Chapter 17
Breaking Your Own Stuff
Hays sat in the “big seat” of the bridge in the Caravan and tossed his wedding ring up in the air over and over. His wife, Kiralhu, hated it when he did that. Wedding charms were meant to be at least somewhat sacred, and were basically the only way anyone knew you were married – well, other than saying you were. But Hays loved her more than life itself, and some trinket didn’t really matter. He threw and caught it blind one more time, then unzipped his uniform jacket and put the ring in an inside pocket. Now, it was time to check on the youngsters.
The bridge was only large enough for five designated work stations, meaning five people at the most were ever assigned to it. Honestly, only one person was needed to pilot this mobile headquarters since it traveled in subway tunnels, making it impossible to go off-route without knowing it. The reason the work stations were here was to make this more of a command location, where all information and diagnostics from the whole of this machine were could be analyzed. That’s why Nudrenmbe and Melk were here, sitting at their separate stations in front of wide flat screens, the two of them pouring through camera footage of the bombing. Corporal Nesembraci Jaydef had picked the cleanest sections of the footage for perusal, and now it was time for grunt work. To put it simply, Captain Hanyan Hays was incredibly bored.
He stood up, walked over to Melk’s work space, and tapped the pubescent young man on the shoulder.
“Still nothing interesting?” Hays asked.
“Not the smallest hint of something worth talking about,” Melk said. “Are those people that came to the building being taken care of?”
“Constable Renker’s not quite the inscrutable force she pretends to be,” Hays said with a smile. “I predict she’ll help them plenty and only send them home when they are well enough. If an injury isn’t healing or is too much, she’ll let whoever it is go and be taken care of by the Cypher’s expertise.”
“That’s good to know, sir.”
“Yup. Nudrenmbe, you got anything?” Hays called toward the other private in the room.
“I think so,” said the girl, whose head and braided hair blocked enough of her screen that Hays couldn’t see what she was looking at. “Can you come see this?”
“Sure,” Hays said as he walked the few paces over to her and stared down at the screen. “That looks like a camera that was facing the alley where reinforcements came from.”
“It is. But there’s a delay. That guy that Headmaster Dastou guessed was the leader, the one with the scar, he almost leaves the alley one second, then holds those people with him back.” Nudrenmbe rewinds the footage and slows it down to show what she’s talking about. “There, see? He puts an arm out, stops them from going. A few seconds later, after Dastou beats the others down, that’s when he sends them out.”
“Do you think he was scared?” Hays said, knowing the answer.
Melk had gotten up and come to look at Nudrenmbe’s screen, too. “Play the first part again,” Melk requested.
The girl did, going back to the original hesitation on the part of New Scar.
“I don’t think he’s scared,” Melk concluded.
“Why?” Hays asked.
“Because... there’s only one hesitation.” Nudrenmbe said, the last few words more excited.
“What’s that mean?” Captain Hays wondered aloud.
“That he... expected to have to hesitate, maybe?” Melk guessed.
“Or at least that he was waiting on something specific to happen, or not happen,” Nudremnbe added.
“Which means,” Hays summed up at last, “that he probably also planned on when to get away. Good job. Nudrenmbe, go to the point at which he made his people run away. Let’s see what that looks like if we add an assumption that he expected to have to flee.”
Nudrenmbe started scrubbing forward and was nearly at the spot she needed to be on the same camera angle, and then her screen turned bright red at the same time a patterned alarm chime blared out from overhead speakers. There were a handful of different alarms or warnings with various accompanying audio tones for things like fire, mechanical problems, intranet failure. This alarm pattern? Hays had never heard it before, never been trained for it. Was it new? On flat screen in the room, including the stations with no one assigned, two red rectangles had popped with a written in white text, which he read aloud.
“Fob unit detected,” the captain quoted. “Run identification protocol.”
“What the heck is a fob?” Melk asked.
“The second phrase is for a command,” Nudrenmbe said. “It’s asking me to run some kind of ID check. Should I?”
Hays thought for a second. “Eh, sure, why not? Let’s see what happens.”
He rubbed his ring from the outside of his uniform jacket for luck as Nudrenmbe moved her terminal’s cursor to the bottom rectangle and clicked it. Immediately when the ID check was turned on, every screen in the room lit up anew with angles from the internal and external cameras of the Caravan. The four work stations and navigator’s seat each had a display, and each display was split into four, a typical arrangement for viewing security footage. This time, however, as they were moored underneath the Blackbrick Diplomatic Center, a good portion of those cameras showed either blackness or dark concrete since the lenses faced a tunnel.
Of interest was the camera pointed at the door in the embassy basement, the only way in or out currently. On that feed was a middle-aged man, well-dressed with salt-and-pepper hair.
On the bottom of every camera feed, new words began to scroll from one side to the other. “Identification protocol inconclusive. Recommended threat level: high.”
“Oh shit,” Melk whispered, his changing voice making the low sound barely audible.
What he cursed at, presumably, was the younger man next to the stranger: New Scar. Trenna had said a man named Milser was some kind of self-appointed leader of their camp, and Hays always guessed he and New Scar were the same person.
“What are those things!?” Nudrenmbe exclaimed.
Three animals, four-legged with shoulders up to the intruder’s waists, had stepped into frame. They had big curved horns, light-colored fur, and black eyes.
“They’re fasshim,” Hays guessed, “some outlandish version of those anyway. Turn on your ears.”
Melk rushed to his seat where his mic transceiver was and did as he was told. Hays paced in the small center area of the bridge as a static hiss filled his ears to denote that everyone in the Caravan could hear everything the others were saying.
“Are we all here?” Captain Hays asked.
“Yes, sir,” came the voices of five separate people at nearly the same time.
“Whoever is in the server room, can you hear this alarm?”
“Yeah, we got it down here,” said Evara Stroff from two floors below. “We can see the camera feed, too. He’s trying to get inside.”
“He’s not trying,” said a male voice that was also not on the bridge. This was Private Zhedani. “Look, here. He’s already in. He’s using Mr. Dastou’s personal access code.”
What? Hays squinted at his screen, perplexed.
“Can he fake that?” asked Hays.
“No,” said Zhedani. “It’s the real thing and only Dastou knows it. The system registered it as his. There’s no pretending.”
“Yet an alarm went off,” Hays said almost to himself. “If he can use the number panel to type in the code, why is he still standing there in front of the camera fumbling with something. Zhedani?”
Zhedani was the best computer science student here by far, and the person who could get the answer to such a question the fastest.
“Hold on... hold on...” Zhedani said. Over the open microphone, the sounds of frantic typing replaced words for several seconds. Then he said, “Fuck!”
“What, what is it?” Hays said, a nervous feeling crawling up his neck.
“He’s in. He got in,” Zhedani said.
As soon as the words were out o
f Zhedani’s mouth, the internal camera monitoring that entryway showed the door sliding. The two men stepped forward and into the Caravan.
“How is that possible?” Hays wondered. “He bypassed a fingerprint scan.”
“Something he did or used, it calculated insanely fast,” Zhedani explained, speaking quickly. “Faster than I could track.”
The animals now walked into the Caravan behind their apparent masters.
“Oh my god,” Nudrenmbe said, staring at her screen, at the fasshim.
“Wall gates, now!” Hays ordered.
His volume and the practiced, earned command in his voice made Nudrenmbe nearly panic to respond to his order. On a camera feed that was tracking movement at his centralized station and on every camera feed that had them in view, slabs of ceramic jutted out from walls and jammed themselves into slots on the opposite sides. The stairwells and elevators also had outer gates, and those sealed at the same time. On a small screen near his hand meant only for status updates, Hays read a confirmation that all emergency wall partitions were functioning and locked in place.
On an internal view, the men had stopped momentarily when the wall seals were in place, the first of which would keep them from getting much further. Hopefully. The middle-aged man looked around, found the tiny black spot near the ceiling that would be the camera, and smiled.
“Okay, you have access to the Caravan,” Hays said calmly, “however you got it and whoever you are. What’s next for you? I’m here and I’m the only one that can open these gates.”
New Scar and the three fasshim took up most of the space between the outer door and the first gate, which was just past a couple meters past the also-sealed stairwell. The middle-aged man walked until he reached that first gate, and the camera’s position made it so that he was almost completely out of view.
“Melk,” Hays said, “take control of the camera close to the partition rotation and give me a view. Watch him.”
“Um, uh, yeah,” Melk said, though his anxiety didn’t stop him from acting quickly.
In a moment, the cameras moved from facing those weird fasshim-things and rotated one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, and came down about forty-five, providing a somewhat better view of the salt-and-pepper-haired man. He was near the emergency release panel for the ceramic barrier. What was he doing, Hays wondered to himself. Fiddling with something, moving his hands around.
“Zhedani, get into the gate’s active code and keep an eye on what changes with those panels.”
“That’s possible?” asked Zhedani.
“I think so. A base-level diagnostics tracker might do it. You’re the only one here that could get there fast, so get on it.”
For about half a minute, the older man was messing around with the partition control panel. Dastou’s access permissions let him skip half of what was needed to get into the mobile headquarters to begin with, but this lockdown could only be released here at the command center. Hays let his mind add a layer to the scenario by thinking about how this man had no choice but to come in on the top floor, meaning he was a hallway and a vestibule away from the bridge. And nowhere near anywhere else.
“Evara, Even,” Hays called into his mic in a half-whisper, as if he needed to keep quiet. “Go manually cut access to the elevators. Then ruin them.”
“Wait,” Evara began, “what do you mean ‘ruin?’ They’re already locked tight.”
“Only because our computers are telling them to be locked tight. I want you to shut off the elevator breakers, break the thumb switches off, and throw them away.”
“Uh... right. You got it.”
“Oh crap,” Zhedani said in a low voice. “Whatever he did before he’s doing again. I’m in the diagnostics layer and can see calculations flying faster than I can read. He’s got something that’s completely tearing the security of the seal apart.”
As soon as that sentence was finished, the first partition gate slid to the slide slowly, as if protesting the intrusion into its locked protocols.
“He can get past our seals,” Nudrenmbe whispered. “He’s coming. They’re coming.”
“Yeah, and we can’t stop it,” said Hays.
The fact that it sounded like a resignation made Melk spin in his seat and stare in shock at the captain. Hays only looked at the camera view at his station as it switched to the next lens down the hall, tracking the movement of intruders. The middle-aged man glanced up and smirked again, then walked to the next seal in the corridor and got to work. The younger man followed him with a more serious, deadly expression, and the three large animals followed the people.
“But we can keep him from having very much,” Hays added. “Stroffs, mangle those elevators. Zhedani, I need to spill beer on our maps.”
“Sir?” asked Zhedani.
“I want you to make things unusable. Make sure the computers have no idea where they’re going, not ever. I don’t care if we have to build it from scratch again, just destroy that data. You’ve got four minutes.”
“Shit. Fuck. Okay,” Zhedani responded, and more frantic typing came from his open channel.
“Nudremnbe,” Hays said, “you know how you’re never supposed to delete anything in the root folders or root cache?”
“Yeah...” Nudrenmbe responded.
“Well that’s what I need from you. Use my station, I have full access to that level. When I tell you, start making things disappear.”
The girl got up and walked to the big seat and immediately started clicking away to get to the rudimentary level of their computer system’s file structure, which you’re supposed to stay out of if you don’t know what you’re doing.
“Melk, I need you to start shutting off every internal camera by hand. The security layer is entirely separated and impossible to wreck too quickly. Go up one floor at a time starting with the server and engine area. Do you two understand?”
The two privates looked at each other with the combination expression of fear, confusion, and dedication that was typical of your first time in a life-threatening situation. Hays expected that, and was pleased with their stern answers.
“Yes, sir,” they both said in unison after their long glance at each other.
“Evara, Even, when Zhedani is done wrecking our maps in three minutes and thirty seconds, you need to get out of the Caravan. Do not leave the same way the intruders came in, whether or not you think you can make a run for it. Use the emergency exit that leads to the tunnel, and then get out via the manhole east of the Diplomatic Center.”
“Are you out of your mind!?” asked Zhedani, a scraping on his mic patch causing more static than normal. “You want us to leave you three behind?”
“Yes. The bridge’s security has a standalone extra layer that only I can access right now, so they can’t get in here. Follow my order and get out when the time comes.”
Hays grabbed his long-barreled assault rifle from a stand behind his chair, which Nudrenmbe was in. He watched a monitor as another seal slid back to its hiding spot in the wall, and the salt-and-pepper-haired stranger and his own freaky little entourage came forward once again. One more ceramic protective panel and he’d be in the vestibule of the top floor, one more seal and a single locked door away from the bridge.
“Is everyone clear on their instructions?”
“Yes” or “yes, sir” or “yeah” came from the handful of voices, all in his ear, two echoed on the bridge. Hays did feel bad about lying to them – there was no extra security layer on the bridge. Whatever they were using to break through, the thing Zhedani said moved faster than their computers could handle, it was going to be able to get here. But he couldn’t allow these young people to think they were going to die, or that they were being left to die, or that they were leaving others to die. Who knows, maybe this stranger just wanted a chat? Hays kept the laughter to himself and removed the magazine of ammunition and the chambered round from his rifle. He threw both items across the bridge and heard them hit a wall and bounce noisily behind t
he work station in that corner of the room.
The captain looked at his subordinates, Melk and Nudrenmbe, as they both worked fast to get their assignments done. If these people did die today, or soon, they made him proud by not panicking. Earlier today, they also did an amazing job of helping those injured or shocked by the bombing, proving their worth as not only the soldiers they were meant to be, but as decent human beings.
“Ears off, everyone,” Hays ordered. He heard the chirp-click of transceivers being turned off by his five subordinates. “Pardon the noise.”
After he turned off his own transceiver at his waist, Captain Hanyan Hays started using the butt of his rifle to smash every monitor and secondary status screen in the room. Let them have the Caravan if that’s what they want; they sure as shit won’t be able to use it too well.
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