Skyway Angel

by James K. Douglas

  Spread out in tactical positions among the tables and behind the columns were about two dozen security officers. Every one of them was wearing kevlar body armor over their polyester uniforms, and a ballistic helmet on their head. Roughly half of them held assault rifles aimed at us, while the rest relied on smaller sidearms. Grateful to have the police officers between myself and most of the firearms, my mind wandered to the purpose of our intrusion, the prisoners themselves.

  “This is private property,” spoke the oldest of the security personnel, a broadly built man with a grey mustache, standing without cover at the center of the room. “We are duly appointed representatives of the owner of the property. Show a search warrant or leave now.”

  My eyes darted around the room, scanning the edges and corners while simultaneously trying to keep track of the developing standoff in front of me. I tried not to move, not to set anyone off. By the time I laid eyes on the prisoners, I felt ashamed I hadn’t seen them sooner.

  The walls of the room, far to my left and right were covered with cages. Though they were a considerable distance away, I could still tell they were far too small to be humane. Stacked in an overlapping brick-like pattern, four layers of the cells were squeezed in the fifteen feet between the floor and ceiling, meaning that each one was barely tall enough to sit up in, but perhaps long enough to stretch out when lying down. From that distance, all I could make out of the inhabitants were orange jumpsuits and the gentle reflection of fluorescent lights on weary eyes.

  “How many minutes of an executive’s time are your lives worth?” Officer Stripe’s voice brought me back to the immediate danger. “Five? Ten? That’s certainly what they think, the ones upstairs who cut and sign your checks. They sent you down here to die, just to buy them an extra five minutes so they could wipe their computers and shred their paperwork. Every single security officer in this company couldn’t hold the line for ten minutes against my armored officers, and you know it. Put your weapons down now, and I promise this won’t come down on you.” Her head slightly lowered, emphasizing her point. “Or don’t. Five minutes won’t make much of a difference to me.”

  The lead security officer glared at Stripe with the look of a man whose pride had been injured, narrowing his eyes and snarling under his mustache. He raised his sidearm higher, aiming for the police officer’s exposed head. The armored officers flanking her responded by stepping forward and raising their rifles. Stripe was right, of course. The whole room full of them wouldn’t stand a chance if the bullets started flying. I didn’t like my own odds, either.

  No one wanted to take the first shot. I tried to look at them all, to scan the faces behind the clear masks of ballistic helmets. It was mostly fear I saw there, fear and doubt. Hired to do a job, they were used to being able to follow orders and trust the company to watch their backs, but this wasn’t a typical situation. I felt sorry for how many of these men and women were about to learn the same lesson I learned four years ago when I lost my arm.

  The clack of steel broke the silence. My eyes darted to the source. One of the security officers had placed his pistol on the floor, sliding it forward a few feet away from himself. He seemed to breathe a sigh of relief as his shoulders slumped and his head hung.

  “Pick up that weapon, officer,” came a voice from behind a grey mustache.

  “No chance, sir,” the defiant one responded. “This isn’t right. None of this is right.”

  The unarmed officer knelt on the cold floor, placing his hands behind his head. A moment later, another placed her weapon on the floor and knelt, awaiting arrest. Others followed. Before long, nearly two dozen weapons were laying on the concrete.

  Officer Mustache was the last, slamming his weapon on the nearest work table, followed by a backup piece he drew from a boot holster. He stripped off his helmet and knelt like the others, placing his hands behind his head and staring at the ground, awaiting his handcuffs.

  The police officers lowered their weapons to a neutral position while Officer Stripe called her officers from outside to make arrests. Half of the security team was already in zip-tie handcuffs by the time Stripe called for full backup. It took her a few moments to explain the situation to her superiors.

  “Hey Ponytail,” she called out to Tom-Tom after putting away her radio. “We’ve got EMTs incoming. You better get your mob to make way.”

  “I’m on it,” Tom-Tom responded, already on his way back out the door.

  No one had to give me a task. I knew exactly what I needed to do.

  While officers were busy arresting officers, I made my way over to the far right side of the room. I couldn’t count how many people were trapped in the cages there, but I had seen dog crates larger than the containers these people were being forced to live in.

  The bars were thicker than they looked from a distance, plenty thick enough to prevent weakened prisoners from considering escape, and narrow doors were held shut by large padlocks. Plywood and a thin mat comprised the floor of each small cell, and there was certainly no free access to a proper bathroom or bedpan. Beyond a small blanket and a thin pillow, personal possessions were completely absent. There were no pictures, posters, or even a toothbrush inside. There wasn’t so much as a curtain to give them the smallest amount of privacy.

  Dim, exhausted eyes stared at me from the shadows of the cages. None of the prisoners spoke a word through their dry, cracked lips. Some simply rolled over on their mats, avoiding what they may have seen as false hope. I reached for the nearest padlock, taking it in my bionic hand, ready to crush it and all the others, ready to free them all.

  “Stop,” came a gentle voice, accompanied by a firm hand on my shoulder. “You can’t release them.”

  It was Officer Stripe. Her jaw was firm, but her brows were raised, her eyes round with compassion. I saw all of this, but it did nothing to dissuade the fire growing inside of me.

  “And why the hell not?” I barked.

  “They’re still prisoners, properly convicted.” Her eyes turned toward the caged people. “What’s happening here is wrong, but you need to let us handle this. If you give them the chance to run, and some of them take it, things could get a lot worse for them.”

  I pulled away from her hand, squaring up to her. “Then what was the point of any of this?”

  “They will be helped. First thing we do is transport them to a medical facility to get them healthy. Then they all have a long talk with a public defender. The ones held illegally past their release dates will be let go, probably compensated, too. The rest, maybe they’ll get time off of their sentences. I don’t know, but you can rest assured they’ll never end up back in a place like this again.”

  “Eighty percent of prisoners are being held in privately owned for-profit facilities. What makes you so confident that there aren’t ten more buildings just like this around the city?”

  She took a brief moment, letting her eyes roam over the cages. “I guess I can’t be certain. All we can do is our best, helping the people we can help today, and making the best decisions we can.”

  She was speaking in words I found familiar, repeating principles I tried to live by, too. I didn’t like the idea that I couldn’t fix things here, now, today, but I could hold onto the idea that I had helped to set things in motion. Things were moving in the right direction now, and they would have to play out in their own time.

  As I considered my next move, two of Tom-Tom’s crew from the bus came up behind us, each carrying a case of water bottles. The young woman and red headed young man got a nod from Officer Stripe before they started passing them out to the prisoners. Each imprisoned man and woman took the kindness gratefully, accepting it with a nod or a barely audible word of gratitude.

  With this situation handled as well as it could be, I turned my attention to the rest of the room. There was still a chance that Angela’s murderer had access to the new ME-Slim power armor, and this was the best chance I had to gather real information on how to deal with that.

/>   From the looks of it, most of the floor was set up as a factory. Machines I wasn’t familiar with and long work tables were arranged in rows across the concrete. Each line of workstations appeared to be designed to make a different component of the ME-Slim power armor, and all fed into a conveyor belt that took the components to a final construction area on the other side of the room. Though the machines stood quiet, heavy shackles bolted to the floor along the sides of the work tables left no doubt who was being made to operate them.

  I stepped over to the first row of the assembly line, the nearest line of work tables and fabrication machines. Ballistic plates still sat at the first few workstations, with a large bin at the end of the line to catch off quality pieces for recycling. Though I couldn’t see inside the large boxy exterior of the machine at the front end of the work table, it and the next few over each seemed to produce a different kind of plate, different shapes for the different parts of the body they covered.

  The machines were all still uncomfortably warm, most likely keeping the materials inside at liquid temperature. I picked up one of the armor plates to have a closer look. Sure enough, they appeared to be made of about twelve layers of polyethylene and steel sandwiched together. For all typical purposes, they were practically bulletproof and easy to replace when they did take damage.

  The next few machines were dedicated to making the kevlar components that filled in the gaps between the ballistic plates. Large textile machines produced three different kinds of cloth, long bolts of which were still sitting next to them. In line with each of the textile machines appeared to be an industrial cutting machine, where prisoners would have spent untold hours sitting and cutting each of the bolts into manageable sections to be passed onto the station where they were sewn together. Between the long hours of mind numbing work in hot conditions and the miniscule amount of food or water they were allowed, I doubted that the operators of each of these machines still had all of their fingers.

  The more I thought about the repetitious and dangerous nature of each of these jobs, the more I realized that full automation with an overseer for quality control would have been much more efficient, but perhaps not more cost effective. Ultramarine was getting paid to work these people to death. That changed the equation.

  The next long table of workstations was comprised of a series of heat press machines of different shapes and sizes. From the looks of it, an armor piece would be clamped into place so the appropriate bit of kevlar could be melted into it, just inside the outer edge. When done correctly, that should have created an unbreakable, air tight seal, but these were made by forced labor in bad conditions. I made a mental note that a strong arm might be able to slip a sharp blade in through one of those seals.

  Just past the elevator that marked the halfway point of the factory floor were the machines I was most interested in, the ones responsible for creating the power behind the armor. On each machine sat a short pole, loaded with a large spool of monofilament line. The workers would have to measure out a long stretch of the line, cut it, and load it into one of the twisters to be coiled up into a tight little spring, uniform with all the others. A heater was then applied to fix the little coil into that shape permanently, and when the process was completed, a single wire of high temperature nichrome was laced through the middle of the coil and clipped in place.

  These were the artificial muscles that gave the power armor such incredible strength, the same kind of muscles that were in my arm. When the wire heated, the coil contracted. Alone, they weren’t terribly powerful, but when dozens of them were grouped together and used as a single muscle, they ended up roughly fifty times stronger than human muscles of the same size. These weren’t replacing human limbs, though. A whole-bodied person still had to squeeze inside these suits, leaving a lot less room for the artificial muscles.

  My guess was that each limb of the armor was only about a quarter of the strength of a fully bionic limb, and yet I still wouldn’t want to face off with someone in one of these suits. My arm was strong, but I could never lift a car over my head, due to the small problem of my spine snapping. A person in one of these suits, on the other hand, had fewer obvious limitations. No single part of the armor was significantly weaker than another, and the practically bulletproof skin shouldn’t be undervalued, either.

  The final set of workstations was little more than three long tables stretching across the room. Hand tools sat in little holsters on the sides of each table, and half constructed armor sat on top of it. This was where the muscle coils were being fitted inside the pieces in a single thin row around the interior, like a liner. Room was left inside each limb for a small battery pack that the nichrome wires were plugged into, meaning that the suit’s power source was decentralized, making it next to impossible to take down all at once. It was a smart design.

  Examining one of the half finished suits, I found that the articulation in the joints was also impressive, allowing a full range of motion while simultaneously preventing hyperextension. It was well designed, but not perfect. A strong blow to the back of the knee could still put the wearer on the ground, and a hard enough hit to the side might well be able to injure the ligaments or tendons as the impact tested the flexibility of the plastic and steel joint. Due to the fleshiness of the human body, permanent damage was unlikely, but it certainly would hurt like hell.

  In theory, the wearer of the armor would also be wearing a thin undergarment, much like the ones used in full sized power armor. This garment served two purposes, containing the water cooling system that prevented the wearer from passing out from the heat, and holding the electrodes that controlled the suit. As the wearer’s muscles flexed, the electrodes would receive the signal and activate the batteries, heating the wires, which caused the coils to contract. If done correctly, the artificial muscles would smoothly add to the power of the wearer’s normal muscles, effectively giving them superhuman strength. I had no way to confirm this without having a look at one of the undergarments, though, and there didn’t appear to be one handy. Nevertheless, I was pretty confident in my assessment.

  It was then that I noticed the faint rumble from the floor above, like industrial machines hammering along. Making this armor was a time consuming process, and Ultramarine had been tasked with outfitting the entire city’s police force in a week. I wouldn't have been surprised if there were five floors running in shifts around the clock. Soon enough, those machines would go silent, too.

  I picked up a helmet from the line. It was thicker than I expected, larger too. The lower half of the face was a single air filter, not unlike the mask in my pocket, and despite the exterior seeming uniform, from the inside there appeared to be only a thin slit of clear plastic to look through.

  Despite the seriousness of the situation, I was still tempted to slip it on and threaten someone with “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.” The built-in voice modulator probably would have ruined my Robocop voice, anyway.

  I was about to put the helmet back down, when I thought to check the latch. Due to the weakness of the average human neck, the protective collar was perhaps the most important aspect of the suit, and yet the helmet still had to come off, which meant there had to be a strong latch, but one that didn’t take up a lot of space in the slim fitting suit.

  Sure enough, a small electric motor at the back of the neck was connected to two thin strips of what looked like titanium running around the back rim of the helmet, each one about as thick as a zip tie. I pulled on one, sliding it along the narrow track that carried it in and out of the wall of the helmet, but it retracted the second my finger slipped off of it.

  Comparing it to the torso of the suit, I realized that the metal strip, when activated, would run in and out of both pieces of the suit, connecting the helmet to the neck like weaving a basket. It certainly seemed to make for a powerful lock, or at least one more secure than the helmet of the full sized military power armor I had a run in with last week. So long as the small motor remained powered, the
seal should have been too strong for my bionic grip to break, but if the suit’s network of batteries somehow lost power, it would simply disengage. It took me only a moment to realize that it was most likely a safety feature, something to prevent the wearer from being locked inside the suit if it were hit with an EMP, or if the battery life turned out to be similar to most of Marshall Engineering’s other designs.

  “We have to go!” Cassdan called to me. He had thankfully stayed out of the way of the action, but I probably should have checked in with my client sooner.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, chasing after him. He was already halfway back to the hole we had knocked in the wall.

  “April,” he said. “Detective Lannemir never showed up. Someone’s breaking into the apartment!”

  “Hold up,” I said, taking him by the arm. “If we go out that way, we’ll have to fight through the crowd, run to the apartment, find the nearest Skyway access, and then deal with the intruder, if he’s not gone by then.”

  “Then what are you suggesting?”

  I pointed a thumb over my shoulder, back at the elevator the security team had come down in, the only interior access to this floor. I suddenly wondered what regulation allowed them to get away without stairwell access to the lower floors, but put the thought aside for later.

  “We’ll get stopped by security,” he protested. “No way.”

  “We busted a hole in their wall and found half of their security team down here already waiting on us. By now, everyone knows the cops are on their way, and not on their side. There’s a good chance security and the whole corporate hierarchy is on the run by now. Yes it’s a risk, but it’s worth it.”