Escape (14 page)

Just a few paces outside the lift, the captain turned to address them. “Now you will help us end the lockdown.”

Kieran nodded to the officers scattered through the room. “I thought you said you were alone here?”

“Yes.”

“Well, clearly you aren't. Would you care to explain that?”

“I also said that I had suffered memory loss from a head injury. I'm sorry if my forgetfulness has caused you some inconvenience.”

Kieran's eyes narrowed. “So you simply forgot about the twenty plus officers manning the control tower?”

The captain's grin faded dramatically, and he took a long step toward Kieran. The short captain stood looking up at him from an uncomfortably close distance. “Are you calling me a liar, prospector Hawker?”

Kieran frowned, wondering at the imposter captain's sanity. “No.”

“Yes.” The captain's grin made a slow return. He nodded slowly. “Yes, you are.”

“Well, it doesn't really matter, does it? We're here to do a job, and we're going to do it. Whether there's only one of you here to appreciate it, or twenty-one.”

“I admire your attitude, prospector Hawker.”

Kieran turned to the boy slicer. “Well?”

Mister X. was staring intently across the control room, his eyes flicking from control station to control station. Kieran followed his gaze. That was when he noticed what had captured the boy's attention.

Every station was manned by one uniformed officer, busily at work behind his or her control station, with another one standing stock-still behind the first, supervising. There were no exceptions.

Strange.

Garlan was turning his helmeted-head this way and that, perhaps noticing the same thing
—
or perhaps noticing how outnumbered they were. There were about a dozen officers at the control stations, with precisely the same number standing watch behind those stations. Brathus and Dimmi had their eyes suspiciously locked on the short UBER captain.

The boy slicer belatedly replied, turning his gaze slowly from the room to address the UBER captain. “Where is the station administrator's desk?”

“Right this way,” the captain said, and started forward. They followed him down a semicircular aisle which ran between two separate levels of control stations. As they walked, they received a few wide-eyed glances from the officers sitting at the control stations. The ones standing watch behind the stations stood as still as statues, not even acknowledging the newcomers’ presence. As Kieran walked by the comm station, the officer at the controls locked eyes with him and mouthed something. Two words.

Get. Help.

Kieran blinked in shock. Those were the same words he had heard whispered over the comm channel when he had requested permission to dock. As they walked past the comm station, Kieran craned his neck to keep eye contact with the officer, but that officer’s face abruptly twisted in agony, and he turned back to his station. Kieran frowned, wondering what had hurt the man. The officer standing watch behind him hadn’t even moved.

Something very bizarre was going on.
The configuration of one man and one supervisor for each control station, suggested coercion on the part of the supervisors. The men at the controls were likely hostages. But why were they
all
wearing uniforms? A ruse for his team's benefit? Kieran was getting an increasingly bad feeling about helping these terrorists. Brathus, Garlan, and Dimmi were looking around the control tower warily, just waiting for an excuse to draw their weapons.

The UBER captain stopped beside a slightly raised desk near the center of the room with
—
again
—
one officer in the chair at the controls, and another one standing behind, looking over his shoulder.

“Here is the administrator's desk,” the captain said.

Without anyone needing to say a word, the man sitting at the desk stood up from the chair and stepped aside. His eyes met briefly with Kieran's. His mouth opened as if he wanted to say something, but then his eyes darted left to the officer who had been standing behind him, and he shut his mouth again. The supervising officer hadn't moved, or said a word, but he was very carefully watching the one who had been at the controls.

Hesitating briefly, Mister X. swung his backpack off his shoulders and set it down beside the chair. Taking a seat in the chair, the slicer's fingers immediately went to work at the controls. Semi-transparent, white and blue holograms of data structures flickered to life above the desk, which the boy manipulated with a combination of hand gestures and key inputs. A column of unintelligible text and symbols appeared, rapidly scrolling through the air
—
white text against a black background. Encrypted data. After a few moments of studying that seemingly-random scroll of data, the boy opened his backpack and withdrew a black box with a pair of trailing wires. He plugged the wires into two separate inputs near the top of the control station.

Unable to understand what the slicer was doing, Kieran sidled up to the UBER captain. The captain was watching Mister X.'s progress intently, his gray eyes wide and unblinking, his mouth stretched into an eager grin
—
but he was always grinning, so that didn't mean anything.

Kieran cleared his throat for attention.

“Yes, prospector Hawker?”

“I noticed when I docked to the station this time that you've had a visitor since I left.”

“You are referring to, prospector Cardian.”

“You met him, then?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask where he is?”

“You do not like him.”

Kieran frowned, wondering how the captain could know that, and why it was relevant. “Well, no, but
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Kieran's voice turned to a whisper. “If he finds out that I was here, it could create problems for me, you know?”

“He will not find out.”

“Will you
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Kieran hesitated, searching for the right word
—
one which would convey the intended meaning without any accusation. “
Detain
him?”
As good a euphemism as any.

The captain’s head slowly turned from watching Mister X.'s progress. “You need not trouble yourself with prospector Cardian. We will take care of him.”

Kieran frowned, not liking the sound of that. “What do you mean by
—
”

“Got it!” Mister X. exclaimed.

“That was fast,” Garlan said, his gruff voice transmitted through the external speakers in his helmet.

“I'm not done, but I've isolated the data streams. Now I just have to program the interrupter to
—
”

“Just do whatever you have to to disable the lockdown,” Brathus interrupted, waving his hand impatiently at the boy.

The UBER captain turned his gray eyes upon Brathus. His smile faded by degrees, with exaggerated slowness, as his eyes bored into the expedition leader's. “Do not worry, Brathus. You will be able to leave soon.”

“The sooner the better,” Brathus muttered, his green eyes slipping away from the captain's disconcerting stare.

Garlan's helmeted-head turned abruptly to meet that stare. Kieran saw fierce curiosity burning in Garlan's blue eyes. The clear white transpiranium of Garlan's visor did nothing to diminish the intensity of his gaze.

The captain's head cocked curiously to one side, and his grin returned. “You will have to excuse me. Sometimes I forget my audience. It is rude of me to be so familiar with people whom I have just met.”

Kieran watched Garlan's blue eyes appear to sharpen as they narrowed behind his visor, but after a long, silent moment his helmeted-head turned back to watch Mister X.'s progress. Kieran felt distinctly like he had missed something important.

It was five nail-biting minutes before the boy spoke again. When he did, his voice was noticeably subdued
—
managing to sound both guilty and wary at the same time.

“There's a security question. I'm going to see if I can bypass it, but the answer is pretty long, so it could take a while to slice through it.”

“How long?” the UBER officer asked.

“An hour, maybe two. There are 28 characters in the answer, and it's case-sensitive. Assuming only numbers, letters, and spaces were used
 
.
 
.
 
.
there are 63 possibilities for each character. Meaning a total of 63 to the power of 28 possible answers. I can apply some algorithms to reduce that number, but
 
.
 
.
 
.
that's still one incredibly strong password.”

“Can't you slice around it?” Garlan asked.

The boy shook his head. “That would take me even longer.”

“Let's see the question,” Kieran said.

Mister X. cocked an eyebrow at him. “You think you know it?”

“What's to lose? Maybe the answer is self-evident.”

The boy shrugged and turned back to the control station. He tapped a few keys and then the question appeared on screen. The boy pushed back from the desk to let everyone see it. Kieran gasped and his eyes went wide.

“What?” the boy asked.

“The question
 
.
 
.
 
.
” The clear white text appeared to be staring back at him. Kieran blinked and pressed a hand to his suddenly spinning head.

“What about it?” Brathus demanded.

“I know the answer.”

“Do tell,” Dimmi prompted.

The boy grinned wryly, and began slowly nodding. Kieran was joking. He had to be. “Philosophers have been looking for the answer to that question from the dawn of civilization. I'm sure they'd be happy to know that you've answered it for them.”

Kieran shook his head. “No, you don't understand. My father asked my brother and me that question every night before we went to sleep. I found this place on a starmap hidden in a folder on his data pad that was encrypted with the same question.” Kieran turned to their reluctant employer. “You knew my father, didn't you? He was involved with this place somehow.”

As usual, the short UBER officer was grinning unsettlingly, but for a long moment his only reply was to cock his head curiously to one side. “Perhaps. What was his name?”

“Thanos Hawker.”

“I do not know this name.”

Kieran held in the officer's gaze for a long moment. “He would have been here until about four years ago.”

“I'm afraid he must have preceded me.”

Brathus sighed. “Look, not that I don't care that you've uncovered some distant nugget of your father's past, but I actually don't. If you know the answer to the question, then answer it so we can get the kefick out of here.”

Kieran looked away and turned to the boy. “The answer is:
every precious moment of it.
”

Mister X. typed in the answer. The control station issued a sharp
beep,
that was all but drowned out by the blaring alarms. The boy shook his head. “It didn't work.”

Kieran frowned. “That
is
the answer. It has to be.”

“What can I tell you, man? It's probably just a coincidence.”

“The answer is case-sensitive, you said, so capitalize the first letter and add a period after the last. My father was a stickler for details like that.”

“Okay
 
.
 
.
 
.
” They watched Ferrel's fingers tapping the keys. When he punched
execute
, there was no warning beep to indicate a wrong answer. The question disappeared from the screen, and was replaced by a cluttered desktop of applications and files. “I don't believe it. We're in
.
 
.
 
.
 
.
”

Kieran felt his flesh crawl.
My father really was here. But he was just a prospector for the FMG. What would he be doing on a secret Union facility? What weren't you telling us, dad?

“I'm going to run a short test to see if I've got it,” the boy said. “If I have, the lockdown should be temporarily disabled.”

“Please proceed,” the captain said.

“Okay, here goes
 
.
 
.
 
.
” the boy typed in a final key sequence and stabbed the key to execute his program.

Suddenly the blaring alarms faded to a deathly silence and the flashing, red emergency lights disappeared, replaced by a clean, white light that was almost painfully brighter. Kieran's ears began ringing from the silence. He let out a sigh of relief
—