Kingdom Keepers V (9781423153429) (39 page)

But could he trust it?

He'd made it through the walls and into the ship's tech center. All he needed now was a high-bandwidth surge on the LAN that didn't match with a Keeper. With luck, he could trace it back to the OT server and notify Finn and Willa.

His phone rang.

“It's me!” No names were spoken.

“Go ahead,” Philby told Maybeck.

Maybeck told him about Luowski bragging that the OTs would be controlling the Base by sunrise. That he sensed he was being followed, but that he'd never once seen anybody behind him. He didn't know who was back there, if anyone, or what to do about it.

“Where are you,” Philby said, “and what route did you take to get there?”

Maybeck explained the episode on the AquaDuck and how he'd come from there to the Disney Vacation Club desk on Deck 3. He retraced his route in detail.

Philby opened the network log and began plotting Maybeck's movement by network access points. At the same time, he mapped Maybeck's route to his current location and found it hard to believe Maybeck had been followed on security video. Something wasn't right.

“Hang on a second,” he said to Maybeck, trying to think. He scanned the racks of computer equipment, routers, ship's audio and television. Wires. Plugs. Blinking lights. His encyclopedic memory accounted for the function of each and every box. He did not move on to a new piece of equipment until he understood and explained to himself the function of the box he was looking at.

“Still here,” Maybeck said.

“Stand by.”

Box by box, wire by wire, Philby ticked off its purpose. Then he hit a stack of router-size black boxes he couldn't explain.

“You're wearing your DHI costume?”

“Yeah,” Maybeck said.

“Take off your shirt,” Philby said.

“Say what?”

“Your shirt. Now!”

“Okay…it's off. But for the record, this is kinky.”

Philby told him to check the seams of the shirt for a bump, something hard.

Several decks below, Maybeck's fingers stopped abruptly.

“Got it.”

“Small. Maybe half an inch?”

“Correct,” Maybeck said.

“Strip,” Philby said.

“You need to get out more.”

“Seriously! Lose the costume.”

“Dude…”

“The laundry tags the costumes with radio frequency identification. Most of the hotels use the same technology to track sheets and towels. My guess is security realized they could use it to keep track of the peewees on board—no more lost kids. But it could also be used to follow the movement of anyone wearing a crew costume. Our costumes are assigned. Remember the laundry check-in back in Canaveral? They swiped each piece of clothing. So if you lose the costume, whoever's tracking you loses you.”

“I'm supposed to bomb around in my
underwear
?”

“There are towels on the pool decks, if that'll help. I don't care what you wear, just don't wear your Keepers costume.”

“But you guys are!”

“We're holograms. You're not. Lose the clothes and get your butt down to the engine deck.”

“The engine deck?”

“There's a stairway off I-95. I can unlock doors for you as necessary.” Philby began typing into the terminal. “My guess is, our friends are going to need backup.”

* * *

“He thinks it's the engine room,” Finn said, reading from his phone.

“Thinks?” Willa inquired.

Finn jumped up and pressed the LL button on the freight elevator. Lower Level.

“We'll have to take stairs from there,” Willa said, having memorized the ship's map. “Thinks?” she repeated.

“How should I know?” Finn said. “It's not the galleys, that's for sure.”

“The engine room will be hot,” she said. “Tia Dalma.”

“The OT server has a cooler,” Finn said. “It fits.”

Willa led the way out of the elevator to a steep staircase that turned back on itself repeatedly. Down they went.

With each landing, the whirring grew louder.

Willa paused at the door.

“You ready?”

Finn shook his head no, his hologram shoes welded to the floor.

“Finn!”

“I've been here,” he said.

“You think too much!”

She heaved open the heavy door. A blast of stuffy heat engulfed them.

The area was spit-shine clean, surprising him, every machine painted and polished. The area was beyond enormous, stretching most of the length of the ship, with bulkheads at regular intervals. There were myriad valves and signs and levers and switches.

Finn checked his Wave Phone. A miracle! He looked up curiously. “How can we possibly have a signal down here?”

Willa pointed above the open hatch in the bulkhead, where a number of small boxes with antennas were mounted. “Wireless access points. So their guys can stay in the loop.”

He texted:
where now?


stand by
, Philby wrote back.

“It's like a factory,” Finn said.

“It's an electric ship. You know that, right?”

He'd never given it any thought.

“They have three massive generators down here, any one of which can create enough electricity to power a small city. Most of it goes to the electric motors that spin the propellers. The rest is used by all of us: lights, air conditioning, the galleys, electronics. Every cruise ship is a floating power plant.”

Finn felt a chill. Excluding the Base, the most recent battle against the Overtakers had been waged at a power generation facility.

“Another power play?” she said.

The Overtakers had long since figured out that with holograms being projections of light, and therefore the product of electricity, she who controls the electricity, including its generation, is the one in control.

“Do you think they mean to take the entire ship hostage?” Willa asked.

“No idea.”

“The server is small. With some kind of cooling device, still no bigger than a trumpet case.”

The two took in the size of the engine deck for a second time. The task ahead seemed daunting, the area to search nearly infinite.

“We could be here weeks,” she said.

“You're the brainiac. So where do you hide Tia Dalma, if you hide her down here? Where do you locate the server?”

“It's an amazing place to hide anything,” she said. “Perfect. You could hide a car down here.”

“They're not hiding a car. A woman. A witch doctor. Who knows why they wanted her on board, but I'll tell you one thing: she would make a heck of a gatekeeper. With her ability to cast spells, who's going to get past her to the server?”

“A pair of 2.0 holograms, I'm thinking,” Willa said.

“You got that right.”

“It has to be well ventilated, away from the center aisle, and not easy to find. And you may be right: if we find Tia Dalma, maybe we find the server.”

“I can smell it,” he said.

“Actually,” she said, “I think that's the machinery.”

* * *

“I'm telling you, I know this place,” Finn said, leaning into Willa so as to be heard.

“Can we discuss this another time? I'm thinking they must have control rooms down here, and emergency exits—sealable doors leading out of this place, and more stairways like the one we came down. It's huge. Has to be.”

“Then that's where we'll start.”

“A control room makes the most sense, but you see those blue wires along the wall there? Ethernet. Any one of those could be spliced and the server put between them. It's really not rocket science to hang a server off a local area network. So…”

“It could be anywhere.”

“You got it. But not her. If they're hiding her down here, it's going to be on the other side of a door. Some kind of door. That's what we're looking for.”

“Split up?”

“I don't want to,” she said. “But I don't see much choice.”

“No,” Finn said.

They agreed to preset their Wave Phones to text the other with a call for help and to keep their phones in hand so they could fire off the text as quickly as they spotted trouble. Finn held up his phone as if it were a pact between them, a common bond, the thing that linked them.

She held up hers, and Finn thought of swords and knights and epic battles and how in their own way, now as holograms and with Wave Phones, they weren't so very different.

“Be safe,” he said.

She nodded. She looked sad and close to tears.

A few minutes later, having stepped through the emergency door into the next section of the engine deck, his head began to clear. Or maybe it was that his memory took hold. Or it was even possible that something visual triggered the clarity. But whatever the case, the haze slowly lifted. And he remembered.

It wasn't that he knew this place, was simply familiar with it, but that he'd been here. Right here. Right where he was standing.

Which was impossible, but nonetheless, somehow true.

He felt a tingle sweep through him. Reached out to touch a nearby pipe, and his hand made contact. Tried his hand again. This time, he swiped through the pipe. He still had full control of 2.0.

His eyes staying with the telltale blue Ethernet cables neatly strung to his right, he moved toward the stern, the sounds of machinery growing so loud that he felt it in his ankles, shins, and even his jawbone.

His Wave Phone buzzed. A text from Philby.

75' from stern, starboard side


There was yet another bulkhead thirty feet in front of him. Yet another safety door. He estimated Philby's location point just beyond that door.

Confident that Philby had texted them both, Finn nonetheless resent it to Willa along with the words:

going in


He stepped through to the final section. Up ahead, an eighteen-inch-diameter steel driveshaft spun on bushings. It looked to be fifty feet long, mounted into a monstrous motor the size of a small house.

Finn saw the spot now, along the starboard hull: a narrow steel box like the electrical transformer outside his house, but much bigger. A steel room with a single door and a hundred fat wires running into it—including blue Ethernet cables. Its location fit Philby's description.

Making it even more likely as a hiding place for Tia Dalma was how difficult it was to reach. Finn followed a catwalk to his right, then squeezed between two warm humming blocks of metal, ducked under a pipe with gauges, under a second pipe, and back onto a section of catwalk, now facing the door. He spun around once, quickly, like a practiced ballerina.

He'd been sure he would have faced crash-test dummies or rescue dummies or hyenas or OTKs.

Nothing. No one.

He inched toward the door.

Arriving, heart thumping wildly in his chest, he paused to collect himself. “Let the DHI lead the way,” he reminded himself. “You are nothing but light, so nothing can harm you. If nothing can harm you, nothing should frighten you.” A lot of nothing, but it had worked in the past.

Gone was concern about Amanda, or Storey. Gone was thought of his mother's curse. Gone was the anxiety over needing to solve the cryptic puzzles in the journal. Gone was worry about leadership and whether he was doing a good job. Gone was the thought of failure or that anything or anyone could contaminate him. He was light, the product of pure power; he had no equal.

He turned the handle.

T
ia Dalma sat on a makeshift throne. The power center—for it was some kind of humming collection of all things electric—was insanely hot and dimly lit. It smelled of incense, and birds, and of things earthy and dark and nasty.

Her rich brown skin shimmered with sweat, her eye sockets charcoal pools. She had two gold teeth, a nose ring, myriad loops in her ears. She held a black wooden staff, its carving reminding him of Jafar's, and he warned himself not to let whatever happened next frighten him in any way. It was just another Disney attraction, this experience. It all came down to perspective.

She clapped lifelessly. “Well done!” She exhaled slowly. “Quite surprised. Quite surprised, indeed.”

Behind her, encased in a Plexiglas box with a cooling compressor on top, were four rack-mounted Sun computers and a like number of Cisco boxes, lights flashing. The OT server.

“You'll excuse me, please.” Finn walked straight toward where she sat in a chair high atop a bank of large batteries that formed an elevated platform. He saw her astonishment at his brazenness as he reached her. He passed through her. She turned in her chair, climbed half out of it in order to observe him.

“You come back here, boy!”

Finn studied the four interconnected servers. An oversize USB thumb drive was plugged into the bottom Sun console. “Nice gear,” he said, opening the box's door.

He heard her chanting something at once rhythmic and hypnotic, but didn't focus on it, didn't give it weight to where the spell might take hold.

The spell didn't stick.

He pulled out the thumb drive.

She cried out at him. It was a nasty, evil-laced harangue. Just as he reached for the top server, Finn felt his joints freeze. The spell had taken hold. She uncoiled off her improvised throne and came alongside the statue of Finn's sparkling, but corrupted, hologram.

“What should I do with you for all the trouble you've caused me? Hmm? Little boys shouldn't play with fire…” She waved her hand; it lit on fire as it passed Finn's face, then extinguished. “Sometimes it's best to step back and get out of the way. A lesson you never learned, poor boy. A lesson now to be learned the hard way.”

She reached out and plucked the thumb drive from Finn's frozen grasp. “We can't have you having that, I'm sorry to say. And let me make something perfectly clear: I don't go in for all this techno mumbo jumbo. Give me a good old incantation. A conjure. Why, there's more power in the spirits of the bayou than in all the generators in this ship combined. But…I can adapt. I can play along. Hmm?” She stared at the thumb drive in the palm of her hand as if it were an insect she was considering crushing. Spiders crept out from her burlap shirt, squeezing through the dozen beaded necklaces she wore, and hurried down the length of her arm, surrounding the small drive. First three or four. Then more like twenty. The skin on her face moved fluidly, like hot lava.

Finn thought he might be sick.

Professor Philby had educated him on how to crash the servers. Water or any fluid was the preferred method. But equally incapacitating was to run electrical current through the Ethernet port—a port rarely considered when it came to surge suppression. Because the servers were daisy-chained one to the next, a single Ethernet cable would do. Movement returned to his eyes and mouth. He could feel his tongue. Whatever she'd conjured was wearing off—or, and he hoped this was more likely the case, 2.0 was giving him power. In any event, he was coming back, and Tia Dalma was none the wiser.

“A time and place fer everyting,” she growled. Such a low voice for a woman. “Wouldn't you agree? We all have our roles to play. Some small.” She looked at him. “Some large.” She swept a hand out in a partial curtsy to indicate herself. “You have had your time. Now we goin' have ours. You see, boy, knowledge is overrated. 'Tis shaped by history. Da two are one. So, of course, dat is where one must start: at da seat of knowledge.”

The library, Finn was thinking. His toes tingled. He could feel his hands.

“You know dem Louisiana cicadas—da bug, da insect—only present demselves once every thirteen years? We are like that. We have patience. We await our moment to return. Your world…yours, boy…has lost its way. Time for some Order. Capital O.” She sucked in a lungful of air through whistling nostrils. “Our time has come.”

He worked 2.0 like the clutch of a car: engine engaged, engine not engaged. Hologram on. Hologram off. Pivoted and clapped his hand down onto her open palm, crushing the spiders and snatching the thumb drive. Reached
through
her chest, his hand out her back, and then turned his hand solid––a move that was incredibly painful for them both.

He swung her to the side and switched back to hologram, letting her go. Tia Dalma flew against the wall and sank to the floor, clutching her heart where Finn's arm had been inside her.

He tore loose an Ethernet cable, stuck its plastic clip into his mouth, and bit down hard. Drew the cable of loose wires from his lips and spit out the clip. There were five or six tiny wires. He twisted them into two pigtails a half inch apart.

A semiconscious Tia Dalma lifted her arm, and Finn saw her lips move—another curse coming.

From behind Finn, Willa flew across the room and shoved an oily rag in the witch doctor's mouth. She grabbed hold of Tia Dalma's many necklaces, twisted, and hauled the weakened witch to her feet, then hooked the necklaces on a pipe valve. She took off the witch's waist sash and was tying her hands behind her back as Finn shoved the bare wires into an electrical outlet, throwing up a shower of sparks. Smoke wafted from all four servers.

Then the lights went out—he'd tripped a breaker.

His own hologram sparkled. He was half solid, half light.

Willa lost hold of the witch's arms. She felt a withered hand at her throat.

“Finn!” she gasped.

Go full hologram! she was thinking, not understanding how 2.0 had failed her.

From outside the partially open door, emergency floodlights came on. In the sliver of light, an electricity-stunned Finn could see the semi-hologram of Willa off her feet in the clutches of a wild woman. The veins in Tia Dalma's neck bulged, and her face went several shades darker as she choked on the necklaces. Willa danced herself backward, tightening the chokehold.

The electrical shock had done something strange to Finn. He'd flickered between 2.0 and human sixty times in less than a second. It was like trying to restart an Xbox too quickly. The effect was nauseating, phenomenally painful, and dreamlike—ripe with hallucination. He felt something primal, something deep within him, change with this altered state. At first he thought he might die. Then he realized, no, he would live. But it was like he inhabited someone else's body. Like he wasn't himself. He felt bigger, stronger. He felt more in control than he'd ever felt in his life. He felt…

Dangerous.

He marched over to Tia Dalma, picked her up—breaking the woman's hold on Willa—and cast her aside like an empty bag of luggage.

Philby.

“Finn?” Willa gasped. She obviously either saw or sensed something different in him as well. He didn't have time to reflect on such nonsense.

“We must go,” he said, wondering who'd said it. It didn't sound like his voice. “No,” he corrected, turning toward the fallen witch. He stomped over to her without the slightest tremor of fear or concern—who was he?—and took hold of her as she had held Willa, lifting her off her feet.

“Release my mother,” he said. He tightened his grip.

“Finn!”

“Release her, or I swear by all things holy I'll snap your neck like a twig.” He eased Tia Dalma to the deck. “Right…now!” he said.

The sound of quick-moving feet on the steel-grate catwalks.

“Finn…”

Tia Dalma and Finn were locked in a staring contest. “Release her now…or I'll kill you.” Was this him saying this? He'd never considered killing anything beyond a mosquito before. And yet…he knew he meant what he said.

And so, apparently, did Tia Dalma. She nodded. Her lips began moving silently.

“Any tricks, and they will be your last. You cannot harm me. You cannot reach me.” Again, he wondered who was speaking. Such confidence! Wayne had lectured him for years about leadership, about strength and courage and their differences. This new feeling he recognized as strength, unbending and willful.

Dangerous, he reminded himself.

He tightened his chokehold.

“Finn…” Willa's voice. “They're coming.”

“Do it!” he said, shaking Tia Dalma by her neck. She fought to nod.

“It's…done…” she gasped. “Undone.”

He dropped her like a stone. “You have had your time,” he said, quoting her. “And just FYI: cicadas are commonly eaten by birds or wasps. They don't last more than three to four weeks.” He showed Willa the thumb drive in his hand. “Let's go,” he said.

Out they went, into the roar of the motors and generators, out into the harsh emergency lighting that cast shadows as they ran. They turned toward the ship's bow, hearing the scurrying scratching of paws on metal behind them, like a dog that missed its turn on a hardwood floor. Sliding. Colliding.

It must have been the change in lighting, Finn thought. That or the sound of the paws. Or maybe it was this steroidlike, super-size, pumped-up pressurization that created this sense of invincibility within him. But he knew now why he'd earlier sensed a familiarity to it all.

The jump. Or future sight. Or whatever had happened to him after he and Willa had witnessed the theft of the journal. He'd been here: right here. The hyenas after them in the factory. But it wasn't a factory—it was the engine deck of the
Dream
, and they were reliving it now.

Reliving it for real this time.

The hyenas struggled with the ladderway, leaping and slipping, buying Willa and Finn a precious lead they did not squander.

“My mother's safe!” Finn shouted.

“The server's dead, and the OTKs down—at least for the moment,” she hollered back.

They reached I-95—the crew hallway—and headed for the doors to the ship stairs. So early in the morning, the hallway was empty—that is, until four drooling hyenas appeared behind them.

“Run!” Willa said, switching on the afterburners and leading Finn by five strides. Finn too dialed up a higher gear, catching her effortlessly and pulling ahead. He reached and held the door for her.

“What was that?” Willa panted, fleeing past him.

Finn smiled, ducked through the doors.

“Here!” she said, indicating a piece of furniture along the wall. “We can block…” She grunted as Finn reached the other side of it. “Darn it!” she said. “It's bolted to…”

Finn tore it from the wall effortlessly. The bolts pulled through the wood, leaving torn holes. He paused and looked down at his own two arms, not believing he'd done this.

Willa looked gray—ready to pass out. “Who are you?”

“Quickly!” he said.

They dragged the cabinet to the doors and blocked it just as the hyenas collided. The cabinet bounced away an inch.

“It won't hold,” Finn said.

“I've got it.” It was Maybeck, wearing a towel around his waist. “Don't ask,” he said, leaning into the door. “If they bust through, I'll hide behind the door. I'll be fine. Just go.”

Finn nodded. “Thanks.” He led the way up the stairs.

Leading, he thought.

By the time they reached the landing to Deck 3, the hyenas could be heard panting close behind, their paws digging at the carpeting as they climbed.

Out onto the jogging track of Deck 4, the memory of his “dream” becoming all the more real.

The
Dream
, he realized.

“This is not good,” he called to her. “I know how this ends.”

“How can you possibly—”

They ran hard toward the stern, but here came the hyenas like four bolts of lightning. The gap was closing. Unlike Finn's dream, it seemed obvious the hyenas were going to win this one. They would be eaten.

An ear-piercing whistle.

The sound of the hyenas' claws skidding.

Finn glanced over his shoulder.

There, not twenty yards back, stood three girls, shoulder to shoulder. Amanda…Jess…and the girl with the red-dyed hair. He wanted to call out a warning—the girl was an OTK! But his eyes stuck on Amanda. His throat was tight. This girl…what she meant to him…just like at Typhoon Lagoon, she always seemed to appear at the just the right moment.

Then the hyenas were at it again. The whistle had bought Willa and Finn just enough of a lead. He looked down into his own hand—the thumb drive he held looked just like the Return, but it wasn't the Return as he'd once imagined.

Whatever the drive contained, he couldn't allow it to be lost at sea with him and Willa.

“Get…us…out…of…here!” she cried.