Barriers

by Patrick Skelton

  “Hopefully there will be minimal casualties, if any,” Micah said. “Tranquilizer guns aren’t typically effective on humans, but I had a chemist mix up a drug that should do the job if we’re smart about it. We might have to use a little more on our boy, Denny. He’s the guard at the McMurdo Barrier mainframe, and he’s as big as a bear.”

  Nathan gave his gun a few practice trigger squeezes. He had never held anything resembling a gun before. Civilian-owned firearms in the continental United States were outlawed years before he was born. Alaska followed suit when he was eleven or twelve.

  “What are the other things in the suitcase?” Ashlyn asked. “They look like grenades.”

  Bryce removed one from the surrounding foam and placed it on the table. “No one touches these except me. Got it? I’m the tactical coordinator.”

  “What are they?” Nathan asked.

  “They’re force field generators. I’ve been building them for the last week. We’ll bury them a few inches under the snow and create an invisible force field around the perimeter of the Barrier mainframe. Anyone who crosses the circle will be thrown backward with a jolt. And it’ll probably render him unconscious for a few minutes. Unfortunately, it can’t stop bullets.”

  “So basically, an invisible electric fence?” Ashlyn asked.

  “Yeah,” Bryce said. “Except this fence is an eight-inch-thick energy field.”

  He set a different device on the table and a holographic schematic emerged. “This is the McMurdo Barrier mainframe. Elliot Gareth selected it because of the minimal security—only a single armed guard and two unarmed technicians per shift.”

  Bryce went through all the details. They’d watch the weather forecast closely and strike when they had clear skies. Ashlyn would enter the mainframe and hit it off with Denny the security guard—a single man in his forties who had to weigh four hundred pounds and stuttered like a schoolboy around women. Ashlyn protested, but Bryce reminded her she was young, attractive, and chatty, and at the moment, she was as vital of an asset as Nathan. If Ashlyn couldn’t get Denny’s eyes away from the security monitors for a good fifteen minutes, Bryce wouldn’t have enough time to lay the force field generators around the perimeter of the mainframe building. Without the energy field, there’d be no way to hold off security reinforcements after she took out Denny with her dart gun. Denny’s protocol called for a check-in with the Ice Runway guard every thirty minutes. But the guards and the flood of people who’d come running to investigate were the least of their concerns: Leland and his men were on their way.

  After that, Nathan would be in the hot seat. A fresh set of ripples occurred every two to five minutes, depending on solar activity, wind speed, temperature and other environmental factors like snow, rain, and sleet. A fountain of ionized energy erupted from a tower and fed the epicenter of the McMurdo Barrier during this five-minute window. Nathan would have to spot the exact moment the fountain collided with the Barrier epicenter to create a fresh set of ripples. He would have to study each ripple cycle and predict when the next burst would occur. The system allowed for a two-second reaction time. Nathan would have a device in his hand he would tap at the exact moment a new energy fountain erupted. He then would have only seconds to enter a passcode. This would activate a backdoor into the global Barrier system and allow for administrator override. Elliot had programmed this secret backdoor into the system forty years ago should the need ever arise, and Rankcon Corporation had no knowledge of it. The only catch was that the backdoor required a customized wave analyzer.

  Nathan would be performing the task of sophisticated equipment with the naked eye.

  “And then what?” Nathan asked.

  “We wait for Elliot Gareth to take control of every Barrier in the world and make his demands,” Bryce said.

  “What demands?” Ashlyn said.

  “The immediate dissolution of the Rankcon Intergovernmental Partnership, and the release of every person imprisoned in a Sanctuary. Barrier technology will go public from that point forward,” Bryce said.

  “That’s quite a demand,” Nathan added. “And if the Partnership doesn’t comply?”

  Bryce’s face stiffened, and he gave everyone in the room a long, serious look. “If they don’t comply, Elliot will initiate a self-destruct command starting with McMurdo. The instructions will spread systematically and will annihilate every Barrier in the world in the span of thirty minutes, right in time for the next flare. It’ll take the planet decades to recover and rebuild, and the flares are only going to get worse.”

  “That’s some bluff,” Ashlyn said, eyes wide. “Do you think he’d do it?”

  “Let’s hope we don’t have to find out,” Bryce said. “Keep in mind, this is like playing a high stakes poker game with powerful elitists. They won’t take action if they don’t sense a tangible, imminent threat to their own futures. It takes extreme measures to get their attention.”

  Nathan set his dart gun on the table and rubbed the back of his neck.

  Oh boy.

  33

  Nathan had been lying on his back for several hours, on top of an ice cliff, studying the sky above McMurdo Station. There were no signs that a Barrier even existed. How could he possibly detect the insane level of detail Bryce needed if the weather wouldn’t cooperate for five minutes straight? The forecast was calling for wind and thick cloud cover for the next two hours, and Leland was due to arrive in three.

  He sat up and opened a thermos of coffee. The stuff Bryce brewed was black and bitter, and nowhere near Nathan’s tame preference. But at least it warmed him up and reminded him of home. He’d give anything to talk to Sarah right now, hear her voice and know she and his mother were safe.

  Bryce emerged from Outpost 16, motioning Nathan to come back inside.

  He climbed down from the ice cliff and took one last despairing glance at the gray sky pressing down on McMurdo Station in all directions. He sighed, then met Bryce at the entrance of their outpost. He followed him into the backroom, removing his gloves and rubbing his palms together near the ceiling vent. Heat never felt so good.

  “You were out there for a long time, Nathan—any luck?” Bryce said, pulling up a weather map on a monitor.

  “Not really.”

  “Are you certain you can do this?” Micah added, folding his arms and leaning against a lab table.

  Nathan bit the inside of his cheek. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  About as sure as he was of Sarah’s safety.

  “I hope so,” Bryce said. “If you’ve got any reservations, then we might as well pack up and get out of here while we still can.”

  The room grew tense as Nathan searched for the right words.

  “I said I could do this and I will,” he finally said. “But I need thirty minutes of clear skies to train my eyes. Nine hours here and that’s yet to happen.”

  Bryce pointed to a green blob on a monitor. “Looks like we might get some relief in the next hour.”

  “How much relief?” Nathan asked.

  “There’s a small clearing on the way. Could give you the window you need. We need to head out now.”

  A few hard knocks on the front door.

  Bryce spun around, his eyes wide. “Nobody move.”

  Several more knocks.

  “Someone needs to get it,” Ashlyn said. “Whoever’s out there might have seen Nathan enter. There’s a good chance they know we’re home.”

  Bryce went to the front door while everyone watched from the backroom. He bent back the edge of the cardboard glued to the building’s only window and peaked out. “Bright yellow jacket. Thick dark beard. Built like an ox. Sound like your pal from the plane, Nathan?”

  “Yeah, that’s probably Dustin.”

  Bryce grabbed a stack of equipment off a lab table and tossed it into a cardboard box. He folded it shut and slid it under the table. “Not good, man. What’s he doing here?”

  Nathan joined him in the front room. “No idea. You think I invited him here?�
�

  Bryce smacked the tabletop with his palm. “You’re a journalist, right?”

  “Used to be.”

  “Shouldn’t you be good at fabricating a story?”

  Nathan grimaced. “In thirty seconds?”

  “Tell him he can’t come in and make it sound believable.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Am I laughing?”

  Nathan cracked the door open about a foot, blocking the view of the room behind him with this body.

  “Time to pay up, Justin,” Dustin said with a smirk. “You have my two hundred dollars?”

  For a second, Nathan was taken aback. Not from Dustin’s friendly jiving, but because he hadn’t gone by his alias for almost an entire day. “Afraid not, my friend,” Nathan said with a shrug. “I’m just another broke scientist until the grant funds come through.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir, bud.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a small metal container. “I wanted to welcome your team to McMurdo with a housewarming gift.”

  “Thanks. What’s in it?”

  “Premium Ethiopian coffee beans roasted in one of those illegal greenhouses. It’s about a hundred dollars a pound, and there’s a certain way you need to brew it. Got a minute?”

  “Uh…you mean you want to come inside?”

  “Sure, if you have a minute.”

  Nathan glanced behind him. Bryce was shaking his head and mouthing what looked like “Get him out of here.”

  “Can’t right now, Bryce,” Nathan said, tapping on the door frame. “The team’s slammed. Every table has equipment set up and the coffee pot’s put away.”

  Dustin bobbed his head, trying to see over Nathan’s shoulder. “Everything okay in there?”

  “Great….could be warmer.”

  “Warmer?” Dustin laughed. “This is summer here, bud. Be glad you’re not stuck here in July when it’s seventy below zero and dark from morning until night. You are green, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, guess I am.”

  He handed the container to Nathan. “Tell you what…you hang onto this, but don’t touch it until I can come in and show you how it’s brewed. Deal?”

  Nathan nodded.

  Dustin walked to his snowmobile, waved and sped off. Nathan shut the door and let out a long breath.

  “That was close,” Ashlyn said, stepping out of the back room.

  “Too close,” Bryce added. “Time to make our move. Our snowmobiles are out back.”

  _____

  They stopped behind a maintenance building a mile from the McMurdo Barrier mainframe. The sun was high above the horizon at 12:35 a.m. Pacific Time, but most of McMurdo was sleeping. Even though there was twenty-four hours of daylight this time of year, many residents adhered to a schedule correlating with work hours back in the states.

  Bryce signaled Nathan, Micah, and Ashlyn to shut off their snowmobiles, then he scanned the vicinity. Nathan’s eyes followed his gaze. A cluster of maintenance buildings, a few outposts, a fueling station where two vacated Terra Buses were parked. No activity, no people, no movements in the windows.

  “Time to mount the camera-microphone on Ashlyn,” Bryce said. He opened a metal case and handed Ashlyn what looked like a shirt button. “Denny just started his shift and the sky’s starting to open up.”

  “Do you think Denny’s going to be into me?” Ashlyn said, clipping the lapel pin-sized camera onto her jacket collar. “I’m not the greatest with men…probably why I’m still single at twenty-six.”

  Bryce grinned. “You said you’d been hit on six times in two days. Seems to me you’re great with men, young lady.”

  Ashlyn scowled. “I’m not a flirt, if that’s what you’re implying.”

  “Tell him you just broke up with your boyfriend and there’s nobody awake to talk to,” Bryce said. “He’ll turn to mush.”

  Ashlyn rolled her eyes.

  “Keep Denny’s eyes glued to you and away from the security monitors,” Micah added. “We’ll gauge his actions through the laptop as we make our way around the perimeter of the mainframe. We have several dozen force field generators to plant under the snow, and we’ll need at least fifteen minutes.”

  Ashlyn pulled the dart gun from her jacket pocket and inspected it proudly. “Then I get to pop him in the neck?”

  “Yeah, but make sure his hand is nowhere near his gun. The drug should knock him out in a few seconds.”

  “And what if the bear takes a few minutes to go to sleep?”

  “Shoot him a second time. Right in the neck,” Bryce said.

  “Got it.” She tucked it inside her coat and fired up the snowmobile. “Wish me luck.”

  After she left, Bryce opened a laptop and pulled up her camera feed. “After Ashlyn takes out Denny and we’ve verified the mainframe building is fully barricaded by the generators, Micah and I will run in and take out the two technicians. They’re unarmed and it should be a breeze.”

  “And what am I doing?” Nathan asked, fingering the handle of the dart gun in his pocket. He’d fired a few practice rounds from thirty feet, but barely hit the outer ring of the target. Good thing he’d never chosen law enforcement as a profession.

  “You need to save your darts,” Bryce said. “I was only able to bring in three for each of us legally. There’s no telling who you’ll run into and how far the situation will escalate once Denny fails to check in and report to the other guard shack.”

  “But I’m coming in with you two, right?” Nathan asked.

  Micah pulled up a blueprint of the mainframe building on the laptop and pointed. “Yes, and you’ll need to take these stairs six flights to the top floor. There’s a door to the rooftop. The Barrier tower is only fifty yards from the mainframe building. The two-foot wall surrounding the perimeter of the rooftop should protect you from gunfire below and get you about as good a view as you’re going to get of the Barrier tower’s geyser bursts.”

  “Geyser bursts…like Old Faithful?” Nathan asked.

  “Similar concept,” Bryce said. “Except this geyser burst is three thousand feet high and disperses across a ten-mile radius. A new geyser burst signals a fresh Barrier wave cycle, and that’s what you’re searching for.”

  Bryce passed Nathan a device that resembled a mobile phone from the bygone era of cellular technology. “This is what Micah’s been building all week.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a customized transmitter that will allow you to send instructions to the mainframe.” He handed Nathan a slip of paper. “The second you detect a fresh wave cycle, press the green button and input this sequence.”

  Nathan glanced at the paper: Gareth-Execute-Admin Control-Beta109789-132790ZA. “That’s a lot of typing,” he said, rubbing his left temple. “What if I mess up?”

  “You have twenty seconds and one chance to type it correctly.”

  “And if I get it wrong?”

  “Don’t get it wrong,” Micah said, stiffening his jaw. “And remember, the system only allows for a two-second reaction time to compensate for calibration variances in other Barriers. Every Barrier in the world adheres to an identical wave cycle and it’s all governed from a heavily guarded, central mainframe in Tokyo.”

  “Right.” He acted like he understood.

  “But you do have an option to abort after you hit the green button,” Bryce added. “So, if you’re not confident, hit the red button immediately. That’s why it’s there. Any more questions?”

  “Yeah…when is the sky going to clear up?”

  Micah opened a second laptop and glanced at the screen. “Should have a window in thirty minutes if my calculations are correct and if the weather map’s accurate.”

  “How far out is Leland?” Bryce asked.

  “I just intercepted an Air Traffic Control message from the Ice Runway,” Micah said. “There’s an unscheduled flight about an hour away. That has to be him.”

  Bryce looked at Nathan with intense eyes. “Once Elliot takes co
ntrol of every Barrier in the world, we’re hoping the situation will demand Leland’s full attention. Hopefully all the mayhem will provide the diversion we need to get out of here alive.”

  They watched Ashlyn through the laptop. She parked the snowmobile in front of the mainframe building and stopped at a security phone outside the surrounding fence. In tears, she called Denny and asked if she could come in and talk. The gate opened and she walked toward the entrance.

  34

  Ashlyn approached the security desk. Everything was how she’d pictured from the tower schematics: a long row of camera monitors followed the circumference of the half-circle desk; a door behind the desk led to the McMurdo Barrier mainframe on the floor above; and above that, energy field generators, turbines, and other high-tech gadgetry.

  “What’s the emergency, miss?” Denny said, jumping to his feet, leaving the monitors and meeting her near the doorway. This was good. Bryce and the team would use this opportunity to make their first move around the tower, laying out the force field generators under the snow. She would stall him here as long as she could.

  She sniffled. “I, well, I’m sooo…”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Just in my heart, that’s all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ashlyn improvised the most melodramatic breakup story she could muster and she made it last twenty minutes. Denny stood there like a dopey gorilla, gun strapped to a pair of saggy blue pants that hugged the bulge of his gut.

  “That just ain’t right,” he said, shaking his head.

  Ashlyn ended the show with one last sniffle. “Do you think I could stay here a while, with you?”

  “Uh…um…well, I guess so.” He glanced back at the desk. “But I have to check in with the guard at the Ice Runway. Come on, you can sit with me if you want.”

  She followed him to the desk, littered with candy wrappers and soda cans. As Denny made the call, Ashlyn peeked at the monitors. She spotted Micah, Bryce, and Nathan on monitor thirteen.

  After Denny gave an “all clear” to the other guard shack, Ashlyn said, “Something dropped on the floor while you were talking. I think it rolled under the desk.”