Operation: Minerva
The yellow tell-tale
on Colonel White's console winked out as soon as Ochre signed off. They would
maintain close tabs on the situation in the cabin - a situation that had
deteriorated with a surprising rapidity and thoroughness.
The Mysterons hadn't
missed a trick, this time. They seldom did.
"Doctor
Fawn," he said. "Can I have your assessment of Captain Ochre's
condition?"
Fawn's brow was
creased with a puzzled kind of deep thought, his eyes distracted and staring
off into some unseen middle-distance. Fawn's eyes came around at the request,
but his frown remained.
"You said it
yourself, Colonel. He's hardly optimal. He was lucky - he's sustained a
few flesh wounds and he's got professional help to take care of them. Lucky too
that it was his left arm. Ochre will be no good in a scrap if it comes to one.
But if he's got a defensible position and a solid wall at his back he's worth
something with his firearms. Short term."
"We'll get there
first, Colonel." Magenta broke in. "We have to."
"That is
the plan, Captain." Colonel White nodded gravely to himself. "As soon
as you manage to open those files I want you to encrypt and transmit the
contents directly to Doctor Fawn. If it's what I suspect it is, that material
is going to be highly classified. Don't spend any time looking for information
in it. I also suspect it's going to be obscure and full of technical detail.
You simply have no time for that."
"S.I.G.,
sir." Magenta acknowledged, and that channel went silent
again as the Captain focused down on that immediate requirement, eager to clear
it out of his way so that he could move onto rescue planning instead. He
doubted that Magenta even cared what was in the files; Magenta's total
interest went no further than getting them dealt with and off of his slate.
Captain Scarlet was
another matter.
"Which
information gaps can you fill in for us, Colonel?" Scarlet
asked. "There must be something you can tell us about Minerva."
"In bits and
pieces, Captain, she's already told you what it is. But I think Doctor Fawn may
be a little ahead of you on that."
The crease remained
in Fawn's brow and his gaze had returned to mid-air. "Rabies," Fawn
repeated, a sudden and decisive statement. "Reticular formations and
neural nets and real intelligence." Fawn shook his head, closing his eyes.
"A computer engineer, a neurobiologist and a veterinarian. It’s the right
combination of talent and know-how."
"You're getting
very warm, now, Doctor." Colonel White nodded. "One last clue for
you: she can't use electrosleep."
Fawn's eyes snapped
open. "No. Of course not. Captain Scarlet - does the thing inside your
paperweight look rather like a very delicate, lop-sided piece of
cauliflower?"
Blue and Grey were
looking at Fawn in deepening confusion, trying to pick up the same pieces and
put them together sensibly.
"Somewhat," Scarlet
replied after a moment's pause. "More like dense lace around the
edges."
"Yes - it would
be. Thank you Captain." Doctor Fawn nodded one more time in satisfaction.
"I believe I know what they've done, now."
"And that would
be...what? Precisely?" Scarlet's tone went all clipped and frustrated
again. "What's all this about electrosleep and rabies? What do either
of those things have to do with the Minerva gizmo?"
"Quite a bit," Fawn replied. "They're our first real
clues - clear windows into the process."
"Electrosleep's
neural," Blue said next, thinking aloud. "It's in the
Room of Sleep's User Manual."
"And rabies," Grey
added. "That's neurological too."
"Yes. Exactly,
Captains." Fawn's gaze flicked from one officer to the other. "It's a
common denominator."
Colonel White
interrupted. There wasn’t time to let them guess and ramble. "What Weller and his team have done,
gentlemen," he said, "is unprecedented. I will say this clearly and
repeat precisely the way Doctor McLaine defined it for me. The Minerva module
is, and I quote, a very creative piece of bio-engineered cyber-science that
directly and successfully links a living human mind to some of the most
advanced computer technology available on the planet, unquote. In
this case, that living human mind happens to belong to Tylan McLaine." He
paused, giving that a moment to sink in. Then he went on, carefully and
emphatically. "Minerva is the ultimate neural-net interface. When
it's active, it gives Doctor McLaine conscious, real-time access to everything
that the Minerva lab's computer system can connect through to. And it isn't
only access, which could be devastating enough in itself. It's access and
control."
"Minus a few
important details" Scarlet noted irritably. "That's what
Weller told us at the outset."
"Weller gave us
as much truth as he felt he morally could. He was protecting Doctor McLaine and
her secret to the best of his ability. He was also quite up front about their
desire to keep the technology out of anyone's hands aside from their
own. They recognized the danger - they knew that this technology could be
weaponized."
"A neural
interface?" Scarlet repeated the term skeptically and then fell
silent. "Interface mind to computer? How? How the hell do you attach a
brain to a computer and make it work? Except in science fiction?"
"Perhaps more
easily than we've imagined, Captain." Doctor Fawn stood up and paced a few
steps away from the control desk and then back again. "Electrosleep works
by stimulating something in the brainstem known as the reticular activating system
- that part of the brain that controls the sleep cycle. From the brainstem
reticular neurons spread out widely and attach to the spinal cord, to motor
neurons, to the cortex and more. They feedback information to themselves in
looping pathways. So they both can and do have the capacity to influence the
entire brain." Fawn paced as he talked, a rising excitement in his tone.
"If you wanted to build a complex neural interface, the reticular
formation gives you a ready scaffold for wiring that extends into virtually every
other part of the brain. Moreover, reticular cells are anatomically different
from other neurons. And that's where rabies comes into the picture."
Grey's expression was
as skeptical as Scarlet's vocal inquiry had been. "Isn't rabies a bad
thing?" he asked.
"In its natural
state, yes, of course. The rabies virus attacks the nervous system in general.
My best educated guess is that they were able to genetically tailor the virus
to make it non-lethal and to give it a specific affinity for reticular
tissue. If they managed that, then they could use it to vector in something
else."
"Like
what?" Blue's eyes followed the Doctor's wandering course.
Fawn shrugged.
"I'm speculating it would be a silicon-based plaque of some sort –
something that would substitute silicon for carbon in its molecular structure –
that's how they build biochips. Possibly. Something that could construct a
network of conductive filaments all along the reticular axons. A network that
would then be as complex as the reticular blueprint. All you'd need to do after
that is to export the output. Filter, sort and translate the cortical signals
that network would tap. We already have ways to do that. Medicine has been
implanting electrodes and reading EEG's since the mid-20th century. PET scans
and MRI's have carried over into the 21st and taught us a lot about the finer
points of neural processing in vivo. We also already have both biochips
and AI - closely related and moderately successful technologies that are still
evolving. Add all of that to Demeter's state-of-the-art biotech and genetic
engineering expertise and then toss the Minerva team's combination of talent
and know-how into the mix." Fawn ceased pacing, apparently having
concluded that train of conjecture. He inhaled deeply. "That's a very
potent and dynamic sort of intellectual cocktail. Am I wrong, Colonel?"
Fawn had hit all of
the most salient points. Based on minimal information, Fawn had just delivered
an inspired bit of on-the-spot deductive reasoning, eloquently expressed in
terms that his colleagues could absorb. Fawn understood the relevant sciences
and he knew it was more than possible. In an earlier pre-Spectrum
career, Fawn himself had devised, developed and clinically proven a highly
technical and successful mix of robotics and medicine - he'd written the
rulebook for the entire field of contemporary automated medical care and was
still considered a world authority in such matters.
Colonel White shook
his head slowly. "I'd like to be able to say so. But you're not
wrong, Doctor Fawn."
"It's brilliant," Fawn breathed, obviously impressed
by the accomplishment. "And I'll say it out loud, too - this is a work
of genius."
"Literally."
White nodded.
"Science fiction," Scarlet murmured
incredulously, still working to digest it. "Sir...tell me this is
science fiction."
Colonel White sighed,
wishing it was so. But the Mysterons didn't deal in science fiction.
"Not anymore, it
isn't, Captain Scarlet," he said grimly. "Not anymore."
"You're
the....module."
She held her breath
as Ochre repeated her last statement slowly and without any true comprehension.
It was exhaustion in his voice now. It was pain and it was information
overload.
He was looking at her
with a numb and bewildered look that finally went blank. It was an emotional
shock on top of the physical one of the injury. Tylan hadn't once let go of his
hand since her confession and she didn't let go now, not even when his
shoulders slumped suddenly and he blinked, trying to make some sense of it.
"Never would
have figured that," he admitted at last, shaking his head, "You're
the...the what?"
"Long
story," she said. "But if you sit still and shutup, I'll tell it. No
questions until I'm done. I'm going to keep it short - we don't have a lot of
time for this anymore." She
squeezed his hand again, hard enough to ensure she had his attention, and
waited.
He closed his eyes
and didn't open them for a slow minute. "Got it," he said at last, a
fatigued agreement. "Go back to the beginning - it's as good a place as
any to start."
"That’s a deal.
Now listen up - I'll stop the instant I see you're not taking it in." She
leaned toward him and placed a second kiss on his forehead, trying to decide
where the sensible beginning might have been, settling finally on the bit that
Spectrum already had in hand, a very recent bit from Scarlet's report that
might have stuck in Ochre's mind.
"Once upon a
time," she began. "There were three scientists with a paper
airplane..."
The story unfolded as
she went back to the business of finishing up with his damaged arm, wrapping it
in gauze and bandages before setting the whole limb into a sling, feeling
horrible and guilty about the entire ugly thing.
It was her fault -
all of it, her fault. She was still shaky inside, because she'd talked
him into letting Merlin in. A Merlin that Ochre had suspected hadn't
been, not then or anymore and whose lifeless not-Merlin body was still lying
there on the floor behind her and enough to make her knees weak if she let even
the smallest scrap of what had happened back into her head.
Ochre hadn't wanted
to let the dog in - for very good reasons.
What could
have happened was even worse to contemplate and her weak knees threatened to go
right to water and crumple under her whenever those thoughts slipped through.
She wrenched her
attention back and kept the story brief, saying only a few sketchy words about
Arthur's contributions to the project, though they deserved much more than
that. She'd gotten all the way up to the development stage and the module's rat
and primate studies before lifting Ochre's chin again. The crescent-shaped tear
high on his cheekbone needed three small stitches. She completed those quickly
enough, and when they were done, he was still listening to her without
interruption, still attentive because he had no choice but to believe every
word of what she was saying.
"Installation
was the worst part. I had to stay awake, so that we could monitor cortical
activity. Andy and Arthur kept me up for three days, while an IV dripped live
viral serum and silicon substrates into the net-building process. We used a
short-lived radio-isotope of phosphorus to track Minerva’s growth - with a
portable PET scanner we could watch the plaque consolidate and grow from those
raw materials as long as the isotope was actively being taken up in the
phosphate linkages of the viral RNA...."
She droned on, not
entirely convinced he was taking it all in, carefully wiping at the cheek wound
with a bit of antiseptic gel that made him wince. But the story wasn't very
long after that part.
"Then we got to
testing it - and found out how easy it was to go anywhere and do anything with
the system live and connected. That was dangerous - that's what scared us. We
took Minerva offline. Andy decided to move it here to the cabin - we still
wanted to do some further testing - the science was too interesting, too
promising. But we wanted it kept secret, even from Demeter staff, until we
learned more about the real extent of what it could do."
She paused, waited
and finally shrugged when he didn't say anything. "End of story," she
concluded, in case he was waiting for more. "The snow came and it's been
sitting up here on the shelf for months. All we've done is talk about where to
go next with the research. The cabin's been on seasonal shutdown. Nothing new
or different has happened with Minerva since we transferred it - at least,
nothing until Spectrum turned up asking about it. You know the rest after
that."
That’s a helluva
story.” Ochre slumped back in his seat, touching gingerly at the arm in the
sling. “The thing’s been sitting up here since last fall? All by itself?”
She shrugged again.
“It snowed. The cabin was shut down. That’s
why there wasn’t any heat at first. The thermics were on minimal and the lab
had priority for power.”
“I thought it was
shelved. What did it still need power for?”
“There’s a cryogenic
component – it has to stay cold or the system crashes.”
“So, it’s – live?
There’s no checklist, no power-up? It’s live and ready to use?
You mean, right now?” Ochre’s tone told her that it meant he’d only then
realized things were worse than he’d thought.
“Yeah, it is.” She
swallowed nervously. “It snowed and we never got back to shut it right down.
There was no reason. It wasn’t going to do anything. There was no harm
in just letting it idle. Not until the Mysterons. It’s why I shouldn’t be here.
It’s why Andy didn’t want me to come anywhere near Demeter. And when I talked
Colonel White into letting me, I wasn’t planning to come to the cabin
for the actual disposal.”
“Carey found a way to
make you change your mind.” Ochre said, making it a statement.
Her gut fluttered
again. It had not crossed her conscious mind on the airfield that Andy and
Arthur were already dead, or that their otherwise inexplicable behavior confirmed
it. But it must have been there somewhere as an immediate unconscious knowledge
and it had instantly, effectively motivated her frantic flight from the scene
as Minerva’s sole surviving protector.
Todd had
figured it out - obviously.
She obviously had not
– not until afterwards, not until it was too late. She had been terrified on
the climb upwards - terrified of meeting Mysterons. Terrified of meeting anyone
at all – anyone who might have been one, or who might have decided that she had
become one too. Terrified that the cabin might not have been found undisturbed.
Terrified of not knowing the consequences of what she’d done by running, and
twice as terrified of those consequences because she had.
She drew a deep,
guilty breath, peeling off the latex gloves. “Andy was right.”
Ochre shook his head
wearily. “Zil – it’s not all your fault. It’s not.”
But some of it was.
She turned and saw Merlin – a Mysteron that she’d talked Ochre into
letting into the cabin – laying there all creepy-dead on the floor. Turning
back, she saw Ochre hurt because of it.
Merlin – her Merlin,
that was – had already been dead, the same as Andy and Arthur had already been
dead.
These had become
facts.
And as for the whole
rest of the world…
Well, the rest of the
world was in trouble too - unless she did something about it.
“You need to rest,”
she said suddenly. “I have work to do. Com’on.”
He didn’t argue. She
put one shoulder under Ochre’s good arm, helping him to his feet and back to
the sofa in the living room. She let him stand there for an unsteady moment
while she pushed it around, leaving it in a spot where she could see it from
inside the study. She settled him there with pillow and blanket, refusing to
allow herself a hug and a kiss. She would make time for that later.
“What’s contact
schedule 4?” she asked.
He told her, and she
left him to get comfortable, returning to the kitchen to get his radio cap and
placing it at the study workstation in mute adoption of communications duties.
Then she made one more trip, this time to retrieve the creepy-dead Mysteron.
She dragged it from the kitchen and into the entry corridor, sealing the
carcass on the far side of the inner door; she would not have been able to work
otherwise.
She locked that door,
and Ochre nodded approval, sinking back into his pillow once that distressing
little task was accomplished.
“You…” she
told him, in no uncertain terms, “…are going to go to sleep now. I’ll be
sitting right over there, at the desk in the study, and I’ll be able to see you
while I work on Plan C. I’ll wake you up as soon as it’s ready to install. Got
it?”
He nodded again,
drained and exhausted. “Yeah - I’ve got it.”
“Start counting
sheep.” She stood and moved resolutely for the workstation, activating the
system there and glancing back as it booted up, making sure that he was doing
as he’d been told.
He watched only until
the vid-screen lit active, and he closed his eyes.
Finally then, she
turned her full attention to the monitor in front of her, and began to
transcribe what was liable to prove the single most important piece of work she
was ever likely to do.
The word came from
Lieutenant Green only a moment after Scarlet had arrived at Demeter’s main
hangar with Teal and Roan in tow.
“The Prince George
authorities have made contact with the manager of the car rental agency. We
have final confirmation that the two persons who engaged the vehicle were in
fact Captain Black and Todd Carey. Positive identification.”
Scarlet nodded to
himself, exchanging glances with the two lieutenants as he threw the hood of
his Spectrum-issue parka back, shaking it clear of
the snow that had plastered itself to the fabric during the short but irksome
snowmobile ride from the Admin building.
He was immensely put
out with the weather. The short ride across the airfield had served to convince
him that a ground pursuit of the Mysteron agents – as much as he’d wanted and
begged to conduct one - would have been futile. Futile and dangerous.
“S.I.G. Lieutenant Green. Message
received and acknowledged.” Scarlet sighed heavily as the channel closed,
striding toward the helijet and sizing up its location within the hangar.
Magenta had managed to spot land the craft inside the main doors – a tricky
maneuver under any circumstances, and a phenomenal bit of piloting skill under
blizzard conditions. Nevertheless, the helijet was currently facing the wrong
direction, and they would have to un-chock and physically turn it around if
they hoped to make any sort of a rapid sortie out of there with it.
Still, that was
better than having to de-ice and pre-flight outside in that weather…
“Why does anyone
choose to live in this climate?” Roan asked rhetorically from behind him, not
truly expecting an answer as he scattered snow from his own parka, emerging
from under the hood to look the helijet over. “We’ll have to spin the nose a
full one-eighty, sir.”
“The weather can’t
turn soon enough for my liking, Lieutenant,” Scarlet replied, aware with a wry
humor that any native son of the Australian outback could ask no other possible
question about the present inclement conditions. “But right now – even if Todd
Carey does know the way to the cabin – the weather must be slowing the
Mysterons down somewhat. It will buy us a bit of time to sort this out.”
“Would you really
have gone after them, sir?” Teal asked, drawing level with him as he stopped
beside the aircraft.
“If we’d got there any
sooner…” Scarlet’s voice trailed off as he
contemplated it. “Yes, Lieutenant, I would have.”
“It seemed like a
good idea at the time. I was thinking about it,” Roan admitted, obviously now
having a few second thoughts of his own on the matter, his prior enthusiasm for
such a foray cold and dampened by a dose of harsh reality. “How far do you think we might have gotten?”
“Not very far.” Teal
shook his head. “This is worse than the Great Blizzard of ’53, the way I
remember it.”
It had been a
riveting global news story at the time, and as a teenager Scarlet had – along
with the rest of the world - followed that dramatic media story with a kind of
morbid fascination as it had unfolded. It had been the culmination of the Great
Winter – a sustained period of brutal minus 40C temperatures across the
majority of North America that had lasted a solid 48 days without respite
before it had finally broken in something the meteorologists had identified as
a hundred year storm. The Great Blizzard of ’53 had killed thousands across the
central parts of Canada and the United States in one of the worst natural
disasters of the 21st century.
“No one has forgotten the blizzard of 2053,”
Scarlet recalled. “The way I remember it, that storm buried half of
North America under more snow than this and it lasted far longer. This, as bad
as it is, is only a localized disturbance.”
“It’s still more than
enough to freeze your butt off, sir.” Teal said. “Without the proper gear and
training, what we’ve got out there is severe frostbite and hypothermia in less
than ten minutes.”
It was not an
educated guess made by an officer trained in emergency first aid – as all
Spectrum field agents were. Teal would have known with more certainty than
that. Teal was a year or two older than the rest of Cloudbase’s new
recruits – and he’d signed up with Spectrum after a prior and commended career
as an elite paramedic in the city of Chicago’s Emergency Response department.
Scarlet merely
shrugged. “It would have been a mistake. But I still would have gone, if
there’d really been any chance of catching up. Never mind the frostbite.”
Roan shivered at the
thought. “That’s inhuman, Captain.”
He nodded slowly. ”So
are the Mysterons, Lieutenant.”
And I might be too, Scarlet
thought inwardly, as unsettled at the thought in that moment as he was every
time it happened to cross his mind. The notion of freezing to death in a
snowbank didn’t appeal. Neither did he like the idea of his corpse being found
curled and twisted in some grimacing pose of rigor mortis and having to be thawed
for recovery, like some prehistoric curiosity for study.
He wondered grimly
what Fawn’s threshold might have been for that particular fate.
Scarlet wrenched his
thoughts back to the business at hand and surveyed the helijet one more time.
“Let’s get moving
here - set her up and get the pre-flights done…”
An hour later, the
helijet had been spun about to face the hangar doors, ready to launch. He’d had
the lieutenants run through the flight
checklists together, listening absently as they’d double-checked one another,
and gotten it right. He conferred with the Security detail that had been
managing the hangar and soon after sent Teal and Roan off with a pair of
Security operatives to
set Demeter’s snow- plowing equipment into motion and to clear some of the snow
away from the vicinity of the hangar doors.
Magenta turned up shortly
after that task had been put into action.
“Well?” Scarlet
inquired of Magenta’s code-breaking assignment.
“Done and transmitted,” Magenta replied. “The Inquisition’s
got a juicy bone to chew.”
“Anything of
interest?”
“I’m sure it was all
of interest.” Magenta shook his head slowly. “There was a lot of in-depth
biology to it. Not much that I could interpret and I didn’t try. The idea’s
intriguing enough though. I hope they’ll de-classify it enough for me to get it
figured out.” Magenta began a walk-around of the helijet, starting his own
pre-flight inspection of the craft. It was a recommended practice for any
pilot, not to trust the state of your aircraft to the hearsay of another
person’s un-verified report.
And certainly not for
a flight as critical as the one they were in preparation for.
“Spectrum
Intelligence will want a working knowledge before they’re done with it,” Scarlet commented dryly. “Though I expect
SWC will fight it tooth and nail.”
“I’ll settle for just
a theoretical overview. But that’s not likely to happen today.”
“We can always ask Godzilla once we get there,” Scarlet muttered sourly. “For all the good
that might do us.”
“We won’t even have to,” Magenta offered, not even batting an eye.
“Colonel White cleared Ochre for the whole story.” Magenta reiterated
the fact with a tiny grin. “We’ll only have to ask him.”
It went entirely
against the rules. Ochre having clearance strictly didn’t
translate as the freedom for Ochre to pass the information along.
Ochre and Magenta, as
a pair, however, were infamous for disregarding the rules.
It was a cheerful
thought that lightened Scarlet’s dark mood considerably.
It seemed that Zil had no sooner sorted out
his injures and settled him down to rest on the sofa, than
she was back again, away from her keyboard and nudging at him to wake
up.
Groggy and aching, it took a moment for Ochre
to realize again where he was and why - then he snapped abruptly into
consciousness and tried to sit up. She blocked that sudden move with an arm
across his chest.
"Easy, take it slow. You'll make
yourself dizzy, Och."
"Yeah," he mumbled, rubbing at his
eyes with his good hand and already feeling that way. "Right."
"I'm done – the program’s done, that is.
I let you sleep as long as I could."
He let his glance go past her shoulder, into
her work-den. The computer system there was dark, the lights off. She had a
data disc in one hand. That and her silver, double-black striped
keycard.
"Lab tour and demonstration time?"
Ochre asked, pushing himself up and off of the cushions slowly, wondering what
time it actually was and how long he'd been out. "I thought we'd never get
around to it."
He would have to report first, check for
updates and news; he wasn't going anywhere until
then. He’d been out cold – the depth of his own muzziness and the fact that he
could recall nothing, not a shred of memory of any scheduled security calls
having been received – confirmed that. He didn’t like it. Didn’t like the way
he still hurt, and especially didn’t like the way he really wanted to lie back
again and sleep for another few hours or longer.
"We're coming right down to
the wire." Zil replied with a sigh, looking every bit as tired as he was
feeling himself. "It’s now or never."
"Sink or swim?" he
countered in unthinking word-association. "Do or...." He stopped that
pointless cliché mid-sentence.
"Or die?” She finished it
for him, with an earnest, searching sort of regard. "Maybe not. But only
if we get moving." She helped him to his feet. "How's the arm
feel?"
"Sore. Aching. Nothing
unexpected." He flexed the hand cradled in the sling, finding no immediate
desire to remove that support. He reached for his cap when she held it out,
activating it, reporting a firm, business-like all quiet to Scarlet when
his colleague answered, getting a terse acknowledgement back and a brief report
on the helijet's ready-and-waiting status before Scarlet patched him through to
Cloudbase again.
Colonel White was likewise brief. "I
won't waste your time, Captain. I trust that Doctor McLaine is ready to
implement Plan C?"
"She is, sir. We're about to head to the
lab for installation."
"And your particular status, Captain
Ochre?"
"I'm....functional enough, sir," he
said, after the tiniest pause and a determined effort to rouse himself from the
muzzy state. "I've been better, Colonel, but I've been worse too."
"Understood, Captain. I expect you'll
be out of radio contact for a short time. Report back at first opportunity -
I'm sure Doctor McLaine may be able to facilitate that before you're done. Good
luck - to both of you."
"Thank you, sir. Ochre out." His
cap mike flipped up, and he looked at her. "Let's go then," he said,
glancing around and wondering which way. "Wherever it is that we're
going."
She shrugged, pausing to pick up a hand-axe
from beside the woodpile. “For destruct purposes,” she muttered, turning with
it in hand and moving toward the staircase. "We’re going downstairs."
He blinked, following a close step behind.
"There's a downstairs?"
"Oh, yes, very downstairs. We're going
down to Andy's once-and-future - " she hesitated, and changed her mind
about what she'd been about to say. “Well, down to Andy's once-and-never spa,
now, I guess," she finished wanly.
The Andy-wound was still too fresh.
"Spa?" That was not what he'd
thought to hear, and he blinked again. "A secret spa, I take it?"
She leaned one elbow on the
banister at the staircase, the keycard in that hand. "Not really. The lab
was the real secret. The whole spa-thing became a cover excuse for all the
construction. Secrets – places or things or plans - were something Andy never
quite grew out of – he loved the whole idea of intrigue. You can let me know
what you think of this one when we get there."
She then slipped the keycard into
a hitherto unsuspected slot beneath the decorative trim there.
A panel in the posh, textured
wallboard slid quietly aside, opening a shoulder-width portal to reveal a
concealed corridor whose very existence Ochre hadn't even guessed at – another
bit of omitted information, another thing to be unhappy about. She sealed that
door again as soon as they'd crossed the threshold. The corridor there was
starkly empty and narrow, and it carried on back beneath the loft-stairs and
under what would have been the upstairs hallway. Embedded in the rock wall at
the far end were the doors of a small capacity elevator.
Her keycard opened that access
too.
Ochre got into the lift with her,
absorbing it all wordlessly until the doors had closed and it had begun to
descend.
"How deep?" he asked.
"Not quite 200 feet. It's a
natural shaft for the most part - same with the cavern. There's a hot spring at
the bottom; beyond just using it to generate power for the cabin, Andy really
did want to develop it, turn it into something recreational. That was his
original intention. Storing Minerva down here was very much an
afterthought."
"Is this the only way in and
out?"
"Yes," she nodded.
"That's why Andy considered it secure."
He didn't like that idea. Places
with only one way in or out were too much like traps.
The lift slowed, and then let them out into a dimly lit space - a
space that wasn't built over like the corridor upstairs - this was a raw tunnel
of both natural and quarried rock and the air down here was warmer, with a
moist and faintly sulfurous tang to it.
"Hot spring," Zil said
again, glancing at him as he breathed deeply, taking it in. "Down that way
a bit. It powers the thermic generator. It's small scale, but more than
adequate."
"Independent?" Ochre
asked, realizing it had to be so. And of course, in that case. The reports that Spectrum had seen had
indicated no power lines run up to the cabin. That much was true.
The cabin didn't need them. The
cabin had its own thermal plant, as did Demeter, albeit on a smaller scale.
Therefore there was no point in asking Scarlet to cut off Minerva's power
supply. It couldn't be disabled that way. Not from Scarlet's end of things.
Maybe from his end, if necessary.
Depending on what other destruction he could wreak on the target project. After
whatever demonstration was forthcoming.
"Yes," she confirmed
that too. "The lab is completely independent."
There was simply no good
news to be had, he thought, depressed by the information. "How's Minerva
talk to the outside world, then?" There had to be a way to break that
link. If he killed the transmitter, if Minerva was isolated and unable to
communicate with World Telecom---
They’d take the axe to it, that
was what they’d do…
And that would work, as long as
the Mysterons didn't just hook it right back up again when they were done with
vandalizing it.
He didn't doubt that anything he
could do, they could very easily undo. Whether or not they could undo Zil's
anti-Mysteron plan remained to be seen.
Ahead of them, along the other
branch of the stone tunnel, there was an air-locked portal, the end terminus of
a ribbed, umbilical extension link that ran further back and curved around a
bend in the rocky access. The tunnel narrowed under a lowering overhead, until
the stone ceiling came to within an inch or so of the translucent umbilical.
"There's a satellite uplink
and a transmitter on top of the mountain. It's hardwired up through an
ascending crevasse that exits a couple of thousand feet up and keeps going
through a conduit the rest of the way to the top. That's buried under snow pack
right now. SWC has a geo-stationary satellite that connects Demeter - and
Minerva - to World Telecom."
She approached the portal with
her keycard out, pushed it into the slot she found there and completed the scan
for access. The door swung open and she stepped into the throat of the
umbilical corridor. He followed and she closed the access behind them.
Inside, the air was drier and
cleaner - the sulfurous taint had vanished.
"Air scrubber," she
remarked. "The damp and the sulfur presented an environment too corrosive
for some of the hardware. But Andy wanted the security down here. Cleaning the
air was an easy fix."
The ribbed tunnel was perhaps 60
feet long - its interior length was spookily pristine, diffusely lit and silent
save for the sounds of their own breathing and footsteps muted on the
rubberized floor mat.
There was another sealed door at
the far end of the pristine corridor. Her keycard opened that access too,
revealing a domed bubble-chamber constructed of the same material as the
umbilical. It was small, but seemingly well equipped.
Ochre stood at the entry
threshold, taking in the details.
There were two computer consoles
sitting in the middle of the chamber, facing the portal. To his immediate left
there was a wide vid-screen stationed under the slope of the bubble/dome
opposing the consoles. Sitting several feet behind those workstations there was
some sort of apparatus that he couldn't identify. It hummed quietly, and
consisted of a tangle of heavy cables and a skein of finer ones that nested
around a central tank of some sort. The heavy lines vanished through a conduit
in the back wall of the bubble, and the finer ones snaked across the floor to
disappear under the consoles, connected to them, he assumed.
It was a sterile, austere
environment, somehow not what he'd expected.
"It doesn't look like
much," she said, echoing his thoughts, her words muted in the acoustically
muffled space. "But this is it. Minerva. The whole thing, now that
I'm here too."
Foreboding crept up his spine.
"You make it sound so ominous."
She blinked, looked away and then
glanced at him,. "Because it is," she said quietly. Her brow creased
with concern. "You'd better come over here and sit down before you fall
down - you're much too pale, Och."
"I'm fine," he muttered
absently, but allowed her to draw him along and sit him down in the seat behind
the first console. The workstation was constructed of smooth, molded plastic
with a few connector portals and an inset vid-phone. In the center there was a
shallow depression that housed what appeared to be a custom-designed laptop
computer. The console right next was this one's identical twin.
"You are really in
denial, Och." Zil shook her head. She leaned over his shoulder and pushed
a button. The slim lid of the laptop popped open and lit active, though the
screen remained blank. She then dropped into the seat next over, discarded her
hatchet to the side and activated that system too, keying in some sort of code
that brought up a sparsely populated menu screen on both units. She selected All
Functions and waited as the chamber thrummed to life and brightened around
them. The big screen glowed and the mystery tank behind them sang, emitting a
harmonious series of noises before settling down to a quiet whirring.
Ochre turned to look at it. The
sense of foreboding was back, redoubled and convincing him that things here
were somehow not safe.
"What is that thing? And what the hell does it do,
Zil?"
She didn't look up as she
continued to work the keyboard. "That's the equipment we're here to
dispose of - Arthur's contribution to the project. We call it the Think
Tank."
"The Think Tank?"
He repeated the name. It sounded...well, silly.
"Yeah. I know. It's kinda
stupid-cute." Zil shrugged. "But the name stuck after we said it out
loud the first time. You'll see in a minute."
"But what's it do?"
He repeated the question, suddenly convinced to the core that it was critical.
Zil looked at him, as if trying to
find a way to shorten an impossibly long answer. "It works."
He stared at her.
"I know that's not
helpful," she mumbled. "It's complicated, I skipped a lot of that.
And we still don't have much time."
"Then dumb it down. I need
to get a solid grip on all of this." He pressed for an answer.
She spun her seat to face him.
"Do you know how a search engine works?"
"Um - vaguely. It taps
enormous pools of data storage - RAM encoded magnetically or 3-D holographic -
disks and tapes and lasers and the like."
He knew the general gist of the way it worked, certainly not the nuts
and bolts. IT was Magenta's field of expertise.
"Close enough," she
nodded at him. "Next - do you know how human consciousness works?"
He was on firmer ground with that
question. "That's a bit easier. It's all neurons and synapses and
electrochemicals."
He gave her the short answer,
because he did actually know something about that. In the years he’d
spent working undercover drugs and vice for the World Police, he'd had to learn
a fair bit about which drugs had what effects on brain function and subsequent
user behavior. He was one of the few people on Cloudbase that could
actually carry on a decent, running conversation with Fawn about that sort of
thing and he was invariably called in if any sort of drug trafficking or
substance abuse was suspected anywhere in the organization. He had the
investigative background and experience.
He qualified his statement.
"Are you asking me about mind or brain?"
Because there was a huge
difference. The mind was the driver, the brain just its vehicle.
Zil nodded again, having
established his level of knowledge to some satisfaction.
"Both,” she answered. “The
neurons and electrochemicals are all-important. But I won’t make you guess. I
just want you to believe me when I tell you that human memory is stored in the
brain by a protein known as alpha-CaMKII, and the only thing you need to know
about it right now is that it has properties that enable it to encode
information in a manner very similar to electronic holographic memory."
She indicated her temple with one finger, putting an obvious emphasis on what
was inside the skull. "Our knowledge and memories - our data storage and
recall and processing - our thinking - all happens through the
interaction of the various EM fields created by electrochemical neuronal
activity throughout the brain. That's what consciousness is."
"It sounds simple when you
put it like that."
"It is, in principle. It
just gets complicated when you toss in trillions of interconnected neurons.
It's why neural net tech has never really caught on and AI stagnates. Bottom
line - you simply can't manufacture a neural net complex enough."
She turned toward her console and
popped open a drawer beneath, removing a slender cable with connectors on both
ends - one standard, the other of a very fine and elongated construction. She
plugged the standard end into a port on the side of the laptop.
"Fair enough." He
wasn't about to argue it. "And?"
"It means – and this is the
whole key to it – that human brains and holographic data storage work the same
way. A mind can read and manipulate that kind of data. You only have to
connect them properly."
He looked at the cable in her
hand, and felt the lump in his belly contract. "Where's that end go?"
He whispered the question with his heart pounding in another momentary,
gut-level panic.
She had told him this, he was
sure she had explained it. It had made some sort of sense at the time, and then
it had faded away like any bad dream would. He realized now what she'd been
trying to tell him - and which he had clearly missed or entirely misunderstood.
The question became stupid, because there was only one possible answer.
I am the module.
She'd said it. That and more.
Her response was to wordlessly
reach up to a spot behind her right ear and push her hair aside. She applied
pressure; something popped softly and she removed what looked like a small plug
of plastic scalp with a tuft of long brown hair attached. Ochre stared, waiting
expectantly for the next lunatic move, watching for it now, transfixed and
unnerved and utterly helpless to look away as she lifted the elongated
connector and seated it home with an audible, sinister click.
Seated it directly into her
skull.
And every screen in the chamber
flickered in immediate response.
Her eyelids fluttered - they
always did - and Tylan squeezed them shut, pulling in a single, shuddering
breath before forcing them back open.
STATUS: SEARCHING the screens advised, in blinking
block script. And then: ACQUISITION OF SIGNAL: CONFIRMED. LOCK POSITIVE.
All the while, Ochre's stare
bounced from the screen to her face and back again, over and over.
STATUS: MINERVA ONLINE. LOCAL NETWORK
ONLY.
"There's always a bit of
rush and a buzz to that," she said, looking down, toying with the tufted
plug in her hand. She wound the bit of long brown hair nervously around a
finger, then peeled it off and dropped it in the drawer. "Keeps the shampoo
out of the works," she offered sheepishly, by way of explanation.
"The receptacle's made out of carbon fiber - I don't set off security
detectors at the airport that way. And what's inside - is silicon-based and
organic and so fine that even an x-ray can't pick it up. Here’s what it looks
like…”
Colorful schematics popped onto
the screens, two objects in rotating 3-D, one a transparent human skull, the
other a layered cutaway of the Think Tank. Inside the skull was a complex
tracery of fine lines that ran crooked and fanlike from the base of the brain
to the frontal areas, in increasing density.
That image was superimposed
inside the Tank.
“That’s the connection,” she
said. “The receptacle is tied to a nano-processor that binds to the reticular
net. And this is what happens when we
log on.”
She could have reached for the
keyboard and clicked the command, but she deliberately did not, preferring to
demonstrate the Minerva-bestowed ability to think it instead.
SEARCHING: LINK TO:
SWC-SAT1149/AUTHCODE*****//WORLDNET: AUTHENTICATION AFFIRMATIVE ACQUISITION OF SIGNAL: CONFIRMED LOCK
POSITIVE. MINERVA ONLINE WORLDNET.
Within the onscreen Tank image,
spherical layer after colored layer appeared and nested over one another, the
graphics spinning and shimmering in translucent, onion-like layers that
immersed the cortical image within them. Nothing was to scale; those layers
were impossibly thin, staggeringly numerous and difficult to adequately depict.
“The tank contains a
superconducting fluid and the layers you see there represent Worldnet RAM, in
fluxing holographic download,” she explained. “The shells and the cortical net
are maintained by different frequencies of magnetic field – and those EM fields
interact.” She paused for breath. “It’s a direct mimicry of consciousness.”
His eyes didn’t leave the screen.
“Your consciousness?”
“Yes. Mine.”
She closed her eyes. There was
always an out-of-body sense of cognitive free-fall and an eerie duality that
came part and parcel with the live connection. The sensation was more acute
without the anchor of her engaged vision; it was as if she truly existed
in two places at once. It was difficult to fully describe, easier to explain
with the schematics, as crude and as not-to-scale as they were. The fluxing RAM
in which her mirrored, analog-consciousness was embedded was, in fact, every
bit as good as the knowledge that was already inside her head and every bit as
easy for her to access and to use.
Snapping her eyes open, she
looked at Ochre again.
He leaned back in his seat,
uncomfortably resigned to the idea. “So…what happens next?”
“Whatever I want to make happen.”
It was an arrogant statement –
and a true one. Minerva online was as close as a mortal being could come
to omniscience and omnipotence – another difficult thing to describe
adequately. Andy and Arthur had seen Minerva in action and had claimed to
understand, but she was the only one who actually knew it for fact.
She had – wisely, she hoped -
always been rather afraid of that unexpected part of it.
He frowned at that. Deeply. He
didn’t reply. And – thankfully - he didn’t reach for his gun either.
There was no way to set him at
ease, not about what she was about to do.
“But I think right now,” she
added, in a conciliatory tone, “that I should probably talk to Colonel White.
How much would you care to bet I can break Spectrum’s security in less than a
minute?”
“No-one,” he said slowly, implying
that there were miscreant parties that tried to do such things on occasion,
“has ever managed to do that.”
His frown went skeptical. “But I guess they didn’t have one of those
to help.” Ochre cast his glance toward the humming tank behind them.
“No - I guess they didn’t.” Tylan
shrugged, folded her arms and leaned back in her own seat. “Let’s take it for a
test drive, shall we?”
She narrowed her eyes again,
focused them on the main screen, and thought about where she wanted to go and
the best possible way to get there. Perhaps even to have a bit of fun on the
ride.
The blinking WORLDNET status advisement
there was instantly obliterated in a sudden storm of alpha-numeric symbols and
code that flickered and scrolled across and down the screen faster than the eye
could possibly follow.
She extended into the net, sought
and passed gateway after gateway, reading the programs and anticipating the
pathways. She knew the languages, could fluently read the algorithms and
understand the most cryptic of syntaxes; she navigated the firewalls, security
blocks and passwords as easily as if she’d written the code herself – the
principles were universal and the Think Tank enabled her mind to surf immense
data pools at the velocity of the very best search engines that Worldnet
possessed---
Her destination was specific, her
course narrow and direct – SWC satweb to World Telecom, out of the general
commercial communications pools, up to high level encrypted Government security
routers that in turn cyber-climbed an ascending hierarchy from local to
regional to national and finally to global addresses. The World Government’s
vast mainframes down-stepped, as the entire system then branched its services
out in a proliferation of descending options. She ignored Administration and
Civil, selected Military, and skipped the gateways for a myriad of services
that included World Intelligence, World Army Air Force, World Navy, WASP and
others – she zoned right to Spectrum, routed to London HQ, scanned
through the security servers for a
particular bit of data and moved on to Spectrum satweb; she bounced via uplink
to the closest of Spectrum’s dedicated geostationary communications satellites
and then downlinked direct to Cloudbase Central Control, skimmed through
the communications mainboard and personally, illegally activated Colonel
White’s emergency hotline…
Her narrowed eyes blinked – the
blur of code ceased its rapid-scroll motion and the message now sitting there
took only a few seconds for Ochre to read and to consequently gape at.
MESSAGE: ATTENTION: SPECTRUM OPS:
COLONEL WHITE – EYES ONLY – SECMAX: RAINBOW ALERT –REPEAT RAINBOW ALERT.
IMMEDIATE RESPONSE IMPERATIVE. AUTHORIZATION CODE: 8693-222-3968 ENDIT.
“That had better not be real…” he
murmured, paler than he had been.
“Nah. It’s just a bit of
attention getting.”
She had picked up the appropriate
information from the security pools en route, wanting something specific and
real that would make an unmistakable, undeniable point.
Because a maximum security
Rainbow Alert served irrevocable notice that a World Government-sanctioned
thermonuclear action was about to engage…
Beneath that dire onscreen
message was another brief tidbit of information: ELAPSED TIME: 16.456 SECONDS
It was far less than a minute,
and it had taken that long only because she had delayed to find and extract the
alert data.
And to scan that very, very interesting classified file
about Scarlet.
She waited, giving it another 10
seconds before she appended more to the communication.
NEVER MIND – IT’S REALLY NOT
THE WORLD PREZ WITH A SURPRISE PARTY FOR YOU – JUST A LITTLE GODZILLA-STYLE
DEMONSTRATION FOR CAPTAIN OCHRE - YOU DID SAY NOT TO HOLD ANYTHING BACK. SORRY
I’M SUCH A DRAMA QUEEN! DO GIVE US A CALL ON VIDPHONE – USE DEMETER’S MAIN
RECEPTION LINE, EXTENSION 666. (NO, THAT WASN’T MY DOING, ANDY
PLAGIARIZED IT YEARS AGO.)
Ochre swore quietly. “Dammit,
Zil. He’ll hemorrhage.”
“More to the point, he’ll call.”
“I don’t doubt it. But did you
have to drag my name into it?” Ochre shook his head and complained, pale and
annoyed.
The vidphone beeped for
attention.
“Feel free…” she said dryly,
nodding at the console device inset between the workstations.
Ochre reached to select the ACCEPT INCOMING button and pressed
it. Then he settled back, not without some mild trepidation, knowing that they
were both seated within the view-field of the outbound cam.
Colonel White’s features were
visibly apoplectic when they flashed onscreen. “What in the name of Almighty
God do you suppose you’re doing down there, Doctor?!” Spectrum’s
Commander-in-Chief roared out the question, as enraged as Ochre had ever had
the misfortune to see him. “I’ve never in all my born days seen the like of
it and I‘ll not tolerate it for---”
The colonel’s voice changed
abruptly in mid-sentence, as his eyes shifted from her side of the view-field
to Ochre’s...
“Captain – Good Lord, man! Look
at the state you’re in!”
She
glanced over. She’d seen that startling and graphic mess, almost from the
beginning of it – the large and dark splotches of dried blood against the
desert-yellow of Ochre’s tunic were still obvious despite the sling that
partially concealed them. And there was the small but stark and newly stitched
wound on his cheekbone, a general battered, unshaven look and the shadowed
circles under his eyes that spelled deep fatigue all too clearly.
She
looked back to the screen and saw Colonel White’s eyes flash through a quick,
calculating reassessment of things as they stood. One such explicit vid picture
spoke a thousand words more loudly than any hearsay the colonel would have had
from her earlier conversation with Doctor Fawn.
“I was
multi-tasking,” she said levelly. “Facilitating communications and
making a pointed demonstration of Minerva in action at the same time. It works
pretty well, I’d say.”
Ochre
cleared his throat. “Sorry, sir. But I’m afraid I have to report it took only
16.456 seconds to breach Spectrum’s security, start to finish. And I’d call
that a bit of a problem, sir.”
The pale
blue eyes underwent another unpleasant calculation. “You both have an
extraordinary gift for understatement. I’ll forgive it on educational grounds,
then,” Colonel White grumbled unhappily. “Thank you for the
enlightenment. I believe you owe me a program, Doctor McLaine.”
She held
up the data disk. “Done and ready to install. Minerva can download the bulk of
it and drop it into every major system you own worldwide.”
He
measured the statement, and did not miss the key word. “And what might be
above and beyond that bulk?”
“Let’s
call it a patch – for a worst case scenario.”
“Be
clear, Doctor! Spell it out in detail.”
“The
patch contains a self-destruct feedback command. If Minerva is used to breach
the program’s firewall – no matter what the gateway - it will engage. I can
install that too, but it’s better if you do it.”
“How so?”
“It
requires a password – one that I won’t know. Yes, I can get around passwords
before you feel you have to mention that bit of obvious. But I’ve specifically
set this up so that it will make it difficult, even for me, to do so. If that
program is violated, an in-built random password generator kicks on and throws
out a reiterating series of new passwords to break. Minerva can overcome
that too – but the patch will run fractionally ahead of any Minerva-sourced
countermeasures - those will doppler behind the patch just far enough to buy
the feedback command sufficient time to execute before I could manage to break
it. I hope. It will buy some time for Spectrum, too.”
Colonel
White’s brow furrowed. “Time for Spectrum to do precisely what, Doctor?”
“Time
enough for Cloudbase to disconnect and isolate itself. Minerva can only
sabotage what it can connect to.”
“That
would leave this base virtually blind and deaf!”
“And alive,
in case I need to point that out. Minerva can turn off your hover combines
as simply as it can send you a Rainbow Alert. I could do it right now and you
wouldn’t be able to stop me. If I was a Mysteron. Minerva is still online, Colonel White.
Think about it. You’re vulnerable. Get Spectrum HQ to do it too. Each and every
Spectrum facility needs to copy that patch and set a password. If Spectrum
falls, the world follows. That patch is the best I can manage. Take it or leave
it.”
She
handed the data disk to Ochre, surrendering the entire option over to
Spectrum’s authority. There was nothing else she could do – not for herself,
not for Spectrum and not for the rest of the planet.
Nothing.
She
exhaled a deep breath, feeling a little less of the burden. “It’s your call,
Colonel White,” she prompted softly.
Ochre
took the disk gingerly, and glanced toward the screen. “I think she’s right,
sir. The Mysteron threat was specific – to destroy first Spectrum and then the
world. Protecting Spectrum protects everyone else. They’re always literal.” He
fell silent, waiting for further instruction as to what to do with the disk.
Colonel
White’s furrowed brows knit together into an intensely worried frown. It wasn’t
indecision, simply a weighing out of the various risks either way, and it
didn’t last for even a full minute.
“If you
were a Mysteron, Doctor McLaine, I somehow doubt we’d still be discussing it.”
He sighed heavily. “Spectrum will take your program and the patch – with
sincere gratitude. Thank you.”
“Freely
given with my profound apologies, Colonel. I’ve made quite a mess of the
situation.”
“Well.
So.” Colonel White did not quite shrug it off. “I rather
believe we’ve all contributed something to that end of things, Doctor, and I’ve
not been keeping score. We’ll call it even.”
She put
her hand out and accepted the disk back from Ochre. “We will be
destroying the equipment as soon as this is installed for you. The patch may
become moot as soon as that’s done. I can’t guarantee the program’s error-free.
It was written under a certain amount of duress and it’s untested besides.
That’s your other risk.”
“An
acceptable one. We’re standing by for download – at your convenience.”
She
popped the disk into the workstation reader and leaned back again, watching as
the various vidscreens automatically split between the open line to Cloudbase
and a second hail of code that began to rapid scroll down its portion of the
display. It didn’t take very long – Spectrum had only five main gateways:
Headquarters, Operations, Intelligence, Security, Recruitment.
“The
patch in is a separate file – it requires a standard set-up and reboot.
Instructions included,” she advised when it was done. “We’ll be signing off and
shutting down for demolition. We’ll have no communications other than
Spectrum’s as soon as we sever the uplink.”
“I’ll
re-establish contact as soon as possible, sir.” Ochre added. “If you’ll be kind
enough to pass that along.”
“Consider
it done, Captain. Carry on and exercise all due caution. Be thorough, Captain
Ochre. Once again, good luck to you both.”
“Thank you, sir.” Ochre nodded
one last time at the vidcam, and she closed the connection. The screens went
dark. She reached up absently and pulled the specialized connector that linked
her to the Think Tank. The quiet whirring slowed with another series of
harmonious notes, and settled back into the low hum of its idling mode.
Minerva was offline.
For good. That was it and that
was all. She would catalog her regrets another time.
She shut the lab down. And then
she sat there, morbidly glad that Andy and Arthur weren’t there to see the rest
of what was coming. And not only regarding the immediate destruction about to
unfold.
There would be a full blown
security inquest, and visits from World Tech Central. SWC would be under
siege. World Government hound-dogs and watch-dogs would prowl and dig. There
would be all manner of bureaucratic nightmares to contend with – up to and
including interrogations and incarcerations. She was liable to be the first one
thrown in jail.
All so long as the world didn’t
end first, that was.
“Zil?”
Ochre was looking at her,
concerned.
She retrieved her scalp plug from
the drawer, snapping it back into place as she stood. She’d left her hatchet on
the floor beside the workstation, and she retrieved that too, squaring her
shoulders and swinging it once and lightly, testing the heft of it. She was
ready to burn off a bit of that frustration and stress and worry.
“I’ll do the heavy stuff,” she
said, contemplating the division of upcoming labor, trying to be cheerful. “And
your job will be to shoot a few holes in the tank...”
His arm hurt.
Ochre was exhausted, drained.
Vandalism was harder work than he'd imagined, even though he’d gotten off easy
and had spent most their demolition time breaking fragile circuit boards into
useless piles of silicon confetti. The more robust pieces had been
electronically fried when she’d swapped out their low-voltage fuses and turned
up the juice.
After that, she had used the
hatchet to good effect, severing and chopping connector cables and disabled
power feeds into small bits. The two custom laptops had been hammered to scrap.
The delicate EM fields inside the tank had collapsed when she’d pulled the plug
on their long-automatically maintained superconducting components.
Their very last task had been to
breach the tank and spill its specialized, super-cooled and no doubt very
expensive cryogenic fluid. Retreating to the ribbed corridor outside the dome’s
portal, they had closed that door as far as possible and he’d then fired a
couple of bullets directly into the tank – the pressurized, liquefied contents
had come boiling out in an icy plume of rapidly expanding vapor. A cloud of
non-toxic but nonetheless asphyxiating mix of exotic gases began immediately to
displace the scrubbed air inside the dome. They’d slammed the portal closed
before it reached them and had quickly cleared the umbilical corridor, moving
smartly for the waiting elevator – the increased pressure inside the ransacked
dome was hissing and leaking into the cavern through emergency release valves,
further contaminating the already sulfur-tainted air of the rock tunnels.
Once they were safely inside the
lift, Ochre breathed relief and leaned against the back wall with his arm
throbbing, allowing his eyes to close for a moment. His mission, as far as it
was possible, was accomplished – and Zil simply wasn't going to need that very
disquieting and sinister skull connector anymore.
The Think-Tank was trash, the
electronics a jumbled heap of snapped and overloaded and scorched silicon and
plastic. Minerva was as dead as he and Zil could make it and beyond any sort of
short-term human resurrection.
It was not necessarily beyond a
non-human one, which was still the worrisome thing.
Ochre let his hand rest on the
holster of his electron gun, estimating the charge it had left. He'd fired it
once on the airfield, dispatching the Mysteronized Doctor Weller. He’d fired it twice more to take down the
dog. The capacitors were usually good for 6 or 7 discharges. He glanced at his
watch. It was a little bit after 6:00 am. He would have no voltage to waste if
Black and Carey were for any reason ahead of schedule. If he was lucky – if he
was fast and accurate enough - he had two shots apiece for them. Almost.
Although it was also highly unlikely that they'd be standing still for it. Todd
Carey would be the easier target – the Mysteron would have no more experience
or skill with weapons than the original.
Conrad Turner, however, was
another matter altogether and would by far be the more dangerous prospect of
the two.
He'd much rather find Magenta and
Scarlet waiting at the door – hopefully still human. Hopefully not able to
detonate and prove otherwise. They would bring Teal and Roan and a detector
with them and if they weren't all Mysterons, they'd hand it over cheerfully and
without offense to let Zil make a security check while he held a gun on them
for the duration. They would expect that, would insist on it, in fact. Hell,
they'd report him for dereliction of duty if he didn't…
If they were all Mysterons, then he
simply didn't have enough voltage left for the lot of them and for Black and
Carey too; then he'd have a real problem.
But his colleagues weren't likely
to arrive unannounced. They would wait for him to re-establish contact, and
then stay in radio touch while they made the hop up the mountain. According to
Colonel White, the helijet was intact, had been under guard and moreover
inspected personally by his would-be rescuers. There had been no further
incidents at Demeter. He had faith that his colleagues – at least as of this
moment – were not Mysterons. Any
communications interruption during in-flight transmission would be his first
clue that something was amiss.
Carefully, Ochre eased his
injured arm out of the makeshift sling. Zil started to protest, and then
stopped, realizing as the lift approached ground level that they were at a
critical, dangerous juncture, and that he might well need the arm, regardless
of condition. She watched him nervously as he flexed it, slowly and with
extreme caution; he winced at the pain and the stiffness and mentally
re-calculated the odds if things went badly. The range and speed of motion in
that arm did not lend him any confidence. He debated giving her the other gun,
as another just-in-case last ditch defensive measure.
The doors opened, letting them
back into the corridor under the stairs, and they moved to the exit that would
let them back into the cabin again after that. He activated his cap mike,
looking to put himself in immediate touch with his colleagues, and not to miss
a single second more out of contact than necessary.
The air was cool when that door
slid aside. Or it seemed that way, after the moist and somewhat warmer air at
lab-level. The fire was out. The cabin was quiet. The door to the outer
corridor was closed. Nothing seemed to be out of place. Cautiously, Ochre took a step into the
deserted living room, keeping the electron gun high. He moved sidelong across
the wall, glancing up, checking the stairs to the loft, hoping to catch glimpse
of any would-be snipers on the upper level if there were any present. He
listened, straining to catch any stray or out-of-place sounds - footsteps or
breathing, anything….
But there was only Zil behind
him, peering over the threshold, still nervous, still scared, though she was
putting on a very brave face and waiting desperately for him to say that
everything was okay---
He heard a shot and
simultaneously felt an impact that slammed him violently back against the wall,
shattering his senses with the radiating shock of a new and serious injury.
Astonishment jangled through his nerves until a jolt of searing pain caught up
with it, obliterating everything in a mottled haze of red and black as the
already damaged arm hit the same wall---
Zil screeched out his name,
sounding somehow distant and far away as he felt his knees wobble beneath him,
felt it as gravity inexorably dragged him floorwards and he saw from the corner
of his eye the broad, crimson smear he was leaving on the wall behind him as he
collapsed.
I’m hit, I’m hit – the certain knowledge
chanted and danced through his head, carried on an abrupt and surreal sense of
dislocation.
And then, inane question and
lucid answer strung themselves together.
How’d they get here so damn fast?
It froze. The ice – it froze - the temperature dropped the lake froze
solid enough they crossed it Black and Carey didn’t go around the long way they
saved themselves all that time…
Through the haze he saw a figure coming into
view from the direction of the kitchen.
It was Todd Carey, bearing a raised rifle of
some sort.
Ochre’s head hit the floor with his cap ridiculously aslant,
crackling with static and alive with Scarlet’s voice in his ear: “Ochre?
What the hell was that? Ochre!”
They heard, they heard the shot,
they’ll move now…they’ll move but…
“They’re here…Scarlet, they’re
here…Carey and—“
A slur of noise seemed to come
out of his mouth as his eyes cycled through another blink and the bizarrely
tilted scene morphed to include another sinister figure, that one coming from
the vicinity of the entry corridor.
“---and Black – he’s
here---they’re both here---“
Someone – Zil – was
clawing desperately at his hip, going after the gun he should already have
given her dammit all…
“Get out.” He tried to make his
lips and the words work, tried but wasn’t sure that he’d made any sound at all.
Get out, get past them, run and
run and run ---
A deep, jittery panic spread
though his limbs, riding on the crawling cold of physical shock.
Too late, too late, she’ll never
get around Conrad---
He saw his own hand flung out on
the plush carpet with the electron gun loosely gripped in his fingers, tried to
make them close, tried to raise that gun and fire but his fingertips scarcely
twitched. Feet came into view – heavily booted feet over there and Zil’s right
here close to him, braced for fight or flight.
His eyelids eclipsed one more
time, changing it all yet again, and this time…
This time Zil was caught fast in
Carey’s grip and staring at Captain Black coming toward her with a small pistol
in one hand as she watched, helpless and wide-eyed and disbelieving, like
something hypnotized and blinded by oncoming headlights, something
uncomprehending and paralyzed and, and…
She didn’t even start to scream
until the barrel of the pistol touched her temple.
No! No, Conrad, no, don’t!
An escalating raw terror closed
his eyes, outright rejecting that scene. Powerless, he struggled desperately to
move, fought to prevent it, to will it to stop by sheer brute denial---
He never saw it happen.
He never heard the shot.
But the stark reality registered
when the screaming stopped abruptly and something solid hit the floor nearby
with a heart-rending, hideous finality.
It was the end of the world.
No, no, no, no, no---
After that, there was nothing.
Nothing at all but a cold and
dark oblivion that drank him down.
TO BE CONCLUDED…..
OTHER STORIES BY SIOBBHAN ZETTLER
Any comments? Send
an E-MAIL directly to THE AUTHOR
or to the SPECTRUM HEADQUARTERS site.