Ravagers [03.00] Deviate

by Alex Albrinck

  Silver laughed, an amused look upon his face. “Liars lie. Liars will claim to know those they’ve never met, and deny those they’ve known for a lifetime. My comments were designed to learn his true identity and understand his purpose in being here. The intruder didn’t reveal his identity, but we all learned his purpose. He came to sow discord among us.” He looked around. “We must not let him succeed. We won’t let him succeed.”

  There were murmurs, questions, but Silver shook his head. “Nothing that you’ve seen or heard here should have any impact on your lives. It’s best you forget it happened. Move on.”

  It took several minutes, but the crowds finally dispersed. Sheila dodged people as they walked away, waiting until only Silver and a few of his guards remained. She slid closer, staring at Micah. He looked the picture of death, and though he’d made the point that he couldn’t die, having never been alive, she couldn’t help but feel that this was a permanent thing.

  In the midst of a massive structure floating in space, with a holding capacity she estimated at ten thousand people or more, she felt utterly alone.

  Silver glared at Micah—no, at the man Micah impersonated—with a hatred deeper than Sheila believed possible. He jabbed his silver finger in the direction of the body. “Take him back to my quarters. Ensure that you aren’t seen, and don’t allow anyone in my room. Am I clear?”

  The men nodded.

  Silver turned and took one step away from Micah—and then whirled around, seized his gun from his holster, and fired two more rounds into the lifeless body. Holes opened in the body as a clanging sound reverberated throughout the corridor. Silver’s eyes widened, then narrowed, as if noting that something was amiss with the body of the man he’d just killed.

  The guards moved to Micah.

  The body dissolved into dust, vanishing as though it had never existed.

  Silver stared at the spot, then stormed off, screaming and waving his arms. Sheila didn’t recognize the words, suspecting they belonged to a long dead language from the man’s earliest days, undoubtedly expressing frustration that he’d been unable to learn more about who—or what—he’d just shot to death. Sheila shook her head. How quickly her mind adapted to new realities. She had no trouble now accepting the idea that Oswald Silver could look so young while still being a dozen centuries old or more, or that Silver had argued with a sentient robot of a similar age perfectly impersonating a man long vanished from the world.

  Silver’s entourage followed him. Sheila moved in the opposite direction, dodging people as she moved, looking for anything that might suggest a heavily guarded server. But she found nothing.

  After fifteen minutes, she accepted that she had no idea what clues might reveal the server’s location. Given the size of this floating city, they could do nothing more complicated than store it in a little-used corner. Without guards calling attention to the machine’s importance, she might never find her target.

  She needed time to think, and a safe place where she wouldn’t devote mental energy to avoiding the endless volume of people walking around. Without those disturbances, she might be able to reason out where they’d hidden the server. It was the type of work she’d done for Micah back in the Bunker. He’d bring her an issue of critical importance in which data was limited but still sufficient to reason out an answer, and she’d perform the necessary mental acrobatics to find that answer.

  She’d not been dodging people while wearing an invisibility suit made of tiny robots which could destroy a society if given “bad mood” coding during her old job, though.

  She walked along until opportunity presented itself, a suddenly cleared corridor. Stunned, Sheila looked behind herself and found no human presence there either. She scanned the nearest doors on both sides. Most were closed with light slipping out underneath, indicating current occupancy. One door was closed, without light slipping out from within, and that would have to do. She didn’t look at the name plate because it didn’t matter; it was the only unoccupied room in the area. She moved toward the door while shooting several nanos ahead into the room. It was dark inside, cluttered, and without human occupants. Perfect. She did a final check for any potential eyes before slipping inside the room.

  She leaned against the closed door, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. Safety. For now. Images of the bullet tearing a hole through Micah’s metallic brain entered her mind, reminding her that safety was temporary. She scanned the room, confirming its vacancy, and then removed her invisibility shield and nanos. With her fingertips exposed, she fumbled along the wall until she located a light switch and flipped it on.

  The room looked to be an abandoned personal office. She saw papers strewn about in haphazard piles upon a large, flat work surface. Additional papers hung upon the walls. The only furniture—a simple sofa pressed against the far wall—seemed almost out of place in a space where the previous occupant or occupants seemed hell-bent on never sitting down.

  Curious, she stepped toward the worktable. She saw sketches with notes scribbled atop them. The sketches were varied views of this city in space, a tube formed into a circle around a central axle, with a half dozen spokes connecting the central hub and the outer wheel. She saw detailed maps showing the layout of rooms in arc sections of the wheel. Names adorned the various rooms on the map—Delaney, Sebastian, Wiley, Desdemona—but none of them sounded familiar. She frowned. No, wait; Sebastian was the name Micah used in reference to the man she knew as Oswald Silver. If “Sebastian” was indeed Oswald Silver, and the altercation with Micah occurred nearby, she ought to see her own space on here. She dug through papers, looking for maps, until she saw names she recognized, names on doors she’d avoided before diving in this room. Her eyes centered on the room she’d entered, the only one where she’d not looked at the name on the outside.

  Ashley Farmer.

  She sucked in her breath. Ashley, as best she knew, died long before this structure became reality. Her name shouldn’t appear anywhere in this station. Someone had clearly used this room for their own purposes and research, and had affixed the name outside as a means of claiming for their own use.

  She knew that must have been Micah.

  He’d all but told her he’d been here before, and while he’d said he hadn’t found the critical Ravager server, this room proved he’d spent his time here collecting information about the detailed layout of the station. It made sense; he’d needed at least one visit here to set up the portal door on this side, something he’d do only after identifying a low traffic area where portal travelers could move between sites with minimal notice. He’d split this room and the portal room up, ensuring that finding one didn’t mean finding the other. Ashley’s name was undoubtedly on the door outside; that name would keep others out, allow them to assume the room belonged to one of the thousands of residents of this space station they’d never met. Only the oldest humans aboard had any chance of recognizing the name or the significance.

  Micah had hidden his private research room in plain sight. Brilliant.

  She frowned. He’d kept that room hidden from her, though. Why hadn’t he mentioned it? Was he concerned she’d expose its existence if captured immediately upon her arrival? Wasn’t it a greater risk that she’d never find it, never have access to the information he’d compiled during his visits here?

  Perhaps he’d not left the information here for her at all. Perhaps he used this room as a permanent record of information learned on each visit, retained in the event he didn’t survive, leaving it there for future incarnations to discover anew. But that didn’t explain why he didn’t tell her about it before he’d flown away.

  She’d add it to the list of questions she’d ask him upon her return.

  She moved around the room, studying all of the papers and notes, trying to find any detail he’d recorded that might give her a clue as to where they’d store the server. She recalled her mental note that the server could be heavily guarded, but such action would call attention to that local
e. They might instead choose to hide the server, not under heavy guard, but in a thoroughly isolated location inside the space station.

  Her eyes fell upon a diagram of the entire structure, printed upon paper that took up an entire wall. She marveled at the size of this locale. Micah had helpfully marked the locations of both this room and the supply room housing the portal door, each room a tiny dot on a scaled drawing of a structure miles in diameter. It gave her additional confidence in her theory that there would be no fortress teeming with guards around a single computer server in space so large. They’d hide it in plain sight. There was no reason to do otherwise.

  They’d do the same thing Micah had done with this room.

  The challenge would come in identifying that uninhabited spot on a tube, one which the massive blueprint suggested contained at least three sections, each a huge corridor twisting around an interior tube holding all electrical, air, and plumbing pipes and wiring.

  She frowned. That central tube moved around the entire ring. If she’d read the diagram correctly, all electrical power, waste processing, water and air purification, and gravity generation occurred within the axle. Cleansed air and water and electrical power traveled out to the interior tube and from there to the living spaces. Waste and dirtied air moved back in the same fashion for cleansing and redistribution.

  Everything important happened in that core.

  It acted as the control center for the entire station.

  She felt a chill run down her spine.

  In any cityplex, they’d put significant security around water purification and power generation facilities. It would take little more than a single disgruntled individual to turn a cityplex into an uncivilized wasteland with the proper explosives and mental derangement; security forces and strictly enforced access kept the numbers allowed near critical systems to an absolute minimum.

  No reason to think it would be any different here.

  She felt it deep inside, confident beyond measure that she’d identified the section of the ship housing the Ravager control server. They’d hidden the machine in plain sight, hidden it in the most naturally isolated, heavily guarded section of the space station, where limited access minimized the chances for sabotage. Or discovery.

  She checked the map once more. She’d either need to burrow her way into the interior tube and swim to the central core—not happening—or get into one of the spokes connecting the exterior wheel to the interior axle. The nearest was perhaps a two hundred yard walk to the right as she exited this room.

  She moved to the door and rebuilt the exterior nanoskeleton and ensured it was invisible. She then turned off the lights and slid a few nanos under the door, waited until she’d confirmed an empty corridor, and then slipped silently through.

  She made it about halfway to the spoke entrance before encountering traffic. She hadn’t known for certain how many people lived in this place, but it seemed every one of them walked by her over the next few minutes. Try as she might, she couldn’t avoid everyone, and several people glanced through her at the closest individual to understand why the minor collision occurred.

  She tried moving to the side, but that triggered even more contact. She had to get out of the way.

  Something Micah told her clicked. The nanos weren’t static objects; they could form any shape, take on any color… and they could move. She hadn’t thought about the last point, yet the invisible bots stayed with her even when not surrounding her body as a protective shell. Did they trail along behind her, or did the surround her in all directions?

  Could the nanos… fly?

  There was only one way to find out. She told the nanos surrounding her to move straight up.

  Many of those milling about in the corridor looked up, trying to locate the loud thumping sound they’d heard above. They saw nothing and heard nothing else. One man held his hand to his mouth, unable to understand how his lower lip had suddenly split open.

  The crowds continued along a moment later, no longer concerned about an odd sound or inexplicable bloodied mouth. Sheila hovered just below the ceiling, trying to master three dimensional movement while remaining inconspicuous. She hoped the man with the bloodied lip recovered soon; she’d lifted from the ground so quickly that she’d not had the chance to pull her foot aside before contact occurred, nor had she avoided bouncing off the ceiling before stabilizing her vertical position.

  She finally managed some stability, then ordered the nanos forward at a modest clip.

  She was invisible and flying above a crowd walking in a massive city floating in space that she’d reached by walking through a door. She couldn’t even shake her head at this point; she’d become numb to the paradigm-shattering changes she continued to experience.

  As she neared the entrance to the access spoke, she glided down to the ground and walked. Flying was fun, but she preferred to keep to solid terrain.

  As she’d expected, guards stood outside the entry to the access spoke. The door didn’t look to be locked via physical or electrical means. Signs identified the functions maintained in the core, noting that only authorized personnel would be permitted inside. Two guards, sporting a pair of automatic rifles slung over shoulders, stood facing each other, perpendicular to the door. The setup enabled simultaneous monitoring of foot traffic approaching in both directions.

  Neither guard noticed Sheila.

  Sheila slid a small number of nanos under the access tunnel doorway. The images revealed a long, straight, hallway with thick carpet. She wasn’t sure why they’d opted for that particular flooring choice, but it made one fact clear. She’d need to float the entire distance, lest she leave traceable footprints in the plush fibers.

  That, of course, assumed she’d get inside. Surely one of the guards would notice if the doors opened, despite the speed she’d developed in that skill since her arrival. She recalled the nanos after confirming no activity inside the tunnel—no curves or horizons to worry about in there—and considered how she might mount a distraction.

  She lifted a few inches off the ground and glided past the guards to the door. She chewed her lip, thinking. When the idea struck, she nearly snapped her fingers but stopped herself. Disaster averted.

  The nanos crawled along the floor, imperceptible in their current form, until they’d just passed both guards. They then shot straight up to eye level as a pair of solid, if invisible, balls of matter. The speed of movement proved sufficient to generate a small gust of wind… and garner both guards’ attention.

  Sheila’s hand crept to the door handle.

  The nanos illuminated, a pair of bright lights hovering by the guards. At Sheila’s direction, the lights changed colors like a kaleidoscope, hypnotic in their own fashion. With each guard’s eyes fixed on a separate light, Sheila moved each kaleidoscope further and further past their visible range… until both turned their heads to follow the show.

  Sheila was inside the door in less than a second.

  She turned on the visual images from the dancing lights. The guards still hadn’t moved their feet, but their heads and eyes remained on the separate flying spheres. Nothing in their facial expressions suggested they’d noticed her access the tunnel entrance. Sheila smiled. The lights went dim, then vanished, the last images in her mind from them the looks of disappointment from the guards. She suspected they didn’t have much to do; any entertainment was a welcomed relief from staring at empty hallways and space station residents uninterested in seeing their waste cleaned and turned into drinking water. She shut off the images from the nanos and replaced them in the small empty spot under her left boot.

  She found the journey through the “spoke” from wheel to axle to be perhaps the most uninteresting thing she’d done in the past few days. After so much adrenaline-fueled chaos, the quiet was welcomed, her life and perspective an inverse of the guards she’d just entertained. Right now, she’d like little more than a quiet, secluded room with a comfortable bed and complete darkness. Her mind and body still cra
ved the recovery derived from sleep. She couldn’t give that to them. Not yet.

  She floated into the massive central core of the station. Staircases led both up and down; signs made clear a series of distinct levels focused on the varying critical support functions required to keep the station operational. Those signs indicated that air processing and water purification occurred on the levels above; gravity generation, naturally, took place down one level.

  This level featured a series of massive generators humming along. Sheila was no expert on the machinery, but the sheer size suggested they’d never lack for electrical energy here. She wondered as to the generators’ fuel source, but saw no outward indications or signage identifying storage areas. Curious, but a mystery she’d leave for another day.

  Given that electricity would no doubt drive the other critical functions—machines cleaning air and water, pumps pushing both back out—this level followed her logic and represented the most likely storage locale for the server.

  The haystack still existed. But in a haystack this size, she had a chance to locate that missing needle.

  After floating around the chamber, she felt doubtful. Perhaps she’d assessed everything improperly. There was no server room. There weren’t any rooms. She saw nothing resembling a cabinet or rack, no possible place they might store the machine, no special features in this room outside an unbearable heat near the generators.

  Think, Sheila.

  The server might not be in the core. She shook her head, frowning. No, it made too much sense to put it here. Even if the rest of the station lost power, she was standing in the middle of a few dozen massive generators. They’d have power here at all times. The other levels didn’t make sense. She didn’t know how gravity generation worked, but if there were any gravity mishaps, the critical server might be pulled to the ground, smashed, or launch toward and into the ceiling. Too much risk. Air purification? Why put dirty air around a machine which might cease working if buffeted with too much dust? And water? Water destroyed servers.