Two of the women incarcerated with her had also been in her assault force. Both had been with about fifty who had surrendered to the Marines. One of them, Tamika Dilliard-Smith, said she had seen Colonel Hannrahan go down, his head blown off of his shoulders. Michi hadn’t really liked her so-called assistant, but she shed a few tears at the news.
At least the FCDC interrogators had left them alone so far. Michi thought it was because of too many witnesses. If she was taken, others would know it. If she “disappeared” or came back a vegetable, others would know it. She had no doubt that the fuckdicks—how she loved that term—would be trying to come up with a plan to isolate them, but for now, she was relatively safe.
So when the cell door clicked and swung open on the second night after her arrival, Michi looked upon that with extreme suspicion. What better way to isolate their prize prisoners than to let them go and then capture them again? If she was not taken back to their communal cell, the others could be told she had either escaped or had been killed in her recapture.
The other 15 women got up and approached the door, buzzing on what it could mean. Two women frankly said it was a trap, and they sat on one of the bunks, refusing to get up. Several other women cautiously stepped into the main corridor.
From down that corridor, Michi heard a voice call out, “Look at the guards! They’re locked in!”
Despite her misgivings, Michi had to see. She pushed past several of her cellmates and out into the corridor. From each cell, both men and women were gathering outside. At the end, where the guards controlled the cells, about 20 prisoners were gathered, several pointing and laughing. Michi made her way down the corridor to see for herself.
The guard station occupied what would have been the first cell in line. However, the wall was reinforced glass, and inside were chairs and the control panel. Each cell was under 24-hour observation and could be controlled as far as locking the door, turning off the lights, and even administering knock-out gas. Only now, none of that was happening. Inside, three guards were standing, looking at the prisoners. One was holding a handwritten note that said:
Get back to your cells now!
In back of them, their control panel was off. None of the feeds worked. To make things worse for them, the red light on the door leading out into the main corridor was flashing. They were locked in.
Michi looked at the others. Was this a trap? Even if it was, she knew this could be her chance. If she left, they would still have to capture her again, and she wasn’t going to let that happen. One way or the other, she was not coming back alive.
Two of the men pushed open their wing door, and it opened into the main corridor. In a rush, about forty of them poured into the main corridor. Down on the far end, there was only a set of double gates before leading to the holding room and the outside.
From other wings, people started trickling out. It looked like every cell in the place had been opened. Starting slowly, then gathering momentum and people, the tide of prisoners rushed the double gates. If they were locked, Michi figured people would get crushed in the press, but it was too late to worry about that. The mob wouldn’t be stopped.
The gates were open, though, and within moments, the leading edge of the mob was out in the darkness. Several people were out and about, and they ran when confronted with the mass escape. Two jacks came around the corner, saw the mob, and turned and ran. They would report what they had seen, however, so time was a-wasting.
Michi looked around her. There had to be 200 prisoners outside the jail now, and more were still coming. Michi knew she had to get out of there, so she started running. She didn’t have a destination; she just needed to get as far away from the jail as she could.
She started running out of breath within five minutes. The time she had spent as a prisoner, and her refusal to exercise, was taking its toll. She recognized the Tennyson complex and turned into it. Doug had been able to control it, so maybe others had as well, keeping surveillance out of it. She was winded, anyway, so she had to stop.
Michi crept past one of the broken-down entrances and looked around. She wasn’t sure of the time, but there were a number of people going about their business. Her orange jumpsuit made her stand out, but so far, nobody seemed to take overt notice. When the word was passed, however, and a reward offered, she was sure that some of the people would suddenly recall the orange-clad figure skulking around in the night.
She knew she had to get out of sight for awhile and plan out what she wanted to do. Each complex had a small retail section, and she made her way in back of the line of stores. She thought there might be something that had been discarded she could put on to get rid of the jumpsuit.
She cautiously approached the first dumpster, looking to see if anyone was watching her. She grabbed the lid and lifted.
“Shut that thing!” an orange jumpsuited man yelled back up to her from where he was lying inside.
She dropped the lid, her heart pounding. How had he gotten there so quickly? She must have really gotten out of shape. She moved down two more, then slowly lifted up the lid. When no one yelled out, she slid inside.
There was restaurant refuse in the dumpster, so it stunk with rotting food. She didn’t care much about that as she rooted around in the darkness, feeling for clothing. To her surprise, she felt something right away. Running her fingers over it, she could tell is was a shirt. It was a little difficult to get it on with only one working hand, but she managed to pull it over her jumpsuit. It had some slime on it, but it would do, she hoped. Now she just needed something for her legs, and she could get out of there and move on.
She felt something and pulled it out of the garbage, but she thought it was another shirt and discarded it. If she didn’t find anything soon, she would have to bail and just hope the shirt she’d found would be enough.
She was down in the far corner of the dumpster and had put her hand into something particularly disgusting when the lid of the dumpster opened.
She wheeled around ready to attack, one-handed or not, when a voice asked, “Michi? That you?”
Doug and Tamara were standing there, concerned looks on their faces.
“Shit girl, get out of there. We’ve got to get you out of here and hidden,” Tamara said, relief evident in her voice.
For Michi, she was not sure if she’d ever seen such a welcome sight in her life.
Chapter 37
“Get out of bed and do something,” Tamara said.
“Easy for you to say,” Michi grumbled. “You’re not stuck in this cage.”
“Look, I know it’s tough, but hang in there. We’ll figure out something. Doug will come by at lunchtime, and maybe we can both be here for a nice dinner. I’ve really got to go, though.”
She kissed Michi on the forehead and then left for work.
Michi turned over and pulled her lone sheet over her head. She knew she shouldn’t take it out on Tamara. She owed the two of them too much. But she had no contact with anyone else, so that left only her two friends.
It had been the two of them who had sprung her from captivity. They had scoured the lists for her name among the dead and captured. Doug had finally found reference to her on some company docs and her transfer to FCDC custody, but he couldn’t pinpoint a location nor anything else. The FCDC security was just too tough for him to hack. They had been surprised and overjoyed, then when she turned up as a transfer to the city jail. It hadn’t taken Doug long to pinpoint her, even hacking into the surveillance inside her cell.
Between the two of them, they had considered and rejected a number of plans, finally coming up with taking control of the jail, then locking in the guards while opening the prisoner cells. The hope was that so many people would escape that it would overwhelm the jacks, giving them time to locate and isolate Michi. Using the same technology as he had once described to Michi, he had programs scanning all surveillance cams looking for her body and gait. Michi had changed through the course of her abuse, but after several false
hits, the two friends saw Michi enter the complex and walk in back of the shops. Surveillance was down in the back access, but Tamara had been sure that was her, so they had rushed to find her.
When they could not see her, they started opening dumpsters, first surprising the same other escapee, then finding her in the fourth dumpster they’d tried. They had her throw on the clothes they’d brought which added about twenty pounds with the padding, and gave her the old boots she’d worn with the gait-changing inserts. One of Doug’s planned safe houses was inside Tennyson II, so within ten minutes, they had her inside and in a hot bath. Tamara had stayed with her that night, holding Michi in bed until she fell asleep.
For the next week, both of her friends tried to see her as often as they could. They brought food and more importantly, news. Michi was cut off from the outside world: no net, no vids, no holos. Doug didn’t want there to be any trace of her in the city.
At first, Michi wanted to know about the attack. Doug had access to the corporate records, and the intra-company memos reported that 622 “rebels” were killed, 813 captured. Of the captured, five had died while in detention. Details of the attack were sketchy, but it seemed that Derrick, one of the first two jacks who had first awaken her after her capture, had the basics correct (other than the number of casualties). The Marines, with help from corporate security and spies within the NIP, were well aware of the coming attack. The river commando force had been captured as they entered the water. The day “patrols” that had gone out were actually assault forces, and they had quickly captured the forward command center and the gun position. Finally, the Marine assault force and supporting arms had broken up the attack and killed, captured, or scattered her fighters. Not one Marine had even been wounded.
In retrospect, to think they had a chance against prepared Marines was a ridiculous notion. Michi had thought in her heart, they could win, and in defeating that one Marine company, that would force the Federation to leave the planet.
The results sickened her, especially the knowledge that they had essentially been doing the Federation’s bidding by attacking. They had been drawn out, tricked into attacking a defensible position, and then broken. With the main armed force gone, the Marines were no longer needed, and they were taken away for their next devil’s mission.
Michi wanted to know if there had been any reaction, any protesting the failed attack. There had been almost nothing, Doug and Tamara told her. If the company had expected a crushing defeat to also crush the population, then they had been correct. The people had been cowed. Even the WRP, while not disbanded, had closed shop until things had stabilized.
It looked like the company had won.
Oh, Michi and her two friends played scenarios in their minds, from simple things such as jumping another jack to fanciful plans such as enlisting the Brotherhood to invade and set thing right. Nothing was either possible or would make an impact.
Their conversations shifted from striking back to smuggling Michi off the planet and to some non-Federation world. That would be difficult, though. The jail break had been big news, and Michi was prominently displayed and declared “high importance” and with a large reward, a target for anyone wanting to cash in. Security had been tightened, and bounty hunters tracked down any trace of her.
One other aspect of the jailbreak was that the company now knew someone had a backdoor into their system. It was only a matter of time until they tracked the breach down, and Doug was getting more and more nervous. Ironically, it was Doug’s own division that was part of the team trying to find the breach.
Michi turned over to her back, holding out her right arm. Her hand itched horribly, and even though she knew that was a good sign, she was tempted to rip the chamber off and throw it away. She resisted, though: it would be hard for her to walk into a clinic for any treatment.
She finally got up out of bed and made herself some instant noodles.
God, I’m getting sick of these, she thought.
She finished them, then crawled back into bed, where she still was four hours later when Doug came in the door. She caught the slight frown of disapproval from him as he saw her, but at least he didn’t nag like Tamara did.
He handed her a hotpack. It was Italian! That was the best thing that had happened today. She popped the activator, waited ten seconds, then unzipped the top, letting the aromas of amatriciana waft through the room.
She had never realized how dependent she had been on fabricators. But with Doug vetoing any power usage in the room, fabricators were out, and she could only eat prepared food and takeout. The pasta smelled wonderful and tasted even better.
In a better mood, she started chatting with Doug. He’d been working on finding her a way off-planet, but with the heightened security, he couldn’t spend much time on it yet. And that was also why he could only come over during his lunch break. No more virtual work days. He had to physically be there.
Michi peeled open the hotpack and licked the remaining sauce. “This was great! I’m getting so that I would even eat raw bases, and let my stomach fabricate them,” she said with a laugh.
“Oh, I’m sure Tammy could get you some Blue-99 if you really wanted,” Doug said with a laugh.
He had been calling her Tammy ever since Michi got out, but she couldn’t tell if their relationship had changed,
“I think I was close enough to the damn stuff on my own,” she said bitterly. “You know, even with it being a trap, if we could have just made in into the algae banks, we might have been able to win. The Marines might be the best around, but that can make people too confident. By selecting that area for us to attack,” and she realized now that the company-slash-Federation had maneuvered things for just that end, “they left an Achilles heel. The company couldn’t risk losing all that base, and they would have had to negotiate. Maybe we should have forgotten the attack and just snuck in and planted explosives. It couldn’t have been a worse outcome.”
“They’ve got pretty serious security around the farm. That’s their most valuable base, and certainly their most vulnerable in those hydro-glass tubes,” Doug said. “In order to affect them, you’d have to get them some other way. Disease, maybe. Or corruption. But then the problem would be delivery. They wouldn’t let someone in a white lab coat just walk in and inject the farm with a virus, you know. A contagion is one thing, but without a vector, it would just be like all our other plans, stupid games of fantasy.”
Michi checked the pack for any last traces of sauce. She was only half-listening to Doug, who, quite frankly, tended to go off on technological soliloquies that Michi had neither the background nor inclination to follow. But then she stopped. Something he had just said registered.
“We have a vector,” she said.
“What vector?” Doug asked, already getting up to go back to work.
“Tamara!”
Chapter 38
“No, that wouldn’t work,” Doug protested.
Michi took the last piece of pizza. The three of them had been up for hours arguing, and the pizza was cold, but Italian twice in one day was a treat.
“Why not?” Tamara asked.
“The viral screens. The company is not stupid, and even without the acts of man, nature can inject a virus as it so wills. So each bank of tubes has a virus screen at the CO2 generators. Besides, what would you do? Just show up and walk down the rows? You think your little access badge is going to make them let you destroy the algae? Anyway, even if you did, all that would be is revenge, like I said before. We’d have no leverage.”
“And I told you, at this stage, revenge would be good enough for me,” Michi said before downing the last bite of crust.
“But that is why the programming would be a better option. We can threaten to destroy their entire strain. They would have to listen, then. And best of all, it can be injected into the matrix at the organics lab.”
“I swear, I still don’t understand how it could work. How can computer programming affect a growing organi
sm?” Michi asked with Tamara nodding in agreement.
“I’ve tried to explain it. Let me reword it. Uh . . . OK, you know that Blue-99 is a genetically modified product, one owned by the company, right?” When both girls nodded, he went on. “So, in some ways, the algae is just a programmed matrix that sort of sits on top of the original DNA. The matrix sends signals to the DNA to do what the company wants it to do. As long as the programming functions correctly, the algae’s DNA follows the instructions, making Blue-99. If that programming were modified to, let’s say, activate the cell’s suicide switch, then all the algae would die. So all we have to do is input a worm that will change the programming.”
“It sort of makes sense, but you said it might not work,” Tamara told him.
“In theory, it will work. But in reality, we need the worm that will change the programming as we want it to. That’s the hard part.”
“So the simple question is, can you do it?”
“I don’t know, to be honest. I might be able to, but we wouldn’t know until we try it. And we might only have one shot at it,” he admitted.
“How long to know if you can pull this off?”
“Probably in a week or so. I would know at least if I can’t do it. I wouldn’t know for sure if I can until we send the worm on its way. Then there is the timing. Tammy would have to infect the programming while I still have my backdoor, and I don’t know how long that will be. They’re closing in, and all my evasion techniques are only delaying the inevitable.”
“A week? Well, I don’t totally understand, but I’ve got to trust you, Doug. Let’s do it.”
Chapter 39
Six days later, Doug and Michi were back at Tamara’s and his condo. Michi had already taken off the regen chamber from her hand and put on her costumes. Her finger was not totally healed, but there wasn’t anything to be done about that. There was nothing for her to do yet, so she had to just sit with Doug and watch.
Rebel (The United Federation Marine Corps) Page 19