“Correction. There are nine employees on the clock at the moment, not six,” Garotte said between explosions. “Or, at least, there are three more secure entries than secure exits. The other three must be unlisted and on the lowest levels. And there are… ten levels beyond the lowest our scanner was able to detect.”
“You’ll have to tell that doctor his stuff needs work,” Silo said.
Two simultaneous explosions caused some gravel to trickle down from above, bouncing off the table beside the work display.
“Do try to avoid bringing down the whole facility just yet, my dear.”
“Listen, hon. A building comes down when I want it to come down. Not before.”
After a few more thumping bursts of fire and heat, Silo lowered her launcher and surveyed her surroundings.
“I count twenty-two wrecked robots, two damaged ones,” she said, switching to the shotgun for a few more shots. “Make that twenty-four wrecked robots. Darn good calibration on these grenades. It can be a little hairy using them indoors, even in a big space like this, but they worked beautifully.”
“According to the official manifest, you’ve finished off the totality of their defensive equipment, aside from some handheld weaponry in the lower levels.”
“I’ll keep my eyes peeled for armed civilians then.”
“Interesting…” Garotte said, looking over the screen. “You may not be dealing exclusively with civilians.”
“Oh no?”
“There are two different levels of security access here. The lower levels have their own separate system, and it’s rather resistant to even my skilled penetration. Absolutely military-grade. I suspect all of this is merely the logistics and administration for whatever is going on down below.” He tapped through a few more menus. “And the level of obfuscation suggests whatever is going on down below is something the aforementioned military presence does not want anyone to know about. Everything you see here is little more than a glorified mail room. The only data listed on the outgoing packages are shipping dimensions and the destinations, all of which are on planet and known Syndicate headquarters. No details on contents.”
“What about the incoming packages? I don’t suppose we’ve got a nice return address to link the stuff they’re warehousing here to a supplier.”
“Curiouser and curiouser. The incoming packages are all consumables. Water, fuel, food, toiletries… some very basic maintenance parts. And that’s going all the way back to all unarchived data. Months of shipments.”
“Okay, so they’re blanking the incoming records. Seems like a pretty standard way to cover their tracks.”
“Possibly. But there is only one way to be sure,” he said. He entered a few commands, and the warning lights around the huge elevator activated. “Onward and downward,” he said. “And it may be wise to hurry. A distress call has gone out. I’ve elevated the access privileges on our stolen IDs as high as they will go. Head down and keep your eyes open. I’ll be along shortly.”
“Where are you going?”
“To fetch the ship and bring it in. It would be rather anticlimactic to successfully blow the lid off this entire operation and have them destroy our means of escape.”
“This seems suspiciously like you’re trying to avoid giving me my chance to drive.”
“… I suppose it is an occupational hazard for people to assume every act a spy takes has an ulterior motivation. Very well, I shall infiltrate the facility we believe to be filled with military-grade explosives. In retrospect, that is the course of action least likely to end in a premature mushroom cloud.”
“Uh-huh,” Silo said, securing her equipment. “Unless you’ve forgotten, the only unwanted explosions I ever produced were thanks to your poorly timed dares.”
“Then I’ll be sure to keep any wagers from this point forward entirely hypothetical,” he assured her as they went their separate ways.
#
The cargo elevator, while painfully slow, was also the only means to the lower levels. Either this place was intended to be entirely automated or it was designed and built by an overzealous cost-cutter who believed that fire exits and service hallways were unnecessary extravagances. As the platform slid ponderously along, Garotte flipped through the improved schematic.
“Let us see. Levels 1 through 4 are entirely shipping logistics. Level 5 is home to most of the environmental equipment and the dormitories. The first of the inventory is on level 6.” He glanced at the wall, watching as the number “3” slowly slid by. “How wonderfully efficient it must be to work here,” he said.
He heard a few clicks and crackles on his communicator, then a cool, collected voice. It was the first such voice he’d heard beside Silo’s and his own since he’d arrived.
“Attention invading soldiers,” said the voice. “You are trespassing in a restricted area.”
“Yes, that was the entire purpose of this endeavor. I’m pleased that you’ve noticed, however. It would be rather embarrassing to come this far without making an impression on the military liaison.”
“I am not a military liaison.”
“I assure you, you are. Funny thing about experience and discipline. It seldom takes more than a few syllables for a trained ear to pick it up.”
“A distress call has been sent out to all local forces. In fifteen minutes this facility will be utterly surrounded by Broadline Syndicate forces.”
“Splendid!” Garotte said. “While you are being so free with your plans and other information, what are the precise capabilities of Broadline as a fighting force?”
“That is classified information.”
“Is it? Then I suppose that would explain why it had a ‘Classified’ heading in the computer system,” Garotte said, thumbing through his purloined files until he found the troop manifest. “My, my… It is actually rather disappointing. Not much in the way of manpower. You were hoping the drones would do the job, eh? You certainly have a lot of them. I recognize that is the standard for planetary defense and occupation these days, but your ratio is a little rich on the mechanized front.”
Garotte raised his head at the distant sound of grinding gears and hissing hydraulics. The elevator slowed to a stop.
“I have instituted a priority one override on all systems. The door is closing and shall remain closed. All internal doors are locked. The elevator is disabled,” remarked the voice over the connection.
“Well that is bothersome. Silo, dear, are you hearing this?” Garotte asked.
“Yeah. Just about to the ship now. When I get back, I’ll be sure to bring the key to the front door,” she said.
“Lovely. I’ll just see to the elevator then.”
Garotte clanked his way to a maintenance panel on the elevator and pulled it open. It revealed a network of struts, wires, and tubes.
“It has been a bit of a while since my last maintenance training,” he muttered. “But I believe this would be the control panel for the motor drivers… Which means these would be the control signals. And these fat cables here are power… Have you really done nothing more than cut power and engage the brakes? I’m disappointed. I would have expected a security lockout.”
“If I had any say in it, there would have been. But this will do the job.”
“Normally I would agree, but you face a force better prepared than most. Silo, be a dear and bring along one of the power module test rigs when you join me?”
“Roger,” Silo said.
Garotte rubbed his hands together. “I was hoping to get a chance to use this…”
#
Silo jumped into the pilot’s seat of the ship and punched in the coordinates of the facility entrance. The autopilot lifted them off and began the journey while she made her way through the ship to the ammo cache. Most of her more traditional field work had been done deep behind enemy lines or otherwise separated from supply lines. That meant having to be extremely economical with ammunition and taking any opportunity to top off her clips. Having the ship
nearby meant she could rearm at a whim. It was downright convenient.
“I’ve got you on visual sensors now. The door is a fully reinforced grade-seven blast door. Your ship is clearly not armed to penetrate it,” the voice decreed.
“Good heavens no. That’s merely a laboratory vessel. When the time comes to poke holes in things, I leave it to the lovely young Silo.”
“Didn’t we talk about you being a bit more professional, hon?” Silo said, activating the cargo door of the ship.
“I don’t believe I’d agreed, my dear,” Garotte said.
She stepped out onto the open cargo door and surveyed the now tightly sealed door to the facility.
“Grade seven, huh?” she said. “You folks cheaped out on everything but the doors. I suppose if you’re only going to invest in one bit of security, that’s it.”
Silo hefted her rocket launcher from its case and loaded up an extended vertical magazine with six carefully selected rockets. With the weapon perched on her shoulder, she pocketed a controller of some kind and hopped down from the door of the hovering ship. She was at what she perceived to be a safe distance back, which was over fifty meters.
“That door is built to withstand a nuclear blast. You can’t hope to blast through it,” the voice stated.
Silo shook her head. “You really need to read up on basic materials science, hon,” she said. “You can poke through most bulletproof vests with a good sharp knife. Something made for a swift, spread-out wallop just isn’t ready for a focused, prolonged force. Same goes for meltdown temperature. And supposedly, we’ve got some magnetic thermite to try.”
She raised the rocket launcher and took aim. Jets of flame burst from the back of the tube as one by one she delivered rounds to their target. Each one struck with a splat rather than a boom, spreading a black paste in a sticky smear across the face of the door. When she was through, the points of impact traced out a lumpy arc just about the size of the narrowest dimension of the ship. Gradually, almost as though they were alive, the blobs of stuff started spreading thinner and oozing along the surface of the door.
After a moment of critiquing her own accuracy, she fetched the controller, turned her head aside, and tapped the screen. The splatters of black instantly turned white-hot. The heat was just short of blistering against her skin, even at this distance. After a few seconds, the alloy of the door ran like candle wax. The glowing molten blobs shifted toward the still-solid metal of the door, letting the liquefied bits of blast door run into a pool on the ground. Before long the portion of the door below the glowing arc crumbled to the ground.
“Knock, knock,” Silo said.
She tapped out another few commands and carefully guided the ship through the still-faintly-glowing hole. A proximity warning from the ship’s sensors bleeped across the communications channel just as she finished squeezing the ship through an opening that was just large enough for it. She turned.
“Looks like the first of our company is inbound. I’d put them at two minutes to intercept. I would have liked to be gone before they showed up.”
“We both knew there wasn’t much chance of that,” Garotte said.
His voice was audible both over the communicator and echoing through the entry bay as he thumped up the shallow slope of the elevator’s rails.
“If we’re going to be left alone to finish what we came here to do, we’re going to have to refortify this doorway a bit better than they did, or else one of us is going to have to stick around and have some target practice.”
“I vote fortify. Didn’t the good doctor provide us with a mobile shield generator to test?”
“I’ve never seen one of those good for more than a few direct hits,” Silo said.
“We are dealing with someone only marginally better equipped than a police force, for the most part.”
“Except for those warheads that brought us here in the first place.”
“Yes, well. We’ll hope that either said warheads are not standard equipment yet or this experimental generator can take more of a beating than most.”
“From what I’ve seen so far, this guy does err on the side of excess.”
“Indeed. You set up the defenses, I’ll see about the elevator.”
“Works for me.”
She popped open the cargo door and rummaged around the tightly packed interior until she found the device that would supposedly hold off the bulk of an overmilitarized corporation’s forces. It was laughably small, barely the size of a lunch box.
“This does not give me a good feeling,” Silo said, picking up the deceivingly heavy case and hauling it out to the base of the doorway.
Silo thumbed through the manuals they had been provided. Halfway through the description it became abundantly clear that Dr. Dee himself had penned these particular instructions.
“‘The first worthwhile portable shield wall. This is made for idiots, so the instructions are dirt simple. Set it up within twenty meters of the target shield location. Make sure the area above and around the device, for one meter ahead and behind, don’t have anything you don’t mind losing hanging out there. Point the emitter where you want the shield to go, dial in the distance and measurements, then apply power and back off. It’s a one-way wall, so projectiles and energy blasts from behind will pass through just fine. Handy for return fire. Cut power to shut the device down,’” she read.
After following the vague instructions to the best of her ability, she hauled a cable from the ship and hooked it up. The device rattled and hummed, then sent a lance of cracking gold energy out the top, bottom, sides, and front. The front projected out into a rectangular force field matching the rough dimensions she’d programmed in. Deeper orange fields of light struck the walls, floor, and ceiling around the device and wrenched it into the air, centering it vertically in the space and nearly yanking the power cable free. The wedges of light pressed mightily against the anchor points, causing the roof to fracture slightly and the floor to creak before everything settled into equilibrium. When the excitement was over, the door was bolstered by a formidable shield, and the device was anchored to the very structural limits of the surrounding architecture.
Silo took a shaky breath. “Seems like there should have been a few more warnings on that…”
Her rattling heart, not yet recovered from the startling activation of the first device, got another test as an apocalyptic rumble shook the facility behind her. She turned to see the huge cargo elevator rise into view at an inadvisable speed, slamming to a stop when it struck the top of the shaft. Without a positive stop of his own, Garotte continued in a ballistic arc, cresting at a few meters in the air before tumbling to the ground.
“What the heck was that?” Silo asked, rushing to help him to his feet.
Garotte brushed himself off and steadied himself. “I grabbed the power module from the beta list and hooked it up to the elevator’s motors. My expectation was that it would take everything the device had to even budge the platform. Evidently that was the first of two mistakes, the other being the assumed polarity of the power cables.”
“Is it possible that this Dr. Dee is trying to kill us?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Garotte said. He checked his equipment to ensure that he’d not lost anything in the incident. “Well then, now that I know how to remedy the situation, shall we investigate the lower levels together, or ought someone remain here to monitor the success of the shield?”
“I’d wager the rest of the building will come down before the shield will, but all the same I’d rather stick with the ship and the weapons.”
“So be it, we shall keep in touch.”
#
Garotte stepped back onto the platform and gingerly tugged at the smoldering power cables, easing them out of nearly fused connectors and swapping locations before reactivating the power module at a much-reduced intensity. The motors rumbled to life again and drove the platform downward. Even with the module down to 20 percent, the elevator was mov
ing nearly twice the speed it had been when it was operating under its own power.
“Damn it. All personnel, arm yourselves. Prepare to defend the lower levels,” shouted the voice on the radio.
“All personnel, unless I’ve missed someone, amounts to seven people right now, after subtracting the poor unfortunates outside,” Garotte said.
“That’s still seven to two.”
“Perhaps in raw numbers, but I think you’ll agree, the people on my side of the equation are more equal than those on your side.”
“I can’t shoot! I’m a technician!” cried the voice of one of the remaining employees.
Most of the other sounds Garotte heard were consistent with someone dropping their communicator and retreating.
“Damned white collar… fine. Try and enter the lower levels. I’ll be waiting for you,” the voice on the radio said ominously.
With that, the audio on the communication went entirely dead. Garotte limited his communicator to broadcast only to Silo again.
“You’ve been combat oriented longer than I, my dear. Might you care to weigh in on this fellow’s psychological state?”
“First off, never you mind who’s been at this longer. Second, if you need me to tell you that a cornered soldier is a dangerous soldier, then I think maybe you’re in the wrong business.”
“Point taken.” He glanced at the floor numbers, then at his slidepad for the schematic. “They’ve done a fair job at locking down the security measures, but we’re still linked to the upper-level monitoring systems. It looks like our friends down below have effectively locked their own people up in their attempts to lock us out. I don’t imagine that was done on purpose, but regardless, that is a stroke of luck. Unless I am feeling particularly motivated, I don’t imagine I shall have any trouble with the employees. How do we look with the coming reinforcements?”
Beta Testers Page 11
