Kaleidocide

by Dave Swavely

  29

  FIRE

  “Min!” Terrey yelled into all channels. “Get Lynn into the air—the aero in the garage.” The big cyborg had already forgotten about his human embarrassment, and began to move again with the efficiency of a machine, escorting Lynn out of the kitchen before Terrey could even finish. “The lab caught fire while Go was working there, and it’s spreading fast in all directions. I don’t know if any of us can get to the hangar or another exit without being blocked by—”

  “Wait,” Lynn said, grabbing the doorway as she was ushered through it. “They told us the fire system is really good.”

  “True,” I said quickly. “But take her up anyway, just in case.” Min moved her through the door with a perfect balance of gentleness and force.

  As if in response to Lynn’s statement, the hill shuddered once more, presumably from the fire causing another explosion, and then the lights went completely out for a minute or more. By the time they came back on, everything was still and quiet, and the almost extrasensory perception I had developed in the military told me that whatever happened had stopped. Terrey confirmed this shortly after.

  “Is everyone okay?” he asked, on all channels again. Everyone responded that they were, except for Go, so he continued. “Ni and San are plugged in to the base, and they tell me that it has an EM suppression system, so once it identified the fire locations and allowed a few moments for any humans to escape, it killed the flames.” This was the latest development in indoor fire safety: scientists had discovered that physics actually worked better than chemistry in fighting fire, and that waves of the right kind of electromagnetic energy could disrupt the cold plasma that made up a flame. So rather than a sprinkler system, the rooms of the base and the house above had been built with the ability to send a blast of electricity into them when a harmful fire was detected.

  “The girls are making their way into the burnt area right now,” Terrey continued, “to find their sister and find out what happened. In the meantime, I suggest you all make your way to the aero bay, so we can debrief but also be able to take to the air at a moment’s notice. In case something else happens.”

  While I was telling Min to keep Lynn in the air for now, until we knew for sure what was going on, I noticed on my screen that the medbox was still standing in the living room, but there was no sign of the tech from Cyber Hole. I was thinking that he must have panicked when hearing of the fire, and run off in some random direction, until I switched cameras and noticed that he was hunched up inside the box. Its doors were still open, presumably because there wouldn’t be enough room inside if they were closed, so I wasn’t sure how he thought this would protect him from a rabid fire.

  “You can come out now,” I said, and the room translated it into Mandarin. He stirred slowly and sheepishly emerged from the box, only to run right back in when I added, “The fire is out.” He must have been unsure about my first statement, and the translation of the second must have given him the impression that the fire was outside the room, or something frightening like that. I tried a few other ways of saying it, and finally broke through the communication barrier. I told him the way to the aero bay in the hill below, because I knew he still had to work on Min in the medical bay (if it wasn’t burnt to a crisp) and wanted him to be at a place where he could be evacuated easily, like Terrey had said.

  Not long after, everyone was gathered in the bay and I was looking in on them through the surveillance system there. I had to fiddle with the zoom and the audio more, because this was a very large room, since it had to be big enough to hold a number of aeros and a couple Firehawk helicopters as well. The hillside entrance, or “mouth” of the bay, also had to be quite large, of course. It was hidden from the outside by a huge holo that made it look like part of the hillside. The protection team, minus the triplets and with the addition of the Chinese tech, were huddled near several aeros at the mouth of the bay, ready to jump into them if a wave of lethal fire should suddenly start heading their way.

  To make sure I could hear everything, I tuned the second screen on my wall to the double’s eyes and ears, and when I did I could hear Stephenson talking to his partner as they waited for Terrey to begin the debrief (Terrey was currently talking to the triplets on his earpiece).

  “You’re not gonna believe this,” the little man said to Korcz, with his trademark wide-eyed enthusiasm.

  “Another drimm come true?” the big man said, with no enthusiasm whatsoever.

  “Yeah, I had a dream about fire, since New York. I thought it was just a recapitulation of that episode, but it could be prophetic. I’ll have to run the precog scale on it. But we just escaped a fire.” Then his enthusiasm dimmed a bit. “Although in the dream I’m running from it.”

  “The more you see the dreams come true,” said Tyra, who was also eavesdropping, having planted her floating chair near Korcz as she usually did, “the more you think I’m gonna die.” It occurred to me that this woman was safer than anyone from the threat of a fire, because she could simply fly out of the hangar on the chair—she didn’t even need a car.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Korcz answered instead of Stephenson, requiting some of her affection, or at least showing some concern for her feelings.

  “You don’t think it’s God, or voodoo?” Tyra said to Korcz. “I’ve heard a lot about both in my life. But the Catholic hoodoo isn’t much different from the African voodoo, ya ask me.”

  “How many drimms you have at night?” Korcz asked Stephenson. “How many on the machine?”

  “About ten to twenty.”

  “Can see anything,” Korcz said with a grunt, talking to both of them now. “Can see anything you want to see.”

  “But you’re forgetting,” Stephenson objected. “We’re talking statistics here. They don’t all have the same precog value.”

  “Did you ever have a high precock,” Tyra said, “and it didn’t come true?”

  “It’s precog. And yes, sometimes.”

  “Then you don’t really know, danyet?” Korcz said, “It’s ahhh … what you call it? Presvorninck?”

  “Random?” Tyra said.

  “Da,” Korcz said, still in the Russian mode, and more delighted in Tyra. “You know Russian?”

  “No, I guessed,” she said. “But I could learn.” She sent a big grin his way, and I noticed she was prettier when she smiled. And he actually returned it, though his version of a smile made him look worse.

  “I thought it was ‘precock,’ too,” Korcz whispered to her, after Terrey had started calling the team to order, and the triplets came into the room, two of them carrying the scorched body of the third on an unfolded stretcher. I noticed immediately that a pall hung over both of them, and their skin patches were now a flat black. They had obviously turned off all the moving colors in the nanotech decorations, in honor of their sister’s suffering. They asked the Chinese tech (in flawless Chinese) if they could use his box, because they didn’t want to be in the med lab right now, for the same reason everyone was gathered in the bay. He was more than willing, and soon the refrigerator transformed itself into an operating table and both triplets went to work on the third. Their hands moved much faster on the table, and their bodies around it, than I was used to seeing. It was like watching a normal operation in fast forward.

  “She’s alive?” Stephenson asked Terrey, not wanting to bother the Asian superwomen.

  “Right now she is,” he answered. “It’s hard to kill a cyborg.”

  It was difficult to tell exactly what they were doing, because they moved so fast and I didn’t have a close angle, but I did notice that they turned the body over at one point and were working on the apparatus that looked like a backpack. But then Terrey interrupted my spectating of the high-speed procedure.

  “Let me tell you what happened,” he said. “And Ni and San can correct me if I get anything wrong. They’re good at multitasking.” Terrey was no longer referring to them with terms like “the Sheilas” at this time, or
even the Trois—that and the slight change in his visage made me think he had some decent amount of concern for them. But I also realized that he may have just been worried about the tremendous amount of money they were worth to him.

  “When they made their way to the lab,” Terrey said, “they found that the fire had spread one floor up and down, and about fifty meters in every direction before the suppression system stopped it. But the floors and walls retained integrity for the most part, so the girls were able to get to the lab and examine it briefly before bringing Go over here. That combined with their watching of the security video leading up to when the first explosion destroyed the camera, this is what we know: Go had finished her exam of the sniper’s body and had turned to the ballistics that we took out of the ground near the gravesite. She put the first bullet under a faucet to wash it off, and it practically exploded in her hands. It dropped in the sink, of course, and then the sink flared up and the faucet itself blew off its base, with balls of fire showering out into the rest of the room. Then the whole cabinet down into the floor was on fire. Go herself was on fire by then, but she grabbed the extinguisher on the other side of the room and tried to use it on the flames around her. But when she did, they exploded more and the camera was knocked out.”

  Stephenson looked at Korcz, Korcz looked at Tyra, and Tyra looked back at both of them.

  “We know what that is,” she said.

  “Yes, you do, and if I hadn’t seen the report of what happened to you all at the Money lab in New York, I wouldn’t have realized what happened nearly this soon. But we’re looking at the same kind of chemical concoction that reacts with H2O. It was in the Money lab that day, and it was in the bullet that the sniper fired this morning. We don’t see it too often, because I guess the only people crazy enough to use it are the mob and Chinese assassins. No offense.” He said the last to Tyra.

  “No, s’okay,” she said. “I think my people are crazy, too—that’s why I ratted on ’em.”

  “What is actually a more amazing coincidence,” Terrey continued, “is that this base has an EM system, instead of a sprinkler system. I’m sure that bastard Sun was assuming that there would be a sprinkler system, and when the bullet ignited by contact with water, there would be a flood of more water coming out of the ceilings, and that would ignite, too, and we’d all be toast in about five minutes, with no time to escape the firestorm. It’s an ingenious plan, actually, but we were very lucky.”

  We all then became aware that Ni and San had finished their work at the table, and both of them were now slumped down to the ground, crying hard. It was obvious to all of us that Go had died while they were working on her, until just a few moments later, when her charred body began moving on the table. She sat up slowly, but everyone watching still jumped a bit when she did. She slid her feet out over the edge of the box, so the other two sisters could clearly see her, but strangely they didn’t react at all, or even seem to care that she was alive. And then she started weeping, too, burying her head in a blackened hand. I was really confused, but I didn’t have time to think about it, because Stephenson was about to discover the next threat we would face.

  “So this is the red color of the kaleidocide,” the little man said. “Explosives, red, makes sense.”

  “Yes, I suppose,” Terrey said, distracted and looking back and forth between Stephenson and the triplets. His distraction, and that of the triplets, was undoubtedly why Stephenson was the one, rather than they, who figured out the danger we were all in.

  “And you said that the sniper had a red belt that held all his ammunition,” the ex-professor said. “A belt that was waterproof.”

  “Yes,” Terrey said meaningfully, starting to catch on.

  “So it probably wasn’t just one of the bullets that was engineered to react with water, it was all of them. And they couldn’t count on us bringing the bullets into the base, and they couldn’t count on us getting the bullets wet. So there must be another way that this red method was supposed to work.”

  “They’re not catching fire in the ground,” I said, partly to let them know I was still watching them. “So it must take more water to cause the reaction than what’s in the ground, or in a human body.”

  “Right,” Stephenson said, and then added what most of us were already thinking. “Is there any rain in the forecast? We’d have to find the bullets before it rains, or at least be prepared to stop the fire if it starts.”

  “How could we stop something like that out there, while it’s raining, for God sake?” This was from Tyra. “Even in the city with just snow on the ground, it ate up three blocks.”

  “Girls, I’m so sorry,” Terrey said to the triplets, who were already wiping the last tears off their face, and bringing themselves back to their feet. “But you’re gonna have to help us with this. Can you start by checking the forecast?”

  “Yes,” one of them said, either Ni or San. Then right after, Go said from the table, “I’m in a lot of pain.” She said this in the direction of the Chinese tech, presumably because he was the only one there who could do anything about it. But he just stared into space, so then, with an amazing presence of mind considering her condition, she said the same thing to him in Mandarin. When she did he scurried into action, liberating a needle from the side of his medbox and sticking her with it. In no time she was lying prone again, out cold and with no care in the world.

  “No rain in any of the forecasts online,” said the triplet who had dived into the net.

  We were all silent for a while, as if we knew there was something else, and yet couldn’t place it. Finally, I was the one who broke the silence.

  “Aw hell,” I said, and the others looked up in the air when they heard my voice coming from the faraway speakers. “When does the dew form?”

  “Aw hell is right,” Terrey said, as everyone else realized it, too, and the triplets silently conferred with the net and with each other, and did some fairly complex calculations.

  “Dew point in this area,” one of them said after a few moments, “should be in about twenty minutes, with a four-minute margin of error either way.”

  “Wow, okay,” Terrey said. “Let’s get everyone in the air right now.” The triplets carried their sister to one of the flying cars and everyone else moved toward one—except for Stephenson, who stepped over to Terrey.

  “Drop me at the gravesite and I’ll find the bullets,” the little man said, and saw Terrey’s puzzled look. “I had a dream that I’ll survive the fire.”

  “What if it was the fire that already happened?” Terrey asked as he walked toward a car.

  “No, I know how this works, trust me.”

  “Well I sure don’t,” Terrey said. “But I’d rather you do it than lose another of my Trois, so fine. Let’s go.”

  I made sure that Min was keeping Lynn in the air in our aero, and high enough that there would be no possible danger to her. I even told him to check the fuel gauge, just to be safe, and there was no issue with that. Then I sat back and mentally strapped myself in, feeling helpless as usual to do anything about what I was watching, but also a bit relieved that I wasn’t there on the hill. The prospect of such an aggressive fire was frightening, even for a hardened veteran of combat like me. I went so far as to wonder whether a fire started there by those chemicals and spreading by dew could possibly reach as far as the cottage, four or five miles away. This prompted me to tell Terrey to notify the Valley’s emergency services, informing them to ready themselves and not to use water—or anything containing water—on this kind of fire. Preventative burning on swaths of ground would probably be the only recourse. Terrey thanked me and said that the triplets were already on it.

  Three aeros exited the hill through the holo and flew toward the gravesite. In one was Terrey, the nervous Chinese tech, and Jon, with whom I was now riding so I could see what happened through his eyes. In the second aero was Korcz, Stephenson, and Tyra. And in the third were the triplets, with two in the front seat and their unco
nscious sister lying in the back. Forgetting their grief for now, they were busy reviewing video from the sniper attack, calculating where the bullets could have ended up, and preparing some handheld equipment that could locate the bullets on and in the ground. I was amazed to think that they had something like this on hand, but I found out later that they actually had equipment built into their own cyborg bodies that could be removed and customized for emergency use.

  When the aeros reached the gravesite, Terrey stayed high in the air to overlook the operation and protect the double, while the other two aeros flew down close to the graves. Stephenson jumped out onto the ground, and despite Terrey’s hesitations so did one of the triplets, who handed Stephenson a scanning device. They both immediately went to work under the instructions of the triplet who stayed in the aero, and who knew what direction the bullets had gone. Many of them were on top of the ground where Min’s shield had blocked them, but others had lodged in the hill beyond the little cemetery. When Stephenson and the girl found them, they were simply sticking them in their pockets, because there had been no time to get any kind of bags or containers, and the protective belt worn by the sniper had been destroyed in the fire, of course.

  “I have to admire the plan,” Terrey said from the seat next to me—or next to my double, I should say. “If the sniper doesn’t hit his target, the bullets he fired become bombs that can start a chain reaction and spread to the house. I’m glad that the ground slopes up from the line of fire, with the hills in that direction. Imagine if the bullets traveled for miles before lodging … we’d never have a chance of finding them before they were ignited by the dew.”

  At his mention of the dew, both Jon and I looked out the window of the aero at the hills and the descending sun. I didn’t know much about science, but I remembered that dew forms when a surface cools fast enough that the water in the air near it condenses into droplets, and that was the “dew point” that the triplet referred to. Obviously the combustive reaction with the chemicals could only take place with water in its liquid state, and probably with only a certain amount of mass. So to keep the bullets from igniting, we just had to get them off the ground before the droplets formed on or around them.