Time Salvager (12 page)
It had been a long night, and chances were, it’d be another long day as well. The newest batch of victims, as she liked to call them, had just flown to the platform by transport in threes and fours. By the end of the week, Nutris would be at 80 percent capacity and fully operational. There would be many more sleepless, deep-underwater nights for the next couple of years. Elise wouldn’t have it any other way. It actually made her sort of giddy; she was living her lifelong dream, exploring the most remote crevices of the world and healing Gaia from the many previous centuries of abuse.
“Barn Spider, what is your ETA topside?” a voice crackled, almost mumbling, through the radio.
Charlotte’s AI, predicting her request, pulled up the depth reading and flashed it in front of her left eye. She radioed back, “Morning, Hank. I’m three kilometers down and rising. I’m going to take a pause at a hundred meters and see if I can say hi to that herd of blue whales lurking in the neighborhood. I want to make sure the foundation cables aren’t going to be a problem for them. At the very least, I’d like to snap some photos to send back to my folks.”
“So, in fifteen then?”
“Make that thirty.”
“You got it, Barn Spider. I’ll allocate Bay Two.”
“Much obliged.”
An hour later, Charlotte crawled into Bay 2 of the mechanoid hanger and Elise stepped out, stretching upward on her tippy toes and reaching for the ceiling with her fingers. Her mechanoid was custom-built for her, so technically, she could stretch while inside, but fourteen hours was fourteen hours, and even someone like Elise, who lived to pilot mechanoids, could get a little claustrophobic. She never did find the blue whales, but got distracted by a family of belugas enjoying the warm morning sun.
Elise stripped out of her control suit and changed into her official Nutris Platform uniform. She hated the stiff, military-looking garb, but the director insisted all senior staff be properly attired when inside the Head Repository. Fortunately, that meant she had to wear this thing only once a week, during his status meetings.
She gave Charlotte an affectionate pat on the leg and relayed some last-minute instructions to the chief mechanic before heading out of the hangar. With a little bounce to her step, she passed by the lower dock corridor and stopped at an intersection, a slow smile growing on her face. This was where she had met Salman yesterday, the new security guy on her staff.
Elise had been floating on the ocean surface a hundred meters offshore when she noticed him wandering the perimeter like a lost puppy. She had slipped underwater and closed in like a shark. She even hummed the
Jaws
theme while she crept up behind him and launched the mechanoid onto her unsuspecting prey. The look on his face …
No matter how many times she had done that in Charlotte, it never got old.
Salman was nice. A little weird and awkward, but he seemed like a decent guy. Elise liked her men a little off. Mama always said to watch out for guys who were a bit too on the straight and narrow. The ones who showed a little bend were the good and honest ones. Mama was also a hippie from Portland and Dad was a bona fide weirdo, so all her advice needed to be taken with a grain of salt. Well, she and Salman were stuck on this giant metal raft for the next two years. She would have plenty of chances to get to know him.
Elise continued past the lower dock corridor and cut through Sector Two. Her sector. The idea that some supposedly very smart people decided to make her a sector chief blew her mind. As the youngest chief on Nutris and head biologist, she had an important role, and she wasn’t going to let any of her recommendations down.
Just last week, they’d found another of those plague blooms, a tiny one on the bottom of the Caspian Sea. Whatever this thing was, it was spreading. Fortunately, early trials were promising. The world community had caught the plague in its infancy, and the odds were good that they could nip the whole thing in the bud. Thank Gaia. If they hadn’t, that nasty mutation would theoretically have killed millions of cubic kilometers of ocean within a matter of years.
Elise had long come to accept that the tedium of the next four hours was just as important as her work four kilometers underwater. From their food reserves, to that new space-age energy generator, to the hordes of new staff coming online, the grand poobahs left very little unturned. Paper-pushing kept the lights on and the labs funded, Director Hammon liked to say. It was still a little soul-sucking but she grinned and bore it. By the time it wrapped up late in the afternoon, an early dinner or nap was in order. That or drinks.
“Hey, Elise,” Hugh, the security head from Sector Four, called out to her as the meeting wrapped up.
She motioned for him to follow her into the hallway. “What’s up?”
“You remember that security guard you transferred to my sector?”
“The Father Time guy with the long beard? About two weeks ago?”
“Yeah. Thanks for that, by the way. Great having a guard who uses a walking stick to go on patrol.”
She grinned. “How’s he working out?”
Hugh shrugged. “He’s not. The guy was around for a few days and then he went missing.”
Alarms rang in Elise’s head. They were floating on a giant platform filled with nooks and crannies and hundreds of places to fall accidentally into the middle of the Arctic ocean. She should have known better. Her initial instincts when the man had first approached her to ask for a transfer from Sector Two to Sector Four, on the grounds that Sector Two was too large for him to patrol, were simply to discharge him and send him off to retirement.
However, she had occasionally been beaten in triathlon and marathon races by ninety-year-olds, so she didn’t feel right firing someone simply because he was elderly. If the guy thought he could do his job, then by Gaia, Elise was going to let him prove to her that he could. Still, she couldn’t help but think she’d made a mistake, and a costly one at that.
“Did you report this to the director? Have you sent out search parties?” she asked. “I can get divers to survey the water under the platform. Maybe he fell and—”
“Already did. We came up empty,” said Hugh. “I had my guys go over all of Sector Four as well as his housing module. This morning, I went to go pull up his personnel files and got nothing. He’s not in our systems.”
Elise frowned. “That’s impossible. I saw them before I sent him to you.”
“That’s the thing,” he replied. “I saw them too when he came over, but they’re gone now. All of them.” Hugh looked behind him at the meeting room, where the director was still chatting with his deputy. “I really don’t want to go in there and tell Hammon that I lost a guy who somehow doesn’t exist.”
“Yeah, I could see how that could be an uncomfortable conversation,” Elise said. “What about landside? Can we query his background sources?”
“What sources? I can’t find anything.”
The two stood in the hallway in awkward silence. “Well,” Elise said finally, “part of me wants to say, if you don’t say anything, I won’t either, but that’s probably the wrong way to go about it.” She thought for a moment. “Go back to the security recruiting files and match them with our staff counts. He had to have come up through there somehow. If that comes up blank, then we have a problem and can’t rule out espionage. Until then, don’t raise the alarm until we’re sure this ghost doesn’t exist and we have all our asses covered.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Hugh said.
“Keep me updated.”
Elise watched him head toward the communications room to make the request. She had a bad nagging feeling about all this. A person disappearing like that was nearly impossible. It could be espionage, but who would want to do that to the Nutris Platform? They were a nonprofit and one of the most open-sourced projects in the world. It made no sense.
Elise needed something to take her mind off the long meeting and the news about the ghost guard. Her nice day had taken a turn for the worse and had put a damper on her good mood. She exited the Head Repository and made a beeline toward the nearest bar.
She looked to her right and her face brightened. “Just what the doctor ordered, Elise Kim. Ask and you shall receive,” she quipped. She walked toward a figure lounging against the wall. “First day and already sleeping on the job, huh?”
The morning after James arrived on the Nutris Platform, he got lost again, and this time Elise wasn’t around to bail him out. Time was short. Nutris was coming online tomorrow morning and would burn down into the ocean by the afternoon. He had spent the entire night wandering around the sectors, mapping the areas and pathing his objectives. It took him until well past dawn before he was able to verify all three targets and formulate a plan.
His AI band would be able to identify the marks once he got inside, but until then, he had to do all the legwork himself. He had originally thought it’d take just a few hours to trace his steps and have his AI band build a functioning map. Unfortunately, the floating city was even more confusing by night than during the day. Not all the lights on the walkways were fully operational yet. James got lost often and ended up wandering in circles. By the time dawn rolled around, he was exhausted and just wanted to get some sleep. Unfortunately, he had to report for his first day of work.
This had been one of his initial concerns with tying himself to the network, but in the end, the advantages outweighed the risks. That was why he had put himself on a security team. Security work was still security work after four hundred years. Sure, a late-twenty-first-century gun was completely different from an early-twenty-sixth-century wrist beam, but it was still patrol, take cover, aim, and shoot. The philosophy of it hadn’t changed since these primitive times.
Scratch that. “Primitive” wasn’t the right word. This time period was considered the zenith of humanity’s achievements before the Great Decay began. While the present certainly boasted some advances in space travel, the military, and colonization, many more technologies were lost from four centuries of war and famine.
The sector commander decided in the first five minutes that he hated James, which really wasn’t a big deal since the guy was going to be dead in a day anyway. Until then, though, the doughy commander, a nearly unheard-of adjective in the present day, put him on patrol on the western blocks of Sector Two. That suited James just fine. It gave him the chance to review the layout in his head.
By his estimate, it would take at least an hour to hit all three facilities. He wasn’t sure how much time he had before the entire city sunk, but he wasn’t taking any chances. Two of the marks were in this area and patrolling gave him the opportunity to enter all the buildings and pinpoint his intended targets. By the time his shift ended, he had mapped his entire retrieval route for the first two marks.
The only thing left was the data core housed in the Head Repository. He would have to go in on that one blind. Access to that building required the highest clearance level, one that James had not given himself. He had initially been tempted to grab the access he needed, but had decided against it. The only people with access to the Head Repository were senior leadership. They probably all knew each other, and a stranger’s name mysteriously appearing on the access control list would raise questions.
James did the next best thing and scouted around the building, looking for someone with access his AI could duplicate onto his band. With his shift over, he leaned against the wall opposite the Head Repository and watched the people coming in and out. All of them had their access to the building imprinted on their badges. He’d need to tail one of them and get close enough for his AI to swipe and imprint the access codes onto his own badge. It was that, hack the access control lists, or break the door down as the city sunk into the ocean. The first option was the quickest and most elegant. He’d need those precious seconds.
“Smitt,” he thought. “What’s the distress call time stamps on the morning the platform sunk?”
“Three hours forty-six minutes between the initial distress call and when the first craft reached their location. By that time, there were only massive oil fires on the surface of the water and high radiation signatures in the entire region.”
Not a lot of room for error; none, actually. His initial assessment had been right. This was a difficult mission. It would be a miracle if he got all three marks out. Still, he had to try. This was his ticket out of ChronoCom.
“First day and already sleeping on the job, huh?”
James turned toward the voice and saw Elise walking out of the Head Repository.
A genuine smile appeared on his face and he waved. It felt strange. Then he noticed her uniform. Now that she was out of her control suit, he could see that Elise was corporate military and a colonel to boot. He stopped midwave and saluted.
She gave him a lazy salute back. “Only when we’re on the job and in the presence of officers, pal. I’m just a civilian they slapped a pretty badge on. It’s hard enough to make friends around here as it is.”
“For you? Hard to believe.”
“That’s what I thought,” she feigned exasperation. “But two-year stints mean all the civilians they recruited have families. Not many singles sign up for this type of job knowing that they’re stuck here the entire time.”
“There are at least two of us.” He shrugged. Immediately, he regretted saying that. What was he thinking? He had work to do, and less than sixteen hours to do it.
She took her badge off her collar. “Well, I’m off duty now. Guess you can buy me dinner.”
Her directness stopped James in his tracks. On the one hand, he’d love to spend more time with Elise. On the other hand, she was a distraction he didn’t need on this job. After all, the entire place was going up in a ball of radiated fire tomorrow. Hanging out with a soon-to-be ghost was a sure way for him to screw up the assignment, or worse, get himself killed.
He was about to turn her down when he stopped again. Why couldn’t he take this woman—probably the first woman he’d ever been attracted to who didn’t make it a business transaction—out to dinner? What was the harm of spending one evening with Elise? It would probably be healthy and help preserve his sanity. He deserved a little happiness, didn’t he?