Flotsam Prison Blues (The Technomancer Novels Book 2)

by M. K. Gibson

  Grimm moved quickly around the warehouse, silent and unbreathing, but he could not find the central security terminal. The absence of a fact meant the truth was present, meaning there was no central terminal. Not on this side. Nor did he see one outside the warehouse.

  These facts meant any sort of terminal or control device was located below in the sub-vault. This also meant that there must be a tunnel or a connection of some kind from Andromalius’s home and the vault.

  A tunnel meant he and Salem had a way of ingress. Difficult, yes. But not impossible. Grimm decided that he needed to get back to Salem and report his finding. Together, they would come up with a plan. Obviously, tonight would not be the night to break in. Salem would need to accept this. Grimm began to melt away and shift back outside.

  Nothing happened.

  Grimm frowned and tried again. Still, nothing happened.

  This was unanticipated, Grimm thought to himself. Casting eyes around the room, nothing stood out. Which meant something was amiss.

  Or hidden.

  Grimm summoned another fraction of his energy, moved his fingers in an intricate pattern, and released the energy. The LED lights dimmed and Denochian sigils began to glow in red luminescent hues.

  Grimm recognized the sigils. More so, he recognized the craftmanship.

  Rasputin. He was not only alive, but was involved somehow.

  This warehouse was as much a trap for Grimm as it was for Salem. The sigils proved it. Grigori had been like a son to Grimm at one point. And Rasputin knew the full truth of Grimm’s condition and his ability to play dead, allowing him to survive in a vacuum. But the one thing Grigori did not count on was a bored Salem left to his own devices.

  Grimm knelt down and meditated on what was to come.

  ************************

  I was getting very bored. Grimm had been gone for a while now. I checked my tech bracer, continuing to scan the warehouse, getting back nothing. The whole place was locked down. There were no windows except for the skylights set at the third story of the place. No entrances along the sides. Only a front main entrance and what seemed to be a larger rear entrance for vehicle deliveries.

  What did Grimm mean when he said if I went in there I would die? Sometimes he could be so freaking frustratingly esoteric and aloof. Oh well, I guess I would be at his age too.

  When Grimm had first teleported into my home after hiring me, I ran a DNA test from a swab I took. Dad said he was perfect, or as near to it as possible. That he literally did not make weaker cells, and that he was easily many thousands of years old. I guess if I ever got to be that freaking old and I was partnered with a kid I would go all Mr. Miyagi on him too.

  If he makes me “sand the floor,” “paint the fence,” or “wax on, wax off,” I am just going to shoot him in the leg.

  I “wax off” just fine on my own, thank you.

  While my tech bracer couldn’t find any signal because of the warehouse’s shielding, I always had the Collective. So I closed my eyes, concentrated, listened, and counted heartbeats.

  The beautiful thing about the Collective was that it was a bridge between a human mind and a computer. I gave it a task and it took care of the rest using my enhanced senses, then fed me the information as if I had done it all by myself.

  What I heard, though, was not beautiful. There was no sound coming from within the warehouse. I knew Grimm could fool sensors, even my own when he chose to. I still didn’t know how he did that, which pissed me off and in which he took snotty delight. Dick.

  So not hearing him wasn’t an issue. But the elevated heart rates of posted front and rear guards wasn’t good. What was worse were the thirty more thumping heartbeats I heard coming our way. That meant Grimm did something in there that set off a silent alarm.

  Shit.

  The sounds of the coming heartbeats—more armed guards, no doubt—were coming from the other side of the warehouse complex. So, no time to go through the front or rear entrance.

  I mentally reminded myself to come back and make a sex joke about that statement at a later time.

  Well, if life won’t give you a door, you make one. Sorry, warehouse wall. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I eyed the wall’s construction material. Duranium. A hybrid aluminum titanium alloy created in the second great war for its strength, relative light weight and ease of fabrication. But it was also strong as shit. I could probably shoot my way through it and/or punch a hole if I had the time. But with guards coming fast, no doubt heavily armed and paid to kill intruders on sight, there was no time.

  Skylights it was. I fired off a nano-filament line and began reeling myself up. I ran along the side of the warehouse like the 1960s Batman. Adam West, hallowed be thy name.

  When I got to the skylight, I disengaged my tether, used my tech bracer’s hard-light camera to form an energy shield around my fist, and smashed the skylight. The sudden rush of air intake caught me off guard and literally sucked me into the warehouse.

  I felt the air leave my lungs and my body went into panic mode. Adrenaline automatically kicked in, for all the good it did me. It just ensured I could perceive everything that was going on around me.

  I saw an energy shield spring up, encasing the warehouse’s inside. I saw small silver canisters explode, releasing some sort of greenish gas.

  Well, this ought to be good.

  I fell through the skylight to the ground. Just before my head went crack on the concrete floor, I suddenly stopped. My eyes opened wide and Father Grimm was holding me. I reached for my throat as my lungs burned for air. Grimm pulled my arms away and pinned me to the ground, sitting on top of me. I struggled to get him off me, flailing like a berserker.

  What the fuck was he doing?!

  Why won’t he let me up?!

  Why the hell can’t I breathe?

  And how the fuck was he that strong?!

  I was lashing out in full adrenaline-fueled anger, yet he was able to pin my arms down. I felt myself going out. Blackness welled up and I knew my lights were going to be snuffed permanently. I smelled the descending gas. I just wanted to sleep.

  Then Grimm did something really freaking weird. He threw his fist up and created his signature energy dome. That wasn’t the weird part. The weird part was when he pressed his lips against mine and he kissed me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chunky Elephant

  OK, so, maybe I panicked . . . a little.

  Grimm wasn’t kissing me. He was in fact blowing air into my lungs. How did he have air in his lungs when mine got sucked out of me when that damn vacuum sucked me into this freaking trap?

  Grimm released me and I got my nerves under control. One breath wasn’t much. In fact, all it did was make me giddy and warm for a second before the dread of going through asphyxiation raged through my mind and body again. What the hell could I do with one breath?

  Well, for one, I could stop panicking and pay attention to Grimm, who was gesturing with his free hand, the one that wasn’t holding the shield in place. Outside the dome of energy I saw the swirling green mist of whatever was in those silver canisters. Grimm was pointing down, to the concrete floor below us.

  What did he want? I could feel the burn starting as my body was using up what air I now had left. I held my hands out in a helpless manner, gesturing back a “What the fuck?” to Grimm, who rolled his eyes. He made a fist and pantomimed punching down.

  He wanted me to punch the ground? Why? If he wanted a hole, my blasters would make short work of the concrete. I reached for them, but Grimm grabbed my arm in his viselike grip. Grimm shook his head and gestured around the dome.

  Ahh, of course. No air. I blame my idiocy on that whole lack of breathing thing. My blasters were ionized, super-heated plasma combined with my own energy. But the plasma needed oxygen. So punching it was. I fired up the other neat trick Tesla put in my tech bracers. Mass inducers. My fists began to gain exponential mass as the inducers pulled the ambient weight from the air around us. Once
they weighed in at about one hundred pounds each, I made an energy shield around my fist and started slamming my fists down like war mauls.

  The first punch cracked the concrete and threw up chips of broken cement. The second began making a hole. The third widened it. Over and over I slammed my fists down in frustration. A minute went by. Then two. Then three. My lungs burned worse than before. My vision started blurring again. The exertion was burning through that one breath fast. My body needed oxygen, and by now the Collective was siphoning what it could from fat deposits. But without fresh oxygen fueling my cells, even my amazing Collective would begin to wither and die.

  Sweating and near passed out, I looked at Grimm, trying to convey the hopelessness of the situation. He simply pointed down, his eyes intense. And in that moment I got his message: Break through the fucking floor or die. Well, since I didn’t want to die, break through the fucking floor I would.

  I raised both of my fists above my head, dialed up the mass inducers to a setting I could only describe as “Chunky Elephant,” and brought them down! And that was it, that was all I had. I dropped down in the rubble I had spent the last few minutes making in vain, ready to pass out and die. I collapsed and my head bounced on the concrete. My vision blackened and I just let go.

  Then I felt a faint wisp of cool air rushing into Grimm’s dome shield from the chamber below us. The wisp became a rush. I gasped a half breath. It tasted like sweet cool life. I gasped again. The dome was filling up, but not fast enough. Those couple of half gasps gave me enough incentive to finish this. My head swimming, I raised up to my knees and brought my fists down again, and again and again and again and . . . BOOM!

  The floor beneath us exploded upward into Grimm’s dome from the vacuum’s force, crumbling into broken chunks and fragments of concrete. Gravity took over from there as Grimm and I fell down through the hole into the chamber below us. Sweet, plentiful, breathable air rushed past us as it flooded upwards into the warehouse.

  I lay on my back, covered in dust and debris. I held my middle finger high and pointed it at the hole and the warehouse trap. After I regained my breath and felt my body return to normal, I fished out my lighter and pack of smokes, lit one up and just lay there a moment with my eyes closed, taking it all in.

  That’s when I heard Grimm’s heartbeat and breathing. “Are you all right?” Grimm asked.

  “Sure. Peachy.” I breathed in my menthol cloud of awesome. “Just so you know, you are a horrible kisser.” I sat up and put out my hand for Grimm to help me up.

  Grimm took my hand and pulled me up hard and fast, right into his personal zone. “If I were to kiss you, you would never forget it.”

  I pushed off him and laughed. “OK, Casanova. So what the hell happened up there?”

  “The whole warehouse was a trap,” Grimm explained. “All the air was removed, which created a vacuum, sealing the whole building. When I tried to leave to warn you, I was unable. Another mage put up blood wards, which allowed me to get in, but not to leave. I waited for your inevitable entrance. This place was meant to capture us both.”

  I nodded, taking this in. I checked out the chamber we were in, trying not to ask the obvious question: How the hell did you survive? “So, this is the sub vault The Field mentioned? That’s why you had me smash the ground.”

  “Yes. While I was above, I found no terminal. No way out. But I knew there was a chamber below us. While I saw no entrance, I assumed the entrance was hidden. Which meant the way to get into the warehouse safely, or disarm the warehouse while the trap was enabled, was from below.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” I said. “So how in the holy hell did you survive in a vacuum? You do need to breathe, don’t you?”

  “Not always,” was all Grimm said.

  Not always? “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means what it means. Also, I am fairly sure Andromalius knows we are here.”

  “Yeah, he does. Before I broke in to the warehouse, there were about thirty armed guards coming my way. Maybe they assume we’re trapped?” I asked.

  “Then we only have a little time before they realize we are not. I recommend we hurry. You find Jensen’s arm, I will locate a way out of here.”

  “Yeah, sounds like a plan,” I said as I dropped my smoke and stepped on it.

  The vault was big, double the size of the warehouse above, and was lit by soft-light digital wall sconces. This was obviously where Andromalius kept the bulk of his collection. No doubt the really good and really expensive stuff.

  I checked my tech bracer and I was finally getting input. But it was weak. The concrete sub-walls blocked outside data, but inside the vault, there were items giving off signals. There was an access terminal somewhere. I checked my bracer for a special signal that all my equipment put off. Something that I engineered for just such situations. The stasis box that held Jensen’s arm had a long-lasting fusion power supply. So the signal should be present.

  “There,” I said to myself. The signal was there, but weak. I had a general direction, but that was it.

  Great—needle in a haystack time. I walked along the rows of the vault. I really didn’t get a good a look at the warehouse above as I fell through the skylight and pounded the ground for dear life. But what I recalled were several levels of rows of crates. Down here though, the items were out in the open. Displayed. Similar to my own vault, but this guy obviously liked to walk around and examine his items.

  I followed my signal and passed a large display case on my left. I paused a moment. The case was a stained metal tube with a closed circular window, about eight feet tall and five feet across with a seam bisecting it. The case looked like some of the sketches from my dad’s notes. It looked like an original stasis capsule.

  I wiped at the side and sure as hell, there was a “K/M” stamp in the metal. Kurasawa-MacMillan. My dad’s company, before the split. When Dad refused to follow through with Project RE-GENESIS, Mr. Kurasawa took his half of the company back to Japan. The Board of Directors removed him as CEO and removed him from the company. They later became ARCTech and basically brought about the end of the world.

  I wiped at the circular window and looked in. I nearly lost my shit when I recognized the contents.

  ADAM-1. The first cyborg—well, except for me, of course. He was the first guy who stepped up during the first Demon War to have himself augmented by DARPA. He was just a normal dude with asthma and regular job as a real estate appraiser. But when the war broke out, DARPA took volunteers, and Adam went through the process. He led human militias into battle and they looked up to him. I actually fought with him once. In the battle of Baltimore Harbor. After that fight it was called Razor Bay and remained so to this day.

  The trip down memory lane was short, as out of the corner of my eye I saw Father Grimm standing right behind me. I nearly jumped and shit myself at the same time.

  “Seriously! Do you always need to do that?”

  “Have you found the arm?” Grimm asked, but his eyes were locked on the ancient stasis module.

  “No, not yet. I got distracted. Sorry. I know, bad guys and all,” I apologized. “The signal is just up ahead. Let me go grab it.”

  “Yes, do that,” Grimm said, not taking his eyes off the capsule. ADAM-1 held his attention. I paused a second.

  “I knew him, you know. We fought together. Well, we were in the same attack group. He led the Battle of Razor Bay. I doubt he would remember me.”

  “Really? I doubt that. Something tells me that even then, you were memorable,” Grimm said, and I chuckled. Still, Grimm held his gaze on the cyborg.

  “You knew him also, didn’t you?” I asked.

  Grimm nodded. “Yes.”

  “Was he another of your apprentices? Like Rasputin?”

  “No. Not exactly. He was a student of sorts. But he never listened to me,” Grimm said in a voice that sounded remorseful. “Go, find your prize.”

  “What about the way out? Did you find a tunnel or the ele
vator up?”

  “Yes!” Grimm yelled, then composed himself. “Yes. I found the tunnel that leads back to Andromalius’s lair, the elevator and the central terminal. Up is no longer an option, as energy shields have sealed it off. Our only way out is through the tunnel and through Andromalius’s home. But for now, please just go find the arm. I would like a moment.”

  “Sure, sure,” I said, and went to find the stasis box that held Jensen’s arm. I stopped a second and looked back at Grimm, who just stared at ADAM-1. “You know, I can’t be 100% sure, but I think he is still alive,” I said. Grimm said nothing in response. He only nodded slightly and kept staring.

  Weird.

  Moving down the aisles of displayed unique items, I found it. Andromalius had set the stasis box on an oval wooden dais with a brass plate that read “Taken from the Technomancer.”

  Freaking prick. Stole it a few days ago and already had an engraved plate made up. Or, even more audacious, he had the plate made ahead of time. I really needed to kick this demon in the balls.

  I reached out to take the stasis box. Then I had a brief flash of Indiana Jones and The Raiders of the Lost Ark. Was this thing trapped? I checked for wires and pressure plates. It seemed safe. But I hesitated a moment longer, looking it over. The stasis box was a four-foot-long hexagonal tube with a duranium outer case and tinted acrylic glass composite. I could see the arm sitting in there, slightly fuzzy, as it was technically out of phase and immune to the passage of time as long as the box was active. So why didn’t I just reach out and take it?

  Easy. Because I was scared.

  Grimm and I could possibly get out of here undetected. Possibly. But by taking this, I would be cementing a new enemy. A new villain who might take his anger out on Löngutangar and all its residents. I know what I said to Grimm outside in the outrider. But here, now? I was hesitating.