The men did fire at me, a handful of shots, and I dimly recalled the sounds of the bullets thunking against my solid light armor, but they never touched me and I barely noticed them, and they stopped after the first volley.
I slid to a stop at the end of the street and looked back. The glaring headlights of the four trucks were pointed straight at me, making it hard to see what was going on. The hovering drones swarmed in my direction, but I ignored them.
I wanted to run, like I had so many times before, but this time was different. There were over two hundred people in Oberon Lake now. Couples, families, extended families, old folks. Most of them couldn’t defend themselves at all, and the ones who could fight back would probably get themselves killed while resisting arrest.
“Lux, sword two.”
The enormous fantasy blade erupted from my right hand and I opened the simulated throttle again, flying back through the darkness toward the lights.
The SWAT team opened fire on me again, but the bullets fell harmlessly away from my bike and my armor, and I held my sword out to my side, level with the road. The holographic blade’s laser edge sliced into the first truck, tearing a long thin scar down its length that shattered its windows, burst its tires, and sent a flood of gasoline onto the pavement. I sliced open the second truck just as easily, but then I had to swerve away to avoid running over the man with the hose. He blasted my back with freezing cold water and all around me I saw the facets of my holograms flicker and flash as they fought to stay online.
“Lux, shield four.”
Shield number four was new. Nothing real, nothing fantasy. Just a huge square of perfect black photons locked in an icy lattice with no edges, no seams, no tiny gaps for water to seep inside and damage my suit. The shield appeared on the back of my arm and I held it up between me and the spray of water, and to my relief, the cold shower stopped.
I raced by the last of the trucks and headed down to the far end of the street where I pulled over to check my suit. Only the back of the jacket had gotten wet, so only the armor back there was in trouble. The bike and my weapons were fine, for the moment.
Again the swarm of drones circled overhead, but if they were armed, they didn’t show it. They just hovered there, watching me. I peered down the dark street. The armed men were all bunched up around the trucks now, still pointing their rifles at me as they came closer. A flash of light on my right revealed a pair of frightened faces in an upstairs window of a large house. Two kids.
This is way too dangerous. The longer I stay here, the more likely it is that someone will get hurt.
“Frost!” I shouted. “If you’re here, who’s minding the store?”
I hit the throttle and shot straight into the line of men and trucks with my big square shield right in front of me. I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear the guns firing and the water spraying, and then I heard the awkward thumps as the men were plowed aside by the edge of the shield hitting them, and I saw them go tumbling toward the side of the road as I rolled by. The edge of the shield raked along the sides of the trucks, shaving off a fraction of their roofs, but I steered clear to make sure I didn’t hit one head-on, and a moment later I was past them and racing toward the top of the street again.
“Lux, shield off.”
I looked back at the knot of armed men and the four trucks surrounded by broken glass and scorched metal. I hadn’t sliced open the back two, and now I really hoped that Frost realized that.
I shouted back, “Frost! If you want to arrest me so bad, I’ll do you a favor. I’m going to go commit a crime right now.”
And I took off.
I knew they couldn’t catch me in those trucks, so I had to hope the drones would do the racing for me, and I was right. The flying cameras and tranqs stayed right with me as I swung through two little turns and roared out onto old Route 40, straight back toward the city. I got rid of my sword and focused on driving down the wide road. Like all the other roads, it was littered with fallen tree branches and logs, as well as the odd rusty car, shopping cart, couch, and other things I couldn’t identify in the dark. The mess kept me dodging and weaving, so I couldn’t open up the throttle, and the drones went on buzzing around my head.
I called Felix.
“Carmen, are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“When I saw that guy with the hose, I thought you were done.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not done yet. Are they still there?”
He paused. “Two of the trucks just left with a bunch of guys.”
“How many guys are left outside?” I asked.
“Uhm… I don’t know, I don’t see anyone.”
“Okay, well, I want you to wait a few minutes to make sure the trucks are good and gone, and then take a peek outside to see if they left anyone behind. But be careful, okay?”
“Okay.”
I hung up and focused on the road.
Sweat clung to my face like a mask of wet cobwebs, refusing to let go even when I shook my head. My palms were sticky too, and my hands were starting to ache from holding the bike’s handles so tightly. I tried to relax, I tried to loosen my grip and straighten my back, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about the men and the guns, the little army that had just rolled into my perfect little world for no good reason.
They only had one reason. Fear. Fear of losing control, fear of losing money, fear of losing power.
Meanwhile, how many millions of people were living like rats in cages, working like disposable machines, eating food not fit for human consumption, and watching their children growing up to live just a little bit poorer, and a little bit shorter, than themselves?
How many?
“YAAAAAGH!”
Screaming didn’t make me feel any better, but that didn’t stop me.
After about twenty minutes, the road cleared up and I started to pick up the pace. I could see the haze of amber light rising from the city now, washing out the stars, hiding the real night sky behind fumes and glare.
I passed an old, crooked sign that said, “Welcome to Baltimore.”
And I wondered what sort of people had once traveled in and out of the city whenever they wanted, enough to warrant that sign.
My phone buzzed.
“Felix?”
“It’s all clear. We’ve checked around all the houses and back yards. It looks like they took everyone with them in those two trucks.”
“Okay, good. That means you guys are safe now.”
“Yeah, but what about you? Can you get clear of them?”
I glanced up at the drones. There must have been twenty of them. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Then what are you going to do now?”
I took a long breath. “I’m going to end this. All of it. I’m going to shut them down. Cygnus. Susquehanna. As many companies as I can get in one night.”
“What? How?”
“Just keep Oberon safe for me until I get back, okay?”
“Wait, Car, what—”
I hung up.
He called back. I ignored it.
He called again. I ignored it again.
I didn’t want to talk about it. Just in case.
In case it went wrong.
Talking about it might make me lose my nerve. Over-thinking always made me nervous, and right now, I needed to be strong and steady.
I found an on-ramp to the beltway and headed south, back down toward the airport and the warehouses. Ten minutes after that I was pulling off onto a small street surrounded by large cinderblock buildings with no signs except the small metal plates with the address numbers on them. I checked my phone once to make sure I was in the right area.
Three more blocks.
I had never been there before. And if I hadn’t worked at Cygnus, I never would have even known about the place. No one ever went there, except for the handful of people who maintained it. And I only heard about it because I kept forgetting my password at work, so I would have to walk
down to the IT office and get it reset, and while I was there I heard the guys chatting about this place.
A warehouse.
Very secure.
Massive power systems.
Elaborate environmental controls.
The server farm.
In one building, somewhere out in the world, they had all the brainpower behind Cygnus and half a dozen of their sister companies all housed together, all shielded together, storing all the information that made Cygnus what it was, everything they knew about 3D printers, everything they knew about feedstock, all their records, including all of their financial data, all in one place. And without that data, when their employees showed up to work the next day, they couldn’t do anything. They couldn’t order supplies, or arrange shipments, or make new printers, or harass their customers, or fill out their timesheets, or anything. Not ever again.
I found the street and saw eight or ten huge buildings. All identical, all unmarked, all behind large steel fences.
Which one is it?
I didn’t have time to search them all. And if they were all server farms, then I might risk destroying the computers that kept a hospital running, or something even more critical.
Frowning and squinting, I rolled slowly up the street, looking for some clue as to which one belonged to Cygnus.
The street was empty. But there was a white pickup truck parked next to one fence. I drove up next to it and looked in the windows. Nothing there.
I rolled through the other parking lots quickly, looking all around for a sign or a sticker in a window. I glanced around a trash dumpster, hoping to see some scrap of paper with the Cygnus logo on it. I even looked at the tire marks in the shadows, as if they might tell me anything.
I started to feel a bit desperate as the seconds ticked by and the drones went on droning overhead. I knew Frost could see me. He knew where I was. It was only a matter of time before he caught up.
A parking sticker!
I raced back to the white pickup to check its windows, but they were all empty.
And that’s when I heard the helicopter. The pattering of the rotors roared in from nowhere, all of a sudden, and there it was, a sleek black and silver shape in the night sky swirling down out of the darkness onto the roof of the warehouse across the street. The Cygnus logo flashed on the chopper’s side as it slowly descended.
“Lux, bike!”
I dove onto the motorcycle and tore down the street toward the helicopter and into the other parking lot, slashing through the steel gate with my sword, and I didn’t stop until I was about to crash into the front door. Then it took a precious moment for me to kill the bike and I sliced through the locks and barged into the office beyond.
Three men in white uniforms were waiting for me, all with their guns drawn and ready.
“Freeze! Down on the ground!” they shouted.
“Lux, shield!”
They fired half a dozen times and the smashed bullets clattered on the floor.
I peeked out. “Just curious. How can I get down on the ground if I’m supposed to freeze?”
“Stand down, you are under arrest!”
They fired again, with the same result.
“Hey guys, I don’t have time for this.” I jogged toward them, ramming my shield into the first two guys. They both rebounded off the wall of cold photons and fell on the third guy, all in a big groaning pile. I kicked the guns out of their hands, and then smashed the weapons with my sword. “Now get out, or I slice off your hands!”
They got up slowly, slower than I liked, and they gave me a bunch of dirty looks, but in the end I guess Cygnus wasn’t paying them enough to lose a limb in the line of duty, so they backed out the door, leaving me alone.
There was only one other door, a huge metal door like bank vault from an old movie. I could only guess how thick it was, or what sort of keys and passwords someone would need in order to get past it. Fortunately, I didn’t need any of them. I jammed my sword into the edge of the door and sliced up and down a few times, hearing a lot of strange hissing and clicking as I went, and then the door banged once and swung open, just a little.
I threw the door open and ran down the white corridor beyond it. I could hear Frost up on the roof, and I knew I only had a few seconds to get this done before he caught up to me, before his security team surrounded me. I slashed through the next door and there it was, the server farm.
I had expected a lot of machines. Hundreds of blades on hundreds of racks, but this… I hadn’t expected this.
The warehouse was enormous, probably the size of a football stadium, and it had three levels that you could get to using the stairs and little freight elevators at the ends of it. But the racks… the servers…
I had never seen so many computers in one place before. It was a baffling sea of blinking red and green lights, and miles of fiber optic cable, all neatly bundled and wrapped into thick ropes of orange strands bolted along the racks and ceilings and floors. Every rack cage had fifty Katana-class server blades, and I couldn’t even begin to guess how many cages there were.
Thousands.
Tens of thousands.
The rows seemed to go on forever.
And the sight of it almost broke my heart.
I had planned to go charging in there with my sword raised and just slash through them, destroying zetabyte after zetabyte of precious corporate data, obliterating everything the companies were and knew and could do in a shower of sparks and cinders.
But this…
This would take hours to destroy.
I didn’t have hours.
I didn’t even have minutes.
As I stood there, staring with my mouth drooping open, something new caught my eye. There was a grid of white pipes running up and down all the rows of server racks.
The fire suppression system!
I spun around and threw open the first door I found and plunged into a narrow hall where I found a whole string of identical unlabeled doors, so I broke them in one by one, looking for the room that controlled the fire extinguisher grid. I found a broom closet, a bathroom, a stairwell, and then a slightly larger room with a hundred pipes and canisters and meters.
Yes!
I went inside and looked at the labels on the huge canisters, and my insides ran cold. They didn’t use water. They didn’t use foam. They didn’t use anything that could possibly damage the servers, which was sort of obvious now that I thought about it, but it didn’t help me at all. The system responded to the fire alarm by flooding the server warehouse with inert gasses to starve the fire of oxygen. Very safe for them. But for me, entirely useless.
I was about to leave when I saw the little utility sink in the corner of the room. There was a bucket and mop beside it, and some bottles of generic cleaning supplies underneath with a hose and a brush.
A drop of water fell from the tap. A drop of brown, filthy-looking water. I turned the handle and watched a flood of dirty water pour into the sink. It never ran clear. And that gave me an idea.
I grabbed the hose that was coiled up under the sink and screwed it onto the faucet, and then I ran over to the canisters of gas and found a nozzle that was about the right size. I yanked off the hose for the gas and jammed on the hose from the sink. It didn’t quite fit, it wouldn’t quite stay on, and as the seconds ticked by I wanted to scream again, but then I spotted the silvery roll of duct tape under the sink with the cleaning supplies and I smiled brighter than I ever had before.
With the hose held in place with about fifty layers of duct tape, I opened up the faucet and heard the dark, scummy water shoot through the hose and into the fire suppression system.
Now, I just need to buy enough time to flood all those pipes outside.
I closed the door to the room and ran back out into the server warehouse just in time to hear something metal clanging high overhead. I saw a pale flash of light as a door swung open and a group of men ran down a narrow metal staircase to a catwalk high above the warehouse
floor.
Frost.
They were running to the end of the building where more stairs and an elevator would bring them down to me.
I had thirty seconds.
Probably less.
Taking a deep breath, I lunged at the first cage and slashed through all fifty of the winking machines inside from top to bottom. Instantly they all went dark as they split open, creating a white-hot scar all the way down. I jogged to my left and slashed the next one, and then the next one.
But then I looked down the row, that impossibly long row, and back at all the rows behind me, and up at the two levels still above me, and I stopped.
This is hopeless. How do I stall them? By running? Again?
Frost and his goon squad reached the ground level and came sprinting toward me with their guns raised, but I was too tired and angry and frustrated to care about the guns anymore. I slashed open another server rack with a shout just as they swarmed around me, shouting at me to drop the sword, to drop the armor, to surrender.
I just stood there, glaring at the dead computers in front of me. If only I had thought of this before. I spent a whole week out in the suburbs playing house with Felix, living in my little fantasy world, making stupid carpets and board games when I should have been thinking about this, about Cygnus, about my next move.
No use beating myself up about it now, is there?
“Carmen?”
I looked over at Frost. He pointed a shotgun at me. “Yeah?”
“This is for the zoo.”
He fired.
The blast punched me in the stomach so hard that my hips flew backward as I doubled over in shock. I landed on my ass with all the air knocked out of my lungs and a searing pain spreading across my belly.
And there was something cold.
And wet.
I looked down and saw the puddle on my stomach and lap, and spreading across the floor under me. I looked up at Frost.
“Water rounds.” He chambered another shell. “Originally designed for destroying bombs. Seemed appropriate.”
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