The Society (A Broken World Book 1) (20 page)

Brennan wasn't wearing any kind of designer scent, but he didn't need one any more than he needed a suit. He smelled like himself. Like harsh soap, hot metal and machine oil. He smelled like industry, and that was a much headier scent than I'd expected it to be. With anyone else I would have immediately pulled back as soon as I had my feet back underneath me, but this time I let myself linger there as he slowly withdrew his arms.

When contact between us finally broke, I shook myself. "It's fine. I should have been paying closer attention to the stairs. I can't be a very good bodyguard if I can't even keep my feet under me."

We resumed walking down the stairs, hit the first landing, and doubled back several times before arriving at the bottom floor. I tapped the concrete wall next to me and tried to get back into character.

"What is this place? Your workshop? Doesn't having it so far underground make it hard to bring supplies down?"

Brennan nodded. "Yeah, it can't be helped though. This is the only way to make sure that nobody can spy on my work."

We were standing before another door. Brennan unlocked it, and then we were inside his workshop and I was having a hard time breathing. So many months of training, years of proving myself loyal to the Society, and it was finally happening. I could see the generator dominating the center of the space in front of me.

Luckily Brennan attributed my speechlessness to something else.

"I always feel the same way when I come down here. So many pre-Desolation artifacts gathered in one place. It's awe-inspiring."

"I don't understand. Where did you find all of this stuff, Brennan? I thought that nearly everything from before the Desolation had been destroyed."

"Nearly everything
was
destroyed. Electromagnetic pulses took out almost all of the electronics, but some stuff survived. Things that were buried far enough underground, or that were stored in Faraday cages were safe from the EMP, but even then most of those installations were destroyed by the high-altitude bombs. The ants had near-perfect penetration of the military organizations of all of the major powers of the day, but there were still some small countries that stockpiled supplies and equipment in locations that the ants didn't know about."

I shook my head, still not understanding. "But how did you find them? More importantly, how did you get them transported here? Everyone knows that the ants have completely shut down travel outside of the cities."

"I wish I could answer all of your questions, Skye, but that isn't my secret to tell. Suffice it to say that I'm the heir to a priceless legacy. More effort than I can comprehend went into hunting down this machinery, and enormous risks were taken to get it all moved here."

"It's impossible. I know that I'm seeing it with my own eyes, but it still feels impossible. Are you sure that you didn't just invent all of this yourself?"

That earned me another smile. "I know how you feel, but no, I didn't create most of the contents of this room. This is what I'm working towards though. The tools down here are letting me progress much faster than I otherwise could have, but every time I fire them up I know there's a chance that they're going to break on me. That's why I'm working so hard to create a decent tech base."

"No wonder you have so much security in place. The other warlords could never hope to utilize the stuff you have down here, but they wouldn't be above destroying it just so that their rivals couldn't get their hands on it."

"Yeah. To be honest though, the other warlords and gang leaders are the least of my worries in that area. If the ants knew I had all of this they would probably level the entire city if that's what it took to make sure this tech can't be used."

I wanted to keep walking, wanted to get closer to the generator, but I wasn't sure the person I was pretending to be would realize that was Brennan's crown jewel.

"Brennan, why am I down here? I mean doesn't this violate every security protocol you have? Wouldn't you have just been better off leaving me upstairs with the other two?"

"Yeah, but I'm not the one who instigated the protocols. Tyrell and Jax aren't going to be particularly happy about me bringing you down here, but they were the ones who insisted that I always have at least one other person down here with me. I could've brought Alan down. He's been with me almost as long as Jax, so he is the next logical person to be brought into the inner circle, but that wouldn't have been in keeping with the front we're trying to present to the outside world. If you and I were…dating…then I wouldn't have left you up there with the others."

He gave me a nervous shrug and then started off towards the generator, motioning for me to follow. "This is what I've been thinking about almost non-stop for the last two days."

"What is it?"

"Something new. Everything else I've accomplished here so far has just been rediscovering something somebody else invented centuries ago. This, though, this is something that has the potential to change everything. It's a new kind of generator, one that will make energy the next best thing to free."

It was time to play dumb. "Don't you already have that? I mean, with the geothermal plants that you've built here? Now that they are up and running the ongoing maintenance is basically zero."

"No, it's not comparable. There are only a few places on this continent where the ground gets hot enough quickly enough to make drilling for geothermal energy feasible. Even here, it took us months to get even just the first-stage power generation working. When you add in all of the raw materials for the pipes and everything else, our phase one generator was a ridiculous investment that we made only because there wasn't any other way to get the power we needed. This will use a fraction of the resources to build, and once it's up and running will produce four hundred times as much power."

"How is that even possible?"

"It's an antimatter generator. The math is ridiculously complex, but the basic idea is that under the right circumstances certain elements will break down into matter and antimatter. When that happens free energy is sucked out of the surrounding environment. That cooling effect will form one stage of the power generation. Kind of the opposite of what we're doing with the geothermal installation in the bore. The real kicker, though, is that it should be possible to channel the antimatter into a special chamber with magnetic fields where it can then be annihilated against regular matter."

I had to force my mouth closed. The Skye whom Brennan thought I was never could have understood what he was talking about, but the one from the Society could almost grasp the edges of what he was trying to tell me.

If the reactions he was talking about all happened inside of a small enough space, there would be no net energy generated because the heat sucked out of the surrounding environment when the matter and antimatter were split would just be put back into the environment when antimatter collided with some other bit of matter.

By doing what he was doing, Brennan was creating a temperature difference between the two stages of power generation, which would allow him to generate something that for all intents and purposes looked like free energy. No wonder the Citizen-President had been so worried about this device.

Once again, Brennan misinterpreted my silence. He turned around and grabbed my hands like a little boy who'd just been told that Christmas was arriving twice this year.

"This will change everything, Skye. Energy is a cost, an input, into everything we do. The food we grow, the clothes we wear, the steel required to build this building, it all required energy to bring it to pass—often at multiple stages of the creation process. If energy gets cheaper, then everything else gets cheaper too. Rebuilding civilization is going to be unimaginably expensive, but this generator is going to reduce the costs in a major way. It will cut decades, or maybe even more, out of the process."

I looked into his eyes and smiled, faking an excitement that I didn't actually feel. I was no closer to unlocking the secret of Brennan's real intentions, but I finally understood just how high the stakes really were.

Chapter 14

Brennan pulled a chair up for me next to his work area and got started fitting something round to an arm-like protrusion on the top of the machine. I watched him work for two hours and was astonished by two observations.

The first was just how lost he became in his work. It was like nothing else but the generator existed.

He finished fitting the round part onto the generator and then went over to some of the machinery mounted against the wall and began fabricating a long copper coil. I was pretty sure that was going to end up with a current running through it so that it could serve as a magnetic conduit for the antimatter, but I couldn't ask—not without betraying too much interest.

The second observation was the fact that Brennan didn't seem to be working from any written notes. It seemed incredible that he could construct something so complex from memory, but it was hard to argue with my own eyes.

It wasn't until he sighed and set down the copper coil that I finally dared ask. "Are you really doing all of this from memory?"

"Not exactly." He pointed over at a heavy steel cabinet. "I've got plans locked away over there, but they are all encoded, so I tend not to use them unless I don't have any other choice."

"You're worried about someone stealing your idea?"

He double-checked that the machines he'd been using were powered down, and then nodded. "Yes, but even if someone managed to make it through all of my security it still wouldn't do them any good. My notes are useless unless you know the set of rotating constants that I multiply my calculations by."

I faked a smile and nodded. "That's good. So all you have to worry about is someone stealing the generator itself."

"Yeah, only that's going to be a lot harder than it sounds. It's going to take a lot of disassembly to get it through the door at this point, and once it's up and running it's going to be full of anti-matter, so disassembling it without knowing what you're doing will result in an explosion big enough to take out the entire city block."

Brennan gave the generator one last pat. "As much as I'd like to stay down here all day and make more progress on this beast, we'd better go back upstairs. There isn't a ton more I can do on it without the rest of the steel and copper I still need from the foundry. If I want to finish the generator, I'll need to put in the time to get the foundry back up and running."

I followed Brennan over to the door, and then waited as he shut off the lights inside of the workshop before leading me into the dim stairwell. I was trying to be more careful, but despite that I still misjudged one of the steps halfway up and stumbled again. Brennan's arm once again snaked around my waist, offering support at the same time that it pulled me in closer to him.

I didn't complain, even though he didn't release me until we were all the way up to the top of the stairs. It was odd—I was the one with cutting-edge nanites flowing through my bloodstream and an assault rifle hanging from a sling, but he somehow made me feel safer with just his touch.

We picked up Alan and the other guy—Chell—and then headed upstairs. I was surprised when our destination turned out to be one of the older buildings in the compound. I'd been expecting Brennan to lead us back into the bore so that we could go help with the foundry, but instead he'd led us to the textiles factory.

A tired-looking Lexis met us a few feet inside of the door. "Her clothes aren't ready for you yet, Brennan, if that's what you're here for."

The words could have been taken as an insult—some of Lexis' previous employers probably would have taken them that way—but Brennan didn't seem to mind.

"You know me better than that. I'm not here to bust your chops over a new outfit."

"Do I? If you wanted to get right down to it, all I do here is make new outfits, so every time you've come over here to bust my chops it has been over a new outfit of some kind or another. Technically speaking."

Brennan stopped looking around at the factory floor and focused on Lexis. "What's going on, Lexis? This isn't like you."

"The main drive belt is weeks overdue getting replaced. The power outage when the foundry blew put us behind schedule, which means that we're going to miss our delivery window for the latest shipment of textiles, and there isn't anything I can do about it."

"Damn it, I should have remembered that was one of the things that Piter didn't deliver. You should have said something, Lexis."

She shook her head at him, and then pulled him towards a small office over in the corner of the building. "Saying something wouldn't have made any difference, Brennan, and you know it. This whole thing is one giant, rickety cart with four loose wheels that might come off at any moment.

"The foundry being down means that we've got fewer goods to export to the surrounding territories. We are a long way from being self-sufficient, which means that the rest of us have to pick up the slack. If we shut down textiles production then you're not going to have anything left to trade Piter and the rest, which means that you're not going to be able to get me a replacement drive belt."

Brennan was starting to get angry—maybe the only time I'd seen him angry since I'd arrived. His anger wasn't a hot flash, it was a slow, white-hot force of nature that I could tell he was having a hard time containing.

"Lexis, you don't get to make that call. If that belt goes it could destroy the surrounding machinery—or even worse, it could kill someone. I know you're concerned, but it's my job to make these kinds of calls, not yours. If we're that far past the scheduled replacement date, then Tyrell or I need to be over here at least twice a day to check on things and make sure that the belt is still holding up."

"And then you'll shut me down, at which point you'll be out of trade goods."

"There's still fresh produce—hell, if necessary I can always trade Piter more ammunition. I'm not losing another person to a needless accident. We lose too many to the ones we can't avoid as it is. Shut the production floor down."