Free Radical (26 page)

Deck moved to the next recording. It was Paul again, "We came in to work this morning but there's nothing to work on. Every scrap of prosthetic and augmentation is gone from inventory. Even the brand new prototype models that were in the security locker. Only three - well, two now - only two people have the code for that thing, and neither of them opened the locker for anyone. I went to call home a min-"

Deck skipped through the message. He knew how the story ended. He scanned through a few more logs. Most were personal and fairly emotional. Each crew member would pour out their heart as someone close to them vanished, was infected, or killed. The logs stopped about a week before he awoke. There was never any mention of the cyborgs. Either people stopped making entries at some point, or the cyborgs swept through so fast that nobody had a chance to talk about them.

Deck leaned back and stretched gently, careful to avoid aggravating his numerous wounds. He had lost track of time as he waded through the messages. It was time to get moving.

Incoming signal: US.GOV-RL1.VID - signal type unknown.

Deck figured it was the encryption. He used 2-4601 as the key and the feed opened up.

"Looks like you found my employee number."

Every time he saw her she looked a little more burnt out and haggard. "I have so many questions for you I don't even know where to start."

"Screw your questions for now. What the hell am I going to be doing when I get to the reactor level?"

She seemed surprised, "When you get there? We figured you would be there by now."

"I suppose I would be if all I had to do was walk there. It's not like I can just wander around freely. This place is crawling with crazy stuff and getting from A to B is dangerous and time-consuming. Which makes me wonder why I'm doing it. "

She glanced over to someone off camera, "Actually, there's some debate on that now. The military guys want you to go down and blow up the antennae array."

"Sounds like a lot of fun. What the hell good will it do?"

"The array is what Shodan uses to communicate with the satellites. With everything, really. Blow it up, and you will cut Shodan off from the satellites. I don't know if we'll get them back at that point, but it should stop her from getting any more - and stop her from using the ones she has. You can't imagine the uproar caused by losing a fourth of the world's comsats."

"Actually, I can. So what's the debate?"

"TriOp argues that the array cost about two billion dollars, and you don't need to blow it up - just disable it."

He laughed, "To hell with that. I'm only going to do this once. If I turn it off, she'll turn it back on. If I break it, she'll fix it. The only way to stop this is to destroy it."

"That's exactly what the military guys are saying, but TriOp disagrees, and it is their property. It's not really very clear who's in charge here."

Deck growled, "You know who's in charge here?"

She raised an eyebrow.

"
Me
. I'm up here alone, and I'm the one risking my life." As he spoke, he could hear outraged yelling in the background on Rebecca's end.

He responded, "Hey, if you guys don't like the way I run this show, feel free to send up one of your own guys. Otherwise, I'm gonna blow up your damn antennae."

Rebecca smiled weakly.

"So we're gonna blow it up. That sounds great, but I'm fresh out of plastic explosives."

"Well, the records we have indicate there were some various munitions stored on level four - that's the storage and cargo level."

"Moving around isn't that easy up here. I can't just hop from floor to floor. I nearly got killed about forty-five minutes ago when I ran into some bot. Now I'm supposed to hunt around on level four before I head down to engineering?"

Someone began talking to her in the background. She held up a hand to silence them. "A TriOp lawyer helpfully points out that you don't need explosives if you are just just going to disable the antennae."

Deck drew in a slow, angry breath. "Fine. Storage. How do we get there?"

"There is a freight elevator that goes from levels two through five. That might be better than using the main elevator."

"Yeah, that would be good. Mutants seem to congregate around the elevators for whatever reason. I'd better get moving."

"Wait. Don't hang up on me again. You keep doing that, and it's making me crazy."

"Well? What else do you need?"

"She paged through some paper in front of her. Look, there are a bunch of questions I'm supposed to ask you. You dropped quite a bomb on us earlier when you said you were the one that messed up Shodan."

"Yeah, well, I was supposed to get a chance to talk with the tech guy - one of the Shodan designers. I have some questions for him."

She sighed, "Where do I start?"

Deck gazed at the tired, frustrated face in his mind's eye. "You look like hell. I'll tell you what. I want to sneak up, er down - I guess - to level four. That means I can't be talking to you. Why don't you get some sleep and I'll contact you when I get there?"

She nodded, "Sounds good to me."

"See you on level four, Out," he closed the connection and began the long crawl across the research level.

The elevator doors split open and parted. Deck stood in the center of the elevator, gun drawn, ready for conflict. There were no mutants this time. He stepped out and the doors drew closed behind him.

The storage level had the ambient noise of an empty tomb. There were no bodies or even evidence of violent conflict. Whatever had happened on Citadel, it hadn't happened much here.

The ceilings were high to accommodate the towering piles of supplies stacked on pallets. The walls were a pale industrial blue. The crates came in an array of beige, gray, and dark brown. The floor was a smooth, slate-gray rubber, traced with the tracks of numerous mechanical beasts of burden. Overhead, the floodlights stung his eyes with their intensity, and yet seemed unable to properly illuminate the floor area. The light poured from the fixtures above and was swallowed by the dark towers of supply crates, which were arranged in even rows of varying heights like a miniature city.

The floor was a grid of oily rubber tire tracks, the markings left by some sort of vehicle as it had traveled the rows of containers. The tracks followed the same path with a precision that indicated they had not been made by human-controlled machines.

Deck moved slowly away from the elevator, aiming his weapon ahead of him as he proceeded into the bowels of the cargo storage area. His movements were slow and uneven because of his throbbing leg wound.

He worked his way through the rows of supplies. The crates were marked both with bar codes and text. Each crate also had a strip of symbols down each side that indicated the recommended storage temperature range, sensitivity to decompression, sensitivity to impact, how fragile the contents were, their flammability, and which way was up.

He examined the labels, but none of it struck him as useful. He found some crates that seemed to be food, but they were part of a tall stack that he was unlikely to access without mechanical assistance. He frowned and realized that even if he could loot the crates, they probably contained dry goods that would need to be prepared. His stomach growled as he thought of dry milk and reconstituted meat. Even during his days of poverty in the Undercity, he had never faced hunger like this.

After exploring for a few minutes, he found that the level was divided into four areas, separated by airlocks. The massive room he was in was really just one-fourth of the level.

He moved through an airlock into another area. A few crates had been pried open and looted. Nearby, a forklift bot had been smashed and scorched. Other than this, the area was indistinguishable from the last.

He moved through the dingy gloom, examining storage containers and fantasizing about what sort of loot they might contain. His footsteps echoed off the steel walls and through the parallel canyons of steel crates. Every step, every ragged breath, and every careless sound was projected and amplified through the cavernous space, announcing his position.

The lighting wasn't bright enough to see properly, and yet not dark enough to conceal him. He wiped oily grime from containers at random, looking for something that might be of use to him. A few were labeled clearly, but most simply had useless codes stamped on their sides, giving him no real clue about their contents.

A terminal capped the end of one aisle of crates. He linked up and flew through its data banks It was both inventory and bot control. From here you could request some particular item and have a fork bot retrieve it. According to the system, there were no bots available. They had probably either been disabled by people or cannibalized for parts by Shodan.

He found a map detailing the layout of goods on the level. A moment later he had the location of the munitions storage area and jacked out.

According to the map, he needed to move to the adjacent storage cell. As he crossed the level, he found discrepancies between the map and the actual locations of walls of crates. It was unclear if these things had been moved before or after the disaster.

The titanic steel jaws of the airlock rumbled open with a hydraulic howl. As he stepped into the next storage room, he could hear the quick, high-pitched movements of bots somewhere in the distance.

There was a sharp whine of servos, followed by a metallic impact. Metal dragged against metal and then an electric motor began to close in on his position.

He didn't know if there was even any point in drawing his pistol. He hesitated. There was nothing to hide behind nearby.

Behind him, the airlock began to slide closed again.

A fork bot rolled out from between the rows of containers. Deck drew his pistol.

It was propelled by a set of short treads. It made a precise turn as it reached the end of the aisle, following the well-defined patterns of grime on the floor, and began advancing on him.

Its body was a hardened shell of steel, with a heavy-duty forklift mounted on the front. There was no visible head, or eye - no apparent vulnerable spot of any kind. Its treads spun furiously as it closed the gap between them. It was moving far faster than any human could run.

It obviously didn't have any projectile weapons, so its only offensive ability would be to crush him with the massive lifting fork or to run him over. There was a neat stack of crates off to one side that might provide cover, but Deck decided to stay in the open where he could move around.

The metal beast came to a perfect stop at the foot of the stack of crates and rotated in place. The fork divided and become a four-fingered claw reaching into the air. Its hefty arm extended its length several times, bringing the claw to the top of the stack. The fingers slid into position around the angled corners of the crate and clamped down. It pulled back as the arm retracted, lifting the massive crate as if it was a child's toy block. The claw rotated and pulled back until the crate rested on the flattened top of the bot, perfectly positioned above the its center of gravity.

The moment the crate came to rest, the bot turned in place and headed back into the aisle, ending the precise mechanical dance.

Deck holstered the pistol. He had no idea why the bots would be moving inventory around. He ignored the bot and pushed on.

This storage area was not like the others. Sections were sealed off behind security-controlled airlocks, separate from the main area and isolated from each other. The row of airlocks dominated the back wall of the storage area.

Various symbols hinted at what might be inside, but there were no explicit signs to direct him. The first several doors were marked with biohazard symbols. These could contain anything - medical waste, human waste, or even the biological agents that were deployed against the inhabitants of Citadel. After that, there were two doors with radiation warnings.

The next few doors were marked with security symbols and decorated with "AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY" signs.

The last door had an additional sign warning of explosive hazard, as well as a different set of security locks. He checked the map in his head. This was it.

Deck's hand hit the keypad and he was jacked in. As he tore through the world of geometric shapes, something seemed different.

Three tenths of a second after he jacked in, he reached the access code. It was a blur. The digits changed so quickly they looked like a set of flickering eights. They rotated in a chaotic manner, with no discernible pattern. He examined the rest of the keypad to see if he could manipulate the mechanism manually, and ran into a wall of opaque black ICE.

Shodan.

He jacked out.

Deck sat down and leaned against a nearby tower of supplies, the afterimage of the digital world still flickering in his head. His entire body ached. The dermal patch had relieved a lot of the leg pain, but the bruise on his chest was still throbbing.

He decided to call Rebecca while he thought about this problem. There was a long pause before she finally responded.

Connected. US.GOV-RL1.VID

Rebecca appeared in his head. She had taken off the stiff outer coat of her uniform and was down to her undershirt. She looked more alert than the last time he'd seen her.

"You finally get some sleep?"

"A little," she smiled, "You finally ready to answer some questions?"

"Ask"

"Right. The first question is: Why?"

"Diego made me an offer I couldn't refuse. He wanted control of Shodan so she could assist him with whatever illegal stuff he had going on the side."

A bunch of voices had erupted in the background on Rebecca's end as he was talking. She turned to address someone off-camera. "No... no, I am not playing this game with you guys." As she spoke, a male voice overlapped hers, arguing with her. "Fine. No questions? No? Then you guys work out what the hell you want and get back to me."

Deck sighed heavily.

"Hacker?"

He rolled his eyes, "You don't have to get my attention to see if I'm still here. Its not like I can just walk away from the terminal like you can. Its in my head. If our connection is live, I can hear you."