The Girl in the Machine (Leah King Book 3)

by Philip Harris

  When she looked back at the security monitors again, three of them had changed. One was showing the guard she’d seen earlier. A label on the screen said FLR1-CAM11. Leah checked the map and felt her heart quicken. The man was heading directly toward the same stairs Alice and Da Silva were descending.

  “Alice, there’s someone coming—a Transport policeman.”

  They’d reached the second floor and were standing in front of another door.

  “We’re nearly there; get this door open. Then see if you can slow him down.”

  Leah opened the LOCK/UNLOCK dialog for the door out of the stairwell. Her hands shook as she tried to type the unlock code, and she got it wrong. The screen flashed an angry red. She tried again and this time got it right. The rectangle around the door turned green.

  The man was almost at the next door. Leah hurriedly locked it. A few seconds later, the red box around the door turned green. She switched cameras, putting the output of Camera 16 up onto screen two. The man was already through the door and descending the stairs.

  Leah saw Da Silva duck out of the stairwell and the door swing shut. The man quickened his pace.

  “I think he heard you.”

  Alice didn’t reply.

  The man touched a walkie-talkie attached to his shoulder and spoke into it.

  “Pourteau, you see anyone in stairwell one?”

  The tinny voice had come from a black box sitting on the desk. The sudden flush of panic that hit Leah felt like an express train slamming into her gut. She let out a little gasp of despair.

  There was a speaker in the box with a rectangular button beside it. On the screen, the Transport officer was still walking down the stairs. He was holding his walkie-talkie, waiting for a reply. Alice and Da Silva were still twenty feet from the end of the next corridor. If the man got through the door, he’d see them.

  Leah reached over, pressed the black button, and said, “Nope.”

  She’d lowered her voice, but it sounded utterly fake to her. She watched the screen intently, and when the officer released his microphone, she breathed a sigh of relief.

  The next door was outlined in red. Leah opened the dialog. This time, the key was RED BITTEN SIX. Leah found the phrase and got the unlock code. The screen turned red again. She retried the code and got the same result.

  Alice and Da Silva had reached the door, but the Transport Authority officer was almost down the stairs as well, and he was heading toward the same level Alice and Da Silva were on.

  “Alice! The code isn’t working.”

  “Stay calm. Make sure you’re getting the code right.”

  Leah glanced up at the screens. The Transport officer was almost at the door. For a moment, Leah thought he was going to continue on past. Then he paused and turned back to the door.

  Leah checked the pass phrase again. The code looked different, and she realized she’d been reading the wrong line in the file. She found and entered the right code, forcing her fingers to move slowly so as not to make any mistakes. After a brief but heart-stopping delay, the door turned green.

  “Go!”

  Alice pushed open the door and held it while Da Silva darted through. Alice followed. The door closed just as the Transport officer opened the door at the opposite end of the corridor.

  He stood in the corridor. The image on the security screen was blurred, but Leah studied his face anyway, searching for any indication that he’d seen anything amiss. After several agonizing seconds, the man turned back, closed the door, and continued down the stairs.

  “He’s gone.”

  “Good. We should be close to the detention wing.”

  They were in a short corridor that ended in a T-junction. Leah checked the map on the screen. “Yes, that’s right. According to this, they should be on the left.”

  “How many guards are there on the other side?” Da Silva said.

  Leah switched the camera to the guardroom at the entrance to the detention wing. It was a small, rectangular room. There was a wooden desk with an old-looking computer on it and a battered office chair but no other furniture. It looked like there were three Transport officers.

  Leah checked twice before telling Alice. “One of them is near the door; the other two are farther in on either side of the first room. They have guns, but they aren’t holding them.”

  “Which way are they looking?” Da Silva said.

  “The one near the door is looking away from it. The other two are sort of looking toward her. All three of them are having a conversation, so I don’t think they’re paying much attention.”

  “Any more doors inside?” said Alice.

  “There’s one, and it’s locked. It looks like it leads to the cells themselves.”

  “Can you see inside the cells?”

  Leah checked the map. There were no cameras beyond the last door. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, don’t unlock the detention wing until we’re ready.”

  Alice and Da Silva made their way quickly to the entrance to the detention center. They stood on either side of the door, their guns pointing down toward the floor.

  “We’re set,” said Alice, staring at the light on the door’s control panel.

  Leah already had the unlock dialog on screen and had typed in most of the entry code. When Alice spoke, she typed the final number. The door on the map turned green.

  The next few seconds were a blur of activity. Leah saw Alice run in. She lunged at the woman standing near the door, driving her knife up into her jaw before she could react.

  Da Silva was even quicker. She was inside the room, her gun bucking before Leah even realized she was moving. The first of her targets, an acne-ridden young man on the right-hand side of the room, hit the floor before Alice’s target.

  Leah had been right about the guards being distracted. The third one managed to get his hand onto the butt of his pistol but no farther. Red bloomed across his chest. He fell back against the wall and slid to the ground.

  Alice pointed toward a heavy steel door on the opposite side of the room. “Get us in.”

  “On it.”

  Leah brought up the login dialog for the final door. This one was different. It had two pass phrases and two boxes to enter the resultant code.

  She found the first phrase—DIAGONAL FILTER ALPHA SIXTEEN. The list on her tablet gave her the response. Her hands were sweating as she typed in the code. The first box turned green.

  The second pass phrase gave her a three-digit code. But when she entered it, the screen flashed red and the dialog reset, giving her two new pass phrases. The number 2 was displayed in the bottom right corner of the dialog.

  Leah swore under her breath.

  “Problems?” said Alice.

  “It’s okay,” said Leah, but a cold, hard dread was settling in the pit of her stomach.

  Again, the first code went in correctly, and again, the second, much shorter phrase was rejected. The number changed to 1.

  “The codes aren’t working,” said Leah.

  The two security screens Leah hadn’t set were cycling through the cameras dotted around the station. Leah saw three Transport soldiers, none of them the man from the stairwell. They were moving slowly with no sign that they’d been tipped off to the fact there were intruders in the station, but she was convinced that wouldn’t last long.

  She typed in the code for the first pass phrase. The entry box turned green. The second phrase was BLACK THIRTEEN. Before she’d even found the matching code, she knew it wouldn’t work.

  Leah entered the number. Immediately, the computer’s screen flashed red, and the dialog faded away. On the map, a small red padlock sat over the door to the cellblock.

  Leah tapped on the door again. The computer made an annoyed little burping sound. No dialog appeared.

  11

  “I can’t open the door!”

  “Stay calm,” said Alice. “What’s the problem?”

  The idea that she could be calm seemed ridiculou
s to Leah, but she took a deep breath before she replied anyway. “The codes didn’t work. I’m locked out!”

  “Okay, we’ll do this the old-fashioned way.”

  On the screen, Alice removed a small black box from a pouch on her belt. A white disk was attached to it by a wire. It looked like a physical version of the infiltration kit Leah had used in the VR. Alice pressed the disk against the rectangular lock beside the door. A red circle appeared on the box in her hand.

  The security screens cycled again and revealed a group of five Transport soldiers in the wide entrance hall that took up most of the front of the building. They were standing together in a circle. One of them was pointing, seemingly giving directions to the others. Leah locked the screen on to that camera.

  “You need to get out of there. There’s a Transport team in the building, and I think they know we’re here.”

  Screen Alice shook her head. “We’re too close. There won’t be another opportunity like this.”

  “If they get here before you get that door open, we’ll be trapped.” It was Da Silva’s voice.

  “You can handle a few Transport flatfoots. Leah, it’s time for you to go. Find a car, and get back to Hobbs and Wichita, and tell them what’s happened. If we’re not back in twenty minutes, get out of there.”

  “No, I can help you get out.”

  “Leah, if you stay, Transport will capture or kill you. Both of those would be very bad.”

  Leah opened her mouth to protest, but Alice was right. She looked at the pistol on the desk. It wouldn’t be enough. For a moment, she considered running, then her eyes landed on the silver spike of the VRI sitting on the shelf beneath the desk. Unconsciously, she touched her fingers to the port in the back of her neck.

  “I can use the VRI.”

  “No! It’ll take too long, and Transport will detect you. Leave now. That’s an order.”

  Leah hesitated. The Transport officers were pulling on heavy black combat vests and checking weapons.

  “I’m sorry, Sarge,” said Leah, “your signal’s cutting out. I’m going into the VR. I’ll open the door from there.”

  Leah grabbed the VRI. The device’s tubing crackled and popped as it moved. Nerves clawed at her resolve. Surely, whatever security Transport had in place on the computer would be replicated inside the VR? There’d probably be other defenses, too—the daemons Alice had talked about so many times. Every time she’d gone up against the simulated drones, she’d lost. And then there were the Sirens.

  Even if there were no daemons, the door locks would be just as effective in the virtual world as they were in the real one. She considered Alice’s words again. Maybe she’d been right and Leah should leave and try to get a message to Hobbs.

  Leah had almost changed her mind when she remembered the infiltration software they’d used to plant the data in TRACE’s network. She checked her pockets for Alice’s storage module and found it tucked into her jacket’s breast pocket. The VRI PC had three narrow slots in the front, each one a different size. Leah found the right one and slipped in the module. Its LED glowed green.

  She looked at the screens one last time. The Transport officers were still at the front of the building, checking their equipment. Then she felt around the back of her neck, her fingertips seeking out the cool metal of her port. She took a deep breath and pushed the VRI connector into place.

  12

  The transition into the station’s VR was subtle. The usual shift in perspective was there, but it felt more like a dimming of the lights than the stomach-churning lurch Leah normally experienced. The air was different, too. There was an odd purity to it, not fresh exactly, just utterly neutral.

  Bright lights flared to life and revealed a square table edged with glowing blue strips. The room itself wasn’t much bigger than the table. The walls and ceiling were unadorned apart from four square ceiling panels that lit the room.

  Leah took a step toward the table. The white lights dimmed then turned red. A siren began to wail.

  Terror gripped Leah by the throat so tightly that she let out a choked cry. The red lighting gave everything a strange out-of-focus look. Leah considered getting out of the simulation, but the thought of leaving Alice and Da Silva stranded was too much for her to bear.

  She circled the table, looking for an access panel, but there were no keypads or controls of any kind, just a solid sheet of black glass and the glowing blue surrounding it. It wasn’t until her second pass that she thought to check underneath it.

  The tabletop was sitting on top of an octagonal pillar. She found an access panel on one side, got down on her hands and knees, and crawled beneath the table. The panel was secured with four square bolts, but the infiltration kit’s multitool made light work of them. Leah pulled away the panel, expecting to see a single microchip as she had before.

  Instead, she found a far more complicated circuit board. She counted fifteen black rectangular chips, each with a dozen or more silver pins. The biggest of the chips was square, but there was a circular groove cut into it, and she could see the circuit board beneath.

  In addition to the chips, there were tiny colored cylinders, resistors, and flat disks the size of her fingernails. LEDs were sprinkled across the board. Most were green, but there was a cluster of angry-looking red blocks on one edge of the board and a couple of spherical yellow LEDs that were blinking rapidly.

  Leah rubbed her face as though it would scrub away the dread growing inside her. Then she opened the infiltration kit. She ignored the probes and metal clips. Even if they were what she needed, she had no idea which of the pins she should attach them to.

  There was a second control box that looked identical to the first one but was about half the size, and a soft oval pad made of some sort of yellow leather, neither of which seemed particularly useful. She wasn’t sure whether it was frustration or fear that sparked the tears in her eyes.

  She was about to start just ripping out the circuit boards and hoping for the best when she noticed the smaller control box was nestled inside a foam insert. She pulled the box out and turned it over. There was a circular strip of metal in its base. She lined it up with the circular groove in the chip. They matched. She pushed the box until it clicked into place.

  The familiar red disk appeared on the control box LCD. Leah nervously tapped her fingers on the floor as the green wedge appeared and began inching its way around. When it finally filled the disk completely, there was a brief high-pitched chime. The red LEDs on the circuit board turned green.

  Leah slid out from under the table. In her eagerness to stand up, she hit her head on the glass top. She cried out and rubbed her head, but the pain evaporated when she saw the glowing map of the police station hovering above the table.

  It was a holographic representation of the ground floor. She could see the control room where she was sitting right now, the waiting room, and the corridor that led back into the station. Without thinking, she reached out and touched the map, and the representation zoomed in to the room nearest to her hand. A label hovered above the rectangular space—Interrogation B. She touched the map again, and it pulled back out to show the whole station.

  She moved her hand in a sweeping gesture from left to right, and the map rotated smoothly around. On a hunch, she swept her hand up. The map rose, and as it did, the ground floor faded out and was replaced by the next floor down.

  Leah eagerly rotated the map then zoomed in on the room where Alice and Da Silva would be. The door to the detention center was highlighted in red, and a three-dimensional padlock hovered above it. She tapped the padlock with her fingers, and the now familiar entry box opened up. Eight characters appeared and began cycling as the infiltration software went to work.

  The sirens blared around her, wearing at her nerves. The first two characters quickly froze in place, but the third seemed to be taking an age. She waved her hand over the map in an attempt to trigger some sort of real-time display of the people in the station, but the movement di
d nothing but adjust her view.

  The third character finally locked into place, quickly followed by the next two. Five characters down. She paced around the table, hoping her inattention might somehow encourage the software to work more quickly. When her impatience finally got the better of her and she checked the entry box again, seven of the characters were locked.

  The control box beeped, and the final character froze. The padlock glowed green, flipped open, and then faded away. The door to the cells turned green.

  Leah stood, wondering what she could do next to help Alice and Da Silva, but the sirens seemed to be growing louder. She’d pushed her luck too far, and she needed to get back.

  She turned to leave the room then remembered the infiltration kit. Cursing her stupid, forgetful brain, she retrieved the control box and put it back into the case. With the kit safely stowed on her belt, she closed her eyes and imagined the walls around her peeling away to reveal the real world.

  She felt the subtle shifting of the world around her. The neutral air of the simulation was replaced by the smell of human habitation. She opened her eyes.

  The man they’d handcuffed, Pourteau, was standing in front of her, a grin on his face.

  13

  Another man grabbed Leah from behind and pulled the VRI out of her neck. Pain shot down her arms only to be replaced seconds later by a thousand tiny pinpricks of fire. She screamed.

  The man dragged her out of the chair. She kicked out, and her foot connected with the desk. The man jerked her upright. His arm wedged tight across her throat and cut off her breath.

  He leaned in close to her ear. Hot air that smelled of garlic wafted over her face. “Well, hello there, girly.”

  Leah tried to back-heel the man in the shin. Her foot slid wide. He yanked her backward again, and she let out a strangled gasp.