by Joe Ducie
‘They don’t come to see you, do they?’ Drake asked. ‘Why not? Does Irene, from the girls’ platform, come? She’s a redhead.’
‘Irene Finlay? How did you meet her?’
Again, Drake could read the look on her face. No, Irene – Finlay – did not have scheduled meetings – and that bothered Doctor Lambros.
Drake licked his lips and decided to share a concern he’d had since learning of Grey’s ‘advanced lessons’, or whatever he was doing.
‘I think they’re up to something. I think whatever they’re up to is happening through a locked door on the eastern platform.’ Drake took a deep breath and thought of Irene. She had trusted him in the infirmary, when she probably shouldn’t have. ‘I mean I don’t see him for weeks at a time. Where is he?’
Doctor Lambros shrugged. ‘Perhaps I’ll have a chat with the warden and see if I can’t find out a little bit more about it. Honestly though, Will, I think you’re worrying over nothing.’
Drake snorted. ‘He tried to kill me not so long ago. I’d rather know where the bastard is and what he’s up to.’
‘Please don’t curse in my office,’ Doctor Lambros chided and offered him a brown paper bag. ‘Care for a strawberry bonbon, Will?’
The rest of February fell into much the same routine to which Drake had grown accustomed. Life on the Rig ticked idly by, governed for the inmates solely by the trackers. Having stopped pushing his luck with the boundaries so much, Drake had actually managed to bring his debt to the Alliance down somewhat. He sat at $-1356 which, while not on the runway and heading towards a gate, had come down a few hundred credits from the upper stratosphere. Tristan even took pity on him and bought him a candy bar from the common room one night.
‘You won’t clear that debt inside a year,’ he said, and threw Drake a Snickers as he lazed on his bunk during free time. ‘So make this last.’ Tristan had been enjoying a few relatively uneventful months since he’d swiped Brand’s baton and word had got round that Drake didn’t like anyone messing with his roommate.
Drake stared at the chocolate for a moment, unsure just what to say. He mumbled thanks and returned to staring at the ceiling, a rather incomplete map of the Rig’s vent system dancing through his head.
‘When you going to tell me about your plan to get this tracker off?’ Drake asked a few minutes later, around a mouthful of peanuts and caramel.
Tristan chuckled. ‘Trust me, I’m working on it. My rough assessment of a week should’ve been closer to a month.’
Two more Saturdays came and went, as did two more games of rigball. Tommy’s team, having enjoyed a near-tie on the first match, were trounced both times by Grey and his thugs. They did better the second game, as Grey was out sick and his team played a man down, but the sheer size and ferocity of those left, while not making up for a player of Grey’s immense size, still afforded them victory.
Tommy was impressed with Drake’s playing, however, and promoted him on the Tubes crew to, as he put it, ‘No more than three crap tubes a shift’. A high honour, indeed.
Near the end of the month, the Titan returned to resupply the Rig. Drake watched the freight ship from his cell, still amazed at its length and how something so heavy could stay afloat. Those tiny speedboats emerged from the hull, just like before, and inspected the ship and the pillars of the Rig’s platforms for damage. He watched them offload on the southern platform, using the tall crane on the ship’s stern. As before, a whole bunch of Alliance-stamped crates and small shipping containers were also loaded onto the Titan. Waste? Drake wondered. What else? Strange that both Warden Storm and Doctor Elias oversaw the loading, as the sun set to the west and darkness cast a blanket of shadow over the Rig.
By the next morning the Titan was gone, and February became March.
Down on the eastern platform clearing pipes, Drake thought the weather had a little less bite to it. The seasons were changing and the icy conditions were becoming more favourable. He expected the Rig was chilly year round, given its location in the middle of the bloody Arctic Ocean, but a few degrees warmer made all the difference to his frozen fingers and toes after he emerged sodden and stinking from a pipe.
Still, staring out at the ocean from his window in 36C that night, his forehead pressed against the tough Perspex, Drake couldn’t help but find it harder than usual to temper his frustration. The Alliance had sent him to the Rig because it had a perfect record – it was inescapable – and nothing he had done so far had gone any length towards tarnishing that record. Would he see his sixteenth birthday here? His seventeenth? Or, all said and done, his twentieth? He was nearly four months, a third of a year, on the Rig, and no closer to escape. With little else to do, he stood thinking these thoughts for close to an hour until Tristan returned, trying hard to suppress a smile.
‘I’ve got it,’ he said, keeping his voice an excited whisper. ‘What I was looking for.’
Drake stepped away from the window. ‘What’s that now?’
‘Come sit over here and keep your voice down.’
Curious, Drake did as instructed. He was lost for a moment, then his eyes widened. ‘You mean for getting this off?’ He tapped his tracker. ‘Tristan, how?’
‘You see that narrow hole on the side of the tracker? Like a keyhole without the curves? That’s how we trip the system, even without the proper key.’
Drake considered the keyhole and then nodded. ‘Okay … I tried working it with a pen lid with no luck. So how does it work?’
‘It’s a hole for an electromagnetic key,’ Tristan said, speaking almost to himself. ‘I’ve seen them before. Knowing that tells me a lot about how the trackers work.’
Drake stared into the hole. It didn’t look like anything special to him. ‘And how do you know that?’
Tristan smiled a touch sadly. ‘From my past misdeeds. Sometimes, to break into a network, you actually have to be in the building. About two and a half years ago, I was trying to get into an insurance company’s files – all that personal data is worth a fortune online – but it was on a completely self-contained drive within the building. I had to break in and use a terminal onsite. Getting the security cameras to loop safe footage was easy, but the back door was sealed with an electromagnetic lock at night. Physical security, you know, ugh.’
‘Electromagnetic?’
‘Yeah. Think of it kind of like a really strong clamp. It’s not, but that’ll do. They’re impossible to force manually with anything less than a tank, or about fifteen hundred pounds of pressure.’
‘So how did you break it?’
Tristan shook his head. ‘That’s just it – you can’t break them.’ He dug around in his pocket and produced a handful of tiny magnets, some stuck together and others repelled. Half were circular, some were semi-circles, a bunch were shiny and cube shaped. The rest were thin bars about the length of a fingernail. ‘But you can confuse them.’
‘Confuse them?’
Tristan dug around in his other pocket and produced another handful of small fridge magnets in the shape of bananas and strawberries, and two floppy pictures of St. John’s – the nearest port to the Rig – with magnetic backing. ‘It’ll be trial and error, and we’ll have to be careful or we could blow the power to the entire tracker, which will bring the guards, but if I can confuse the magnets in the lock within your tracker … then it may just pop open.’
Drake felt a surge of excitement. ‘You actually know what you’re talking about, don’t you?’
Tristan sighed. ‘That’s why I’m in prison.’
‘Okay, sorry. So tell me how it works – how all of this,’ he gestured to the various magnets on the bed, ‘will do the trick?’
‘It may not,’ Tristan admitted. ‘But I’d be very surprised if it doesn’t. As I said, the trick will be doing it carefully enough that we don’t disrupt the power to the entire tracker. You’ll disappear from the monitoring display up in Control if that happens, and then I imagine all manner of alarms will sound. Not conducive to
sneaking about and escape, is it?’
‘No.’
Tristan played with the magnets, sorting what repelled from what didn’t. He made two large piles and every so often slipped a bunch of different magnets into a third, smaller pile. The cube-shaped magnets dominated this pile.
‘What’s so special about these ones?’ Drake picked up one of the cubes. The magnet was heavier than he thought it would be. He tossed it at the bed frame and it stuck fast with a resounding chime.
‘Nickel-plated neodymium,’ Tristan said, as if that explained everything. He finished sorting and looked up at Drake. ‘You know, the strongest type of permanent magnet they make? Head actuators on hard disks? Never mind. I pulled these out of the back of the lifter and compressor in the laundry tonight. Took me a week to loosen the panel without being spotted. These piles came from the common room. I swiped these thin ones from cabinet latches, and the half-circles from the extractor fan above the toilet.’
Drake looked up at the ceiling. ‘The extractor fan?’
‘Yeah. Don’t use the extractor fan.’
He laughed. ‘You think they’ll do the trick?’
‘Properly aligned with the magnets in the tracker, that thing will fly off your arm.’ Tristan frowned and pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. ‘But again, we’re going for subtlety here.’
The casual confidence in his voice was at odds with the quiet, shuffling boy Drake had met nearly four long months ago. For the first time, he was seeing Michael Tristan in his element. The kid was smart – spooky smart – and he knew it.
‘Okay, the magnets are a start,’ Tristan said. ‘But we’ll be needing some other materials. A small power source, like a watch battery – it doesn’t need to be strong – and some copper coil wire. With that, I can create a key, I suppose, that should unlock the tracker.’
Drake didn’t have any idea where he’d be able to swipe a power source – yet – but his mind flicked to the defunct machinery at the bottom of the eastern platform, in Tubes, through the worst of the muck. Or maybe one of the vending machines in the common room? No, they’d notice that. Who wore a watch? Doctor Lambros did. He didn’t want to steal from her. Probably the eastern platform, then. Loose wires and, possibly, more magnets, abounded down there. He swallowed. Ugh … no one said this would be easy.
‘I’m still not clear how it’ll work.’
Tristan nodded. ‘It is a bit complex to begin with. Took me three weeks to trip my first lock back in Perth.’ He turned his right forearm towards the ceiling, exposing the underside of his tracker, and ran his finger along the almost imperceptible seam that bound it to his wrist. ‘Imagine all along the length of this thing are magnets of varying polarity, either north or south. Our key will have to match that varying polarity exactly, you understand. North to north, south to south, and so on … or the armature plate, that fifteen-hundred pound pressure thing, won’t release. Sounds simple, right?’
Drake nodded slowly. ‘Yeah, but we can’t see what polarity the magnets in the tracker are, or even how many there are.’
‘Good. You’re beginning to see the problem and how much you’ll owe me once this is done.’
Drake thought more on what was fast becoming a headache. He was keeping up with what Tristan was saying, but only just. ‘Say there are five magnets in the tracker … that would mean, what, the key would have to be assembled a certain number of ways to find the right combination of magnets to unlock the tracker?’
Tristan pointed at him. ‘Now you’re getting it. It’s pretty simple to extrapolate the variables.’
‘What?’
‘Count the possible combinations.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah, so each magnet along the length of the tracker is either north or south. Two variables to each magnet, right? If there are five, like in your example, then that’s a possible thirty-two key combinations.’
Drake perked up. ‘Not so many.’
‘That’s if there are five. The amount of combinations doubles for each additional magnet over your five. Six magnets, sixty-four possible combinations. Seven, then one hundred and twenty-eight. Ten magnets, God help us, is a thousand and twenty-four combinations.’
‘Okay.’ Drake tapped his tracker against the edge of the bed, producing a dull metal click, as if that would force the device to release and save them all the hassle. ‘Let’s hope for less than ten, then.’
‘Twelve magnets would be a possible four thousand and ninety-six combinations.’
‘Bugger.’
‘Indeed.’
Drake and Tristan sat in silence for a moment, contemplating the challenge ahead. ‘So we’ll start at one magnet and work our way up, I guess,’ said Drake.
‘Logical way to do it, yeah, but there’ll definitely be more than one.’
‘How’d you know that?’
Tristan smiled grimly. ‘Because this won’t work if there isn’t.’
‘Ah. Do you think the magnets in my tracker are in the same order as yours?’
Tristan shrugged. ‘No idea. I’ve never seen the keys they use to take these things off. Could be each tracker comes with its own magnetic key, aligned with the magnets in that particular tracker.’
Drake thought that sounded about right. Given what he understood of the electromagnetic locking process so far, a master key was probably the stuff of fairytale. ‘These magnets don’t fit the lock on the side of the tracker,’ he pointed out.
‘No, they don’t. Which is why I’ve got the neodymium magnets for a little extra kick. Only way this has any chance of working, actually. Our key will work by aligning with the magnets inside the tracker along the underside, or perhaps to either side of the underside. We’ll see.’
‘How will it work? I’m not getting that.’
Tristan removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He looked tired, but answered the question. ‘The key we’re creating works by using a pulsating magnetic field. It’ll cause the magnets in the tracker to vibrate – perhaps violently, if we’re not careful – at between thirty and fifty vibrations a second. The key, arranged in the right order of polarity, will cause the bolt to release.’
‘Hopefully without interrupting the power to the rest of the tracker.’
‘Right. Keep that in mind.’
Drake took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. ‘This could take a while.’
Tristan stood up and began transferring his piles of magnets over to the drawers under the sink. ‘Well, I’ve got about five years. How about you?’
12
Unleashed
In the first week of March, Tommy’s Tubes crew was reassigned to maintenance duty on the southern platform of the Rig. Drake didn’t mind, as it meant less time crawling through grime-stricken pipes and dusty vents – he had an idea there’d be plenty of that coming his way, once Tristan managed to build a key to unlock his tracker.
The final materials necessary to construct the key – a copper coil and power source – had, quite literally, been thrust into Drake’s hands during rigball practice the night before.
The racquet.
Powered by an internal source, magnetised, and in essence, according to Tristan, almost what they were trying to build anyway – just on a much smaller and more refined, complex scale – the racquet was perfect. After practice, Drake offered to clear away and store the equipment. The other lads shrugged and left him to it. His time short before lights out, Drake had simply snapped one of the racquets and stolen its innards, a string of circular lithium watch batteries and a handful of wiring and magnets, stuffing the whole mess into his jumpsuit and heading back to 36C. He tossed the broken racquet over the edge of the Rig and into the cold, dark waters of the Arctic.
Tristan had been impressed. The wire and the batteries were exactly what he needed. He said they could start working on the combination key as early as the next night.
Tonight, Drake thought, as Warden Storm waddled towards him and the Tubes crew, skirting aro
und the Seahawk helicopter resting stationary on the helipad. Now what could he want?
Apart from brief glimpses and at the rigball games, Drake had seen nothing of the Rig’s warden since his induction meeting in the man’s office. Brand accompanied the warden, one hand resting on his rifle, glaring at Tommy’s crew as if they’d been caught trying to do something silly, like escape.
Storm still wore his fine suits. The white jacket was pristine and a wide-rimmed Stetson adorned his large head. His thumbs were tucked into his belt buckle. Tristan had told him that the warden sent a suit down to the laundry on the centre platform once a day to be dry-cleaned and pressed. The man took care of his appearance, much like he took care of the Rig.
In the four months since he’d been imprisoned here, Drake was still grudgingly impressed by how clean everything was. From the washrooms to the cafeteria, from the cells to the corridors. Half the inmates were on cleaning crews – not as dirty as Tubes – but cleaning crews nevertheless. They could never quite mask the taste of the sea, or the old scent of crude oil, under their chemical cleaners, but they gave a good job of it. Warden Storm seemed to care more for the Rig than for the inmates under his charge.
‘Good afternoon, gentlemen,’ Storm said. ‘And what a glorious afternoon it is on my beautiful rig. Can you smell that marvellous sea air? Good to be out in the sun, eh, and away from those tubes?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Tommy said. He was standing up straight and proper. The rest of the crew murmured similar sentiments. Drake kept his silence.
‘That’s a good lad,’ the warden said. ‘You’ve done a good job, these last few years, Mr Nasim, keeping this old girl’s insides running smoothly.’
Tommy beamed at the praise. ‘Thank you, sir.’
‘And you almost had Alan Grey’s team in the game last Saturday, didn’t you, boys?’
Mario was sporting two black eyes to match the split lip he’d earned during the first match, nearly four weeks ago. He’d managed to keep splitting it, week after week. ‘We’ll get them this Saturday, Warden. You watch.’
Brand snorted.