Supersymmetry (24 page)

The fence blocked their view of most of what was inside. “Once we start this, it'll be hard to back out,” she said. “You're sure you want to do this? You've never even met Alex.”

“But if we don't rescue her, who's going to tell me the embarrassing truths about your childhood?” Angel said. “You're hardly a trustworthy source.”

“It was her childhood, too.”

“Ah, good point. Let's leave her in there, then.” Angel cocked his head at her and smiled. “Ready?”

Sandra sighed. “What if we hurt someone?”

“We're rescuing them, remember? If we do nothing, then the varcolac kills them all.”

“They might not see it that way.”

“Alas, no.” Angel put a solemn palm on his chest. “It is our lot in life to be misunderstood.”

“Okay, joker,” Sandra said. “Let's do this.”

They had phoned the prison at midnight and told them a bomb had been hidden in the prison and set to go off at 5:46 the next morning. She didn't know what the prison administration had done in response, but it wasn't what they had hoped. At least, Sandra and Angel hadn't observed any activity that looked like large-scale prisoner evacuation.

“Here we go,” Angel said. On the south side of the prison was a field of rocks that had been excavated from the ground when the new prison was built. Angel stretched out his hand (a little overdramatically, Sandra thought), and teleported a large rock into the middle of the prison's perimeter wall. The wall exploded, shattered concrete flying everywhere in a fountaining cloud of dust. A klaxon began wailing. Sandra was ready with the next rock, and teleported it into the wall of the prison itself. Before the dust had even cleared, a dozen quadcopters were racing across the field and in through the gap.

Now came the hard part. The prison was immense, and they had no idea where Alex was being kept. The copters had cameras and image recognition software, but some of the faces would be hidden, or turned away, or blocked. There would be a percentage that the copters couldn't eliminate as possibilities, that would require a human to check, and they didn't know how large that percentage would be. Once they found her, Sandra would teleport in, grab her, and teleport out.

Leaving a pair of copters by the hole to relay the images, the swarm flew into the complex, each of them armed with the blueprints for the prison complex. They had only so much battery power and a lot of area to cover. Angel had written an algorithm to allow the ten remaining copters to visit every cell in the prison as efficiently as possible.

The copters teleported from cell to cell, staying high to avoid collisions with people or furniture, taking pictures and moving on. Images of faces started flicking rapidly into Sandra's vision. “They're too fast!” she said. Ten copters, jumping through cell after cell, produced a lot of pictures in short order. Even with the image recognition software eliminating most of them, there were too many to keep up with. And although each copter could recognize a human as an infrared hotspot, it wasn't good at taking an image at such an angle as to make the person easy to identify. Sandra rejected them as fast as she could, but there were too many maybes—dark-haired, jumpsuit-clad women of about the right age—for comfort.

“Can we send some of the copters back to reimage the maybes?” Sandra asked.

“Not if we want them to cover the prison before running out of juice,” Angel said. “They're less than ten percent through at this point.”

“Okay. I'm going in,” Sandra said.

The sound of approaching sirens vied with the prison's klaxon. “Do it quick,” Angel said. “We don't have much time.”

The copters had recorded the exact locations from which each picture had been taken, so Sandra could use their coordinates to teleport there herself. The shielding didn't prevent her, because she didn't need connectivity to find the location. Besides which, as soon as she teleported in, her system connected to the copters inside the prison, maintaining communication with Angel and the outside world through the relay copters. She could use the pictures to minimize the likelihood of a collision.

Sandra materialized in a tiny cell, six feet by nine feet, with bare concrete walls painted a pale green. She also appeared only a few inches away from the cell's inhabitant. Before Sandra could even get a good look at her, the woman pushed her hard in the chest, sending her crashing backward into the room's small, metal toilet. She cracked her head against it, making her ears ring. The inmate was Alex's height, but much wider in the shoulders and hips. She was staring at Sandra with wide, terrified eyes.

“Where did you come from?” she shouted.

Rattled, Sandra teleported straight back to Angel without answering.

“Are you okay?” Angel asked.

Sandra shook her head to clear it, but said, “I'm fine. It wasn't her.”

“Okay. We've got some company.” The blue and red flashing lights of multiple police cars and trucks pulled into the prison's front lot. “Let's mix things up a little,” Angel said. He chose a section of wall between their hole and the arriving backup and blew another hole in it.

Sandra cringed a little. She should be with the police, driving onto the scene with flashing lights, not setting off explosions and staging a prison break. They would be lucky to get through this without killing someone, and although she knew that if they didn't, the varcolac might very well kill every person here, that wouldn't make her feel any better if someone died as a direct result of her actions.

She teleported to the next uncertain identification and quickly eliminated her. Each time she did it, she half-expected to be killed herself, appearing inside a wall or a bed or the inmate herself. It was always a place where the copters themselves had previously been, meaning that it had recently been safe, but things—especially people—had a habit of not staying where they'd been put.

Five minutes later, they found her. Sandra appeared in the room, by this time not expecting to find her at all, and there she was, a mirror of Sandra's own face looking back at her.

“You did it!” Alex said, standing. “I wasn't sure . . . I feel like such an idiot.”

“No time,” Sandra said. “We need to get you out of here.”

“What about Jean?”

“It took long enough to find you.”

“But she's right here, in a different spoke.”

Sandra remembered how the prison's cells were arranged like spokes of a wheel, to allow a single guard to see a dozen prisoners from one vantage point. The guard on duty had seen her arrive, and was shouting into a receiver. He was unarmed, but she was sure there would be others coming soon. Sandra grasped her sister's hand and teleported into the central chamber, behind the guard. Before he could turn around, she had spotted Jean.

“I can only take one at a time,” Sandra said. “I've got the coordinates, so I'll come right back for her.”

She jumped with Alex back to the hillside where Angel still stood. Job complete, the copters had all teleported back to the entrance, and were flying back to Angel. “One more to get,” Sandra said. She teleported back to Jean's cell. Jean was standing there, waiting. The moment Sandra appeared, Jean grabbed her by the throat and smashed her head against the concrete wall with all her strength. Sparks flashed in Sandra's vision. She cried out, but she was falling, falling.
I'm trying to rescue you
, she thought, but before she could say it, the floor jumped up to hit her head again and all thought was gone.

Jean had no reason to want to hurt Alessandra Kelley, not either version of her. If their father had still been alive, the self-righteous prig, she would have torn him apart piece by piece and burned the pieces for good measure. But this girl was just unfortunate collateral damage, a means to an end. Jean pried her thumbs into the girl's eyes and popped her eyejack lenses free. The Higgs projector was slightly harder to find, a slim, card-sized object that she finally located in the girl's sock. Jean put the lenses into her own eyes, and the software didn't know that she wasn't Alessandra.

For over a decade, Jean had been trapped in this prison by a society that didn't understand or appreciate what she had done or why. She didn't owe society anything. Now she was out, and she had power. She was ready to bet that Alessandra and whoever else was involved had no real vision for the kind of raw power a Higgs projector entailed.

Jean brought up the interface. She was afraid it would be unfamiliar, that she wouldn't know how to use it. When she saw how the options were laid out, however, she laughed out loud. The fool had given them the original software as a starting point, and they had simply migrated it to a modern platform, or at least used the original as a template. This was
her
technology. She might not know the latest programming techniques, but she knew how to make a Higgs projector work for her.

She teleported away, not to another position on the ground, but high in the air, a mile above the prison, looking down. She fell immediately, the wind buffeting her and roaring in her ears. The earth stretched out before her in a grand vista, no walls or bars or guards or cages, just clear, fresh air to the horizon. She screamed her delight into the rushing wind. Finally. Finally, she was free.

From her vantage point, she could see that large rocks had been placed around the perimeter of the prison, probably for decoration, though possibly also to discourage anyone trying to smash through the fence with a vehicle. Interesting. It gave her an idea.

An idiot might have teleported straight to the ground, forgetting that the momentum she had built up by falling would still be in effect, and would kill her by smashing her body straight into the ground. But Jean was no idiot. She teleported to a new orientation that was rotated 180 degrees, and instead of falling she was suddenly shooting up like a rocket, thrown against gravity by the kinetic energy of her free fall. Gravity gradually took hold again, slowing her and bleeding away her momentum.

When she reached the peak, she teleported to the ground close to one of the rocks. It wasn't perfect. She lost her balance and fell but was unharmed. Grinning, she wrapped her arms around the rock. It was the size of a refrigerator, easily a hundred times her weight.

The visual interface for the Higgs projector had an object edge recognition algorithm built in, indicating what would come along when she teleported. This appeared in her view as a greenish highlight, and automatically included her clothing and any small items she was holding. She adjusted the controls until the highlight snapped out to include the rock as well. Time to see what this technology could do.

She teleported again, back to a point a mile above the prison. The rock, despite its size, came with her. Almost immediately, before she could build up much momentum, she teleported back again, leaving the rock behind in free fall. She was pretty certain the effects of wind at that height would be negligible, but just to be sure, she did it again with one of the other rocks. And again. Seventeen seconds later, the first rock struck the roof of the prison complex traveling over four hundred miles an hour and packing the punch of a truck full of dynamite. It hit dead center, driving straight through the building and into the ground like a meteor.

Debris catapulted into the air as the foundation buckled, tearing the building apart. Then the second rock hit, and the third. Watching from nearby, Jean felt the ground lurch with each impact as if from an earthquake. Sirens blared. With an ironic, parting salute at the building that had stolen the last fifteen years of her life, Jean Massey disappeared.

It only took a few moments for Angel to realize that something was wrong. It should have taken no time at all for Sandra to teleport back with Jean Massey, but she hadn't returned. “I'm going in,” he said. He thought of just following her last coordinates, but that seemed foolish. Something had happened at those coordinates to prevent her return, and it wouldn't help her to get himself caught in the same trap.