The Far Side (76 page)

Captain Wolford pointed to that building first.  “One of the things we need to decide early on -- that’s an elementary school, and they’d normally be kicking into gear in another hour, or hour and a half.  Is there a risk?”

Kris glanced at Kurt who shrugged.  “Captain Wolford,” Kris told him, “I don’t believe there is a risk.  That said, none of us would enjoy what would happen if I was wrong.”

Kurt nodded.  “Do you want to go public with the exact nature of the problem?”

“We’d prefer not to.  But a lie could come back to haunt us.”

“That’s so.  So, let’s try the minimum first.  A white lie.  Call up the local radio and TV stations and tell them that school is closed today.  There was a police incident with shots fired, and you are still working on stabilizing the situation.  Get the word out.  Turn cars away on a mile perimeter.  Get the school district involved early on, tell them there is an unspecified threat to the school, and that you aren’t comfortable with classes being held there, at least today.”

Captain Wolford looked the deputy mayor who nodded, pulling out his cell phone and speaking into it.  The assistant police chief listened a few moments, and then spoke into his radio.

In the meantime, Captain Wolford pointed to a cluster of homes two and three hundred feet away.  “The fusor is in the largest home there, the one closest to us.  They have a basement under part of the house, and that’s where it is.  The owner’s son is one of the missing.  This house here is the home of the survivor’s parents -- currently they are in protective custody.

“If you wish to talk to him, the young man is available on a half hour’s notice.”

He nodded at the house with the fusor.  “That home belongs to Mr. James Early, a Chicago alderman, whose son is one of the missing.  The other missing young man lives directly in front of the elementary school -- his father is the principal there.  Mr. Early hasn’t been cooperative.  The mayor and governor have both talked to him, but he’s not being helpful.”

The deputy police chief nodded.  “We have him downtown on a warrant for obstruction.  He tried to break into the fusor room last night and scuffled with the guards.  He punched one of them in the nose -- the officer struck was the former partner of the missing sergeant -- the officer responded by decking the alderman, then cuffing him and then the alderman was transported downtown.  The mother is staying with a neighbor and has been sedated.  They have a lawyer en route.”

“Kris, your thoughts?” Kurt asked.

“I’m concerned,” she told the former major.  “The actions taken from the Far Side seem like intelligence rather than a hunger for raw meat.  But if there was something intelligent beyond the door, you’d think they’d poke their heads through to see what’s here.  An animal wouldn’t have bothered with the cameras, I’m thinking.  Perhaps smashing them, but not pulling them through.  One maybe, but not two.

“Tentatively, I think we are looking at something intelligent and of a physical size that precludes sticking more than a small limb through the door -- and perhaps not even that.”

Kurt looked at her for a second and then turned to the policemen.  “Do you have any idea of where we’d be if that asshole from Homeland Security had his way?  I’ve been thinking ‘hungry animal’ ever since I heard Captain Wolford’s description.  Hungry as in a lion or tiger.

“And I have no excuse.  While I’ve never seen a dralha, I have seen a dralka.  A dralka couldn’t get through a Far Side door.”

“It could if it stooped over,” Ezra reminded him, “and folded its wings tight.”

“Yes.”

Captain Wolford rubbed his chin.  “Honestly, that this was some kind of animal was my thought as well.  As you said -- something like a lion or bear.”  He nodded at his superior.  “I told them this was a pointless exercise -- that those people are alien shit now.  Christ, there are dozens of animals from Earth that wouldn’t fit through that door.  There is a chance they are still alive, I suppose, but I wouldn’t bet against anything less than a hundred to one odds.”

“Captain,” Kris said bluntly, “they are dead.  I’ve been stranded on the Far Side.  If you can get through that door, even if you think there is virtually no chance, the instinct to go for it would be overwhelming.  It’s a huge psychological motivation, sir.  We can sit here and ascribe motives in our comfort and lack of stress, but that wouldn’t have been what they were facing -- even if they were being led off by something like the Tengri to be slaves.  They couldn’t be sure, and if they could see the door, they’d have tried for it.”

“Shit!” the deputy chief said with heat.  “Christ!  Three dead cops!  We want some payback!”

“Officers,” Kurt said gently, “who died doing their duty, no different than those heroic men and women who died on 9/11.”

“Please,” Kris said, “forget the last part of what Kurt just said.  I don’t want fusors and terrorism mentioned in the same breath if we can help it.  They were brave men, doing their duty as policemen do.  Period, stop, end of sentence.  No comparisons to other events.”

Kurt chuckled.  “Kris, someday you’ll have that asshole’s job, and the world will be a hell of a lot better place than it is now.”

“Well, she’s got the ‘managing the news’ part of the job down pat,” the deputy police chief agreed with Kurt.  “Okay, that’s how we’ll go with it.”

His phone sounded and he picked up.  He said a few quiet words and then looked at them.  “Your other men are here and are coming; call it twenty minutes until they arrive.  I’m sorry, Miss Boyle and Major Sandusky, but the governor talked to the sorry bastard in DC on his cell overnight and just a few minutes ago declared an emergency.  He has made a public announcement, explaining the nature of the emergency.”

“That’s not our concern, so long as you can keep the perimeter,” Kurt told him.

“Oh, we can keep it, alright.  No problem.  In fact, the governor has ordered it to be two miles in diameter.”

“Let’s walk over and check things out,” Kris suggested to Kurt, gesturing at the house with the fusor in it.

Chapter 29 :: The Plan For a Rescue

Kurt Sandusky nodded to Kris, agreeing that it was time to view the scene.  Then he added, “What about weapons and armor?”

“On that, I have to bow to you, Kurt,” Kris told him.  “We should do this right from the beginning.”

Kurt turned to Pete Sharp who’d been silent through everything.  “Officer, would you see that Kris is fitted into a proper party dress?”

“Yes, sir.”

Kris went back to the SWAT van, and the two SWAT officers and Pete helped her find armor that fit.  She made a face as they fit it over her clothes.  “Why am I hanging out and you guys have it all out of sight?”

One of the SWAT men laughed.  “Miss, first, you’d have to strip down to bra and panties.  Then we’d hang this on you, and your clothes wouldn’t fit over it.  You’d have to go with the armor, bra, and panties.”

“That would be exciting!” Kris said wryly.  “I suddenly find this is more comfortable than I thought!”

“For some of us more than others,” the SWAT sergeant told her.  “You’d find that the armor chafes without padding.  This is better, Miss.”

When it came time to walk across the street Kris thought she more closely resembled a waddling bear than her usual self.  Still, that was pretty much how everyone moved, except the SWAT team, who must have had a lot of practice.

They reached the house and entered, threading their way through rooms that even Kris would have considered palatial until they reached a rough-finished storeroom off the garage, with a set of steps that led down.

Downstairs, a half-dozen police officers were all awake and alert, although Kris was sure that at least two of them had been asleep within the last few minutes.

She looked over the fusor, checked the spot where the Far Side door had been.  She looked up at Kurt and Ezra.  “I don’t see any blood.”

“No,” Kurt agreed.  “What do you want to do first?”

“Well, a camera on a coax first,” she told them.  “A really good, really high-speed, camera, with a big fat pipe back to a workstation.”

Captain Wolford said that they had one and it was on site.

They prepared it and discussed additional resources.  “These men all have either rifles or shotguns, plus their personal weapons,” Kurt told Captain Wolford.  “Everyone should keep their personal weapons, but we need something heavier.  At least two SAWs; maybe something like a Barrett.”

“A Barrett?” the SWAT supervisor who had been listening in to the conversation said with a laugh.  “I’ve tried to get authorization for one a half dozen times, but the bean counters say there wasn’t a justification.”

“You can use one?”

“I did in Afghanistan.  I wasn’t as great a shot as some of them, but I can knock gnat’s socks off at five hundred meters.”

“We have one coming.  Kris, can I oversee emplacing the heavy weapons and shooters?” Kurt asked.

“I don’t want to tell you your business, Kurt, but none of the doors upstairs can be in the line of fire.  If things go in the toilet, we may have to make a hasty withdrawal, and who knows which door?”

The deputy mayor spoke up.  “You seem to pick the worst scenarios.”

Kris smiled slightly and shook her head.

Kurt Sandusky chuckled.  “Yes -- if it’s not something special, odds are we can deal with it off the top of our heads.  If things go bad -- all you have is training and experience.  Better to make provision for the worst case up front.”

“And your idea of worst case, Major?”

“We get killed as soon as we go through the Far Side door.  They start coming through to invade Earth.  We cut the door and kill those that came through.  We assume they are armored like an M-1 Abrams.”

Kris laughed.  “My scenario is worse,” she told him.

“Worse than we all get killed as soon as we go through?”

“Sure.  It takes thirty to forty-five seconds to stabilize the Far Side door.  Plenty of time for others on the Far Side to get set.  Before we even move they hit us from the far side with weapons or explosives on this side.  We all die before we can move.  Then they try to invade.”

“Yours is definitely worse than mine,” Kurt agreed.  “Shit!”

“Well, someone standing directly behind the Far Side door would be safe, except from ricochets.”

She turned to Captain Wolford.  “Do your people have a bomb robot or something we can use to flip a switch and then try to put a camera through the door?  I have an idea how we could do that.”

“How?” Kurt asked.

“Andie was telling me the other day about some tests that she was running on the door to Arvala.  She wanted to measure how far it was from the cave wall to the door.  For reasons I don’t understand, she thought she had to go from here to there, so what she did was mount a range finder on a carefully designed arm that they could extend a millimeter at a time.

“Then she made a dozen measurements of how far it was to the wall when the range finder would poke the barest bit through the door.  Two point one seven meters.  Then I told her she could have just put the range finder up against the other wall and measured that way, as it has its exact dimensions on the side of the device.  She measured the distance down to a micron.”

“Micrometer,” Pete Sharp said, correcting her.

“A micrometer is a device of measuring small distances,” Kris said primly, “not a small distance.  At least that’s what my high school biology teacher told us.”

“We have a robot that can do that,” Captain Wolford told her.  “It’s what the camera is mounted on.”

“It will be important that we be able to adjust either the camera lens position or the light bar,” Kris told him.  “The two will have to be in exactly the same plane.”

“I’m sure we have something like that.  We’ll get it here as quickly as possible.”

One of the SWAT officers spoke up.  “The Bomb Squad sent a van; they have the robot in their equipment trailer.”

“Go tell them to set up,” Captain Wolford commanded.

Kris looked at Pete Sharp.  “You’re still quiet.”

“I don’t know if you’re going to get me killed or make me a hero.  I’m still trying to figure out why I’m here.”

Kris smiled but didn’t say anything further.

She reviewed the fusor controls, but it was a straight-forward copy of what Andie had built.  Someone had even left the vacuum pump on, which must have taken some bureaucratic backbone.

“Whose idea was it,” she asked, “to leave the vacuum pump on?”  She said it in a mildly accusatory tone.

Captain Wolford spoke up.  “The survivor said if we turned it off, it could take a half day to get the machine running again.  I made the decision.”

“He was right, Captain, and so were you,” Kris told him.  “I’m going to need some electric extension cords, some diags and a soldering iron.”

The tools were fetched, and she carefully rewired the controls, except for the vacuum pump, to run from upstairs.  Technicians brought the robot downstairs and set it up, while Kris and Ezra worked on what was going to be the on-site command post, upstairs in the home theater.

They put the various controls close together, but not so close that the operators of each would interfere with each other.  The police robot had its own operator, and the camera techs were willing to let the robot operator handle the cameras as well.  Kris was going to sit next to the robot operator with the fusor controls, while Kurt and Ezra would be their guards.  Kris asked that a man with a radio be stationed at the house’s main electrical panel with instructions to pull the plug if he thought something was up.  Pete Sharp volunteered for that, and the local police decided that the job was something they could leave to one of their expensive consultants.

By the time they were ready, Kurt had the rest of his crew on site.  They too wore body armor and carried a variety of automatic weapons, including two men with RPGs.  Kurt stationed one of the RPG men in the room with Kris, and the other north of the house, between the house and the school, even though there weren’t any kids there while the rest were held back as reserves.

Finally, about ten in the morning their ducks were in a row, and most of the police had pulled back.  Kurt, Ezra, Kris, and the RPG guy were in the home theater, and Pete was in the garage at the main electrical panel.  Captain Wolford was in the room, along with the robot’s operator and two SWAT officers.

It was a larger group than Kris felt comfortable with, eight people in the room with another in the garage, but she didn’t think that there could be fewer without ruffling feathers.

She turned on the fusor and brought the door into shimmering existence.  She had the operator move the robot forward as the door steadied.  It solidified and the robot arm began to extend forward.

It had gone just a few inches when something began to beep on the robot operator’s panel.

“What’s that?” Captain Wolford asked.

The operator tapped the blinking light.  “That’s the carbon monoxide alarm,” he told the captain.  “That’s not possible.  There’s no carbon monoxide source.”

“Stop!” Kris commanded.  Without another word, she flipped the switches and the door blinked out.  “Everyone out of the house!  Right now!”

She picked up the radio to Pete.  “Pete, listen up.  Open the garage door and go out that way -- don’t go back into the house.”

“You guys?”

“This room has a sliding glass door to the outside.  We’ll use that.  Hazardous gas levels!”

Kurt already had the door open, and Ezra was shooing people forward.  The robot operator got his machine shut down and looked at Kris.  “You don’t think that was a sensor malfunction?”

“Listen,” she told him.

In the distance, out in the hall, another sensor was chirping.  “Houses like this have carbon monoxide alarms just like they have smoke detectors.  Come on, before we all turn blue.”

They went outside, and the various deputies joined them.  “There was a problem?” the mayoral deputy asked.

“Yes.  Evidently the room on the Far Side has been flooded with carbon monoxide.  It’s a good thing we weren’t down there, because we’d have had a tough time getting out if we’d been downstairs.”

“We have air tanks, don’t we?” the police official asked Captain Wolford.

“Yes, sir,” Captain Wolford.  “It’ll be uncomfortable as hell, but at least it’s October and not July.”

“Sir,” Kurt spoke out.  “This is something we hadn’t expected.  If a man loses his mask or air in that sort of environment, he’s dead.  This is going to significantly increase the risk.”

“And you want more money,” the deputy mayor said disgustedly.

“No, sir, we have a contract and we’ll keep it.  But I’m here to tell you, sir, that the people who went through to the far side are either dead or prisoners such that it is unlikely we can retrieve them without a lot of casualties.”

“We need firemen and EMTs,” Kurt told them.  “Someone knowledgeable about carbon monoxide.”

“We have a couple of fire engines on scene and three EMT squads,” Captain Wolford told him.

“Call their senior guy,” Kris told him.  “Are there any other assets available on site that you’ve overlooked mentioning?”

He shrugged and looked apologetic.  “I’m sorry; this is a standard emergency turnout.  There is a police helicopter in the area, and a state police chopper close by as well.  We even have a pool reporter, back at the safe line, two miles away.  By now there are several hundred officers on the perimeter.”

One of the SWAT sergeants produced a map and started pointing out locations of units and officers who were cordoning off the site.  He also sketched the safe line, well inside the inner perimeter.  Kurt grunted approval when the sergeant finished.  “Let this be a lesson to all of us.  You said it was a standard emergency turnout.  Well, guess what?  We haven’t rehearsed, and you people have.  Speaking now as a big fan of Norwich, we’d sure like the loan of some of your trainers at some point in time to come and talk to us about ‘standard’ emergency procedures.”

“You’ve got it,” Captain Wolford said.  “Chief Murphy of the fire department is on his way up.”

Kris had been musing for a moment.  “The cat’s out of the bag, right?  The word about a fusor and a door to the Far Side is public?”

“Yes,” the deputy mayor told her.  “The mayor was displeased with the premature release of the information.  We’ve been on the air telling people not to panic -- but a lot of people saw Tom Cruise and the
War of the Worlds
movie.  There is already very heavy traffic headed out of the city this morning; heavier than what we usually see.  So far it’s orderly but...”

“I know this is your area, sir, but I would like to talk to that reporter.  Information management is something we should stay on top of.”

“And what are you going to talk to him about?”

“Offer him a chance to come along in exchange for not showing it live.  I’d like to get a cut at the first edit, but they won’t give us that.”

“No, they probably won’t,” the deputy mayor said.  “I got my start in the PIO trenches.  Odds are that I know whoever it is.  Sure -- a little good publicity would be helpful.”