“That’s me,” Fergus answered.
“You’ve been licensed for nine years now?”
“Seven,” he said.
“Why were you outside our building?”
“I wasn’t outside your building. I was across the street, eating lunch,” Fergus said. She pointed with her chin towards his shoulder, and he looked down to see sauce on his workalls. “I wasn’t given the opportunity to wash up or even finish my coffee before I got dragged away. I’m happy to take my messy self out of here and leave you to it, whatever your problem is.”
“No, it’s fine,” she said. “Empanadas?”
“Enchiladas.”
“Those are excellent too. One of my favorite lunch spots,” she said. “So, here’s our situation. We have our usual power, which is running our lights and ventilation and all our usual stuff, and then we have this secondary system.” She pointed to where three squat, black boxes were bolted to the wall, with conduit coming in and out of each and running between. A control panel beside it was all orange and red warning lights. “Are you familiar with this?”
“It’s the city dedicated line,” Fergus said. “I’ve never worked directly with it, though. It has its own special technicians.”
“Yes, but none of them are available, as apparently there are issues throughout this sector. And also unfortunately for us, we need this up sooner rather than later. Can you tell if the original fault was here?”
“I have no idea,” Fergus said, “but I can try.”
“Great,” she said, and then stood there and folded her arms across her chest, as if she had no intention of doing anything other than watch him perform miracles in front of her.
“Yeah, okay,” he said, and set his toolbox down, then took a few steps back from the panels. “I just need to look at this for a minute, get an idea what’s what.”
He made a pretense of studying it, looking it up and down, tracing conduits with his eyes as they ran up the walls and disappeared, or across the ceiling to other corners, but really, what his eyes saw didn’t matter; it was the hum, the network, that he could feel. Although, the small, nondescript gray box farther down the wall with the DM logo embossed in one corner was a nice find. “You said the whole dedicated line is down?” he asked Dr. Williams.
“The sector, anyway. That’s what I was told,” she said.
“And when did it go down?”
“Right when we—” Phil started to say, but Williams glared at him.
“By coincidence, we were doing some work with our internal security systems,” she said instead. “I can’t imagine it’s related.”
“Well, yeah, probably not,” Fergus said. “Not unless whatever jackass installed your security system did it really badly or was hoping to extort bucks out of you by tanking your line on purpose.”
Williams and the others exchanged looks, which Fergus studiously ignored. He walked over to the gray box. “What’s this?” he asked.
The guard coughed. “Part of the security system,” she said.
“Ohh,” Fergus said, in a knowing way. “Maybe some jackassery after all. You said you were doing something with it? It’s still running, though, right?”
“Not exactly,” Phil said.
Fergus took a meter out of his toolbox and ran it along the conduits, stopping now and then to study it and, once, shake it and whack it on side with his fist before retracing a route. “Something odd, yeah. The current is all wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe it’s a short somewhere in the system. When you said you were doing something with it, it didn’t involve wire cutters or poking screwdrivers into outlets or anything?”
“No,” Phil said, scowling.
Yes, officers, Fergus thought, he conned his way in to steal things, but we weren’t suspicious of him because he was kinda irritating.
“Okay, let me check it,” he said. He moved away from the DM box and back to the control panel, and plugged his confuddler in. “This might take a while,” he added.
“We need things back up as quickly as possible,” Dr. Williams said.
“So you’ve both said. And quick as possible still might be a while,” he said.
Williams gave a heavy sigh. “I’m going back up to check in with OHQ. You, Griffin: you don’t go anywhere without our officer here, Lucy, or Dr. Orchard. Got it?”
“Uh-huh,” Fergus answered, without turning around, as he worked. He’d never cracked a system right in front of its owners before, and it was a mixture of thrilling and weirdly shameful. More the latter, he thought, which maybe meant it was time to get out of this business. He chuckled; unless he got those pieces, he was getting out of this business. All business, along with everyone and everything else, unless Ignatio was exaggerating the threat of the Vraet.
Sorry, I thought the whole solar system was in danger, but it turned out to just be a pair of space marmots armed with raisins, he thought.
The guard, Lucy, spoke up. “What’s funny?” she asked.
“Just remembering I promised my father I’d never go into government work,” Fergus answered.
“Yeah, me too,” Phil added. “And yet here we are.”
“Here we are,” Fergus agreed. He was into the system and could see the indicators that the city’s dedicated line was preparing to come back up. He set the safety to keep it down in the building for now—it wouldn’t do to “fix” the problem before he was done there—and then began tracing the DM connections. Sure enough, the tech company had left backdoors into the main building systems. “You sure your security company was on your side?” he asked Phil.
Phil came closer. “Why?”
Fergus showed him the tracings on his screen. “See here and here? I’m not a security expert, but this looks like this was set up so they could remotely manipulate all your building systems, including your regular security, and this looks like they’ve got a bypass to the event logger so its system leaves no traces. Or maybe someone hacked it?”
“Is it . . . a problem right now?” Phil asked.
“Well, it’s off,” Fergus said, “but I’m betting when the dedicated line comes back up, it will too.”
“Can you disable it?”
“Yeah, probably,” Fergus said, “but not here. The conduits from the gray box go up. Is there another of these? First floor somewhere?”
“Second,” Phil said. “In the secure lab.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” the guard said.
“Yep, well, then not much I can do for you,” Fergus said, and unplugged his confuddler and started putting his other tools away. “The power fault with the dedicated line is external; just coincidence that it went when it did while you were mucking with this other system. But when it’s back up, which should be soon, this is gonna reboot, and whoever put this in is going to be in control of your facility again. If I were you, I’d get someone else in to look at it who’s more of an expert in these things, as soon as possible.”
“No, we should do this now,” Phil said. “Can you at least disconnect it so it won’t come back on?”
“Yeah, sure, if you don’t mind me breaking it a little,” Fergus said. “But I gotta do it at the other box.”
“I don’t mind if you break it,” Phil said.
“Uh . . .” the guard said. “We should check with Dr. Williams first.”
“Just call— Oh, right, that’s down too,” Phil said. “Well, we don’t have time for this. Lucy, you can go check in with the director, or come with us, whichever you think is best.”
“I promise I won’t lick anything,” Fergus said.
The guard rolled her eyes and groaned. “Fine, let’s go. But if you keep thinking you’re a witty man, Griffin, I might just tase you for the fun of it. We are all very stressed here right now. You get me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Fergus said.
He followed Phil back to the stairs and up to the second floor, the guard on their heels, to where a balcony ran the perimeter between the atrium and the building’s many labs. Most had interior windows, some of them tinted too heavily to see in, but some had none at all. Phil directed him to a door by one of the windowless labs, tried to use the ID scanner several times, then remembered the power was off and used a key to unlock it. “In here,” he said. “Don’t touch anything.”
The room was lined with instruments on the far wall, none of which he had any idea what they were, but realization of what the signal intensity in this room would be like when everything came back online made his head preemptively ache.
The DM box was easy to spot, the front panel open across the room. Between it and him were a number of lab benches, also containing smaller instruments and microscopes and all the usual paraphernalia of hard-core science. Fragments were everywhere, each one carefully tagged and numbered with a traceable chip. There were at least fifty pieces, but without even having to look directly at them, the presence of the eleven core pieces glowed against his consciousness, bright dots of light and noise scattered in the room. As he walked in, heading around the benches for the DM control box, they grew louder, and it was as if they were all talking excitedly to each other and trying to talk to him.
“Are you humming?” Phil asked.
“Yep,” Fergus said. He was humming, mostly under his breath, because the buzz of the sound in his body helped him center and focus his internal bees, get them on his frequency, not listening to the fragments’ call of temptation. “It’s less annoying than whistling while I work, I figure.”
“I suppose,” Phil said. “It’s real close, though.”
Fergus peered into the panel. The scientists had indeed shut it down, but his guess that it would reboot when the power came back was correct. “Good thing the power’s off,” he said to Phil. “This thing’s been booby-trapped! I’ve never seen anything like it. If I was touching this panel like I am right now when it came back on—” In his other hand he had his handpad, where he’d routed control of the safety cutoff downstairs, and just before he pressed it, he poked the center of the DM panel with his finger and let a massive blast of electricity through the connection. “—-Aaaah!” he yelled, and fell to the floor, just as the dedicated power line came back up.
Fergus lay on the floor, not moving, holding his breath.
“Oh shit, oh shit, the electrician killed himself!” Phil shouted.
The guard stepped closer. “Is he dead?”
“I don’t know! Can’t you, you know, check his pulse?”
“Is it safe to touch him, or will I get shocked too?”
“He’s no longer touching the panel. I think you’re fine,” Phil said.
“ ‘Think’? Why don’t you go get the director and explain all this and get emergency medical summoned while I watch over him. Okay?”
“Yes. Okay,” Phil said, and raced from the room.
Lucy the guard stared at him a while, then finally knelt down to take his pulse. I’ve got this trick down, Fergus thought, and zapped her the moment her fingers made contact.
All the core fragments in the room fully woke and reached out, tendrils of signal twisting toward him.
“No, no, shush!” he hissed at them as he lowered the stunned guard to the floor, then grabbed his toolbox and pulled out the bag of decoy fragments he’d had Whiro fab for him.
It took him about six minutes to take all the core fragments and switch their tags over to the decoys before putting them in place. One by one he picked up the real fragments and dropped them into the modified soda cans he had under the tray in the toolbox, capping and sealing them, but not before each one sang to him of doorways, and something else whispered and rustled and whined, a sound somewhere between the chatter of tiny insects and the click of ravenous machines, in a chorus of billions through that connection from the other side.
If he was still shaken-looking when the director ran in with Phil and an EMT in tow, it was not feigned. He was already helping the guard up, who was shaking her head groggily.
“What happened?” Dr. Williams demanded.
“That gray panel was rigged to try to kill anyone who tampered with it,” Fergus said. He coughed, his throat parched. “I think it must have sparked again while your guard was checking on me.” He looked back at the smoking, blackened controls in the box. “I think it’s done now, unless you count being a fire hazard. Whoever installed that needs to give you a refund. Or do jail time for attempted murder.”
“You okay, Lucy?” Dr. Williams asked.
Lucy stumbled to her feet. “Yeah,” she said. “Head hurts. What happened?”
“You got zapped,” Phil said. He pointed at the melted DM box, and Lucy took a shaky step farther away from it.
Dr. Williams was surveying the room and seemed satisfied. “Okay, everyone out,” she said. “Griffin, bring your tools. Let’s get you and Lucy checked down in the atrium for injuries while we secure this room. Dr. Orchard, you re-scan everything.”
“Yes,” Phil said.
Fergus hauled his toolbox down the stairs after the Director, and an EMT led them out of the building to where an ambulance was waiting. “We just want to check you over,” the medic said. “Besides, you’ll need the medical report to file with your employer.”
Fergus laughed. “I’m self-employed,” he said. “I think I’m all right. Been shocked before, probably will be again. It’s like I attract electricity. Can I go?”
The EMT shrugged. “We recommend you let us check you out, but we can’t force you. It’s on your head.”
“Then thanks, but no thanks,” Fergus said. “I’ve got other jobs, and after that, I think I need a beer in a quiet bar somewhere.”
“Can’t blame you for that,” Lucy the guard said from where she was sitting on the open doors of the ambulance, being checked herself. “Glad you’re not dead.”
“Yeah, you too,” Fergus said, and crossed the street back to his van, dropped the ID badge down the street gutter, and got in.
As his autovan waited to merge into traffic, he saw Phil and Dr. Williams running out of the front door, shouting and waving, and the guards at the gate and the EMTs turning to look toward him.
His autovan found the opening it needed and pulled evenly out, accelerating down the street and away, and Fergus carefully did not look out the window toward where a growing group of people were shouting to get his attention.
Whiro spoke up in his ear. “The police have been summoned, as well as Alliance HQ. Vehicles and drones are being deployed to intercept you.”
“That was fast,” Fergus grumbled. He bent down under the dash and plugged his confuddler in, and easily overrode the van’s simple security. “Can you take the wheel, Whiro?”
“Happily,” Whiro said.
Fergus straightened up and was climbing into the back of the van when it suddenly swerved, and he crashed shoulder-first into one of the seats. “Apologies,” Whiro said. “I forgot there is no up. Recalculating. It looks like we have four police cruisers, five police drones, and two Alliance drones coming for us. Going to take a sharp right to avoid a roadblock in three . . . two . . . one . . . Now.”
Fergus held tight to the back of the seat as the van screeched around a corner, tilting alarmingly. He was half-out of his workalls and struggled to free at least one leg as the van returned, belatedly, to its normal horizontal orientation with a crash. “Whiro, please try to keep all four wheels on the road,” he said.
“Would you rather drive?” Whiro answered.
“No.”
“Then please be quiet. This technology is limited and requires my concentration.”
Fergus finally got both his legs out of the workalls, bunched them up, and threw them to the back of the van. H
e was just getting out his change of clothes when Whiro swerved again, though less alarmingly diagonally. “The Baltimore traffic control systems have taken over signals to box us in with stopped traffic,” Whiro said. “Do you object to me violating some laws to get us around this?”
“I don’t mind at all,” Fergus said.
“We will still have to stop in about forty-three seconds before I can alter our route. We have one drone very close to us, and it will be able to reach and tag us with a tracer or possibly interfere with our tire infrastructure.”
“Can you stay stationary for about ten seconds without losing our opportunity to escape?”
“Yes,” Whiro said.
“Okay. Give me warning,” Fergus said. He got the rest of the black bodysuit on that he’d bought at Lake Tahoe, hastily mended during the previous night’s stopover in Boston to get supplies, and was just tugging at the sleeve ends when Whiro gave him a five-second warning.
The van stopped. Fergus opened the autovan’s back door and took a ball bearing from his toolbox, charged it up, and loaded it into his slingshot. It was still crackling with electricity when the drone came around one of the many brick buildings, about two stories up, straight toward him. He got it on the first shot, and the spluttering, smoking drone dropped from the sky, landing on a street-cart canopy.
Fergus jumped back in the van and was still swinging the door shut when Whiro accelerated, bumping up and over the sidewalk and around the obstructing traffic, the wrong way around a rotary, and then off down another side street at significant speeds.
He carefully packed the eleven modified soda cans carrying the key to saving the world in his duffel bag, and tossed it up into the front passenger seat of the van, followed by the few other items he cared about. Climbing back up into the driver seat, he popped the seal on a cleaner nanite capsule and tossed it over his shoulder. It hit the van floor with a tiny snap and the faint smell of ozone that meant it had gone off.
The Scavenger Door Page 36
