A mild and silky male voice answered the phone. Sally’s administrative assistant was a dapper, hyper-polite thirty-something with twinkling eyes and a corporate dagger always held behind his back.
“Kip,” Holly said, not bothering to hide the annoyance in her voice, “Get me Sally, please.”
“Ms. Cordina is not available,” Kip replied in full passive-aggressive tone, “Maybe if you tell me what it is you need, I might be able to help.”
Maybe and might, Holly thought, what a prick. “Oh, thank you so much,” Holly replied, mirroring Kip’s tone. “Maybe you’d be so kind as to tell Sally that I’m being denied access to the sub-basement. Maybe you can help explain to her that if I don’t get that access, Mr. Thistlethwaite will not get the extra power run to said basement. Maybe you—”
“Holly,” a voice interrupted. “I am here. That will be all, Kip,” Sally said, her deep voice as flat and inscrutable as always. The line clicked as Kip hung up. “How can I help you?”
“For starters,” Holly said, heedless of professional boundaries, “you can put a door in the wall of goons keeping me from doing my assigned tasks. I’ve got twenty electricians and an electrical engineer cooling their high-salary heels outside my office trying to get this done. All to complete a job, I might add, that was dropped on my desk just last week that I’m doing in half the normal time.”
Holly paused, catching her breath. There was nothing but silence on the line for a good five seconds, enough time to speculate on whether or not she’d made a very big mistake.
“I understand,” Sally said. “For the record, your efforts have been favourably noticed. Send your team down, I’ll make sure they have access. Take a break, Holly, you’ve earned it.” Click. Sally was gone.
A combination of relief and surprise sent Holly to a hard landing on her worn office chair. Praise from Sally Cordina was unheard of. The woman was a notorious ice queen and one of the Gideon’s right-hand VPs. Holly guessed there was still a chance of reprisal for her insubordinate tone but given the praise, she may have earned some respect for sheer courage. Holly was always direct, but coming off that way to someone at work was not something she generally did, not even to someone working under her. For some reason, her hackles were up and she couldn’t pinpoint why.
Holly reached into her hip pocket for her phone. She pulled up the encrypted file sent to her three days ago. She’d tried to trace the email, but the header information was thoroughly spoofed and scrubbed. The only reason she’d opened the attachment was because the email appeared to be from Derek, her absent boss.
The two were never very friendly. They had a solid work relationship and shared only the generic ‘how was your weekend’ small talk around the office. So, when Holly read the subject line that declared “Having a great vacation! You should check this place out!”, she was pleasantly surprised.
But then, she couldn’t open the .jpeg file attachment. She’d thought the file might be corrupt, so she fired up some compression debugging tools because that’s the kind of computer scientist she was. She quickly discovered the file was not a corrupt .jpeg, but a document file with the wrong extension.
Unable to resist intrigue, she opened the file to discover sixty-three shipping manifests. She almost deleted the email and the file that came with it, thinking it was spam, but the items, names and places on the manifests jumped out at her.
All the shipments were from Southeast Asia and parts of Southern China. All were labeled as computing equipment. The strangest thing was the billing descriptions of refrigeration units. Holly was familiar with pretty much all the hardware used at Plexcorp, and none of it needed refrigeration, not during transport. So, either that hardware was some new and exotic type of tech, or the shipments didn’t match the labels.
Holly jabbed the screen with her thumb, sending it into a continuous scroll. The movement blurred the individual lines, but the last column, each line showing the same data, stood out: Loading dock F. That was main receiving for the lower levels of the Plexcorp campus. Whatever that stuff was, it was under Holly’s feet, exactly where her engineering team needed to go. Holly clicked off her phone and slipped it back in her pocket. She decided she didn’t need that break after all.
***
Dante still lay flat on his back with a bag of ice on his throbbing forehead when he heard Holly’s voice in the lab.
“What the hell did you guys do to him?” Holly asked, surveying the lab. Items still lay strewn across the floor in a wide arc around the workbench.
“It’s a long story,” Martin said as he ushered Holly into the lab. He checked the hallway first.
“She can’t be in here!” Najeel exclaimed.
“Relax, nobody saw her,” Martin replied.
“Cameras!” Najeel pointed out.
“Oh, yeah,” Martin said, scratching his head. “Guess the stress got to me.”
“Yeah,” Holly said, “I know this lab is top secret and all that crap, but I need your lab rat.”
Dante groaned as he labored to a seated position.
“Jesus!” Holly exclaimed, noting Dante’s hooded, baggy eyes. “He looks like a heroin addict.”
“How would you know?” Dante asked, making to stand but settling back into a seated position instead.
“Whatever,” Holly said, waving her hand in annoyance. “I need the script master here to do some debugging.”
“Bullshit,” Martin said, crossing his arms across his barrel chest. “You’re onto something, aren’t you?” He moved around to his computer tapped a few keys and pointed to the camera in the corner of the lab with a smile.
“You turned it off?” Holly said.
“Yup.” Martin said with a self-satisfied grin.
“I won’t ask,” Holly said flatly.
“Better not to,” Martin replied. “Speak freely.”
“Someone sent me some documents disguised as a picture file. I think it’s some kind of a whistle blower. It came from Derek’s account, but the email header was spoofed, quite expertly, I might add. It went through three untraceable email relays.”
“Shit,” Dante said as his head cleared. “Someone has skills.”
“What was in the file?” Martin asked.
“Shipping manifests that made no sense,” Holly replied, describing the details.
Martin whistled, arched his eyebrows and replied, “Probably something illegal.”
“Drugs?” Dante asked.
Holly and Martin both skewered him with a ‘what-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about’ expression. Dante held up his hands as if in self defense. “What, then?” he asked.
“Probably something worse,” Martin replied. “There’s plenty of tech out there that’s not allowed to pass through the open market.”
Holly just stood there with a crooked smirk on her face that gave Dante’s spine a primal tingle.
Martin shook his head. “If you two are that stupid or crazy, I may as well implicate myself, too. I’ll shut down the cameras,” he said, cracking his knuckles while sitting back at his workstation.
“Does that mean you’ll clear me for this mission?”
Martin arched an eyebrow and shook his head. “If I thought I could stop you, I would, so I might as well turn you loose after an untested human brain VR interface device nearly just put you into a coma. Why the hell not?”
Dante followed Holly back out into the hallway, the smell of her perfume tickling his nose and waking him up a bit. They headed down to the end of the hall and boarded an empty elevator used only to access the secure levels.
“If this door opens, we’re clear,” Holly said as she touched her keycard to the access pad. The doors opened.
Every button on the panel glowed red, but one: floor B13.
“Really?” Dante said, “Why is it always the thirteenth floor…”
“Come on,” Holly said, giving him a shove inside the stainless-steel elevator car. “Don’t tell me you’re superstitious.”
The elevator dropped them down quickly. When the doors opened again, the hallway was crowded with workers wearing hard hats and coveralls, belts festooned with electrician’s tools.
“You must be Holly?” one of the electricians said, stepping through the crowd.
“In the flesh,” Holly replied.
The woman thrust out a calloused hand. “About time. I’m Danielle Mendoza. Let’s get this show on the road.” She immediately turned on her heel and walked down the hall to a set of white steel doors.
The entire group filed into a small room where another set of doors confronted them. Dante hated mouse traps. The doors to the computing floor only opened when the doors behind them closed, and someone from security unlocked the entry doors.
To his surprise, Dante’s phone vibrated a text notification in his pocket. I guess WiFi works down here, he thought.
“Buying you coffee in five minutes. Coffee will stay warm for 15 minutes.”
“Coffee? Seriously? We’re kinda in the middle of something here,” Dante texted back.
“Dumbass,” Martin replied.
Holly read the message over his shoulder. They made eye contact and Holly thrust out her chin, then turned her face to the camera in the corner.
“Oh.” Dante’s ears flushed red with embarrassment. “Thanks,” Dante replied. “Coffee’s great.”
Holly covered her face with a hand and groaned, drawing a few looks from the electricians.
“Don’t worry, Ma’am,” one of the younger electricians said. “We’ll get this power hooked up in no time.” He flashed a smooth-guy grin at Holly, who shut him down with a deadpan face, rolling her eyes away.
Dante suppressed a snicker and turned away just as the entry doors swung open on their own. Cold air rushed in and everyone gave a shiver. Dante went immediately to a rack of courtesy coats and handed one to Holly. The electricians were already prepared for the cold, and they headed off into the endless server racks.
Holly shrugged on the coat and, with a quick glance to make sure the engineers were headed off to do their job, strode off purposefully in the other direction. Dante had to jog to catch up with her.
“Where are we going?” he whispered.
“The service elevator for the loading dock—the one from the shipping manifests.” She didn’t lower her voice, but gave him a sideways glance. “Could you look any more suspicious?”
Dante blushed again. Holly’s bright confidence always made him feel slow and awkward in comparison, like an old flashlight sitting next to a bright halogen bulb. Still, he took her veiled advice and straightened up a bit, trying to look like he belonged here, walked this corridor every day.
Security down here was tight, mostly to protect the servers, but once you’d passed the main entrance very little obstacles would stand in their way. At least, that’s what Holly was banking on.They reached the massive elevator doors and Holly stabbed the call button. Cables and pulleys rumbled ominously in the elevator shaft. To her relief, the door parted smoothly.
“This is the biggest elevator car I’ve ever seen,” Holly said, crossing the threshold and stepping onto the rusty diamond-plate steel floor.
“Got to be,” Dante said, also marveling at the size. “This is how they get all that heavy HVAC equipment down here, but still…wow. You could fit a semi-trailer in here.”
“Which floor?” Holly asked. All the buttons glowed red, from the thirteenth sub-basement floor all the way down B20.
They both bent knees at the sudden lurch as the elevator car dropped on its own. Wide eyes met wide eyes.
“Who did that?” Dante said.
“Somebody called the car!” Holly exclaimed.
“Oh, shit,” Dante said. “Nowhere to hide. He looked up at the ceiling, then searched the walls until he found what he was looking for. “There! The emergency hatch!” He pointed to a ladder that ran up the wall to a trap door in the ceiling.
They hustled over and up the ladder they went. Dante didn’t wait for Holly before scrambling up behind her. The toe of her Doc Martins clipped the crown of his head as she pulled herself up onto the roof of the elevator.
“Sorry!” she yelped.
“It’s fine,” Dante replied, as he slammed the trap door closed just as the mammoth doors opened.
“What now?” Holly asked.
“I thought you had the damn plan,” Dante hissed.
Holly gave a crooked smirk and shrugged her shoulders. Dante laughed in spite of himself and fished in his pocket for a penlight. Clicking it on, he surveyed the elevator shaft.
“You nerds always come in handy with a flashlight,”
Dante scowled. “I don’t always like your sense of humor, Holly.”
“There!” Holly spotted it first. A glowing red light across the roof of the car on the opposite side from the doors. “An emergency hatch.”
Holly started off towards it, but Dante grabbed her arm and put his finger to his lips. The sound of muffled voices came through from the car below. The sound of a whining electric forklift motor carried over the voices.
Dante led the way, carefully stepping around the edge of the elevator ceiling, careful not to make footfall on the thin metal roof. They reached the hatch. To Dante’s relief, the door opened smoothly and they crawled through.
“This is just like the movies,” Dante couldn’t help but whisper.
Holly snickered behind him. The crawlspace ended at a shaft with a ladder. Climbing down it, they found themselves in a supply closet among mops, brooms and other janitorial supplies. Holly cracked open the door and peeked through, listening like a rabbit emerging from the brush.
Before them, floor to ceiling glass windows looked over a loading area in front of the elevators. The room was was enormous. The cavernous area had two shipping containers side by side, both with their doors standing open as workers in hazard suits wheeled out long cylindrical tubes. About six feet long and made of polished stainless steel, they lay on gurneys that were carefully maneuvered, checked, then taken through a set of steel doors opposite the elevator.
“What are they?” Dante asked quietly.
This time, Holly kept her voice down, too. “I don’t know,” she said. “But they’re like no computing parts I’ve ever seen.”
“Where are they going?” Dante asked, glancing at the door they’d come through.
Holly pursed her lips. If they wanted to know, they’d have to get into that loading room and through the steel doors. The problem was, it would be filled with people. If they were caught in a secure area, it wouldn’t bode well for either of them. “I don’t know, but I can guarantee you this is why security is so amped up right now.”
“Has to be,” Dante replied. “I wonder—”
A siren called out, making both of them jump with alarm. The workers through the window didn’t flinch, but hurried their movements as the workflow altered. The workers that had disappeared into the side room emerged. Instead of pulling things out, the six-foot tubes were secured in place or pushed back into the containers as the people moving them stretched, nodded to each other and began to file out a side door.
Holly’s eyes lit up. “Shift change!” she said with a grin.
She ushered Dante back along the corridor and through a door at the end of the hall. They paused, checking they were still alone, then walked quickly, further away from the server room that Holly, at least, should have been in.
There were no side doors, just a large, secured door at the very end of the hallway. Holly tried the security pass. It beeped noisily and a red light flashed on.
“Dammit,” she said, her fine black brows pulling into a frown.
“Let me,” Dante said with a grin. He quickly tapped a message to Martin.
18.2.7
Holly smirked, recognising the number etched on the door plate. It was a standard location marker, designed to help employees keep their bearings in the huge building, and to facilitate the electronic locking and alarm systems.
They waited, silence broken only by the noise of their quick, stifled breaths. The lock beeped twice and a green light flashed on. Dante pushed it open before it locked again.
“Don’t let it close,” Holly whispered. The room beyond was dark, dim white lights hidden behind complicated equipment casting ominous shadows towards them. It wasn’t the kind of room she wanted to be stuck inside.
Dante propped the door open with his boot while he looked around. Holly grabbed a notepad off a nearby desk and wedged it in the bottom of the door. She read the words “automation log” on the notebook’s front cover.
They two padded across the office floor to yet another set of doors. There was no keypad, just a regular doorknob. Dante put his hand on it, and before turning the cold, round, brushed-steel knob, turned to Holly, who took a deep breath and nodded her head.
“Fish tanks?” Dante said as the two stepped forward into another cavernous space.
The dawning realization of the objects in the tanks kept both of them from reacting to the cold that made their breath hang in the air and drift away like a waking dream.
“Those are not fish,” Holly said. She turned slowly and pointed to a tank of greenish water, illuminated above by bright LEDs. Gold foil circuits covered large areas of the glass, connected to hundreds of thin wires attached to the bottom of the tank.
“My God,” Dante whispered with the last of his breath.
A human brain, connected to a spinal column, floated in the tank. Thin tendrils reached out in every direction from the vertebrae, many touching the glass.
“It’s a VR interface for…” his voice trailed off.
“Dead bodies,” Holly said, covering her mouth with her hand. Her shoulders jerked once, twice. The hand dropped, her breakfast thankfully still where it should be.
“This… this is sick,” Dante said. “Those are people.” He absently noted the violent tremor than ran through his body. It had nothing to do with the frigid air.
“Stop!” a voice shouted from the other end of the room. A flashlight beam slashed at them through the mist created by the moisture of their breath. “This is a clean room!” the muffled voice shouted.
Realm of the Nine Circles: A LitRPG Novel Page 8
