That, bizarre though it might be, was the only explanation that made sense. They wouldn’t have access to one of the few flying craft left.
But how had they generated so much destruction and sailed a large yacht away? If they’d commandeered a boat at the Lakeplex port, it suggested that their original traveling companion—one of the men in the boat—might have excellent sailing skills. It didn’t translate perfectly; sailing a small personal sailboat or motorboat wasn’t the same thing as blasting away the dock as you pulled a craft of such massive tonnage away.
Without knowing the man’s background, he couldn’t rule out the possibility that he might have such skills.
But could he also pilot them away from the Ravagers, disable whatever security might be protecting the boat, and blow up the dock?
He zoomed in on the image of the fifth member of the group, the one who’d joined up after the rendezvous by his home in the Lakeplex. The man who’d done what none of the other four could have done. But the man had dipped below the side of the smaller boat; Micah could see nothing more than a few tufts of hair.
It didn’t matter. Mary and the children clearly trusted him, and so Micah moved on. He’d need to get a message to Jeffrey and Desdemona, letting them know he’d located Mary and the children, and that his island outpost was almost certainly Ravager-destroyed by now. He measured and computed the direction of travel and sent that along as well, suggesting that the big boat had sufficient capacity to reach the mainland. They’d dig up their old ship and get Roddy out to the East to track his family down and bring them home, reuniting them after so many years and so much confusion and heartache. And they’d need to do it quickly, before any Ravagers in the East outside Micah’s control activated and might do what the machines in the West had failed to do: destroy their estranged daughter-in-law and grandchildren.
With the message sent, Micah returned to his final effort: working the underground terrestrial network that would connect him to the ancients.
He'd made the first crack through and sent his first broadcast message out—one that emphasized he was no stranger and no enemy. He explained how he’d gotten in—he’d traced traffic from new entertainment videos and music through a network pathway that shouldn’t exist where it reached people who couldn’t be alive—and told them how they could prevent future incursions by the enemy should they ever suspect any of the ancients remained. He added more stories from the old days to increase his credibility and trustworthiness, and ended his message with a plea: to keep the channels of communication with him open, but offered them other means to reach him if they preferred to lock the network connection down, teasing them with a promise of a way to reawaken something from the distant past for those interested.
Most of all, he offered a warning. He told them of the reprogrammed nanos and the damage they’d done, how he now controlled them, how he’d use them against the old enemy now rising from the ashes to a dominance their ancient counterparts could only dream about… until they ran into the teeth of the weapon they’d launched against others. He warned them to be careful, told them how to protect themselves and their property from harm.
And then… he waited.
He needed his ship back, preferably with Sheila aboard. He needed to make sure that Roddy and his family were safely reunited. And he needed the help of the ancients, the only ones who could fight the new Phoenix elite, just as they’d fought before in the war preceding the Golden Ages.
He had to succeed, had to make sure all actions were completed successfully.
It was only the fate of humanity—and the world—in the balance.
No pressure at all.
—17—
SHEILA CLARKE
SHE REREAD THE SIGN three times. It wasn’t necessary, technically; the large, neon letters spelled out “Armory” in the clearest possible way.
But nothing else made sense.
There were no guards here. It seemed to her that if you had a depot for arms and ammunition, you’d post a guard outside; that was standard back on the surface.
She’d also expected to find another set of the alarmed doors in place. Instead, there were no doors at all; the entry was wide enough to accommodate five people across at a time.
She looked at those puzzling details, and once more read the sign. It still glowed with the letters spelling the word Armory.
She shook her invisible head and floated inside.
The place was enormous, easily the largest semi-enclosed space she’d seen here outside Noah’s Ark. It was stocked with everything she could want or need for her upcoming escapades in the remaining hours before her escape. Grenades. Explosives of various sizes, both with and without timers. Firearms and ammunition, from the smallest caliber bullet and the associated miniature handgun up to massive shoulder-mounted beasts that could fire shells she thought might tear a hole in the side of the station. That seemed like a questionable product choice, but then, nothing about how they handled their Armory made sense to her.
But she did know one thing: having been through training sessions with the hardcore women and men in the armed forces, she knew they'd be literally drooling in a place like this, unlimited variety and, as best she could tell, it was free for the taking.
The memory of how so many of them died—and by whose hand—brought her back, reminded her why she was here, and reinforced her determination to carry her final mission aboard this station through to a successful completion.
No matter the personal price she might pay.
The plan called for her to free those detained in the Brig and leave for them sufficient weaponry to fight against their jailers, making their way eventually to the docking stations where sufficient ships awaited to carry them all back to the surface. That served two purposes: it freed the imprisoned from captivity and risk of recapture, and it stranded some portion of Phoenix here in space. She was under no illusions that those freed would all survive the battles to come, or that all of them would make it safely home. But she’d give them that chance.
To make that plan work, she’d written out a note explaining who she was and what she’d done. She’d reminded them of the location of the docking stations relative to the Brig, as she couldn’t be certain if they had any notion of where to go. And she told them that she’d leave sufficient distractions to keep local security busy—that it should make the path clear. Couldn’t promise anything, being but one person.
For those freed, she’d need a huge number of weapons and lots of ammunition. She could only carry so much without losing her ability to remain unseen, which meant size was critical. She scanned the weaponry, read the data, computed in her head the best combination of small size, high capacity, and firing power. She nodded at the bins—full bins of this stuff!—where the components were stored. She formed an invisible backpack outside her body, one that she could “stretch” as needed.
She also made a smaller bag she’d used to hold the supplies she’d keep with her. One handgun with a bit more kick. Plenty of ammunition. Hope that she’d not need to use it, as it would only conceivably be used if she lost her shielding. More critical were the explosives. She’d take as many as she could carry, a couple with remote detonators, most with timers.
Prepared for her shopping spree… she waited. There were people milling about inside, and she didn’t want to make obvious the presence of an invisible force making materials disappear, especially not in the quantities she’d use.
She needed to test her collection mechanism. She hovered over the bin holding her choice for her personal sidearm. Waited until nobody was there. Sent a small sliver of nanos down to “swallow” the weapon into invisibility. Floated it back through the air. Dropped it into her invisible carrying bag. Looked around. Nobody reacted.
Satisfied, she spent the next forty-five minutes repeating the process, collecting in small batches so as not to alert the other shoppers. Most left without taking anything, they were apparently just looking around. But they ce
rtainly made no indication that they’d noticed certain bins empty gradually. She hadn’t noticed any security cameras on the walls, ceilings, floors, or anywhere else.
One woman caught her attention, exhaling audibly at the new weapon she picked up. She collected a bit of ammunition and stowed it in a personal carrying bag. And then she walked out the entry.
A mechanical voice filled the space. “Joanna Farwick, checking out quantity one Field 226 semi-automatic, magazines 543234 and 543546.”
Sheila winced. Well, that explained everything. Everything in here was chipped, down to the smallest bullet. The walls allowing entry and exit scanned everything, knew who you were, and thus knew who got what. They probably tracked what you picked up over time, looking for interesting patterns of accumulation. She wondered if there was a shooting range here for practice. Made sense; they had plenty of weaponry, little reason to suspect an attack, and people who needed to build or retain their skills.
And that meant the security teams here didn’t need to post an on-site guard or lock the doors. Alerted to patterns of someone who picked up weaponry, not to practice with, but to collect and accumulate, they could pay people visits quietly and inquire as to why they might need so many weapons or so much ammunition.
She wondered why that didn’t apply to the other doors, wondered if it was because they were trying to keep things in, not keep people out. If there were radiation leaks in the central core, you could keep everyone out and contain the radiation. And you obviously didn’t want one of the giant animals with the huge teeth wandering out; she doubted the creatures would be deterred by a human voice demanding it stay in its cage.
Still, it posed an issue. How would the system react to a person not in their records floating out a huge stash of weaponry? That would trigger all types of warning signals and draw far too much attention.
Her eyes fell upon the man still perusing a wall of rifles. Her mouth tightened, and her eyes turned into slits. He was about to have a very bad day.
She attached both bags into a single unit and had it track the man, floating a few feet over his head. Sheila then floated out through the door—no voice, no alarm, which meant she'd removed everything—and waited.
The man completed his selection—ironically, the same one Sheila had chosen for herself—grabbed a box of applicable bullets, muttered something about “scary times what with at least two traitors running around,” and headed out.
“Anthony Bell, checking out quantity nine hand grenades, forty-five Field 1228 semi-automatic weapons, twenty-eight Lowell explosives and timers—”
Anthony Bell stopped in his tracks. His face was incredulous. “What? What are you talking about? I haven’t got any of those!”
The bored computer voice completed the inventory—including, at the very end, the items Anthony, rather than Sheila, had actually selected—and ended with the ominous command: “Remain where you are, Anthony Bell.”
“But I only got this!” He held out the weapon and the boxes of bullets. “The system is clearly malfunctioning.”
Sheila watched as a security detail emerged through doors hidden behind the shelving in the store, rifles pointed at the head of the baffled man, shouts ordering him to put down his weaponry and raise his hands.
“Sorry,” Sheila muttered an apology to a man she'd never meet with words he'd never hear.
Then she floated away.
She took with her the stash of weaponry now presumed owned by one Anthony Bell. Security would question him. Demand to know where everything was. Would realize that something was wrong since they could see nothing, and he wasn’t carrying anything else on his person. Would wonder about a malfunction. Would eventually realize that the inventory was down by exactly the amount detected by the system.
By the time they connected this bizarre episode back to “the two traitors running around” and tried to ascertain how they’d tricked the inventory tracking system… those missing weapons would be turned against Phoenix.
She hoped.
Sheila floated along at a higher speed than usual, less concerned now about detection. What she’d just done, what she was about to do, meant the finer subtleties of her invisibility weren’t quite so important. As she moved, she split the two invisible bags and pulled her personal one close, mentally pushing everything inside into her pockets, absorbing the nanos back into the thinner exoskeleton.
She reached the Brig without incident.
It was as opposite the Armory as possible. There were no signs. There were guards. The doors were armed with the standard security system she’d seen elsewhere.
The guards were on high alert, heads shifting back and forth at every real or imagined noise, hands on rifles held ready to shoot anything suspicious.
She expanded her personal cocoon, thinning it out to give herself an invisible workspace. She opened the larger pack first and made sure that the written note was in there, then “resealed” it and pushed it away and back out of her cocoon. She opened the smaller bag and found the five most powerful explosives she had. She “sealed” the smaller bag and moved it aside. Then she pulled her cocoon closer to her body once more, shrinking her workspace, and used it to silently attach each explosive to the Brig entry doors, affixing them to the inside of the frame to minimize the chance they’d be seen. She then quickly set the timers for fifteen seconds each, floated up and away, and then used a few nanos to “knock” on the doors she’d just set for demolition.
One of the guards paused and glanced at her partner. “Did you hear that?”
The man paused, then shook his head. “I haven't heard anything but my stomach grumbling. Aren't we about due to be relieved?”
“Pretty soon, I think. But I thought I heard something else, like someone had knocked on the doors.”
They both turned toward the doors to look, took two steps closer.
The explosions were deafening. The security doors evaporated, and the gap expanded far beyond the space she’d set. She knew she’d overdone it, but she also knew that she wouldn’t get a second chance; overkill was necessary.
She saw no sign of the guards, nothing recognizable as human in the debris pile around the new, expanded Brig entryway. It meant she’d killed two men in cold blood, with full intent this time. This time, the deaths were intentional.
She felt nothing. This was war.
She shot through the opening, through the dust and smoke, and looked around. The Brig was another large, open space with little semblance of personal privacy. Cots with thin blankets covered much of the floor space. There were a few small showers lining one of the walls, and a few toilets nearby; it looked like the prisoners had fashioned a few small stands to hold towels to provide a moderate bit of privacy for washing and elimination activities. She saw long, dull tables with trays of partially eaten food that looked like it was spoiling.
And there were people. Dozens of them. Most were able-bodied adults, but she spotted at least three young children. And there were two older men who looked like they couldn’t walk, just lying on two of the cots, veins protruding from thin skin. She wondered if they were dead, just left there by the jailers, and found herself even less ashamed of the murder she’d just committed.
She moved to the open floor space—the part of the area without cots, tables, toilets, or showers—where the bulk of the population congregated. She imagined there’d normally be idle chatter of some kind, but now they all stared at the gaping hole where the security doors had once been, eyes wide as if wondering what they’d see when the dust settled. Sheila put the large weapons bag in the middle of the space and dissolved the bag away, just as she heard one woman note that they could now finally escape their prison… just to be shot by the guards outside.
It only took seconds for them to notice the mini-armory that had appeared. “Guns! Grenades!” came the shouts. “We can fight back now!”
One of the children noticed the letter. She picked it up and read it aloud, the voice uneven and lurc
hing in the manner of all new readers. The adults crowded around, even as they distributed the weaponry, listening intently to every word. Their faces, lifeless and hopeless a moment ago, were transformed into stern, battle-hardened lines of determination now. They nodded as the child finished reading Sheila’s written explanation; bizarre though it sounded, they’d learned through being captive inside a city floating in space that so much of what they “knew” was wrong and that Sheila’s words of explanation made as much sense as anything else.
A few of them murmured quiet thanks to their invisible benefactor.
Sheila was already flying away, back through the much larger and unsecured doorway. But she murmured a quiet “you’re welcome” back to the group, though she knew they couldn’t hear her.
She knew security would be on its way soon to re-secure the Brig. They’d be surprised—probably—to find the prisoners armed and ready to fight.
Sheila would give them more to worry about before they ever reached the Brig.
She floated down the massive corridor, away from the Brig and heading toward the docking bays, snapping explosives to the walls, setting timers for random and varied intervals. She wanted the explosions to be chaotic, to look unplanned, to make it look like she was moving back and forth, up and down the corridor, leaving them wondering when and where the next explosion would strike.
With any luck, she’d take out more members of the security guard as they headed toward the impending fight with those unjustly imprisoned, men and women who now had a chance for freedom, who would literally fight to the death to keep that freedom.
And then she’d reached the docking area, a huge complex in and of itself. There were docking bays up and down the corridor, each with centralized hubs where passengers could safely enter the space station. She tried to count, but lost track at thirty central hubs, fifteen on each side of the central corridor. The hubs seemed to specialize in ships of varying sizes, but most had between three and five separate docking areas, usually on levels, spread out from nearest to farthest from the central hub area. She found the hub called AA, noted that there were two levels—numbered 1 and 2—and spotted Micah’s silvery sphere beyond two other docking bays on that level. Hub AA, level two, third bay out.
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