“It’s kind of complicated.” I lied. “You sure that’s all doable for a first day trainee?”
“Well, if you think it’s too much for you honey, I guess I could lighten the load a bit.” He grinned. “Slide me a twenty and I’ll cut it by half. Twenty more and I’ll even toss you a good first-day evaluation.”
I glared at him, snatched the clipboard from his hands. “Go to hell.”
His good cheer disappeared, and his smile turned ugly. “Then get going, bitch. We don’t pay you to stand around.”
“No. You don’t.” I hauled the cart out of the room, wrestled it down the corridor. I felt his confused eyes on my back as I went, and smiled my own cold smile. One of the small advantages of being a supervillain was that you could ensure that horrible people got what they deserved. Curtis had made the list, and I would assign him some karmic justice later.
Putting up with the man had paid off, though. I’d gotten a basic janitorial badge, and access to a bit over half the building. Nothing vital, of course; the research and financial floors took care of their own cleaning. So in a sense I couldn’t fault the company for having lousy security for their lowest-tier janitorial staff, it wasn’t like they were risking much by having poor procedures here. Anyone trying to infiltrate by this method wouldn’t get far.
Of course, most people trying to infiltrate with this method didn’t have access to my technical skills, or a universal remote.
I started in with my work orders. It was amazingly dull work, but nobody looked twice at me. I took the opportunity to study the place.
Cubes of cloth and metal stretched across wide rooms, with evenly-set, reinforced windows. Hundreds of suited men and women moved through and chattered with each other, bearing documents, cups of coffee, and tablet computers on their inscrutable, mundane errands. Others sat and focused on their workstations, tapping in reports or gridmails or memos or the other things that people do in offices.
It was very much artificial to me. An air of stress ran through the entire place, and many of the employees seemed to be running on short sleep and caffeine. Was the pay truly so good to put up with this? Trapped day after day in a box designed to hold and pacify them, shackled to machines that instantly transmitted the whims of those who cared little for their well-being?
It seemed to me a form of living death. Perhaps made more tolerable by internet access, but still a fate to be avoided at all costs. I was mollified a bit by the fact that most of those here had doubtlessly chosen this fate. Morgenstern Inc. was near the top of the business chain in the area, and could afford good pay and benefits. They hadn’t bought into the downsizing fad that had ripped through similar businesses over the last few years.
That was what the business articles I’d studied in preparation for this run told me, anyway. I hadn’t conducted a full analysis of the market and their specialties within the field. But I’d worried about that for nothing, seemingly. I was pretty much invisible to the business folk living their cubicle lives.
My phone beeped, and I checked it. A text from Vorpal.
BEING SHOWN AROUND NOW READY WHEN YOU ARE
My return text was one short word.
BIDE.
At the first opportunity, I maneuvered into the floor’s janitorial closet, pulled out the universal remote, and began my hunt. The networks in here were still too tight to risk taking control of any local electronics— I’d surely alert their security if I tried that. Instead, I poked up and down through the nearby floors, looking for a place that I couldn’t get a read on. My reasoning there was that any network shielded against my remote was likely to have the data I wanted.
After a cursory scan and a quick hop and down the elevators, I growled in frustration at my findings. There were four possible locations. One in the third sublevel, a second one in the middle of the building, a fourth on the thirtieth floor, which should be the security room if the information I had turned up was correct, and a fourth spot in the uppermost floor.
Four places to check. Well, Vorpal had the responsibility for one of those. The key to the rest of them, if matters worked out.
Top down or bottom up? That was the choice. After mulling it over, I decided to start at the bottom, and work my way up. That was the best approach for my exit strategy, and Vorpal’s efforts would pull security to the floors above.
I took the elevator down to Sub-level One, the farthest down that my janitorial badge would get me, and took up a stance by the stairwell down. Pulling out my phone, I typed out a single message to Vorpal.
GO TIME.
Then I settled back against the wall to wait, mop in my hands, pretending to work.
I didn’t have long to wait.
Within a minute, emergency lights starting flickering on and off, and sirens started to wail. The programmers and tech-types who seemed to inhabit this section of the building muttered, and stood up, peering over their cubicle walls.
“The hell?”
“I didn’t think we were due for an exercise.”
“Uh, guys? I don’t think this is a drill.”
“Fuck me running, this is gonna set back the release.”
“Bob, watch the language.”
“Easy for you to say Greg, it’s not your ass on the line here!”
A short woman walked around, glared into Bob’s cube. “Bob. You’ve been warned. And besides, we’ve got a guest.” She turned to me, and I blinked at the attention. “Sorry about that, dear. Bob’s got a bit of a mouth.”
“That’s alright,” I said. “Sheee... shoot, no problem at all. “D... heard worse. Haha.”
She narrowed her eyes a bit. “Well, no worry. I’m sure this will be over in no time at all. In the meantime, it looks like you’re stuck in here with us for this lockdown. Is there anything we can get you?”
The door next to me slammed open, and a fully-armored security guard emerged, took up point next to the door, and tapped his comm. “Sublevel one. Room is secure!”
“Copy!” Came the voice over his comm.
He didn’t see it coming.
I waited until he was glancing away, whipped my taser from the small of my back, and shocked him into unconsciousness. The entire room stood, shocked, as I took his comm, his badge, and his gun.
“No thank you,” I told the short woman, who was now staring at me with a dawning look of horror. “Got everything she needs right now.”
Before she could respond, I ran the guard’s badge through the stairwell access panel, and slipped through the door, closing it behind me.
It would have been smarter to stun or shoot them all. There were only perhaps ten people in the room, and each one of them I left conscious was one more to call for help, or alert guards to my presence. But hey, I’d sworn to limit collateral damage to civilians, hadn’t I? This entire caper with the flowers had caused enough chaos for my conscience. So instead of taking the ruthless but certain path, I pulled out my universal remote, and took a few precious moments to shut down their workstations and phones, one by one. Not a moment too soon, either; the last one I shut down was dialing nine-one-one.
I descended the stairs to sub-level three, got a text from Vorpal on the way down.
SECURITY ROOM GOT RDY FOR DOORS OPEN
I grinned. We’d pinpointed the location of the main security floor from the building’s own floor directory. Which was why we’d gotten Vorpal into position in marketing, the next floor up. She’d used her energy blade powers to cut through the floor, drop in on the main security room, and disable the guards before taking it over. It was a pity that they’d managed to get an alarm off before she was done, but no help for it. I texted back as fast as I could, cursing the tiny keys of the phone.
YES. UNLOCK FLOOR 14, SUBLEVEL 1, AND PENTHOUSE 1
3 LOC?
Y
FML
DO IT OR ALLS FOR NOUGAT
WHAT?
STUPID AUTOCORRECT. NOUGHT! NAUGHT! JUST DO IT!
LOL
Ah
ead of me, the light from the door at the bottom of the stairwell clicked from red to green, and without slowing down I threw it open, tased the man stationed there as he looked up in shock, and pointed my taser at the unarmored guard behind the checkpoint.
“How many guards on this floor?” I yelled.
“I, uh...”
I tased him, plucked his badge from his chest, and ran it through the panel behind him. The next door hummed and opened...
...revealing a wide, mostly-empty room. Ultraviolet lights and grow lamps hung from the ceiling, and several rows of tables held hydroponic misters, set over frames square-cut to hold plastic trays. Plastic trays the size of the ones currently in the cargo boxes I’d liberated. This had to be the lab where they’d grown the flowers.
But every table was bare. There were spaces for a few hundred trays, but not a single space was filled. A cloying odor mixed with chemicals, and the drains in the floor looked moist from recent usage.
Nothing left. They must have disposed of any other plants in this facility, or shipped them to alternate locations. I took a few precious minutes to search in a few outlying chambers which seemed to have been used as offices, and testing rooms. There were spaces for servers and workstations, even a few hard-wired network drops, but not a single computer. I growled in frustration, as every network drop I tested with my remote turned out to be inactive. They’d scrubbed this place thoroughly, and there was nothing to be had here. No wonder they’d only had two guards on it.
I made my way back up the stairwell, dropping the guard’s comm at the door to sublevel one as I went. The comm wasn’t a benefit, too easily traced. Sooner or later they’d try to take the security room back, and Vorpal would be forced to escape. Once they’d done that, they’d start looking for things out of place, and a comm wandering through the building was a textbook example of a security breach.
Right. On to floor thirty— cautiously, though. Charging in there would probably get me killed. A more sneaky approach was called for.
UNLOCK ELEVATORS I texted, then slipped into the service elevator on floor one. Nobody stopped me as I moved through the employees only section... everyone was locked down in their rooms, and they evidently hadn’t seen a reason to put guards on locked-down elevators.
Vorpal came through, and I took a ride up to the Security floor. When the door hissed open I dove out, taser and stolen pistol at the ready. But no one was there to stop me, and as I clambered to my feet, my nose filled with the scent of chemicals, heavy enough to make me woozy. I pulled out one of my janitor’s rags, held it over my nose, and proceeded through the antechamber. Fallen guards were strewn all around me, unconscious but still breathing. Some sort of gas? Smelled like it. Vorpal must have activated an emergency measure, hosed the rest of the entire floor.
I found Vorpal in the central room, back to me, sitting in a swivel chair watching a bank of monitors. About ten security guards were laying there, some bloody, some unconscious, some armored, some not. In the center of the room, a large plug made of roofing material, flooring tile, and several feet of thick armor plate lay on the floor, with a smoking hole above it showing where Vorpal had dropped down.
“Dire. Good.” She said, without moving.
“Blood? Dire gave you a perfectly good taser. Why—” She turned, and I broke off. “Oh.”
One of her hands clutched a fire axe, white-knuckled and locked around it with a death grip. The other hand grasped her side, where large burn marks surrounded a charred hole in the blouse, and a horrific black-red burn on the flesh beneath.
“They had these laser things,” Vorpal said, nodding at the floor, and the bodies strewn about. “Quicker with them then I thought.”
“The taser didn’t help?”
“I dropped down in the middle of most of them. Tased a few, but for the rest, it was not fast enough.” There were a fair amount of bodies here. “I had to use the the axe, with a lightning aura. It wasn’t good...”
She trailed off, stared at the far wall for a second, head drooping.
“Vorpal.”
Her head snapped up. “Uh?”
“You’re done. Need to get you out of here.”
“No! I can still—” She struggled to her feet, swayed against the chair, hissing as her hand clamped on her burn again.
“You need to get to Martin and have him patch you up. Stop arguing, and sit down. She’s calling in the armor.” I popped my phone open, called the number I’d set up in advance, and snapped it shut. It would take a minute for my suit to boot up and get here. In the meantime, I studied the monitors. Two spots left where I could possibly find the information I needed. The eighteenth floor in the middle of the building, and the Penthouse at the top of it.
I busied myself while I waited, settling down in front of an unlocked terminal, and hacking into the video system. It didn’t take much. The central security room was the hub of the building, and they assumed that if you were in here, you were authorized to view pretty much everything.
But I couldn’t view the Penthouse level. No cameras up there, it seemed. I growled in frustration, and switched over to the eighteenth floor.
Most of the floor was devoted to a machine shop, with people scurrying around and working furiously. In the middle of it stood four racks, each one holding three metal suits of armor. They were dull green in color, much bulkier than my own suit, and I recognized servos, pistons, and heavy-duty armatures. Heavy duty stuff. They’d be in my strength range, maybe better depending on the materials and tolerances. Half of them were armed with large-caliber weapons. Machine guns, by the look of it. Most had jetpacks.
And the guards buckling into them definitely didn’t look happy. Technicians hovered around, running them through diagnostics and startup procedures. I had no doubts as to why they were being activated now.
“Mein gott...” Vorpal whispered from behind me.
“Yep.” I didn’t know what she’d just said, but it was probably safe to agree with the sentiment.
“They are going to come up here and kick our asses, yah?”
I curled my hands into fists. “They’ll try.”
WHAM!
She started. I smiled.
WHAM!
“What is...”
“The cavalry.”
CRASH!
The wall caved in, sending monitors sparking and popping, as Vorpal shrieked.
And as the dust settled, my mask loomed out of the cloud, the rest of the dull gray armor stomping forward, heavy feet crunching on the debris that its entry had kicked into the room.
I walked forward to meet it, put my hand on its mask. “The King in Yellow has much to answer for,” I muttered. The armor stopped at the sound of the preset command words. With a hiss, the mask unsealed and I pulled it free, returning it to its rightful place on my face. Blackness for a second then shimmering, as the room faded in around me, and once again I wore my rightful visage.
“MUCH BETTER.”
“How does this help?”
“IT DOESN’T. GET IN THE ARMOR.”
“What? No, I—”
“YOU CAN BARELY STAND. IT WILL TAKE YOU TO THE RENDEZVOUS POINT AND RETURN. DIRE WILL HOLD THEM OFF WITHOUT IT UNTIL THEN.”
“They have power armor. You cannot seriously think to prevail without your own.”
Depending on how good those suits were, I might not be able to do it even with my own. But that fact wouldn’t get her out of here any faster. “NON-NEGOTIABLE,” I said. “GET ABOARD AND GET GOING. THE SOONER YOU REACH THE RENDEZVOUS, THE SOONER IT CAN RETURN AND BACK DIRE UP.”
She stared at me for a long moment.
“GO!”
She moved around, and the suit grabbed her. She squealed in pain as the rough metal pressed against her laser burn.
“PEEL,” I commanded, and it was gone as fast as it had come, engines accelerating to full as it charged out the holes it had made on the way in. No way to avoid being seen on the exit, but I’d pre-programmed it w
ith some twisty courses to the dropoff point before this whole affair started. Couldn’t guarantee it would get away clean. But I doubted there was much in the city that could stop it right now, if anyone tried to get in its way.
And then I was alone in the main security room, staring at the armored suits on the monitors, as the first of them finished booting up, and marched off of their stands, readying weapons and tromping toward the elevator shafts and stairwells up.
“ALRIGHT, YOU TIN SOLDIERS.” I sorted through the bodies and unconscious guards scattered around the room, and came up with a laser rifle. Then I started hacking for all I was worth.
“LET’S SEE WHAT YOU’RE REALLY MADE OF.”
CHAPTER 15: THE MAN IN CHARGE
“Perhaps it's old-fashioned of me, but I find that most problems are best addressed with a spring in your step, a handkerchief in your pocket, and a sturdy cane in your hand.”
--Aegon Morgenstern, during his 1994 interview on the long-running Tycoon Talk show.
I have to admit, a part of me was eager. It is one thing to menace civilians, and hurt security guards who are just doing their jobs. It is entirely another thing to see a troop of high-tech soldiers equipped with cutting edge power armor coming for my hide. It was more fair, somehow. The others hadn’t had a chance to really get clear or do anything but be neutralized. But these guys? They were a threat. They knew what they were doing. And until my armor returned, I was very much the underdog.
For once, I didn’t have to hold back.
I locked doors to slow down the ones on the stairwells, then shifted my attention to the primary elevator shaft. Once four of them started flying up it, I dropped an elevator car on them from the top floor. Probably wouldn’t kill them, but it would slow them down. Either way, I couldn’t stick around to confirm it; I had to evade the rest of them until my armor returned, or it was game over. They’d be shooting to kill, after what we’d done.
So I pulled over the nearest chair, clambered up on it, and wormed my way up through the hole in the ceiling.
DIRE : SEED (The Dire Saga Book 2) Page 22
