The massive breaking system of the Acela shrieked. As their speed slowed to a manageable level, communication became possible.
Michael shouted over the wind, “we need to jump before the station!”
Rising to a knee, Tanya looked over the crest of the train. The wind blew her hair in a trail behind her. She pointed ahead. “Let’s jump onto the edge of that building.”
A utilitarian structure approached rapidly. It’s long flat, concrete sides not looking particularly soft for the inevitable failure of the men to land properly. The train slowed and they stood up, BOGs in hand. Luthor visibly shook from fear, but at least he didn’t completely shut down like he had on the seabus. He was improving. Sort of.
In one motion Vika threw her 126 at the wall and jumped toward it. She reoriented instinctively, landing perpendicular to the wall next to the orange BOG. Michael’s body tumbled sideways and slammed pathetically against the vertical surface. He grunted as the air was knocked from his lungs. Luthor landed equally awkwardly while Tanya landed with a catlike grace. She looked like she had been born jumping off trains into altered gravity wells. She impressed Vika. Killing that sniper had saved their lives and in the process she had learned the folly of pacifism. Sometimes people just needed to die and you needed to be the one to kill them. It was as simple as that. Tanya had finally grasped that concept and had grown into the woman they needed her to be.
Michael squatted on his haunches and rubbed his knee. “It must be a woman thing, I suck at this,” he said. There was something strangely endearing about him being in pain. No. She pushed the thought away. Nothing is endearing about him.
“You’re just coming up with excuses,” replied Tanya.
“Then why is it easy for both of you, and hard for me and Luthor?”
“It’s just easier for you to blame your ineptitude on a genetic problem rather than a personal one.”
“I helped discover 126!” Michael yelled. “If anyone knows how it works, it’s me!”
“You’d think,” she said with a grin, “but this time it was simple.”
“You call that simple?” he asked, “we just jumped off a moving train!”
“Like Vika says, you just have to think of the wall as down. The rest falls into place—so to speak.”
From the way the boys landed, they obviously hadn’t been cogitating much about their orientation. At least Luthor hadn’t crapped himself this time.
Michael glared at Tanya, who seemed to be enjoying the experience. “You want to try something hard, Michael? Try climbing twenty stories and killing a sniper without him seeing you.”
If Vika had been wearing a hat, she would have tipped it to her.
They dismounted the building, landing outside the high wall protecting the tracks and casually made their way back to the street.
Almost immediately, a dilapidated truck picked its way through the hoard of human chariots outside the Acela station and stopped at the curb next to them.
“You look like you could use a lift.”
Vika saw a soft-looking Asian leaning out of the window of the truck. Probably the “Qwiz” person who had been helping them.
“How did you know we would be here?” Luthor asked.
The man driving the truck shook his white mane. “You kiddin me, son? This is Quency, the computer whiz. That boy could find anything, anywhere. You could bet your dick on it.” Vika had no idea who the man was, but she liked him instantly. His vulgar, yet positive demeanor, implied a man of action. This was a man who could get things done.
“They are searching the train for us as we speak. Was that a fluke that you found us or are we that easy to track?” Luthor asked.
“I knew what you guys were trying to do, so I could see a pattern where they might not,” the Asian replied. “The carbon police seem to think you went for a swim, they decided to scout the train as a precaution.”
“They know where we are now.”
“At least we’ll have a head start,” Michael added.
“Are you going to actually get in the truck or just keep playing with yourselves?” the old man yelled.
“A man after my own heart,” said Vika, and she swung herself onto the truck.
END OF PART II
PART III:
CHICAGO
Chapter 22:
Eleven Years Ago: The Great Crevasse, Antarctica
“Damn it, Tenrel. Not you too!”
Someone was shaking him. Luthor’s eyes popped open. His tinted goggles painted the white backdrop into a yellow red. Garcia’s masked face loomed above him.
“Get up.” It sounded like a plea, rather than an order.
Luthor tried to move his muscles, and to his surprise, found they responded to him. His suit was warm. Garcia must have turned it on. “What happened?”
Garcia closed his eyes slowly, like it was too painful to remember.
“Damn you, Sarge. Tell me!” Luthor’s voice echoed strangely. Normal Antarctica didn’t echo, it absorbed voices like a sponge; the wind whisked them away immediately. He looked around, wherever he was it wasn’t the flat plane of Titan Dome. A steep canyon of jagged ice rose dozens of meters into the air around him. The light that made its way down refracted off the walls giving them a blue, gem-like hue.
Chaz appeared next to Garcia. “Can’t you see? An hour ago, this place didn’t exist. The Chinese planted enough napalm along this trench to burn every tree in Vietnam. They waited until half of our armor was through and lit it up.”
“They what?” Luthor couldn’t believe his ears. “They could have destabilized the whole continent!”
“For all we know, that’s exactly what they did.” Garcia said. “I haven’t had any communication since I fell down here.”
“I can’t believe they would risk something so stupid.”
“Neither did command, or we would have never launched this offensive.”
“They could have flooded the planet!”
“Yes. My best guess is that this was a failsafe. In case we ever managed to break through their perimeter with overwhelming force, they could light it –”
“And cut off our escape and reinforcements.”
“Exactly, operation Zeus is totally fubar. They launched a counter offensive the minute this thing blew. If the battle isn’t over yet, it soon will be. They will have killed or captured 7th tunneling and our entire 3rd armor division.”
“Son of a bitch.” It was all that needed to be said.
“Come on, we need to move. If we can’t find transport or power, our heating cells will give out within the day.”
Luthor remembered what Jake had said, “I don’t want to be a popsicle, Sarge,” and heartily agreed with the sentiment. He groaned and got to his feet.
Garcia grabbed his knee in pain. “That fall fucked up my knee.”
Luthor wondered again what had allowed him to remain uninjured and alive when everyone else was dropping like flies. Garcia leaned on him and led him down the ice-canyon. The floor was uneven, glossy, and covered in debris and chunks of ice. They passed a mangled Dragon, gun impaled into the ground like a spade. Chaz hunted around the wreckage. Luthor passed a tangled mess of wire and metal half the size of a man. On the side, a few hand-painted letters in blood red were still visible. They read: Claptrap. Luthor felt a tear freeze on his cheek for his mechanical companion.
“I found him,” Chaz said, his voice deader than the landscape. He pointed. Several meters away the unmistakable form of a crumpled paratrooper lay unmoving on the ice. The bottom of the dragon seemed to salute the dead man.
Chaz handed a dog tag to Garcia. “You should have this.”
Luthor caught a glimpse of the imprint as it passed him. It read: Jacob M. Eugene.
Garcia clenched his fist around the metal, but said nothing. Jake was dead.Thudding in the distance bespoke continuing violence on the surface.
#
Aurora, IL
Back safely in Bill’s apartment, Qwiz
brought them up to date on his own brushes with death and proudly produced the research he and Bill had saved.
“Well done buddy,” Michael said, “our copy took a bath and then sort of …blew up.”
“Thank you!” Luthor said. “Without the risk you took in saving this, our research would be lost. For the first time since Eli died, I feel like we actually have a chance to get ourselves out of this mess. By saving this, you saved all our lives.”
Qwiz bowed as humbly as he could manage, accepting the gracious words. Qwiz might not be the Vanguard or any real hero, but he’d risked his life and helped keep his friends alive. He was sure his father would agree that all of those things mattered.
Then the debate began. How to proceed? There were lots of varying opinions between the four valiant friends, but Qwiz didn’t feel particularly qualified to add much to their discussion. What they’d gone through made his chase with Stalker’s cronies seem like a game of patty cake.
Out of the corner of his eye, Qwiz saw little beads of sweat had formed on either side of Bill’s retreating hairline. The man might have been brave when the bullets were flying, but less so with people. Something about the discussion was bothering him, but he didn’t know how to address it.
“There has to be a way to do a mass email or post this to a website or something,” Michael was saying.
“We have gone over this before, it can’t work.” Luthor’s face was taut with frustration. Qwiz had imagined the Vanguard with the very same expression when dealing with corrupt authorities. “It would be censored and taken exclusively by the USW before anyone could read it. That’s the reason I never risked saving it to the cloud. Anything online will be taken.”
Michael turned toward Qwiz, “with him here, we can hack around all that.”
Qwiz bowed again. “I apologize, but Luthor is right. This isn’t something I can fix.”
“Why not, didn’t you hack into the European network?”
“Actually, no. Remember that email I told you about? Somebody gave me a username and a password to go with it. That’s how I got in. And anything I did access had already made it past the sensors and screeners. Uploading is a totally different beast, different protocols, different security.”
“But you can get around it right? I mean the law isn’t exactly something we have been worried about following the last couple of weeks.”
Tanya grinned, “we haven’t even been obeying the laws of physics.”
Qwiz laughed, but stopped himself quickly. What they were suggesting wasn’t funny, unless it meant that they were funny in the head. Hacking the current system to upload data was such an absurd notion that even the Vanguard would have regarded it as impossible.
Qwiz folded his hands in front of himself calmly, they didn’t possess even a rudimentary understanding of the nationalized computer network. “I am telling you it is totally impossible. The USW has completely rerouted all network connections through central locations in the major cities, all hard lines end up there, all wireless connections are routed through their towers, so any attempt to upload something ends up in their hands first. The censors can scan, read, confiscate it, or delete it altogether before it ever gets to the public.”
“So there is no possible way to do this?” Luthor asked, the first one of them sounding reasonable.
“No,” Qwiz said, trying to be polite but also allow no room for debate. “Let me ink a comic for you: In Chicago, the main screening center is in the USNN Tower. It houses both the USNN and the Censor Bureau and is something like 90 stories tall. All the upper stories are covered in Satellite dishes and cell towers. We would have to climb up the outside to those floors, and tap directly into one of the satellite dishes. That’s the only way to bypass all of the screeners and physically get around their firewall.” Tanya looked intrigued for some reason, she did realize that climbing something that tall would be impossible, right?
He had to turn on the heat, show them how stupid the idea was. “Even if by some miracle we did get up there and access the network, they would still see our activity. They would know they’d been hacked. They’d automatically get a copy of anything we send. And probably shut us down as soon as we did anything. Plus, that place is going to have a gazillion guards. We would have minutes before they arrest us.”
“Damn,” Luthor ground his teeth audibly, “are there are other transmission towers in the area?”
They still weren’t getting the point. “There are a lot of them in an area the size of Chicago. But they are all subnetworks.”
“What does that mean?” asked Tanya.
“Basically, the USNN Tower is the king, they are all serfs. They all do the work delegated by the king.”
“But they might have less security, right?”
“We wouldn’t have to climb so many stories, but because the building is smaller, that means the swat team would get there faster. We’re still talking minutes of time before they arrest us. And they would still see our activity! Which means after our first upload, we’d get shut down.”
“So, basically, trying to upload this through the internet is a dead end,” Michael summarized. “We can’t do it, and even if we do, we’ll get caught before anything happens.”
Qwiz nodded. They had finally figured out how impossible—and how stupid— trying something like that really was.
“What about the USNN itself?” Michael asked. “What if we broke into the newsroom instead? We could record an interview and broadcast a special report or something about 126.”
“The only way to do anything like what you’re talking about—sending a global message—is to steal whatever authorization codes the USNN has for their news. Which, by the way, are probably guarded with extreme security; think nuclear launch codes. They might even require some sort of activation. A CPI scan. Something like that. Then whoever got those codes would still have to tap directly into the satellite uplink on the roof so they would be able to bypass the censors in the building,” Qwiz sighed. “We might as well be trying to steal an ICBM.”
“Then we should steal a missile and threaten to launch it at the capital unless they publish the research,” Vika said matter-of-factly.
Michael laughed, but abruptly stopped after Vika scowled at him.
“Do you know what sort of security would be around the actual codes themselves?” Luthor asked.
“I’m more familiar with digital security. I haven’t ever come across anything regarding USNN codes, which means they are probably transported non-digitally, hand to hand.”
“Like the briefcase with the nuclear launch codes?” Michael asked.
“I doubt that they are that well protected, but whoever has access to them probably has their own security.”
“And you’re sure we can’t do a special report without those codes? What if we just hacked the USNN thing on the roof?” Tanya asked.
“Without the codes we can’t do much. Anything unapproved through the USNN dish would probably trigger an immediate shut down. Essentially, it would be like if we’d hacked into the other satellite dishes. It would allow us to upload a single uncensored file—like an email or something— before they noticed the hack and cut the hard lines. It would be the same as the other uplinks. We just wouldn’t have enough time to do anything. I am talking enough time to send one file. One email to one person. I doubt one email is going to do much.”
Luthor lowered his head. “So we’re back to square one.”
“I have a plan,” Bill said tentatively.
Everyone turned to him expectantly. Surprisingly, Bill hadn’t blathered anything about the government putting sedatives in the water or that global warming was just a made-up conspiracy created by politicians as an excuse to grab more power. In fact, he hadn’t spoken a single word the entire conversation, an exceptional feat for him.
“My son was recently promoted to reporter for USNN Chicago. I bet my beard that he’d love an exclusive with you.”
“Why didn’t y
ou mention this before?” asked Tanya, not unkindly.
Because his son hates his guts, disagrees with everything he thinks and says, and won’t speak with him. Qwiz thought.
“My son and I don’t exactly see eye to eye on…” Bill hesitated. “Well, on a goddamn thing. He might not want to help us because of me. In fact, that nuke might be easier to steal than getting him to talk to me.”
“But he’d have no problem meeting in secret with a bunch of international terrorists?” Michael asked.
“He might. He’s the one who did the special report on the explosion in Luthor’s apartment.”
Michael whistled.
“On the other hand, it would make for an interesting angle for him. He probably wouldn’t be shy about a miracle energy story. He could get you on the news all safe and legal-like.”
“You’re saying if he helps us, we don’t need to sneak anywhere and we don’t kill anybody?” Tanya asked. “What are we waiting for?”
“Hell yeah. Let’s give it a shot,” Michael agreed.
“I will see if I can find him tomorrow.”
“Find him? Why not call him?” asked Tanya.
“He won’t answer my calls, ma’am. So I got a job as a janitor at the USNN building hoping maybe he would talk to me then. My plan hasn’t worked so good, but I run into him occasionally and we … exchange words.”
#
Bill managed to “run into” his son at work. Apparently, it hadn’t been easy, but he convinced him to come meet them under the condition that he not report it to the authorities.
Tanya felt bad for the old man. She had certainly had her share of rows with her father too—particularly when they decided to leave society rather than be marked—but she didn’t hate him. She loved him. It sounded like William legitimately detested Bill, despite all of the efforts that Bill made to try to restore the relationship with him. Poor guy, all he wants is to know his son.
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