by Clara Woods
A wide corridor with a long glass wall led away to the right. Plants in pots stood against the transparent panels, and, behind the glass, rooms were visible. As if someone had made a feeble attempt to make the place homier.
Several more rooms, these hidden behind solid walls, lay to the left. The door to one of those rooms stood open, and that was where the voices were coming from. Trying to walk as silently as she could, Lenah made her way over to the entryway. Cassius wanted to overtake her, but she held up her hand and sent her influence toward the three minds in the room. They would be expecting Lenah.
She only stepped through when she was sure her influence had reached them. The smell inside was like hospital disinfectant, and a young man lay stretched out on a gurney in the center of the room. Two women, both in medical coats, attended to him but looked up as Lenah and her group stepped inside.
“Hello,” Lenah said, trying to sound friendly and harmless. “Please, don’t let us interrupt you. We’re only here to take a look as we had discussed.”
“Miss Callo,” both women greeted, their faces pleasant. One of them was younger, and a tag proclaimed her a doctor, the older woman’s tag read nurse.
“Just keep monitoring his heartbeat, will you? Alert me as soon as you see changes,” the doctor said to the nurse, who nodded and stepped close to a machine.
“What happened to him?” Lenah asked, approaching the man on the gurney. He couldn’t be much older than Lorka and was wearing a mage necklace. His chest was exposed, showing several tubes connected to his body. Was that one of the young mages Dr. Whiteham had warned about?
“He’s not yet used to the drain,” the doctor answered willingly under Lenah’s influence.
“The drain?” Uz asked, stepping closer, eyes wide and her voice quivering audibly.
The doctor took a long look at Uz, especially taking in the scars on her forehead, before answering.
Lenah enforced the idea that she’d been expecting them all, including Uz. Nonetheless, Uz shrunk backward at the doctor’s scrutiny, her hands going to her forehead.
“Yes, transfer of too much magical energy into the reservoir.” The doctor hesitated. “You remind me of someone,” she said a bit stiffly, still looking at Uz, and furrowing her brow. Was it because she recognized her promised lab subject?
Uz flinched into a corner while Lenah tried to relax the doctor, sending a more dominant idea into her mind.
“We don’t usually allow visitors in here.” The doctor said slowly.
“I’m Lenah Callo,” Lenah said in her best authoritative tone. “We exchanged communications about this just yesterday. Don’t you remember, Doctor?” Along with her words, she sent the image of them receiving an official message from her father and the request to answer any questions.
“Yes, yes, of course.” The doctor shook her head. “I remember now. Please, accept my apology, Miss Callo.”
Lenah nodded. “I don’t know much about the farms and would like to have a thorough introduction.”
“And we’d like to see that reservoir,” Doctor Lund added.
“Yes, if you don’t mind, could you give us a quick tour?” Lenah asked.
“Of course,” the doctor said, looking down at the man on the gurney. “Just know that his regeneration process will not be optimized if we leave him. But I suppose that’s your money lost.”
“Will he suffer alone here?” Lenah asked.
The doctor shook her head. “No, he will sleep.”
Lenah breathed out in relief. “Let’s start the tour here,” she said. “What happened to him? Is this normal?”
The doctor looked up at her in surprise and with some anger, though Lenah didn’t know why. Her influence was working, wasn’t it?
“The mages experience complications from the transfer. It’s very taxing on the body, and the maximum amount someone is able to give depends greatly on the quality of rest they were able to take. Mage Proles,” she nodded down to the man, “probably didn’t sleep well—we’ve caught him before not taking his sleep medications—and now his immune system is flaring up.”
When Lenah gave her a questioning look, the doctor continued, “Imagine yourself getting the wrong blood infusion. Flu-like fevers, aching joints, chills. And there is the burn on the injection site…” The doctor’s voice trailed off, and she pointed toward a red and swollen part on the mage’s neck. He had a port there, sticking out of blistered and bleeding skin.
“That’s what happens to them? They get sick? Always?”
“Not always, no. It’s a fine line to know how much magic you can filter out of someone’s blood or overdoing it just a bit. But you don’t need to worry, Miss Callo. Mage Proles will be hooked up to the reservoir again by tomorrow night.”
Lenah didn’t say that that was exactly what she was worried about. Apparently, the impression down here was that the Callos wanted to get the reservoir filled to the maximum, no matter the suffering it brought to the mages.
“Let’s move on,” she said, her voice sounding raspy. Her throat suddenly felt very dry. “I’d like to see the rest.”
“Of course,” the doctor answered, clicking several buttons on the machine connected to the mage, then briefly touching his forehead. “The fever is still very high,” she said to the nurse. “We need to monitor that.” Then she turned to the door, waiting for Lenah to walk out first.
“Over there,” she said and pointed to the next door, “is the ICU. State-of-the-art. We’ve saved lives in there. Luckily, we haven’t had a patient in a few weeks.” The doctor walked toward a window that revealed a room with three beds inside and lots of machinery.
“Tina was released less than two weeks ago from her total overdrain.” The nurse spoke for the first time.
“Mage Tata,” the doctor corrected. “We don’t address our patients by their first names.”
“Yes, of course.”
Lenah saw in her mind a woman spread out in one of those beds and almost lost her grip on the influence she was still sending toward the two. Total overdrain. That’s what the farms could do to the mages? They’d signed up to lead a better life, not to spend a lifetime on spaceships and away from their family. Instead, they ended up in an ICU down here where the only nice thing seemed to be the potted plants lining the corridors. Like that would help.
29 Freedom
Next, they saw the apartments behind the glass wall down the corridor. Studios with a kitchen unit and one door that Lenah assumed led into a lavatory. There was zero privacy in the living area, thanks to the glass wall.
“That’s to make sure no one faints or experiences any negative side effects without our notice,” the doctor explained when Lenah inquired.
“Why wouldn’t you use tracking implants for that? What’s the need to have these people live in glass boxes?” Lenah clearly remembered the initial designs she had seen of the mage farms that had included studios with a view of Lake Asturis. Had all that been a lie to calm investors? Or to manipulate people like Lenah? She certainly had not agreed to this at any time in her life.
“With the degraded blood and weak body signals when the patients come out of their shifts, the scanners are completely useless.”
Lenah didn’t answer. She became distracted by an older mage in his unit, shuffling from where he’d been lying on the bed toward the kitchen. He shot them a few hostile glances as they passed. Lenah couldn’t blame him. She wouldn’t want anyone gawking at her under no circumstances, and especially when she wasn’t feeling good.
“Then why are they still here?” she said more to herself, trying to remember the employment contracts made for the mages. “I do remember that it was a two-year contract, but our lawyers surely gave them an out-clause.”
“If they can pay fifty thousand CGC, yes,” the nurse answered, looking Lenah up and down. You are the asshole who created these conditions, they seemed to be saying. Lenah certainly wouldn’t disagree.
Her job had always been securing investme
nts, but now she felt she should have paid attention to this. She had always prided herself on being a skeptic. Or was she really the spoiled girl Cassius saw in her? She glanced at where he was walking, in the back of their group. He hadn’t spoken at all since they entered the facility. Was he trying not to call attention to himself, or did he want to get as far away from Lenah as possible?
They passed a dozen more units before reaching the end of the corridor where an orange sign over a door announced the area as restricted. Just in case, Lenah sent the doctor and nurse a more detailed version of the message requesting a tour, now specifying to include the restricted areas and the reservoir as well.
The doctor stopped, turning toward Lenah with narrowed eyes. “We won’t be able to show you the reservoir. It’s only accessible for the chemists and their security.” She suddenly looked doubtful. “Who wrote that message again?”
“It was my father, Mr. Timothy Callo,” Lenah said, further fleshing out her image of the message with her father’s name on it.
“Ah, that’s right. I remember now,” the doctor said and nodded. “He doesn’t come here often; he probably forgot. You big guys up there can’t be overly bothered with our little rules and problems down here, right?” She barked out a short laugh.
“Er, right,” Lenah answered, feeling terrible. She didn’t care to be known as the big guy up there.
“Can we at least go past this door, or which way is the reservoir?”
“Oh, sure. The reservoir is in Tract B. But here, we have the transfusion facilities. I assume you’d want to take a look?”
“Yes, please.” Lenah smiled at her. That sounded like they would find mages behind this door. “Just a quick one.” She added, thinking about how time must be running out.
They walked through the door and stepped into a large room that looked even more like a hospital than the one they had come from. There was a large area with special gurneys surrounded by a station of machinery on each side. Several mages were hooked up to the machines by IVs. Most of them looked up as the group entered.
Lenah saw the mage closest to her take in her face, then her badge as his gaze lowered. He sneered. Fighting her feelings, Lenah stepped closer to see the station better. Two tubes filled with blood were sticking out of the man’s neck and led into the machine. Lenah remembered that one tube would pump a certain amount of blood into the machine where the Cheung Corp technology filtered out the magic and sent it into the reservoir where it was stabilized and saved to the warp drives. Finally, the drained blood was pumped back into the mage’s bloodstream.
“What else is in this tract, other than what we’ve seen?” Lenah asked the doctor.
“Not much. There’s a laboratory back there, but it hasn’t been used in months. I heard that the colleague who was going to staff it never showed up to his first day,” the doctor answered, and Lenah shuddered. Behind her, Doctor Lund let out a strangled moan. He’d been the candidate to staff the lab, unwillingly. As an expert in warp magic, he’d been taken from his archeology mission on New Earth to be forced to work here. The assumption presumably was that that he would not be missed for vanishing from an inhospitable place like the abandoned wasteland of humanity’s old settlement. By taking off the Rambler, where he and Uz had been held, Lenah had left with him before he was able to show up for his first day of work.
“The mages are either in the hospital, their rooms, or here?”
The doctor nodded.
“No recreational facilities? Lake view?”
“Lake view? We’re several hundred meters underground,” the doctor said. She and the nurse gawked at Lenah.
“Never mind,” Lenah said, before turning slightly and trying to get her friends’ attention. If nowhere else was filled with people, then the next step was clear. It was time to act.
This time, Cassius picked up her gaze and gave a small nod, touching Persia lightly on the arm. Persia’s hand went inside her jacket where she had her weapon. Lenah held up her palm in a calming gesture. They needed to get the mages off these machines first. The doctor had seen Lenah’s gesture too and froze. Lenah took a few moments to collect her concentration. Then she shoved the idea of shift end and the resulting unhooking of all mages toward the nurse and doctor.
“Shift end?” the doctor said, incredulity dripping out of her voice. “But we don’t have shift end. What are you doing here, exactly? Did Mr. Callo really send you?” She stepped closer to Lenah. “If you get me in trouble…”
That made Lenah stop. She didn’t want to get these women in trouble.
“You need to unhook all the mages. Now.” Lenah sent urgency with the words but felt like she was doing a sloppy job. She was tense, frustrated, and felt like hitting something rather than concentrating.
“Unhook? No. I’m not going to risk my job for a business puppy.”
Lenah huffed out a breath. Had she gotten too impatient? The mages watched the discussion with interest, but none of them moved. Could they even move with those tubes stuck inside their necks? Someone cleared his throat behind Lenah.
She turned, seeing Cassius and Persia standing there, weapons pointed at the doctor and nurse.
“You’ll do as she says,” Cassius said, coldness in his voice. He lifted his metal arm in what Lenah knew was a gesture for added effect.
The doctor shrunk from him, full alarm spreading over her features. “Who are you? Why is a cyborg down here? Are you military? Why didn’t I realize something was off before?” She fumbled with a black band on her wrist.
Lenah dropped all pretenses and jumped for her. She grabbed the woman’s arm to yank it toward her but was only in time to see her press a tiny button attached to a bracelet.
“Show me that,” Lenah demanded at the same time the other woman said, “Who are you really?”
Lenah got hold of her arm, and the doctor didn’t object as she started inspecting the bracelet. “A Cheung-branded security alarm bracelet,” Lenah said.
“That probably means there are guards down here, but I can’t hear them coming yet,” Cassius said, his tone worried. He was holding the nurse tightly in his metal arm.
The nurse gave him an incredulous look like it was impossible to hear anyone through these doors, but she probably wasn’t thinking of cyborg hearing implants.
“Good. That means we at least have some time,” Lenah said, before addressing the mages in the room. None of them had moved away from their chairs, even though several looked like they really wanted to. None had attacked either.
“We’re here to free you. This facility is about to be attacked. I am Lenah Callo, the daughter of the owner, and my friends and I will help you get outside and drop you off in a safe location.” She looked at the faces staring back at her. Upon closer inspection, she wasn’t surprised none of the mages had attacked. They all looked exhausted. Maybe their resources were drained?
“Unhook them from the machines,” Lenah said to the doctor in her best commanding voice. “We won’t harm you, and you’ll be evacuated as well.” She put the feeling of truthfulness toward the woman. The doctor eyed her for a moment, but when Lenah’s emotion touched her mind, she shuffled to do as asked.
“Why are you not defending yourselves?” Uz asked, stepping closer toward a female mage who eyed her suspiciously but didn’t otherwise move.
“They can’t,” the nurse answered. “They can’t use their abilities during the filtering process, and it’s really difficult to unhook yourself when you’re stuck in that chair.”
“What would happen if you used your abilities?” Uz asked the mage softly.
It was again the nurse who answered. “The filtering process is difficult. It’s like getting a bunch of dirt deposited in your veins.”
The first mage had been unhooked by the doctor and got off his chair. Lenah sent the emotion of getting help toward him. Then extended it to his companions. He didn’t attack, just stood there, waiting. Maybe he didn’t feel a tickle like Lorka had?
&
nbsp; “I can hear the guards coming now,” Cassius said. “Five or six pairs of footsteps. They just entered the Tract C door and will be here in under a minute.”
Lenah nodded. “I can take care of everyone else in here. You take these guards.”
Cassius dropped his backpack in the corner, followed by the others. Then he, Persia, and Uz took up positions by the door. Doctor Lund guarded the backpacks, but even he drew out a gun. As always, he looked uncomfortable even holding it, and it was only a tranquilizer.
“They’re here and pulling out weapons,” Cassius whispered and yanked the heavy door open. Uz had to sidestep to avoid being hit, but she recovered quickly. Cassius succeeded in surprising the six guards outside and was already in the middle of them, swinging his cyborg arm. Two of them were struck and stumbled toward Persia and Uz, who each shot them with a dart from their tranquilizer guns.
Cassius turned, repeating the gesture with two more guards, but they withstood the attack. Trying not to lose focus on the minds she was still calming, Lenah saw the guards were wearing strange suits with a Cheung Corp logo on the chest. The suit fit their bodies snugly and was made out of iridescent material. Fighting suits. That probably meant these guys couldn’t be stunned or get hurt by a tranquilizer dart. Unlike Cassius, Lenah thought, as she watched him dance around his four adversaries. He managed to push two more guards in normal uniforms toward Uz and Persia, who took care of one each.
Persia lurched for her adversary and actually brought them both down to the ground where they started struggling. Metal clanked against the floor as Persia tried to wrangle the laser pistol out of the guard’s hand. The other guard was too late to react when Uz crashed into him. Apparently, she had approved of Persia’s plan.
Next to them, Cassius confronted the two remaining guards, but despite his enhanced strength, he wasn’t having much effect. They seemed as fast and as strong as him and matched each of his attacks with ease. He took a blow to his chest and stumbled back. Were they cyborgs under those suits or was it something else? With a hand on her own tranquilizer gun, Lenah was about to turn to help when a movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention.
