Thorin returned the first hand to rest and brought the other one into the light. Above the two middle fingers was some sort of nozzle. As with the weapon on the opposite side, this had a tube running back up into the arm.
“That’s a nozzle,” said Dice. “Can you get closer to the torso? There’s an odd bulge toward the back. I can just barely . . .”
The camera angle changed, drawing in on what looked to Chuck like a tank of some sort.
“A fire bot?” murmured Eugene from behind Chuck. “We talked about those, remember? That would explain the laser cutter and the tank, wouldn’t it? Maybe it sprays carbon dioxide.”
Dice looked skeptical. “Maybe, but—”
From the iPhone, Lanfen asked, “But what, Dice? How can we be absolutely sure this isn’t just a harmless rescue bot?”
“I don’t know how we can be sure, Lanfen. Can you see if there’s anything that indicates what they mean to put in those tanks?”
“Such as?”
Dice didn’t want to say it. “Chemical weapons.”
“No, no, no.” Chuck shook his head emphatically. The surge of adrenaline he’d felt at the first sight of the bot had become an icy sludge solidifying in his veins. “I think it’s time for you to get out, Lanfen. Withdraw.”
“Chuck, they might have already seen Thorin wandering around down there. We’re only going to get this one shot, and I want to make sure of this. We need to be sure of this.”
“Not enough to endanger you,” he argued.
“Endanger me how? That’s not me down there in the lab. That’s a robot. They’ll have no way of knowing who’s in control or where that person is.”
“But they can make an educated guess, Lanfen.”
“But Thorin isn’t ‘my’ robot—it’s Reynolds’s. Wouldn’t the suspicion land on him? Listen—we’re wasting time. I’m going deeper into the complex. Maybe there’s a chem lab somewhere or something that will at least tell me what they’re experimenting with.”
“Lanfen, please . . .”
“Let her do it.”
Chuck turned. Mike had risen from his chair and was staring at the screen.
“She’s right, Doc. If these bastards are doing what it looks like they’re doing, we gotta know.”
Chuck swung his gaze back to the screen. The view there danced crazily for a moment before focusing on the next set of double doors. Thorin moved through them into the next chamber. This, too, held rows of bots. They were similar to the ones in the room before, though not identical. Thorin moved swiftly to the first one and, as earlier, gave it a thorough visual once-over, but there wasn’t really anything that jumped out at the group.
What did capture their interest was in the next room. It was a strange collection of items, to say the least. In addition to four charging stands, two of which were occupied, there were racks that held a variety of robot appendages, each outfitted with different types of armaments or tools. Some of the weapons were recognizable as assault rifles by the ammo magazines built into the upper arms. Another set of racks held ordnance: tiny missiles, egg-shaped pellets, objects that looked like short harpoons.
“Makes sense,” murmured Dice. “That’s the way I’d do it. Build a bot chassis that can be adapted to different uses just by swapping out parts.”
“I hear someone,” Lanfen said, and the view slewed crazily again.
“Get out,” said Chuck.
Behind him, Mini said softly, “She is out, Chuck.”
“But the bot . . .”
“Wait,” said Lanfen.
She moved the bot to the far side of the lab, its optics trained on a thick, steel-plated door of the sort that might be found on a deep freeze or a vault. There was a round window in the door made up of two thick pieces of glass set about four inches apart. The window grew until it filled the TV screen from top to bottom.
Chuck realized they were looking into a smaller chamber that contained rows of shelved canisters. He moved closer to the screen.
“Lanfen, can you adjust his optics to focus in on the labels?”
But she was already doing it. The image adjusted so sharply, it made Chuck dizzy. When he was able to focus, the lettering on the nearest canister became suddenly readable.
“Oh,” said Eugene weakly. “That’s not C-O-two, is it?”
“No,” Chuck answered, “it’s methylphosphonofluoridate.”
“What’s that?” Mini asked.
“It’s used to make sarin gas.”
THORIN’S AURAL SENSORS WERE NOW picking up definite sounds of movement in the next lab. Had the bot been detected, or was it just a security patrol on regular rounds? No alarms had sounded, though that might be a measure to catch the rogue robot—or his handler—unaware.
The sounds of approach were coming from the lab Lanfen and her metal counterpart had visited previously. Accordingly, she turned and moved as swiftly and quietly as possible to one of the two unoccupied charging stations. She stepped Thorin up into it. Even partially disassembled, his two neighbors dwarfed him. Lanfen allowed a corner of her mind to be amused that she had once found Thorin formidable-looking and overlarge.
She’d barely gotten the bot frozen in place when the doors at the entrance of the lab swung open, and a single security guard entered and flipped on the light. He swept the lab with an alert gaze once, his eyes landing on Thorin. He stepped over to the bot with a quizzical look on his face, seeming to find its presence bemusing. He leaned closer, eyes focused on the bot’s right shoulder.
Adrenaline hit Lanfen like an electrical charge. She needed to shift his attention off of Thorin, and quick.
At the speed of thought, Lanfen leapt mind-first into the battle droid she’d scanned in the previous chamber, powered it up, and sent it careening into the workbenches at the center of the room. They were heavily enough built that the collision caused no damage, but the noise was thunderous.
She leapt back to Thorin in time to see the guard hurry back toward the doors, talking rapidly into his headset, his weapon drawn. He disappeared into the neighboring lab.
Brilliant—now I’m cut off.
That left her three options: continue on through the interconnected labs and hope the guards made a full circuit, venture out into the corridors, or leave Thorin where he was. She opted for the corridors, moving to the chem lab’s outer door to take a cautious peek beyond.
Her caution was warranted. A glance into the corridors proved them to be a bit busier than she might have hoped. A team of security guards was already entering the lab in which she’d crashed the battle bot.
She took stock of the situation. If she continued around the ring of labs, she would eventually come to the one opposite Thorin’s barracks. Thorin ducked back into the labs and made haste through one after another, recording everything in his path. That included a stunning variety of robot forms. Forms that tantalized, disturbed, terrified. There were even-bigger battle bots being outfitted with more-powerful weapons. There were sleek, reptilian robots with segmented bodies like Bilbo’s and magnetic clamps on their appendages. There were others of the same type but covered with wet suits.
No time to give them a thorough examination. I can only hope Dice and Chuck can figure out what they mean from the footage I’m sending back.
Time was definitely a factor, and she paused only every now and again to create a new disturbance along her back trail—for all the good it did. Alarms were sounding now, and the sensors were picking up a lot of human feet pelting along the corridors. Between the added stimuli and reckless passage through the facility, she had lost track of where she was and was reluctant to poke her robotic head out into the corridor again. Sending up prayers to her ancestors to grant her wisdom, Chen Lanfen at last spied an empty charging station in what appeared to be a repair bay. She put Thorin into it, shut him down, and escaped to her maintenance closet.
Drenched in a cold sweat, she huddled in the corner behind the trash bins and shivered, waiting for morning.
IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT WHEN everyone left Chuck’s house. They had turned on a late-night movie to cover their continued discussions. Anxiety ran high, with anger and fear boiling underneath.
Chuck had never felt so powerless in his entire life. He was out of his element. Trapped in a box, the dimensions of which he couldn’t see. He didn’t think he could sleep. Lanfen was safe enough for the moment, but just knowing that she was huddled on the floor of a storage closet in a secret military installation and wouldn’t be able to get out until morning made him crazy.
What had they been thinking? That they were spies? Superspies, even, with psychic powers? For God’s sake, he was just a neurologist. A scientist who now knew too much about an organization that did not seem to exist on any chart his contacts knew about.
His conversation with his colleague at the FBI had been the most chilling. Chuck had fairly high security clearance there himself, and his friend, Wallace Freely, had stratospheric clearance. Confronted with the names Deep Shield and General Leighton Howard and the blanks Chuck had drawn at the Pentagon and the CIA, Wallace had said simply, “I need to look into this, Chuck. Please don’t take this anywhere else.”
His imagination went into overdrive. What if the Deeps shut the place down after the incident with the rogue robot? What if they canceled Forward Kinetics’ classes? What if Lanfen ended up stranded in the facility with no way to get out?
What if . . . ?
He called her cell phone finally, at around 4 A.M., just to be sure she was all right. He had gone back into his study, where the bugs were still dormant thanks to Mike’s tinkering.
“Were you sleeping?” he asked when she answered.
She laughed softly. “What do you think? Were you?”
“No. I’m . . . kind of nervous about tomorrow. If they cancel our classes, if we can’t get in to get you out—”
“I have PowerBars and a water bottle,” she said. “And there’s a bathroom on the other side of the door.”
“Are you okay otherwise?”
“Yes. No. I mean . . . the things in those labs . . .”
“Yeah.”
“What did your guy at the FBI say?”
“That he needs to look into it. That I shouldn’t talk to anyone else about it. Of course I already have. I called the Pentagon and the CIA. I told him that, though. He seemed okay with it.” He was jabbering. He stopped.
“How well do you know him, Chuck? Could he be . . . What if he’s an insider? What if he goes to Howard? Did you get the feeling he might?”
“N-no,” Chuck said. Then he added more decisively, “No. I’ve worked with Wallace. He sounded . . . spooked. I’m not sure General Howard is anything he claims to be. The fact is, we don’t really know anything other than what Howard has told us . . . and Matt has assumed.”
“So what do we do? It sounds as if we’re trapped. We can’t just break our contract on some pretext, can we?”
“No, but there may be another way. Matt might be able to negotiate something. He’s good at that. I’m not.”
“I hope so.” She yawned. “Thanks for calling, Chuck. I think maybe I can sleep for a little bit now.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
They said good night and hung up. Not for the first time that night, Chuck picked up the business card he’d set in the middle of his desk. It had two words on it—Kristian Lorstad—and, beneath the name, a telephone number. He thought about dialing it but couldn’t bring himself to do it. It felt too much like jumping out of a boat into deep water with no idea of what might be living in it.
He had a choice: throw himself to the sharks or talk to Matt.
He’d have to weigh it seriously.
Chapter 25
MATTERS OF SECURITY
Lanfen’s iPhone woke her with a soft vibration at quarter to eight in the morning. She was groggy from a lack of sleep and stiff from being still for so long. She checked the jammer reflexively. It was off. There were no security cameras in the maintenance closet.
She’d checked back in with Thorin several times during the night. The labs had been crawling with MPs every time, and they had found Thorin during their sweep of the facilities. Brian had been summoned to return him to his own lab, where he was examined minutely. Lieutenant Reynolds had looked grim and nervous, which made Lanfen cringe with discomfort. She knew what she had done was necessary, but it felt somehow dishonorable.
At 7:55 she heard the door of the women’s restroom open and Mini’s voice say, “Well, I love those boots, Lanfen. I’m going to have to go to Macy’s and see if they’ve got some in my size.”
That was Lanfen’s signal to make sure the jammer was off. They needed the surveillance cameras to pick up Mini and her Lanfen wraith (Lanfen couldn’t help but think of Mini’s creations that way) entering the room. Lanfen rose from her corner, stretched, and moved to the closet door, listening intently. If this was going to work, Mini had to get herself and the wraith into the two stalls closest to the maintenance closet. Lanfen heard Mini’s steps go past her hiding place and heard one of the stall doors creak open.
“Shoot,” Mini said. “I forgot my hairbrush. Can I borrow yours?”
There was a moment of near silence, then the sound of a stall door opening. Lanfen switched the jammer back on, slipped out of the closet as quickly as she could, and sprinted the three strides across the room into the last stall. She shut the door and flipped the jammer off. A cold tide of adrenaline surged through her.
Okay, Chen, breathe.
Sweating a little, she reached down to pick up the jeans, sweater, and boots Mini had pushed under the stall dividers. Then she perched on the edge of the toilet seat and sent up a prayer of relief and gratitude.
“So how was your night?” Mini asked. “I had all kinds of weird dreams because of that stupid movie. I dreamed the espresso machine in our lunchroom turned into a big, shiny robot.”
“I didn’t sleep well either,” Lanfen said, pulling off her clothes. “I know what you mean about the robots. Stuff of nightmares.”
“I want to pick the movie next time,” Mini said.
Lanfen pulled on her jeans and sweater. “Good luck. They’re going to want to see the next five Transformers movies now.”
“There are five?”
Lanfen laughed as she pulled on her boots. “I don’t know. I may be exaggerating. At least I hope I am. I vote we watch a romantic comedy next time.”
“You like those?” Mini asked incredulously.
“No. But I’m willing to subject myself to one just to see the boys suffer.”
Lanfen shoved her discarded clothing and shoes under the stall divider. Mini bundled them into her voluminous purse. Then Lanfen took a deep breath, stood up, and got her small bag down from the hook where she’d hung it. After a moment of thought, she flushed the toilet. Mini’s toilet flushed a moment later, and the two women moved to the sink in harmony, washed their hands, and left the restroom, sidestepping the “wet floor” cone that declared the bathroom closed for cleaning.
By the time they’d made their way to the canteen to meet up with Dice, Lanfen’s stomach had settled enough for her to eat a bagel and drink a big mug of black tea before they parted to go to their respective classes.
Up until the time she entered her practice room, Lanfen had seen no sign that the deeper recesses of Deep Shield had had any nocturnal excitement. But her whole class was there with one very important exception: Reynolds.
“Where’s Brian?” she asked the other lieutenant in her class, Cathy Letson.
“I can’t say, ma’am,” Letson answered. “All I know is he’s got meetings this morning.”
Meetings. No doubt he did. Lanfen felt a stab of guilt. If Brian was in trouble with his superiors, it was her fault. She reminded herself it was for a good cause, though, smiled at the lieutenant, and said, “Well, his loss then.”
She began her class drills, praying that no one would connect Thorin’s walkabout with anyone at For
ward Kinetics.
DICE HAD ALMOST RELAXED WHEN he was called away from the lab to a meeting with General Howard. He told himself he was only anxious about it because he knew all sorts of things Howard didn’t. It was probably nothing. The general just wanted an update.
But when he wasn’t escorted to Howard’s office, he tensed once again. He was led to a far more lived-in sanctuary in the hidden part of Deep Shield—the part that Lanfen had used Thorin to infiltrate. His suspicions were further aroused when he saw Chuck sitting in a side chair before the general’s large desk. Chuck came to Deep Shield only on rare occasions, when his expertise with the interface was required. Dice tried to compose himself, getting his brain into some semblance of order. He had a very real fear that if someone asked the right question, he’d blab everything. He wasn’t trained for this, dammit. He was a robotics engineer, not a spy.
More Q, less James Bond.
The general was not behind his desk when the polite corporal delivered Dice into the office. He sat in the chair beside Chuck. The corporal offered Dice a cup of coffee, which he accepted just so he’d have something to do with his hands.
When the corporal was gone, he turned to Chuck. “Do you have any idea—”
Chuck shook his head. “None.”
Dice opened his mouth to ask another question but quickly closed it. The less said, the better. Chances were good the office was bugged. So he and Chuck sipped coffee and waited. In ten minutes on the nose, General Howard appeared, Lieutenant Reynolds in his wake. Dice knew Lanfen had been fretting over her pet student all morning; she’d be happy to know he wasn’t shuffling around in chains.
I hope the same can be said about us after this meeting.
Howard slid into the chair behind his desk. Reynolds stood at ease just to his right.
The general didn’t waste time. “We had an incident last night with a couple of the robots. Lieutenant Reynolds’s unit apparently got loose in the labs somehow. Did some damage, including to several other robots. Thankfully it wasn’t as much damage as it could have done. We found it in a repair bay some distance from its assigned station.”
The God Wave Page 27