by Davies, WJ
“Is that possible?” Reggie asked, raising his eyebrows. Humans had only lived on Taran for two centuries. What harm could they have elicited in such a short time?
“It’s a compelling case,” Magnus pointed out, “considering that as far as we can tell, the disruptions didn’t occur before humans arrived.”
Reggie shook his head, but said nothing. The three of them were the only ones left on the platform. Everyone else had turned their attention to the rescue operation.
Reggie couldn’t bear to look any longer. “We have to leave the city,” he said. “Find a way out of here.” It sounded callous given the circumstances, but they had a strict shooting schedule to adhere to.
“Our next train is almost here.” Stevens glanced up from his wrist band. He pointed in the distance. Through the smoke, Reggie made out the shape of a small bulletcar zooming around the bend of the tracks, quickly approaching their position.
“There’s one thing I still don't get,” Reggie said picking up his travel pack. “Why didn’t he blow the train while it was still in the station? I mean, what was he waiting for?” Reggie pictured the man pressing that button, knowing he was ending his own life, and all those innocent lives on the train.
Stevens clicked his tongue and gestured around them. “It would’ve been very expensive to rebuild this station. That would consume significant planetary resources. They’re an environmentalist group, remember?”
Reggie was aghast. “Oh, so they blow up just enough to make their point? Where the hell do they draw the line?”
“Where indeed?” Magnus asked, crossing his arms.
“Sadistic bastards,” Stevens added as the belletcar approached.
Their new ride hushed to a stop in front of them. No one seemed to notice the quiet sound of their private car arriving over the blaring sirens.
A door slid open out of the slick steel, revealing a spacious interior—larger than any compartment they would have had on the mag-lev.
“After you,” Magnus gestured toward Reggie.
Reggie grabbed his pack and entered the car. Stepping into the compartment, he couldn’t help but give a sad smile as he saw velvet seating and a mini-bar.
Why didn’t we order this car in the first place? He was going to enjoy these luxuries while they lasted.
Finally on the move, Reggie contented himself with crossing his legs and looking out the window as the bulletcar tore down the tracks. It cleared the final wall of the station and zoomed out into open air.
Reggie leaned out and pressed his face against the window, looking downward. The adjacent tracks were ruined by the bomb, flames still dancing in the wreckage. The planetary guard stood around helplessly while firefighters continued their frantic search through the rubble.
He realized he still had the holo-cam clipped to his shirt. A shudder rippled through his body when he thought of all the compelling footage he had captured. The station, interactions with passengers on the train, their swift exit, the explosion...
Reggie bolted upright in his seat, nearly spilling his drink. “Shit. All my luggage was on that train, wasn’t it?”
Magnus nodded unconcernedly. “Sorry old man. Nothing we can do about it now. Don’t worry, we’ll get you sorted at the bio-dome. They’ll have everything we need.”
Such is life.
Soon, they were out of the city, leaving the horrors behind them. Reggie was mesmerized by the quartz mountains zooming past the window, made dull only by a cloudy Evening sky. He took a great pull from his double whisky and popped a few painkillers. The alcohol, drugs, and the knowledge that he had six hours to rest did wonders for his gimped leg and aching joints.
Leaning back in his seat, he closed his eyes, trying to dream of peaceful things, of long lost loves, of children he wished he had. But all he could see were exploding trains and fireballs streaking across the sky.
He took another sip of his drink, ice clinking against expensive crystal. He supposed he should be thankful that Magnus and Stevens had given him a second chance at life. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the girl with the butterfly pin. Her dreams, her hopes, her aspirations—her entire life had been snuffed out, destroyed by the political agenda of a twisted and maniacal group of murderers.
There would be no second chances for her, no matter what documentary he ended up making.
Chapter 21
Jonathas…
Wake up.
Jonathas jerked awake at the sound of a man’s voice.
“You made the call? My god, are you two alright?”
Jonathas raised his bleary eyes to the medic who was unfolding a metal stretcher beside the table.
“My name’s Neilson,” the thin man said. His features were cycling between worry and relief. “Damn glad to see you people alive. We’ve barely heard from anyone who got caught down there during the disruption.”
Jonathas rose to his feet and checked Linsya’s pulse. Her skin was cold.
“Is this all they sent?” he demanded. “Just you? We have to get Linsya help—”
“Man, you’re lucky I was available. You wouldn’t believe what we’re dealing with here; nearly a full collapse underground. This station won’t generate another ampule of electricity for months, at best. The whole circuit-board’s fried from the ground up and we still don’t know how many of the tunnels have collapsed. It’ll be a week before we even finish the rescue operation,” he paused. “Assuming people are still alive when we get to ‘em.”
Neilson’s radio buzzed to life and a voice—strong and powerful—crackled through. “Neilson, you got Jonathas there?”
Jonathas recognized the voice of Cornelius Grazomov, director of the Bangalian Binary Cycle Plant.
Neilson pressed a button on the radio. “Yessir,” he replied. “I’m gonna take him and Linsya to the infirmary. Looks like she got bumped pretty bad.”
“That’s fine, take Linsya, but send Jonathas to Operations. Tell him to move his ass. Got it?”
“Will do sir.” He clicked off the radio and turned to Jonathas. “Ya hear that? You’d better get over to Control, you know how old Corny can get.”
Jonathas firmly shook his head. “I’m staying with Linsya until she wakes up.” He hadn’t come this far only to leave her.
“Sorry, you heard the director. You’d best get moving, it’ll be my skinny ass on the line if you don’t show up.”
Jonathas frowned and cast a long glance down at Linsya. “Fine, but when she wakes up, alert me immediately, alright?”
“Of course.”
Jonathas helped lift her off the table and onto the stretcher.
“Now get the hell over to Control,” Neilson said. “I’ll buzz you if there’s any change in her condition.” He patted Jonathas on the shoulder. “Don’t worry kid, she’ll be fine. Good work dressing her wound by the way, that could very well be what saves her life.”
Jonathas tied the hair ribbon to Linsya's wrist, kissed her forehead and sprinted out into the hallway.
Judging by the green lights on all the door panels he passed, it seemed like somebody had the good sense to temporarily remove the security locks on the doors on the upper level. Better late than never, he supposed.
His unease dissipated with every step. Thanks to him, Linsya was in capable hands. He rounded a corner and passed his badge over the panel beside the door marked Control. It hissed open and when he entered, he was greeted with an unexpected scene.
Nearly the entire Operations team was cramped into the control modules, foreheads beaded with sweat and brows furrowed in concentration. They were all jacked into the TMD network, controlling machines far below the surface. The shimmering holographic interfaces lit up their staunch faces.
Jonathas recognized Eddie Samson sitting at one of the modules. He looked up, gave a somber nod, and then returned to his console.
Cornelius stood up from a terminal. “Jonathas, damn good to see you.” Long white hair fell across hard features, shrouding his deter
mined eyes in shadows. The director’s mouth was barely visible through a salt and pepper beard, but his voice boomed throughout the room, reverberating off walls and causing those around him to stiffen up a little.
Jonathas reached out to shake his muscular hand, meeting his brown-speckled eyes.
“I’m afraid we have a bit of a situation here, Jonathas.”
“What is it, sir?” Jonathas asked, trying to keep his focus on the director despite his desire to dash over to the medical bay to check on Linsya.
Cornelius gestured toward the banks of control modules, each with a nervous Operator frantically manipulating invisible controls.
“As you’re very much aware,” Cornelius said, glancing at the cuts and bruises covering Jonathas’s face and body, “we’ve had severe cave-ins throughout the plant. You’re to be commended for bringing Linsya to safety. Her father is a very close friend of mine; he would have been devastated had anything happened to her.”
“Of course, sir, I’m happy to do my part.” Jonathas knew deep down he hadn’t rescued her for her father’s sake, but for his own selfish love.
Cornelius continued. “About an hour ago we received a wire from down below. There’s a room full of trapped miners about five-hundred meters down. They were putting in an extra shift when the disruption began. They’re still trapped. They rigged up one of the old communication lines and managed to get a message through to us before they lost power. Apparently the heat sinks are out and things are heating up pretty bad down there.” His confident eyes grew sad. “I’m afraid they’re running out of time.”
“I noticed the heat as well,” Jonathas told him. “Luckily, I wasn’t down there too long.”
The incident with the drone seemed a distant dream now. In fact, Jonathas was starting to suspect that his fleeting memories were false, illusions dreamt up by a tired and worried mind.
“Anything I can do to help, sir?”
Cornelius nodded. “I know you’ve only just been promoted, and that you haven’t had much training yet—”
“I haven’t had any training yet, sir.”
Cornelius waived a hand. “No matter. We’ve got half a dozen Operators already performing a search. Seems there’s a few drones buried in the rubble not too far from the room they’re trapped in. If we can just get them moving we might be able to open up some airways, cool things down a bit while we dig our way down.”
All Jonathas wanted to do was get back to Linsya. What use could he be here?
“With all due respect, sir, what can I do that the other Operators can’t?”
“Well, that’s just it, son. Nobody can establish a connection with the drones. Either their sensors are damaged, or something’s wrong with the module relay, blocking our signal. I want to get you hooked up and we’ll set you to scan the area, looking for any active drones that our machines can talk to. If you find one, we can patch the feed over to one of the more experienced guys. They can take over from there.”
Jonathas nodded. “I’ll do my best, sir. I know what it’s like to be trapped down there. Not a fun experience by any means.”
“Indeed. Our technician is going to get you started. Thank you for coming so quickly. We need all the help we can get.”
• Binary •
Chapter 22
Before long, Jonathas was sitting in the white control module, a holographic display glowing softly in front of him. The tech, Matt, stood beside him running through a checklist a mile long.
“Now, if you’ve never done this before, it can be quite disorienting,” Matt told him. “Some Operators say it feels like they’re inside the drone, others say its like they’re looking at it from above. That’s the thing about this technology,” he waved a hand at the mess of cables and machines littering the room, “it’s all wired directly to your body, and everyone’s body is different, so you never know what you’re going to get. We haven’t finished testing you, but from the preliminary response, I’d say your body is accepting the nano-DNA. Congratulations, Jonathas, you’re going to make a fine Operator.”
This made Jonathas think about Fletcher, his failures as an Operator, and his unfortunate demise.
“Hey, I uh, passed out a few times underground,” Jonathas said. “I thought I could almost see the network of drones underneath me.”
“See them?” The tech frowned and shook his head. “Not unless you’re hooked up to these modules,” he said, pointing to the white cylinders and holographic displays. “Must have been disorientation from the initial injection. Here, I’m gonna fire this thing up. Take a deep breath and relax, buddy.”
Matt smashed his hand into a button at the side of the console and the whole module began vibrating. He took several steps back and Jonathas’s seat rose up a few feet, placing him head first into the hologram. The room looked green and shiny through the holographic interface.
Matt’s fingers danced over the terminal’s controls. “Now, I’m gonna turn on the visual overlay of the drones. They should appear as little blue dots on the map, red if they’re operational. Use the joystick to cycle through the floors, and the button on top to activate the drone once you’ve locked onto it. If it turns red, we’re in business; it stays blue, you move on and keep searching. We wanna get those miners out as quick as possible, so let’s get to it. I’ve preprogrammed the map so you won’t be searching too far from the room. I’m gonna go check on the others, holler at me if you need anything. Capiche?”
Jonathas took a breath and focused on the map before him. It displayed a latticework of green tunnels and chambers. He nudged the joystick and the map shifted accordingly. He saw several blue dots and used the trigger to focus in on them. He hovered over one at a time, pressing the joystick’s top button once they were in range, attempting to activate them, but they stayed blue.
He pulled the view back a bit, zooming out. In the three-dimensional display, he saw the room where the miners were trapped, which was coded yellow.
Damn, they were directly adjacent to the thermal exhaust piping system. If the heat sinks were blown, there was no doubt that those guys were roasting alive down there, or would be soon.
Jonathas continued his frenzied scan, trying to turn blue to red, the color of life.
No success.
He grew frustrated as he moved through the levels, the blue dots mocking him, immobile and heartless.
Three levels below the trapped miners lay a cluster of half a dozen blue dots, all resting together in a store room. He hovered over the group and pressed the button. Nothing. He tried one drone at a time. Still nothing.
Dammit, what was wrong with these things? What had the tech said, something about the communication relay being broken? Jonathas could easily fix that if he were down there with the drones, but it was going to take a lot of cajoling for him to ever take a step back into those mines.
He thought again of that droid down below, the one he’d used to dig a path to Linsya. How had it moved, all on its own like that? Perhaps one of these operators had activated it, he thought hopefully. But hadn’t Cornelius said they’d only just begun the rescue attempt? It seemed like he’d just pictured it crashing through the wall and then it had just… been on the other side.
Suddenly he heard a beeping sound. He glanced at the map and one of the six drones had turned red. Yes, he thought, maybe there was a delayed response from when he’d pushed the button. Another series of beeps and the other five blinked from blue to red as well.
Feeling a jolt of adrenaline, Jonathas concentrated on the little red blips on the display. Matt hadn’t told him how to actually move the drones, but he figured it had to do with moving his hands and concentrating on them, allowing the system to use his body movements to control the distant robots. He slowly raised the stick upward, moving the map, and then raised his hand, watching with satisfaction as the little dots rose upward to follow his movements. They slowed once they hit a ceiling, but after tunnelling and breaking through the rock, they continued through
to the next floor.
Yes, come on. You can do this, Jonnie.
In a flash, Jonathas was with the robots. He could feel them as they drilled through the rock. He was no longer in the control module, or at least his mind wasn’t. He wasn’t even sure his hands still rested on the controls.
One more floor to go.
The lead drone tunnelled through a rocky ceiling, just below the chamber where the miners were trapped. He slowed the drone down with his mind, not wanting to startle anyone in the room. The last thing they would expect was a tuneller shoving its way up out of the floor. He hoped by now they could hear it coming and would stand back.
Jonathas felt, more than saw, the nose of the drone punch through the rocky floor and land with a bang in front of a crowd of about a dozen men. Jonathas observed the confused miners through the drone’s optical sensors, and within moments, wide grins broke out among the group as it dawned on them that they were being rescued. They started cheering and clapping each other on the back. The men were all shirtless, and even in the gloomy light, Jonathas could see sweat glistening off their bodies. The drone’s thermometer readings displayed a scorching fifty-two degrees celsius. They certainly wouldn’t have lasted much longer without water.
One of the men eagerly pointed toward a wall, and Jonathas understood they wanted him to drill through it. He maneuvered the robot in position in front of the wall and zoomed his vision back so he could see the other drones trailing behind. He steered the small army of machines toward the wall and saw where a few flecks of rock had been chipped off, presumably by the miners using some of the crude pickaxes he saw strewn about the floor. It may well have taken them days to hew enough stone out to allow their passage through the rock.
As Jonathas began tunnelling, the men put hands up to their ears, bracing against the noise, but watched the scene intently with wide eyes. Within minutes, the drones made it through the wall and into the hallway beyond. Like so many of the halls down below, the way was blocked by a cave-in, and he pushed his robots into the mess of debris. Without really knowing how he did it, Jonathas overlaid the holographic map overtop of what he saw through the drone’s sensors and saw that from here, it was a straight shot up to the surface.
