Xenotech Queen's Gambit: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 2) (25 page)

“Use this, please,” I said. “I need my phone to focus on overriding the control panel.”

Ray Ray didn’t waste time by replying. He just took the penlight and resumed his search. I lifted my phone to the panel filled with buttons.

“Eight minutes.”

“And counting,” I said. “I get it. What do you see behind the panel?”

“An explosive charge set to go off if anyone tries to change the position of the elevator in the shaft,” said my phone.

“That doesn’t sound good,” I said.

“What doesn’t?” said Ray Ray, inspecting the ceiling near the nova bomb.

“If we mess with the panel, we’re dead.”

“Good thing I found a maintenance panel in the ceiling, then,” said Ray Ray.

“Where?”

“There.”

Ray Ray pointed to a spot in the steel mesh ceiling directly above the nova bomb. It was a two by three-foot trap door that opened up, into the elevator shaft.

“Only one problem,” said Ray Ray.

“Seven minutes,” said my phone.

“What’s that?”

“It’s locked.”

My phone and I both laughed.

“Is
that
all?”

I walked over to the nova bomb, taking care not to touch it by accident, and tossed my phone toward the ceiling. It hit the steel mesh gently and extruded dozens of tiny arms to hang on. Then it moved hand over hand over hand to get to the trap door. It was closed with a simple combination lock like I used at the gym. My phone shifted to mutakey mode and after three seconds of probing, the lock opened. We were home free. Then I saw an arc of electricity as wide as a garden hose jump from the lock to my phone. Stars flashed across my retinas and the hairs on my neck stood up. I smelled ozone and watched, horrified, as my phone fell straight down toward the nova bomb. Despite my compromised vision, I managed to catch it in mid-fall like a center fielder snagging a pop-up. I pulled it close to my body, then looked up when a second, even larger arc of electricity welded the treacherous lock shut again, sealing us in the elevator.

I guessed there were less than six minutes left before the nova bomb vaporized everything within a five hundred galmet radius.

“You okay?” I said to my phone.

It didn’t answer. A crisped and blackened corner of its mutacase broke off in my hand. My heart sank.

Crap.

Crap. Crap. Crap.

I opened my backpack tool bag and carefully wrapped my phone in the fabric of my B.I.T.S. coverall. It was probably a futile gesture, considering we were all likely to be reduced to our constituent atoms in a few minutes, but it made me feel better.

“Got any ideas?” I asked Ray Ray.

“Maybe,” he said. “Got any high explosives in that bag?”

“Would these do?” I said, pulling out the pair of Macerator power pack cylinders.

“They might.”

Ray Ray examined the cylinders.

“There are pictures on the sides explaining how to use these as time bombs,” he said.

Maybe the Macerators’ designers were fans of the George S. Patton quote about the object of war not being to die for your country, but to make the other poor, dumb bastard die for his. The cylinders would be unexpectedly potent weapons for a soldier’s last stand.

“You want to blow us up
before
the nova bomb goes off?” I said.

“No,” said Ray Ray. “I want to damage the containment sphere around the nova bomb. The congruent circuitry inside it is delicate. If we can breach the sphere, we have a chance of disabling the nova bomb.”

“And how do we live through the power pack cylinder explosions?” I asked.

“Grab all the padded mats off the walls and stack them up on the side away from the nova bomb,” he said. “Make an enclosed lean-to for protection from the smaller blast.”

“Got it.”

I pulled all the mats down and dragged them to the end of the elevator car farthest away from the nova bomb, while Ray Ray fiddled with the power pack cylinders.

“Get under the mats,” he said. “Leave me an opening at one end so I can jump inside. I’m setting these for ten seconds.”

“You’re using both?”

“I have to make sure they crack the containment sphere.”

“If you say so.”

“Don’t worry,” said Ray Ray. “I’m a trained engineer.”

Somehow that wasn’t reassuring.

I wriggled under my lean-to made of mats and made sure there was a small opening at one end for Ray Ray to enter. The clock in my head said we were cutting it really close. I heard the snap of relays engaging on the power pack cylinders and heard Ray Ray’s footsteps running this way. I held the mat in front of me open so Ray Ray would have more room. When the ten second countdown I was reciting reached three, Ray Ray dived in next to me and I pulled the mat in tight behind him. I exhaled, covered my ears with my upper arms, and pressed my face deeply into the mat I’d put on the floor. Then I felt a blow like Thor’s hammer crushing me into Captain America’s shield, combined with a large dose of “Hulk Smash.”

The floor tilted up and Ray Ray and I—riding on a mat--began to slide toward the far end of the elevator, which was now substantially lower than our end. The only thing that stopped us was the mat catching on a random splintered floorboard bent upward by the blast. After five minutes, Ray Ray and I were a bit more together. Our noses were bleeding and our ears were ringing, but we could at least stand up.

I wiped my nose on my sleeve and looked around. The far end of the elevator was gone, including whatever hardware had held that end of the car on its tracks. We leaned over the edge of broken floorboards and saw the cracked sphere of the nova bomb at the bottom of the shaft, two levels below us. Ray Ray and I were lucky to be alive. Our ears weren’t working too well, so I mimed a heartfelt “thank you” at Ray Ray. His fast thinking had saved my life, and his own. He smiled and made a thumbs up gesture. We’d survived.

Now we needed to get out of this mangled elevator. It was four o’clock on a Thursday morning in a deserted hangar and the explosion had been contained to the elevator shaft, not affecting the rest of the building. The blast might have shown up on a seismograph in a lab at Georgia Tech as a small blip on a graph, but I didn’t expect a plume of smoke to be rising from the roof to summon the authorities. I didn’t know when or if anyone would ever show up to investigate and get us out. I was also concerned that the elevator car might decide to see if gravity still worked and reduce its potential energy by falling. Then I looked up and saw one of the sweetest sights I’d seen in hours—a pair of octovacs coming down the elevator shaft to pull Ray Ray and me to safety.

When we were lifted all the way to the top and back in my van, after lots of dome rubs for the octovacs, I opened my backpack tool bag and checked on my phone. The mutacase was a total loss. Its remaining carbonized pieces fell off and left thick black marks on my van’s clean carpet. I put them in the garbage bag with my ruined tux and used my ruffled formal shirt to carefully clean my phone’s screen and casing. I rubbed my fingers over its screen in gentle gestures, but nothing happened. Then there was a faint blue glow on my phone’s screen. Part of my heart that hadn’t dared to hope rejoiced.

My phone wasn’t dead. But I wasn’t so sure about the long term prospects for Columbia Brown, Penn and Princeton.

Chapter 28

“Well, I’m back.”
— Samwise Gamgee

Ray Ray was hungry and dehydrated so I gave him what was left of my bottle of Diet Starbuzz and drove somewhere close by, where he could recharge his batteries. Roger Joe-Bob Bacon’s Waffle House on Virginia Avenue north of Hartsfield was just as bright and clean and welcoming at five o’clock on a Thursday morning as it had been at seven o’clock on a Monday. Roger himself was on his rotating stool in the kitchen, wearing his chef’s hat, pouring waffles and flipping fried eggs. He waved at us with a spatula held in one of his tentacles when we entered.

“Seat yourselves,” he said. “One of the servers will be with you in a minute.”

It was too early for the first breakfast rush, so things weren’t busy.

“Thanks,” I said. With my backpack tool bag over my shoulder, I helped guide Ray Ray into a booth and signaled to Roger Joe-Bob. He left his cook’s station and brought over a large cup of hot coffee for Ray Ray, plus a Diet Starbuzz in a glass with lots of ice for me. Roger Joe-Bob stretched and extended one of his eye stalks so he could get a good look at the man who’d saved my life.

“You, sir, need an All-Star Breakfast.”

Ray Ray answered the Pyr with eight short words.

“Scrambled. Covered. Country ham. Plain waffle. Raisin toast.”

This wasn’t Ray Ray’s first Waffle House dining experience.

Roger Joe-Bob moved to start cooking Ray Ray’s order, but I stopped him with a question. Being trilaterally symmetrical, the little alien didn’t have to turn around.

“Do you have a charging pad I can borrow?”

“Sure, Jack,” he said. “Current is free here. The last quarter galzen of these new-fangled tables is
all
charging pad. Just put your devices down on it and they’ll get power. I used to have little signs explaining that, but customers kept taking them as souvenirs.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Now I’ve got another question.”

“What’s that?” said the Pyr.

“Why didn’t you ask
me
what I wanted for breakfast?”

“You’ve got a spot of Flying Biscuit Caf
é
apple butter on your cheek and biscuit crumbs mashed into your t-shirt,” said Roger Joe-Bob. “You must have had breakfast not too long ago.”

“Oh,” I said with a smile. “I hope you aren’t unhappy I’m also patronizing the competition.”

“Not one bit,” said Roger Joe-Bob. “I like to get me some of their biscuits myself now and ag’in.”

The Pyr might appreciate some dialect coaching from Poly. Roger Joe-Bob returned to his stool and started cooking Ray Ray’s order.

I put my phone on the table’s charging pad, realizing that the broad black stripe in the table’s surface delineated the charging area. Ray Ray did the same with his phone, a brand new model half the size of mine. Its battery must have drained while he was held captive. Then I realized why customers had been taking Roger Joe-Bob’s signs. They’d probably read something like “Power for your mobile devices—no charge.” Maybe the Pyr needed Poly’s help with his signage, too.

Ray Ray was sitting quietly across from me, sipping his coffee. He looked like he was resting on a charging pad himself.

“Call your father,” I said. “He’s worried about you.”

“It’s five in the morning,” said Ray Ray.

“He’ll want to hear from you.”

“He doesn’t even know I’m in trouble.”

“He knows he hasn’t heard from you in a week, so call him. He’ll need to drive here from Newnan to pick you up anyway.”

“I can take an autocab home,” said Ray Ray, without much enthusiasm.

“You’ve just had a traumatic experience,” I said, “and don’t need to go back to an empty apartment in Midtown. You need family around, and Charli’s in Pittsburgh. Call your father.”

“My phone’s charging.”

“It’s got enough juice to make a call by now,” I said.

“Okay, I’ll call.”

I waited until he’d picked up his phone and placed the call, then excused myself to sit at the empty counter for a few minutes so I could chat with Roger Joe-Bob.

“I understand you’re friends with Tomáso and Queen Sherrhi.”

“Yep,” said the Pyr. “Isn’t that little girl of theirs a cute one? I’ve been meanin’ to circle by the Dauushan consulate and say howdy to Sherrhi since I heard she was here on Terra.”

“I’m sure they’d love to see you,” I said. “But I’d like to ask for your help on something that would keep Sherrhi and her little girl from being kidnapped.”

“Kidnapped? Who’d want to do such a thing?” he said. “Glad to be of service any way I can.”

“Great,” I said. “We don’t really know who’s behind things, but I have an idea how to stop them. It would help if I could borrow some of your inventory.”

“There’s not much on hand here,” he said. “Trucks bring in new eggs and flour and such every day.”

“No,” I said. “Not your Waffle House inventory, your Khufu, Limited inventory.”

“That’s a whole ’nother kettle o’ fish. What d’ya have in mind, son?”

He slid his stool away from his grills and waffle making station until he was directly in front of me. I leaned over the counter and whispered into where I thought one of the Pyr’s ears was located.

“That jest might be doable,” said Roger Joe-Bob, after I’d finished. “Providin’ it’s only temp’rary.”

“Just until four o’clock on Saturday afternoon,” I said.

“I’ll tell my Chief Operatin’ Officer,” said Roger Joe-Bob. “He’ll make it happen.”

The billionaire Pyr returned to his grill and I went back to keep Ray Ray company. He was off the phone and had returned to sipping his coffee.

“How’s your dad?”

“Good,” he said. “He said he’ll be here in an hour and a half.”

“Great.”

It would a pleasure to see R.C. in the flesh. Now I needed to learn everything I could from Ray Ray about O’Sullivan Fabrication and why he was trussed up on the floor of the hangar.

A server bustled over to our table with two steaming plates.

“Scrambled eggs, hash browns with cheese, country ham, raisin toast and a waffle,” she said, putting the plates down in front of Ray Ray. “Anything for you?”

She had her pad and pencil out ready to take my order.

“That raisin toast looks good,” I said.

She nodded and left, coming back a minute later with the toast and a refill on my Diet Starbuzz, then leaving again. Ray Ray was making a serious dent in his All-Star Breakfast.

I looked at Ray Ray until he lifted his head from what must have been his first meal in quite a while.

“Let’s talk about the eight hundred pound gorilla,” I said.

“The what?”

“How you ended up bound on the floor of a hangar that was about to be vaporized?”

“It’s a long story.”

“We’ve got an hour and a half.”

Ray Ray began to eat more slowly. He chewed on a piece of ham and looked like he was trying to get his thoughts in order.

“I thought it was a decent job,” he said a few seconds later. “The pay was good and I’d worked on Model-43 fabricators in the lab at Georgia Tech.”

I nodded. The Dauushan Model-43 was a bit dated now, but still a workhorse.

“You were the 3D printer operator?”

“Most of the time. I also reviewed fabrication designs, did three dimensional modeling for new products, worked out materials tolerances, handled quality control and managed inventory.”

That was a lot more than Mike had been doing at WT&F, but Ray Ray did have an engineering degree.

“Then things started looking sketchy.”

“What do you mean?”

“We started doing these late night fabrication runs, fabbing stuff that looked more military than commercial. I didn’t sign up to fab weapons.”

“Uh huh.”

“But it was the inventory tracking that really made me think something was wrong.”

“Going through too much feed stock?”

“Yeah. We were using twice as much as we should, including supplies of the more expensive, exotic materials with military uses. I accounted for every job going through our Model-43, even the runs when I wasn’t working, and we were using way more than that.”

“What did you do when you found out?”

“I told my boss,” said Ray Ray. “Sarah Barnard, the Ice Woman.”

“Sarah Lawrence Barnard?”

More women’s college names.

“Yeah. Do you know her?”

“I’m beginning to think I do. What does she look like?”

“Tall, black, brown eyes, short dark hair, about thirty-five, wears glasses and expensive clothes.”

Those details fit Columbia Brown precisely.

“She always gave me the creeps,” said Ray Ray. “If I’d met her during my interviews I wouldn’t have taken the job. Her voice was cold, hard, and totally intimidating.”

“What did she say when you told her about the inventory discrepancies?”

“She told me not to worry about it. She’d deal with it.”

“You thought someone was stealing?”

“Yeah, and that she’d put a stop to it one way or another. I didn’t want to be on her bad side.”

“But you ended up there...?”

“Right. But before that, I learned about the lower level.”

I nodded encouragement.

“Ms. Barnard said that she would show me where the extra feedstock was going, but made me sign a new confidentiality agreement first. She made it sound like we were working on secret government contracts or something. We took an elevator down several stories and I learned there was a duplicate fabrication facility down there, with another Dauushan Model-43. This printer was fabbing parts for giant combat robots, and I didn’t want any part of it. There were lots of those eight-legged assemblers around, too, like the ones that rescued us.”

“I call them octovacs.”

Ray Ray ate more hash browns and spoke between bites.

“If you say so. They remind me of spiders and I can’t say I’m much of a fan.”

“They grow on you,” I said. “Then what?”

“This was last Friday. Ms. Barnard said she wanted me to be in charge of both the upper and the lower fabbers,” he said. “She said a client needed a dozen giant robots by this Friday.”

“They wanted delivery tomorrow?” I said. “What did you say?”

“I said yes,” said Ray Ray. “I was afraid I’d never see the light of day again if I said no.”

“Let me shift gears for a minute. Does the name Agnes Spelman mean anything to you?”

“Sure, that’s Ms. Barnard’s sister. She runs Factor-E-Flor, the design shop.”

Columbia Brown has a
sister?
What other
bad news did the universe have for me today?

“So you agreed to run fabbing for both levels. Then what?”

“That night, after work, I called my dad. We talked for an hour. I didn’t tell him anything specific, just that I was uncomfortable. If anything happened to me I wanted him to know where to start looking.”

“He told me about that.”

“He did?” said Ray Ray. “I guess that’s just my dad. Always oversharing.”

“He loves you and he’s proud of you,” I said. “You can tell from his expression whenever he talks about you.”

“At the end of the call he told me that he knew I’d do the right thing,” said Ray Ray.

“Your father is a wise man.”

“Listening to him nearly got me killed,” said Ray Ray with a rueful smile. “I went back to the office that night and did it.”

Ray Ray paused, sipped his coffee, then resumed.

“I sabotaged the robots being built by both the upper and lower Model-43s.”

“And that’s when they caught you and tied you up?” I asked.

“No,” said Ray Ray. He looked at me like he wondered if I thought he was an idiot. “I was subtle about it.”

I knew how I’d do subtle sabotage in a similar situation, but wondered how Ray Ray would do it.

“I changed the materials used in the lower legs,” he said. “They would test the robots at night in one of the fields near the O’Sullivan Fabrication facility. When the robots would try to stand, their own weight would snap their shins. Lots of other components would be damaged when the robots fell over.”

Not bad. I would have picked ankles, but shins would work just as well.

“How much time did that buy you?”

“Several days, as the parts were reprinted and retested.”

“Then Ms. Barnard started to get suspicious. I had planned to quit without notice the next day and intended to spend some time with my dad down in Newnan.”

“But…?”

“I got tricky and wanted to prevent them from building more robots, so I decided to disable the Model-43s themselves.”

“By breaking off the rails for the feedstock towers?”

“No,” said Ray Ray. “Cyanoacrylate on the output nozzles.”

Ouch. Superglue would be a bear to remove. The nozzles would need to be completely replaced.

“Sounds like a sticky situation,” I said.

Ray Ray shook his head in disgust.

“Barnard and three of her goons were waiting for me in the parking lot,” said Ray Ray. “They zapped me with a stun gun and threw me in the trunk of a car.”

“Then they took you to the hangar?”

“No, then they took me to Disney World.”

“Don’t be that way.”

“Sorry,” said Ray Ray. “Now I have a question.”

“Sure,” I said.

“How did you know where to find me?”

“I didn’t. I found you by accident while looking for someone else.”

“I’m alive because of an accident?” said Ray Ray.

“A lot of us are,” I said.

We hadn’t noticed, but the restaurant had gotten busier around us as we’d talked. The place was full of people having breakfast before their shifts started at seven. Our server had been by a few times to refill Ray Ray’s coffee but her transient presence didn’t really register. Then someone else was standing next to our table.

“Good to see you, son,” said R. C. Dunwoody. “You too, Jack.”

I stood up and shook R. C.’s hand, then got out of the way so that R. C. and Ray Ray could hug. The two of them looked a lot alike. Both had the same model of sunglasses pushed up on their foreheads and the same big smiles on their faces.

“Take my seat, please, R. C.,” I said. “I have to get home and get some sleep.”

“Thanks for finding Ray Ray.” said R. C.

“Just so you know,” I told R. C., “your son saved my life.”

R. C. looked at Ray Ray with pride.

“And you saved mine, Jack,” said Ray Ray.

“Pick up the check and we’ll call it even,” I said.

I opened a pocket on my backpack tool bag, removed my phone from the charging pad, and gently placed it inside. Its glow was brighter now, but it still wasn’t talking. I’d run it through a full set of diagnostics back at my apartment.