And not just the vastness of the sea. Of the drill. And of our task ahead.
“Any word from the drone yet?” Ania shouts, the noise from the enormous machines in the cavern rendering her words nearly inaudible. I frown and tune in to the drone’s feed just to make sure I haven’t missed a notification in the middle of all the not-dying business. It’s one minute until the meeting time I put in the message to all the board members, but the room is still dark. Did they talk to each other offline and set a new meeting place? Did they figure out the message is a fake? Does no one arrive early for these things?
“Nothing yet,” I say. “We’ll have to start somewhere else. We can’t do anything to the drill without the codes.”
“First things first,” Remi chimes in. “We need to shut down the maz collectors. I feel really . . . just . . . wrong down here. It skeeves me out.”
Jaesin turns to me. “Maz collectors, pathfinder?”
“On it,” I say, syncing wirelessly to the platform’s controls. No network security because honestly, who ever thought a hacker would end up down here? I find what we need in less than ten seconds.
“I can shut it down, but we’re gonna do something a little more permanent than hitting the off switch, right?” I say. “The control systems for the absorbers are on one of the other platforms, along with the drilling controls. Everyone grab on to something. We’re gonna move.”
We all pick a workstation and hold on to the handrails, worn dull from years of MMC employees at their daily tasks. Ania kindly weaves us all a quick and simple terraz spell to keep our feet stable as the maneuvering thrusters fire. The kickback almost throws me, but Ania’s spell holds fast as the platform accelerates toward the major mechanical controls. Once we near the other platform, ours decelerates smoothly until it docks with a heavy clank. We’ve barely been still for a second before Remi is dashing off to examine the controls. I stay where I am, doing my own inspection digitally.
“Give me one second,” I shout over the noise, louder now that we’re so close to the source, and get to work on the platform’s console. Easy. Some basic security here, a supervisor’s password required to give the shutdown command, but I retrieve it from the database and enter it without a problem. Another quick command and—
The vibration of the platform beneath our feet suddenly tapers off with a great sound of powering down, the lights around us flickering for a moment. I grin.
“Extractors are off! Working on the drill now,” I call to the others. I can’t do much without the executive board’s drill codes, but I can at least get the lay of the digital land, see what I’ll be working with.
“We’re partly here to break stuff, right?” Jaesin says, his voice full of twelve-year-old-Jaesin intent. I look up, scenting mischief on the air.
“Right,” Remi shouts back with a grin.
Jaesin hefts a heavy piece of steel piping. “Cool. I’m gonna break stuff.”
And with that, he swings the pipe into the extraction system master control, sending up a shower of sparks and a deliciously satisfying crunch. Ania’s eyes nearly bug out of her head, watching Jaesin’s arms, then she seems to shake herself and begins weaving her own bit of destruction. She and Remi take turns hurling spells at the rest of the system, setting small fires and crushing pipes. As soon as I look around for something to join in with, though, a notification pops up in my lenses.
The drone at MMC headquarters.
I flip over to the video feed from the drone and watch as the lights in the boardroom click on, triggered by two women in their fifties entering the room. They take seats on the far side of the table, guessing about the topic of the emergency meeting as they wait for their fellows. The board members trickle in one or two at a time over the next two minutes, and I have to laugh to myself. They’re all passive-aggressively trying to be the most fashionably late, like they’re so important they had other priorities even in the middle of the night. Once they’re all seated, an awkward silence falls as everyone waits for someone else to bring up the reason for the meeting. No one does, of course. None of them called the meeting.
I did.
I shout for the others to pause in their destructo party, toggle on a noise filter, and speak loud and clear through the tiny speakers on the drone.
“Hi, everyone!”
The board members freeze. I share the video feed from the drone with the others so they can tune in, and I give Ania mic access too. She’s better at talking to fancy people than I am. Once I’m sure we have everyone’s attention, I command the drone to fly down from its perch on the ceiling and hover at the front of the room in plain view.
“You must be wondering why we’ve called you here tonight,” Ania says in her best business voice.
“Who the hell are you?” a sharp-looking man in a rumpled black suit demands.
I roll my eyes and jump in. “Before we tell you that, I just want you to know what’s at stake here. First off, you might have noticed the maz this drone is carrying. It’s a pretty clever spell if I do say so myself, something we created ourselves just for this occasion. I’ll spare you the details, though, and be clear about just one thing. That purple glow is maz-15. If at any point you try to leave or we don’t like what you’re saying, the drone lets the spell loose, and you all spend the rest of your very short lives vomiting your plaguey guts out. Understood?”
The man closest to the door pushes back from the table, and I swoop the drone toward him, cutting off his exit.
“Ah ah ah,” I say. “Sit down, Michael. There’s a good boy.”
“How do you know my name?” the man asks, trying to sound brave despite his pale face and shaking voice. I gesture for Ania to take over again, and she nods gracefully.
“We know everything about you, Michael,” she jumps in smoothly. “And you, Antonia, and Koki, and Ceillie, and everyone in this room. Mostly important, though, we know what you don’t want anyone to know. We know about the mistress, Michael. Those awful, dirty people you’re in debt to, Irif.” Ania goes around the table one by one, listing the fruits of my insomnia hacking, my terrible habit that I thought would never be anything but a diversion for sleepless nights. Turned out to be more useful than I ever thought. MMC may be untouchable, with their media control and purchased politicians. Their board members, on the other hand, are not. By the time Ania’s done, the whole room is silent, everyone’s eyes averted, cheeks stained red where complexions allow, everyone sweating or breathing fast or tense with fury.
“What is it you want, then?” a stately older woman with white corkscrew curls asks.
I glance away from the video feed in time to see Ania’s lips curl into a triumphant little smile. “The drill codes, please,” she says, “and your word, worthless though it is, that you’ll stop every awful thing you’ve been doing to this community. No more doing business with maz-15. No plans to destroy parts of the city. No murdering scientists. But mostly the drill codes.”
I pick up the speech from there. “Give us the codes and we’ll keep our mouths shut, and this little drone will keep its maz to itself. You all get to walk out of here plague-free. Your choice. What do you say?”
Then a bullet pings off the station beside me, and I snatch my hand back, blood thundering in my ears.
Another platform drifts toward us, crawling with guards in bright orange suits like ours. I grab my deck off the console and bring it down into my lap, digging into the maintenance pod systems. Sure enough, there are two new pods down here with us, and three more on the way. We’re about to have a lot more company.
“Shit,” I say eloquently.
“Yes,” Ania agrees, even as she weaves us a shield, thick rivulets of terraz pouring between her fingers.
“Okay. This is fine,” I say, thinking, thinking. “We can’t let that other platform reach us. Jaesin, you have a driving license. You theoretically can steer things. Think you can fly this platform?”
He blinks at me. “I mean, I think I’m gonna ha
ve to. It can’t be that different from a car, right?”
I don’t bother answering that. In my ear, the board members bicker among themselves, working their way slowly toward the inevitable. Just give us the codes, I think furiously at them, just do it!
“Okay, Jaesin, get us away from that other platform and take us down near the rift so Remi can do their thing. Ania, I’m gonna work from inside the system to stop those other pods on their way down. I think. Can you keep our shooty friends off our backs for a little while?”
“A very little while,” she says, adding magnaz to her weave with elegant gestures. “I’m not Remi, I can’t just pull in all of this maz around us. Unless Remi has the time to load some of it into my ware, I’ve got limited utility here.”
Damn it to hell, she’s right, and it’s obnoxious. How frustrating to be surrounded by vast stores of power you can’t use. But it’ll have to be enough. I tip my head back and will my breath to slow, my heart to calm, my brain to just chill the hell out for a minute. Slow down and think.
First things first.
“Ania, at your feet,” I say, then slide her my gun. I can’t do much with it while I’m working the computer side of things, and this way she’ll at least be able to do something when her maz runs out. In my ear, the board members are having some kind of vote, but I catch only the last two votes. Both “no” votes.
Ugh.
“Time is ticking away,” I say through the drone, forcing more confidence into my voice than I truly feel. “You have sixty seconds before this plague bomb goes off. Your answer.”
With that, I trigger the extra dramatic little bit I added at the last minute. The drone starts counting down in a cheerful voice, its beady little eyes blinking with each tick.
“Sixty! Fifty-nine! Fifty-eight!”
With a growl of frustration, the older woman slams her hands down on the table and pushes to her feet.
“The ayes have it, and as board president, I’m giving my authorization. We’re only going to say these codes once, so listen up.”
“Yes!” Remi hisses, sending another boulder of terraz at the other platform. It crashes down on the corner, tipping the whole thing at a dangerous angle. They’re pulling maz from the air all around us with a fierce joy, reveling in the ability to sling it around without thinking, for once. No rationing needed here. Ania may still be limited by her ware, but Remi is totally in their element.
I prep a recording and tap furiously at my deck, burrowing my way into the drilling system. I enter each segment of the code as the board member responsible for it recites it. The final man hesitates, his reluctance obvious, but a quick glance at the maz glowing in the drone’s belly has him rattling off the final string after only a second. With the last bit entered, the drill interface turns green. I’m in.
“Thanks so very much,” I say, then rush to add, “there’s just one last thing.”
And with that, I send the command to release the spell.
The flash is too much for the camera. The feed goes white, then black. My lenses flood with angry red warnings of damage to the drone, critical system errors, impending failure. After a moment, the drone’s cameras readjust, showing the aftermath with a giant crack down the center of the lens.
Every single board member sits rigid in their seat, slumped over, expressions locked in frozen horror. The only movement is the faint rise and fall of their breath.
Also, minor detail: they all have floppy rabbit ears sprouting from their heads. What the hell?
A few feet away, Remi cackles with glee even as they sling spells at our attackers from behind Ania’s shield.
“What did you do?” I ask, baffled.
“Professor Silva gave me a few tips when I asked about the berserker rabbits in the minefield. The maz I needed to add to make it glow purple is pointless otherwise, so I just . . . got a little creative.”
I snort and reopen the comm channel to make use of the dying drone’s last few seconds of life.
“So, as you may have guessed, you don’t actually have the plague,” I say. “But now you know just how much it sucks to think you might, so maybe consider your life choices while you’re stuck sitting there. Because you are stuck. Little paralysis spell, like what they use to subdue patients in hospitals. Couldn’t have you giving us the codes, then running off to override us or sending the cops, blah blah. The rabbit ears are just for fun. Enjoy! And since I know you’ll have a good four hours to plan and plot and rage internally before the morning guard shift shows up, I just want to offer one last little warning. We still have your secrets, and far more where they came from. We’ll be watching.”
Before I can really nail the threat home, though, the drone gives one last lurch, lists to one side, then crashes into the boardroom table. The feed cuts off with a quick hiss, and I actually feel a quick pang of distress at the thought of my little drone’s death. At least it went out in a blaze of glory.
“RIP, little bug,” Jaesin says, letting go of the steering controls just long enough to fire a volley of stun bolts at the other platform. I smile to myself, grateful for the tiny recognition, then shove it all away. Time to focus on my next job.
The drilling rig is a complicated system of maz engines, heat management systems, slurry pumps, and piping. It’s enormous, several stories tall, and wider at the bottom where the drill bit sits motionless below the surface of the Maz Sea, waiting for orders to dig deeper. Four enormous pylons jut out from its core at forty-five-degree angles, keeping it perfectly balanced above the rift. The controls are complicated—so complicated that for the first time, I feel a pang of dread. People train for years to be able to operate something like this, and they start with much simpler augers and surface-level drills.
I force myself to breathe evenly and go through each menu of the interface one at a time, looking for something, anything that might help. Finally, I come across PREPROGRAMMED FUNCTIONS, and get a genius idea.
Well . . . a better-than-nothing idea.
I open the window, and sure enough, it helpfully lists all of the drill’s most basic functions and the commands that drive them. Copy, paste, bam, too easy. I can work with this.
First things first—I command the drill bit to back out of the rift. No way we can seal it with the drill still wedged inside. With a hiss and a clank from the enormous maz engine systems, the drill slowly whirs to life and begins its slow ascent—
—and a flood of violet maz bubbles to the surface in its wake, overtaking everything around it.
“Go back, go back!” Ania shouts, rushing back to my side. I reverse the command, overriding the safeties to rush the process, and the flood slows. The damage is done, though. The sea around the rift roils with violet maz-15, a lake of poison right where Remi needs to work.
“We’ll have to seal the rift while we stop the drill. If we don’t do them at the same time, we’re just going to make the contamination worse than it’s ever been,” Ania says.
Our platform gives a sudden lurch, then tips sickeningly, nearly spilling us into the sea. I scrabble for a hold on the nearest railing and clutch my deck to my chest until the platform rights itself, Jaesin clinging to the controls for dear life. Just beyond him, I see the problem—another two pods have arrived, and two more platforms are in motion, slipping around the drill to flank us. We’re so screwed.
I grab a fistful of my hair and yank, thinking through the problem. “We’re going to have to time this super carefully. Remi,” I finally say, turning to them. “You and I will have to coordinate. Start on your part and—”
But they shake their head, hands held helplessly at their sides.
“I can’t manipulate the maz from up here, Diz. It’s too far. I can sense it, but I can’t reach it.”
“Take us lower then, Jaesin,” I snap. We’re already drifting lower, but so slow, ugh.
Jaesin pounds a fist on the console in frustration. “I’m trying,” he says, “but there’s some kind of failsafe that won’t let
us get any closer to the surface than one hundred yards. This is as far as we go.”
“I’ll work on that,” I say, already backing out of the pod system to dig into the platform’s ones and zeroes. “I can probably turn it off. Remi, how low do we need to get, do you think?”
I turn to look at them, only to find them staring down at the eye of swirling maz at the bottom of the cavern.
“I can fix this,” they say.
Our eyes meet, and Remi gives me a sad, lingering smile as they flick off their suit’s nullifying barrier.
Then they dive off the platform, straight into the contaminated Maz Sea.
Twenty-Eight
“NO!”
The word tears itself from my throat, following Remi down into the void. But it’s too late.
Remi’s body falls and falls, a graceful arrow, until they slip into the Maz Sea with barely a ripple, disappearing completely beneath the swirling glow of the most concentrated maz in the world. Right near the rift that’s leaking toxic maz-15. The rift that I just flooded with more poison.
I can’t breathe, can’t hear anything through static in my ears, the crushing tightness in my chest, and my throat is as raw as if I’ve been screaming for hours. They couldn’t just wait? I was working on it, I was going to fix it, between Jaesin and me we could have—
A bullet pings off the platform beside me, bringing me back to the very dangerous present, and I roll away as three more shots come in: two stunning spells and another bullet. Ania crouchs next to me, her woven shield flaring bright gold with each bullet and spell that strikes it.
Maybe waiting isn’t an option after all.
“Drive, damn it!” Ania shouts to Jaesin over the noise, pushing more maz into her shield. “I can’t hold them off forever!”
I get my feet under me and scramble for better cover, ducking behind a low bulkhead. My hands shake over the screen of my deck, the code blurring before my eyes. I take a minute to get my breath back, swallowing great gulps of air to slow my racing heart.
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