Unclear Skies

by Jason LaPier

  “How is this going to work?” Dava asked.

  “I’m locking out the intake of power here, on this side,” he said, pointing at some kind of map on the screen. “From the power station. So that means, no more relaying power from there to the observatory over here. However, there is another power line directly on the opposite side of town. That one goes straight to the observatory. See? It makes a big ring.”

  Dava didn’t really see it, but ventured a guess. “So we’re breaking the ring?”

  “Right, that’s what we do first. But the reason it’s built like a ring is so if there is a break, power can still flow around the other way.”

  She sighed. “I don’t get it. Why are we here if the observatory is still going to get power from the other station?”

  “That’s where we get crafty.” Freezer smiled and cracked his knuckles. “See, this whole redundancy ring has a priority system built in. And Vulca City gets priority over everything. So all we have to do is convince this far power station that there’s a problem, and then it will stop sending power to the observatory because the town has priority.”

  “So how do we do that?”

  “From here, I can start an emergency drain. This will suck power from the observatory like air out of a hull breach.” He curled his hands into a tube and put them to his mouth, making a sucking sound. “Like that, right? The drain will pull power from the other side, right through the observatory. The other side will detect the massive spike in load and go into an emergency cut-off so as not to deprive the town.”

  She slapped him on the shoulder. “You know, Frank, you’re a lot more useful when you don’t have a gun in your hands.”

  Freezer sighed. “Yeah, I know. I know. Alright.” He tapped at the keys. “Let’s kill the lights in this motherfucker.”

  * * *

  Once the doors of the transport opened into the garage in Vulca City, Runstom was so wound up he practically sprinted out. Troyo bobbed along behind him, trying to keep up while warning him not to get involved. He found the exit and looked up and down one of the short, wide corridors that he saw everywhere in this place.

  Re-routed, with no explanation. The damn bus had just turned around halfway to the observatory. He knew something was up, and no one was telling him. Not Captain Oliver, who was not answering any of the messages he sent to her. Not anyone on the transport. His traveling companions, Dr. Leesen and Peter Troyo, we just as clueless. He needed to find someone who knew what was happening.

  He grabbed the arm of a woman in gray coveralls who was passing by with her face in a large handypad. “Where’s the security office?”

  “What?” she said, looking up and blinking.

  “Stan, just leave it be,” Troyo tried to say, but Runstom waved him away.

  He pulled out his notepad and flipped back a few pages. “Willis Polinsky. Head of Security. Where would I find him?”

  “Oh. Um, Willy’s office is just down the auburn side of the hall.”

  He looked up and down the corridor. The walls in either direction were painted a kind of reddish brown. “Can you just point, please?”

  She leaned back and cocked her head slightly. “Yeah, that way.” Her eyes went to Runstom’s notepad. “Hey … is that paper?”

  He ignored her and stalked off down the hall. Behind him, Troyo was saying, “Stan, slow down. Sheesh, I coulda told you where Willy’s office was.”

  Runstom was moving so fast down the rust-colored tube, he went by a door and didn’t register the words HEAD OF SECURITY until he’d passed it. He turned around to see Troyo standing there waiting for him. He pointed at the door, then held out a hand. “Willy’s office. I’ll do the talking.”

  Troyo opened the door and Runstom was forced to bring up the rear. Willis Polinsky was pacing around the back of the small office, talking on a headset. There were no details in this side of the conversation, just a few yeahs and nos. He nodded to them as they came in and held up a single finger.

  “Yeah, okay. Fine.” He tapped the headset and put on a wary smile. “Petey. Stanford. What brings y’all to my office this morning?”

  “Willy,” Troyo said, taking a step forward as if to block Runstom slightly. “What’s going on? We were on a transport out to the observatory and it stopped and turned around.”

  “Ah, that.” Polinsky looked down at his hands. “Had to come back in.”

  “But why?”

  “Protocol.” He’d shaven since Runstom last saw him, and it made the man look young. Too young for the job.

  “What protocol?” Runstom asked, sidestepping Troyo.

  “Well, I can’t really say.”

  “Willy, come on, man.” Troyo put on his broad smile. “It’s me. You can fill us in a little, can’t you?”

  He looked from Troyo to Runstom and back. “It’s just – well, for security reasons, I can’t really say.”

  “For security reasons,” Runstom said.

  “Yeah,” he replied, drawing the word out.

  “Who else knows?” Runstom prodded.

  “Uh. What, uh, what do you mean?”

  “Who has clearance? Who could we request clearance from?”

  “Well, I’m not sure. I – I don’t know.”

  “Aren’t you head of security?”

  “Okay, Stan,” Troyo said, making his way around the room and putting a hand on Polinsky’s shoulder. “I think that’s enough. Willy would tell us if he could.”

  “You’re right.” Runstom blinked in revelation. “He doesn’t know what’s going on.”

  Polinsky frowned and looked at his hands. Troyo took a step back and looked at him. “Really? Willy, you really don’t know?”

  “Dammit,” he said, slapping his hands down on his desk. “No, I don’t know. It’s an alarm. It’s just a damn alarm from the guys over at the south power relay station. I don’t know why it went off or who tripped it.” He looked up, his eyes beginning to water. “No one will answer the damn radio!”

  “An alarm,” Troyo said.

  “From the guys?” Runstom asked. He took out his notepad. “You mean the guards stationed there? At the south power relay station? What time did it go off?”

  “A little after nine.”

  Runstom took a step forward. “What time, Willy?”

  Polinsky sighed and shuffled to his desk, picking up a handypad. “Oh nine oh seven in the A.M. It went off at 9:07.”

  “Okay.” Runstom jotted down a note and then spun toward the door. “Thank you, Willy.”

  He hit the hallway and kept marching, not knowing where he was going next, only knowing that he was being kept in the dark. His whole career he’d been kept in the dark, and this new position hadn’t changed anything in the slightest. He needed to talk to Captain Oliver.

  “Look, man.” Troyo came up behind him, then came around in front of him to stop him in his tracks. “Look, just stop a second.”

  “Get out of my way.”

  “No one is more pissed about this than me, okay?” Troyo’s face turned dark, rare creases forming in his forehead and around his eyes. He stuck an arm out to gesture at something in the distance. “I had a whole fucking day planned out there. You know, it’s not easy to get all these assholes to come see us. None of them fucking want us here, and I have to put on a smile and practically beg them to show up for these little shindigs. All so we can show how fucking nice and shiny ModPol is and what great chums they are to have around. So I don’t even know what the hell you’re so mad about. You didn’t really want to go out there – hell, you don’t even want to be here. You know it and I know it. So what’s your problem right now?”

  Runstom glared at him for a moment, then decided he wasn’t the enemy, not for the moment, anyway. “My problem is Oliver. Something was going on this morning and she deliberately kept it from us. She kept us out of the loop. I hate being left out of the loop. We’re supposed to be part of the same team.”

  “Yeah.” They were walking again, Runstom s
wept up in Troyo’s sudden determination. “I mean, now you’re getting the other side of it. You’re getting what we have to deal with. We’re supposed to be the face of this company, but it’s like the muscles aren’t connected to the skin. The muscles go off and do whatever the fuck they need to do, and we have to bend and flex and make it look like everything’s as it’s supposed to be.”

  They’d gone around a corner and Troyo stopped at a door, waving a keycard in front of it. Once the door was opened, Runstom recognized the account manager’s office. He hadn’t realized this was that hallway; that their march had taken them to that one color of maroon.

  “I’m going to check my messages,” Troyo said. “See if I can get any idea of what’s happening.”

  Runstom pulled out his on-loan handypad and checked to see if Oliver had written him back, but there was nothing. He poked at the thing pointedly, trying to get it to refresh, retry, resync, whatever it needed to do to make a message show up.

  “Here we go.” Troyo was behind his desk but was still standing, bending over to read from his terminal. “From one of Oliver’s Lieutenants. Lt. Beckas. He says they went out on perimeter watch this morning. Out to west power station, then down to the south power relay.”

  “Beckas? You mean she. Why did she tell you? Why didn’t I get a message?”

  Troyo looked up at Runstom. “Did you check your mail?”

  He looked at the handypad. Lt. Cato had only set it up for guest access into the MPORDU intel and address book. Runstom couldn’t check his own mail on it. “This is a loaner from Cato.” His face felt hot and he swallowed. “I left my WrappiMate in my quarters this morning.”

  “Well. Shit.” Troyo bent down to his screen again. “Anyway, it says they received the distress call from the south power relay station. It says they believed the station was …”

  “What?”

  “Under attack.”

  “Under attack? Who attacked them?”

  “Doesn’t say. That’s the end of it.”

  Runstom stood silent in thought for a second, then popped his notebook out. “What time did that message come in?”

  “Uh, let’s see … 9:13.”

  As he wrote it down, he tried to decide if he wanted to go back to his room to get his WrappiMate. He turned to the door, then stopped and looked back at Troyo. “Come on, Peter. Let’s go.”

  Troyo came around his desk. “Where are we going?”

  “You know the quickest way to the barracks?”

  “Barracks?”

  “I mean the Defense Unit’s quarters.”

  “Oh, right.” Troyo stepped past him into the hallway and gestured. “Yeah, it’s just down this way, around the corner and into the magenta hall.”

  They headed straight down the corridor for a few minutes and then Runstom heard familiar voices. It sounded like a heated discussion.

  “Hold up a minute,” he said and backtracked to a large double-door. The sign above read FACILITY MANAGEMENT. He caught the word observatory coming from the other side.

  “That sounds like Dr. Leesen,” he said.

  “Come on, let’s see what’s up,” Troyo said, pushing his way through the doors.

  They entered a large room some fifteen meters deep and twice that across. There were four sets of long, multi-screened consoles situated in the middle, each occupied by a pair of operators. Rhonda Harrison stood on a slightly elevated platform in the center of the room, in between all four consoles. Dr. Johanna Leesen was trying to talk to her, but the facilities manager kept spinning around to ask for status updates from the operators.

  “I mean, I just got a flood of messages from my researchers,” Leesen was saying as they approached. “Some of them were seeing power fluctuations, others were losing power altogether. Then everything just stopped.”

  “Power fluctuations?” Runstom asked. He had a feeling of déjà vu, then realized he was remembering the conversation he’d had with Jenna Zarconi in the prison mess hall back at ModPol HQ.

  Lessen turned to face them. “Oh, you two. Did you find out why our transport was turned around? Was it because something is happening at the observatory?”

  “Well, not really,” Runstom said. “Mr. Polinsky said it was protocol. An alarm went off at the south power relay and they were under orders to pull all transports back to the city.”

  “What sort of alarm?”

  Runstom looked at Troyo, who pursed his lips. “We don’t know, exactly.” He took out his notebook. “Why don’t you tell me what you know. What time did the messages start coming in from your researchers? And what time did they stop?”

  Her eyes went to the notebook in his hands for a brief moment, then she lifted her handypad and poked at it. “Let’s see. The first one that mentioned power issues came in about 9:30.”

  “At 9:30 exactly?”

  She frowned. “At 9:34.”

  “And the last message you got from anyone at the observatory?”

  Leesen scrolled down with a finger. “9:46.”

  They both looked up at the clock. “That was only twelve minutes ago,” Runstom said.

  “I know,” she said, then showed him her handypad. “But look. It was a steady stream – every single team was mailing me – and then it just stopped.”

  “They’re cut off.” They turned to face Harrison who was stepping down from the podium. She walked to one of the large console banks and the three of them trailed her. She pointed at a crude map on one of the screens. “Power grid. Or what would be a grid if we were anything bigger than a spread-out research facility.”

  It looked like a trapezoid, with a rectangular block overlaying the middle of the longest side and smaller rectangles positioned at each corner. “This is the city?” Runstom asked, pointing at the largest block. It was flipped around, but now he could see the resemblance to the map on the handypad that Lt. Cato had given him.

  “Right,” Harrison said. She pointed around the map as she spoke. “See how we’re all blue lines here? Over here, the observatory is red.”

  “So they have no power?” Leesen’s usual calm demeanor was starting to waver. “Why? Rhonda, what’s happening?”

  Harrison sighed. “All I can tell you is that the south power relay, over here? It stopped accepting power from the west power station. Normally, that wouldn’t be a total cut-off to the observatory, because they’d still get it from the east station over here. But something else is wrong. There was a heavy drain detected at the east station. Way beyond normal. The safety switches tripped, in order to preserve power to us here in town in an emergency.”

  “What’s going to happen to them?” Leesen gripped Harrison’s arm. “Are they going to …?”

  She shook her head. “They should be okay for a while, running on emergency power. But I need to get a team out there, and soon. I’m going to go request transport.”

  She started to walk toward the door, but Troyo’s words stopped her. “But Willy said that—”

  She looked at him. “Said what?”

  Troyo looked at Runstom, who frowned and nodded. “Willy said something is going on. Security-related. No transport is allowed.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Harrison said, planting her hands on her hips.

  “Security-related?” Leesen said.

  Runstom put out his hands. “Look, just calm down. We’re still piecing everything together.”

  “Are you going to go out there?” Leesen pulled up close to Runstom. “Please tell me you’re going out there.”

  “Well, I—”

  “Mr. Runstom. My – my people are out there. I hand-picked the research personnel in this facility. I can’t – I need them to be …”

  “Johanna,” Troyo said, touching her arm. “It’ll be okay.”

  “Fuck you, Peter,” she said, yanking her arm away. “This is what you are supposed to be here for, isn’t it? Isn’t this the whole point of this defense contracting bullshit?” She stabbed a finger into his che
st. “How about you go out there and fucking defend us?”

  “Alright,” Runstom said, pulling Troyo away. “You’re right. You’re right, Dr. Leesen. We’ll get out there.”

  When they hit the hallway, Troyo leaned into Runstom. “Stan, for all we know, LJ and her troops are already out there.”

  “We don’t know anything yet.”

  * * *

  They went around a bend and then another and another and a few minutes later Troyo was pulling Runstom’s swift stride to a halt to point him to the quarters of the ModPol Onsite Rapid Defense Unit. The door was locked but Troyo’s keycard opened it.

  Inside, they found three men and one woman sitting around a small round table playing cards. The four privates looked up as they came through the door. One of them, a dough-faced young man with short, wiry, blond hair stood and saluted Runstom. “Sir,” he said, then looked at his companions, who remained seated.

  “He ain’t Defense,” one of the others said, scratching at his poorly-shaved cheek.

  The standing one held his salute and looked sideways at the other. “Royi, I think he outranks us,” he said under his breath.

  “At ease, Defender,” Runstom said. The private flinched, then dropped his hand, still standing. “Where is everyone?”

  The privates looked at each other, then the poorly-shaven one spoke up. “On patrol.”

  “We know they went out to do perimeter watch,” Troyo said. “Where are they now?”

  “Uh.” The private looked at the others for help, but they all suddenly seemed interested in their cards. “Well, one squad went east, and one went west.”

  “Squad?” Runstom said. “How many?”

  “Ten. In each.”

  “Do you know about the attack at the south relay?” Troyo asked.

  “No. Well, just that there was one.”

  “We’re still waiting for an update,” the female private said.

  They collectively spasmed, everyone except Runstom. The four privates reflexively reached for their military-issue handypads and Troyo checked his WrappiMate.

  “What is it?” Runstom asked. “Is it Captain Oliver?”

  “They’re moving inside the building,” the standing private said. “Inside the power relay station. In pursuit of …” He seemed to lose his voice.