Revolution (9 page)

Lifting the lighter higher to examine the manhole cover, he discovered dirt and slime caked into the edges where the cracks used to be. His fingernails desperately scraped at the dirt and slime coating the edges of the cover. He scraped until his fingers bled as the water lifted above his waist.

    Flicking off the lighter, Rayne used its sharp edge to scrape at the dirt caked around the edges of the manhole cover. Every so often he would pound on the cover with his right hand to see if it had loosened, but it hadn’t. The water lifted to his chest.

Screaming with frustration, Rayne realized how close he was to making an escape, but couldn’t. Bloody fingers clenched the lighter in a death grip as he desperately scraped away the dirt and grime imbedded in the edges. Slimy flakes of dirt drifted down over his fingers. A bloody finger flicked the lighter again when the water reached neck level. Most of the dirt and slime was gone from the edges. Bracing his back against the wall, he locked his feet onto a ladder rung and pushed upward on the cover with both hands.

    Rayne focused all his remaining strength on pushing upwards. The cover still didn’t budge as the water reached his nostrils. His hands continued to push. Peter thought he could feel the metal cover giving way slightly, but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t his overworked imagination.

When the water finally covered him completely, he held his breath and continued to push. The water had reached the actual cover, but his bloody hands still continued to push relentlessly against the metal surface. Rayne thought he could feel the metal giving way slightly, but it still held. Water pressure built up around him as the rising water ran out of places to go. Pushing again, he felt the cover give way.

    A rush of elation swept through his mind as the cover tumbled onto the street with a harsh clanging sound. Rayne set his feet securely on a ladder rung and pushed upwards, lifting his head out of the water. Cold air caressed his face like a lover. He grabbed the edge of the street with both hands and pushed up until he was waist level with the swirling black water. He dragged himself out and rolled onto the street.

    Rayne lay on his back in a puddle of slimy water and stared up at the clear night sky. A cloud floated across a crescent moon high above him as his lungs gasped for air. He continued to stare upward at the starry sky and cough out wastewater as precious air filled his lungs.

    When Rayne felt his breath return, he sat up. He was sitting in a puddle next to the flooded manhole in the middle of a dark street surrounded by towering eight-story tenement buildings. Water was still pouring out of the manhole and flooding the street.

The luminous crescent moon cast bizarre shadows of buildings and fire escapes across the wide street, giving the environment a surreal quality as if he was in a shadow world. There were no people in sight and the area was completely still and quiet with only the dull noise of distant traffic in the background. Rayne stood, shaking and dripping wastewater onto the street as he made his way toward the nearest alleyway.

Chapter 9

     Campion had lied when she told her Assistant Director that she had figured out a way of getting around the capitol city’s elaborate security systems. Aside from vague thoughts about the government’s high-tech theme park, Virtual-world, she didn’t have any real ideas. The fact was that it seemed impossible to get past the high-tech systems. If they were not able to breach the island’s security, her organization didn’t have a chance to finish what it started.

    Campion finished another set of curls and stared at the ceiling.

   
The most
important quality a leader must possess is acting skill
, she decided, rubbing her chin while she stared at the white plaster surface.

    As long as I continue to act confident and take risks, some of which pay off, people will listen to me and continue to follow my orders. That’s why I can’t allow my current
indecisiveness to be revealed to anyone
.

    For almost two hours Campion worked out at a frantic pace in her private gym and tried to think of an answer to the current crisis. Her muscles were exhausted, but her mind was still fevered.

    She needed inspiration. Whenever she needed inspiration, she turned to the Classics. Campion enjoyed the irony of being the leader of a violent organization, while still appreciating the finer things in life like classic art and literature.

    Jane showered quickly and returned to her office. Her library of classic literature occupied an entire wall. The rest of the available space on the walls contained paintings by her favorite artists. She thought it was important for the leader of any organization to be versatile and well educated.

    Ironically, Campion was an expert in Classic Literature. She taught for six years at the city’s public schools until she was laid off in the recession of 2045. All the public schools in the country were privatized that year in response to unprecedented federal and state deficits. The bailout for the pharmaceutical industry alone in 2094 had cost the public nine-hundred-billion dollars, which pumped up the deficit to unheard of levels.

    When the public schools closed, a lot of young people couldn’t afford to go to private schools.  Naturally, the nation’s crime rate increased dramatically. President Frump passed the Justice Reform Act the next year in response to the crisis. The JRA Act of 2046 federalized the nation’s local police forces into a single national police organization. The Act diverted national defense money into the new force to give them state-of-the-art equipment to fight crime. The modern “Shock Troopers” were born: heavily armored and armed to the teeth.

    Jobs were plentiful in the new Federal Police Force, so Jane tried her luck and applied. She was hired and sent to the Academy. She worked for three years as a Federal Police Officer or “Shock Trooper” and learned many combat skills in the Inner City war zones. She became increasingly disillusioned with society as she responded to more and more violent calls in Inner City.

    After two years on the force, Campion started drinking heavily in the Club District on the outskirts of Inner City. By accident, she encountered a member of the Freedom Underground at a bar, who thought she would make a good addition to the organization. At first, she used her position as a Federal Police Officer for espionage work. Eventually, it became too dangerous and she had to resign.

    After three years as a cop, she went to work full-time for the Underground. Several missions later, her combat experience and adroit mission performance moved her quickly up the hierarchy. She was as surprised as anyone when the last commander died during a mission and she was told she was next in line.

    With the recent setbacks, she had struck a brick wall and needed to think outside the box for a solution. The only inspiration she could think of was the classic literature she loved so long ago when she was a teacher in the public schools. In times of crisis, she instinctively returned to the arms of her old love for solace and inspiration. She walked to the long bookcase at the back of the office and scanned it. Something caught her eye.

    Shakespeare. Henry V.

    Henry V was the English warrior-king who faced the impossible challenge of conquering and overthrowing the country of France. Campion wished this historical figure would give her some ideas about conquering and overthrowing the government of her own country. She thumbed through the play, scanning some of her favorite underlined passages.   

   
We want to breach our enemies’ fortifications, so what’s more appropriate than Act III, scene i of Shakespeare’s Henry V:

Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more,

Or fill up the wall with our English dead.

In peace, there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility:

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger.

   
That’s a great inspirational speech to give if we were about to attack New Washington, but it doesn’t help me with what I’m trying to do.
   

    Campion continued to read from Shakespeare’s works, trading in one play for another as she anxiously flipped through the pages. After several hours, she found that she had gone through all the histories and tragedies.

   
This isn’t good. I’m stuck with the
romances and the comedies
.

    Campion grabbed Shakespeare’s comedy,
As You Like It,
from the shelf and sat down in her office chair. She leaned back with resignation and began scanning the play. If she couldn’t find any inspiration, she could at least distract herself with some good reading. She opened to a page at random and read it.

    “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players,”
she read.
“They have
their exits and their entrances and one man in his time, plays many parts.”
She closed the book and rubbed her temples.

     The world is a stage and the people are merely actors in it. That pretty much sums up my position in this organization as Chief Actor, but how is that going to help me? The only place I can think of where the world really is a giant stage is Virtual-world. The only actors in it are completely artificial; androids and robots. From what I’ve heard about the park, they don’t act very well…

    Suddenly, Campion sat upright in the chair and stared at a painting on the wall by Marcel Duchamps. Her eyes traced the mechanical design of the android-like figure in the painting walking down a flight of stairs in multiple perspectives. Her vision darted to the next painting by Duchamps on the wall, which showed a design resembling an elaborate piece of machinery harboring a maze of wires, circuits, screens and zig-zagging pipes.

The images of machine art made her think of something one of her spies told her about the captured blueprints of the underground bunker beneath the city of New Washington.

    The spy was also an engineer who pointed out that when the high-tech amusement park was constructed, it required an enormous amount of power to operate. It would have been prohibitively expensive to siphon power from mainland generators or to construct a generator in the park itself. It was easier for the park builders to drill underground, go beneath the city wall and connect the amusement park’s power conduits to the underground nuclear reactor.

It made sense because the reactor already powered up the command bunker and the rest of New Washington. In order to maintain the power conduits, they had to set up an elaborate maze of underground maintenance passages beneath the amusement park, which led under the city wall to the nuclear reactor. The reactor was connected directly to the supposedly impenetrable bunker.    

    Jane couldn’t imagine the difficulty of getting a spy into the maintenance corridors beneath the amusement park, and from there to the reactor, and then finally the bunker. They didn’t have blueprints for the maintenance passages or the reactor. The bunker itself was known as being impregnable. Of course, that meant impregnable from the outside; from the city itself, not from its own nuclear reactor. The maintenance corridors would have to run both ways, from the reactor to the amusement park and from the reactor to the bunker.

    But what would an agent do once he/she was inside the bunker?

    It was probably loaded with security cameras and personnel like the city above. Jane decided she would worry about that later. At least she had a plan now. Whether it worked or not was irrelevant. She had a direction she could lead her people in and that was what mattered.

    Campion stood from her chair and walked over to an intercom on the wall. She pushed the button that connected her with Rick Connelly’s private quarters.

    “Hey, Rick, you in there?” she asked.

    A few seconds elapsed and a reluctant voice answered.

    “Yeah, I was about to go to sleep. It’s almost midnight,” Rick said, sighing.

    “Forget sleep. I want a meeting with our engineers and tactical people scheduled for 12:30 AM.”

    “Some of them are in the capitol city.”

    “Recall them. I know how to get into the command bunker under New Washington.”

********

    Rayne couldn’t believe his luck. Not only had he escaped the sewers, but he was also closer to his apartment. The unplanned shortcut was significant because of the cold temperature, which threatened to freeze his drenched clothing to his body. After walking for another ten minutes, he turned his key in the deadbolt lock on the door of his tenement apartment.

    In his haste to get inside, Peter forgot he was still soaked with wastewater. His wet jacket still had a thin layer of ice on the surface. If the walk had been any longer, he probably would have frozen to death. The soaked clothing felt heavy and unnatural on his body.

    Rayne shut the door, bolted it, and pulled off the heavy clothing. Taking off his jacket, Rayne felt a hard object in one of the inner pockets. He reached into the pocket and pulled out Prince’s computer. The palm-sized computer felt cold, but it still appeared functional. He walked over to the coffee table in the living room and placed the small computer on it.