by J D Cortese
Sarinda took one step forward before interrupting. “Democracy? You're kidding.”
“Yes, democracy, where everyone communicates with the government without representatives. Without corrupt politicians that—”
“You mean anarchy.”
This time, Sarinda elicited a smirk from Rychar. "Looks like you know our history well,” he said. “Maybe you should be the one telling it to the alien. Ah, the need to object, another trait of democracy. Yes, we were called anarchists, and worse, American Novo-Nazis. We did have, and this is true, more than a few leftover Aryan believers with us, but also many communists and extreme environmentalists.”
“You people don't care about the environment,” Sarinda said and turned away, as if resting from Rychar’s eyes.
“Oh, yes, we do,” Rychar said. “We have started to build a new wall around New York City. The sea is rising more than predicted, and half of humanity may perish; this is good, really, as we will go back to a better state.”
“What do you mean?” Agdinar couldn't resist. Rychar had a professorial manner of speaking that invited questions, even debate. Not what he'd expected from the head of a battalion of criminals.
“We will all share the world. We are not a single movement, with a sole leader, like a cult. Each city has its own head, and we have many under our control. You've surely heard about Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and of New Portland in the East. The South is coming around—Miami and Atlanta first, and then Raleigh and Charlotte—and soon New York. They will all fall completely, dragging the rest of the East front with them—Boston, DC, Alexandria—to become finally independent from the tyranny of false laws. Then, the world. As I've said, there will be no more nations. And, probably a surprise to you, no racial infighting. Everybody will seek their peers and live in harmony. Sort of in their own playpen.”
“I think you're lying to everybody to keep this group together.” Sarinda was now talking from afar, nodding her head without looking back. Rychar walked toward her, as if he were going to walk past the glass and into the cell.
“So, politics is alive and well,” Rychar said. “A good lesson for our spacey friend.”
“You should let us go,” Agdinar said. “We are no threat to your group.”
“Ah, but you're both wrong on this. I do need information from her—and something else too—and, now that I think about it, I would need some facts from you, about your mothership. As for those nifty suits, we can use a few of them. The question for both of you is how difficult you're going to make it for us to get the answers I want.”
“We won't say anything,” Sarinda said, coming back closer to the window but staying behind Agdinar.
“But you will, or your stay here will get much, much harder. I'll let you simmer a little on this, before you get into more trouble with those mouths.”
Rychar quickly rushed away, and Agdinar caught a glimpse of an open door. Stealy appeared worried as he looked at them for a last time, before he joined Rychar in the outside hallway.
* * *
There were a couple of clanging noises, away from their cell, and a confusing clamoring that felt as if it were coming from different directions. Something was going on beyond their room, and it was mobilizing the occupants of their corner of the DND Building.
They heard a big explosion outside, still recognizable through the many walls that separated them from the street. And gunfire, chunked in repeated bursts.
Those shots sounded close enough to be coming from inside the building.
After a while, everything sank back into silence.
Agdinar and Sarinda were standing near the glass when the power went out briefly, a minute at most; when it came back, the glass opening had reappeared. Agdinar thought that the holding cell’s wall had a primitive form of force field, quite unusual outside top-secret military facilities.
Even more interesting, this technology wasn’t present at all in his information vaults about New York City. But soon the noises, too many to classify, made him forget what had piqued his curiosity.
Chapter 16
They were starting to get a little claustrophobic and paced around the cell in opposite directions. But the ongoing commotion was also giving them cover, and Agdinar encouraged Sarinda to join him in checking for potential tools they could use to escape.
Sarinda suggested that they take apart the toilet and throw it against the weakest point of the front glass wall of the cell, just where the glass opened into a rectangular gap. They soon learned that special extra-long screws would make it all but impossible to remove the seat from its holding plate. This annoyed Sarinda, and she started to pace dangerously close to the thick mesh that framed their cell, possibly risking cuts and scrapes from loose wires.
They couldn’t find anything in their relatively small quarters that could provide leverage to lift the mesh, or, even less likely, break the bulletproof cage of glass-plastic standing between them and the rest of the room.
And of course, nothing they could do inside the cell would disable the laser alarm at the door. That would require a source of energy their suits couldn't provide, uncharged as they were. They would need to tap into a powerful resource to recharge them. And Agdinar knew that they wouldn’t be getting any help from Dhern—he was probably traveling the building’s structures to reach them.
Outside, the confusion was now limited to people coming and going near the hallway that led to their room. Every few minutes, shadows cast blurry shifting outlines on the one outer wall they could see. These shadows were coming from interspersed lamps in the hallways. Few cables carried electricity for the entire building, and probably all of them were connected to a high-voltage generator in the lower floor.
A very large source of energy, indeed.
Agdinar almost fell back over the toilet when he realized what that meant. He tried to explain to Sarinda his new plan, especially since it involved using—quite dangerously—the only piece of Watchers' technology they had.
Their suits.
* * *
Agdinar’s plan was going to be risky and might not work at all. Their two suits still held about a quarter of the charge of a full suit. They would never get enough charge from the generator to replenish both sequentially, and so there was a tricky part to Agdinar’s plan.
“Please, hug me,” he said.
“What?”
“Hug me; we need to get the suits to touch, so their charges will merge.”
“You are not saying this...”
“No, it's not the time to be funny,” he said, but he was enjoying the moment enough to smile.
She grabbed his shoulder and surrounded his waist with both arms.
There was an uncomfortable shuffling, as he imitated her and held her waist with a free arm. It felt as if they were getting ready to dance, waiting for their song.
Quite intelligent on their own, the suits followed the instructions Agdinar had placed on the mind-reader.
Threads of black matter emerged from his suit and coiled around Sarinda's. Not to be left behind, her suit emitted several spongy protuberances that, as they grew, bent the cables rushing away from Agdinar's suit.
Very soon, they were enveloped by a messy cocoon, split in half by a long cylindric appendix. There was something oddly biological about the complex mechanism, and it looked like a weird seed was ready to grow into a plant. The tube crawled toward the back wall—more precisely, straight into an ancient electric outlet—and soon broke into thin pieces, pouring itself through the outlet's slots and into the wall itself. The black cables emerged above them and started to snake across the ceiling.
A few minutes went by, which seemed a lot less comfortable for Sarinda. She was trying to stay as far as possible from Agdinar, while he leaned on her, letting the elastic bands pull him closer. He could feel the pressure of her body on his chest.
The noise outside started to increase.
Agdinar smelled Sarinda's hair a couple of times.
He saw a single blue light on her suit.
With her right index finger, she traced a path of orange dots on his.
More lights appeared in both suits, in too many colors to name, and scattered enough to be outside of their fingers' reach.
The lights went out in their room. There was a distant hollering outside, and a muffled explosion. At the same time the sound faded, the suits started to emit an orange glow.
“Give me your hand,” he said.
“My hand? I can't.”
“Yes, you can reach it. Please, I'm very close.”
She pushed her right arm away from the suit, and a few rubbery threads broke out of it, like strands of grass.
He took her hand and pointed with his right index finger—and hers, captive and tied to his—to the front wall of their cell.
“Close your eyes,” he said.
Her hand finally matched his, and new black bundles quickly grew around them, fusing into a pointy arrowhead.
She closed her eyes, shaking and making the arrow wander right and left.
He managed to close his eyes before their bodies were enveloped by lightning.
A burst of fire brushed against Agdinar's face, and he lost consciousness.
* * *
His blackout might have lasted a few seconds, but to Agdinar it felt like an hour had passed. Sarinda was stirring and slowly waking up; her suit was badly burned on the side—and presumably even more on its backside—and the tendrils the suits had grown were strewn on the floor, some looking like red-hot charcoal.
They were unharmed, and, as he reviewed his suit’s mind-screens, Agdinar guessed that their suits would repair themselves in a matter of minutes, a little longer if they wanted to look presentable. As for their jail cell, it had seen better days—the plastic-glass walls had melted in part, twisting and pouring into a structure that would elicit interest from modern art museums.
Agdinar got up enough to start feeling woozy, and then knelt to support Sarinda's body. He pushed her into a seated position, her legs still astride and immobile.
“Can you walk?”
“Uh, yes, probably.” She shifted one leg on top of the other, and then flexed her knees with hesitance prompted by pain.
“We don't have much time,” he said. “We need to get moving.”
“It's quiet,” she said, increasing her grab of his arm. He shuddered but kept a firm hold of her waist. They slowly rose, their legs trying to get away from them.
The silence outside was complete, and an accompanying darkness spoke of dead generators and busy Hawks. Whatever it was saying, it was loud and about danger. They stayed a whole minute in silence, listening.
Agdinar started to move toward the door, but the pain in his right leg stopped him. He leaned on her to find stability.
“We need to find Tysa,” she said.
He wanted to argue but didn’t. “All right, but only if she's on this side of the building. Otherwise, we leave this mess and regroup outside.”
“We need to find her.”
“I know, but we are taking a huge risk every minute we stay in this place. Our luck might run out.”
They stared at each other. Time was still a little out of its rails, so they could have lost a minute thinking about their own words, a precious minute when toying with disaster. Sarinda kept her hand grasping Agdinar’s arm.
A distant explosion spoke for both of them.
They reached the hallway, and it was pitch black at both ends. The blinking lights of their suits bounced softly on the walls, making festive ghosts that crawled to follow them.
The first door they saw opened easily with a soft push, and a burst of light made them flinch. They were standing at the far end of the vast computer room, which was now completely empty. With so many computers with their black monitors turned off, it resembled some abandoned teaching lab.
Agdinar moved to walk ahead of Sarinda, watching for guards or hidden laser triggers—any battery-powered alarm that would make them lose the small advantage they had. He kept turning back, nodding to Sarinda to keep her walking, as she was moving as if balancing on a tightrope.
They crossed the Hawks' command center—it eerily reminded Agdinar of the Watchers’ stations—and stopped at its entrance. Another corridor started there and led to other turns and further rooms; they would need to know the building quite well to decide which one would take them in the outward direction.
“How do we know?” she asked, pointing to the juncture between two hallways.
Agdinar pointed to the right. “I guess it's that way.”
“But that's where the noise is coming from.”
“Yes, and I assume the Hawks are fighting an enemy outside. So they are between us and the exit.”
“Exactly. They are in our way.”
“We are going to get past them,” he said, and vanished.
A second later, he reappeared on the other side of Sarinda. “We got a 40 percent charge,” he said, “at least on my suit, and that should be enough to—”
They both froze and turned toward the end of the corridor that ran behind them.
A rhythmic noise. Someone was banging something regularly to get attention.
Agdinar rushed to the dark, and Sarinda followed, this time without arguing.
Chapter 17
It didn't take them long to find the source of the clattering—it was Tysa. Sarinda’s friend was inside an office, not too different from the one Agdinar had borrowed the previous day. Only this one had a wood door with a window half its height—thick glass, and opaque with whorls, but not enough to hide Tysa's face.
Agdinar signaled Tysa to move away from the door. He got ready to use his suit's laser weapon, and then thought better of wasting charge on busting a primitive lock. He turned around and kicked the glass of a fire emergency locker. Sarinda jumped, startled by the noise.
“Why did you do that?”
“Saving us power for later, I guess. We shouldn’t do everything with our suits.”
Agdinar closed the discussion by lifting a hatchet that was perfect for what he had to do.
Sarinda lurched at the door, yelling across it before Agdinar had time to swing the medium-size ax-like tool. “Tysa, get away. Back off.”
The hatchet demolished the door's wood panel, loosening the grip of the lock. Agdinar hit it again and again—three or four times—until the door opened with a quarter of its right side missing. The crashing noise bounced back in a distant turn of the corridor.
Tysa was leaning awkwardly on a wall, and she slid to sit astride on the floor. In an instant, Sarinda was hugging her.
Agdinar was breathing hard when he deposited his door-busting tool. He wasn't concerned about the noise he'd made; time was their real problem. When the Hawks returned to that floor, they were going to be quickly discovered and recaptured.
Tysa was quite disheveled, without a jacket in the cold and damp room, and she had a purple blotch on the side of her forehead. She was tiny, even for her age—maybe three years younger than Sarinda—and Sarinda loomed over her, crying as she cradled Tysa’s torso and caressed her hair.
Agdinar considered how well Sarinda's friend had fared, given their predicament, but he kept worrying that dangerous criminals would soon crowd the building. “Let's go,” he said. “We don't know how much time we have.”
“It's true,” Sarinda said, her head touching Tysa's. “We have to be moving.”
“All right,” Tysa answered, her voice surprisingly loud for a girl her size.
“Do you remember me?” Agdinar said, approaching Tysa.
She recoiled. “Yes, I know you. You left me alone in the park, so these bastards could take me. This is all your fault.”
“No, Tysa,” Sarinda said. “He wanted to help us.”
Agdinar was looking at the busted door. “You know, girls,” he said, “I deserve to get all the blame, for not having taken you with us. I am sorry.”
Tysa smiled thinly, and then
she pointed to Sarinda’s suit, spotted by little bright yellow stars. Sarinda stared at her forearm. “He helped me, gave me this power-suit.”
“Yes, he had it before, the suit,” Tysa answered, staring at Agdinar. She appeared confused, searching for words.
Agdinar interrupted before Sarinda started to explain. “We've got them, yes,” he said, “but we don't have much time to get into the how.” He approached Tysa, watching her foot barely touching the floor. “I need to know,” he said, “how's your foot? Are you up to walking? We need to get out of here.”
“That, I understand,” Tysa said, and tried to walk but fell back against the wall. “My foot hurts, but it’s better than after the fall. They made me sit for a long time, and then they hit me because I didn't say where you were.”
Sarinda was having trouble looking at Tysa, and she turned toward Agdinar. “Sons of bitches,” she said. “We are going to blow up this place. Yes, we should.”
Agdinar put his hand on Sarinda’s shoulder. “Let's not get too worked up,” he said. “We are lucky to be okay, and we have to get out—and soon.”
“No, we should destroy this place,” Sarinda said, looking around the room as if searching for a handy explosive. “The next time,” she added, “when they take another kid, we are not going to be around to help.”
Agdinar held Tysa by her underarm. “My friend is right,” she said, flinching at her righted stance, “but I don't know how you plan to destroy this huge building. Are you carrying a bomb?”
“No, but he can...” Sarinda started and then stopped, her explanation impossible.
Agdinar was still trying to help Tysa reach the door. “Why don't we all stop this military conference, and go?”
“Yes. Tysa, are you ready?” Sarinda moved to the side of her friend, ready to hold her.
