The Elgin Deceptions (Sunken City Capers Book 2)

by Jeffrey A. Ballard

  I can hear the squiddie on the other side of the door. They’re like an octopus on growth hormones. The big, gangly, mechanical creature is swishing water around as it snakes its appendages loaded with sensors in various directions, looking for me.

  The white light from the squiddie pours through the square, transom window at the top of the door, changes angle as it descends.

  Oh, God. I hope the door will add some measure of protection from the infrared.

  The door handle jiggles!

  The door starts to slowly slide open and quickly shunts up against the bookcase. White light bleeds through the crack, pointed away from where I’m hidden behind the door.

  The light shifts around, searching.

  Something—an appendage—scrapes against the door. It’s trying to get in!

  A desperate plan starts to form. The runner is packed away in my backpack. But I could run farther into the building, gaining time to get the runner out and then set it off. Use the squiddie’s size in the tight confines of the building against it.

  But it’d be a disaster. The squiddie would call others. It’d destroy the building in its enthusiasm to capture and drag me to the surface. More than once, what the squiddie has dragged to the surface was freshly drowned as the mechanical creature proudly dumped off its cargo, unaware in the slightest it had killed its prize.

  The questing appendage scraping against the door thuds to a stop. The crack between the door and its frame isn’t big enough for the appendage to squeeze through.

  I would exhale in relief if I could breathe.

  Will it force its way through or not?

  Squiddies are programmed not to disturb anything unless there’s a high enough probability of a capture.

  The seconds ache by. The white light continues to shine through the crack, dart up and down. It feels as if it’s yearning to turn the corner and stare at me in the face.

  The light strains for a second more before abruptly clicking off. The squiddie moves upward with heavy whoosh of water.

  Puo whispers over the comm, “It’s looking over the rest of the building. Sit tight.”

  I don’t answer.

  If the squiddie detected me, it would’ve already been through the door in seconds. Thank goodness for the anti-gravity suit’s infrared protection.

  I have a complicated relationship with the suits. I love them, I do, it’s just— They are what caused us to flee from the U.S. east coast to the west coast, and strew bodies behind us on both coasts. As well as that whole broken heart thing.

  I sit there for several more minutes, breathing shallowly once more. Sweat drips off of me in the suit. It’s hot and moist in my helmet. The internal heater doesn’t account for the internal stress of coming within five feet of being dragged to the surface and arrested.

  Finally, Puo comes on the line, “It’s moving off.”

  “Told you it’d be fine.”

  “You know it at least left a mini-squatter behind,” Puo says.

  “I know.” It’s what the squiddies are programmed to do if they assess it’s a low probability that something might be in the water.

  * * *

  The Pianola Museum is a three-story Dutch building dedicated to the player piano—an early twentieth-century invention. A piano that played itself was all the rage back then, a precursor to record players. All you needed was a player piano and a piano roll, and this place is so helpfully full of both.

  But I ain’t moving no piano; the piano rolls on the other hand are nice and portable. And the early ones that are made in sheet metal are quite collectible—quite collectible. Most of the later piano rolls were encoded in paper, which obviously didn’t survive the ocean rearranging itself, but the sheet-metal rolls (with a little restoration) do just fine.

  I stand up slowly and try turning on the nightvision again, which is a total bust. It’s too dark in here to be any good. I switch off the nightvision and kick on one of two helmet flashlights and reduce it to twenty percent power.

  The controls in the helmet are all retina-tracking based, so it sometimes feels like I’m having a seizure, flicking my eyes all over the place to move through menus and trying to mimic strobing with all the blinking. But now that that’s settled I take stock of my surroundings.

  The inside of the museum may have been grand in its heyday, but now it’s a debris-littered wreck with a thick layer of mustard-colored silt. A staircase doubles back on itself in the two-story hallway leading up. Rooms open up from the hallway on each side.

  I step deeper into the museum and glance in the side rooms. Player pianos sit there silently, waiting to be played. It’s an eerie feeling to imagine them playing by themselves, or this place once filled with music back when they held concerts here.

  I can nearly imagine the people in old-time clothes with thick mustaches, drinking beers and leering at serving woman, hoping to catch a glimpse of their ankles. Now the pianos sit silently, brooding near one another as flecks of silt float by, disturbed by my passing.

  The piano rolls, according to our research, are all held on the second floor. I step up the stairs carefully, testing my weight on each step before committing my full weight—I’m pretty sure the racket from a stairway collapsing would recall that suspicious squiddie, or alert the mini-squatter it probably left behind outside the door.

  The stairs blessedly don’t creak or crack as I slowly walk up.

  “Approaching the second floor,” I tell Puo.

  “Roger, that,” Puo says. “You got the leech bag for them?”

  “Yes.” Although if I didn’t, there’d be absolutely nothing to do about it now.

  The leech bag is how we’re getting the piano rolls out of this place. It’s programmed to sit on the ocean floor for several hours until the merchant, Golden Delight, drives overhead; where then, the bag will float to the surface and attach itself to the hull for us to easily pick up later.

  If you’re going to get caught trespassing in a protected sunken city zone, it goes a lot better for you if you don’t actually have any stolen items on you.

  The museum stairs dump me off on the second floor landing. The room we want is toward the front of the building and has a double-wide door-frame with no door.

  “Bingo,” I say. Straight ahead is the piano roll room with floor-to-ceiling little cubbies that once held the forearm-length piano rolls.

  “You see the sheet-metal rolls?” Puo asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. They’re the only ones that are still in the cubbies. All the rest have since disintegrated and all that’s left is the wooden spool they were wound around.

  I walk into the room that’s the length of the front of the building and about half as wide. The windows on the outside of the building are covered by the cubbies—probably to protect the once fragile paper from the sun. There are maybe fifteen to twenty of the sheet-metal rolls in a room designed to hold at least several hundred.

  But the buyer we’re working with isn’t interested in fifteen to twenty random sheet-metal piano rolls. He wants four, very specific, Igor Stravinsky piano rolls. And for the amount he’s paying us, he’s going to get those four, very specific, Igor Stravinsky piano rolls.

  Except I don’t read Dutch, which is what all the plastic-engraved name plates are in.

  I switch on the text translator overlay in my helmet. I walk up to the nearest nameplate with an intact piano roll in it and read the text it projects over the nameplate:

  >> Detecting language …

  I try not to move my helmet as the program works.

  >> Does not recognize language.

  Great. I try wiping off the nameplate.

  >> Does not recognize language.

  Damn it! I flip through the settings on the stupid program to tell it what language it is. Where is the stupid default setting?

  “Your program sucks, Puo,” I vent at him.

  “That’d be because it’s not my program,” Puo answers matter-of-factly.

  “S
till your fault.”

  “Naturally. Have you tried telling it, it’s in Dutch?”

  I bite back my first response. “Yeah, I just found it.” I select the Dutch option—

  “Shit!” I snap. “Now it’s all in Dutch.” Including the freaking menu!

  Puo tries to bite back his laughter, but is doing a poor job of it. “Can you now read the name plates?”

  I try.

  >> Kan niet lezen tekst.

  “No! It’s all in Dutch!”

  Puo chortles more.

  “What the hell are you laughing about?”

  “Just look for ‘Stravinsky.’ It may be in another language, but they’re not going to rewrite a proper noun.”

  “We do it all the time,” I snap back. “Stravinsky itself is the English spelling of a Russian name. If they’re going to honor the name, it’s going to be in Russian. Do you know what it is in Russian?”

  “Yeah,” Puo says, “Stravinsky.”

  Freaking Puo.

  I turn up one of the flashlights to seventy-five percent.

  >> Bach: Goldberg Variaties. Opgenomen 1905 door een onbekende pianist.

  “Fuck!”

  Puo just snickers at my troubles. “Just slow down. Remember what you did to select Dutch and repeat—”

  “Duh. Now shut up and let me think.”

  “Shutting up, boss.”

  I exhale deliberately and try to let my frustration dissipate. I think back through how I brought up that menu with the retina-tracking, focusing on what menus I selected and how many items in the menu from the top and whatnot.

  I go slowly, taking my time.

  “Well?” Puo asks.

  “Alll-most there,” I answer back absent-mindedly.

  There. Finally, a list of different languages in their native languages pop up. I select English and swing back to translate the nameplate.

  >> Bach: Goldberg Variations. Recorded 1905 by an unknown pianist.

  Right. Not quite what I’m looking for. Fortunately, there’s not many metal-sheet piano rolls in here, and it doesn’t take too long to find the Stravinskys.

  “Puo,” I say, “There’s five. Not four.”

  “Is there room in the leech bag?”

  “Yeah,” I say. I’ve already gotten the black leech bag out of my backpack and started to carefully pack the piano rolls into it.

  “Then grab it,” Puo says.

  “Somehow,” I say, “duh, just isn’t the right response here. Suggestions?” I zip up the inner bag of the leech bag and tie the outer one tight. The battery levels on the control panel are reading full.

  “Mmm,” Puo says. “How about, ‘Puo is a genius,’ or ‘Golly, Puo was right. Puo’s always right. I should—’ ”

  “Golly?” I snort. “Gee whiz, wise guy. You giving me the business?”

  “What?” Puo asks.

  “Never mind, June.” But I know what I’m making Puo watch when we get back home to the Seattle Isles after this job is over.

  I continue, “The presents are wrapped. I’m headed out to drop them in the mail. Where’s the squiddie?”

  “Back at its original post,” Puo says. “You’re not going out the front door are you?”

  “Of course not.” That’s where the squiddie likely left a surprise for me. “What do you take me for?”

  Puo says seriously, “A reckless thrill seeker whose admittedly well-developed skills will one day not be able to bail her butt out.”

  “Way to suck the fun out of the moment.” I head back down the stairs, once again careful to go slow and test the steps.

  “Just sayin’.”

  “Well … that’s why I have you.” I make a kissing sound at him.

  Puo mmmm’s, but otherwise stays silent.

  Puo is asexual, and when he is interested, it’s in men. So even though we’ve been together for nearly two decades, there’s never been anything sexual between us. We’re just closer than brother and sister, thicker than thieves (which we technically are), two peas in a pod.

  “I’m approaching the back of the hallway,” I say to Puo. “Where’s the exit?” The hallway on the ground level is dead-ending at a small servant’s-type door. There’s a sign on the door that the bright flashlight shines on and the language program translates for me.

  >> Museum staff only.

  “Through the door,” Puo says, “is another stairwell. Push past that to find a gathering room or kitchen of some kind. There’s a door on the back to the right. That leads out the back to the loading area.”

  “Roger, that.” I push Museum-staff-only door open, and step past the stairwell. “You were wrong, Puo. It’s a break room.” It’s a small room with half a kitchen along one wall, lockers up against another wall and a round table for sitting at.

  “That’s a gathering room,” Puo defends himself. “Don’t you remember, ‘Puo is always right’?”

  “Just make sure you’re in place for my pickup in eleven minutes.”

  “I’ll be there,” Puo says, “I’m nearing my turn-around point.”

  The door to the back is yellowish-green with a metal doorknob. “Stepping outside.”

  “Roger, that,” Puo says. “Will you at least ready the runner?”

  “No,” I say. I don’t want to tie one of my hands up. “The squiddie doesn’t know I’m here. There’s no point.”

  I turn the metal doorknob. The door swings outward with a whoosh of silt. My bright flashlight lances out into the back courtyard and falls on a knee-high miniature black metal trashcan looking device—a mini-squatter.

  “Oh, shit—!”

  The top of the squatter shoots up. Bright lights flash out at me, temporarily blinding me.

  NEE-eu! NEE-eu! NEE-eu!

  CHAPTER THREE

  OH, HELL NO.

  I move as fast as I can toward the mini-squatter. As good as the anti-gravity suits are, you can’t really run underwater—only a kind of desperate shuffle-step in close quarters.

  NEE-eu! NEE-eu! NEE-eu!

  I can feel the sound waves pass over me. Its white bright light tries to blind me, but my meta-materials helmet is auto-adjusting the visor’s tint to keep the worst of it out.

  As for the annoying device trying to get a picture of me, go right ahead. All they’ll get is someone in a black suit wearing an opaque helmet that in a digital photo will show a middle finger on my helmet flicking them off.

  I get to the mini-squatter and drop to my knees. They have no defenses. Their purpose is to be loud and scare any quarry into not moving while the squiddies descend.

  Fuck that.

  I rip the access panel open at the base of the mini-squatter. I may not have Puo’s technical abilities, but I do know how to destroy things: rip, smash, pull, etc.

  The mini-squatter abruptly shuts off its annoying siren. The courtyard blinks back into darkness except for my helmet flashlight.

  Damn it, the flashlights. That’s probably what the mini-squatter detected. I quickly flick it off with the retina-tracking.

  There isn’t time to dwell on it. I kick on the nightvision, and weak, blue pixelated surfaces emerge.

  “Whoa,” Puo says, “you’ve got a lot of company headed your way. And they’re dispatching a cruiser. Squatter?”

  Shit. “Yeah,” I say, desperately looking for a place to hide. The runner is only of any use if they can’t initially find you. “The squiddie must have dropped it.” Crafty mechanical bastard.

  It’s a mark of seriousness when Puo doesn’t reply with a smartass comment.

  The back courtyard is closed in by buildings. The only ways out are either up and over, or through one of those buildings. The Pianola Museum is out. The mini-squatter got a picture of me leaving it, and the squiddies will definitely blunder through it. That leaves nine other mystery doors in the courtyard without time to make a decision.

  “Puo—” I’m already moving. “—I’m headed toward the westernmost courtyard door.”

  “Roger. Bri
nging up building plans now. I’ve already turned around and am headed back near your area.”

  Good. Puo is driving overhead in the skylanes. He needs to be somewhat close for an extraction.

  “They’re going to be there any second,” Puo says. “Hurry.”

  Like I need to be told twice. My chosen mystery door is a gray security door with a white, square vent in the top quarter of the door.

  Locked.

  My heart pounds in my chest. I feel along the frame of the door: rotting wood that’s been sitting in seawater for eighty-six years.

  I start ripping at the rotten wood with both hands around the lock, the wood flaking off easily.

  I lean against the door and push. It gives, ripping out the rest of the doorframe around the lock.

  I rush in and try to close the door behind me as best I can. As I do, I see the water in the courtyard lightening rapidly, more blue pixels spreading out over the courtyard surfaces from several approaching squiddies.

  It won’t take them long to find the evidence of the fresh gouges I left in the doorframe.

  There are no blue pixelated surfaces in the building. Nothing once I closed the door. It’s pitch black in here.

  With no other option, I turn on one of my helmet flashlights to one percent, the lowest it’ll go. One percent isn’t enough to see anything; turning on the helmet lights automatically turns off the nightvision by default.

  Even while I’m doing all this I’m taking slow, careful steps forward. “Puo, talk to me. Where’s an exit?”

  “Workkk-ing,” Puo answers.

  I override the default setting and turn back on the nightvision with one percent flashlight. Blue pixelated surfaces spread out before me.

  “I’m in a kitchen,” I say. “There’s a double-hinged service door to my left—”

  “Got it!” Puo says. “You’re in Zoe’s Raw Bar. Go through that door to the main dining room. From there you can exit to the street.”

  I follow Puo’s instructions and step into the main dining room. It’s hard tell in blue monochrome what kind of restaurant this was. But there’s a bar in the middle of the floor, and square tables (most are knocked over) set up around it. The front windows are broken.