Silent Death (Cryptid Assassin Book 2)

by Michael Anderle

  If that happened, Bobby still had the word out with his friends that they were looking for workers and the position would probably be filled again quickly and without too much difficulty.

  There was an odd moment when he heard Vickie move around in her little apartment. He was used to the relative quiet in the area without having to share it with anyone, but he accepted that he would have to adjust to having the woman in the same building as him.

  He had acclimated to sleeping in a barracks with almost thirty other men during boot camp, so this would be a breeze by comparison.

  A little uncomfortably, he stared in the general direction of her area. For all he knew, this was a new and sneaky way for Banks to keep tabs on him. With a rueful grin, he shook the thought aside. Honestly, that was an entirely convoluted alternative to the obvious solution, which was to simply bug his phone lines.

  The next morning saw him up and ready to go by nine. He had managed to get an early night as all the sleep he had missed out on the night before rushed back with a vengeance. As a result, he was rested and refreshed, if still a little grumpy by the time he needed to head down and start work for the day.

  Surprisingly, Vickie was up as well and was apparently already in the garage. He could hear her tinkering with the equipment down there.

  Ordinarily, he would have been annoyed that someone messed with his stuff, but she had to get used to her surroundings eventually and might as well get started sooner rather than later. It wasn't like she would find textbooks on their particular field of work. Besides, the fact that she was early for the day was a promising sign that she did, in fact, take this opportunity seriously.

  Once he reached the garage area, a few changes were instantly apparent. Her hair had already been short when they first met her—six or seven inches long, in fact. It appeared that she had taken his advice regarding appearances to heart, however, and had applied a trimmer to her head and given herself a buzz cut. It looked like she had just arrived at boot camp.

  Ordinarily, he would have found the choice a little odd but interestingly enough, it looked natural on the woman.

  Taylor dropped into the seat beside his workbench and began to adjust the security systems for the morning to only detect and alert. He made no comment at all on her choice of hairstyle.

  She had obviously expected something and moved over to where he sat.

  "What do you think?" she asked finally and ran her fingers over the short hair.

  He nodded. "You're rocking it, and it is one way to make your looks your own, I guess. It’s not the usual way to go about it, but I have the feeling you're not one to settle for the usual, so I guess it is fitting."

  "Thanks." The woman lowered her head. She probably wasn't used to positive reinforcement when it came to her antics and likely didn't know what to say next. "What are you working on?"

  "I’m bringing the security down for the day," he explained and rubbed his eyes. "We've had problems in this part of town and since Bobby and I know a thing or two about security systems, we set one up for the building."

  "It looks fairly extensive." She tilted her head and studied the network he was working on.

  "Yeah, I guess you could say that. Don't worry, I already added you to the exempt list so you shouldn't trigger anything. Although, having said that, it would be a little tricky to get any of your…shall we say friends through the system late at night. Not only that, I won't be pleased to have to wake up and do it for you so I'd suggest you spend the night at his or her place."

  "His," Vickie corrected him. "No offense to the chicks who dig other chicks, but guys are what work for me."

  "That’s not really my business." He turned as the garage doors began to open to reveal Bobby's truck waiting outside.

  As had become something of a custom, the man had brought coffee and pastries for them to have as breakfast.

  "So, for starters," Taylor said once they were ready to work, “there are these pieces here." He indicated one of the metal tables that held a number of pieces from one of the mech suits spread on it. "We'll put the suits back together, so you can probably start by taking some of that blue spray over there and using it and some of the paper towels to clean off the green marks—like you see here."

  She leaned in close and narrowed her eyes at the splotches of green that appeared to be mixed in with the grease. "What the hell is that?" she asked.

  "No one's really sure," Taylor said. "Specialists have tried to identify it, but all we know is that it's present in the Zoo, and it quite literally gets everywhere. It’s a mild corrosive and if left, will damage the armor. We need to clean it off before we can start putting the pieces back together."

  "Okay. "

  He didn't think he would need to double-check her work but he did anyway, at least for the first couple of pieces she attended to. Sure enough, she was deft and methodical, and her thin, nimble hands were far better suited to the work than either of the men’s were.

  "It looks like this green stuff gets into the circuitry too," she noted after almost an hour of cleaning. "But it doesn't look like it mixes well with the electronics and almost stays away from them."

  "Yeah, it mostly only sticks to the joints," he agreed. "It doesn't like electricity."

  "You talk about it like it has a mind of its own.”

  "If you are around the Zoo for long enough, you'll realize that essentially everything in the jungle has a mind of its own. It gets to the point where you kind of have to assume that everything does until proven otherwise. Seriously, even the trees can swoop down and take you if you don’t pay attention."

  "You seem to know a lot about the Zoo.”

  "Some might say there aren't many who know it better, except maybe a handful of the researchers," Bobby pointed out.

  "Were you in there?" she asked him.

  "I went in a couple of times," the mechanic replied. "It didn't agree with me, so I stuck to fixing the mech suits of those who were stupid enough to head in time after time like this one.” He pointed at his friend. “I cycled out after about a year and stayed away."

  "Believe it or not, that is the smart thing to do." Taylor inspected one of the pieces and studied the damage that had been done to the circuitry around one of the reloading mechanisms.

  "Which I guess makes you a dumbass for heading in there eighty-three times, right?" Bungees told him with a grin.

  "I'll not disagree with that," he responded. "Although there's something to be said for having survived the damn place so many times."

  "Eighty-three?" Vickie stepped over to him and took the piece from his hand.

  "Yeah…it starts a kind of addiction when you head in there the first time." He paused when he noticed she wasn’t acting like he thought she would. "What are you doing?"

  "It's a simple mechanism," she replied, pulled the devices apart, and reversed the polarity. Her eyes narrowed in focus, she fiddled with the wiring before she applied a little electricity to confirm it was now working. "It’s not that complicated but sometimes, when something goes wrong, it's hard to see."

  "Well…I would have found that eventually." Taylor pushed aside the feeling that he’d been outdone by a damned rookie. "The damage must have jarred the wiring together."

  "Sure, you would have," Vickie said with a small grin before she returned to her work.

  She was still a beginner, and while he didn't appreciate having his skills challenged so openly, it was still good to see that she was picking up on what they were doing so quickly.

  It was refreshing, really, and his irritation aside, he began to think their new employee would prove an asset.

  "So, what I'm doing now…" she said once he began to assemble the pieces of the suit again while Bobby worked on the hydraulic system. “It basically amounts to busy work, right?"

  "Well, you're not wrong, but that's also not entirely accurate," Taylor explained. "Getting to know the individual pieces and components these mechs work off is never a waste of time,
of course. And yes, we do need to clean that green stuff off before we can put it back together."

  "So, what is this mechanism supposed to do?" she asked as she watched him put it together. "It looks simple but it also looks like it's seen a ton of work."

  "It's an automatic reloading mechanism." He put two pieces together and reached for a third. "It connects to a series of magazines in the chest, and the chain rolls them forward across the arm and to the weapon that's being held—usually an assault rifle—and reloads it."

  "Why don't they keep the ammo stored in the arm?"

  "Unfortunately, it’s because the chances of losing an arm are too large to ignore. That and the arms are the most likely to be impacted during combat, which causes something to break. If the mechanism breaks and the ammo's stored on the chest, you can always reload it manually. If it's in the arm, it would be trapped inside the armor, which means you need to destroy the suit to get to the ammo inside."

  "I guess that makes a morbid kind of sense." Her expression seemed both fascinated and disapproving. "It still seems like it's a process that needs more efficiency, though."

  "Well, think about it," Taylor said once he’d fitted the necessary pieces together and connected them to a power source to make sure the mechanism worked correctly. "Again, a ton of money goes into improving these suits, and they're making new and advanced models every year. Oh, and remember to trademark your ideas. You don't want to be fucked over by a company that gets their hands on it while it’s still in development."

  "Do you have any ideas for improvement?" Vickie asked.

  "Well, they're not my ideas, but many suits have issues with relying on hydraulics and mounted rockets to move faster," he explained. “Especially the heavier ones. A friend of Bobby's came up with a system that works with magnetic coils instead. It takes much less power to function and delivers far more bang for your buck, so to speak."

  "Ummm…" she said thoughtfully as she returned to cleaning the remaining pieces. "But it would be an issue with diminishing returns. You would need larger and larger coils in the boots the heavier the suit is. The coils would make it heavier and heavier and bring it to the point where it no longer works."

  "Yes," he agreed. "But it does work for the lighter suits like the ones you see here, so we're working on installing them on all those it would work on efficiently. The clients have said they approve of the changes and that it helps them move faster, more lightly, and with less power consumption."

  "I wouldn't think you'd need to worry about that with a nuclear-powered mech suit," she said. "I'll be right back. I’m heading to the ladies' room."

  "Take your time." He waited for her to be out of earshot before he turned to Bobby. "Did you tell her the suits we're working on have nuclear power packs?"

  His friend shook his head. "Not many people figure that out. Too many are scared of that kind of thing these days."

  "Huh. She’s a smart kid and picks the details fast up too."

  His friend grinned. "Maybe too fast?"

  "Nah, nothing like that." He ignored the grin and refocused on his work.

  Chapter Seventeen

  "What are you working on?" Taylor asked when he returned from his lunch break.

  Vickie looked up from the device she was working on and didn’t seem like she was overly embarrassed to have been caught fiddling.

  The whole idea of her joining their crew was for her to learn about the suits so she would be more of a help to make the shop function efficiently. Most of her work thus far had been the smaller jobs that needed to be done but required far less technical expertise.

  Any knowledge or experience she gained meant that eventually, she would become skilled enough that she would need an upgrade from intern to apprentice and with higher pay. In turn, this obviously meant she’d spend less time cleaning up and more time actually working on the suits. That was the eventual idea, of course, but it meant they would need to find a new intern. Or maybe they would simply have to divide the damn jobs between them.

  No, it’s better to find another intern.

  "I’m trying to find out how these motion sensors are supposed to work," Vickie explained and showed him the processor she was tinkering with.

  "You've been around for almost a week now. I'd say you should know what they do already."

  "I know what motion sensors are but that's not the point." She shook her head. "I'm saying that… Well, the whole system is far more complicated than it needs to be. It's supposed to simply transfer the data to the HUD, but there are a ridiculous number of loops that feed it into this processor here."

  "Oh, that's because it’s supposed to handle data from other sources too," he explained. "You have a couple of inputs from the motion sensors and a handful from the night vision in there, as well as a couple of other sensors spread across the suits.” He touched a point on the part she was holding. “All feed into this processor here and are transferred into a program in the HUD that gives the pilot a live feed of basically everything that's happening around them. It was made because there are some parts of the Zoo where the tree cover is so dense that it might as well be night. The people in there need to be able to operate with as much of a view of their surroundings as possible."

  "Huh." She frowned and took another look at the part in her hand. "But what if the processor is damaged? Doesn't that leave the pilot blind?"

  "Not really.” He shook his head. "First of all, there's a reason why it's placed this deep inside the breastplate. That's to make sure it doesn't get damaged and if it did, you probably wouldn’t give a shit because you’d be dead. There are a couple of redundancies spread through the rest of the suit, and if all those fail and you aren’t dead, you can still access the data and have it brought up to your HUD. It’ll work that way, but it won't be all…uh, plugged together. Anyway, I would have thought someone with your particular set of skills would at least know something about electronics."

  "Sure, I learned a thing or two," Vickie said. "It’s hard not to when you spend so much time building computers and stuff like that. I can't say I enjoyed it, though, and when my brain became cluttered, I did a Sherlock Holmes and cleaned the clutter out of my mental attic."

  "That's not how brains work.”

  "It's how my brain works," she replied and shrugged.

  "Whatever. We'll work on soldering the pieces together that need it, including that processor there. I’m not sure how closely you want to watch, but if you want to be close, you'll need glasses. They should be in the desk over there."

  He gestured toward his left and it seemed that Vickie did, in fact, want to help but the shop's phone rang. There weren't too many places with a landline these days but given that he needed to be in contact with folks outside the country, it was cheaper to call them from that than from a cellphone. It was easier for them to call him too, although it meant someone needed to be around the physical location of the device. If they weren’t, a message could be left and if it was urgent, they could use his cell phone as a last resort.

  This was how he’d set things up until he managed to route the landline to his cellphone, which would allow him to answer it from wherever he happened to be. He wasn't sure if that was the best idea, though, since he didn't want to answer a call from a potential client if he was drunk. That would deliver a blow to his reputation he didn't think it would recover from.

  With that said, there were still kinks in the business they needed to resolve.

  "Vickie, would you mind answering that?" Taylor asked, his soldering gun already in hand and glasses in place. While it was only soldering and he wouldn’t have to worry about the dangers something like welding would present, he was always strict about eyewear in the shop.

  "Sure," she said and picked the receiver up from the cradle. "Who the hell has a landline these days?"

  "We the hell do. Answer the damn phone."

  He could almost hear her eyes rolling as she pressed the receiver to the side of her head. "McFadden
's Mechs, how can I help you?"

  It wasn't a great name, but he had yet to use his frustration over that to generate a more impressive alternative. He pushed the irritation aside and focused on his work but also listened to the only side of the conversation he could hear.

  "What?" Vickie demanded. "No, I'm not a secretary. Why, are you a janitor? Yeah, all janitors are men, right, so all men must be janitors… Are you kidding me right now?"

  He raised an eyebrow. Maybe work could wait. He wanted to hear what she had to say to whoever had called.

  "Yes, it was a sexist question, thanks for asking," she snapped. "Now, do you want to try again? Hi, this is Vickie from McFadden's Mechs, how can I help you to not be a sexist asshole this afternoon?"

  Well, that was one way to go about it.

  Taylor was close enough to hear the man on the line laugh, which was better than them being offended and hanging up. Still, he might need to step in if things escalated. He suppressed a grin and pushed up from where he was working to move beside her.

  "Sure, you can probably get your suit to us for much-needed repairs, but if you want it to be a rush job, it means you're asking us to put the jobs we already have lined up on hold to get yours out first, right?" she continued. "So, you can go ahead and ship it here, but if you want it to be a rush job, there will be a fee for that… Ten thousand… Yeah, that's our protocol. All right, then. If you can get it to us next Tuesday, we can ship it back to you the Friday after that for the regular fee plus the rush fee which will be added to the invoice… All right. I look forward to working with you."

  He sat across from her and raised an eyebrow. "What was that?" he asked.

  "Oh, the guy wanted it to be a rush job, so I thought he should pay us more if he wanted his suit faster than everyone else," she explained.

  "We don't have that kind of policy."

  "You should."

  "Yes, and as a matter of fact, we do now." He grinned. "That was quick thinking, and upselling is something you'll definitely be rewarded for."