“Ngh,” he groaned.
Aura screamed.
Rubber-soled shoes squeaked on the other side of the console. Women grunted and gasped. Aura’s scream faded into sobbing.
Kevin huddled over her, pressing her into the floor.
“Ow!” wailed Aura. “She shot me!”
Tris roared. The next fleshy thump made him cringe from the loudness of it. The ISF woman wheezed and gurgled. A meaty smack rang out. Kevin looked up at the armored woman’s face bouncing away from the wall of display panels. Tris held the wrist of her gun hand, keeping the weapon pointed more or less at the ceiling. The woman bounced away from the wall with a dazed expression. Tris stabbed the stunner past a feeble grope for her arm and held it to the woman’s cheek for three seconds of electric buzzing.
A limp body collapsed the ground.
Kevin shifted to his knees and rolled Aura onto her back, checking her for injuries. His hand came away from her left thigh bloody. “Dammit, she’s hit.”
Tris hurried over. “I’m so sorry… it’s my fault.”
“Ow!” Aura whined, clenching her teeth. “It burns!”
He pulled at a rip in the fabric about a hand’s with down from the girl’s hip. The wound looked more like a nip from a sword than a gunshot. “It just grazed her.”
Tris ripped the jumpsuit open a little more to get a look at the girl’s paper-white leg. She deflated into a slump. “Oh damn… we got lucky. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Done what?” Kevin smiled. “Kicked the gun or kidnapped the kid?”
Tris’ mournful frown made him feel like an asshole.
“Sorry. Trying to lighten the mood.”
“Am I gonna die?” whined Aura.
“No kiddo. You got a little scratch.” Kevin patted her forehead. “The bullet bounced off the wall before it hit you, barely touched you.”
Already, the wound appeared smaller.
Tris gasped. “You’re shot!”
“Yeah.” He grunted as concern for Aura gave way to feeling pain. “That one probably would’ve hit her in the face. Better it got me.”
Aura looked at him in disbelief.
“You don’t have nanites.” Tris fussed at his back, making the pain flare.
“Holy fffaaaah!” He bit his knuckle.
“That’s not what you wanted to say,” whispered Aura.
Kevin laughed as a tear dropped from his left eye. “They give kids nanites too?”
“She’s probably had them for about a year. Ten’s the minimum age.” She picked at his back. “The slug hit your shoulder blade. I can’t tell if it went into it or stopped against it. Gonna pull it out on three.”
He clenched his teeth, expecting her to count to one and yank.
She did.
The room turned white for a second as pain flared and faded. A small metal click came from the left.
Aura sat up and poked at her leg. “It stings.”
Tris bowed her head and took the girl’s hand, apologizing over and over. Kevin gritted his teeth and reoriented himself. Aside from being smeared with blood, the paper-white skin visible through the rip in the girl’s pant leg looked pristine.
“I need me some nanites,” he muttered while grasping Tris’ shoulder. “Hey, come on. We can’t sit around here feeling guilty.”
“I’m sorry.” Aura looked down. “I didn’t mean to make them angry.”
Tris shook her head. “You couldn’t know. As soon as you acted like this place really was a waste treatment facility, they knew I lied. If I’d been sent here on a maintenance job, I’d know what they really used this building for… and there’s no way they’d send a child along here.”
“What is it?” asked Aura, genuine interest in her expression.
“Come on. I’ll show you.” Tris stood. “But first…”
She hurried around the heavy security desk and stooped out of sight. A small white box came flying over a second later. Kevin caught it, recognizing a first-aid kit from the green plus on it.
“Aura, take one of the white tubes with the blood drips on it out of that box, pull off the green cap, and spray a bit into the hole in his back please?” Tris sat at the console and typed at a keyboard.
The girl rolled over and stood on her knees. “Okay.”
Kevin opened the box; on the left half, five white plastic tubes sat in rails, each with a red blood droplet mark on the side. The other side had a few bottles of pills, gauze, bandages, and three gizmos he couldn’t begin to guess the function of.
Aura reached past him and grabbed one of the tubes.
“What is that?” asked Kevin.
“Spray-skin,” said the girl. “It’ll stop you from bleeding.”
“Not that I have a problem with no longer bleeding, but if everyone here has nanites, why do they have first aid kits?”
Tris bent down and stripped both ISF officers out of their utility belts and armor. “Kids under ten, plus some of the kits have been around since before the nanites became widespread.”
“So this is… twenty year old medicine?” He chuckled.
“Maybe,” said Tris.
A faint snap came from behind him. He tensed.
“It’s okay,” said Aura. “They don’t hurt. It’ll feel cold and itchy for a little bit. I built this remote control plane once and it blew up. It took my dad almost an hour to pluck little pieces out of me.”
Hiss.
His shoulder twinged with a chill similar to what he imagined being impaled with an icicle would’ve felt like, minus the pain of being stabbed. “Oh, that’s odd.”
Both of the ISF officers had black military-style handcuffs with a hinge rather than a chain in their belts. Tris secured their hands behind their backs with their arms linked. After, she slipped into the woman’s armor. It made her chest seem larger, but otherwise fit.
“The other suit might be a bit pinchy. You’re bigger than him.”
Kevin chuckled. “I didn’t think you looked.”
Her face turned pink around the nose. She shot a pointed glare at Aura as if to say ‘there’s a damn kid here, watch it.’ “Hurry up. Anyone could walk in here at any minute.”
Kevin grumbled and stood, rolling his left shoulder to work the soreness out. His skin tugged at the wound site, like a patch of something sticky clung to him. “That feels so damn weird.” He stared at the armored suit. “Umm. How’s this thing work?”
Tris sighed and dressed him like a three-year old, holding up the pants for him to step into. She hit a button near the waistline and they cinched snug in an instant, making him groan as his junk crushed. “Oof.” The upper half fit like a jacket; it too squeezed tight at the push of a button. The material couldn’t have been thicker than an eighth inch in some spots, up to a full quarter-inch over the heart and major chest plates. Chromatic silver hexagonal lines gleamed under a smooth layer of black, catching the light as he moved.
“This doesn’t feel heavy enough to be armor…”
“Move!” Tris waved for Aura to follow and ran to the back of the room. She typed a code into a keypad on the wall, and one entire cabinet’s worth of computer equipment opened like a door, revealing an elevator with bright silver walls. Five glowing lights in the white ceiling resembled blobs of gel sitting in bowls. “In here.”
“Oh wow.” Kevin overacted an impressed face. “An elevator that works. I didn’t think this place had any.”
Once the door closed and the cab began to lower, Aura burst into tears.
“What’s wrong?” asked Tris, sounding worried.
“I… I’m gonna get in so much trouble.” She sniffled. “We just beat up the ISF and this isn’t a waste plant. I don’t know what’s going on anymore.”
Tris patted her shoulder. “Try to stay calm. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Whenever we say that, it turns out the other way. Kevin forced a smile.
Another set of doors on the opposite side of the elevator opened. Tris strode o
ut into a corridor with an immaculate white floor and walls, lit with a blinding glow from overhead LED tube lights, bee-lining for the door at the far end about fifty yards away. Kevin peered into rooms on the left and right as they passed. One looked like a break room, another a storage room full of shelves, another a long hallway leading off to the right. The third and fourth resembled hospital procedure rooms. Another much larger room had a secondary corridor going off into the distance that appeared to connect to a train tunnel.
“You…” said Tris.
A man yelled out in alarm.
Aura screamed.
Kevin, having fallen behind due to his curious gandering, sprinted ahead into a room with four rows of control desks like some kind of NASA launch center. Despite the size of the place, it held only five people. Three men in their mid-twenties stood half out of their chairs in the center of the room. One white-haired, one black-haired, and one brown. They stared at Tris who had a fiftyish man in a white jumpsuit pinned against the leftmost wall.
She pistol whipped him as fast as she could move her arm. “Goddamned filthy piece of shit. You’re lucky there’s a damn child behind me or I’d put a bullet in your lousy pig face. I remember you! You thought I was unconscious, but I was only paralyzed.” She let off a shriek of rage and hit him harder.
A younger woman by the console farthest from the door, beneath a huge bay window that wrapped around in a manner suggesting her workstation occupied an overhanging ledge, gasped.
Noting she, as well as the three men at consoles, all wore sidearms, Kevin pulled his .45 and raised it. “Please just stand still.”
The man against the wall moaned, waving his hands in a futile effort to ward off Tris’ blurry arm. Her strength and speed rendered him unconscious in seconds. She hit him twice more before letting him slump to the floor.
Tris stood over him, fuming. The look in her eye worried him.
“Tris?” he asked, drawing the word out long. “You okay?”
“I wanna kill him. When they put me into VR, this guy was about to rape me. I woke up, but the drug left me paralyzed. He would have if another tech didn’t walk in on him.”
The other four workers gasped.
“Rich?” asked the man with white hair. “He wouldn’t do that.”
“Bullshit,” muttered Tris.
“Uhh,” said the brown-haired man. “Actually…”
Tris whirled around and stared at him. “You walked in on him. You knew what he was going to do to me.”
“Yeah. That’s why I went in there… usually, prepping someone for the chill is a one-person job. I’d… caught him before. Reported it, but they never did anything.”
Tris pointed the Beretta at the unconscious man, hand shaking.
Aura turned away, covering her face.
Kevin shrugged. “I would. Go for it.”
“I have more important things to do. Besides…” She waved at the techs. “I need these people to trust me for a minute.”
“What do you want?” asked the woman.
Tris walked over to the first row of consoles by the wraparound window. “What’s your name?”
“Mara.”
“Hello, Mara. I’m Tris. Doctor Jameson’s daughter.” She waved for Kevin to bring Aura over. “What is your job function?”
Mara eyed the girl.
“Oh, she’s already down here.” Tris smiled. “No more secrets.”
Kevin edged up to the window behind Tris. Aura gasped, half crawling up on the console to get a closer look. Thousands of coffin-sized chambers lined a wall about twenty feet away from the window, stretching down at least five stories into the earth. Tracks carried box-shaped robots with four and five limbs back and forth, tending to the pods. Each contained a single nude body, floating in translucent slime on the clear end of whitish.
All had a single wire connecting from behind one ear to the head-end of the cylindrical chamber covered in flickering lights. Toward the left, age varied quite a bit among middle to late adulthood, though as he swept his gaze to the right, the occupants became younger and younger. At the point he couldn’t make out enough detail to guess age, most appeared to be about eighteen.
Bursts of orange sparks leapt into the gloom every so often in the distance at random places, too far away to discern the cause.
Aura, shaking, pressed her hands to the glass and stared at the seemingly endless room. “W-what is this?”
“This is what the Core City really looks like.” Tris eyed Mara. “How many?”
Rich moaned.
“Excuse me a moment.” Kevin walked over to the guy lying on the ground, the man who’d tried to rape Tris. For a second, he almost felt like pulling the trigger, but he channeled his abrupt boiling of rage into a kick across the man’s face. He turned back to the room, blinking at the realization he’d taken his eyes off three armed men who still stood among the middle consoles. Shit. Maybe they’re too afraid of Tris to try anything. The blur of her arm as she pistol-whipped Rich gave away her boosts. Oh, armor… right. Those pistols won’t go through this. The attack on Nederland replayed in his mind, the pistol he’d taken from the first man Zara sniped hadn’t done a damn thing to the others.
Mara sank into a chair and poked at one of the screens. “I’m not sure I can tell you. The systems have been misbehaving for a little while now. My job is to monitor the people in stasis and make sure their vital signs stay healthy. I mean… they’re frozen, so it’s not like anything can happen unless the system fails.” She blinked when the terminal responded to her command. “Wow… guess we’re back online. The current population figures show 5,653 individuals in deep stasis, and another 2,925 in light stasis.”
“What so some are only half awake?” Kevin blinked.
The three men chuckled.
“Light stasis are those in the virtual reality of the Core City,” said Mara. “Individuals who were either too old to have children, incapable of doing so, who possessed no skills or knowledge of immediate necessity, or those who finish University with no acceptable genetic partner are placed into deep stasis. They are not in VR and are unaware of the passage of any time.”
Aura pushed away from the window and grabbed Tris. “I don’t wanna be frozen.”
Monitors on various consoles cycled among views from small drones, more advanced versions of the one that led them around the basement. Cameras panned by rows and rows of people stuck in cylindrical ice cubes. Almost all of them had white hair and snow-white skin. The occasional outlier with black or brown hair stood out like a fly on a tablecloth.
One screen scrolled past a point where the tanks ceased holding bodies. About six columns of empty capsules contained the goopy translucent gel, after which the clear plastic tanks sat empty. About fifteen pods farther to the right, workers assembled more of the superstructure that held the tanks, installed wiring, built the rails for the attendant robots, and hoisted more tanks into place. At the point the drone reversed course, the hint of excavation crept into the edge of the frame.
“They’re still going,” whispered Kevin. “Building this room bigger and bigger.”
“That’s correct.” Mara folded her hands in her lap. “Until the outside world is ready for human habitation, we have to put people in stasis. We don’t have enough resources to feed and provide for a population much past a thousand people.”
Tris folded her arms. “They would if they opened the gates.”
“The Quarantine Section?” asked Kevin. “So… there’s no ten thousand some odd soldiers?”
“That’s right.” Mara nodded. She looked up at him with a flirtatious smile. “You’re from the outside, aren’t you?”
Tris leaned toward her. “He is. And he’s taken.”
“Okay.” Mara raised her hands in surrender. “I’m dead ended, so…”
“Sorry.” Tris frowned. “It’s nowhere near as bad as they tell us outside. You can have a family. You only need to go outside. If you’re really desperate for some D
, I know this guy… Neeley.”
Kevin snickered.
The men gasped.
“But it’s contaminated,” said the one with black hair.
“Most of the contamination out there came from the Enclave.” Kevin’s knuckles creaked as he squeezed the .45 tighter. “People were rebuilding… some of the settlements got pretty damn large. Tens of thousands. Then the Virus knocked us back to the Stone Age.”
Tris put a hand on Aura’s back. “When you turn eighteen and finish high school, you’ll be required to have a jack installed in your head. Then, you’ll be told you’re going to University… but the medical checkup is a lie. That’s when they put you to sleep and load you into one of those pods… unless you join the military or the ISF… or get approved to have kids of your own. Now I understand why the interface plugs are required by law… so they can force everyone into VR.”
Aura yelled, “No! I don’t want to be a popsicle!”
“That’s why I’m here.” She squeezed the girl’s shoulder before looking at the four techs. “I don’t know if any of you have ever heard the name Doctor Ian Jameson… he was one of the founders of the Enclave. He knew the Council had set us on an unsustainable path. His ghost is in the system now. It’s time to open the gates and rejoin the world.”
The door they’d entered from burst open; six figures in sleek black armor with ISF logos rushed in, rifles raised. Two covered Kevin, three pointed their rifles at Tris, and a short woman left of the lead man trained her weapon on the techs.
“You,” said the man in front, aiming at Tris, “Drop your weapon and get on the ground.”
28
Diplomacy
Fuck.
Kevin flashed a cheesy smile at the men pointing rifles at him. He knew his .45 wouldn’t bother them much unless he caught them in the head, and he had no clue how those Enclave rifles would fare against his stolen armor. They had a better chance of penetrating than his pistol, so he lowered his arm and indicated it with his left hand, shrugged, and chuckled. Oh this? Don’t mind this… it’s just a toy.
The Roadhouse Chronicles Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 122