I could probably do it myself but did not want to expose that authority so recklessly. I would live longer if the soldiers did not have an overwhelming reason to kill me.
“Is there anyone else in this complex?” I asked, but they shook their heads.
Anna replied, “Closer to shift change there would be dozens of us here, but they are all at their work sites. We were about to fetch some cleaning supplies from next door when we spotted you in the corridor. You looked very suspicious. We did not realize you were just dust being blown along by this disaster.”
I asked, “If we leave here, they will enter and take control. Would anything critical be affected?”
She replied, “Not if we disable it before we leave. And I agree with Dado, we need to leave quickly. Those guys are carrying explosives that they probably stole from us.”
I called to Nasruddin, “While we still can, tell the Colonel we are leaving here and will be moving towards them.”
He called back, “Even our secure line is getting noisy. Regardless, she says to stay put. Can we hold out?”
I raced back to the door of his office, “No, they are bringing explosives. We will go up and over to the transformer room across the hall. They have stronger doors. Close this down now.”
I called for one of the guards to attend me and hurried back to the steep stairwell that led down. As a distraction, we closed and locked the trapdoor to the stairwell. The floor beside it was marked with the landing target for a freight hoist and just beyond it the ladder up to the overhead power conduit.
To hell with waiting for tomorrow; I was doing my standing and walking exercise now. I stood up gingerly, telling the guard to carry my field station. I walked slowly and carefully to the ladder that led up, leaving my wheelchair as a decoy beside the stairwell down. I looked up, a long way up. Even in the low gravity of the Moon, there was no way I could climb that ladder.
Cindy offered, “Over here a bit. We can winch you up in a freight cage.”
Holding the ladder so I did not tip over, I looked up again and saw a small trap door in the ceiling where the ladder entered the tunnel. Beside it, there was a larger trap door labelled ‘freight hoist’. I let go of the ladder and shuffled over to the target. Cindy scampered up the ladder like a monkey, filling me with pangs of envy that I could no longer join her. Far above, she opened the trap door for the freight hoist, clipped a cable to a metal cage, and pushed it over the hole.
When the cage bumped onto the floor, I climbed in and grabbed the metal frame. As soon as the guard tucked my field station between my legs, I was whisked up. I’ve scaled crumbly sandstone cliffs, dropped by parachute into remote canyons, and rappelled into caves and mine shafts filled with explosives, but clinging to my field station as the cage swung back and forth was one of the most vertigo-inducing rides I’ve ever taken. I was out of practice in the running and jumping side of the business.
With considerable assistance, I climbed out of the cage. The power tunnel was low and narrow. I began to crawl on hands and knees. Cindy pushed my field station along behind me on a small trolley. The others climbed up the ladder and I heard the trapdoor bang shut and click as the locks engaged. The distance along the tunnel could not have been more than twenty meters, but I was tired by the time we arrived at the access to the transformer room. Crawling in armour had not been part of my exercise routine.
At the access point, the tunnel expanded into a small room. A heavy door in the side wall was labelled ‘TR35-23’. Evidently, WR must mean Work Room and TR stood for Transformer Room. The transformer room was the origin of the power conduits and apparently merited both a stairwell and a freight elevator. At the far end of the room, a smaller door labeled PO35-23 blocked access to the Public Office. I unlocked both doors and opened them. I asked Nasruddin to go to the Public Office, to see if they could declare a city-wide emergency, or at least a local one. They might also be able to replace the wheelchair we had left behind.
The rest of us went down to the transformer room, I and my guards by the freight elevator. We were met at the bottom by hostile power workers. They barely tolerated Cindy and treated the rest of us as terrorists. I understood their suspicion but asked them to wait until Nasruddin could rejoin us with our last guard.
We waited impatiently until sirens started screaming in the transformer room. I could just feel the shudder as airtight doors out in the corridor slammed shut. The power workers jumped and one of their guns discharged, clipping a guard on the shoulder. The bullet was too light to penetrate the armour, but I asked them to take their fingers off the triggers to prevent a repeat. They refused, rudely.
A few moments later, Nasruddin came running down the stairs, accompanied by his guard and the whole staff of the Public office. “Close the doors and lock them!” he called as soon as they were inside the stairwell. One of the officers held an ancient, collapsible wheelchair. It had no motor, so I was safe from being hijacked by comm.
The Public Officers squeezed past the maintenance workers, telling the power workers to put down their guns, that we were authorized to be here and were fellow refugees from the real terrorists outside. They could not contact the city authorities, nor even the neighbouring districts, but had declared a local emergency and could only hope that other districts followed their example. Out to the boundaries of the district, an emergency declaration was propagating from node to node in the comm system. It was designed to be robust against DDoS and most connectivity failures.
I asked if we could see what was happening. Very reluctantly, they led Nasruddin, myself and three of the Public Officers into a room at the far end of the complex. The walls were lined with monitors, some showing the nearby hallways. The images jittered and broke from the DDoS attack. As I had hoped, half the soldiers were struggling to reopen the airtight doors. No one even bothered with the massive doors on the transformer room. Only a couple were still trying to break into the maintenance complex.
I asked what was happening beyond the airtight doors at the ends of this corridor. The signal was bad, but the squad attacking our door had not left anyone beyond the end of the corridor. The north corridor, beyond WR35-23, was worse, littered with five dead civilians and a crowd of hostages held at gunpoint by two of the soldiers.
One of the Public Officers sobbed, “What can we do? They are being murdered and we are forced to watch.”
Nasruddin was hardly more encouraging. “We can open and close doors and crawl away from trouble. Damn, I want a full weapons rack.”
“Stop whining,” I said, “Do we have grenades or anything that would make a big bang?”
“Of course,” said one of the guards. I really wished I knew some of their names, but they were hard to distinguish in nearly identical armour. “These days, we have to worry about debates getting out of control. There are ten thousand crazy solutions under discussion, so things go awry regularly. We all carry crowd-control flashbangs. They are intended to startle the inexperienced and blow out some smoke, so they make a good bang without causing much damage.”
“Excellent,” I replied. “Would someone be willing to go back into the maintenance room? Turn on one of the monitors that we can hack into from here, then drop a grenade with a delay just inside each of the outer doors and run up the ladder again. I will wait at the trapdoor in the tunnel until they explode, then will open both doors. We can hope to trap the soldiers in the complex, where they will waste their time trying to escape rather than killing more people. Do we have someone who can imitate a victim in pain? Someone who can shriek fetchingly, inserting the word ‘Ghost’ from time to time?”
Nasruddin/private, “HA! Old whiner here anticipated you would want to go back, so I deliberately left my monitor on in a standby mode. Beware, you are getting predictable in your unpredictability.”
“Cindy, that has to be you,” Anna replied. “Don’t look so sour; you know you can sing better than any of us. Remember when Brent cut his toe? Imitate that up a couple of octaves a
nd act like you want him to come back so you can cut off the rest of his toes.”
Maintenance workers everywhere have tough jobs and develop a very physical sense of humour.
Without more discussion, two of the guards came over. One scooped me up, the other hefted the field station, while a third was setting the timers on a pair of flashbangs. We headed for the stairs as I opened the door to the tunnel. It was every bit as painful crawling back as it had been coming. I opened the trapdoor, quietly and just a crack, so we could listen in case the enemy was already within. All was quiet below, so I fully opened the door. One guard scrambled down the ladder and ran to the north end of the complex. On the way back, ze stuck zer head into the office with the monitor and said something too quiet for me to hear. Ze placed the second flashbang beside the door we had entered and ran back to the ladder. As ze swung up into the tunnel, the flashbangs exploded and I unlocked both the outer doors so that they swung gently inwards. I mostly closed the trap door so that it was not obviously open as a terrible yodelling of pain began to cry from the monitor in the office. As I had hoped, soldiers erupted through the doors at both ends of the complex, converging on my wheelchair and the office. An angry shout from the office told me it was time, so I slammed shut and locked both the outer doors, then quietly closed and locked the trapdoor. My guards pulled a section of spare conduit from a pile on the side and wedged it over the trapdoor. It would not delay them long if they could get the door itself open, but anything that delayed them might help. We crawled back down the tunnel to the transformer room, descended the stairs and locked ourselves in again.
We were greeted by raucous laughter as we emerged from the stairwell. One of the power workers choked through his mirth, “The superstitious bastards think the Ghost escaped from a Martian comic book just to lure them into this trap!” Inside my armour, hidden by the mask, I could only smile grimly.
“How many are still outside?” I asked.
“Two in this corridor, only one on the north side. That one is now pinned to the floor with zer own weapon pointed at zer face. Couldn’t happen to a nicer murdering turd.”
I could not tell who had said that except it was one of my anonymous guards.
I looked at the guards. “Can you take two of them?”
Nasruddin replied, “Of course we can. If they have recent comm units in that armour we can paralyze both of them, but we will have a considerable element of surprise in any case. Would you like to do the honours with the door?”
The power workers pointed to the correct door, explaining that the enemy would be ten meters to the left along the corridor, then stepped far out of our way as my guards carried me and my field station closer to the door. Nasruddin and the other three guards positioned themselves in front of the door, then paused as they all bumped helmets together for a private conversation.
Two of the guards picked up the third like a log and held zim overhead with one arm while flourishing their guns with their free hands. When Nasruddin said “Now,” I unlocked the heavy doors and swung them inwards. The two standing guards tossed their comrade through the top of the doorway as a single shot ricocheted off the middle of the door frame, binging and smacking around the room. They jumped through the door themselves, followed by Nasruddin, but no further shots were fired on either side.
Nasruddin stuck his head back in. “Two officers with vulnerable comm units. I pushed them over and opened their helmets. This way they get to breathe a little longer and can berate each other as fools. The total isolation inside unresponsive armour with only myself to blame is what I found most distressing about Father Paul.”
I remembered hiding under the Martian sand following a failed mission and knew what he meant. The other guards crept over to the door to look for a few moments at the enemy officers, who were cursing with rage in their paralyzed armour.
I called everyone back in and closed the door again for a bit of privacy. Looking them over, I approved of what I saw. I loved all Lunatics, but these workers lived in the dark side of the moon, strong people who dealt routinely with broken equipment and angry citizens. They would be steady in the face of danger.
I explained, “We are trying to get into the TDF base and are hoping to meet up with two squads of armoured troops half ways. You can stay here or come with us. I’m not sure which is safer. There are more soldiers and active firefights close to the base, but now that the enemy knows there are people in these rooms they will try to send reinforcements.”
Guy replied, “You are the scariest man in the Moon, but you know what you are doing in a fight. I’m coming with you.”
“Coming with you,” echoed the other maintenance workers. The Public Officers and power workers hesitated only briefly before joining our ragtag band.
“Good,” I continued, “my assumption is that the workers will understand the back corridors, tunnels and workrooms better than I do and the officers will understand the public spaces better. We don’t want to fight trained soldiers if we can avoid it because these tricks only work a few times before people learn to defeat them. Ignoring the doors, which I will deal with as best I can, what would be the best route towards the base?”
One of the power workers said, “Turn east as we exit the room. At the next door, turn north through a second airtight door into corridor C35. Go through two more airtight doors, then right into a hallway that leads to Gagarin Road. We could continue along the corridor to Renoir Street but there is a big maintenance room labeled WR87-19 on that hallway just beside Gagarin Road. We should stop there to check again. The route is not actually clear, but I think we have enough firepower to intimidate the few hostiles we will meet. The DDoS prevents me from seeing anything past the hallway.”
Anna added, “Yes, the maintenance room over there is probably full of people who were trapped when we closed the doors. That is a busy location.
“Are introductions appropriate? I know this fellow, the big one, is called Nasruddin, but I don’t know any of the rest. I’m Anna, chief of this team. These are Dado, Cindy and Guy. I don’t know who you are Sir, but if you are the same agent Guy idolizes, you scare the liver out of me. Regardless, I’m glad you are here or we might be as badly off as those poor civilians in the north corridor. The soldiers believed that the Ghost was in our workroom and were hoping for a big prize. In pursuit of that fantasy, they were willing to kill us all.”
The power workers introduced themselves as Chief Rowald, Brunhild, Daxin, and Soto. The guards introduced themselves as One, Two, Three, Four and Five. I could barely distinguish the different sizes of their armour and it was clear they were using synthesized voices. The one who had carried me was Three and Two was carrying my field station. I hoped they did not switch roles.
They all looked at me until I realized I also needed a name. “Just call me Agent Wheels. Before we leave, there is a little bit of theatre I would like to play with Nasruddin and the guards. Would the six of you form up behind me and follow silently. How do we expand this wheelchair?”
Three opened the ancient wheelchair and stepped behind to push. Two tucked the field station into a rack below the seat but stayed alongside. I darkened my mask so black I had to use the built-in cameras to see and everyone copied that style. Otherwise, we were pure white, ghostly figures without faces. We formed into a line, with Nasruddin behind the rest of us.
I swung the door open and directed where I wanted to go with my fingers. We rolled up to the two paralyzed officers, who were berating each other for not getting more shots away. I signalled that I wanted to stop beside their heads. Slowly, carefully, I stood up, towering over their bodies, then bent slowly over, using the armour’s built-in motors as much as I could to support my weight. This would never have worked on the Earth, but here on the Moon, it felt like I was lying on a slightly bouncy table. I directed my black void of a face at one of them until he stopped cursing and looked up. I felt like a snake mesmerizing a bird; Nasruddin would know what I meant, but no one else. The
man went silent and slowly his face grew the rictus of fear. Once he was sufficiently intimidated, I swung over to stare at the other, a woman by her voice, by now also quiet and fearful. After a final minute of silence, I stood back up, sat down in the chair and signalled that it was time to leave. The guards swung into formation behind me and we started down the corridor. Nasruddin stayed a moment longer, staring silently at the two of them as though considering further torments, then spun around and strode after us.
As we passed the door to the transformer room, the others filed out. I swung the door shut and locked it again. No one said a word as we left.
Schematic Map of Corridor C35 [1]
2357-03-28 13:30
Lost Patrol
At the end of the corridor, we faced the next door. All but the guards pressed against the wall as I cracked the door open. Guard One peered through, slipped quickly past the door, then reached through with an arm to wave us all forward. The short stretch of corridor beyond was empty and silent to Gagarin Road. Corridor C35 ran north/south but was blocked by doors going both ways, so I closed the door behind us and we repeated the process for the north door.
This time the Guard One reported that there were seven soldiers milling about aimlessly in front of the door that led to the north corridor behind WR35-23. After a quick, silent exchange amongst the guards, One signalled that I should open the door a bit wider. Ze stepped through and repeated an instruction in several languages that the soldiers should lay down their weapons by the authority of the Terrestrial Defence Force and the Lunar Council. No bullets came, but a hand reached through to wave us forward. Nasruddin quietly told everyone to stay except Four, Five and himself. In a moment Four (Five?) stepped back to call the rest of us forward as well.
The seven soldiers stood in a row, looking confused and hopeless, like captured criminals awaiting justice. Their guns lay at their feet. As we approached, I got a message from Nasruddin.
Lord Banshee Lunatic (Nightmare Wars Book 3) Page 27
