energy, repair and survival; it expels waste products; it ages and decays; it mutates gradually, responding to environmental factors around it.
Like a living organism too, a Sarcodinay megacity is subject to infection, any breach in the outer skin a chance for an opportunistic viral attack. Knowing how to take advantage of megacity weaknesses is a specialized skill, the striker tattoo for the knowledge a beehive (left arm, upper triceps,) with an added bee for each successful insertion and escape. Zaladin did not wear striker tattoos anymore, but he undoubtedly would have earned the right to that one, had he wanted it.
Vanessa had seen firsthand the techniques a striketeam could use to gain access, and had simply transferred that knowledge to Keeper’s Island. It hadn’t taken her long to notice that there had been a drone malfunction on the island’s security grid, and a maintenance worker had been sent to fix the problem. He had returned, without incident, and moved on to fixing a problem with the power supply deep inside the megacity dome walls. The computer insisted the worker was there, but we couldn’t raise him by vid.
Vanessa and I both agreed the worker was likely dead, and Zaladin had used him to gain entrance to the maintenance tunnels, and through them, anywhere in the city. He was indeed here, and he’d been here for almost an hour.
I shuddered to think how much damage he might have already done, and it was too late to do anything but try to find him before he made his move. To use an expression that Belisle had probably grown up with, locking down the city would be locking the hen house after the fox was already inside.
Rhodes ended up locking down the entire city anyway. Cleared members of security could override the lock-down on individual doors—which made it effectively useless for keeping out the real threat. But all of us thought it would help keep any stray technicians or lost doctors from wandering into the fire zone unexpectedly until the reinforcements I’d called in arrived.
That would happen in anywhere from 30 minutes to a day, depending on who decided to raise a bureaucratic outcry over Merlin’s request to bring in League troops. Ministry of Justice Secretary Tal-Stiles Breman could make all kinds of fuss if he chose to. He could bog it down and let it sink slowly.
I still wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I had a sneaking suspicion that the only thing accomplished by bringing in platoons of troops would be platoons of dead troops. The chaos could only work to Zaladin’s favor—all those unfamiliar faces, all that uncertainty about who had clearance and who didn’t. Glitches affecting cleared personnel in the computer system were only to be expected.
Maia-Leia Shana’s guards were, unfortunately, worthless. I’m sure they would have been quite competent versus humans or even normal Sarcodinay, but against a telepathic High Guard who could kill or control them with barely a passing wink, they were little better than chum in the water. Plus, they knew it, which made them itchy and scared. More reason for the lock-down: there wasn’t one of them who wouldn’t shoot first at anything even remotely suspicious. They were terrified, and that made them a danger to everyone.
Rhodes was trying to keep his guards together. Vanessa was looking over old computer files, working through the puzzles of Les Dieux de Guerre and the Crazy Ivans in her own way. I was standing in the middle of the main security control room, surrounded by holo vids showing camera feeds and security monitoring data. I wasn’t looking at any single screen, not concentrating on any particular set of information. I know that I must have garnered some odd looks. Probably looked like an idiot, or some crazy bitch a bit too caught up in the romance of being at the ‘center’ of all the pretty lights.
I have learned a few tricks over the years, tricks that neither Zach nor Duncan had ever taught me. When I was younger I had not questioned their provenance, and now that I was older and forced to painfully access my own ancestry their origins were no less opaque.
I am good at finding patterns. I always have been. My talent is so uncanny it verges on supernatural—I would be actively scared by it if the gift were not trumped outright by my occasional attacks of telepathy. It is the reason I am so good at building my toys and the real reason why I am no fun to play against in chess or twenty questions. Once I had assumed it was the result of being a telepath, even if that talent was as unsteady as a drunken fighter pilot out on shore leave on Liberty, but gradually I came to realize such could not be the case. No Sarcodinay or Kantari telepath that I know of has ever demonstrated my gifts at deciphering the laws of the universe. That power is mine alone.
So how to explain to these technicians and security personnel that while I wasn’t monitoring each individual screen, I was nonetheless paying each its due, pulling order and meaning out of the chaos as a spider in the center of her web feels for the vibrations of the captured fly. I didn’t know what shape that pattern would take, only that I would recognize the shivery sensation when it arrived and—
“What room is that?” I asked, my voice sharp and harsh as I stabbed a finger at a round circle on a monitor which had just switched from red to green.
A security guard looked up, identified the screen I was pointing to, and said, “Door access 159c. Leads to the power generators.”
I look sharply at her. “Antimatter?”
“Geothermal,” the officer corrected with a quick shake of her head. “Magma vents from Mount Kilauea.” She frowned at the monitor. “No one should be down there right now.”
“Tell that to the person who just opened that door.” My eyes sought out and found a layered representational schematic of the hospital. I needed the schematic: Keepers’ Hospital was different enough from a normal megacity that my knowledge of the traditional city layouts were more hindrance than help. I found the power generators and then followed the line up through floors, to what lay above those generators. I tapped the glass and scowled.
“Tell Rhodes I’m going after him,” I said as I headed out the door. I didn’t explain who I meant by ‘him.’
All things considered, I guess I didn’t have to.
ggg
The entrance to the power station was locked, and I couldn’t help laughing at the thought that I would be kept from confronting Zach by something as simple as a security door.
“Medusa, override this lock, would you?”
“Done,” she said. I watched the light next to the entry pad switch from red to green.
As I reached for the handle, it switched back to red.
I tugged on the handle: still locked.
“Medusa?”
“Someone else is active in the system.”
“Rhodes?”
“No, not Rhodes. Just a second while I fix this—” The light turned green again, and I yanked the door open immediately, stopping it when it was open an inch.
“Thanks, Medusa—” The light blinked red. The door would lock behind me when I closed it. “What the hell is going on? A repeating loop?”
“Someone’s controlling the system from beyond that door, from a computer terminal. They’ve detected my attempt to override their override and sent me the oddest data packet.”
“A virus?”
“No. That’s what’s so odd about it. I expected a virus, but other than a set of instructions asking me to cease my present course of action and destroy the data packet after completion, there is nothing here that would force any computer system to execute malicious commands, let alone me.”
“What are you saying? Someone sent you the equivalent of ‘stop it because I said pretty please?’”
“Yes.”
“Weird. Don’t unlock the door again. Let them think whatever they meant to do worked. You didn’t delete that data packet, did you?”
“Of course not.” Medusa sounded like she was deciding whether or not I’d hurt her feelings.
“Good. I’ll want to look at it later.” I pulled out my sidearm and slipped inside the entry tunnel.
Most of the megacities ran on antimatter grids, but at some point, someone had taken a look at Keepers’ Island and dec
ided that all that free-flowing lava right next to the ocean was just too good to be allowed to literally slip by. So the Sarcodinay built huge collection tanks of water, which they heated up using the lava funneled from the volcanic rift of the island. The steam turned the turbines, and the condensate was recycled for the next heating cycle. They built the megacity right on top of it all. Easy. Sure, there was always the risk of volcanic eruption throwing a monkey wrench into the works, but at least water vapor was relatively non-volatile.
Which is why I was a little confused about the bomb.
I found it almost immediately, tucked inside one of the booths that controlled water replenishment for the giant underground steam pipes that hovered like radiator tubes just out of the reach of a slow-moving river of bright yellow-gold. The bomb was classic Sarcodinay military issue, slick and small, with a timer, auto-destruct, and tamper-proof case. I dismantled it in just under thirty seconds.
There was no sign of Zaladin, or anyone else. The booth was one of several that lined the outside of the main lava chamber, sheltered from any unexpected volcanic activity by walls thick enough for hull plating. Camera feeds showed me the main chamber, faintly glowing from the hot magma flowing through a deep gorge through the center of the room. Even here, it was damn hot.
“Am I missing something, Medusa? Why blow this up?”
“It would disrupt power...” Even she