The door slid open and nobody shouted in alarm.
“There, you see?” Viggo gestured for the monk to precede him and they stepped into a chamber smelling of ozone and hydraulic fluid.
He brought up his HUD and found the nearest elevator. It was a ten-second walk and there was nobody here to get in their way. Those two maintenance workers had probably headed for the nearest pub.
Or showers.
They stopped at the inner doors but then Viggo realized he wasn’t taking the time to work out the operational part of his plan. He compared the layout of the maintenance facility with the floor they needed to get to. “Not the right elevator,” he whispered.
“What’s wrong with it?” the monk demanded, a hint of irritation creeping into his voice.
“It comes out near a busy concourse,” Viggo explained. “We’d have to walk through a pretty dense crowd to reach our destination. Facial recognition would probably have enough time to resolve my features, even if I smear grease or something all over my face.”
He pointed. “Next one over is much closer and it comes out in a maintenance zone between two residential areas, one of which is our destination.”
“Can we go then?”
An inquisitive warbling, with undertones of urgency, backed Roj up.
“Fine, we’re going,” Viggo hissed, “but calm yourselves! We either do this right or we don’t do it at all.” His eyes drifted off focus as he looked ahead.
“One guy between us and the elevator,” he warned. “You’d better take this one, Roj. Unspecified, irrational fear is fine for scaring folks inside the city – nobody’s gonna report something like that – but a chimera on the loose is the kind of thing you definitely call security over.”
Roj gazed down the hallway, a mild frown on his features. Somewhere ahead of them, a pair of feet started running. They were getting louder.
“Oops,” the monk muttered.
“Oops?”
Roj waved off Viggo’s startled outburst and concentrated. The footsteps slid to a halt, then they started again.
Viggo relaxed, having already seen that the steps would be receding. The chimera, having felt his relief, sat on her haunches, tongue lolling.
The monk released his concentration and glanced over at the Human, a wry smile on his face. “Not used to doing that indoors,” he explained.
“You sure I’m the only one thinking about girls?”
Roj extended his thumb and middle finger, the universal ‘screw you’ gesture since the days of the old Bolshari empire.
Viggo grinned. He’d been nervous during the last few miles on the river but that seemed to have disappeared now that they were inside and committed to the plan. They could still turn back, of course, but the farther into the city they got, the less of an option that became and his nerves were growing steadier with every step they took.
He led the way to an express elevator, searching the near future as they walked. There was always the danger of another precog Human, one with a longer time-range, seeing them first and setting up an ambush but it would still come to a point where Viggo would see it.
And he’d never heard of anyone with a longer range.
“This one stops at a closed off area, maintenance only,” he said, reaching for the call panel but snatching his hand back with a muttered curse at his own stupidity. “There shouldn’t be anyone up there.”
“Shouldn’t?” Roj’s hand had stopped, hovering near the call panel. “Maybe you could take a moment out of your busy schedule and look into the future?”
“This is a big city, Roj. The elevator ride is longer than my precog horizon. It’ll be a good ten seconds at least before I can tell what’s waiting for us up there.”
“So we’re just going to take the chance?”
Viggo nodded. “If there’s trouble, we’ll still have fifteen seconds to react. You’ll need to be ready with something particularly fearsome and not your usual ‘something in the jungle’s gonna eat me’ routine. It’s gotta be something more plausible in an urban setting.”
“Well, then, give me something to work with,” Roj hissed. “I don’t know if you noticed but I spend most of my time living in a cave with no electricity!”
“Okay, okay,” Viggo soothed, bringing up a technical overlay in his HUD. “Umm, the elevators have capacitors so they can power the grav interactors if the inductive rails in the shaft should ever lose power.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means you can convince anyone up there that the capacitors are about to go kaboom,” Viggo said.
“Really? That’s a thing? You use elevators that go kaboom?”
“Of course not! There’s no known instance of that happening. The specs I’m looking at specifically state that they’re physically incapable of exploding. That’s kind of the point, though.
“We want the fear to fit with the urban setting but be implausible enough for security to ignore. If someone runs from that maintenance section and reports a possible capacitor explosion, security will check the system and see such a thing’s impossible. They’ll assume there’s something wrong with the caller, not the systems.”
He nodded at the chimera. “If they call security claiming that a dangerous creature is loose in the city, we’d step out of this elevator and straight into the face of a dozen weapons.”
Roj pursed his lips, nodding his head meditatively. “This is certainly an educational experience,” he muttered, placing his hand on the panel to call the elevator. “Like an advanced class on tactics…”
It took a moment for Viggo to realize he’d been paid a compliment by the monk. The doors snapped open and Vigo stepped in, grabbing a can of conduit sealer from the shelf on the wall next to the elevator. Keeping his head down, he reached up and sprayed the sealer all over the panel that protected the security cameras.
“Let’s go!” he said. The other two entered the small space. “Seventy-nine,” he told the monk who looked back at him blankly.
He’s never been in an elevator, genius! “We’re going to the seventy-ninth floor, he explained. He nodded at a holo-screen that hovered a finger’s breadth away from the wall panel next to the door. “Poke a finger through the number for seventy-nine.”
Roj gave him a look of amused tolerance but it changed when he put his index finger through the holographic number. “Interactive holos? How long ago were these invented?”
They had holo-screens at the South Abbey but they were display only. Viggo had assumed there was some monastic reason behind it. Clearly, this order had settled on 3428 before the invention of the interactive variant.
“Head in the game, Roj,” he urged. “Remember, capacitor explosion in the grav sub-system.” He looked upward, as if that would help him see their future arrival better.
After a while, Roj began to lose patience. His fidgeting was becoming a distraction. “Well,” he finally whispered. “Is there anyone up there?”
“Can’t tell yet,” Viggo whispered back. “We’re caught in traffic. I should have realized there’s a shift change happening right now. Other cars are using this shaft. They get routed to the outer paths to reduce congestion at peak times. The cars also stop and passengers switch to one that will get them home faster.”
“Will this car be picking up anybody?”
“Hells!” Viggo was astounded at his own stupidity. “There’s a good chance of that happening.”
“More like a bad chance.”
“Can you even scare an entire group of commuters? Like thirty or forty people?”
“What? No!” Roj shot him a worried look. “No. Five or six at the most!”
“Well, we can’t have the doors open with a crowd standing there looking in at a chimera, now, can we?”
“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask why she came inside with us,” Roj said, casting a sidelong glance down. “No offense…”
The chimera waggled her head.
“I don’t know,” Viggo adm
itted. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. If you’re going up against a whole city filled with rebels, it pays to have a tough ally in your corner.”
He held up a hand. “Wait,” he looked at the chimera. “Can you please come to this corner? I need you to be mostly out of sight.”
The beast got up and moved as requested.
“Mostly?” Roj blurted, his voice coming out in a higher tone. “And what the hells are you doing?”
“Forget about the capacitor,” Viggo said, lying face-down near the chimera. “You need to project fear of a mad dog.”
“What the ever-loving hells is a dog?”
“Like a chimera but a fifth the size and furry. They’re mostly friendly creatures that integrate seamlessly with Human families. We had a few hundred on the Guadalcanal that the Marines used for ship-board security. If they turn on you, they can easily kill a man.”
“But they’ll still be seeing part of a chimera when the doors open.”
“Your order might understand harmony,” Viggo said, voice muffled by the floor, “but you don’t know shit about group dynamics. If you’re doing your thing, getting into a few groups as we approach, enough of them will believe they saw a huge dog standing over a dead man. They’ll override what the others think they saw. There’ll be a few holdouts but the more plausible story will win out, as long as you prime the crowd with the right fears.”
“Won’t that be a little too plausible for security to ignore?”
“It will… Fornication! That’s why you need to press fifty-eight right now.”
Roj did as asked. “Why does that help?”
“‘Cause we’re stopping there in ten seconds, start projecting!”
Roj muttered a curse, backing into the other corner. He closed his eyes and concentrated. After a moment, his head turned slightly and he took a shallow breath, holding it. A moment later, he repeated the procedure.
This happened twice more and then the doors snapped open, revealing a shrieking crowd. Those at the front were pushing back against the people behind them, desperately trying to escape the notice of the vicious ‘dog’ in the elevator car.
Few were looking toward the open doors and even those found their view obscured by flailing limbs and shoving bodies. The doors slid closed on the mayhem.
“That’s the only stop,” Viggo said, getting back up. “It went about as well as you could expect, I suppose.”
“Why did I hit the floor number?”
“To muddy up the waters a little. Security’s going to be investigating this now, so we let them wonder if we meant to get off at that floor.” He shrugged. “It’s pretty thin but every little bit should slow them down. Come to think of it…”
He let his eyes glaze over as he held his hand near the buttons. He stood like that until Roj was about to ask him what he was doing. “Hit number sixty-two.”
“More misdirection, yes?”
“Yeah,” he replied absently, eyes still being ignored while his brain parsed the near future.
The car stopped and the doors slid open on an empty corridor. “Now hit sixty-eight.”
That floor proved empty as well. “Eighty-one and eighty-two.”
Roj called the last two stops.
“We’re clear on seventy-nine,” Viggo assured him.
They stepped out into what looked like a medium-sized workshop. It was there for anyone sent up to perform maintenance work on local residences but it was currently deserted.
“So, what now?” Roj asked. “We slip inside the ventilation system or…”
“This way,” Viggo brushed past him and went out a hatch marked ‘Res-Corr-79-B’.
Roj and the chimera followed, finding themselves in a pleasantly decorated hallway with potted plants on either side of each doorway. “We’re out in the open here, aren’t we?” he whispered.
Viggo put a finger to his lips, asking for silence. Then he turned and pounded on a door. The monk nearly jumped out of his skin at the loud noise.
Viggo hammered at the door a second time and, after another pause, was raising his hand again but then abruptly changed his mind and lowered it again. He waited there, looking up and down the hallway, chewing on the inside of his cheek, fingers drumming against his leg.
Then the door snapped open and a young woman frowned at them, her eyes growing wide. “Viggo?” she said in disbelief. Then she gestured urgently. “Get in here, you idiot, before somebody sees you!”
Viggo stepped back and waved his companions forward. She raised an eyebrow at the monk but then she shrieked and threw herself backwards as the chimera squeezed through the narrow meter-and-a-half wide doorway.
Cursing himself again for an idiot, Viggo raced inside to place himself between her and the creature. The sight of her in sleeping-shorts and a thin, form-hugging t-shirt had temporarily scrambled his focus. “It’s okay, Hallie, she’s with me! She’s a friend.”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Roj muttered, averting his eyes from the attractive young woman. “Can’t help but think your judgement may be clouded…” he trailed off under his breath.
“What?” Hallie blurted after a moment of shock. She opened her mouth to say something, gesturing vaguely at the beast. Whatever she’d planned to say fell flat in her mind and she let go of it. She stared at the massive animal, her chest still heaving from the adrenaline rush, a motion that Viggo was now acutely aware of. He forced his gaze back to her face, knowing that she’d catch him otherwise.
“You made friends with a chimera…,” she said flatly, as if she’d just passed beyond a state where anything held any surprise for her anymore.
“You know,” Viggo began slowly, “they can be surprisingly friendly, as long as they don’t see you as a meal, that is…” Too soon for jokes like that. He reached out on an impulse and took her hand, the contact sending a thrill through his entire body.
The chimera, sensing his feelings, gave a congratulatory rumble, reinforcing his sudden elation. Her electromagnetic emissions were hardly a focused beam. They spread in all directions, affecting Viggo, Roj…
And Hallie.
A smile crept over her face and she gave Viggo’s hand a friendly little squeeze, despite the persistent fact that she had one of the planet’s deadliest predators in front of her. “She’s kind of beautiful, up close like this!” she whispered.
Another rumble and another relay of feeling.
Viggo was coming to realize the chimera was forming a rudimentary link between his mind and the others. Some of the more basic emotions were being passed back and forth as if she were a translator. He knew beyond a doubt that Hallie was glad to see him, even if it meant being scared half to death by one of his new friends.
“Perhaps there’s another room I could wait in,” Roj suggested, his face red.
“Come closer and meet her properly,” Viggo urged, ignoring the monk and drawing her by the hand. She resisted for an instant but then relented. He placed her hand on the dark scales at the back of the chimera’s head and took his hand away.
He didn’t need to say more. The chimera arched her head forward and Hallie’s hand slid down the scales. The happy warbling was enough to encourage the young woman and she tried a few more strokes, her own precog ability, practically the same as Viggo’s, showing her the best methods.
Viggo stepped back, smiling at the scene. He’d known Hallie would get along with the creature and it wasn’t through any precognitive ability. He just knew she had the sort of mind that could accept such a radical concept.
He’d almost managed to forget he was a teenager for a few moments but the young woman’s legs reminded him. His throat suddenly went dry and he turned away. He found no refuge in Roj’s expression. The Monk clearly understood what he was seeing. Gods! Is it really that obvious?
The chimera let out a long, low rumble and he felt a sudden flush of heat. Well, it’s sure as hells obvious now. Thanks for nothing, you nosy creature! He caught his breath. That feeling
I just got through the chimera... He turned to Hallie, embarrassed, but also curious. She was smiling shyly at him, the fingers of her right hand twined in her dark hair.
“Can we please get to the reason we’re here?” Roj pleaded.
It was like a splash of cold water. Viggo had almost managed to forget the monk was there but his request brought him back to the reality of his situation.
Hallie as well. “Viggo, I had nothing to do with all of this,” she insisted. She took her hand from the chimera. “You have to believe me!”
“I know,” he reassured her. “That’s why I came. I need your help and I don’t know who else I can trust.”
That earned him a smile he’d remember for life. She came to stand in front of him. “Tell me how I can help.”
“You have a pretty large following on ‘NowThink’.”
She screwed up her face. “I don’t know if I’d call it a following. They’re just friends I chat with.”
“You just chat with thirty percent of the city’s population?” Viggo asked. “How many of those do you meet on a regular basis, for coffee, say?”
“Alright,” she conceded, “it might be a little less intimate than I was leading myself to believe but… Oh!” She nodded. “You want to use that group to fight against their propaganda.”
“Pretty much. What are they saying about us, anyway?”
“That your parents have been arrested by the Alliance for running a slavery ring.” She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know how anyone can fall for that but most are willing to lean on the lie so they don’t have to do anything about it. My great uncle Tobias is claiming that he’s simply taking over in the interim while the case is decided. He even has a fake arrest warrant for you.”
“That’s one of the reasons I need you,” he told her, unsure what prompted him to add the ‘one of the’ at the last moment but he was glad he did. “You’re the most prominent member of the Fletcher family on the network. The older generation never took to it.”
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