Silent Order_Image Hand Page 11

  “And there are nearly a hundred million people in the Northgate City area,” said March. “Ten or eleven billion people on Raetia. It depends on the range of this hypothetical radiation weapon.”

  “He’s right, Elizabeth,” said Eighty. “We’ll need to figure out how to get our hands on that thing as soon as possible.”

  “A raid,” said March. “If we can hire enough mercenaries, tell them we’re robbing the Slovell Center…”

  “There might be a better way,” said Winter. She released Eighty’s hand, retrieved her purse, and drew out a flier. March had seen several of them in the lobby of the Slovell Center. “The Slovell Center has its yearly student film festival in four days.”

  “Film festival?” said March, taking the flier. He had seen the banners in the lobby, but taken little note of them, assuming that it would consist of a dozen students attempting to explain the profound significance of amateurish videos taken with their phone cameras.

  “Strange, isn’t it?” said Winter. “No one except for a few hobbyists have used actual film to record video for nearly a hundred thousand years, but we still call it a film festival. Funny how names linger.” She shook her head. “But I’m digressing. A danger of the trained legal mind, I’m afraid. The Center’s film festival will make an excellent opportunity to steal whatever is creating that quantum entanglement effect.”

  “Will it?” said March. “How many people does this festival draw?”

  “About ten thousand to fifteen thousand guests, usually,” said Winter.

  March blinked. “Fifteen thousand?”

  “It’s something of a big deal,” said Winter. “The film contestants are chosen by Slovell himself, and so is the jury. Representatives come from every media company in the Falcon Republic, and from several other human worlds. The top ten finalists get cash prizes, and the winner gets a quarter of a million credits and a job with Slovell’s production company.”

  “Something of a big deal, then,” echoed March. “The University’s official security will be strained, and so will Slovell’s unofficial security.”

  “Yes,” said Winter. “That will probably be our best chance to break in and take the quantum device without alerting Slovell or any Machinist agents with him.” She smirked. “I would like to see his expression when he realizes it’s gone.”

  “He would be unhappy, I imagine,” said March. He remembered the Iron Hand who had escorted Slovell. “But his friends would be unhappier, and I’m more concerned about them. If we get the quantum device, we’ll need to get it off-world as soon as possible.”

  “Agreed,” said Winter. “Some bribes will accomplish that. We can start planning tomorrow, once Eighty is back on his feet.”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Eighty, though his voice sounded woozy. “I’ve been shot in the face with a particle beam. Crack on the head, that’s nothing.”

  March nodded and turned to go.

  “Mr. Norther,” said Winter.

  March paused.

  “Thank you for saving Eighty’s life,” said Winter, her voice quiet. “If you hadn’t been there, I don’t think anyone would have walked away from that ambush.”

  March hesitated, nodded again, and left the infirmary. He had a great deal on his mind, and there was a lot of work and planning ahead of him. Four days to prepare a raid on the Slovell Center was doable, but it would be challenging. Nevertheless, Winter was right. That would be their best chance to evade Slovell’s security and take whatever relic of the Great Elder Ones he had squirreled away in his private studio.

  Because March was now certain that the Machinists were working on a significant covert project with Slovell. It explained the attack on the street. That had been a huge risk for Skinner and his thugs. Any number of things could have gone wrong, which March had proved by escaping and killing several of them in the process. But he knew firsthand the lengths to which the Machinists would go to obtain the relics of the Great Elder Ones.

  He had seen the corpses they had left in their wake.

  March decided to visit the gym to clear his mind. Eighty’s cloned metabolism was a finely-tuned thing, but the pawnbroker nevertheless exercised on a regular basis, using secondhand equipment he obtained over the course of his business. The exercise equipment occupied a room at the end of the hall. March walked past the door, intending to get exercise clothes from his luggage, and stopped.

  Cassandra was in the gym.

  She sat on the end of a treadmill, her arms wrapped around herself, her eyes haunted.

  Belatedly March realized that he had better check on her.

  He crossed into the gym, and she looked up at him.

  “We almost died today,” she said, “didn’t we?”

  “Yes.” There was no point in lying to make her feel better. She was too intelligent for that.

  “I know,” said Cassandra. She took a deep breath. “Oh, God. Oh, God. I thought I had a better handle on myself than this.” She held up her left hand, which was shaking a little.

  “You’re coming down from a lot of adrenalin.” March stopped a few paces away. “That’s always hard on the system.”

  “I know,” said Cassandra. She squeezed her eyes shut and grabbed her knees, took a deep breath. “I know.”

  “And you did well,” said March. “You didn’t freeze, you kept your head, followed instructions. Sometimes people just lock up in a crisis. You didn’t.”

  “It’s just…after is hard,” said Cassandra. She got to her feet, wobbled a little in her heeled boots, and March caught her elbow. “Thanks. You can’t think during the fight, you know? I learned that on the Alpine. But after…after you can think about it. All the different ways you could have gotten killed.”

  “Yeah,” said March. Which was why he wanted to exercise.

  “If you hadn’t been there, I would have been dead,” said Cassandra. “That’s all there is to it. It’s…it’s scary to think about.”

  “Yes,” said March. “But we’re alive, and they’re not. I think you should exercise. That will help clear your mind.” He waved a hand at the machines. “Eighty has a decent collection of free weights. I’ll spot you, if you want.”

  “That’s a good idea,” said Cassandra. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Jack…thanks for my life. Again.” She smiled a little. “Suppose saving my life is getting to be a habit by now.”

  “Suppose it is,” said March. “But they say the best way to develop good habits is through repetition.”

  “That is actually based on sound behavioral science,” said Cassandra. She hesitated. “But…you’ve changed, I think.”

  “That’s what people do.”

  “Not always,” said Cassandra. “Not really.” She tried to smile. “I guess your girlfriend is a good influence on you.”

  March let out a breath. He didn’t want to talk about Adelaide. But he needed Cassandra to keep herself together. Again, he felt a wave of annoyance at Censor for ordering her into the field. This was not the sort of mission that played to Cassandra’s strengths.

  “Maybe,” said March. “How have I changed?”

  “Before, you would have just told me we’re alive and they’re dead, and that’s that,” said Cassandra.

  “People change,” said March. His initial impulse was to turn the conversation to a different topic. But it was distracting her from the recent dangers, which was what she needed. He knew her well enough to realize that her mind would lock onto things and refuse to let them go unless something else caught her attention. He sighed. “Sometimes they change each other.”

  “That is true,” said Cassandra. “Have you known each other long?”

  “A while now,” said March. He didn’t want to tell Cassandra too many details. Anything that she didn’t know couldn’t be pried out of her in an interrogation. “I met her for the first time a few months after the Alpine. By accident, mostly. There was a mission, and she got tangled up in it, and…”

  Cassandra sm
iled. “You fell madly in love?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “What’s she like?” said Cassandra.

  “Confident,” said March. “A little reckless at times. Good at what she does.”

  “You have a lot in common, then,” said Cassandra.

  “Yes,” said March. Which wasn’t true on the surface, he knew. An archaeologist with a media career and a privateer had very little in common. But the Final Consciousness had made them into what they were. “In some ways. Not so much in others. I almost broke up with her right after we began.”

  March blinked. He hadn’t intended to say that.

  “Why would you do that?” said Cassandra.

  “It’s not fair to her,” said March. “In the time we’ve been together, I’ve spent maybe a third of it with her. The rest of the time I’m flying around doing missions for our mutual employer.” Even in a safe house, he still would not speak the name of the Silent Order aloud.

  Cassandra shrugged. “I don’t think that’s such a big deal.”

  “Isn’t it?” said March.

  “Well, if you do the mathematics,” said Cassandra, and March took care not to smile, “there are twenty-four hours in a day, right? Ideally, you should spend at least eight hours sleeping, eight hours working, and then eight hours doing other things. Then you spend some of those last eight hours paying bills and exercising and fixing the house and activities like that. So, on the long view, it averages out the same.”

  “Mathematically, maybe,” said March. “But not in the real world.”

  “The real world is only an emanation of mathematics,” said Cassandra, though she smiled. “Besides, isn’t that kind of arrangement really common on Calaskar? I met a lot of women whose husbands were on tours with the Royal Navy.” She frowned. “There was this one joke I heard about the mattress store, and…”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that one, too,” said March.

  She grinned. “Is it true?”

  March stared at her. “I don’t think that’s an appropriate topic for discussion.”

  Cassandra laughed. “That’s a yes. Look, I don’t think you have to worry. You’re just…so obviously devoted to her. It’s kind of sweet. I think she’ll be waiting for you when you come back.”

  “That doesn’t worry me,” said March. “I wonder whether it’s fair to make her wait.”

  Cassandra nodded. “You’re thinking about stopping as an Alpha Operative.”

  “Yes,” said March. “I’ve been one for a long time now. Far longer than average. I know I’ll have to stop eventually. No one lives forever, and no one can do this kind of job forever. I don’t know if it’s time yet.” He snorted. “Suppose if I’m thinking about it now, that’s a bad sign.”

  “I don’t know,” said Cassandra. “I brought up the topic. It’s my fault.” She blinked and held out her hand. It was steady this time. “And you’re really good at distracting me.”

  “Feel better?” said March.

  “Yeah,” said Cassandra. “Yeah, I do.”

  “What will really make you feel better is a decent workout,” said March. “I’ll spot you, if you want. Then we’re going to work out a plan to rob the Slovell Center.”

  Chapter 6: Imagery

  The next four days were busy.

  March had pulled off jobs like this multiple times before. Serving as an Alpha Operative of the Silent Order sometimes meant working as a high-end thief. Yet four days was a very short time to put together an operation like this. March would have preferred several weeks to observe the target and make notes about the positions of cameras and guards and so forth, to become familiar with the patterns of activity in the Slovell Center.

  But they didn’t have weeks. They had four days.

  On the plus side, if the operation failed, they would be able to try again. Still, that thought left March uneasy. The Machinists knew that someone was investigating Roger Slovell – Skinner’s attack on the streets proved it. That meant the enemy was on their guard and expecting trouble.

  The film festival was the best chance they would have to steal whatever artifact Slovell had locked in the basement.

  That night March took one of Eighty’s cars, Cassandra in the passenger seat, and she scanned Slovell’s main studio with the Eclipse. There was no trace of a quantum entanglement effect, which meant that the only artifact was in the University’s Slovell Center. At least they only had to worry about one target.

  “I have invitations to the festival, of course,” said Winter the next morning when they gathered around Eighty’s conference table. Eighty himself was looking healthier, thanks to a good night’s sleep spent with emergency medical nanobots swimming through his bloodstream. Though the glow from his cybernetic eye did make him look more haggard than usual. “I have enough connections with various media figures that I’m invited, and I can bring a guest. That will at least get us past building security.”

  “Building security isn’t the problem,” said March. “We’ll have to be cautious of them, yes, but they won’t be a serious problem. That vault door in Slovell’s studio will be. Unless we work out a way to get past that, this whole thing is pointless.”

  “The intrepid Dr. Yarrow and I,” said Eighty, and Cassandra smiled at the compliment, “might have found a way around this little problem.”

  “How is that?” said March.

  “Slovell is corrupt, obviously,” said Eighty, “and he might have cut one corner too many. Dr. Yarrow?”

  Cassandra connected her laptop to the room’s projector, and a hologram of blue and green and red lines appeared over the table. March blinked at it a few times, and then recognition came.

  “Is that Arcology Twelve?” said March.

  “Yes,” said Cassandra. “The official architectural blueprint.”

  “The thing about vault doors,” said Eighty, and Cassandra zoomed the hologram to the level holding the University campus, “is that they’re really heavy. You need reinforced concrete and steel supports and all that stuff to keep them from going through the floor. And check this out.”

  Cassandra zoomed the image to the plans for the Slovell Center, and then to the lower level. March stared at it for a moment and then nodded.

  “Unless I’m reading this wrong,” said March, “I don’t see plans for a vault door in that area of the basement.”

  “Nope,” said Eighty. “All the blueprints for any buildings in the arcology have to be registered with the arcology’s central administrative office. And that vault door and any additional cellar space behind it are not on the blueprints. Slovell must have had it installed secretly.”

  March frowned. “I assume that gives us an advantage?”

  “Yeah,” said Eighty. “Vault doors are really heavy. The floor and doorframe need to be reinforced to bear the weight, and based on the blueprints and the video you brought back, Slovell didn’t bother with that. Underneath the Slovell Center’s basements are various access and utility corridors for the air circulation systems, and below that is the ceiling of the next floor of the arcology. If we set off a small explosion, the vault door will go through the floor and into one of the utility corridors. Quick and easy, and Slovell will never see it coming.”

  “Make a hell of a noise, though,” said March.

  “Shaping the blast will help with that,” said Eighty.

  “We might be able to use the party to cover it up,” said Winter. “Some of those student films get really loud.”

  “Could we just pull the fire alarm?” said Cassandra.

  “That could work,” said March. “That’s the oldest trick, though. Slovell might not realize that something is wrong, but the Iron Hands would.” He rubbed his jaw with his right hand, thinking. “Do we even need to go through the vault door at all?”

  “If we want to get inside, yeah,” said Cassandra.

  “Why not go through the floor?” said March.

  The others shared a look.

  “Unless
I’m reading this wrong,” said March, “the floor in that cellar area isn’t all that thick. A good plasma torch could cut through the floor in a few minutes, and we could bypass the door entirely.”

  “That might work,” said Winter.

  “We’d need access to the utility corridors to set off any charges,” said Eighty. “That will take some bribes either way.”

  “Why not just do that?” said Cassandra. “Skip the film festival entirely?”

  “Because the security outside the vault might not be that good,” said March, “but it will probably be better on the other side of the door. Without the distraction of the festival, we might cut through the floor and find five or six Iron Hands waiting for us, or a well-armed security drone.”

  “Better that we combine your plan and Dr. Yarrow’s, then,” said Eighty. “Let’s set off a smoke bomb in the lobby of the Slovell Center. Mix it up with a bad chemical stink. Harmless, but people will be afraid someone set off a chemical weapon in the building. They’ll evacuate the Center, and when we set off the smoke bomb, we can also detonate a small charge below the vault door. The chaos will give Mr. Norther ample opportunity to stroll through the vault door, grab the quantum device, and get the hell out of there.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Winter. She looked at March. “But my opinion doesn’t matter all that much. You’ll be taking most of the risk. What do you think?”

  “I think that’s the best chance we’re likely to get,” said March. “I also don’t think we have the time to wait for a better chance. The Machinists already tested their radiation weapon on a space station and two starships. Slovell used the weapon on that accounting firm. They might try another test soon, or they might ramp up and attack a bigger target…a sporting event, maybe.”

  “Or a film festival?” said Cassandra, troubled. “There will be thousands of people packed into a small space. If they wanted to test a triple-theta dark energy radiation weapon on a large crowd, that would be the perfect test subject.”