Tired. Long trip here.
“Well, that’s just great,” Pepper said. “I risked everything for this job, and you guys can barely stay above the floor.”
The flies rearranged themselves again.
Relax. Watch.
As she watched, several more flies left the wall, buzzing down the hall to the exhibit room. Pepper couldn’t see very well at this distance, but it looked like most of the first wave was on the floor. The second wave of flies buzzed in, and after a moment Pepper realized they were taking over for the first wave. One by one, the replacement flies lifted off, each carrying one of the lenses. The first wave of flies remained on the floor, largely motionless.
“So those first flies…” Pepper stared.
The flies on the wall moved again.
Dead.
Pepper nodded. She realized that the metaswarm losing ten flies was probably the equivalent of Pepper getting a haircut. Still, she took a moment to reflect solemnly on their sacrifice.
The second wave of flies was now buzzing around the room, carrying their lenses. This part was not an exact science. As Pepper understood it, the metaswarm had essentially reprogrammed the flies’ firmware, replacing their reproductive drive with a desire to place the lenses over the camera apertures. This was necessary because the operation was too precise for it to be completely directed by the intelligence of the metaswarm. By the time one of the flies communicated its position to the metaswarm and the metaswarm sent it a course correction, the fly could be several millimeters off course. The metaswarm could direct the flies’ actions on a broad scale, but for the actual process of applying the lenses, it had to rely on the flies’ instincts.
Pepper was skeptical when Ethel had explained the concept to her, but Dr. Harmigen had convinced her it was the only way their plan would work. Seeing it in practice did little to reassure her. The flies seemed to be buzzing around the room at random. Checking her watch, she saw that they had less than five minutes until the next EMP. When it went off, it would fry the circuitry in the lenses, rendering them useless. Not only that, but the longer the flies buzzed around the room, the more likely it would be that someone watching the camera monitors would notice something was amiss. If security got suspicious at the flurry of insects in the exhibit room, they’d send someone to the room and the jig would be up.
But so far there was no sign anyone had noticed, and one by one, the flies began to approach their targets. The cameras panned back and forth at random and the flies struggled to land. Pepper watched as the first one slipped its lens into place and then promptly fell to the floor, dead. Still no alarms went up. Presumably that meant the lens was working as intended, transmitting the prerecorded image of the room to the camera. Either that, or whoever was supposed to be watching the cameras was asleep.
There were only four cameras in the room, and ten lenses. That gave the flies a pretty good margin of error. But already three of the second-string flies were flagging; it seemed unlikely that they would reach their targets. That left six flies for three targets. Pepper had wanted to assign only one fly to a camera, Dr. Harmigen had convinced her that redundancy was better. “Nature loves redundancy,” Harmigen had said. “That’s why you get a hundred million sperm fighting over a single egg. Increases the odds of success.”
The downside of this strategy was what Pepper was now witnessing. Two of the remaining flies had reached one of the cameras at the same time, and were now engaged in a sort of slow motion dogfight, angrily bumping into each other. The two flies were literally fighting to the death over the chance to mate with a camera.
“Can you do something about this?” Pepper asked, turning to the flies on the wall.
The flies responded:
Patience.
Pepper sighed. She now had less than three minutes to get into the exhibit room, grab the emerald, and get out before the cameras went black. That was cutting it way too close.
Looking back into the exhibit room, she saw that two more flies had reached their target and were working their lenses into place. Four more had fallen to the ground. That left only one camera, with two flies fighting over it. Three out of four wasn’t going to cut it: even with the holographic suit, she’d be plainly visible to whoever was watching the monitors.
Finally, one of the two remaining flies plummeted to the floor. For several seconds, the last fly buzzed around the camera, struggling to retain altitude, before finally settling on the camera’s aperture. Pepper breathed a sigh of relief as it maneuvered the lens into place. The fly fell to the floor, dead.
Chapter Eight
Pepper took a deep breath, trying to prepare herself for the next step of the plan. Assuming the lenses were functioning correctly, the cameras would now show the Emerald in its case, in the middle of a completely empty exhibit room—and hopefully they would continue to show that scene while Pepper walked into the room and absconded with the Emerald.
It wasn’t safe to enter the room quite yet, though. She still needed a little more help from the swarm to overcome the exhibit room’s motion detectors and heat sensors. Turning her attention back to the wall where the flies had congregated, she saw that many thousands more flies had arrived to join the original group. Thousands more filled the air in the hall behind her. She had been so intent on the flies battling to mate with the cameras that she had barely noticed the increasingly loud buzzing. She could only hope there were enough of them.
Pepper checked her watch. The EMP would go off in less than two minutes. “Ready?” she asked the wall of flies.
The swarm replied:
Almost.
It was now forming letters by creating negative space between the flies.
“Well, hurry up!” Pepper said. “If you’re not ready in ten seconds, I’m going to have to just run in and hope for…”
But as she spoke, the mass of flies left the wall, joining those in the air around her. They were so thick that she could barely see across the room. The swarm gradually coalesced around her, creating a vaguely Pepper-shaped cloud. At least, that was the idea. Pepper couldn’t see well enough to determine whether the camouflage was working. She had no way of communicating with the swarm in this state, but she was out of time. All she could do is head toward the exhibit room and hope for the best.
Pepper walked slowly toward the exhibit room and the swarm came with her. She walked with her eyes closed, hands held out in front of her, relying on her memory to get her to the emerald. Forcing herself not to hurry, she kept her movements slow and smooth. The theory was that the swarm’s presence would sufficiently confuse the room’s motion detectors and heat sensors that Pepper’s presence would go undetected. Dr. Harmigen had confirmed that the theory was sound, but they’d been unable to test it. So Pepper was relieved when her fingers brushed against the glass display case that housed the diamond. No alarms sounded.
Pepper crouched in front of the case, pulling a small plasma cutter and an adhesive cup with a handle from her pocket. She waved at the flies in front of her face, hoping they would take it as a signal that she needed to see. The swarm thinned slightly in front of her, and she fastened the cup to the case and then cut a grapefruit-sized hole with the plasma cutter. She pulled the glass disc toward her and set it on the floor, then reached into the case and grabbed the emerald. It was the size of a golf ball. She slipped it into her pocket and stood up, then slowly turned and began to walk back the way she had come. In less than a minute, the EMP would fire and the lenses would go black. The initial confusion would probably buy her another minute or two; the security guards would most likely suspect a technical malfunction. When they were unable to bring the cameras back online, they would send someone to investigate and trigger the alarm, summoning the Yanthus Prime City Police. If Pepper wasn’t out of the museum by then, she was as good as caught.
After several steps, the swarm suddenly began to dissipate, and Pepper realized she was back in the hall. She checked her watch: twenty-three seconds.
A group of a few hundred flies settled on the wall to her right and crawled into formation. They spelled:
Good luck!
“Thanks a lot,” Pepper grumbled. She got on her hands and knees again and moved as fast as she dared down the hall. It would have been nice to have another incendiary device to set off as a distraction, but two incidents like that in one night would have been suspicious. She had to rely on stealth, the holographic suit, and the inattentiveness of whoever was monitoring the camera feeds. Once out of camera range, she stood up and began to walk briskly. By now the lenses would have gone dark; the security guard monitoring the feed would be running diagnostics to try to pinpoint the problem. Those tests would indicate that the cameras and lights in the exhibit room were both functioning normally—which could only mean that something was blocking the cameras.
She’d made it to the Civil War exhibit, where she could avoid the wall cameras by moving in a zig-zag pattern she had memorized. She was halfway through when an alarm sounded. Behind her, plasteel gates slammed shut to protect the emerald. The jig was up; the cops had been alerted. She had maybe another five minutes to get out of the museum—while avoiding the museum’s security guards. Subtlety no longer being an option, Pepper pulled another small device from her pocket: a nondescript plastic box. She opened the box and flipped the switch inside. Immediately, deafening bangs began to echo through the museum. Around corners ahead of her and behind, multicolored lights flashed and smoke began to fill the building. This was Pepper’s Hail Mary escape plan. The incendiary device that had provided cover for her entry wasn’t the only surprise she’d planted. She’d placed pyrotechnics and smoke bombs in trash cans throughout the museum. The smoke would help cover her movement and the pyrotechnics would set off sensors throughout the building, making it impossible to pinpoint her location.
She fought her instincts, which told her to make a beeline for the nearest exit. The security guards would have figured out by now that someone was after the emerald, and they’d be covering all the nearby exits. Her best bet was to go where they wouldn’t expect: deeper into the museum. Moving quickly and smoothly, she ran down the route she had memorized, banking on the holographic suit and the smoke to hide her from the cameras. She caught a glimpse of a security guard rounding a corner in front of her and slipped momentarily into a shadowy alcove as they passed. Then she continued on, turning when she reached the domed greenhouse at the center of the museum. The greenhouse was maybe fifty meters across, and filled with hundreds of species of plants. With the room dark and the stars visible through the glass above, Pepper could easily imagine that she was deep in a jungle on a planet far from Yanthus Prime.
She removed a small gun-shaped device from her belt and fired it toward the dome overhead. A cherry-sized globule of a sticky rubbery substance shot from the gun and thunked against the glass. Attached to the glob was a nearly invisible microfilament line that connected to Pepper’s belt. She pressed a button and the line went taut, pulling her upwards. When she neared the glass, some ten yards above the floor, she hit the button again and the servos in her belt winch stopped. She pulled the plasma cutter from her belt and began to cut a person-sized hole in the glass. She had almost completed the circle when she heard footsteps moving toward her. She shut off the cutter and froze.
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a security guard striding into the room, holding a flashlight in front of him. Pepper hoped the man was just cutting through the room, but he stopped a few meters into the room and started looking around the greenhouse, apparently suspecting that the intruder might be hiding among the plants. Fortunately, he had not yet thought to look up.
As the man made his slow, deliberate survey of the greenhouse, Pepper caught a glint of light reflected from the glass above. It took her a split second to realize the gap in the circle had cracked: the half-meter disc of glass was going to fall.
Pepper swept her right arm out and clamped her hand on the edge of the glass as it fell past her. It was heavier than she expected; the glass was nearly two centimeters thick. It nearly slipped out of her fingers before she grabbed it with her other hand as well. She hung upside-down from the microfilament at her waist, straining to hold onto the heavy glass disc. Below her, the guard continued to wave his flashlight slowly back and forth. The glass was slowly slipping from her gloved fingers. She wasn’t going to be able to hold it for long.
If she timed it right, she might be able to hit the guard right on his head. In addition to the difficulty of this task, though, Pepper was worried the blow to the skull might kill the man. He was just a museum security guard, after all; he didn’t deserve to die for doing his job. But the alternative was to let the glass fall to the marble floor and shatter. The guard would quickly realize it had fallen from the ceiling and look up—and Pepper would be caught. A blast from his stungun would incapacitate her until the police arrived.
Her only chance was to drop the glass far enough from the guard that he wouldn’t immediately realize what had happened. If she could toss it into one of the planters a few meters from where he stood, he might be distracted long enough for her to climb onto the roof and escape.
Squeezing the glass disc as tightly as she could, she began to rock back and forth, swinging her body and the glass like a giant pendulum. The centrifugal pull added to the weight made it even harder to hold onto the glass, and it slipped even farther, until her fingertips were barely clutching the edge. She couldn’t see below her and all she could hear was the rushing of blood in her head. The shadows dancing on the wall twenty meters or so in front of her indicated that the guard was still standing underneath her, scanning the room with his flashlight.
Pepper managed to swing back and forth three more times, slightly increasing the length of her arc each time. At the peak of the third forward swing, the glass slipped from Pepper’s left hand. She managed to hold onto it for another second or so with her right before letting it go at the apogee of her backward swing. Feeling like she was on the verge of blacking out, she swung herself forward once more. At the end of the arc, she hooked the fingertips of her left hand on the edge of the hole over her head. As she grabbed the edge with her right hand as well, she listened for the sound of the glass shattering below. It didn’t come.
Pepper swung her legs onto the other side of the glass, released the microfilament line, and glanced down. Now she saw what had happened: letting go of the glass with her left hand had caused the disc to pivot sideways, so it had landed on its edge. The disc was now rolling toward the doorway the guard had walked through a few seconds earlier. As she watched, a second guard came through the doorway and immediately had his legs knocked out from underneath him by the heavy glass disc. He fell to the floor, screaming and clutching his knee. The disc wobbled and fell to the floor like a gigantic coin.
The other guard spun to face the newcomer. “Steve?” he asked uncertainly, shining his flashlight on the man howling on the ground. “Is that you? What happened?”
“Glass… hit me…” Steve moaned.
“Glass?” asked the other man. “What the…” As the answer dawned on him, he craned his neck upward. But Pepper had already clambered onto the top of the pane. She gave the guard a grin and a wave and made her way down the dome to the flat part of the museum roof.
She heard sirens and saw flashing lights in the distance. The cops were on their way, but it would take them some time to close a perimeter around the museum. By then, Pepper would be long gone.
She ran along the roof of the museum toward an alley, keeping low to avoid being seen. She leaped across the alley to the roof of a nearby building, then continued across it and made her way down a fire escape. Meandering through the maze of alleys and side streets, she came to a trash bin where she’d stashed a bag containing a change of clothes. She dumped her gear in the bi
n and put on the clothes over the stealth suit, then called a robocab to meet her at an intersection a few blocks away. The car was waiting when she got there. She got inside and told it to drive toward the spaceport. When she was certain she wasn’t being followed, she gave it the coordinates to Blemmis’ apartment. She had briefed Blemmis on the basics of her plan and told her when to expect her. The cab pulled up ten minutes later and she got out and took the elevator to the thirty-eighth floor apartment. The door to the apartment opened before she could even knock.
“Good evening, Pepper,” said the small, gray-haired man who opened the door. “It seems that we have some business to discuss.”
It was Sam Suharu.
Chapter Nine
“What the hell are you doing here, Sam?” Pepper blurted out. “Where’s Blemmis?”
“Come in, please, Pepper,” Sam said. “I’d prefer not to discuss business in the hallway.”
Pepper reluctantly entered the apartment. She saw that Blemmis was seated in his oversized chair, a glum look on his face. A burly member of the pig-like Nork species stood next to him, holding a lazegun.
“Are you okay, Blemmis? Did these bastards hurt you?”
“I’m okay,” said Blemmis. He seemed more embarrassed than afraid.
“He’s fine,” Sam said, taking a seat on the couch next to Blemmis. “Please, Pepper,” he said. “Have a seat.”
Pepper glanced at the Nork, who glowered at her. She sat down.
“Do you have it on you?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Pepper replied.
Sam sighed. “Blemmis told us all about your plan. Something about insects? I have to admit, it sounded crazy to me, but if my reports from the scene are correct, you pulled it off.”
Aye, Robot (A Rex Nihilo Adventure) (Starship Grifters Book 2) Page 25
