Jack Be Nimble: A Lion About to Roar Book 4

by Ben English

  Jack made a surprised sound. “I found a manual,” he said. “And a whole bunch of user guides for the controls.”

  That was great. Maybe they’d find procedures for turning the whole mess off. “Get me up out of here, will you?” Ian didn’t trust the slick surface, and he was beginning to smell ozone.

  Jack met him at the edge, a loosebound book in each hand. He had trouble deciding which hand to empty and extend to the man below.

  More books lay spread open on the consoles. “Can you make anything out of the controls?” he asked.

  “When in doubt, read the instructions, right? See this?” He indicated a bank of instruments. “These regulate a second electrical system, some kind of containment field for whatever is in the three main conduits. He’s harnessed an incredible amount of power here; it takes a second electromagnetic field to ‘bridle’ it, if that makes sense.”

  “Where’s he getting all this juice?” Ian couldn’t make sense of the formulas and diagrams in the manuals, but the indicator lights on the panels were crystal clear.

  “Hydrothermals. This used to be a volcano, there’s plenty of hotsprings on the island.”

  “Makes sense. Didn’t Mercedes’ father invent some of this stuff?”

  Jack had his nose in another book. “Too bad he’s not here to show us how to turn it off.”

  Ian had a thought. “What if she does?” he said.

  “Say that again?”

  He looked straight up, as if peering through solid rock. “What if Mercedes actually gets up to the transmitter and muffles the power somehow, like Solomon did, or shuts it off entirely?

  Jack’s eyes followed the shining conduits upward. “If she pulls that off, I’m asking her the Golden Questions myself.”

  Sirena

  Wild pigs. Must have been wild pigs careening through the underbrush to make such a racket. The forest at the top of the mountain felt abandoned now, and Mercedes couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen any insects, or birds. Everything alive is fleeing the transmitter, she thought, and wondered at her own lack of sense.

  The sun looked (felt!) like it was just a few hundred feet directly above, but the white-gold light pouring off the transmitter tower cast a double shadow of Mercedes on the ground under her. It was hot. Her hair stuck to her face, and her forearms shone with perspiration.

  The concrete building had a few small windows, high up next to its roof. Maybe she could reach one, near where the building met the hillside.

  Midday, and a windless calm.

  She’d been aware of the sound for some time. Light wasn’t the only form of energy roaring out of the transmitter tower, and Mercedes could distinctly hear at least three tones in the deep sound. What frightened her was not the deliberateness, the weight of each tone, but the meaning she heard in the patterns within the surges and ripples of harmony. It was almost a song. On some deep level, it made sense to her, and she had to fight the urge to stand and listen. Stand still for just a moment, and listen. Surely it would make sense if she just—

  Not quite, no. Mercedes took a long, ragged breath.

  Her entire life, she’d defied circumstances. Deaths of her parents, personal sickness—the litany was long, and she owned it. Acknowledged every slight and wrong the world had paid her, every single one, as entirely hers. Sometimes she even gloried in the private struggle required merely to stand up, to exert force in opposition to gravity. At her core, Mercedes was a fighter, a scrapper, and damned if she’d be turned into—

  And she saw what she’d been looking for.

  A window, on the hill-facing side of the building, right at the level of the ground. It was made of wire glass, and was missing a tiny square section in the corner where the jungle had exerted its inexorable strength. The window frame was clotted with dry weeds and cobwebs, but the vines had done her a service, working themselves all around the window frame.

  She sat down on the hillside, her back against the slope, and kicked the glass with both feet. At first it felt as solid as the front door, but then the wire mesh inside began to give at its weakest edge, the glass itself cracked, crazed, and splintered through. She heard it fall to the floor on the other side.

  Marionette

  It was like dozing off and suddenly jolting yourself awake. Marduk couldn’t decide if he’d been asleep for hours or seconds, but when a shadow passed over him it was Miklos just now moving away, back towards the elevator landing.

  Even if there was someone to hear him, Marduk couldn’t call for help if he tried. He barely had enough energy to breathe. Marduk focused on the idea of breathing. It was dark in the hallway, lit only by the long windows overlooking the central generator. The floor smelled of polish and lime disinfectant.

  A terrific impact sounded from the direction of the generator, and the watery light on the ceiling jumped. It was a deep, jarring resonation, as if a huge hammer met a planet-sized forge. The windows above him shook, but held.

  Marduk found he had the strength to tremble.

  As the echoes ebbed, another noise reached him, this time from the direction of the elevators and the long hallway to the lodge. It was the whine of the electric cart, delivering the master of the house.

  Raines’ voice found its way to him down the shadowed passage. “I wish I’d found you worthy to be implanted with the devices.” For a moment, Marduk was confused, then realized the other man was addressing Miklos.

  “I’m profoundly glad I disappointed you,” the Albanian replied. “As you can see, I’ve got the other trigger.”

  Marduk found he could move his neck. Sure enough, Miklos had taken the computer with him.

  “What do you want?” asked Raines. “You could have shot me by now. What is it you want?”

  “I doubt you can produce Jack Flynn,” said Miklos.

  Raines' voice sounded the same as always, he noticed. No inflection was out of place. He was as calm as he’d ever been. Marduk expected to hear a difference. That nothing had changed in the other man since he’d come to the conclusion to do away with Marduk—now, that was truly terrifying.

  Marduk placed his hands against the floor and pushed, experimentally.

  “As a matter of fact, he’s on the other side of those doors. Why don’t we go in and see him together?”

  Inch by inch, he rose. Marduk felt a smile distort his face. He was weaker than a kitten, yet stood upright. Strength flowed back into him, and he walked feebly to the concealing corner near the elevator lobby. It struck him that this was exactly where Jack Flynn must have stood, listening to the security team prepare to meet Whitaker and him a short time earlier.

  Miklos was speaking. “If I carried the devices, you could have killed me just now the way you did your friend Marduk.”

  “Nonsense. You would already be healed from the wounds you took during the storm. Here, I could inject you now—”

  “Get that away from me. Save it for Flynn.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  Marduk chanced a look around the corner. Guards were in the act of removing their fallen comrades, some of whom still lay unconscious where Flynn and the other man had dropped them.

  Raines and Miklos stood close by each other, as if reasoning together. Miklos was just in the act of handing a palm-sized injector back to Raines. “And listen closely: if you betray me again, you’ll have worse to deal with than a bullet. I’m carrying a trigger too, now. I can find you and kill you anywhere you run.” He hefted the computer. “Your life in my hands. Your life.”

  Raines smiled, showing more teeth than usual. “Again, I agree.”

  The guards were withdrawing into an elevator with the wounded. “Sir, a detail is on its way. If you wait a moment—”

  “There are less than ten minutes before the default signal is transmitted,” said Raines. “I have no intention of losing the world we were meant to rule. I have to send out new instructions, and I want Flynn to see this. Give me your weapon.”

  Both men wa
lked toward the steel doors, crossing out of Marduk’s field of vision.

  Something bothered him. The smile. Raines’ grin. Marduk knew the other man as well or better than he knew himself, and he realized Raines was lying. In the context of their conversation, that could only mean one thing.

  Alex Raines was not carrying the devices within himself. The maker and the master of the new world, he himself was not partaking in the sacrament of new technology.

  Marduk scoured his memory. He’d never seen Raines’ bio information scanned and shown on a screen in a medical bay. Never used the system to find Raines—they always knew where the other was, without looking—and he’d never seen anyone run a diagnostic or upgrade cycle on the nanodevices that were attuned to the customized collection of biological and electro-chemical processes known to the world as Alex Raines.

  Had he ever healed quickly? Hard to say, the man never did the sort of work that would raise so much as a blister.

  The idea hit him low in the gut. It was almost enough to make Marduk sink back to the floor in disbelief. Instead, he crept across the elevator lobby behind the two men and entered the hallway leading to the lodge. He needed air. Needed to get out.

  He hadn’t noticed how black and confining the tunnels were. Marduk slammed the electric car into gear and roared up the tunnel to the lodge. The elevator was big enough to drive into, but he ignored it. To be trapped in such a small area, a space occupied only moments before by his best friend, was too much for him.

  There were bodies on the stairs. The guards lay bent from impact where they’d fallen. He began retching, and when he ran out into the living space of the lodge he found himself gulping and heaving, struggling against a rising gorge.

  He staggered to the balcony and threw up over the railing. A thick column of black smoke rose from one of the storage barns in the valley below, still spewing fire and sparks. What was happening?

  Near the barn, a brighter blossom of fire sprang up, then again, and again. He recognized the mortar. It launched a fourth shell.

  Good. He placed great faith in artillery’s ability to sort things out. As long as the security team possessed better firepower, they were fine.

  Two of the shells collided in mid-air, a few hundred feet above the mortar battery. The other two shells continued unimpeded, back down their own trajectories, right back onto the coordinates they’d originally fired from.

  The mobile mortar vanished at the bottom of a v-shaped funnel of fire, earth, and stone. A second pillar of black smoke boiled up into the tropical sky.

  Miklos took it all in for a long moment. He wasn’t in shock, and he wasn’t sure why not. Recent near-death experience / deep betrayal / whatever the cause, the destruction of the barn and the mortar was all relative.

  He retreated a moment into the lodge, found a computer, and called up the human resource records of every worker and technician on the island.

  There were two lab techs who met his needs. He sent a short set of instructions to each of them, including a set of map coordinates.

  A security alert, tagged for his attention, revealed an attempted break-in at the transmitter control station, near the top of the mountain. He activated the internal and external cameras there and saw Mercedes working diligently to kick through the window.

  Without thinking, Marduk started to type in the command that would alert Raines and direct a team of security men to the peak. He could even dump halon gas into the room. A fire retardant, it was colorless, odorless, and would displace the oxygen quickly enough to asphyxiate Mercedes without her even realizing what was happening.

  He let his hand hover for a few seconds above the keyboard, then sighed. Marduk walked back out to the balcony without signing off the computer.

  Whitaker had made this look easy. At least going down was easier than climbing up. Doing his best to avoid landing in his own vomit, Marduk negotiated the railing and set off down the mountainside.

  *

  Mercedes wondered if she were kicking in sync with a rhythm dictated by the transmitter’s tone, and drove her heels against the wire again and again, until she bent the wire enough and cleared a space she could slip through without slicing herself to ribbons.

  Enough light from the transmitter shone in through the window for Mercedes to aim for the desk about six feet under the window. It looked like a bunker, only stuffed with electrical equipment. The air inside was cooler by at least forty degrees. The shock of the cold drove her further out of whatever hypnotic state the transmitter was inducing, which felt good. She promised herself she’d be content with hypothermia.

  It was also noisy, which helped; the hum of air circulators, water pumps, and cooling equipment bounced off more hard metal and concrete surfaces than she could count. At least, in this light.

  It seemed to be one large room. She found a bank of light switches near the front door and slapped them all on. Correction, one large room plus a tiny bathroom. The center of the room was taken up by steel cases, pipes, and gray steel coils. Each section had its own cooling system, and the whole collection of electrical equipment reminded her of a big step-up transformer her parents had shown her as a child.

  She didn’t remember the names of any of the components before her, but Mercedes could almost see her mother pointing at one of the boxes. “And this converts voltages to higher volumes while reducing amperage and the effects of resistance.”

  At that point, her father had leaned in and added, “When you step up voltage and reduce amperage, you don’t lose energy because of resistance. The amount of potential energy just grows and grows.”

  Ah, she could see them both, right there, beaming at her. Even as a child, they treated her like she was able to comprehend the mysteries they themselves understood. Or she would, one day.

  But that was unlikely, now. She was a grown woman, and her path had taken her far, far away from the world her parents had lived in. She wouldn’t know where to start in attempting to grasp the meaning of the machinery that lay around her. Why, this piece looked like that piece, and this smaller set of electronic dials and guages looked close enough to the larger set across the room that it might as well be exactly the same.

  They’re not the same system. Right, that would be wasteful design, and Raines abhorred that sort of thing. No, those collections of guages looked identical because—because they were a primary and secondary system!

  Of course. This is how her father would design such a system. A secondary electrical system would govern the larger one, like a . . . like a tiny jockey on the back of a huge racehorse. Control the jockey, and you controlled the animal.

  In the world her parents had inhabited, they would call that a—she snapped her fingers absently—a containment field.

  It would be a secondary system. Mercedes followed the path of cables to a steel cabinet next to the desk she’d landed on. Inside, she found a dizzying array of lighted dials and digital displays, all centered around two large levers connected by a grip—a switch which reminded her of a circuit breaker. And maybe that’s exactly what it was.

  She gripped it and prepared to haul it to the down position. Let’s see what this does, she thought. She would have to use all her strength.

  Mercedes paused to take another breath. Despite the chill, she perspired freely.

  Jack was right. She wasn’t trained for this sort of thing. But then again, neither was he. Jack and his crew were highly skilled and ridiculously smart, but as nearly as she could tell they weren’t specialists in dealing with every challenge they came across. They couldn’t be. There had to be another ingredient they held in common, some idea she was missing.

  Mercedes curled her fingers around the grip and tested its resistance. It was considerable.

  Jack’s team was optimistic, focused, and capable. They all got along, trusting each other without being suspicious of everyone outside the group. Their devotion to one another bordered on the religious. And Jack himself—well, Jack liked to break pro
blems down to their individual pieces and understand them, then wrap his brain around the larger issue. That’s how he learned sign language all those years ago, she thought, to teach that kid at the pool. His attention to detail—she saw it in his acting, she saw it in his books. She felt it in the thrilling way he examined every aspect of her.

  And here’s what Jack would do, she thought.

  Mercedes used her knife to pop the cover from the main circuit breaker panel. The entire affair came away, grip and all, and she saw that it directly connected with six other large switches—the real circuit breakers.

  Above the switches, about two feet above, ran six thick strands of wire—they looked like diamond fibers, laced with copper. Each hummed with power. Mercedes looked at the setup, examined the details, and realized what would come next.

  The desk contained nothing useful, not even a roll of duct tape. She had better luck in the bathroom.

  The toilet paper was designed with the dual missions of withstanding the rigors of a tropical climate and keeping Raines’ men appreciative of their station in life. It seemed to be made of aged burlap. Mercedes wondered if such material could even be flushed, and sure enough, found a telescoping toilet snake next to a rubber plunger, within handy reach of the toilet itself.

  A roll of paper fit over each of the six circuit breakers. The thick, segmented wire from the toilet snake attached neatly to fittings on either side of the row of breakers, and snugged up tightly underneath the toilet paper rolls themselves. It was a makeshift system, but she decided it would work. There was no way that any of the six circuits would be able to shut off, no matter what happened.

  Mercedes took a mop with a rubber handle and a wide metal head and tested its length against the wall, careful not to touch any part of the circuit panel.

  Then, remembering this was not a suicide mission, she unlocked the front door and propped it open with a wedge of the industrial-strength toilet paper.