Kaleidocide

by Dave Swavely

  As the flying cars traveled south over Napa City, then Vallejo, and then the top inlets of the San Francisco bay, I switched my video and audio to riding with Jon and coached him on what we would say to John Rabin when we talked with him at the jail. The double was in the passenger seat of Min’s aero, with the big bodyguard driving, and Lynn was in another with Ni driving and the Rabin twins in the back. Stephenson flew one by himself, behind the other two. Terrey and San flanked him in the fourth aero, and would not be stopping with the others at the jail, but would be continuing south to visit the Presidio orphanage in the city, to put the finishing touches on the security measures we cooked up for Lynn’s stay there. The idea was that after the visitors talked with John Rabin and were filmed coming out of the jail, Min would take Lynn to the Presidio and the rest of the team would return to Napa Valley.

  The security officer inside me was worried about having so few team members, and how thinly spread they would be, especially on the return trip. But we didn’t bring in any BASS peacers for fear that one or more of them had been bought off by Sun, because the “heavy guns” sent to kill me had already been dealt with by the triplets in Oakland, and because the team members themselves didn’t seem to share my anxiety. Min and Ni, for example, spent half the trip comparing the specs of their combat augmentations in the most lighthearted fashion I could imagine between two very serious cyborgs. Ni even made a bona fide joke at the end, when she conceded victory to Min because she had never been equipped with a cannon in her derriere. I knew the big machine-man would never live that one down, and now he was taking it on the chin from a creature that seemed to have very little sense of humor otherwise.

  The trip passed uneventfully, despite the tension I felt with Lynn being so close to the double, and soon our destination came into view amid the arid woodlands and hills of San Rafael. The Marin County Civic Center was one of the truly unique buildings in the world, which is why it had been carefully repaired and restored after the big quake. It had been designed by the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, completed in 1962 and, like most of his buildings, seemed to exist outside of time and place. There was nothing quite like it, with its two long, thin arms stretching out in almost opposite directions from a central domed structure, and hundreds of arches of different sizes on the arms reflecting the curve of the dome in an uncanny symmetry. And it was very colorful, of course, which I thought was an interesting coincidence—the roofs of both the long buildings and the dome were painted a bright light blue, which from some angles also looked a little greenish.

  At the end of the longer arm, on the northern end of the buildings, was a circular hill that also added to the symmetry of the whole campus. This was where we were headed, because inside the hill was housed the Marin County Jail, as it had been since the Center was built. The three aeros that were staying parked near the entrance to the jail, and Terrey said good-bye and continued on toward the city. He added that he would be monitoring our visit through Ni, however.

  The entrance to the jail was set down low in the hill, and on the top behind it was a flat but wide pillbox-like structure with skylights on the roof that served as a source of light for the main room inside. It took us a little while to get there, because we had to undergo a security clearance and then wait for permission to visit John. We may not need to alert the press, I thought as we waited. One of the staff here might alert them, because they could probably make some good money by doing that.

  Eventually we were all let in to the main room of the jail, which was deep in the center of the hill. It was quite spacious, containing about twenty tables and chairs—all bolted to the floor, of course—and extending about thirty feet up to the aforementioned roof with all the skylights that sat on the top of the hill. On the outsides of the circular room were two stories of nicely painted cells—a twentieth-century experiment in making incarceration more “open” and accommodating for the inmates, and a significant contrast to the austere interior and gothic exterior of the Nob Hill cathedral Saul Rabin had transformed into a jail in the city. Normally some prisoners would be milling around in the open area, but the jail staff had cleared it out so we could meet with John Rabin alone.

  That didn’t end up happening, however, because the staff informed us that he was unwilling to talk to Lynn and me (my double, that is), but would only see his sisters in another room, if allowed. I was actually somewhat relieved by this, since I had been worried about trying to have another difficult conversation through Jon, so I told the staff through him that Hilly and Jessa could meet with John in one of the interrogation rooms deeper inside the underground facility. After we had given them about ten minutes together, we told the staff to inform them that they would have ten more, and then we would be leaving. At that time, Min contacted the three net news services from the area that we had decided upon, so they had a few minutes to get someone there to film us leaving the jail, and maybe get a few brief comments from us about why we were there.

  This unencrypted communication over the net, however, brought a lot more than some reporters to our location. Before the ten minutes were up, Terrey’s voice broke into all our audio lines, announcing that Ni and San, who were hooked up to the Eye satellite surveillance system, were seeing another enemy assault team in the air just minutes away from the Marin Center.

  42

  JAILBREAK

  “Another assault team?” I said. “Where is this one coming from?”

  “It looks like the Dickensian twists of fate are not with us today, mate, but with our foes,” Terrey said. “There was never more than one assault team before, and I joked about how easy it was to find the other one, but I guess the joke’s on me and they’re smarter than I thought. Looks like they put one in the ruins of Oakland in case you turned up in that direction, and another one in the ruins of San Quentin in case you came this way.”

  San Quentin had been a state prison only a couple miles from where we were, until it was heavily damaged in the earthquake and devastated further by the resultant fires and a protracted fight between the inmates who took it over and the BASS forces who eventually took them out. The prison was not rebuilt, and the area around it had never been an attractive place for people to live anyway. So its seclusion and the shelter of the abandoned buildings, like Oakland across the bay, provided an ideal place for an attack force to gather and wait for the right moment. And the right moment had definitely come—besides being so close to where Jon was, the colorful buildings of the Marin Center must have made Sun and his fellow plotters wet themselves from excitement. In fact, Terrey sent an aerial view of the assault team from the Eye to my second screen, and when it zoomed in I could see that the helicopters and the Armored SUVs that hung from wires below them were all painted the same bright blue as the roofs of the Center. I wondered why there was a misty cloud of that same color trailing from the back of each of the airborne vehicles, until I realized that they had sprayed them so quickly, prior to taking off, that the paint wasn’t even dry yet.

  Of course, I thought, they didn’t know we would be at the Center until just now, when they intercepted our communication. I marveled at their efficiency, but also at the insanity of Sun’s obsession with colors. And I feared for the safety of our team—and my wife—when I counted the helicopters and suspended SUVs. There were four of each, and they would be at the jail before any of us could get out of it.

  “I’m already on my way there,” Terrey said. “And so are the closest BASS Firehawks and peacers. But it’ll be probably twenty-five minutes before the cavalry will arrive, and the bad guys will be there in five. You’ll have to find a way to hold out until some bigger firepower gets there.” He paused for a moment, then added, “I’ll be glad to make suggestions, Michael, but you’ll have to make the calls.”

  “We need to go get Hilly and Jessa out of that room right now,” said Lynn, characteristically thinking of others rather than herself. “And keep them safe.” She waited to hear my answer in her earpiece, which I h
ad made her wear in case I needed to coach her also in the conversation with John Rabin.

  But while she was talking, the jail alarms started to sound, telling me that our enemies were already close enough to be detected by the security systems there. The prisoners would be thoroughly locked down now, and would therefore be sitting ducks for the destruction that was about to be unleashed on the jail. I knew exactly what was going to happen to it after only a few moments of looking at my second screen, because of my military experience and some of the details that the Eye’s scanners had picked up, which the triplets had now transposed onto the view of the approaching vehicles.

  “The rockets on the helicopters are hot,” Terrey said, realizing the same things I had. “And the mercs inside have loaded grenade launchers.” This meant that the attackers wouldn’t be taking any chances on a firefight with rifles, or worrying about collateral damage. They were simply going to fire explosives ahead of them until everyone in the jail was dead, and they would do that into every entrance so no one could escape. They were now close enough to the jail that they were fanning out for their approach, and their trajectories to various points on the property were also being displayed on my screen.

  “Michael,” Lynn said in the direction of the double, “we need to get the girls, now!”

  “No, Lynn,” I said. “Leave them in the back room.”

  “Why?” she shouted over the alarm.

  “Because that will keep them far from the fight that’s about to happen, plus they would slow you down when I try to get you out—and you’re my main priority. But please don’t ask me why again—this is a combat situation and you have to do exactly as I say to survive. We only have minutes. When the copters arrive, at least one of them will fire rockets into the roof to break it, and then fire more rockets to obliterate the room you’re standing in. A group of soldiers will attack the main entrance, firing explosives ahead of them to take out any of the guards defending it and anyone trying to escape out of it. Another group will come through the only other entrance, from the court building adjacent to you, and do the same thing. In a matter of minutes everyone in the jail will be dead. Are you with me so far?”

  “How do you know this?” Lynn asked.

  “Because it’s what we would do,” Terrey answered, “if we were them.”

  “If you stay where you are,” I continued, “you’re dead, no doubt about it. So you’ll all have to move, there’s no other way I can see to save any of you, or even any of the prisoners and guards in the jail. Min, Ni, and Stephenson, you’ll have to take the fight to them right now, meet them on their way to each of those three spots. And it’ll distract them from where Jon and Lynn are going.”

  “Where can we go?” Lynn asked. “There’s no other way out.”

  “Yes there is,” I said. “And we’re going to hope and pray that the Chinese don’t know about it, because they got their information from the net, and the location of the prisoner transfer tunnel up those stairs is not in the public records, for obvious reasons.”

  I knew of the existence and location of the secret tunnel from being in BASS leadership, and we had confirmed it when planning the visit. Frank Lloyd Wright must have had fun designing a corridor that was hidden between the first and second floors of the long courthouse building next to the jail, so that prisoners could be transported safely and quickly to and from the courtrooms.

  “Why don’t I stay back there with Hilly and Jessa?” Lynn asked. “Don’t you want to keep me away from your double?”

  “I normally do, but this is the best way for you to get out alive, and I don’t want to send you alone—I want to go with you by riding with Jon. Once you’re in the clear, or if the enemy finds the two of you, I’ll separate you then, and hopefully they’ll only go after him.” I looked at the screen and saw the enemy location. “But we really don’t have time for whys now. Stephenson, pick your poison … it’s only fair that you should have your choice of which entrance. The public hallway to the court building is to your left—maybe you’ll get lucky and they won’t come in that way after all.” In reality this was a token gesture, because I was sure they would attack that exit, and so any way he went would be suicide. I didn’t think the two combat cyborgs would even survive the day, let alone this unaugmented rent-a-cop.

  Jon turned toward Stephenson when I said his name, so I could see him now, because I was looking through Jon’s eyes. The little man stood there with his mouth wide open, which at first I assumed was because he knew he was going to die soon. But it turned out to be the opposite, and his mouth widened further into a big grin.

  “It doesn’t matter which way I go, because I’ll be invincible. You won’t believe this, but I had a dream about this, too! I thought it was a memory, but now I know it was prophetic. Don’t pity me—pity the poor bastards who get in my way.” He pulled the assault rifle off his back, which had its own grenade launcher, and practically skipped into the hallway, muttering “Yippee-ki-yay” something-or-other.

  I hoped that his dream thing was real in this case, if only because he could provide more time for me to get Lynn away to a safe place. At the very least, it certainly gave the little man a lot of confidence.

  “I’ll take the roof,” Min said, and when Ni asked why, he responded, “Because you can’t do this.” He fired one of his arm guns at a skylight directly above him, then jumped thirty feet up and through the hole he had made. The broken pieces of transteel cascaded down to where he had stood, and the others had to move away to avoid being hit by them. Ni merely grunted in response to Min’s display, pulled her own two guns out and strolled toward the main entrance. She was much more realistic than Stephenson about her chances of surviving this, and was much less eager than he. But as always, she did her job without complaining, and I admired that.

  I told Jon and Lynn to head up the stairs, and spent a moment preparing the best visual strategy for managing this in a way that could save Lynn and the baby’s lives. I transferred the double’s view from the screen to the net room, opening it up in front of me as big as I could with a high enough resolution. The holo stretched out in all directions around me so that I could take advantage of Jon’s peripheral vision and see everything that he was seeing. I opened three small views toward the bottom left on the bigger view so I could see what was happening through Min’s and Ni’s eyes, and Stephenson’s glasses. I toggled off their audio for now so I could concentrate on talking to Jon and Lynn, and I opened two more views on the bottom right of the big one. One was the aerial view of the Center so I could see the enemy movements—at least those outside the buildings—and the other was one a blank one that I wanted to be ready in case I could get Lynn into an aero and fly her away from the scene. So when I looked straight ahead with my own eyes, I saw exactly what Jon was seeing, but I could move them down and watch the smaller views if I wanted to, while still being somewhat aware of what was going on with Jon and Lynn.

  I did watch the smaller views for a few moments, as Jon and Lynn were being ushered into the prisoners’ corridor by a jail guard. In the aerial view on the bottom right, I saw the assault force arrive at the Center, the light blue helicopters dropping the light blue SUVs at four different spots around the jail, and the mercenaries with light blue armor rushing out of the trucks and toward the exact spots I had predicted. The scene gave new meaning to the term “kaleidocide,” because I knew that a lot of people, including my protection team members, were probably going to die from this swarm of light blue attackers, at a building covered with the same color. I did take some heart, though, when I saw the squad enter the big Hall of Justice building on the ground floor, which hopefully meant they would encounter Stephenson on their way in, rather than my wife and my double. And I took even more heart when I saw Min leap from the top of the hill toward the two helicopters that were about to fire into the jail as I had predicted. The big cyborg fired a couple small but powerful rockets from his arm at one of the birds on his way up, and grabbed onto the
legs of the other when he reached it, directing some armor-piercing bullets into its cockpit.

  The helicopter that was hit by Min’s rockets exploded in an orange and red ball of flame (my kind of colors!), and the one he held onto started to spiral toward the ground, its dead pilot slumped over the controls. Min let go and fell to the ground, only to be fired upon by the squad of attackers who had been dropped off near the top of the hill to assure no one escaped that way. The big cyborg had to jump back up to the crashing helicopter and use it for cover from them, but another one was now hovering nearby and drawing a bead on him, so there was soon no place for him to take cover. I glanced over to Ni’s view to see that she was engaging the mercenaries outside the main entrance to the jail, in a similar fashion—valiant yet ultimately futile. Stephenson was running through his hallway in the direction of the enemy, but he hadn’t encountered them yet.

  I couldn’t worry about those team members for one more moment—I had to turn my full attention to Jon’s view and protect my wife and baby as best as I could from thirty miles away. As they moved down the empty prisoner’s corridor, I was still worried that the attackers might know about or find the hidden tunnel, so I told Jon to take the safeties off my boas. But I had him leave them in the holsters, because I didn’t want him to use them unless he absolutely had to, for fear that his amateurism might cause him to shoot Lynn by mistake.

  All three of us were suddenly terrified by a loud and jarring concussion that shook the whole corridor. But then I realized it was an explosion on another floor, and calmed Jon and Lynn down by telling them that it was a good sign because it meant that the attackers were probably engaging Stephenson on the floor below, and didn’t know where they were.

  For confirmation, I looked at the little man’s view on the bottom left of mine. At first I thought he was dead, because it was blank, but then I realized that his view had been obscured by the blast, and he had survived it somehow. He was now hiding in the rubble of a room next to the hallway, where the wall had been blasted away, and he had his rifle trained on the path that the attack squad would be taking on their way to the jail. As I watched, the first few of the blue-suited soldiers came into view, and Stephenson opened fire on them.