"Kyle!" Daniel suddenly called out.
"What? Time to go?" he called back and tried to determine if there was a difference in the airflow in the room. It didn't feel like it to him, but he hadn't noticed anything like it before either.
"I found it," Daniel called back.
Kyle smirked. "Way to go," he called, returned to the edge and found Daniel two rows further down already pulling bags of coiled wire off the shelves. He stopped next to the younger man and eyed the selection of tools, fixtures and other knick-knacks he had no names for. "This must be a virtual cornucopia for you," he commented.
Daniel smirked. "All I care about right now is getting this back to Bark. I really hope he can fix that com-station." He paused, a dark look crossing his face. "And I really hope your dad will help us."
It wasn't something he wanted to say out loud, but Kyle hoped so too. In his darker moments - which he didn't have many of - he wondered the exact same thing. The fact that his father had failed to stand up for him was one thing; the fact that he hadn't listened to Kyle when he had proclaimed his innocence ... that was a completely different matter, and it had the undesirable effect of undermining his otherwise positive outlook on life.
Truth be told, he was beginning to feel the stirrings of panic. That thought almost made him chuckle. Panic was probably not the word he was looking for. He was uneasy about the potential for failure. There were so many things that factored into it, so many variables that had to match, that the possibility of this all going down the drain was more than present. "He'll help us," he said in reply. The look the kid gave him made him wonder if he was losing his ability to lie to others and get away with it. Or maybe it was just Daniel being very perceptive? Yeah, that was probably it, he decided.
Daniel grabbed a few of the tools as well and shoved them into his pockets, then handed Kyle two of the packages of wire. "Could you grab these? They're kinda heavy," he said.
Kyle accepted the burden and had to agree. "Who'd think wire could weigh that much?"
"Well, this is the heavy-duty stuff. You would have a hard time setting up a lamp with this. It would probably throw the lamp off the table if you did hook it up," Daniel countered.
That made Kyle laugh. "I can just see it now," he admitted. "Let's get this stuff back to Bark."
Chapter 7
Revelations
The wires fit. That was Kyle's first concern. The moment Bark laid eyes on the wires, he looked relieved and that in turn put Kyle's mind at ease. Daniel also seemed pleased by this and they all crowded into the tight space of the com-station room together. Bark settled down on the floor, grabbed the tool box he had previously retrieved from the hidden cabinet in the wall, and began to measure out wire, cutting it into appropriate pieces.
"Any idea of how long this will take?" Kyle asked while watching the other man work.
Bark glanced up at him and there was something decidedly irritated about his expression. "It will take as long as it takes. It will take even longer if you stand around and ask me every five minutes," he said, his tone a bit on the chilly side.
Kyle raised his hands. "No need to bite my head off, dude. I'm only asking," he said and smiled to take any edge off his words.
"Let's give him some space," Daniel suggested and nodded toward the door. "This place is tight enough as it is."
Reluctantly, Kyle agreed and stepped back outside with the younger man. "He's wound up tight today, huh?" he asked.
"Maybe he's wondering why you're so eager to get the station up and running," Daniel suggested.
"Maybe I should tell him," he countered and Daniel nodded. Kyle considered it for a moment and then shrugged lightly.
"I think everybody should get out of here," Daniel said and sent a quick look out over the tents and lean-tos. "Well ... maybe not everybody," he added and grimaced.
"No, a good portion of these guys are here for a reason," Kyle agreed and settled down on a box. Daniel remained standing and kept looking around. "You know ... there's one thing I've been wondering about," he started and then smirked at his own thoughts. "Actually, that's not true. It sort of just hit me," he added. "When we first met you, Vinnie and I, you took one hell of a chance approaching us like you did. I'm just wondering why."
Daniel grabbed another box, turned it over and sat down on it too. He at no point looked at Kyle, which made Kyle wonder if he was embarrassed about it. "I watched you," he admitted. "Right from the moment you came through the tunnel. You weren't exactly quiet."
"So, you decided we were safe?" Kyle asked, a little surprised that someone in Daniel's position would take a risk like that.
Daniel leaned forward, resting his elbows on his thighs, and folded his hands. For a moment, he just sat there and stared down at the dusty ground under his feet. "Vinnie didn't strike me as being dangerous, even though he looked like he had gone a couple of rounds with a block of cement," he admitted, then glanced sideways at Kyle. "You ... I don't know. You just inspire confidence in some way. I followed you guys, kept watching and listening, and I just kinda had this urge to get to know you." His smile was a little uncertain. "That's stupid, huh?"
This was a bit of a revelation, because even though Kyle had not consciously considered the impact of their meeting until this moment, he knew instantly that he felt the same way, and had ever since they met. There was just something that seemed to connect certain people. He wasn't going to go as far as talk about soul mates, because he didn't believe in such new age nonsense - and wasn't it actually fascinating that something which had been around for almost as long as humanity was still considered new age? - but there was definitely something there. "I wouldn't call it stupid," he said, hedging the subject a bit. Nobody had ever accused him of being sentimental and he wasn't going to start now. "We just clicked. That's just how it goes sometimes. Some people you click with, others you don't."
His reaction seemed to be a bit of a stretch for Daniel, who frowned at his words. Then he grimaced and looked away again, his gaze trailing over the labor camp view in front of them. "If you weren't an optimist, would you still think that your dad would help you get out of here?"
Kyle considered this for a moment and shrugged. "Fact is, I am an optimist and I believe he will want to help; if for nothing other than to make up for past mistakes." He sighed. "Then again, I've wasted much of my life hoping that he would one day drop the charade and tell me that I matter."
For some reason this surprised Daniel. He arched both brows and focused on Kyle. "He's your dad," he said. "Of course you matter to him."
Considering how sad Daniel's connection to his own mother was, Kyle couldn't help chuckling a little helplessly at the plain and utter trust the kid had in a man he'd never met, and would probably fear or hate if he did. "I appreciate the faith you have in the man, Danny, but ... honestly ... if you ever meet him, you'll change your tune. My father ... I don't really think he likes people. He doesn't like animals either. All in all, I don't think he likes anything that breathes."
"I'm sure that's not true. You guys just don't see eye to eye. Maybe this will have opened his eyes to what he's missing," Daniel suggested.
Once again Kyle couldn't help the chuckle. "For someone who's seen as much crap as you have, Danny, you sure are one optimistic dude sometimes," he said. "I'm convinced you'll get a chance to change your mind about my dad. Whether that's good or bad I don't know. But you'll see. He's not one to mess with. Never was, never will be."
"Yeah, we'll see, won't we?" Daniel countered.
"Is that a bet?" Kyle asked with a grin.
Daniel chewed on his lower lip and gave a half-shrug in reply. "Could be," he said and shifted a little.
"You're on," Kyle agreed. "I've already won this, you know, but you're definitely on. I'm not being called an optimist for nothing, after all."
***
The air inside the com-station room was pretty stuffy, but Bark didn't complain, only worked on fu
sing the wires together. Kyle hunkered down next to him and was watching silently, mulling over what term was the right one to use when it came to connecting wires. Fusing? Splicing? Welding? He was pretty sure it wasn't the last, but the other two? Since Bark had indicated that too much talking distracted him, Kyle had refrained from saying much. But he liked to keep an eye on things.
After a bit, Bark glanced at him while stripping the insulation off one wire. "Why are you so intent on getting this station up and running?" he asked.
Daniel's assumption was obviously correct. Bark was curious. For a moment, Kyle considered various replies that would be half-truths at best. "I want to get in touch with Earth," he finally said, not yet willing to spill the beans.
"You've said as much," Bark agreed and used another tool to ... fuse? Was that the right term? ... the two wire ends together. "What do you hope to accomplish by that? Do you really think anyone in the Penal Administration cares about us up here?"
Kyle smirked. "I don't care about the Penal Administration," he admitted and figured since he had employed Bark for this job, he could also let him in on what it was about. It might speed up the process. "I want to get in touch with my father."
Bark started, muttered something under his breath, then realigned the next two pieces of wire and ... was it spliced? ... them together as well, before giving Kyle a quick look. "Your father? I thought he was responsible for landing you here," he said.
"Nah, I did that all on my own," Kyle admitted. "He just didn't do anything to stop me from shooting myself in the foot - figuratively speaking of course." He shrugged. "Come to think of it, I don't really blame him that much. I guess if I was in his shoes, I would probably have done the same. I wasn't exactly an exemplary son."
Something about this didn't sit well with Bark. He shifted a little and muttered under his breath, then glanced at Kyle. "That's no reason to condemn you," he muttered more audibly, while connecting more wires.
The station's insides looked like a mess to Kyle, but the other man obviously knew what he was doing; or so Kyle hoped. "Maybe not, but here's his chance to make up for it. If I can get in touch with someone Earth-side, I can hopefully convince them to get my old man on the line. And if I can do that ..." He trailed off, not sure how much he should divulge. Then again, if Daniel was on the list of people to get out of here, then one more passenger wouldn't hurt.
"Then what?" Bark asked, briefly using his teeth on the bit of wire he was fiddling with. He then touched it to one of the wires in the station, which earned him a spark.
'Hope springs eternal,' Kyle thought and smirked. At least there seemed to be power in the wires. "Then he might be able to stage a rescue," he said.
Bark almost dropped the wire and then turned his head to eye Kyle closely. "Nobody gets out of LPC." He sounded equal parts surprised and suspicious.
"Why so surprised? Didn't you say earlier that you wanted a seat on whatever rescue vehicle I was going to call in exchange for helping me here?" Kyle asked.
The other man grimaced. "Sure. I also thought I was joking at the time," he said and eyed Kyle a little doubtfully. "But ... come on, man ... you must know that nobody gets out of LPC alive, right?"
"So I've heard. But I also think that's bullshit. I don’t think this was always a prison colony. It must have been something else before that, some kind of research station or something. Besides ... no prison has ever been one hundred percent escape-proof," Kyle countered evenly, ignoring the other man's obvious surprise.
The scrutinizing stare this earned him was close to being uncomfortable, until Bark looked away again. For a long moment he stared at the mess inside the com-station, probably trying to process what Kyle had just said. Then he glanced sideways at Kyle again, an indecisive expression etched into his face. "Well, I've heard different about this place. I've heard that they altered the airlocks so you can't attach anything to them. And nobody, apart from us lifers, ever goes inside the domes."
Kyle pursed his lips. "That's not entirely true, now is it?" he asked.
Bark eyed him, a cautious hope rising in him. "What do you mean? Have you seen anyone coming or going?"
"Not per se, but the 'mall' gets restocked, doesn't it?" Kyle asked.
"The ... 'mall'?" The look on Bark's face would have been comical if the topic hadn't been so serious. "You mean the storage room?" he asked after having thought it over for a moment.
"Uh ... yeah, I guess that's what it is. I'm just calling it the 'mall'. Didn't know what else to call it at the time." Obviously it would be called the storage room. He shook his head at the idiocy of not having realized that sooner.
"Yeah, well, most everybody I've talked to calls it the storage room and that's kinda what it is, isn't it?" Bark countered. He fiddled with a length of wire for a moment before looking up to eye Kyle thoughtfully. "You actually think, if you can get in touch with your dad, that he'll be able to get you out of here?"
What else could he say to that but yes? It was simply in his nature to hope for the best; and most times to such a degree that it became blind faith that a sewing-thread thin line would carry his weight - figuratively speaking, of course. "I think he might," he agreed. "And ... since you're helping me do that ... you're welcome to tag along if you want to get out of here?"
For a moment all Bark did was to stare at him. Then he started laughing. It was so chock-full of surprise and disbelief that it sounded fake, but he did laugh. "You're insane," he proclaimed, shook his head and returned to the task at hand, still chuckling lightly.
"You don't think it'll happen?" Kyle asked, actually intrigued by Bark's reaction. It almost seemed as if he knew something about Kyle's father that Kyle didn't.
The laughter died, and when Bark looked at him again, his expression was dead serious. "That you might have a chance of getting out of here? Sure. I believe that. I know who your dad is. If anyone on Earth can pull that off, it would be him, wouldn't it?" he said. "I just don't believe that he'll help get me out of here too."
The possibility that Bark might know something about Jonathan Whitmore, III, seemed very plausible now. "Why wouldn't he?" Kyle asked, hoping the other man wouldn't clam up on him. Bark had previously insisted on being mysterious about his background.
And for a few heartbeats it seemed like that was still the case. Bark stilled and just sat there, staring down at the wire in his hands. Then he glanced at Kyle, the look in his eyes bland. "You wanna know why I'm here?"
Kyle had expected a lot of different responses, a lot of which wouldn't have surprised him in the least, but he hadn't expected a confession and it did catch him a little off guard. "Uh ... sure," he agreed.
Bark grimaced, a fairly joyless smile on his lips. "I'm not a com-tech," he said and sighed. "I am a tech-head, but first and foremost ... I'm a hacker. Among the best Pangaea has to offer, actually. I just got unlucky. I got caught."
That was a bit of a claim, and Kyle couldn't help a dubious smirk. At the same time he couldn't really connect this claim with why his father might not want to help Bark get out of here. "What'd you hack? The Governing Council?" he asked, unable to keep the light sarcasm out of his voice.
Bark grimaced again, that joyless smile still staining his lips. "No, I hacked Whitmore Enterprises," he said quietly and continued splicing wires without looking up.
Splicing. That was probably the right word for what Bark was doing, Kyle figured while his subconscious tried to come to terms with what Bark had just said. And for the first time in a good long while, Kyle was out of things to say. Bark was here because of his father, then. That meant they had something in common. They were both on his father's bad side. He rocked back on his heels for a second and then rose. There was one thing he needed to know before he could decide on how to respond to that claim. "Successfully?"
The other man paused his tinkering. Since his back was now to Kyle, he couldn't really tell what Bark might be thinking, but he didn't really need to. B
ark nodded curtly. Obviously, he wasn't the bragging kind; either that or he wasn't sure he could trust Kyle.
"You know, the fact that I'm going to employ my father's assistance in this escape plan is simply because I know he has the resources and the people to pull it off. I have yet to find out if he's even interested in helping," he said, not really sure why he said it, other than to gain Bark's trust.
Bark returned to connecting wires like a mad man, and for a while he remained silent and concentrated on what he was doing. Finally, though, he sighed and dropped the wire he had just picked up. "I found out things about your father's company that many would have paid through the nose to get a hold of. The thing your father's lawyers and bloodhounds failed to see was that I made no move to go after the money. I've never hacked companies to get rich. I've always done it to prove a point. And, in part I guess, to maybe convince them that I would be the ideal security expert. I never saw your father in all of this. They caught me, they threw the book at me and that was it."
"Yeah, well, that's my father in a nutshell. He probably knows all about it, but he wouldn't show his face because he didn't want to give you the satisfaction of knowing how deeply you upset him by breaching his precious security," Kyle said and hunkered down again, resting his folded arms on top of his knees.
Bark eyed him for a moment, then shrugged and returned to splicing wires. "Doesn't matter now, does it? Even if he wanted to help, there's no way out of here." He paused again, a crooked little smile gracing his lips. "And, by the way, my name's Eddie."
Kyle's eyes widened in surprise, when all the pieces suddenly clicked into place. "Eddie?" he asked, "as in Eddie Valentine?"
Bark aka Eddie smirked again, but didn't look up. "The same," he agreed.
"Holy fuck," Kyle muttered. "And here I thought you were some small-time crook." He had heard about the case against Eddie Valentine alright, but not in connection with Whitmore Enterprises. The lawyers on the case had drummed up a truckload of allegations and many powerful business moguls had pointed fingers at Eddie, which was why he was now in LPC. At the time, Kyle hadn't paid that much attention to the case or he might have realized that the lawyer in charge of that charade was his father's favorite. But, then again, he had never paid much attention to anything concerning what Jonathan Whitmore, III, considered an honest day's work.
Dark Side of the Moon Page 26