Three weeks later, in record time for the construction crews who were on a bonus for fast completion of the build, the Terrestrial T-Ship was born. The sleek lines impressed Garner no end. He had seen many ships, although only recently spaceships, in his time. This one was seriously and overpoweringly, the most impressive to look at.
Osbourne had the AI run through a complete stationary systems test and the full complement of guns and missile tubes grew out of the sides of the ship via dedicated nanobots. Garner thought of flying up to the Fortress and screwing with Ferris a little, before discharging everything at him. He still hadn't forgiven him the murderous coup attempt.
They had put in a call to Zeke last week under the pretext of needing him for issues to do with the major cradle and ship crews as well as a surprise for him. He had agreed to drop everything and come back for a few days. Garner was going to meet with him in the morning. He didn’t for one minute believe that, knowing Zeke as he did, he would suffer the routine without first seeing the surprise. This was well and good by Garner, seeing as he had no other items on the agenda for Zeke to deal with.
He was arriving the following day and the AI was prepped to only accept Zeke’s commands. Osbourne, who was now under pressure to catch up on field tests he had been delaying, had unexpectedly left Garner to do the tour, with the proviso that the AI would prompt him if he forgot to include anything. Garner was secretly pleased about that. He rarely had the opportunity to take Zeke by surprise - this was going to be an enjoyable experience.
Osbourne had been all smiles when he saw Garner look admiringly at the ship, and he had walked away whistling. He had given the handover to Frank because he knew that Zeke would respond to that better. He also wanted to thank Frank for backing him on the construction.
He was aware that Frank had made sure that everyone pulled for this build and where he had anticipated maybe six months, Frank had ensured it was done in under a month. He would watch from afar and let them enjoy the moment. Besides, he had access to the AI remotely so could watch from his terminal in the lab.
- 9 -
Lang’s personal shield emitter lay dismantled on his desk, the innards spread about in an orderly manner. The main component board was raised off the desk with clamp stands. Trailing from it were four coloured wires tagged with tiny bulldog clips, each linked to an attachment plugged into his computer.
Even though Ferris didn’t allow them to be worn, everyone still kept their shields; they were bio-linked and expensive to replace. They often kept them in a pocket, switched off; in case of emergency, they justified when questioned by security. Ferris didn’t seem to mind, he just wouldn’t tolerate them being switched on. He said they aggravated his Ferrazine molecules.
Everyone knew it was only because he was a control freak and wanted his people to feel vulnerable. None of the others believed the shields would work with him around anyway, they knew he had over-ride control codes. They weren’t prepared to get him mad by contesting it, and they knew they were safe enough in the Fortress.
Lang had seen Ferris’s abilities once or twice. On one occasion Ferris, who had just been walking through, moved in a blur across the room disabling a malfunctioning robot that was attacking an engineer. The engineer had later told Lang that the particular model robot Ferris tackled was capable of crushing a human being with one clawed appendage, yet Ferris had overpowered it, effortlessly.
He continued to watch the screen as the lists of files and code sped across it as they downloaded onto the board. He had inserted the memory chip earlier in the day while working in the general lab. Now, he used a tiny dropper to coat it with a grey smudge which, even as he watched, dispersed the upgraded nanobots evenly across the chip. He had designed them to protect the data in the event his shield was switched off, or overridden. Should the case be opened without them being disarmed, they would destroy the chip by eating through it, then destroy themselves by overheating, so that they melted.
Satisfied he had done everything possible to safeguard his technology from getting into the wrong hands, like Ferris and others like him, he gathered up all the bits he had used and ‘nuked’ the evidence in a crucible burner he kept on hand for that purpose. Now, all that remained of his research was contained in the secret chip within the shield emitter.
He turned around and noticed the hover globe. He thought he detected movement, as if it was just re-settling in its wall cradle. He shook his head; part of him had never trusted the damn things. Unlike many of the workers here, he rarely trusted it to do anything except a rudimentary housekeeping of his schedules.
He didn’t intend for it to follow him down to the escape route either. He had deliberately trapped it in the other room on at least ten occasions in the last month to test the reactions and see if anything happened, or if it was reported. He fully expected to get hauled in front of Goeth, or worse, Ferris. Nothing happened other than initially sounding its high-pitched alarm. More recently, it just banged itself futilely against the door in an attempt to follow him until he had gone back in again and released it.
He waited until 03:00hrs.., a time that he knew the shifts would be at their lowest ebb and activity in the corridors would be virtually non existent. He had set the hack virus he had previously used in the laboratory, to activate across the corridors he was using, just after 03:05am for fifteen minutes.
Lang looked at his watch and moved into the bedroom. He pretended to be going in, commanding the globe to switch off main lights, so that it went to follow him into the room. It had its own charge point behind the door and immediately went to its cradle. Lang backed out quickly and closed the door on it for the last time.
He was ready to go. His escape clothing, worn under his lab-coat, wouldn't make him look out of place if staff saw him, they would assume he was off on some harmless errand and ignore him. He was the type that was easy to ignore.
Turning around once to look back into his apartment, saying goodbye to the artificially lit set of rectangles that constituted his home for the last year, he let the door close. Then, silently making his way to the first intersection of walkways that criss-crossed the mountain complex, he took the elevator down to the lowest level.
Lang had timed his exit well. He followed the unused corridor downward until he had gone beyond the lit areas where he activated the glow on his personal orb to help guide him through the narrow, rough cut passages.
These were the pools, a place where the waste products from the Fortress were broken down into harmless residues by a mixture of simple nanobots and bacteria. It was then fed back into the water system to flow out of the complex and out of the mountain. It was this he had found as an escape route.
Lang was the person who installed the local shield nullifiers originally, so was one of only a very few who even knew there was an exit out of the Fortress down there. He remembered Ferris grabbing him when he got back and warning him to keep very quiet about it, on pain of a terminal case of inflicted agony. His escape, though, was not without hazard. He had to get through some very narrow channels which, if he remembered rightly, were subject to flooding.
Lang turned his new personal shield up high; he was going to get cold and wet. Despite the incredible innovations implemented into shields that monitored the wearer's health and security, nobody had come up with a way of making the shield impervious to the incursion of water. He hoped its activation wouldn’t alert anyone in the Fortress.
As with air for breathing, the necessity of being able to eat, drink and bathe was intrinsic to human society, so nobody thought it should be possible to block off either. It was a shame because, right now, Lang wasn’t looking forward to traversing an underwater river for several kilometres with just insulation.
He donned his balaclava, made from the Fortress’ own thermal insulation designs, then did the same with gloves and boots and attached a glow-bulb – another Fortress design – to his shoulder harness. Lastly, he donned a small rucksack that contained his worldly
possessions: a small data-pad, a few clothes and an encrypted diary full of personal memories. He was all set.
He had to slide off the edge into a deep channel. The cold immediately hit him, causing him to suck in air and tense in shock, while the thermal gear got to work.
For the first few hundred yards, he bobbed along sedately as the small lagoon only held the overflow from the diverted river. As Lang approached the point where the diverted water rejoined the main stream, he was glad of the shield’s ability to protect him from the rocks jutting out as the river became more forceful.
As his body contorted to manage the swift currents, the cold water invaded his thermal clothing, running down his back where gaps occurred between skin and material. It made him shudder as it found new places to go. Then, as the water warmed from his body heat, it added to the barrier from the cold.
Lang wasn’t scared; it was exhilarating. The thought of escape from the Fortress and the actual carrying out of his plan, made him feel like laughing in gleeful excitement. He didn’t have time to laugh now, as the water raced through an increasingly smaller channel. There must have been rain recently as the level was higher than he remembered. He was running very close to the roof and might soon get pushed under water. He tried to recollect the shape of the tunnel from here to the main pool where the nullifiers were positioned.
The shield was keeping him from getting banged up from the ride, but it wouldn't stop him from drowning. He lay flat out, keeping his face upward where the air was. He was dragged under as the vortices created by the narrowing tunnel forced him to higher speeds through the smaller space. This, he didn’t like.
He held his breath, and, as it strained his lungs, he allowed a little air to dribble out through his nose to relieve the pressure. He did this twice and was just beginning to feel the onset of his body’s reaction to depleting oxygen levels, when he felt the pressure around him ease. He found himself bobbing on the surface again, the thermal gear providing him with sufficient buoyancy to keep him afloat. He took in a few freezing cold lungfuls of air to recover his oxygen balance.
The glow globe showed him that he was entering the approach to the exit from the Fortress shield. All he had to do then was stop himself being ejected over the edge of the waterfall and instead climb down where he knew there was a goat trail. Lang felt confident as he entered the last stretch. Once past the nullifiers he would be free.
Everything happened at once. He inexplicably sank. His shield, which had been providing him with a small amount of resistance against the water pressure, was gone. He hit the wall and starting gulping in water as he lost all control of his movements and continued to submerge.
He floundered in the darkness; his glow globe not helping in the turbulent river. Something hit him in the back, he felt his right leg go. The pain of it breaking, somewhere above the knee, hit him a second later causing him to open his mouth involuntarily in a scream of agony. The water rushed in; he coughed, causing his lungs to spasm.
As he flowed past the nullifiers, his drowning body was caught by something, his rucksack hooking somewhere, he was held fast while the water, in full explosive force, ripped past his body. His damaged leg, twisting in the tumult, carried new waves of exploding pain into his brain. He felt pressure as he was pulled against the current until he was free of the water and suspended in a small cavern where the nullifiers were placed.
He coughed, and puked up water, retching it out of his body, while he continued to hang over the water. His head was aching, but he willed his eyes open to try and make sense of what had happened. His shield shouldn’t have failed. He shouldn’t be drowning; he shouldn’t... his eyes took in the view in front of him, the glow globe illuminated his worst nightmare. Ferris.
“Lang, you little shit!” Ferris bellowed. It echoed around the cavern. Ferris was holding him up by the straps of his rucksack and looking into his eyes as he pulled him level with his Ferrazine strength.
“Did you honestly think you could leave here without my approval, eh?” He shook Lang as if he was a little doll. The strength of the man was superhuman, and the puny body he was holding was nothing to him in terms of mass.
Lang screamed as his leg went a different way to his body from the momentum.
Ferris laughed. His smile disappeared in the light of the glow globe, to be replaced by an evil scowl.
“You have something of mine, Lang, and I WANT it.” He glowered at him, seemingly impervious to the fast water flowing around his feet and the cold air which was freezing Lang as he hung there, shivering from the cold as much as the shock.
“I... I... don’t..” was all that Lang could utter, his voice gone, the fear, shock of the injuries and the cold sapping all of his concentration.
“Oh! don’t worry, Lang, I know where it is.” Ferris' other hand yanked Lang's shield emitter off the strap and waggled it in front of his eyes. “You were right to suspect the globes, Lang, very astute of you. However, you never thought to check for cameras and monitoring devices in your rooms, did you now, eh?”
“Wha... what... you going to do to m...me?” Lang stuttered nervously. He didn’t want to know, but hope inside him burned a hole in his fear. He was still valuable to Ferris; he couldn’t disarm the nanites without him. He was about to tell Ferris that when Ferris bawled at him.
“Do with you, Lang?” he laughed gleefully. “Why, I’m going to let you go, Lang,” he chortled, his face looking more demonic in the half light from the glow globe. “In fact, I am going to let you go NOW!” he roared with laughter.
Lang felt himself thrown back into the freezing me-lee. As he struggled to fight the fierce current, he almost passed out as the torrent took him. Within seconds, he was in deep water. He banged painfully against the wall on the other side of the underground river, distracting him only momentarily. He screamed as he saw the black maw of the water-filled tunnel rush towards him, knowing that beyond it, was the empty expanse of space, and freedom.
He was barely conscious as he was forcefully ejected out through the waterfall. Free of the water's power, his body gave him peace from pain for his last few remaining seconds on Earth. He felt nothing as his body hit the ground, two thousand feet below. The snow of the coming winter turned red with his blood, which froze on contact until it too became covered, the white carpet hiding Lang’s body until the Spring thaw.
Ferris walked in on Goeth, who was painstakingly counting something on his microscope using a manual counter. The ‘click’, ‘click’, ‘click’ indicated the progress his eye made across the slide.
The shield emitter in Ferris’ hand, landed in front of Goeth, forcing his eyes away from the scope. Distracted now, he turned his attention to his partner. “Is it done?” he asked Ferris.
“Aye, the little shit has gone down the sluice, without that,”he indicated the shield emitter in Goeth’s hand. “There won’t be much left of him by the end of winter.”
Goeth fingered it, reluctant to play with it. “He will have sabotaged it. Are you sure he inserted the code in this?” he asked, dubiously.
“Aye, you can see the recordings from his spy globe,” the term they called the personal globes every worker was forced to have with them at all times. Also known by the manual workers as ‘Guardians’, the scientists preferred to believe the globe was there for their own personal use and used it for lots of silly tasks. Its only job was to spy on them.
Goeth shook his head. “No, I believe you, Ferris,” he picked up an instrument off his desk, turning back to Ferris and placing the emitter on the table in front of them.
“Are you just going to open it? Haven’t you got some means of pulling the information out of there, without damaging it?” Ferris queried when he saw the scalpel in Goeth's hand.
“If it’s sabotaged, it won’t help us. Our only chance is to recover as much as we can before it does whatever it’s going to do. He pulled a squeeze bottle with a clear fluid near to him and a couple of throwaway cloths.
Fer
ris leaned over, placing his hand on Goeth’s arm, restraining him. “We aren’t going to blow this just because you don’t have a better idea.” He took the emitter back and placed it in his pocket. “Tell me you have a plan, and I will bring it back for you to work on. In the meantime, that boy was working on something important, work some magic on his drive and find out what it was.”
Ferris walked out leaving Goeth seething. He knew he was right, but Goeth also knew there was practically no way of getting in there except by brute force. He knew Lang’s nature and abilities; he was a smart little bastard. He would have set whatever was in there to disintegrate the moment the seal was popped.
He sighed, looked back at the counter he had in his hand again. Clicking it back to zero, he put his eye over his scope and was soon clicking away again. Science sometimes was very monotonous, but he knew he was close to the secret of the Ferrazine. He had been testing it as a substitute platform for the computer processors. Its crystal properties were perfect for temperature control and the conductivity was the best they had ever found.
The monitoring globe that Pod had left hovering over the Fortress detected the movement in the lower levels of the Fortress. It had been instructed to monitor anything out of the ordinary, as well as the development of the trojan virus that Pod had infiltrated into the computer system previously. When it found the activity had moved to a specific point it had been told to raise the alarm over, it did so, forwarding the observation that the signature of the human, Ferris, was present. In response, Pod arrived, not thirty seconds later by D-Jump, and observed the last few seconds just as Lang was ejected back into the river.
Pod, not aware of what had occurred, quickly made the assumption that Ferris would not have thrown the individual into the water if he had not meant for him to be killed by the two thousand foot drop to the base of the mountain.
POD (The Pattern Universe) Page 9
