Guardians Inc.:Thundersword (Guardians Incorporated #2) (40 page)

He would have to do a physical exam.

“I was about to say that you needed to check her.” Ratatosk said as Thomas picked the woman off the ground.

There was a click underneath her.

There had been something under her body. He saw the flat metal thing and immediately recognized it. He had seen it in movies and in videogames. The shape was immediately recognizable by most teenagers in the United States.

It was a Claymore antipersonnel mine.

And the click could only mean that he had activated it when he picked up the body. They were alive because of the speed at which they moved.

“What is this thing?” Ratatosk said, sniffing at the mine.

“It's a bomb,” Thomas said. “Don't touch it.” All he really knew about Claymores was that once you activated one in any game, it meant game over. He pulled the woman toward the waterway and away from the bomb until he felt it was safe to check her out.

She was in her mid twenties, dark hair cropped short, and freckles dotted her nose. He gently sat her against the small wall of the waterfront and checked her uniform's pockets for an I.D.

“Amanda De Moulins,” Thomas read. “Twenty-four, French National, Id Number, Blood type. Fire Team 12. Red Clearance.”

“Is she alive?” Ratatosk jumped in front of her face.

“She seems unconscious; I hope she's just out.”

“Why kill the other three and leave this one alive?” Ratatosk asked. Her teammates had been brutally killed, but she seemed unscathed.

Thomas had already figured out why—his brain had clicked once Ratatosk had found her in a direct line to his grandfather. “She's the scapegoat,” he said, “and the trap.” He stood up and pointed at his grandfather. “Gramps is shot, and then the Azure Guards look over here and find her against the building, rifle in her hands. They either attack immediately or just check her out and then—”

“Boom,” Ratatosk said. “She blows up and maybe takes another one or two of the Azure Guards with her.”

“The blame goes to the Guardians,” Thomas said, “and in the current state we might have lost the last of the Clans on our side.”

“Brilliant plan,” Ratatosk said.

“And devious.” Thomas opened her jacket; there were no apparent wounds or blood. “At least I think this confirms one thing about the robot.”

“What?”

“It's not one of ours. That outcome goes against everything Guardians Inc. stands for.” Thomas pulled the zipper up on Amanda's jacket.

About two hours later, Thomas was ready to head back to the Mansion. Bolswaithe had confirmed that the message was unintelligible to anyone not possessing Cypher abilities, and Thomas had set up the surveillance cameras from the doomed Fire Team around Gramps and his team. He wanted to see his reaction when time resumed and the cameras were already recording everything.

He had taken the bodies of the Fire Team and buried them under a mound of snow; beside them he had buried the remains of the robot and both sniper rifles. He wanted to leave all the evidence of the assassination attempt ready for Guardian teams as soon as Bolswaithe could connect to them.

He decided to take the robot's head with him though, and he placed it one of Team's 12 backpack.

Bolswaithe didn't know anything about the other robot, although he assured Thomas that Guardians Inc. wasn't working on any military project. All the robots the company made were designed to assist humanity, not to eliminate it.

“I'll be able to tell you more once we are in normal time again,” Bolswaithe assured him. “I'll access the Intra and Internets and the Control Room records to search for any project that involves weaponized bipedal robots.”

“Can you check the government too?” Thomas knew that all governments were aware of Guardians Inc. In fact, all governments
had
to work with Guardians Inc. one way or the other. The Guardians had existed before any government, and they helped create many of them and even brought down some of them too on occasion. 

Although with the signing of the Magna Carta in the 13th Century, Guardians Inc. had promised to keep out of world government and religion. Their presence was pervasive, and their control of the world economy, above and beyond any market or country economy, was undeniable and unquestionable.

Thomas wanted to make sure that those governments didn't want to eliminate his grandfather.

Or himself, for that matter.

“I'll check all governments,” Bolswaithe assured him. “Are we ready to go now?”

Thomas took a last glance around; he had thrown the activated Claymore into the lake as far away as he could. Cameras were set up. Gramps was in position.

He looked at Nardir; the mountain lion gave him the creeps.

“What's the matter?” Ratatosk asked.

“Nothing,” Thomas said. He was angry and scared at the faun, but angrier at himself for being scared. He leaned to pick up Amanda de Moulins. He couldn't leave the girl behind, not if there was any chance she was alive.

He glanced again at the mountain lion and remembered the threat against not only him, but his gramps as well...
I will kill you while he watches, and then he too will die by my hand.

“Aw... screw it!” Thomas said, standing up. He placed his arms on the frozen mountain lion’s shoulders and kneed him as strongly as he could in the groin. The faun even lifted up from the snow a little bit. Thomas released him, and walked back toward Amanda with a smile on his face.

“That wasn't very honorable!” Ratatosk seemed appalled.

“He wasn't very honorable when he gave me this.” Thomas said, showing the scar on his cheek. 

“He was defenseless!”

“Thomas was defenseless too when Nardir wounded him,” Bolswaithe said. “He was already beat, and Nardir willfully broke the set rules of combat by drawing blood.”

Thomas lifted an eyebrow to the squirrel. Ratatosk looked at the mountain lion. “Is all that true?”

      Thomas nodded. Ratatosk ran toward Nardir and climbed up on his shoulder. His horn sprouted from his forehead, and with a swift movement, he cut off all the mountain lion’s whiskers, eyebrows, and practically shaved a patch of fur mimicking Thomas’s scar on Nardir’s cheek. He then ran back toward Thomas.

“And what was that for?” Thomas asked with a smirk.

Ratatosk horn receded on his forehead. “The honor-less deserve no respect,” he said. “Besides, this way he'll know where the pain is coming from.”

The Rogue

Thomas woke up in a great mood. He anticipated the images the cameras he had set around Gramps and his team would relay to the Mansion after he caught up with normal time. He was even more excited about Nardir's reaction than that of his grandfather.

Thomas had left Amanda on a stretcher in the Medical Ward, and after writing a note about Versoix and leaving it in Mrs. Pianova's lap he connected Bolswaithe for a recharge. Bolswaithe expected to have a couple of answers about the robot in the hours Thomas slept; they would probably amount to only a couple of seconds in real time, but his transfer rate was in the terabytes and then he would have more time to analyze the data.

According to Bolswaithe's calculations, Thomas still had a little over thirty-six of his hours to spend alone before his speed approached normal rate and he rejoined “normal” time.

“What do you want to do today?” Thomas asked Ratatosk as he dressed. He used double the amount of deodorant; he really disliked not being able to have a hot shower, and he had already tried to have a bath using water bottles, but it was just too impractical. He checked in the mirror—he had patches of scruff all over his face mixed with clean skin where his beard hadn't begun to grow. He had just turned sixteen, but thanks to his seven months in limbo, he was closer to seventeen now in the real world. Gramps had always been a man that shaved regularly, as was his dad. But in two or three occasions he had seen them grow a full beard; he had secretly waited for his full beard to grow too.

Maybe when he turned seventeen for real he would grow one. Now he just looked unkempt.

“For starters, I want to eat something better than this.” Ratatosk showed Thomas a bag of chips he had already eaten. Thomas smiled; the squirrel was a ravenous little beast. He and Tony would hit it off instantly.

Tony!

That was what they were going to do today. Find Tony.

“I'll get you something better,” Thomas said, “then we'll check on Bolswaithe.”

***

Ratatosk was indeed ravenous. Thomas couldn't figure out where the squirrel had fit the entire watermelon he had given him. He had cut it in half, and before he could cut a triangle for himself, the squirrel had jumped into one side and chewed through it. The other side had followed, a little slower, but just as messily as the first.

Ratatosk was still licking himself clean as they undocked Bolswaithe from his connection.

“Good morning, Thomas,” the voice sounded high and fast. Thomas had decelerated a little bit and Bolswaithe was now faster than him.

“You need another adjustment…one, two, three, four.” They had done five adjustments already and Thomas knew the drill—he counted until Bolswaithe analyzed the speed of his speech.

“Better?” the voice came out perfectly.

“Done,” Thomas said. “What did you find out about the robot?”

“It was a very limited search.” Bolswaithe displayed information on the wristpadd screen. “Nothing conclusive so far, but there was something that, if confirmed, is very disturbing.” The screen split; on one side it showed the robot skull, which Thomas had taken with them to the Mansion and placed in front of Bolswaithe for him to analyze while they slept, and on the other an amateur video of a kid’s birthday party where a flying rod crossed through the air. “I believe these are connected,” Bolswaithe said.

Thomas sighed. Maybe the limits on Bolswaithe’s computing power were greater than he imagined or the butler's intelligence had already deteriorated. “I thought we had said that these rods are an optical effect. An insect flying faster than the camera can see,” Thomas said. “Your words.”

“I remember that conversation differently.”

“Your words without all the technical things,” Thomas said. “You said that it was an optical illusion.”

“That is the general expert opinion,” Bolswaithe said, “and now I believe that is the case in ninety-nine percent of the time, but I’ve been reviewing video records and this one is different. Check the highlights.” The video of the rod froze, and Bolswaithe electronically enhanced the picture, then highlighted in blue a long line attached to a circle on one side of the rod. “See that shape?”

“Yes,” Thomas and Ratatosk said in union.

“Now check the eyes of the robot skull, please.”

Bolswaithe displayed their fight in Ethipothala Falls. “I uploaded the robot's skull and cross-checked it with photographic and video archives. In one of my crosschecks I found a telltale mark. Tony was right. There was a rod in Ethipotala, and it's not much, but enough to do a connection with the rods and the skull.”

“I can't see anything similar,” Thomas said after checking the eyes of the skull. The orbs were a plastic white encasing a video camera.

“I'm highlighting it right now on the video.”

A thin, blue line appeared on the still image of the rod. It was just a straight line that made a slight left turn and then became a dot. Thomas checked the skull's eyes again and found something similar running on the outside of the orbs, just a thin line of golden material that ended up turning left and becoming a dot.

“It looks just like a circuit,” Thomas said, “embedded into the material.”

“It is precisely that,” Bolswaithe said. “A microcontroller. But without actually analyzing it in detail I can't be sure of what it actually does.”

“I'm not getting any of this.” Ratatosk sat on top of the skull and began to munch on something he had saved in his cheeks from breakfast.

Thomas knew the feeling; Bolswaithe’s explanations almost always ended with him not understanding anything, but this time he actually understood some of what the butler was saying. “It isn't alien, is it?” he asked remembering Tony saying something about the rods being of alien origin.

“Oh no,” Bolswaithe said. “Humans are capable of creating such devices, actually many companies create them daily. From cellphones to microwave ovens, all electronic devices carry microcontrollers.”

“So it's basically a dead end,” Thomas said. We can't really know who built this thing.”

“We can't.” Bolswaithe’s screen went blank. “But because of the complexity of the design, we can narrow the search to a handful of companies. All of them within the Guardians’ network.”

“You mean these things were created by the Guardians?” This information was disturbing.

“Not directly by us, but by a company partly owned by Guardians. Inc.” Bolswaithe displayed nine names on his screen, and Thomas recognized four of them and his heart sank.

“The Council of Twilight?” Thomas said. “These were created by a Council of Twilight Company?”

“That's what my analysis points to. These seven months the Council has grown more and more restless and resistant to Doctor Franco's chairmanship. The Doctor holds the title of ‘Grand Master’ and the Cane of Aesculapious. They are lifelong titles, so as long as he lives he has control of Guardians Inc., but that doesn't stop the other councilmen companies from growing restless and it has been known in the past that some try to follow their own agendas.”

“Like killing the enemy's Cypher.”

“That is correct. The Doctor has vetoed any proposal to eliminate Morgan while you were gone, but the suggestions about it being an option had surfaced more than once in the Council.”

“And someone decided to act.” Thomas went to the Aesir to take that option out from the table. The Norns had returned him just at the right time to stop it from actually happening. “So we have a traitor in the Council?”

“More like a rogue action,” Bolswaithe said. “Treason against Guardians Inc. has always resulted in the complete destruction of the traitor and the absorption of their holdings. Once we rejoin the time frame we will resolve this issue with the Doctor.”