Small Miracles Page 27

  The door boomed from the impact. The table vibrated like mad, and they almost dropped it. “Again,” Aaron called. Boom! “Again.”

  “Stop that now!” the PA blared. Aaron recognized the voice: Alan Watts.

  “Ignore that,” Aaron shouted. “We need a rhythm. Three, two, one, now!” Boom! “Three, two, one, now!” Boom!

  “This is your last warning,” the PA rumbled ominously.

  “Again!” Aaron yelled. “Three, two, one, now.” Boom!

  Their improvised battering ram began to splinter—but so, to a lesser extent, did the locked door.

  This sounded like what the phone distraction was for.

  * * *

  Telephone insanity.

  Phones rang—three, Kim thought—all but in unison. Pause, and then three more. Pause, and then, not quite so tightly grouped, three more. Some were faint with distance, others jarringly nearby and loud. And with the fourth set—

  Boom! A moment later, another boom!

  It was a hell of a distraction, all right, and Kim almost didn’t hear the heartfelt cussing from the next corridor. She crept closer to a corner and heard the rapid slapping of soles against the floor. Running the other way, back toward the factory floor. To a WiFi hotspot, to consult with the other stalkers?

  She could slip away now from this storeroom cul-de-sac, maybe hide in an area that had been previously searched.

  As much as Kim wanted to hide, she couldn’t. It would be shameful, buying herself a little time by endangering everyone in the auditorium.

  The PA came on. “Stop that, now!”

  Boom! came the answer. Phones rang all around. Boom!

  Kim shook off her paralysis and dashed back to the storeroom where she had stashed the laptops. She would use whatever time Aaron and friends got for her.

  “This is your last warning,” the PA rumbled ominously.

  Boom!

  The lights went out.

  * * *

  Screams, curses, and an off-balance thud as Aaron stumbled in the dark and the ramming team went down in a tangle of limbs. The table edge mashed the fingers of his right hand.

  Then, silence.

  Aaron extracted himself from the pile. “Is everyone all right?”

  Scattered affirmatives, and one, “Sorry. Elvis has left the building.”

  A spate of chuckles eased the tension. Aaron could have kissed whoever had come up with that.

  The chuckles petered out. The darkness was stygian, curiously more so when a couple pinpricks of light appeared. Penlights. They wouldn’t last long.

  Had Kim gotten the distraction she needed? No way to know. Well, they couldn’t do much in the pitch-black. “Any smokers?” Aaron called out.

  “It’s not the day to quit, Doc,” their anonymous wisecracker answered. “Yeah, I have a lighter.”

  “Save it for a sec.” Aaron could think of only one container in which to hold a fire. It wasn’t going to be popular. “Okay, people. Someone near the privy, dump out one wastebasket there in the corner. Bring the empty can to the middle of the room. That’s our fireplace. Bring another, full. We may need what’s inside to put out a fire. The rest of you: get stuff to burn.”

  Soon they had a collection of flammables. Paper napkins for kindling. Leftover hardcopy handouts of presentations past. Padding stripped from some of the chairs. Flame flickered and danced in the can, set in the middle of the auditorium’s center aisle. Heated, the human waste smelled even worse.

  “Okay,” Aaron said. “Now everyone gets back to work.”

  * * *

  A back-road dead zone made Charles late checking in with the rear guard. People too antediluvian to use computers was his theory, rather than a more ambitious, broader-ranged comm shutdown. A minute late, he was the last to reestablish contact.

  The natives are restless, Brittany Corbett recapped. They tried to bust out. We doused the lights and that quieted them.

  Logan Donaldson: Plus annoyance calls all around the building. Phone switch is completely off now.

  Brittany again: Damn, now I see light coming under the doors. Flickering. Must be a fire. They’re beating on a door again.

  Morgan: How much longer to finish searching?

  Alan Watts: Five, ten minutes.

  Just shoot them, Charles thought, but that was frustration talking. Going in, guns blazing, only risked the fire getting out of control.

  Morgan: Finish looking if it’s safe. Don’t get caught in a fire.

  * * *

  The storeroom offered no light to amplify. The computers Kim was cannibalizing were at ambient temperature, so night-vision mode did nothing for her, either. She removed the battery packs by touch.

  How would she find anything else in the dark?

  She needed something conductive and flexible, like wire or foil. Things like that surely lay on the shelves, but finding them by touch could take a long time. So if not on the shelves, then where?

  Inside the walls.

  Time to put her suit to the test. Synchronizing herself with the faint rhythmic thudding in the distance, she punched the wall. Wallboard dimpled beneath her fist. She had scarcely felt a thing. With the next thud, she struck again, harder. Her fist plunged through. She clenched a wad of insulation and pulled out a long chunk. The foil liners ripped right off. Ripping the foil into smaller pieces was more difficult.

  How long till the searcher caught her?

  She carried battery packs and the raggedy pieces of foil two aisles over. One by one she wrapped battery packs in foil and distributed them along the hallway floor.

  “There you are.” Alan Watts’s voice.

  Kim flattened against the wall, afraid to move. The first of her packages had started to glow.

  A tall figure came around the corner and looked right at her. “Huh. Not who I was expecting, whoever you are. Nice try with the nanosuit.”

  Camo only worked with visible light! Night vision sensed infrared—heat—and her body was warmer than the walls. She was a blazing profile against a dark backdrop, and some of that energy must have seeped around the corner.

  Her improvised devices glowed a little brighter. Maybe she wasn’t doomed. If she could just stall …

  “How did you find me?” Kim asked. Her eyes flicked about her visor as she spoke, cranking down the IR sensitivity until she could barely see him.

  “Just come with me,” he said.

  “I’m afraid,” she answered.

  “Come quietly and you won’t be hurt.” The packages were glowing brighter, and Alan glanced down at the nearest one. “What the heck are these?”

  If Tyra hadn’t steered her wrong weeks ago, small firebombs. The energy density of grenades, was it? The shorted-out batteries were discharging themselves rapidly. The only electrical resistance in the circuit—and so, all the heat—was inside the batteries themselves.

  “What are what?” she dissembled.

  Whoosh!

  Flames erupted at Alan’s feet. He threw up his hands and stumbled into a wall.

  Tears streamed from Kim’s eyes despite her night vision’s minimal setting. The sudden glare must have temporarily blinded him.

  Whoosh! Whoosh! Blam!

  He spun around, confused, geysers of flame all around him.

  Kim tackled him low. She crashed face-first into the floor and all his weight fell on her back, but her suit absorbed both impacts. Something crunched in her pocket. She squirmed out from under, rolling onto her back. He grabbed her neck—

  And she clutched his left forearm. She groped at the keypad, entering a long sequence. Poised to enter the last digit, she head-butted him in the visor. He recoiled and she managed to break free—

  While pressing the last key.

  The full factory-test code entered, his suit went rigid head to toe.

  friday, 4:10 P.M., january 20, 2017

  It took three tables, but the auditorium side door finally yielded. By then they were working in the light of improvised torches
: broken-off chair legs wrapped in cloth seat covers.

  They ran through the halls, cheering, torches flickering in their hands. Aaron led the charge. A building exit was no more than a hundred feet away. The cheers swelled as the exit came into sight.

  “Stop!” he screamed.

  Some training was universal in the Army, and terrorism awareness ranked high on the list. The door was rigged!

  It didn’t take a genius to know opening the door would set off the bomb.

  * * *

  Brent waited in the dark, immobile and helpless, with only his imagination for company.

  Oddities piled up. Ringing phones and dull thuds. An angry voice, too remote to make out, on the PA. The facility plunged into darkness. More dull thuds. Bangs and flares of light from another direction. From the air ducts, an acrid smell.

  The possibility of a fire made his skin crawl. He tried to lose himself in speculation. An attempted breakout from the auditorium, he guessed. The detainees wouldn’t have doused the lights. They didn’t have night-vision gear. So some of the Emergent were still here. What were those popping sounds? They didn’t sound like gunfire. What had happened to Kim?

  He strained to hear more, smell more—to sense anything that might provide a clue. He twitched at every unexpected noise and glimmer. Only more and more he twitched at no discernable stimulus.

  Lone bots flailing, Brent reassured himself. Bots wired together by new nerve bundles: that’s what One had been. That’s all it had been. Today had been an emotional roller coaster; now bots were responding to surges of his neurotransmitters. A bit of twitchiness and the occasional muscle tic were only to be expected.

  The darkness crowded in on him.

  Brooding about the dark, fretting about distant noises, worrying about Kim—none of this accomplished anything. He had to trust Kim to prevail, to come back. And then?

  A virus, he had told her, distributed to the Emergent over their VR specs. At least the design of a suitable virus was something productive with which to occupy his mind. Twitching, he tried to imagine a virus tailored to in vivo nanobots and how best to spread it.

  But what made him think he could slip a virus past the notice of the Emergent? It wasn’t as though he often outwitted One.

  It came down to a simple choice. He could work on a plan. He could go crazy, twitching, alone in the dark.

  An easy choice, at last.

  * * *

  Charles again found himself several minutes late for the rear guard’s next check-in. Morgan and Have-Mercy had hit some black ice and spun out—while in a dead zone, naturally. Neither was hurt, but their truck had snapped its front axle. It wasn’t going anywhere. Have-Mercy had hiked far enough to get back online. Charles had been the closest; he detoured to retrieve them and their cargo.

  Sorry we’re late, Morgan IMed to the rear guard. He was riding shotgun. Report.

  Donaldson: The inmates are out.

  Out of the auditorium but in the building, Corbett clarified. Probably they spotted the rigged doors.

  Charles shot a glance at Have-Mercy, sitting by herself in the backseat. She wasn’t linked into this dialogue, of course. Like her AWOL former leader, Merry was one of the sentimental members of the group. And Watts?

  Unknown, Donaldson replied. Off comm.

  Corbett: The escapees are loud. They’re running around with torches. Alan must know they’re out. He’d have fallen back to the evac point if he could.

  Charles, private to Morgan: Time to get our people out. Reseal the building behind them and let events take their natural course.

  Morgan, also private: What about Watts?

  Charles, still private: Earlier, it was “What about Brent?” It’s time to cut our losses.

  A sigh, unmistakable, from Morgan. Okay, he conceded.

  Charles: Donaldson, Corbett, get out now. If a bomb goes off, the cops will swarm. That would make it harder for the two of them to get away.

  Corbett: Are bombs necessary?

  Morgan: Can you warn them over the PA? Announce that you’re leaving and you’ll call the bomb squad for them in an hour. That should keep them quiet.

  Donaldson: Simple enough to restore the phones.

  Charles had never given any thought to how the public-address system worked. Just another extension on the company phone system, apparently. A quick lookup on a server back at Garner Nanotech confirmed his deduction. Go ahead.

  Corbett: Thanks, boss.

  Charles: Kill the router and phones before you leave.

  Morgan: Phones, yes. Leave the router. Alan might yet get in touch.

  “Everything okay?” Have-Mercy asked from the backseat.

  “Absolutely,” Charles answered her. The Garner Nanotech situation would resolve itself in another twenty minutes. Nothing anyone did was going to change that.

  * * *

  Something sparkled in Brent’s eyes. There was an instant of numbness in his right side before that arm began tensing and twitching. A sudden peculiar taste filled his mouth; it as quickly vanished.

  What was happening to him?

  It was wishful thinking even to ask. Core programming was in safe regions of bot memory—otherwise, the hazard of Brownian bit bumps would have manifested earlier on. One by one, the bots would reboot. No, were rebooting: the source of his various tics and twitches. Perhaps the spasms came from bots knocked offline again, more Brownian bit bumps taking their toll.

  One way or another, his desperate gamble had failed.

  Weakly, tentatively, a tendril of alien presence probed Brent’s mind. The recovery process was already well advanced! When enough bots came online, One would return. All the necessary interconnecting nerve bundles were in place, so it wouldn’t take long.

  He wanted to scream. He was so close! Spreading a virus was possible.

  Another mind probe, this one stronger. Then a tremor—a seizure—stronger than any before. If only he could hold on to a shred of control. He struggled to keep to himself what he had been thinking.

  Random resets, reconnections, disconnections: this was going to be ugly.

  And then the spasms, smells, tastes—everything—stopped. Words flashed, all the starker for the sudden absence of any outer world. I’ll take over now.

  * * *

  With a loud click, the PA announced itself. “Attention, everyone. We are leaving now. You’re not. Be advised, we have rigged each building exit with an explosive device. It will go off if the door is opened.

  “We mean you no harm. In an hour, after we are safely away, we’ll contact the state police and advise them of your situation.”

  Kim didn’t recognize the voice. The woman on the PA, whoever she was, sounded apologetic. She damn well should be.

  “Let me go,” Alan Watts said. “I’ll leave with them. I promise I won’t hurt you.”

  The hell with that. He could tell his story to the police.

  Grunting and huffing, Kim began dragging her prisoner. He threatened and fussed nonstop. He must have weighed close to two hundred pounds, and in the rigid nanosuit that was all deadweight. Spatters of fire-extinguisher foam dotted them both.

  Her arms and back screaming in protest, Kim continued dragging.

  * * *

  One did not entirely understand the concept of amusement, but it was fairly sure Brent’s futile resistance merited such a response. How pitifully its host struggled to keep his secrets! A simple rewrite would make its bots immune from another such attack. The need was now obvious and the necessary code change simpler than many it had made. Still, Brent struggled to keep from One what he knew about such software upgrades in newer bots. Did its host not remember in whose mind it resided?

  Perhaps surface resistance masked another objective. It probed further, and the covert plan it found was pathetic. Regain his VR specs and lure the Emergent into … something (still to be determined) foolish. How very human.

  But for as long as Brent remained a prisoner, One was at the mercy of anothe
r human. It/they had to get free. Just maybe—and the notion of amusement surfaced again—it could use Brent’s unfinished plan to manipulate Kim.

  Further opposition could not be tolerated. One banished Brent to the deep recesses of their shared mind, and began working out the details.

  friday, 4:15 P.M., january 20, 2017

  Aaron stared at the rigged door. People crowded close, torches in hand, to see. “Get back!” he screamed in warning—and in fear that one of them would try the exit anyway.

  Most edged away. A few ran back the way they had come. To try another door?

  “Nobody move!” he ordered, in the trust-me-I’m-a-doctor voice he hated but to which most people deferred. “Here’s what we’ll do.”

  Not that he had a plan beyond preventing panic. He could bring others into the planning once everyone had calmed down. Still, a few needs were obvious: getting the lights back on, for example. “Who knows where the circuit breakers are?”

  “I do,” Harry Ng said. He grabbed a torch and started into the dark. “Way in the back of the factory. It’ll take me a couple minutes.”

  “Wait a sec, Harry.” Maybe there was something else to be checked back there. Oh, yeah. “While you’re back that way, see whether the loading dock is also rigged.”

  Harry nodded. “Will do.”

  And next? Aaron didn’t sense the bad guys were shy about ruining things. The electrical circuits might be somehow damaged, or the breakers removed. They shouldn’t just wait here for the lights to come on.

  “Harry, let me know what you find—but don’t assume that if a door looks safe, it is. Let me check it out. The Army trained me to spot booby traps.” Soon Aaron had volunteers to inspect all the exits. “You might find other people in the building, people who were hiding. I know Kim O’Donnell is out there. If anyone finds her, send her …”

  Here? Was there nothing more productive he could do than stand around in this hallway? Pondering that, Aaron noticed several of his battering-ram crew flexing their hands. His own hands had taken quite a bruising. “Send her to the infirmary. That’s where I’ll be. Anyone who needs bandages, aspirin, whatever, come with me now.”