Code Breakers Complete Series: Books 1-4 (94 page)

“Oh, shiny.” He stepped inside and slammed the hatch closed.

More grating noises sounded from inside along with grunts of effort. The door creaked open, and he stood back to allow her through. Inside, the place didn’t just stink of fish, it looked like fish; dried scales had been stuck to the walls to create a weird shifting feel as the light reflected off their multicoloured surfaces. Various fish heads were hung from the walls with OLED bulbs shining out from their opened mouths.
 

“Erm, I like what you’ve done with the place, Xian.” She held back the desire to vomit from the stench. When she looked down, she saw that he’d scratched words into the metal of the hull. Some mad diatribe about life on the seas titled ‘Ode to Little Fishy’.

Xian, dressed in a cloak made from old fishing nets, limped his way through the boat, leading her to another door. It opened into the second boat if she had her sense of direction right, but with the overwhelming stench of rotting fish and the general craziness of the situation, she wasn’t entirely sure.

She passed a bundle of rags that looked like his bed. The sheets were black with stains. A dead squid sat on a shelf above the bed, its tentacles hanging down. Squid ink had dried on one of the tentacles. She got a terrible image of Xian lying in bed while suckling the beast.
 

Thankfully, once into the second boat the madness eased. The second boat was his lab, workshop, and crazy man’s tinker-room. He sat on a decrepit captain’s chair in front of a workbench. Swinging round, he looked at the box she carried containing Alpha’s parts.
 

“What you bring Xian?”
 

“A gift from the past that needs your skilled hands to revive.”

She placed the box on the workbench and got the whiff of a pungent, sweet smell. “What’s that?”

His eyes grew wide. He pointed to a shelf made from an old oar hanging above the workbench. On the shelf were a series of jars containing various organs and liquids. A jar containing a lump of grey matter caught her attention. As she got closer, the smell grew sweeter. It had a potent earthy scent to it with a hint of alcohol. It reminded her of some of Gabe’s earlier concoctions to treat wounds before they found supplies of NanoStem.
 

“What is it?” Petal asked.
 

Xian smiled; he had half of his teeth missing. Only two front upper teeth remained and the bottom canines with a few molars. She supposed he didn’t really need teeth if he were sucking on sushi all day long. “Ambergris. Expensive for perfumes.”

“What’s ambergris?”

“Whales... what is word? Throw-up? Rare these days.”

She backed away with a lurch and again tried not to empty her stomach.

“Fine. We’re wasting time. I need you to help fix this,” Petal said, ignoring the stink while opening the case.
 

Xian hovered over it like it was a holy relic. His waxy hands ran gently over the parts as though honouring some deeper significance.

“Is... amazing,” he said, his voice hushed in reverence. “Where you find?”

“It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that my life, and perhaps the lives of a million others, relies on fixing it. The memory is intact, but the motherboard and processor are fried. I need them repaired, preferably with the same parts in situ.”

He sat back on the chair and gripped his chin.
 

“Xian could do this. And what does Xian get?”

She wanted to say his life, but had to play it cool. Stability was not his thing. “What do you want that I could give you in return for this service?”

“You hack computer systems, yes?”

She nodded. “Go on.”

“You do hack for me, and I fix this, yes?”

“What’s the hack? What do you want to get into?”

“You come.”
 

Xian grabbed her hand, and she instantly tensed with revulsion. It was like all Xian’s fish consumption had slowly mutated his humanity. His hand was clammy and waxy. He took her out of the boats and down onto a section of beach.
 

The wet sand and stones glimmered in the moonlight. The tide was going out, leaving a silvery surface behind. A few fish flipped and dove back into the retreating sea. Xian let her hand go and, with his weird half-limp, half-shuffle, hobbled after his prey. He dove onto his front with his arms out, catching a stray fish, a small silver thing no bigger than his palm.
 

Without hesitating, he bit it headfirst, crunching on the bones.
 

So his molars were useful, after all, she thought with revulsion.
 

He sucked out the innards before placing the rest of the fish in the folds of his net cloak.

“You come,” he shouted back to Petal, who’d stopped some metres behind.
 

“Lead the way,” she said, squelching her boots into the wet sand. The breeze made her shiver. There was a time when she’d have found being here relaxing. A clear night, full moon, receding tide. And the deathly quiet. Only her and Xian’s progress along the beach made any noise. But in these circumstances, without Gabe, and Gerry quiet in her mind, her body hummed with anxiety.

After a further five minutes of trudging along the coastline, Xian stopped at a dark mound. At first Petal thought it was an upturned boat with an old tarp strapped to it, but as she got closer and the shape’s details sharpened, she recognised the distinctive curved cone of a Jaguar.
 

Xian untied the tarp and pulled it clear. He opened his arms as if to present a prized possession to the world. The thing was rustier than his boats. The VTOL engines were caked in sand and mud, its tail buried beneath the sand, and its windshield featured a crack that fractured its way from one side to the other.
 

“You hack computer, we fly.” Xian used his hands to model a flying Jaguar.
 

Petal sighed. “It’s dead, Xian. Just look at it.”

“I fix. Fuel lines good. Engines work. Just need computer hack for control.”

“Give me your flashlight,” Petal said, indicating the OLED light tucked in a rope belt around his cloak. Smiling like an asylum guest, he handed it to her.
 

She shined it inside the windshield. The cockpit, surprisingly, looked in good shape. The controls were in place; the seats were intact with no signs of prior ejection. She moved around the hull of the craft, shining the light into the areas where the fuselage was welded. She extended one of her spikes and poked at it. The spike went through some of the more rusted areas but the seams were strong and held. Whether it’d stand up to the forces of the working engines was a different issue entirely.

As she scanned it, she brushed away some of the dust and dirt and saw the familiar red Russian markings. “Red Widow craft,” she said, more to herself than anything. Xian was hovering about right behind her, nodding eagerly.

“I shot down. Tried to fix to fly, but software bugged.”

That was the problem with Xian. He was a fiend when it came to engineering and hardware, but software, he hadn’t a clue. His addled brain just couldn’t comprehend the abstract logic.
 

“I can’t guarantee it won’t pull itself apart as soon as it takes off,” Petal said. “But if it’s just the software you want fixing, then we can do a deal.”

“One more thing,” Xian said.
 

“What?”

“You fly with me. To the Dome.”

“Um, Xian, I don’t think you’d find the Dome exactly welcoming.”

His facial expression dropped. Even with fish guts staining his lips and chin, she felt a glimmer of sympathy for him. Stuck out here all alone, his tent shelter destroyed, it couldn’t be the most ideal of situations, especially if his mind had continued to deteriorate.
 

She mulled it over: what was the worst that could happen? The old Jaguar coming apart and them having to eject? She’d done that twice in as many months so that wasn’t new. Xian getting weird and trying to kill her? That’d be unfortunate, but his body was dangerously thin and understrength, so he didn’t pose much of a physical threat—as long as she kept him in her vision.
 

On the upside, if he could fix Alpha, and the Jaguar held together for long enough, it’d make the journey back to the Dome in a matter of hours instead of days, and even if the populace of Libertas didn’t take to Xian’s alternative personality, at least she’d have returned with Alpha and could attempt to get Gerry out of her head and give Enna and the others a chance of ending Elliot Robertson’s threat for good.

It was no real dilemma after all. Crazy or not, Xian was her last hope, and Gabe had sacrificed himself in order for her to get here. She had to trust the plan.
 

“Okay,” she said. “You’ve got a deal. You repair my server, and I’ll get this bird in the air—once we’ve dug it out of the sand.”

Xian did a weird little jump and pumped his fist. He bent down behind one of the stub wings and pulled out a shovel. He handed it to her. “We work now, yes?”

“Sure. But first, I want to see your diagnostic on the server. I want to be sure you can fix it.”

He tapped his head with his distorted fingers. “Xian can fix. Trust Xian.”

How had it come to this? The one man she would never trust in a million years had her fate in his weird, fishy hands. She smiled politely and nodded. “I trust Xian. I just want to see first.”
 

Petal followed him back to the boat, where he rummaged around his myriad boxes of server parts, circuit boards, and a slew of electronic flotsam and jetsam. He pulled out a fistful of items, dumping them on his workbench. He hunched over Alpha’s motherboard and switched on a lamp. The desk was worn where his elbows rested against the surface, indicating he had sat for many years in this very position, fixing one thing or another. It gave her confidence now to watch him work like this.
 

All the madness aside, when he concentrated, it was like watching a god create. His touch was delicate as his fingers manipulated miniature tweezers and screwdrivers, taking out blackened parts and placing them with the utmost care onto an EM-shielded, anti-static mat.

Ten minutes later Xian had all the parts laid out, and his battered old holoscreen connected to the processor. A stream of data flowed down the screen. He glanced up at it, then back to the parts before doing a double take and then standing from his chair, pushing his face just inches from the screen.

“Xian never see this before. Is... majestic. Consciousness.”

He slumped into his chair; his eyes stretched wide like a whale’s with awe, and his mouth hung open. It then stretched to a smile.
 

“Well?” Petal said. “Can you fix it without ruining the main parts? It has to remain as original as possible because—”

“Because it’s all one thing,” Xian said, cutting her off, clearly understanding what it was. “Is one personality. Xian know this. Xian will fix.”

For the next hour, Petal watched in fascination as Xian slowly, and lovingly, restored the blackened parts, and in some cases replaced single, individual resistors with those from components of a similar era. Confident he could be trusted, Petal left him to it, under advice that he would need another hour to complete his task. She exited the boat and headed for the Jaguar.
 

Xian so far had held up his end of the bargain, now it was time for her to uphold hers. She heaved the shovel to dig the sand away from the tail of the ’coptor. She had just about cleared it when she heard the H-core whine of an engine coming from inland. A single light bobbed and weaved as it drew nearer.
 

She approached the bank and lifted her head above the surface. It was the ronin. They’d fixed one of their buggies after all. Four of them were in the vehicle, and each one carried a pistol or a shotgun. They drove over the tents and slowed when they came to the bodies of their colleagues. The driver swore and pointed to Xian’s boats before revving the buggy and speeding to the jetty.

Petal gripped the shovel and sprinted across the beach. She had to get to Xian before they did.

Chapter 29

James groaned as the tunnel became narrower. His skin burned, scraping against the rough surface for the last hour had made his hips and back raw. All those years of eating freeze-dried doughnuts had come back to haunt him in a way he could have never expected.
 

Enna in front of him had stopped. “We’re here.”

A thick metal grate barred their way. Enna shined her flashlight through and illuminated a wooden door. “Crowbar, please, Ghanus.”

Ghanus was at the very back and passed the bar down the line. Enna hooked it in and pulled, but the grate remained in place. “Want a hand?” James said.

“Please.”

Enna shifted to the side to allow James room to reach forward and grab the end of the bar. Together they eased the bar to the side. James grunted with the exertion and wished he’d spent more time in General Vickers’ gym instead of sitting at computer screens all day. He felt useless in these environments. But still he gritted his teeth and pulled with everything he had.