April sat on the edge of the bed and said, “You know that we’re just looking for the charm today. Even if we do find it, we can’t retrieve it. We’ll contact Johnson and get our orders from there.”
Connor popped up from the bed. “We’ll still be a lot closer to getting out of here than we were when we went to bed last night, and that’s enough for me.”
April stood with her son and asked, “Do you miss Matthew? I know I do.”
Conner wasn’t one to share his feelings, but it was clear to his mother that he and Matthew shared a special bond.
“Sure, I miss him a little bit. I’m just sick of being here and working in that mine. I can do a lot more than dig holes.”
“I know you can, son. You’re gonna get your chance. I think you’re gonna make a big difference in a lot of people’s lives. You just have to be patient. Your time will come.”
Connor agreed and started toward his door. April rushed to his side and said, “We only have a couple of hours to find the charm, so let’s make them count.”
Blake and Marco were ready to leave and were waiting for April and Connor in the living area. Marco almost fell over when they appeared. “I can’t believe you’re on time. That’s the first time in two months!” The wide-eyed expression on Marco’s face visually displayed the audible sarcasm in his comment.
Blake added, “We have a long walk to the site. We can’t take the transport or they’ll have a log of our movements. I’ve mapped out the best route to avoid the surveillance monitors, and our little helper here will do the rest.”
Blake’s little helper was another little gadget Walter had sent along with the group. He called it the scrambler—it had the ability to interfere with video and audio frequencies. It had been helpful back when Amanda’s badge wouldn’t scan at the transport station, and now it could be used to scramble the video signals of the government’s surveillance equipment.
It normally took ten minutes by transport to get to the site, but it would be forty-five minutes on foot through Sector 4. Avoiding security huts and cameras would only get them halfway there. Getting into the site with no one knowing about it would be the real trick. April and Marco felt they had a plan that would work, but that didn’t reduce the stress of the situation.
The group managed to get around the security hut of their housing complex without anyone seeing them. The housing complex was one of the least-secured areas in each sector, but clearing the hut unseen was a nice start. The team maneuvered itself around buildings and eased their way around camera positions. The scrambler would go off every few minutes, signifying hidden cameras throughout the path. Every time one was found, the group would have to stop and allow the scrambler to alter the signal. This slowed the progress, which meant less time at the site.
Marco was losing his patience. “Damn it! We can’t go twenty steps without that thing going off.”
Blake tried to calm his friend. “This is why we brought it with us. We couldn’t have known how many of these hidden cameras were out there. There seem to be more than we could have imagined.”
Blake and Marco weren’t exaggerating. Signals came from watchtowers, office buildings, overhead signs, and even trash cans. The amount of surveillance the government had in place reinforced the idea that no one in 2185 was ever out of sight of the Minister. At one point or another, anyone could be found at any time.
Marco made a suggestion. “Look, our original route is going to take too long. What if we peel off across Banker’s Crossing? That way we can avoid all the surveillance.”
Banker’s Crossing was a marsh located to the east of the site. It had at one time been a bustling area of commerce with abundant high-rise buildings, shopping complexes, and financial institutions. The Council had had it leveled more than eighty years ago. It was rumored to be an extension of the site, but there had never been any excavations conducted there. It was muddy, nasty, and off the grid.
April wasn’t a big fan of traversing the marsh, but there didn’t seem to be another option. For a normal person, the long trek through deep mud would wear them down after a few steps, but for April and her group, the Hathmec would keep their energy high and their soreness to a minimum.
“This mud is up to my knees!” April was the shortest of the four and struggled the most to lift her feet with each step on the thick, watery trail.
Marco shushed April. “Look, I know we’re out here by ourselves, but keep the yelling to a minimum. We don’t want to draw any attention to ourselves.”
Connor came to his mother’s defense. He was impressed with Agent Blake’s skill and knowledge, but he had grown tired of Agent Marco’s superiority complex. “Just because you’re the biggest guy here doesn’t make you the boss of everyone. Remember, me and mom are the only two here that have ever found and retrieved a charm.”
Marco snickered. “You mean your brother did.”
Blake led the pack with an oversized flashlight that pointed the group in the right direction. He stopped for a moment to make sure they were heading due west. As they stood there, Connor felt something move past his leg, and he screamed out. It wasn’t quite the sound a little girl would make, but it was close.
In a panicked state, he backed up toward Marco and said, “Something just rubbed my leg! Something just rubbed my leg!”
April laughed and held up a stick she had seen floating in the water beside her. Blake pointed the light at the stick and chuckled too. Connor had just grazed the edge of a stick and freaked out about it.
Marco said, “I see that you’ll run to the biggest guy when you have something crawling up your leg.”
Connor trudged back to his place in line and slapped the water with the back of his hand. “You would have done the same thing. Don’t act like you wouldn’t.”
Blake pointed the light back into the marsh and said, “We have another twenty minutes before we get to the east gate of the site. Let’s try to keep our voices down and our shrill cries for help to a minimum.”
The group plowed forward, and by the time they reached the east gate, they had gained back some of the time they had lost earlier in the trip. They were still fifteen minutes behind, but the shortcut had worked.
April took a seat by the gate and took off her boots. A couple of inches of water flowed out. She had dipped them several times during the walk.
Connor was excited to see the gate, but now he wanted to know the rest of the plan. “What’s first? Do we need to clear the gate, or do we let the mosquito go from here?”
April would be up first. Every supervisor had his or her own eight-digit code for entering the site and opening up levels within the site’s control tower. She wasn’t too keen on using her own code to get in, because if it were discovered that someone had entered the site before normal work hours, there could be trouble.
She pulled open the keypad and entered the following code: G1148NBE. The gate, which was just a bit larger than a home’s front door, creaked open with a short buzz and the clack of a deadbolt. Blake asked, “What code did you use? You didn’t use your own, did you?”
April explained that being one of only two female supervisors at the site did have its advantages. “It’s easy to borrow one of the guy’s badges when you really need to use the bathroom and your badge is all the way in the main office. I started to go into some of the issues that women face that men don’t have to deal with, and they were basically throwing me their badges. They just wanted me to stop talking!”
April checked the entrance quickly to verify it was empty and then signaled for the group to follow her. “The badge has an embedded code for the number, but it was easy to read and copy with Walter’s trusty gizmo. If anyone looks at these records, it will look like Jase 42875 opened this door.”
Marco took the lead, and the entire group started to sprint down a long, straight hall. The scrambler knocked out the signal on the one camera positioned at the end.
“We need to get to security level one. We can scr
amble every camera on site from that location.” Marco had calculated that it would take exactly five minutes to scramble the other cameras once they reached the main security office on level one.
The group followed him to a staircase that was used only for workers coming in and out of the site. The management didn’t want the main hallways and elevators getting dirty from the employee’s boots and clothes.
“There’s only one camera along the staircase, and I’ve already taken it down.” Marco took his time around the winding stretch of stairs until he reached level one. April and the others followed and waited for any sign from Marco that they needed to stop. All remained clear, though, and the main security office was within sight.
Blake and Marco entered the unlocked office and made their way to the site’s main controls, which powered the cameras that covered the entire site. Marco plugged the scrambler into a port that fed the control panel. The room was wall-to-wall monitors, at least two hundred of them, displaying feeds from different locations. Some were black and white and some were in color; the color feeds were primarily used for the office areas.
The group stared at the impressive array of monitors and waited for a reaction to the scrambler. It only took thirty seconds. One feed went to a garbled mess of snow, and then another, and then another. It was like watching dominoes fall in a staggered unison, but after a few minutes, all were out of commission. Walter’s device had come through in a big way.
Blake pulled the metal mosquito from his bag. “Ok, Marco is going to stay here and make sure the cameras stay off while the rest of us head up to the tower.”
The tower was both the metaphorical and physical center of the Minister’s Mine. It stood twenty stories high and had once been used as a housing location for the workers of the site. It had been abandoned after the first two years of use—workers were sneaking into the site during the night hours and damaging equipment. It was a sneaky way of getting out of work, but it had been successful for a while. Rumors persisted that some workers had been killed during these night runs.
Those actions had led to the heightened security at the site and the closure of the housing complex. It wasn’t used often, but there was a perfect observation deck on the top level of the structure. That is where Blake, April, and Connor planned to release the metal mosquito.
With all of the cameras in the facility down, the group could run to the tower unnoticed. It was still dark outside, so they had to be careful to keep from tripping over mounds of dirt or falling into an unmarked hole. As they reached the entrance to the actual worksite, they noticed an old-fashioned four-wheeled vehicle parked to the side.
April said, “We could get to the tower in five minutes if we used that jeep.”
Blake took a look inside the vehicle. “I don’t know how to drive one with the stick in the middle.”
April walked to his side. “Get in. I know how to drive this thing.”
Connor and Blake got into the jeep, and April started it up on the first try. She put it into first gear and said, “Here we go.”
The first twenty feet or so went great, but the rest of the drive was a combination of bucking the vehicle between gear shifts, a grinding noise best described as damaging, and the occasional dip of a tire into a hole the size of a refrigerator.
“I never said I could drive it well. I just said that I knew how to drive it.”
Connor patted Blake on the shoulder from the backseat. “Don’t worry. She drove the whole time we were in 1984 and didn’t kill us or anyone else.”
Blake held tight to the small handles at the top of the jeep door’s facing. He was relieved to see the lights from the lower levels of the tower ahead of the vehicle.
The jeep came to a sliding stop in front of the tower’s entrance. Blake took a brief moment to thank a higher power for arriving in one piece. April wasn’t amused. “Hey, we’ve recovered at least ten minutes. We would still be running if it wasn’t for my driving skill.”
“I would still have feeling in my legs if it wasn’t for your driving skills,” Blake responded. “Thank goodness for the Hathmec.”
He looked at April’s sour face and added, “You’re right. We did pick up some time, so let’s not waste it. Let’s get on up to the deck.”
Blake led the team into the main lobby. It was unlocked, and a short hall led to an elevator in the middle of the structure. “Let’s see if these still work.”
He pressed one of the buttons, and a light ding filled the dead air. The doors opened up and they entered. Connor pressed the button on the main panel that said Top Deck, and the elevator started to move.
Connor asked, “How in the world is that one little mosquito camera thing going to check the entire mine in thirty minutes?”
April added, “I was wondering the same thing. I know it’s designed to pick up the natural frequencies coming from the charm, but this place is massive.”
Blake chuckled as he watched the numbers on the elevator light up above his head. “I would normally agree with you, but this mosquito has some tricks that you haven’t seen yet.”
The elevator came to a stop at the top level of the tower, and the doors opened to an abandoned room encased in glass.
“Wow!” Connor said in wonder. “If it wasn’t dark outside, you could see the entire site from up here.”
Connor wasn’t exaggerating. There were unobstructed views to the north, south, east, and west. On a clear day, they would be able to see into another sector. Connor opened one of the windows and felt the brisk morning air hit him in the face. The winds were a bit heavier at this altitude—no mounds of earth or buildings blocked them up here.
Blake prepared the mosquito and pulled a monitor out of his bag to track it. “Walter showed me all the tricks of the mosquito. We spent hours going over this program and how to run it for this very purpose.”
He typed and clicked around on the screen, pulling up a program entitled Firefly. “All I need to do is activate this program and let the mosquito do the work.”
April and Connor stared at Blake as he held his finger over the keyboard. April was a patient person, but she was more than ready to get this done. “What are you waiting for? Press the button.”
“Do you want me to press the button?” Connor added.
Blake smiled. “Go to the window and watch the mosquito.” He then pressed the button, and off it went.
It buzzed past April and Connor’s ears and took a hard right. They could just barely see the little flashing light on the back of the metal insect. It quickly got farther away and harder to see.
Connor asked, “What are we looking for? It’s just flying around out there.”
Blake punched a few more keystrokes and asked, “What about now?”
April looked out into the early morning and noticed there were now two blinking lights. “I see two—no, four lights. Wait, now there are more than four.”
Connor ran back to the window. “Where are they all coming from? I see little blinking lights all over the place now.”
Blake left his computer monitor in the center of the room and walked to the window with April and Connor. He peered into the dark night and was greeted with a show of lights from one side of the site to the other. It was as if a swarm of fireflies covered the entire site.
April thought to herself, “This is really a beautiful sight. I wish Matthew were here to see it.”
“How is this possible?” Connor asked.
Blake explained that the mosquito had split into over one hundred tiny little parts of itself. The lights they saw were more reflections than anything else. The moon was bright and, just like with the sun, the particles reflected the small bit of light that was bouncing off the moon.
April paced slowly back to the computer monitor. “I know the lights are superpretty and all, but we have only one hour before people start arriving to work, so we need to move it along.”
Blake came back to the computer and watched as each of the tiny pieces of
the mosquito sent back information on the signals it was reading. The screen showed hundreds of points along an axis, but none of the points reached a line that was set toward the top of the screen. Blake explained that the line represented the signal they were looking for.
“We need one of these to reach that line, or we don’t find the charm.”
April, Connor, and Blake watched the hundreds of points on the screen for forty minutes, but none of them ever reached the critical line at the top of the screen. All of them were frustrated, but Connor took it the worst.
“It’s not even here. The stupid thing isn’t even here!”
April tried to calm her son down, but it wasn’t working.
“We’ve wasted all of this time here, and for what? I say we get our stuff, head back to base, and tell Walter where he can stick his charm.”
“That’s enough!” April cried. “We knew we might not find the charm tonight, but we can try again.”
Blake selected a new program and put the monitor back into his bag. “I don’t understand it. We covered more than ninety-five percent of the site, and we got nothing.”
April replied, “It must be in the five percent that we didn’t cover. Regardless, we are out of time and need to get back to level one.”
The mosquito flew back in through the window and landed in Blake’s hand. It had reformed itself before returning, so the hundreds of lights were now back to one. Everyone gathered their things and headed back to the elevator. It would be a grim trip back to the entrance of the tower.
As the elevator doors closed, Blake said, “Ninety-five percent of the site, and nothing.” Connor was so upset he didn’t even want to talk. April tried to keep an optimistic view. She had known this could happen. Things just didn’t always go the way you planned them.
“Look, we did a great job tonight, and we checked the majority of the site. We can come back and try again.”
Connor fumed, “I just knew something like this would happen. How do you check that much land and find nothing? Not even a peep! It’s like it’s not here. Maybe somebody else found it and moved it.”
Last Chance Volume 2 - The Legend of the Hathmec: Planting the Seed Page 21