by SL Huang
“You don’t think he’s able to trigger an eruption!” cried Pilar. “He’s not that crazy, is he?”
Nobody answered her. The question rang in the air.
“Shit,” said Denise weakly. I didn’t think I’d heard her curse before. “Vikash and I used to talk about going up to Mammoth. I remember now. And later I found out he didn’t ski, and I said, ‘What on earth do you go up there for, then?’ and he just laughed and said it was beautiful, and I—I agreed…”
I snapped my fingers at Checker. “You. Numbers. Now. I need every single possible piece of numerical information related to either supervolcanoes in general or this one in particular.”
“On it,” said Checker.
“Me, too,” piped up Pilar, her head dipping over her laptop.
“Mammoth’s a big place,” said Arthur. “We know where he could be holed up?”
“Big is an understatement,” said Checker, his fingers not slowing as he talked. “The caldera is like two hundred square miles, and that’s if we assume he’s hiding out somewhere in there and not caldera-adjacent.”
“I suspect I could find him.” Denise was sitting very still, like she’d disconnected from the world. “Or he would find me. He invited me, didn’t he? If I drove up there—”
“Not happening,” said Arthur. “You ain’t going in. This guy’s way too dangerous.”
Denise turned her head to face him. “I’m sorry, but this is my decision.”
“She won’t be going alone,” I said. “She’ll have her robot friend with her. Namely, me.” I grinned at Arthur. He didn’t grin back. I turned back to Denise, something almost like hope tugging at me. “Do you think we might be able to get to him before he dissects Liliana?”
“I don’t—I don’t know.”
“Russell,” said Arthur. “This guy beat you last time. And now it’s a chance he rigged a volcano to blow? You need a better plan. Heck, you need a plan.”
He was right.
I’d fucked up this job from minute one, and it had snapped back on me with several good beatings, a dozen people murdered, and a little girl in the hands of a mad scientist.
But I wasn’t the only one in this room. I didn’t know why it was so hard to remember I wasn’t in things alone.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m open to ideas.”
CHAPTER 34
THE PROBLEM with soliciting other people’s opinions, I reflected, was that they all disagreed. Vehemently.
“You’re not listening to me,” Denise insisted, the better part of an hour later. When she raised her voice it wasn’t loud, but it sounded uncharacteristic enough that it made you pay attention. “This isn’t a BattleBots competition—I need more information! I can’t take one look at what he’s got and then MacGyver a solution in seconds without any time or, or materials—no scientist could!”
A flash of memory, a thin black girl tossing off an acerbic remark—I shook the image away. The pain in my arm was making me tired. “I thought you were as smart as he is,” I said.
“Robotics, yes, but I’m not—I’m not tactical. I need to know what he’s working on, what he has, before I can figure out a weakness. We need to know more.”
“Maybe tech ain’t the answer, then,” said Arthur. “Maybe we don’t fight tech with tech.”
“Then what?” I asked. “What’s orthogonal to technology?”
Pilar looked up from where she was still furiously researching on a laptop. “What about psychology?”
“That’s not exactly my forte,” I said, thinking of Dawna Polk.
Pilar ignored me. “Vikash has an ego the size of a hot air balloon. And filled with the same stuff. I had to handle him just to get routine paperwork out of him. Sometimes that involved ‘accidentally’ putting a hold on his paycheck.”
“It did take finesse to oversee him,” admitted Denise.
“Why? He respects you,” I said.
“Yes. Yes, that’s true; that had to be true. But to get him there—despite the way he talks, the rest of the team wasn’t—” She cleared her throat. “They were all good. Sanjay was more creative than Vikash, and Esther was quicker, and—” She stopped. “He’s brilliant; I’m not denying that. But Pilar is right. He needed handling.”
“I don’t know how this helps us,” I said tiredly.
“Maybe…” Denise folded her lips together. “Maybe I can convince him I’m going to join him. He—he’s just arrogant enough to believe that could be possible.”
“You’re talking undercover,” said Arthur, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Maybe deep. Maybe for a long time, before you know enough to move against him. Ain’t easy, something like that.”
“And Cas sucks at it, assuming she’d be going with,” said Checker, not looking up from his computer.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Well, it’s true,” Checker responded without hesitation. “Plus Agarwal would want to take you apart eventually, and he’d see you bleed when he pricks you, and it would all be over.”
He had a point.
“On that note, quick interrupt,” said Checker. “We’ve got some volcano numbers for you. Pilar, send me the—there it is, thanks.”
I went to look over his shoulder; he minimized a chat window with Pilar, tiled the research on the laptop screen, and handed it up to me.
I sat down and skimmed, the numbers slotting into my brain, forming a picture, eliminating possibilities one by one by one. I could feel everyone else’s eyes on me, quiet, tense—the awkward, surreal wait of finding out if we were at the end of the world.
We were lucky, in a way. The region was so seismically active and prone to earthquakes that it had been under monitoring for some time, especially since a swarm of thirty thousand quakes in one year had hit a few decades ago. Add that to the eruption risk, and the caldera had been under a fair amount of study. I ran seismic indicators, estimated explosive outputs, buried my mind in the vast magma cavern beneath California, the overwhelming size of it dwarfing any puny efforts of humanity…
I blinked and looked up, something loosening deep in my chest. “He can’t do it.” The words felt almost fragile, hopeful rather than true, about to shatter even as I spoke them. “He can’t—he can’t. Nobody could. To trigger an eruption—it’s too big.”
“You sure?” said Arthur. “Some of the bombs we can make—and he might’ve built—”
“No. You don’t understand. It’s…the amount of destabilization he would need to make it happen…saying one man could manage that is like saying he could manage to knock the Earth askew in its orbit. Or lower the level of the oceans. Or break a continent in half. Well. Not quite. But what I mean is, this is too big. It’s too big a problem.”
“You telling me—ain’t no possible tech way?” said Arthur. “The man built a kid. You ain’t think he—”
“That’s nothing,” I said. “When I say it’s too big a problem, I don’t just mean intellectually. It’s too physically big.”
“I actually have no problem believing that,” said Checker. “We as humans are terrible at perceiving scale. The caldera’s huge.”
“Why else would he be there, though?” asked Pilar.
“It is pretty up there,” murmured Denise. “Maybe that’s all.”
“Wait—wait,” said Arthur. “Russell. You saying it’s no chance at all of this?”
“Well, sure, there’s a finite chance,” I said. “Just like there’s a finite chance the thing’ll erupt tomorrow naturally. But I’d rather play the lottery.”
Checker snorted a laugh, and the tension seeped out of the room. Pilar took a deep breath, grinning, and Arthur turned away, scrubbing his hands over his face.
“Hey,” said Pilar into the almost giddy silence, “I have a crazy thought.”
“What is it?” said Checker.
“Well—okay, this might be totally nuts—but we were just talking about handling Vikash, and…if he’s not blowing up the mountain, what if we do it?”
“No no no, that’s not what I meant!” she cried. “I don’t mean we really blow it up. What if we tell him we can?”
“You mean bluff?” asked Checker.
“Yes! He’s the kind of guy—you can’t reason with him. You either have to manipulate him into thinking he wants what you want him to want, or you have to outdo him by so much you flatten him right out of the gate.”
“You agree?” Arthur asked Denise.
“Well—yes, I—I suppose so. I was his supervisor, so it was a little, a little different—ego stroking, mostly—”
“Making him think he wants what you want,” agreed Pilar, nodding.
“But there was one time—he had some grudge against Dana, and I told Vikash if he didn’t stop making snide comments about his code, I’d have Arkacite stop ordering Mountain Dew for the office fridges.”
I stared at her.
“It was his version of a nuclear threat,” she said. “But yes—Pilar’s right. There’s no ramping up. If you do, he’ll have a contingency plan at every step. So if you do have to threaten him…”
“Go big or go home?” said Checker.
“Yes,” said Denise. “At least, I—I think so.”
“Then why not plant, I don’t know, an actual explosive device?” I demanded. “Something we wouldn’t have to bluff our way through?”
“He’d be on the lookout for that,” said Denise. “Any sort of normal double-cross, he’s going to see coming. I don’t know if this is a good idea, but it has the advantage of being outside the box.”
“So far outside the box that it’s something literally impossible!” I objected. “He’s going to know—”
“We didn’t,” pointed out Checker. “We thought there was a chance he was up there being a supervillain and had rigged the whole thing to blow.”
“But even to make this plausible, it would be a ridiculous endeavor!” I argued. “Remember when I said this was big? To be even remotely believable, you’re talking about mining the entire caldera, or at least pretending to, and even to fake that we’d need an army—”
I stopped.
I knew someone with a private army who owed me a favor. Or at least thought she did.
“Cas?” said Checker.
“Hypothetically,” I said slowly, “say I can get us manpower. What then?”
“Could fake some geological survey,” suggested Arthur. “It’s a volcano, right? Can have someone play a volcanologist, make local folk believe we’re out planting sensors. Agarwal won’t worry till you tell him it was for something else.” He paused. “Not that I like this plan. What if he calls the bluff?”
“He seems too egotistical to want to die,” said Checker, though his voice held a thread of doubt.
“More than that—it’s his work,” said Denise softly. “His work will be threatened.”
We all looked at each other for a moment.
“This is the craziest plan ever,” said Checker. “If you had said to me, ‘Come up with a plan so crazy no one would ever think of it,’ this plan wouldn’t even be on that list, it’s so crazy.”
“So crazy he won’t expect it’s fake?” I asked.
No one answered.
I turned to Denise. “You know him best, and you’re the one who’s going to need to sell this. And you’re the one who’ll be in his sights if he doesn’t believe you. Be honest. You think this’ll work?”
“I…I think it has a chance. And I think we have to try.” She swallowed. “It will—we’ll need some time to prepare, right? We can try to figure out—if we think of something better—but if we don’t…he might be fleeing the country any day. He might already have done. If this is our best shot, I want to take it.”
“I’ll be there with you,” I said. “But I might not be able to protect you.” The words sounded hollow, an admission I’d never thought I’d have to make.
“I understand.” She squared her shoulders. “I want to do this.”
Jesus Christ. I’d never understand self-sacrificing people. “Okay,” I said. “Checker, Pilar, get on figuring out how to fake this, and stat. I want to head up there as soon as humanly possible. Arthur…I think maybe call your doctor friend now.”
CHAPTER 35
WE RELOCATED back to Checker’s place now that the Mafia wasn’t after him anymore. Checker and Pilar buried themselves out in the Hole to figure out the best way to fake a geological survey, and Arthur’s doctor friend swooped into the house, berated me for getting shot again—I vaguely recognized her from the last time—and proceeded to fix me up very briskly and with absolutely no sympathy. I had no idea where Arthur found these people.
She did also leave me some highly illegal prescription painkillers, which made me inclined to feel a bit more charitable toward her.
Arthur made a run for supplies, and Denise—who had picked up welding somewhere along the line in her robotics education—seared together an overlapping metal casing to go over my cast. It might already strain Agarwal’s credulity that my arm hadn’t been fixed up as good as new; we wanted him to see what he expected to see as much as possible. A robot with a temporary metal arm might not ring any alarm bells. We hoped.
I’d been wearing the same shirt since the day before, and it was stiff with dried blood. Checker gave me a very loud patterned button-down he said he’d used to cosplay Wash—whatever that meant—and an unlikely purple blazer, since I’d given Arthur his coat back. I had to cut my T-shirt off to change, and with the slightly large, mismatching garments and only one arm through the jacket and the other encased in metal, I looked rather absurd. Which I supposed worked to my advantage.
By the next morning, Checker and Denise had figured out what they wanted the fake volcanic sensors-slash-explosive-devices to look like. Arthur went on another supply run while I made a terribly uncomfortable call to Mama Lorenzo.
“Don’t tell her she owes you a favor,” Pilar instructed me, completely unsolicited. “Ask her, like you’re in a tough spot and you know you’re really putting her out. You want her to feel all magnanimous when she says yes.”
“Malcolm’s the one who told me she feels like she owes me,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but she didn’t,” said Pilar. “You want her to feel like she’s in the position of power on this one. Trust me. It’s all about making her feel good about it.”
“What are you, my public relations advisor?”
She shrugged in her exaggerated fashion. “Well, you kinda need one.”
So I called Mama Lorenzo and rather woodenly begged her for help. The conversation was excessively awkward on both sides, but she conditionally agreed to the favor and set up a meeting with me to discuss details. In probably the sanest move I could have made, I told her I’d be sending Arthur. Pilar was right about my public relations ability.
By the time night fell again, Checker’s living room had been transformed into a soldering lab. Checker and Denise were already pros, and Pilar tentatively offered to learn. “I mean, don’t take the time if it’d be quicker to do it yourself, but I want to help—”
Checker snorted. “A trained monkey could learn to solder. It’s easy. Come on over.”
Pilar’s face lit up as she joined him at his workstation.
“Get a room,” I muttered from where I sat paging one-handed through maps of Mammoth Lakes, memorizing the terrain.
Checker closed his eyes for a moment. “Cas, that was highly inappropriate.”
“It’s okay,” said Pilar blithely. “I’ve learned when I should ignore her.”
“Hey!” I protested.
“Knowing that’s a useful skill,” Checker said to Pilar, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Ignorance is bliss. Especially as I really was hoping to ask you if you wanted to grab a drink with me after this, although now I’m afraid it’ll just seem creepy.”
Pilar laughed. “I’m flattered. B
ut you know, the last girl you dated got you in trouble with the Mob, so I think I’m going to pass.”
“Shot down,” I mocked.
Checker rolled his eyes at me. “For Zarquon’s sake, Cas, I am perfectly capable of accepting it when a woman says no.” He handed Pilar a soldering iron.
“I do want to come see your band sometime, though,” said Pilar. “You should let me know when you’re playing. I’m super into indie music.”
“Oh—wow, uh, cool,” said Checker. “Sure, I’ll let you know.”
“You’re in a band?” I said.
Checker took a moment to stare at the ceiling, as if appealing to the heavens. “You really are a horrible friend. Though you did save my life, so maybe you’re all right.”
Fortunately, Arthur chose that moment to come back from the meeting with Mama Lorenzo, saving me from the risk of descending into sentimentality. “Went well,” he said right away. “She’s marshalling people to go up by tomorrow morning. Got the sense this’ll even the scales ’tween you. And her pet sniper wants to help back you up.” He transferred his attention from me to Checker. “Think I got her to do something for you, too, though don’t count your chickens yet.”
“For me?” Checker froze. “Arthur—I’m really okay; I don’t want—”
“Worse if she feels like she owes you, right?” said Arthur, the slightest touch of teasing in his tone.
“I suppose…” said Checker unhappily.
“I’ve got technobabble for you to memorize,” I said to Arthur. “You’re the best one of us undercover; you play lead volcanologist on this. Interact with the town. Let the Mob guys refer people to you. That sort of thing.”
“That means I ain’t backing you up,” said Arthur with a frown. “Was thinking your sniper buddy and I could watch your back. Can’t do that if I’m play-acting the scientist.”
“I can be the volcanologist,” offered Checker. “All it takes is being able to jabber out a whole lot of scientific jargon at people, right? It’s not like I’ll be in danger of coming face to face with Agarwal—he’s not going to risk being high-profile by nosing around too much. He’ll get the gossip through the grapevine.”
