Interesting Places (Interesting Times #2)

by Matthew Storm

  Oliver heard a whirring noise and then a metallic crash over the speaker. “Here,” Seven said a moment later.

  “Does Mr. Jones have vault access yet?”

  “He’s in the system. He’s cleared for the elevators and the turrets shouldn’t see him as a hostile.”

  “Turrets?” Oliver asked.

  “Thank you.” Artemis clicked the phone off. “Go to Vault 3 in Santa Clara. Return the files you have finished reading to the file room there and select new ones to study. There are rather more than you would be able to read in one lifetime, so do not make your selection too ambitious. You should also examine some of the artifacts kept there and discover their purpose.”

  Oliver nodded. “You want me to play around with them and see what they do?”

  Artemis shut her eyes and Oliver wondered if she was counting to ten before speaking again. “I certainly do not want you to play around with them, Mr. Jones. You will find that each item there has a catalog number. You may reference the numbers in our database in order to learn about their identity and purpose. I encourage you to study this information diligently, and for the sake of this entire planet, do not play with anything.”

  “Got it.”

  “Be certain that you are able to discuss some of these artifacts when you return.”

  “Will there be a test?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” Oliver hadn’t really been serious with that question, but he knew that Artemis was serious with the answer. “Okay, then. Um…I’ve never actually been to any of the vaults before.”

  “There is a first time for everything, is there not?”

  “I mean, I don’t know where it is.”

  “Ah, of course. Ask Tyler to drive you there. It would be unwise of you to enter without knowledge of our security protocols, in any case.”

  “I can take him,” Sally said from the door. Oliver looked up in surprise. He hadn’t heard her there. She shrugged. “I don’t have anything going on and I’d like to get out for some fresh air, if that’s all right.”

  Artemis nodded. “Good. I am pleased to see you taking initiative to help.”

  “I’m just getting some air, not saving the world,” Sally said.

  Artemis looked back at Oliver. “The vault is very large. I don’t expect you to unlock all its mysteries in one afternoon, of course. That would be quite impossible. Take your time, and do be careful in there.”

  “Could anything in there kill me?”

  “Death would be the least of your worries.”

  Oliver was beginning to reconsider his previous desire to get into the vault and start exploring. “I’ll take good care of him,” Sally said with a smile that was probably supposed to be reassuring, but had exactly the opposite effect. “Come on, Oliver. It’ll be good for you to see what we’ve got down there. You never know when it’s going to come in handy.”

  Chapter 9

  There wasn’t much traffic on the freeway and they made good time to Santa Clara in Sally’s Miata. “You’re going to love this,” she said as they approached the city. Her obvious excitement was a nice change in her demeanor, Oliver thought. Getting out of the office obviously agreed with her.

  Oliver, on the other hand, was no longer so sure this had been a good idea. Artemis had never explained exactly what she’d meant by “turrets,” but there seemed to be only so many possibilities. None of them involved a welcoming committee with punch and cookies.

  He would have had to admit to some surprise when Sally exited the freeway and turned into a gated retirement community with a large sign that read Casa de Flores out front. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Oliver said. “The vault is in here?”

  “If you were looking for it, is this where you’d go?”

  “Well, no.”

  “There you go, then.” She pulled up to a small security booth next to the entry gate and handed her company ID to the guard inside. He took a look at it and then scanned it with a handheld device. Oliver heard a series of beeps, and then the guard handed the badge back to her. He looked at Oliver expectantly.

  “Your ID,” she said. Oliver gave Sally his identification badge and she handed it to the guard, who put it through the same procedure as before. Oliver heard the same series of beeps and the guard handed the ID back.

  “You’re good to go. This the new guy?” he asked Sally.

  “Oliver Jones, meet Handsome Dan. Dan, this is Oliver.”

  “Hey,” said Handsome Dan.

  “Hey,” said Oliver. Oliver thought Handsome Dan might have been more aptly called Average Dan, but he didn’t feel the need to point that out.

  “Have fun in there,” Handsome Dan said. He hit a switch to open the gate and Sally drove through it, stopping the car on the other side and waiting for the gate to roll shut before moving on.

  Casa de Flores looked to consist of about 40 small ranch-style houses laid out in a rectangular grid. The houses were identical, each with a single-car garage and painted tan with brown trim. It looked to Oliver more like a painting than a place people would choose to live. “It looks like they’ve got a pretty strict Homeowner’s Association here,” he said.

  “We are the Homeowner’s Association.”

  “Seriously? Araneae owns all these houses?”

  “Every single one.”

  Oliver looked up and down the street as Sally drove. Plenty of older people were out and about in shorts and shirts that looked like they were last in style at around the time Leave it to Beaver had been popular. None of them appeared to have a care in the world. A few even waved as their car passed by. “Who are all these people, then?” Oliver asked. “They can’t be your security force.”

  “No, of course not. Artemis found them. Most of them are older people who were having money problems and looking at spending the end of their lives alone and in poverty, or worse. They get a free place to live in return for not asking questions about the house we’re heading for. Well, and for being the biggest bunch of busybodies on the planet. If these people see anything out of the ordinary, no matter how small it is, the phone in the security office goes nuts. That’s exactly how Artemis wants it.”

  “Was that the security office we just passed? Handsome Dan? No offense, but he didn’t seem like much.”

  “No, that’s just the public face. The security office is…” Sally pointed at one of the houses. “That one. Those guys have enough firepower to put a SWAT team to shame.” She pointed at another house across the street. “And that one isn’t even a house; it’s just a façade. The front part slides into the ground and there’s an Abrams M1A1 in there. We’ve got another one on the next block.”

  “M1A1? That’s…” Oliver thought about it. “That’s a tank.”

  “Well, they’re not just something we picked up at a military surplus sale. They’re very good tanks. And just in case everything else goes to hell, the entire vault is lined with enough explosives to turn the whole thing into a crater. Artemis and Seven are the only ones that can detonate it, though.”

  “You’re not serious?”

  “Do I normally make jokes? There are five vaults now. Fifty years ago there were six. Some of our predecessors had a very bad day a while back. I don’t know all the details. They had a dinosaur egg that hatched or something like that.”

  “Wow.”

  “I wouldn’t bring it up to Artemis. She’s still pretty pissed about it.”

  Oliver made a mental note to avoid that subject. He wondered if he’d be able to find the files relating to that incident today.

  As they reached the last house on the street Sally entered a code on her phone and its garage door opened. She pulled the car inside and shut the door behind them. “Come on,” she said, getting out.

  A door led from the garage into a hallway, and from there into the living room. The house looked entirely typical in every way Oliver could think of. The furnishings were modern, if not particularly elegant. There were framed family photos on the
walls of people Oliver had never seen before. A television and stereo system filled an entertainment center set in front of a long couch. Nobody seemed to be home, though. Oliver said as much to Sally.

  “Nobody is ever home,” she replied. “This one stays empty. Come on.” She opened a set of white French doors that led into an empty closet. “This way.”

  Oliver poked his head into the closet. “There’s nothing in here.”

  Sally put a hand on his back and gently pushed him inside. “Of course there isn’t. You think we keep everything in the living room?” She joined him in the closet and pulled the doors shut. “Now hold still and keep your eyes open.” She cleared her throat. “Identify.”

  Oliver heard a faint humming sound in the darkness that seemed to be coming from all around them. Then a thin rectangle of light appeared above their heads, lining the four walls of the closet. For the life of him, Oliver couldn’t tell where the light was coming from unless it was being generated inside the walls themselves. The light dropped down to eye level, forcing him to squint just a bit, but he kept his eyes open. The light then dropped down to their feet, before slowly rising up the walls again.

  “Nice,” Sally said. “You didn’t get electrocuted.”

  “Was that really a possibility?” Oliver asked.

  “Well, you wouldn’t have been electrocuted to death. Just a little bit.”

  Oliver heard a series of beeps. “Sally Rain,” she said. “Alpha access.” Another beep sounded. Sally looked at Oliver expectantly.

  “Um…Oliver Jones.” He looked at Sally questioningly. “Alpha access?”

  The confirmation beep came and then the closet lit up, the light source still seeming to be the walls themselves. He heard a grinding as if heavy machinery was stirring into action, and then the entire closet began to descend.

  “It’s an elevator,” Oliver said.

  “No, it’s a space ship. Of course it’s an elevator.”

  The elevator closet lowered them for about five full minutes, leading Oliver to wonder exactly how deep they were going. It was very difficult to gauge the elevator’s speed with no point of reference. Could it have been half a mile? How had the vault been created in the first place? It would have taken months to dig out, and how could that have been done without anyone knowing? Asking Artemis about it would probably be a waste of time. It was one more thing he’d have to check those files for. But then the elevator doors opened revealing the warehouse of Oliver’s dreams, and he found he didn’t care where it came from anymore.

  Vault 3 was easily the size of half a dozen football fields, with a high ceiling lined with lighting fixtures from one end to the other. High shelves were arranged in parallel rows with wide aisles he could have driven a truck through. The whole place looked like a Costco, but instead of bulk-packaged household items, these shelves held a dizzying assortment of different objects. Some looked quite ordinary, while others looked like they might have been thousands of years old, and some looked like they might have originated on an alien planet. It was just as well that Artemis didn’t expect him to study the vault in just one day. Cataloging this place could take weeks, or even longer.

  “How many…” Oliver began.

  “Who knows? I never spent much time here,” Sally said. “And most of my first visit was spent hiding from the security system. That thing doesn’t mess around.”

  Oliver looked at her. “This is where you came through? From your world?”

  “Come on, I’ll show you.” She led him down an aisle packed with what looked like Egyptian artifacts. Each item had a small plaque with an identification number next to it. “Those are for the database,” Sally told him when he stopped to read one. “You can look them up in the computer room. Some of the newer stuff has a touchscreen display with it you can use to pull it up right there, but there’s just way too much and we don’t have a guy who maintains the place full-time. There was a guy years ago…”

  “Don’t tell me something in here killed him?”

  “No. It was before my time. Artemis said he just vanished in here one day. Went walking down an aisle and never came back. She seems to think he’ll show up again, eventually, but I don’t see how. If you see anyone in here who isn’t us, though, let me know.”

  Oliver couldn’t tell if she was joking, but decided she probably wasn’t. He resolved to keep his eyes open, and also to keep his hands to himself. He didn’t want to wind up vanishing.

  Sally turned a corner and stopped. The remains of what had once been a tall rectangular mirror with a wooden frame sat cordoned off with red tape that surrounded it in a circle. The frame had been bashed into several large pieces and shards of glass surrounded it. “There it is,” she said.

  “You came…through this?”

  “Yeah. It’s a gateway. Or, it was a gateway.” She knelt down and took one of the shards in her hand. “It’s just glass now.” She held the shard up so he could get a better look.

  Oliver could see part of his eye reflected in the piece of mirror. “How did it work?”

  “You just walked through it and came out on the other side.” Oliver took a hesitant step backward. “Don’t worry,” Sally smirked. “It only works if the mirror’s intact. My team found ours in a bombed-out museum back home. We’d…” she paused, her eyes taking on a faraway look. “We were caught behind enemy lines and we’d been scavenging, trying to find anything we could use. At that point I’d have been happy with a few rusty old swords.” She smiled ruefully. “There wasn’t much in there, but when we found this mirror…”

  “It brought you here.”

  “It did. To this place,” she said, waving her hand at the shelves. “And this stuff was exactly what we needed. Except the minute we came through it tripped the security system and we got pinned down by the turrets. We couldn’t even get back to the mirror to get away. We were stuck in here, hiding under shelves, until Artemis and her team showed up.”

  Oliver looked around. “I don’t actually see any turrets.”

  “You don’t want to see the turrets.” Sally put the mirror shard back down on the ground where she’d found it. “Artemis wanted me to clean this up, but I’m a little attached to it. It’s the last piece of home I have, even if it’s only a reflection.”

  Oliver nodded. “You must really miss it.”

  “Sometimes,” Sally said. “But it doesn’t matter anymore. There’s no putting this thing back together.” She stood up. “The file room and the computers are over there,” she said, pointing at a set of doors along one of the far walls. “Grab an armful of stuff to read back at the office. Then you should spend some time looking around and checking database entries. Artemis is going to expect you to be able to talk about some of the things you saw here. See if you can impress her.”

  “But there’s so much in here…”

  “You don’t have to present a dissertation. Just if, I don’t know, you had to fight an Arcadian wildebeest, you’d know you could come down here and grab a gamma tetradoxalyzer to handle it.”

  Oliver blinked. “Arcadian…”

  Sally laughed. “I made all of that up,” she said.

  “So there are no Arcadian wildebeests or gamma…” he’d already forgotten the next word.

  “I hope not. Then again, who knows? Take your time. I’m going to poke around a little, too. When you’re done there’s something I want to show you, if it’s still here.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a surprise. You’ll love it, trust me.”

  The file room alone turned out to be bigger than their entire office in San Francisco. Oliver spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out the cataloging system but completely failed to work out how the files were organized, so eventually he just grabbed an armful out of a cabinet at random. He’d have plenty of time to read them back at the office later. Files weren’t what he’d really come here to see, anyway.

  The vault’s shelves were another matter entirely. Oliver spent a good
two hours wandering up and down the aisles, examining different artifacts and taking note of their catalog numbers, and then using a computer to look up their entries. He didn’t find the Ark of the Covenant, but the things he did see boggled his mind.

  Sally finally appeared at the entrance to the computer room as he was reading. “Find anything interesting?”

  “Did you know there’s a knife in here that can cut anything?” Oliver asked.

  “That could come in handy sometime. You should try to remember where it is.”

  “And there’s a little statue of a dog that came out of an Egyptian tomb. It’s related to the Spanish Flu that killed half the world in 1918 somehow but I’m still reading…”

  “It killed half the world?”

  “Well, no, but it was a lot.”

  “Come on, Oliver. I want to show you something. We’re just lucky it’s still here.”

  Oliver followed Sally down a series of aisles until they came to stand in front of what appeared to be an old submarine. It was about thirty feet long, large enough for a tall man to stand up inside, and shaped like a bullet with portholes spaced evenly down both sides of the hull. Rust appeared to have gotten the better of it at some point; there was no way this thing was seaworthy, if it ever had been. Oliver ran a hand along the smooth metal of its hull and knocked on it once with his fist. “What is it? I thought it was a submarine, but it doesn’t have propellers. Some kind of bathyscaphe?”

  Sally grinned. “You ready for this? It’s a time machine.”

  Oliver pulled his hand away from the vehicle as if it were about to catch fire. “Are you serious?”

  “Absolutely,” Sally said. “Can you believe it? This thing right here.” She placed her palm on the vehicle’s side. “It’s an actual time machine.”

  Oliver wasn’t sure what he would have expected a time machine to look like, other than a British police box or maybe a DeLorean. This device wasn’t elegant in the least, but the thought of a real time machine right in front of him left him nearly speechless. “Wow.”

  “I know, right? I could hardly believe it, myself. Think about what you could do with it.”