“A good question, but one we do not have time to consider just now.” Mrs. Hull replied quickly. “We need to get the three of us secured and safe before we can even consider others. If nobody can find us and nobody talks about us, then maybe that connection will just be ignored.” She offered.
Tina tilted her head defiantly. “Not likely these guys would leave any stone unturned, but there’s a chance we have time enough to get secured before we warn our friends.” She replied, trying to sound optimistic even though she felt empty inside. She just wanted to cry and be consoled, but that wouldn’t save their lives. That wouldn’t bring back the home life they had enjoyed. It was just a fantasy from the innocent child within her. She shoved it aside with a bit of malice for the brief moment of weakness.
“Okay, let’s get our acts together. We are in a place of relative safety. But we will need new names and identities. I don’t know how to get those. Does anybody here?” She asked. The confused faces of her fellow fugitives told her that neither of them knew how to do it either. She continued… “Fine, then we have to learn that skill as well. We can do things like normal but with a secondary level of caution attached to them. For instance, a search for ID’s would be out of the question, but a search for replacement ID’s for one lost in the clothes recycler would draw much less attention.” She told them. “Do not, under any circumstances, search for the tall man or any of his criminal activities. That would trigger a cascade of red flags and draw them to us like moths seeking the only light in the cosmos.” She iterated. We will need to steal rations from the replicators because our ID’s will have been flagged. Our accounts will have been emptied. The transaction would draw them just as quickly as standing in front of a camera in the marketplace.” She froze for a long moment as if caught by an unexpected thought.
The others watched her patiently for a few minutes, but this was going to drag out even longer. Her mother cleared her throat. “Go on.” She prompted.
Tina shook her head. “Sorry, I just got an idea.” She said. I… it still needs more work before I’m willing to share it.” She said a bit sheepishly. “Anyway, where was I?” She asked a bit embarrassed.
“You were talking about not using our own accounts to buy food.” Lock reminded her.
“Yeah, don’t do that, they’ll find us.” She concluded lamely. Her mind had switched to this new thought and her briefing would be pointless until her faculties came back to the topic. “Look, I need to figure some things out. Just be careful and don’t draw any attention to yourselves.” She told them. Then she went silent again as her mind fumbled through this new idea.
Lock turned to Mrs. Hull. “Well, that was odd.” He said under his breath. Mrs. Hull shrugged.
“I’ve learned to trust her. She’ll tell us when she is ready.” She said in support.
Lock nodded. “I trust her too. She had never steered me wrong and she sometimes sees thing more clearly than I do.” He admitted. “But don’t tell her I said that.” He whispered.
“Your secret is safe with me.” Mrs. Hull replied with a smile. Then her face turned more serious. “How do we get new accounts in order to eat?” She asked.
Lock looked like he was going to turn red. “I’ve never done this before mind you, but I think I have an idea.” He said. He pulled out his Pad device and opened the communications port. He set it to receive only and then pulled out a small directional antenna on it. He pulled up an application and tapped a few buttons. Then he showed the screen to Tina’s mom. “This program will capture the transmitted account codes when you direct it at someone during a transaction.” He declared. Mrs. Hull’s eyes narrowed.
“Never done this huh?” She pressed.
Lock held up his hand. “Honest, I’ve never used this program for that purpose. I usually capture other data in order to do mundane things like open doors or lockers. I’ve never stolen anyone’s ID code before.” He explained in defense.
“Lockers? Whose locker did you open?” Tina’s mother asked.
“Well, it was an investigation you see.” Lock backpedaled. “I need to know who was behind something at school.” He said.
“Mmmmhm” Mrs. Hull replied and then she let him off the hook and took the device from him fully. “I’ll try it first. If it works, you may have saved us at least for the short term.” She told him.
He didn’t realize that he was off the hook yet. “It should. I mean, I’ve never used it that way, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t.” He explained.
Tina spoke to them and startled them both. “She’s already let you go, stop wiggling.” She said.
Tina knelt down next to them both. “We need to get our lives back and that seems impossible just now. But it might not be.” She told them both. Confused faces met her sentence. “If we go public with what we know and the tall man is revealed, the public outcry could bring us enough light to give us justice. But the timing would have to be perfect.” She told them now.
Mrs. Hull was already against this plan. “Oh no, we were told to lay low, stay hidden, stay alive.” She said, paraphrasing their instructions from the detective. “Going public is the exact opposite of our instructions.” She stated flatly.
Tina nodded. “It is. Detective Marshall may be dead for all we know. His message was sent telling us we have been revealed. There is now nothing saving him from the tall man. We may never get another chance to flush the tall man out. If we show ourselves to the public, along with a prepared statement, we might just gather enough momentum to keep him at bay. Protective custody could be offered at least.” She explained.
“I don’t want to go back to jail.” Mrs. Hull replied.
Lock took Tina’s side. “It’s better than death.” He declared.
Tina’s Mom waved him aside. “Granted, but death can be avoided more than one way and stepping out into the open isn’t what I consider to be the best way to do it.” She said, playing devil’s advocate. Then she turned to Tina. “Tell me again how this is going to work.”
Tina was still thinking a mile a minute, but it was obvious that her plan was not complete yet. “First of all, we need to trick the tall man out into the open. I think a personal challenge will be the only way we can accomplish that.”
Lock was the one flabbergasted now. “How do you intend to do that?” He asked.
“The first thing we need to do is to expose the sabotaged system and then direct that at the tall man in the public eye.” Tina replied. She was still thinking on the fly now, but she was getting warmed up. “The main system will be offline, all we’ll have to do is to demonstrate the door not closing when that happens.” She added.
“What? Are you crazy? Why would the main system be offline?” Lock asked.
“The tall man will do it and do it soon I believe.” Tina replied. “He’s planning something big and whatever it is, we are a threat to it. That is why he wants us so badly. Our disappearance has forced him to advance his timetable on whatever it is he’s planning. We just have to be ready as soon as the light goes red.” Tina explained.
Mrs. Hull shook her head and rubbed her eyes. “That’s a lot of supposition girl.” She said chidingly. “The tall man doesn’t seem to work on timetables as we know them. From what I’ve gathered, he does not age himself and has all the patience in the known galaxy. He wouldn’t rush anything because of us. If anything, he would delay his plans until we were either disposed of or died of natural causes. He has that kind of time on his side. She said in retort.
Tina was thinking feverishly now. “In that case, we’d have to make the primary system fail ourselves in order to reveal the treachery.” She said.
“What? No!” Lock replied quickly. “I will not disable a single system on this ship just to expose one man. Too many other lives would be at stake for that to be feasible.” He told her.
Tina was still working angles and routes in her head. She wanted this to work, but her two companions had already shot down her initial plan. She wondered wh
ose side they were on. Then it hit her like lightning. “Has the tall man already shifted his plan into action?” She asked.
Both of her fellow fugitives shrugged their shoulders. “How would we know?” They asked her in unison.
“See if the primary system is still online.” Tina responded with a sigh. “That system had to go down before the backup system could be tried and failed. Once it was shown as a failure, steps would be taken to expose who had sabotaged it. Then the tall man would point at whoever he had decided would take the fall. This whole scheme could be to discredit somebody.” She said, following the logic through.
Lock looked unhappy. “There are much easier and cheaper ways to discredit somebody. Look what they did to you and it cost them almost nothing.” He said in protest. “There has to be something more to it than that and whatever it is, it scares me.” Lock admitted.
Tina had to admit that her theory was far-fetched, but so was sabotage on a ship that nobody could leave. If you were living and depending on these systems, why in all the heavens would you make sure they weren’t working? It really made no sense. All they knew at this point was a door wouldn’t automatically close in the event of a drastic loss of pressure. There were still mechanical actuators that could do the job if someone were close enough when the event happened. What if the door was only a rather small puzzle piece in an even bigger plan? The idea was dazzlingly frightening. Making a door fail was one thing, but what could be the bigger goal?
“Okay, so let’s say the door isn’t the actual goal, but a step along the path to another goal.” She said and the two began thinking on this new line. “What would be the end goal here? I mean, if that door failed, what else would be affected?” Tina asked directly.
Mrs. Hull replied first. “That search is exactly the kind of thing we were told not to do. Are you sure you want us looking into this possibility?” She asked.
Tina never wavered far from serious but now she was fully serious. Her eyes bore through her mother as she responded. “To save our lives, we shouldn’t be searching for this. To save everyone else’s lives, we definitely should be. Nobody else will think about this until it is too late.” She pointed out. Then she noticed Lock was going to put his two-credit’s worth in and cut him off. “If it is us or the rest of the ship, I’ll gladly die to save the others.” She said. Her voice was like steel. “The most important thing now is finding out what the tall man is up to and stopping it. We can all agree that it is no good and must be stopped.” She said, it was almost a question. The faces before her were adequately serious as well. “Fine, then let’s crack this case wide open.” She said.
They used their small protections to begin their searches. The noisy electronics and vast heat exchangers would mask their activities for a while, but it would not save them for long. They were searching for things that had to be red flagged by the very people looking for them. So, they made their queries as accurate as possible for no one knew how long they could search before being shut down.
∆ ∆ ∆
Detective Marshall was in a panic. He was certain that someone had just tried to kill him. He didn’t know if it was a bullet, for he had not heard a shot. But the man next to him had died instantly from the impact. He was smart enough to take that sort of provocation to run. He was darting through the crowd, raising way too much attention as he moved. He didn’t even know from where the shot had come. Was he running in the correct direction? Was he moving to where the enemy wanted him to? He had no answers, only an underlying urgency to keep moving. He needed to get his information to the kids if he could. The tall man’s identity could be telling for them. It hadn’t meant all that much to him, but he was admittedly not as good at sifting through the information as they were. That admission hurt him a bit. He was glad that they were on his side though. But he had just told them to go into lockdown and stay in hiding. His ability to find them was practically non-existent. Even now, he didn’t have time to worry about that too much since he was fleeing for his own life. The worst part was that he couldn’t call in for backup. His precinct had been fully compromised. If he reported in, the assassin would get an update on his location and his flight would have been for nothing. His lungs burned from the exertion. He would need to stop soon. He had been running on adrenaline for a bit now and that could not last. A stitch in his side told him that his flight was over. He ducked into an alcove and hid in the shadows as he panted heavily. Several people watched him as he made a spectacle of himself.
“Sorry, I gotta’ hide.” He tried to explain but he still needed too much air for the words to come out clearly. He was obviously in distress.
A small child waved for him to come and he followed begrudgingly. He would have liked to get his breathing under control before moving again. The child moved to the back of a small area and then tilted a panel sideways, making an opening into the wall itself. Marshall’s eyes went wide. He dove into the opening and then froze so as not to make any more noise than necessary. The child closed the panel behind him. Marshall could not see in the total darkness in there. He could hear his breathing, still heavy and quick. He could hear his pulse racing in his ears. He could feel the cold plating he was lying on. He found comfort in that. How had he come to this? He was in a place that he never even knew existed. Tina had told him that places like this existed, but he hadn’t actually believed her.
Over the next few minutes Marshall listened to everything. The sounds of the outside somehow echoed through this place. As the darkness folded around him, he felt a strange connection to it. His eyes were sort of useless, but since he could hear around him, he was sort of getting an afterimage of the tunnel he was in. It was not all that wide, but wide enough for him to move along it so long as he was careful. It wasn’t all that far down where he could no longer hear the tunnel. He wondered if that meant it opened up there. He wanted for it to be true so that he could stand again. He began slinking down the tunnel, moving as little as possible. The sounds he made caused him to cringe. His weight made the metal tunnel pop occasionally. Each time it made him stop in place and listen. Marshall was sure that at any time he would hear voices shouting out that they had found him. But they never came. When his courage had sufficiently recovered, he began moving again. The openness of the sound was getting closer. He was moving along at a slightly brisker pace having figured out the movements to propel himself. He was making good time and making less noise for his efforts. Then his hand hit an edge. He reached around the edge and followed it all the way around the tunnel. The tunnel ended here, opening into something he could not see. Marshall turned onto his side and pulled his Pad device from his coat pocket. Its light showed him the tunnel he had traversed.
“Was that all the farther I came?” He whispered to himself. It had seemed like such a long journey in the darkness. He reached out in front of himself and shined the light down. The shaft, and that was a generous name, seemed to go down forever. Intellectually he knew that wasn’t possible. The ship was only so long and there were no wormholes that shafts like this could feed into. He found that he could hold the Pad device out at arm’s length without the tension and fatigue that normally accompanied such an action. He wondered just how far down the shaft actually went. It was at least three times the size of the tunnel he was in now. This was some kind of ventilation tunnel after all. The air was fresh in here too. Marshall took a stylus from his pocket and held it out into the channel. He dropped it and marveled as it just hung there. It was slowly turning over from his release alone. There was no gravity here. That was strange for there was in this tunnel. He got a sudden realization that his journey had gotten easier because his weight had reduced, not because his skill at negotiating the tunnel had improved. He was saddened by that at first. But it meant that he could move to another part of the ship in zero gravity and not get all winded. Marshall was getting excited about that. He had to remind himself to remain calm though. Energetic movements in zero gravity were a bad idea in the best of sit
uations. This would not be the best of situations here.
He pulled himself into the channel and found his weightlessness quite refreshing. By tensing up, he could force his body straight and then relax to drift into the desired direction. Plus, there were ladder rungs down the other side. He could guide himself up or down this chute. The real question was “where did he want to go? Up or down?” Of course, being weightless, up and down had no true meaning. They were only referencing for his current orientation within the confines of this service shaft. The thought of running from his unseen attacker was gone. He was enjoying the new way to travel. The occasional robotic lift whipped by him as he moved along at a leisurely pace. He was counting decks as he floated. Where would he come out in the end? He didn’t know. He only knew that it would be far away from where he had gone in. That was good enough for now. He wondered if he got signals in this shaft. He pulled up to a rung and locked an elbow through it while he retrieved his Pad device. He tapped a couple of buttons and was pleasantly surprised that he did indeed have network access in here. He began to search for evidence that the children had received his message. There was no sign. That, in itself, was not conclusive, but how to approach asking where they were was something beyond his training. They were supposed to be laying low, not searching for anything. Not responding to messages… he had set this up. How could he have not had a safe word or something to get around this? He had the Pad location of Lock’s device. It was way more sophisticated than the kid was letting on. He noted the location and it was actually close to him. Of course, that would be hard to see locked into a channel like this, but the proximity sensor told him that he was only a few meters away. He tried a direct message on directional broadcast. He pointed his Pad at the target and tapped the send key.
“It is me, is that you?”
He smiled at the simplicity of it all.
“How did you find us?”
Eternals Among Us: Book one Page 14