dozen feet above. “Yep, looks like a junction box. My guess is that the branch here goes to the Administration level.”
I caught up and saw that the tunnel had been enlarged to make room for working on a large metal box. I kicked out a foot across the channel to wedge myself in place. A few deep breaths to slow the heart rate.
To try, anyway.
The thick bundle of cables from below entered on the bottom side through a punched out circular hole. A smaller bundle exited from a hole on the top and continued upward beyond the glow of my flashlight. A large bundle came out of a hole in the side and ran into a horizontal shaft of the same dimension of the one we were in.
Crypto sat on the edge of the box, dangling his feet over empty space. “So, did you make up your mind yet?”
“About what?”
“About where we’re headed. You never answered.”
“Oh yeah. Sorry.” I remember thinking about it, but then the sensations roared in and swept the thought away.
“Well?”
“The Security level. Let’s head there.”
“You sure? If she’s as injured as you say, don’t you think he’d take her to the Infirmary level?”
“He would if her well-being was his first priority. But it’s not. He wants to lock her away where no one can get to her. To where he won’t be challenged when he decides what to do with her.”
“You sure?”
“It’s a hunch.” And that was as good as anything right now. “Let’s go.”
He pushed up to his feet and stood on the edge of the junction box, shining his flashlight up into the tunnel above. It appeared to go on forever. And that was only the part we could see. It faded to black and kept going beyond that. “You realize that Security is the uppermost level and we’re going to have to climb all the way there?”
I nodded.
“Fine,” he stood on the edge of the box, reaching out for a carved hold on the opposite side.
The box shifted under him. The outside edge dropping several inches.
A creak like a rusty hinge moving for the first time in years.
He slipped and his fingertips missed. He pitched forward over the yawning abyss and fell, arms wheeling.
I shot a hand out as he blurred by.
Latched onto his forearm and held tight.
He slammed into the cables below with a grunt of escaped air from his lungs.
I hauled him up and held him in place until he had a solid grip on the holds.
He glanced down at the endless darkness below and then at me. A wide grin broke out across his face. He whooped with glee. “What a rush! I thought I was going to die for a second there! That would be a hell of a way to go, right? Getting all battered and broken before going splat at the bottom!”
“You’re welcome,” I replied. “Let’s go.”
“What kind of person doesn’t let a guy take a second to enjoy the fact that he just cheated death?”
“Me. That’s who. Now, get moving.”
His face twisted into a scowl, but he swallowed additional complaints and started climbing.
I followed along behind, hoping I’d made the right call.
After all, breaking into the Security level was just about the dumbest thing anyone could do. And if we were doing it for no reason, well, what did that make us?
We continued on, returning to the robotic sequence that was both mind-numbing while also requiring absolute focus.
An endless cycle of predictable repetition.
Until something unexpected occurred.
A smell.
So faint at first, I thought it was my overheated imagination.
But then clear and present and dangerous.
We recognized it at the same time.
“Smoke!”
51
Slender gray wisps curled up around us, vortices that spun apart to combine and create new pockets of turbulence.
I looked down.
Far below, a dim orange light flickered.
The junction box. When it moved, it must’ve cut into the sheathing of a power line and shorted it. It was as good a guess as any. Besides, the cause didn't matter so much as the effect.
The light flared hot white and I snapped my eyes shut.
The carved rock shook and a booming pressure wave hit an instant later.
My feet jarred loose and I dropped, still clamping on with one hand anchored to a hold. My shoulder wrenched as it took my full weight.
I groaned with pain as my ears popped to equalize.
A blast of heat across my cheeks and forehead. The air sucked out of my lungs as if by vacuum pressure.
The temperature spike ebbed and I opened my eyes. Somehow, I was still hanging by the one hand. I anchored to the steps and looked up to see Crypto with his eyes pinched shut and his head buried under his arm.
Looking below, the bright white had dulled to hot yellow. I coughed as a cloud of acrid smoke billowed up and flowed by. We’d gotten lucky to survive the blast. Confined spaces magnified the destructive effects of an explosion.
But luck was a fickle friend. It would save you one instant and watch you die the next.
The smoke was going to kill us if we didn’t get out sooner than later.
I hurried upward and smacked Crypto’s lower leg.
One eye blinked open, staring at me.
“Climb!” I yelled.
The other eye blinked open. He lifted his head and looked around. “We didn’t die?”
“No! But we will soon if you don’t get moving!”
“We didn’t die! Nothing can kill us! We’re invincible!” He broke into shrieking laughter and bounced up and down on the balls of his anchored feet. One foot slipped. “Whoa!” The laughter cut short.
“Go! Now!”
He looked down at me with disdain. “We’re partners, you know. I’m not in the military and you’re not my boss.”
“Why don’t you tell me all about it while we stand here suffocating to death?”
I was seconds away from grabbing him by the seat of his pants and dropping him into the fiery abyss below me.
He took a breath and coughed. “Moving ou
t!”
The smoke grew thicker as we raced up the side of the shaft, moving as fast as we could.
The higher we went, the thicker the smoke.
But there was no other choice. We couldn’t go back down to the raging fire far below.
The biting chemical air scraped down my throat as I did my best to sip shallow breaths. “Faster!” I tried to yell, but croaked instead.
We moved quickly, but our speed only took us deeper into the smoke. We had to be getting close to the Security level. By my count, only eighty steps to go. The smoke was a thick fog. I could no longer see Crypto above me.
But we had to be close.
My eyes were pinched to slits, tears flowing down my cheeks. Sweat coated my skin and soaked through my clothes, leaving them stuck and clinging wherever they touched. A charred plastic taste coated the back of my throat.
My chest convulsed and I coughed out tendrils of thick mucus.
Keep going.
Twenty steps left.
Twenty if I hadn’t lost count. Skipped ahead by accident.
My eyes barely open, seeing nothing but swirling, choking gray.
Keep going.
A sip of air and aching lungs exploded with violent shuddering. Coughing so hard I lost my grip on the hand holds and fell back against the bundled cables.
Just a few more steps.
Had to be.
I forced my eyes open a little wider, trying to see the end, before the end.
Nothing but blinding, suffocating, scorching fog.
A whoosh of air nearby and the smoke sucked away above my head.
A raspy voice from above. “Come on!”
A small, thick hand poked through the fog.
“Here!”
I climbed the final few steps and saw Crypto as he scrambled on his belly into a horizontal shaft. I followed behind, my belly scraping over the smooth rock to stay below the ceiling of smoke a few inches above my head.
Mostly blind and choking to death, I pushed forward and abruptly smashed into Crypto’s head.