by Jack Heath
DEADLY LAKE
As his eyes adjusted, Jarli saw a curved reception desk, a leather couch and a framed poster: MAGNOTECH. WE'RE MAGNANIMOUS! In the picture, the train appeared to be floating above the rails.
The glass door slid closed behind them automatically. Instinctively, Jarli looked for a way to open it again. But there was no handle and no button. Just a keyhole. They were stuck in here, unless they set off the smoke alarm.
And when Jarli looked up, he saw that the blinking light in the ceiling wasn't a smoke alarm after all. It was a camera sealed in a DARK GLASS BUBBLE. Jarli could feel it watching him.
'Can you get the footage of Viper from that?' Doug asked. Jarli still struggled to think of him as 'Terence'.
'No,' Jarli said. 'It wouldn't have its own hard drive. It'll send the files to a computer somewhere. And the computer may not even be in this building.'
'Viper clearly thinks it is,' Doug pointed out. 'He sent his guys here. Makes sense—Magnotech is super paranoid about leaks. Mum wasn't even allowed to take her phone to work. This factory might not have an internet connection.'
Jarli nodded slowly. This was called 'air gapping'—keeping a system secure by severing all connections to the outside world. His dad's old employer, CipherCrypt, had used an air-gapped system to stop hackers getting in and prevent dangerous viruses from escaping onto the internet.
On the other side of the reception desk, a plastic pot plant had been dragged across the carpet to prop open a door. Probably the work of the hazmat guys.
Doug and Jarli climbed over the desk and crept through the door into a corridor. With every step, Jarli got colder and colder. He found himself rubbing his arms and shivering.
'You feel that?' Doug asked. It sounded like his teeth were chattering.
'Yeah. Why is it so cold in here?'
'Some metals are more magnetic at low temperatures. Maybe this place needs to be cold while they make them.'
At the end of the corridor was an open doorway leading to a steel catwalk. It was suspended from the ceiling about two metres above the factory floor. Jarli could see rows upon rows of machines—giant metal arms poised over conveyor belts. Lamps swayed on long chains like flying saucers. Only one of them was switched on.
Jarli didn't freak out until he looked down.
The factory floor was hidden beneath a veil of mist which rolled and rippled like a white ocean.
'What is that?' he whispered.
Doug was peering over the edge of the catwalk, fascinated. 'Liquid nitrogen,' he said. 'Whatever's down there, they must need to keep it really cold. Don't fall in. You'd turn into a block of ice in seconds.'
'No kidding.' Jarli already felt like a block of ice. His hands and feet were numb. 'Is it safe to breathe?'
'Yeah. Nitrogen isn't toxic. It makes up most of the air on Earth, I think.'
Even so, Jarli didn't like the look of the mist rising off the white pool. Then he spotted something on one of the conveyor belts just above the nitrogen pool. It was a box with a tube protruding out one side, about the size of a data projector. Just like the object he had seen in the wreckage of Doug's house.
'Doug,' Jarli said. 'You ever seen something like that before?'
Doug peered down at the conveyor belt. 'No. Why?'
'I think it's the device. The one Viper used to bring down the plane. Reynolds called it an RCG—a reverse coilgun.'
'Why do you think that's what it is?'
Jarli was figuring it out as he spoke. 'If it works like a big magnet, pulling the plane down, it would have needed to be at the house, right? Viper probably hid it in your backyard. But he wouldn't have wanted anyone to find it afterwards and realise what he had done. I think he sent those two guys to collect it. I saw them pick up something exactly like that from the wreckage.'
'So why is it here? Getting repaired?'
'No, I reckon that's a new one. The one at the house was pretty smashed.' As the mist cleared, Jarli saw a second device on the conveyor belt. Then a third. A fourth.
Doug had seen them too. 'Why would Magnotech be making new ones?'
'Maybe Viper ordered more, now that he knows the prototype works. It's an unmanned factory— the robots probably started building the devices automatically as soon as Viper placed the order.'
'Why haven't the police stopped production? Wouldn't they be watching the factory?'
'Maybe they are,' Jarli said. 'Maybe they think they can catch Viper when he picks the RCGs up.'
'But some pólice secretly work for Viper,' Doug said. 'So he probably has a plan to avoid getting caught. This is bad.' He ran a hand through his hair. 'This is so bad.'
He was right. There were enough RCGs here to crash a dozen planes. Maybe more, if they could be used more than once.
Jarli shivered. 'Let's find what we need and get out of here.'
The far end of the catwalk split off in two directions, like a T-intersection. The right-hand side led downstairs. Jarli thought it probably went to a loading dock—it was the same side of the building as the big square door he'd seen earlier.
The other side of the intersection went upstairs to a door marked CONTROL ROOM—UNAUTHORISED ACCESS PROHIBITED.
'You reckon that might be where the computers are?' Doug asked.
'Worth a shot,' Jarli said. 'But keep an eye out for Viper's men.'
They hurried up the catwalk, the metal grill clanking under their feet. When they reached the control room door, Jarli pressed his ear to it.
He couldn't hear anything inside. But that didn't mean the hazmat-suit guys weren't in there. Surely the control room was the first place they would look.
There was a window, but Jarli couldn't peer through it without leaning over the edge of the catwalk, above the deadly ocean of liquid nitrogen. Instead, he twisted the door handle, slowly. It moved without a squeak.
He opened the door just a crack. Warm air flooded through the gap. Darkness inside. If the hazmat guys were in there, they hadn't turned on the lights.
Jarli listened for a moment longer, then he eased his body through the gap. The room came into focus. There were two desks, a filing cabinet, and an air vent in the ceiling—too narrow for a person to hide in. No sign of the hazmat guys.
But there was a desktop computer.
Jarli beckoned to Doug, who slipped in and closed the door behind him. Jarli switched on the computer. As it booted up, he checked the back. Only four cords were plugged in: power, monitor, keyboard, mouse. No LAN cable, so it was probably air gapped. Which hopefully meant not much security. No need to install anti-hacking software on a computer which wasn't connected to the internet, right?
The screen lit up, and a login prompt appeared.
'How long will this take?' Doug asked.
'Try to find a password,' Jarli said. 'People often write it down somewhere near the machine.'
'That's dumb.'
'Yes, but people do it.'
While Doug was searching the room, Jarli tried a few common passwords. Password. ABCDEFGH. 12345678. 87654321.
'There's nothing written down,' Doug said, still looking through the filing cabinet. 'But I found these keys.'
Jarli took the keyring. It had four wide keys on it. Nothing was engraved on them, but it seemed likely that one of them would open the front door.
Jarli clicked the forgotten password link. Two security questions popped up.
'Did you bring that new phone with you?' he asked.
'Yeah.' Doug unlocked it and passed it over. 'Why?'
Jarli was already bringing up a social networking app. 'I'm hoping Kellin Plowman isn't careful with what he posts online.'
Plowman was careful. But his family wasn't. When Jarli found Kellin's profile—unlisted but not private—he found a post from Adrian Plowman, on October 20. Happy birthday, little brother!
In a list of Kellin and Adrian's mutual friends, Jarli found their mother, Sheryl Plowman. A lot of her friends had the surname Goldacre.
Jarli checked Plowman's age on a business news site. Then he typed:
The Computer was air gapped, so it couldn't text the new password to Plowman's phone. Instead, the new password just appeared on the screen.
Doug was watching over Jarli's shoulder. 'Wow,' he said. 'It wouldn't be that easy to get into my computer, would it?'
'Easier, probably.' Jarli was searching the computer's files. But there were thousands of videos, each hours long. And Viper's guys could come in at any moment.
'Do you know what date Viper came here to pick up the device?' Jarli asked.
Doug shook his head. 'I know it was meant to be ready in March last year.'
Jarli found the videos from March. But the facility had at least four cameras, and each one was recording twenty-four hours per day. There was too much data to sift through.
'I have a flash drive,' Doug said. 'We can sort through it all later.'
Jarli had a flash drive too—the one he kept on his keychain and used in last night's coding experiments. But it only had 64 gigabytes of space. 'There are too many videos, and they're too big,' he said. 'We'd need a hundred flash drives.'
And then the alarms went off.
DRONE WARFARE
Doug and Jarli looked at each other. Doug looked as scared as Jarli felt.
'They know we're here,' Jarli hissed.
'Or they know Viper's guys are here,' Doug said. 'Either way, we need to get gone. Can we just take the whole Computer with us?'
Jarli tried to lift it. It didn't budge. It was bolted in place. 'Do you have a screwdriver? Maybe we can rip out the hard drive.' Jarli didn't know how to do that, but he thought Doug might.
Doug was about to reply when a buzzing sound filled the air. Jarli looked out the window. Four flying sentry-robots had entered the factory through a vent in the ceiling. Each one had four rotors and a bubble camera on the underside. With unnerving precision, they turned in mid-air and flew in different directions. Two flew over the nitrogen lake, scanning it with red lasers. Another flew down to the loading dock.
The last one flew up towards the control room.
'That's not good,' Doug said.
He and Jarli both ducked down under the desk as the drone approached the window. A scanning laser swept across the room.
'Can it get in here?' Jarli whispered.
'I don't think so. But we can't just wait for the drones to go away. A human security team will arrive soon.'
He was right. There was no time to disassemble the computer and take the hard drive. They had to get out of here.
Timing his movements to avoid the scanning laser, Jarli leaned out from under the desk and jammed his flash drive into the computer. He couldn't take all the video files from last March, but he could take a few. Maybe he would get lucky and Viper would be in one of them.
The monitor flashed.
OUROBOROS, the virus he'd used to test his firewall, was still on the flash drive. The virus designed to copy every file on a Computer.
The idea hit Jarli so hard it nearly knocked him over. He clicked yes.
The drone at the window was moving away. Jarli motioned for Doug to come out from under the table.
'When you took this phone out of the box,' he asked Doug, 'did you grab the charger cable?'
'Yeah.' Doug pulled it out of his pocket and handed it over. Jarli used it to plug the phone into one of the USB ports at the back of the computer.
'What are you doing?' Doug asked.
Jarli was setting up the phone so the computer could use it as a modem. Hey presto, no more air gap. Once the computer was connected to the internet, the virus would transmit every file on it to the server in India. With a bit of luck, Jarli could hack that server later, and steal the files back. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully. But all that was too difficult to explain right now. 'The phone is emailing the files to me,' he said, simplifying things a bit. 'It'll take hours, though. We'll have to leave it here. What's the data cap?'
A green tick flashed up on the screen.
'There's no data cap,' Doug said. 'Mum wanted to make sure it always worked in an emergency.'
'Well, this is an emergency.' But when they found Doug's mum, Jarli would have to warn her that her bill would be higher than usual this month.
Jarli tucked the phone out of sight behind the computer. There was no way to tell if his plan was working since the virus was invisible. He just hoped it managed to transmit all the files before Plowman found it.
'OK.' Jarli pulled out the flash drive and pocketed it. 'I'm done. How do we get out of here?'
'We can't go back out the front. The drones will spot us. We'll have to go downstairs to the garage exit.'
'Any sign of the hazmat-suit guys?'
Doug peered out the window. 'No.'
This was supposed to be good news, but it felt like bad news. If Viper's men weren't here, they were probably in the loading dock. And if they had come here to delete the videos on the computer, then why hadn't they gone to the control room?
Jarli wondered if he and Doug were too late. Maybe the bad guys had gone up to the control room, logged into the computer, deleted the file with Viper in it, shut the computer down again and escaped through the garage, all while Jarli and Doug were making their way in through reception. Had there been enough time for that? Jarli didn't think so. But then where were they?
Jarli went to go out the door, but Doug grabbed him.
'Wait,' he said. He was watching the drones circle out the window. If they moved at the wrong moment, they could still be spotted.
'Wait,' Doug said again. 'Wait . . . now!'
Jarli wrenched open the door and they both rushed out. The cold was so sudden that it was like stepping into the vacuum of space. Even knowing that the drones couldn't hear him, Jarli cringed as his footsteps clattered on the metal stairs.
One of the drones was zooming over the nitrogen lake towards them. The camera bubble was beneath it rather than on the front. Jarli wondered how close it would have to get before they were spotted.
They sprinted across the T-intersection and dashed down the staircase towards the garage. The drone whined as it got closer and closer.
The further down they went, the colder it was. The stairs descended below the factory floor, and a pane of glass or transparent plastic separated the bottom half of the staircase from the liquid nitrogen. Fine mist trickled over the pane and poured down the stairs. Through the glass, Jarli could see that the nitrogen lake was only about thirty centimetres deep. It was strange how much it looked like normal water. Under the mist, the floor was lined with pipes, frosted at the joins.
The door at the bottom of the stairs was marked LOADING DOCK. It wasn't locked. Jarli and Doug pushed through. Jarli shut the door behind them. He tried to do it quietly—Viper's men might be here— but the sound echoed around the concrete room.
The loading dock was a cavernous space filled with large wooden crates. A crowbar lay in the middle of the floor near a smaller crate, as though someone had abandoned it in a hurry. Cardboard boxes were tightly packed on metal shelves. The big square door Jarli had seen looked no less daunting from the inside.
Doug ran over to it. 'How do you think we get this open?' he asked. 'I don't see a button.'
Jarli dug the keys from the control room out of his pocket, but he couldn't find a keyhole anywhere. 'Maybe with the crowbar,' he said. The crowbar was heavy, but he could lift it. Hopefully it was strong enough to do the job.
Something beeped inside the small crate.
Jarli hesitated.
'Come on,' Doug said. 'Bring it here.'
Jarli ignored him. One wall of the crate wasn't attached—it was just leaning against the sides. He grabbed it and pulled.
'What are you doing?' Doug demanded.
The wall of the crate clattered to the ground, revealing the interior.
There was another beep, and this time Jarli saw what had made it.
A timer. Attached by thin wires to a lump of what
looked like yellow clay.
The timer read, 01:19. Now 01:18.
01:17.
01:16.
COUNTDOWN TO DANGER
'What's that?' Doug's face was ashen.
'A bomb!' Jarli cried. Viper's men hadn't come to delete the files. They were going to blow up the whole building! Every computer, every camera, every trace of the magnetic devices.
The timer had reached 01:08.
'What do we do?' Doug cried.
'Get that door open!'
'I can't!'
Doug was right. Jarli still had the keys in his hand, but he couldn't see a keyhole or a button anywhere. He jammed the crowbar under the door and pulled. It wouldn't budge. Doug grabbed the crowbar as well, but even with their combined strength, they couldn't move the door.
'We'll have to go out the front way,' Doug puffed.
'There's no time!' They would have to run up the stairs, across the catwalk, through reception and get the front door open, all in the space of a minute. Even that might not get them outside the blast radius. The bad guys clearly expected the blast to destroy the control room, which was all the way upstairs. The bomb must have a lot of explosive power. And it would go off in FIFTY-EIGHT SECONDS.
'Do you know how to defuse a bomb?' Jarli asked hopefully.
'Why would I know that?!'
'I don't know! I thought maybe you might have made a bomb disposal robot or something.'
Jarli had played a video game which involved bomb disposal. But the bomb in the game hadn't looked anything like this. And there had been no wire cutting anyway. The player had used a special spray to freeze the bomb.
'Freeze the bomb,' Jarli muttered. An idea formed in his head. He peered at the explosive, trying to see if it was attached to anything. It didn't look like it was. The timer was at 00:47 now.
He carefully lifted the bomb. It was strange to think that something so light could have so much destructive power.
'What are you doing?' Doug demanded.
'We have to freeze it!' Jarli hurried back towards the stairs, carrying the bomb as carefully as a carton of eggs. The lump of plastic explosive was pressed against his chest. If the bomb went off, he'd be vaporised.
