Watching her go, Hoffer commented as if to himself. ‘Well that could have been worse.’
Jacobs looked over at him and smiled. ‘The girl knows her stuff.’
‘It seems so. She’s not what I expected, I have to be honest.’
Orchard let out a brief, good-natured laugh. ‘You wait until you’re in a meeting room with her and twenty other engineers. She’s doesn’t take prisoners.’
Hoffer raised his eyebrows as Orchard leaned over to him and continued in a confiding tone. ‘Trust me, she’s bright as hell and fights like the devil until she gets what she wants. Well,’ he paused, reconsidering his words, ‘she fights until she gets what she thinks is best, which is not always what she wants. The funny thing is, just when you’re at the point you want to throttle her, she’ll take you by the arm, buy you a cup of coffee and ask after your wife or family and it will be like the last two rotations never happened.’
Jacobs looked amused and gave a half-grin. ‘She’s got good hearts,’ he agreed. ‘But don’t let that fool you, she’s probably better at your job than you are. I’ve certainly watched her do mine on at least one occasion.’
Hoffer took this on-board before Orchard proffered an elegant hand to guide the way back to the engineering offices. The three of them started back in the direction in which Katherine had just departed. Privately, Jacobs wondered what the next few shifts would have in store for them. Adapting to the situation, he concluded, was going to be a necessity on this one.
015: Megan
Central Library, Central District, Skala City
Crossing the open area in front of the Central Library, Tyler Olson paused at one of two pools cut into the granite slabs lining the ground. Looking down to admire its blue, mosaic-lined bottom, he wondered how often the water had to be changed; probably daily, in deference to the dust and sand that beset Skala.
The sun at his back was momentarily obscured by an errant cloud, bringing him back to the present. At the top of a flight of grand stone steps, the library’s entrance was large, airy and elegantly venerable. Inside he identified himself at an exquisitely carved front desk. As he stood he could feel a curious, faint sensation of cool air moving up from the flagstone floor. The gentle fluttering of deep red drapes hanging from the walls assured him it was not his imagination, but he saw no vents.
‘Mr Olson?’ prompted a bespectacled desk clerk, replete with a bushy moustache.
‘Sorry,’ said Olson. ‘My mind’s elsewhere. Just wondering how the air’s so cool in here.’
‘Good question,’ replied the clerk with faint annoyance. ‘No one really knows how it works. Some time ago we had a bunch of architectural graduates in for shift after shift trying to figure it out, but they never did. Turned the place upside down and left no wiser.’
‘Funny how that happens,’ said Olson with a little irony. ‘It’s a nice system. We’d be happy to have something similar down at CID.’
‘I’m sure you would. Now, what can we do for you, sir?’
‘City Planning,’ said Olson warmly. ‘I was hoping to get some help from one of your junior staff, a Miss Devin?’
‘You mean Megan?’ said the clerk, picking up a telephone receiver with an earnest look. ‘She’s a mighty good researcher.’
Olson smiled his acknowledgement as the clerk spoke into the mouthpiece.
‘Is Megan up there? Yes, there is a Mr Olson from CID here to see her. Could you send her down please? Thank you.’
He replaced the receiver and gestured to a green leather sofa off to the right. ‘You take a seat, sir, she’ll be right with you.’
‘Thank you,’ said Olson, grateful for the respite. He felt quietly content to sit in the grand entrance for a few turns. It was a serious sort of place but not excessively pretentious. The entrance was circular, ringed by columns set into the walls that extended up to the dome above him. The dome itself was a complex structure of stained-glass panels providing natural light with a pleasantly warm, yellowish hue. Squinting up at them and picking one at random, he was sure it rose a little, opening then retracting on an ornate brass gear-and-pulley system.
The ring of distinctly female footsteps approaching him brought his attention back to ground level. Clutching a notebook firmly to her chest, a young woman strode pragmatically towards him. She was smartly dressed in a grey pencil skirt, cut just below the knee, and an expensive-looking white silk blouse. To Olson’s eyes she bore a striking resemblance to Katherine, although perhaps she was slightly taller, cutting a slimmer figure.
‘Mr Olson?’ she asked politely.
Olson rose and offered his hand. ‘That’s right. You must be Miss Devin? I’m hoping you can help me.’
‘Of course. What is it you need help with?’
‘City Planning,’ he said, not quite sure where to start. ‘I’m working on a case for CID. You have probably heard about it, the missing IDC?’
‘Everyone in the city knows about it. I imagine every outlying seeding from Krai to Ororpresa knows about it by now.’
‘I’m sure they do,’ Olson agreed, with a supplicatory smile. ‘What’s not public knowledge is that we really don’t know how the Intercessor was stolen. There are no clues, it’s like it disappeared into thin air.’
Megan frowned wordlessly, but kept her composure.
‘Your sister, Katherine, suggested I commandeer you for a few shifts,’ Olson continued. This wasn’t strictly true but he had an intuition that Megan, young as she was, could be nothing but an asset.
‘Here, I’m to give you this,’ he said, and offered her the note Katherine had scribbled.
Megan read it quickly, a look of amusement writ large across her face. As was his nature, Olson had not read the note himself and scrutinised Megan for a clue as to what it might contain. The young woman frowned again but gave nothing away.
‘My colleague, Vincent, has been scouring the Vault – you know, the place the Intercessors are kept?’
Megan nodded. ‘Yes, I’m aware of it.’
‘It’s a curious place. Vincent has turned up nothing so far so I’d like to take a look at the problem from a different angle. I want to look back at how it was originally built. According to Katherine, it was a basement put in when the building was new, but over time it’s been extensively modified. I’m hoping there is a record of how and when that happened. With luck we might extract a little insight.’
Megan, bewildered by this onslaught of information and the strange note from her sister, faltered, then recovered. ‘Well, I’m sure I can help you find any plans that are here.’
‘Only if you have the time.’
‘I’m doing archive work. I love working here but…’ she pursed her lips in a mischievous expression he guessed was one that he would never see on Katherine’s face. ‘It’s actually quite boring,’ she confided. ‘If you need help, I’d be happy to ask for a few shifts’ reassignment.’
Olson smiled broadly and stroked his grey beard. ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘where do we start?’
*
Megan had a remarkable grasp of the library’s antiquated referencing system. Over a period of only a few rotations she had withdrawn, cross-referenced and overlaid decades of blueprints dating back to the earliest records of Skala. The oldest bundles of plans stretched back as far as the latter decades of Kul but, despite his natural curiosity, Olson kept his mind focused on the Vault.
The records were fragmented but, as they laid them out across a sturdy oakwood desk, they could see that Katherine’s memory of the pre-Vault basement was largely accurate. As she had suggested, it had been constructed prior to the rest of the Ayon Research building, which had itself developed over more than twenty decades. The layout of the basement, specifically its depth, which was considerable, suggested its original function was cold storage. Surprisingly, access had been via a vertical shaft so that heavy, geological samples could be lowered from the main building. Three decades after construction the shaft had been substantially
widened, changed from square to circular section and labelled with the moniker ‘Cannula’. This, it seemed, was one of several designations bestowed upon the building during its first serious expansion. On the same plan, a prominent upper-floor corridor was labelled ‘Arterial’, a nomenclature that had apparently not endured.
Moving through the decades, Megan noted gaps in the development, possibly due to freelance modifications by whoever made use of the basement at a given time. Its exact purpose had morphed from storage to an ad hoc testing laboratory around ten decades later. By that time, the rest of the building had expanded as far as its footprint would allow and had begun to grow vertically, incorporating electrical ring mains and lighting throughout. By the time Katherine, aged fifteen, had moved in with the inanimate ROOT, the Cannula had been outfitted with an automated lift. Olson asked for references to the high-voltage cages Katherine had mentioned and how they might have been powered. Megan spent a few turns scouring the plans for notes or references to associated documents. She found nothing beyond a single handwritten label that denoted one annexed area as ‘HV’, and a small arrow pointing to a far wall. Olson, following her lead, moved on but made a mental note to investigate further.
The bulk of the blueprints were more recent, detailing the conversion from basement to Vault. If there was an indicative measure of ROOT’s perceived value at this time, the sheer effort and expense of the basement’s conversion was it. Almost nothing was left unchanged; the area had been expanded significantly, no doubt requiring a significant removal of earth. Hoping this might provide an answer to how HEX had been removed, possibly via a second access shaft, Olson was disappointed when Megan turned up a photocopy of calculations pertaining to the upgrade of the Cannula to move bedrock up and equipment down.
Once the Vault had been completed and ROOT installed, the facility stayed much the same for the following decade. Occasional upgrades were introduced; a cooling system was installed, as well as a standalone power supply to the chamber and requisite power-spike suppressors. The monitoring station, then situated to the left of the main corridor linking the Cannula to ROOT’s chamber, was expanded twice for increased server capacity, but the general layout remained intact.
They skipped forward to the next explosion of activity that accompanied HEX’s arrival. The building of a second, upgraded chamber was extensively detailed, as was the significantly revised layout of the Vault itself. As Olson saw it, the whole project had the hallmarks of a battle of egos. Rather than run a second corridor off as a spur, the original corridor had been moved such that it was now positioned between the existing chamber and the later, upgraded version. He asked Megan if she had any insight as to why this extraordinary provision had been made. Her answer, given in a groan of exasperation, surprised him.
‘Katherine. Katherine has to do everything properly.’ She bracketed this last word with waggling index fingers. Olson raised his eyebrows, prompting a further explanation.
‘She has this thing, a sort of tic, that everything has to be done a 100 per cent or not at all. Sometimes even a 100 per cent is not enough.’
‘She’s a perfectionist,’ Olson suggested, in an understanding tone.
‘That’s what people say, but it’s more than that. She’s driven. It’s like she has this itch that she can’t quite scratch. People admire her for it, but it can drive you nuts sometimes.’
‘Do you admire her?’
Megan hesitated for a moment, looking out from their dimly lit alcove. ‘I do. She’s a good person and has everyone’s best interests in mind, but I couldn’t work with her.’ She paused before reluctantly adding, ‘Sometimes I think she drives herself nuts, you know?’
Olson smiled his understanding and gave a quick nod of agreement, then pulled the last Vault layout plan towards him and examined it intently.
‘So what do you think happened to the original corridor?’ he asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Megan, thumbing back through the older plans. ‘It could have been filled in or cut off. This plan shows some of the original network that runs from HEX’s chamber into what was then the monitoring room.’
Olson stood and peered over her shoulder. ‘Can you still access that room?’
‘It doesn’t look like it. At least part of the corridor is still there, but it’s not connected to anywhere else.’
‘But it was once connected,’ Olson asserted, meeting her eyes. ‘That could be our access point to the chamber.’
‘It could,’ Megan conceded sceptically. ‘But it looks like it was sealed off some time ago.’
Olson thought it through. ‘At the end of that corridor there would have been a door. Would the door have been similar in design to the sealed doors that are fitted now?’
‘Yes, probably,’ said Megan, thinking hard. ‘In fact I’m pretty sure they are the same; the lock, the air-operated bolts… I remember Kyra once telling me they were a sort of vanity project. The engineer, I can’t remember her name, but Kyra said she wanted the most impressive locking system she could design. This was way back when the first chamber was built. Have you seen it? It’s very elaborate, but quite neat.’
Olson gave her a hard stare. ‘You’ve seen them?’
Megan coloured instantly, a look of panic across her face. ‘Well, yes, I saw it once.’
‘Katherine took you down there?’
‘Kyra,’ she said sheepishly. ‘Katherine would go mad if she knew. It was only once, just after HEX’s chamber was built. I know she wasn’t supposed to take me, but she was so proud to have HEX installed and working. She really grew up in Katherine’s shadow and for that short time she seemed to feel she’d stepped out of it.’
‘It didn’t last?’
‘For a while, but then the politics started.’ Olson could see that Megan was extremely uncomfortable with what she had already divulged, and decided not to press her further.
‘You know one of your people came here earlier asking about Kyra?’
‘Sergeant Narin, yes,’ said Olson. ‘We’re trying to find your sister.’
‘She has a habit of disappearing for a few shifts at a time, but you probably know that,’ said Megan with pregnant resignation.
‘I’d heard something of the sort,’ said Olson. ‘I’m sure Narin will find her, wherever she’s gone, and she won’t be in any trouble. Not with us anyway.’
Megan stared blankly into space, obviously concerned.
‘So that far wall,’ said Olson, drawing her attention back to the plans. ‘What’s there now? Can we take a look back at where that corridor is in relation to the rooms in the pre-Vault basement?’
‘Certainly,’ said Megan, pulling several sheets of plans across to overlay them. Finding one she thought was appropriate, she turned it, taking the Cannula as her reference point and overlaying its position on both drawings. Satisfied she had it as close as she could, she held the upper sheet with one hand and flapped it back and forth with the other for Olson to compare.
‘Hmm, well I never,’ he said in wonder. He stabbed a finger at the older map to indicate where the corridor would have been. At its central point was the annex that had been marked ‘HV’. ‘I had a feeling that little note would mean something. I’m right in thinking there is no high-voltage trunking running down to the Vault from above?’
‘Not that I can see,’ Megan said, studying the plans again.
‘So thinking around the problem, so to speak, where would you find a high-voltage supply if you were looking for one?’
‘I’ve no idea, Mr Olson,’ she said truthfully. ‘Electrical systems are not my forte.’
‘Still, you’re a hell of a good researcher. I’ll bet you can find out inside of a rotation.’
Megan, happy to be back in favour, took this as a challenge. Not knowing exactly what she was looking for, she began to skim through various plans of Skala’s electrical distribution network. There was an alarming amount of them but she knew enough about electricity to assume that it l
ikely arrived in Skala at very high voltage, and was then reduced for domestic use. She therefore focused her attention on the route from its source at the solar towers out in Hellinar. Within the rotation she had an armful of rolled schematics.
‘I think these are likely be the most relevant,’ she began, as the rolls spilled out onto the table. ‘They date from about eight decades ago.’
‘Before my time,’ Olson smiled.
‘This is about where Ayon Research is located, next to this junction. It’s strange, though,’ she mused, tracing a line diagonally up the map with a forefinger. ‘This line doesn’t run horizontally. All the rest do.’
‘Do you think they might have doubled up on the line running parallel with an existing utility?’
‘Possibly,’ she agreed. ‘It’s got a designation here, 7075. That’s different to all the other lines, they have a two-letter prefix, then a number. There might be some reference to it elsewhere, hang on.’
Getting up, she wandered back into the archive, reappearing a few turns later with further documents.
‘I’ve found it,’ she said excitedly. ‘I think you’re going to find this very informative. 7075 is not the power line designation, it’s a coolant tunnel. It runs from the Western District, through the Central District and then directly past Ayon Research. But here’s what’s really interesting.’ She spread out one of the rolls, not a schematic this time but a depiction of the tunnel in cross-section. ‘It’s deep,’ she asserted. ‘It’s really deep.’
‘As deep as the Vault?’ asked Olson.
‘Deeper.’
‘Where exactly does it run? Can you pin it to a few metres?’
‘I can do better than that,’ she said, brandishing another bundle of papers. ‘According to these drawings, the early extensions to the Vault had to be built just above the 7075 tunnel. Apparently there was some concern they might break into it by accident. They got at least as far as contacting the outer concrete before they stopped.’
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