A Sword Into Darkness (16 page)

There was no help coming.

Crouching down, Nathan shuffled back to the couch and leaned in toward Kris.  He shook her lightly, and then harder as she stayed asleep.  Eventually, her eyes fluttered open, confusion and annoyance at being woken up drifting smoothly into an expression of coy innocence as she saw how close he was to her.

She smiled at him, the corners of her mouth amused by the potential of their relative positions.  “Oh, I’m sorry.  Did I fall asleep?”

Nathan placed his hand over her mouth and received a flash of renewed annoyance from her eyes.  He whispered, “Kris, there’s someone messing around in your office and the phones have been fucked with.  I think someone’s trying to steal the secure files.”

“Who?” she demanded, her loud whisper muffled by his hand.

Nathan pulled his hand away and put a finger to his lips, glaring at her to stay quiet.  “I don’t have any idea, but there’s definitely someone down in your office, working in the dark.  I tried to call security, but no joy.”

Kris jumped up and approached the office’s glass front, only to be jerked down to her knees by Nathan, still crouching.  She pulled her arm free of his grasp, her annoyance now the beginnings of anger, but he only shifted around to grasp both of her shoulders firmly.

“Stop!” he said, firmly but quietly.  “Wait a second and listen to me!  We don’t know who it is and we don’t know what they’re prepared to do, but they seem to be trying to stay covert.  Otherwise, they’d just pull the drives and steal whatever wasn’t nailed down, but that’s going to change if whoever it is realizes someone’s still up here.  You go off half-cocked, you’re going to make things worse and you might even get us killed.”

Kris turned toward him, hissing her words in the barest semblance of a whisper.  “Nathan, we can’t let them have our designs!  Another company would be bad enough, but what if this is some other country?  Can you imagine the Chinese mass-producing these systems?  The world would change overnight, and not for the better if my opinion is worth anything!”

“Don’t you think I know that!?  I’m not proposing we cower up here.”

“Oh.  Then what do you propose?” she asked, an edge to her voice.

“We’re going to stop him—or rather I’m going to stop him while you get outside and call for help on your suite.”

She looked at him, saying nothing, and he could read nothing from her expression.  Soon, the corner of her mouth turned up slightly.  “Really, Rambo?  You’re going to stop the professional industrial super-spy all by your lonesome?  Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t your military specialty surface warfare rather than special warfare?”

His eyes narrowed in exasperation.  “I’m not going to jump him or anything, but I can’t let him just break our encryption and download anything he likes.”

“So what are you going to do, and why couldn’t I do it too?  What happened to not dividing your forces before the enemy, oh great tactical wizard?”

Nathan shook his head and held his own suite out to her.  “Don’t mangle aphorisms at me.  And I don’t know what I’m going to do, yet, but I do know what you’re going to do.  You’re going to take our phones and you’re going to get to the open and you’re going to call in the damn cavalry.  You’ve got the critical job here.  I’m just going to try to keep him on the premises until security shows up.  Do you understand or do you just want to keep arguing?”

She responded by snatching the cell suite from his hand and pulling out her own phone.  Both phones worked, and both showed zero signal strength.  “Reception sucks out here, even beyond the building.  It may take a few minutes to get the word out.”

“Whatever.  Just call them in before I get my ass shot or garroted or whatever it is super-spies do these days.”

“Who do you want me to call?”

Nathan smiled, but failed to keep the nervousness from his eyes.  “Everybody.”

Kristene smiled back, then darted in before he could turn away, kissing him.

Surprise and his own rationalized objections aside, he found himself kissing her back, a hand on the back of her head, his fingers tangled in her brightly colored hair.  Eventually, his misgivings and the mission at hand reasserted themselves, and he pulled away with a flash of guilt.

Before he could say anything, she turned away and crawled to the door, favoring him with a suddenly more enticing view.  Kristene slowly swung the glass door inward, then crawled out and to the right, headed for the distant stairwell exit.

Nathan followed along behind, but turned to the left instead, heading toward the mid-platform stairwell, the shortest route to Kristene’s office and whatever fate awaited him.

He rose from a crawl as soon as his knees hit the diamond grating of the industrial walkway, his joints crying in protest.  Crouching low and keeping close to the shadowy wall, Nathan made his way to the stairs, cursing the sound of his footsteps, but utterly unable to make them any quieter.  He tiptoed down the stairwell, splitting his attention between Kristene’s partly lit office and the darkened stairwell he was trying to negotiate.  To his credit, he made it all the way down with barely a misstep, except for when he misjudged the distance down from the last step and slammed his foot on the grating with too loud of a footfall.

To Nathan’s ears, the sound of his shoe on the metal walkway reverberated through the building, ringing and clanging on and on like church bells at noon, but he convinced himself a moment later that most of the sound was only in his worried head.  Whether it was or not, no one emerged from Kristene’s office, ready to deliver the same unknown fate to Nathan as he had to all the facility’s guards.

Now moving even slower, he crept up to her office, approaching low and close to that level’s wall.  He stopped immediately before the glass-fronted face of her office, close enough to hear the clicking of keys and a mouse, but unable to see the intruder directly without giving himself away.

Nathan crouched, slowly beginning to fume with doubt and self-recrimination.  Here he was, mere feet from the possibly murderous thief who threatened to steal all the research they had devoted themselves to, who would undoubtedly release it to a known enemy, giving them a capability even the US did not enjoy, and he could not see a damned thing.  He now knew less about what was actually going on than he had from cowering in his own office across the way.  The impotency built and built until he gave a silent curse and allowed himself to peek around to peer into the glass front of the office.

Seated in front of Kris’s desktop, a man in a Windward security uniform typed a few letters, grimaced, clicked upon a mouse and shook his own head with frustration.  The thief looked disconcertingly bland:  Caucasian, slightly out of shape, brown hair and eyes, with soft features and a not-too-intelligent look about him.  Nathan winced.  He could describe this man exactly and still have trouble distinguishing him from a host of others.  In fact, from a distance, he would look like their own usual night security guard.

Arrayed in front of the fake guard, alongside the keyboard and mouse were a number of things that were forbidden from the building because their very nature was counter to ensuring security.  There was a high volume flash deck, probably upwards of a 100 terabytes of storage, but only the size of a pack of cigarettes.  Beside it was something that appeared to be a standard cell suite, but was undoubtedly not, judging from the wisps of vapor streaming off it and the tiny steel gas vial plugged into its side.  Only one kind of computer would need active cooling, one that was infinitely more powerful than a suite, or even the desktop the device was plugged in to.

Nathan panicked, but also felt a rush of geeky envy.  The thief had his own “quacker.”  A quantum code-breaker, it could make short work of any encryption system or security algorithm, pitting its super-cooled qubits against a normal computer’s registers of logical ones and zeroes.  It essentially performed in seconds the same code-breaking feats that would tie up a near-AI level supercomputer for months or years.  It was only due to Gordon Lee’s infuriating insistence on multiple layers of encryption (despite the way they slowed going from one file to the next) that the thief had not already absconded with everything on the entire server.  It was just a matter of time, though.

Only one thing kept Nathan from charging the false guard immediately.  Next to the linked flash deck, quacker, and desktop was a slender, lethal, semiautomatic pistol.  Before he could even make it through the door, Nathan was sure he would find out just how destructible he was.  The fate he had narrowly avoided twelve years before would be all too ready to catch up with him, at least with this guy’s able assistance.

He could hardly allow the man to continue using the quacker with impunity, nor could he stop him directly.  And there was no way to tell how long it would take Kris to alert the authorities, or how long it would take them to get here.  By that time, the thief might well have enough time to decrypt all of their research and designs and get away clean.  Once again, no help would arrive in time.  It was up to Nathan.

There was no reason for the grin that began to spread across his face, but it appeared nonetheless, unbidden.

Abandoning any semblance of cover, Nathan jumped to his feet and pounded loudly on the glass partition, over and over again, yelling as loud as he could.  The doughy man in the security outfit almost fell from his chair, his arms flailing in shock.  He succeeded in knocking the keyboard, quacker, and pistol from the desk, leaving only the mouse and the flash deck hanging from their cables.

For the briefest instant, Nathan considered trying for the door and entering the office, to search for the gun before the thief could recover it.  Before he could complete the thought, however, the man reached down and pulled the pistol up from the floor.  Nathan grimaced.  Doughy and surprised though he might be, the man was no amateur.  Seeing the gun come up, Nathan dove to the left, landing hard on his back upon the diamond steel grating.  He looked up to see spider-web cracks blossom from two points of impact in the glass office front, along with a blue flash and a shower of sparks.

Sparks.  Nathan groaned and rolled over, coming to his feet.  He now felt the grin fully upon his face.  Their thief had all the latest gadgets:  high capacity flash decks, quackers, and even capacitor stun rounds for his weapons.  Whoever the man worked for, murder had not been high on their agenda.  The capacitor rounds, plastic bullets which carried enough piezoelectric-induced charge to knock a man unconscious, were the ultimate fusion of gun and stun-gun.  Nathan’s prospects were not much improved, but it did mean he would probably survive the night – which opened up all sorts of new possibilities.

The door opened and Nathan ran, weaving from side to side unevenly along the walkway.  Two capacitors exploded on the railing and stanchion next to him as Nathan darted down the path, leaving his left side tingling from a brushing of the charge they carried.  He cried out and dodged again as a capacitor round hit the opposite wall, even closer this time.

But that was enough.  Nathan’s brief stint as an action hero was over.  He stumbled and rolled, passing right beneath the lower railing on the open side of the walkway, and fell.  His hand lashed out and grabbed, clutching for a moment on the diamond grating, but his fingers slipped.  They held him just long enough to check his headlong dive into open space, and he swung back toward the catwalk below.

Nathan fell atop the railing on the next lower walkway, the second floor.  The topmost safety rail slammed into his side and he felt the crunch as his ribs cracked, something of which he had a passing familiarity given his earlier experience.  He fell further, but this time on the proper side of the walkway, safe on the floor below his attacker.

Not that the thief had any further intention of going after him.  Nathan heard frantic steps upstairs, unknown movement and unknown labors, and then the thief was out of the office and pounding down the walkway in the opposite direction Nathan had run, in the same direction Kristene had gone, toward freedom and the loss of all their secrets.

Nathan had already paid too much to keep those secrets safe only to let him get away now.  He struggled to his feet and limped toward the mid catwalk stairway that the first and second levels alone shared.  “Screw this.  You wanna play with capacitors, I’ll show you some goddamn capacitors.”

He reached the production floor just as the thief reached the far stairwell, only three flights and a short jog away from the exit.  Nathan looked around frantically among the jumbled pieces of the ship, nowhere near being put together, and some of them still in the midst of testing.  One system test stood out in particular.

Beyond a number of high-voltage danger signs and two perimeters of caution tape, one of the intended weapons of the ship stood at full power and readiness.  Part of a capacitor bleed test, the CMEDLA (Collimated Multiple Element Diode Laser Array) had all of its components installed, from the many farads worth of ultracapacitors, to the pulse stretching power inductors, and even the diodes and optics assemblies.  Any component that could potentially bleed off a trickle of power from the fully charged ultracap bank was present, in order to see how long an effective charge could be maintained in the array, a very important tactical consideration.  Everything was there except for the complicated operating system, but Nathan had no need for complexity with what he planned to do.

Passing by the lens trunk, Nathan shoved the rolling concrete safety target out of the way and then eyeballed the base of the stairs.  He bumped the trunk with his hip for a gross aim adjustment and shrugged as the thief jumped down onto the last flight of steps.  Nathan limped back to the trigger assembly that separated the power section from the beam-forming section and frowned at the delicate tangle of diodes and relays, all useless without their operating systems and the computer programs on the eventual bridge.

“I always said this was an unsafe design,” he mumbled.   With that, Nathan picked up a long wrench and tossed it across the trigger assembly, shorting the ultracapacitor bank to the 100 megawatt elements of the diode laser stacks.