Chronica (31 page)

The facility which housed her would keep a master cracker, even someone as talented as Heron, busy for hours. But that was not the way she needed to proceed, because that way would likely result in Max and Sierra's deaths. She was willing to give her life for Sierra, as her sisters had done in Alexandria, if that were necessary. But she thought that that, too, was not the best way forward, at least for now.

Appleton was resting in the next room. She held the stick that Appleton had had her make. It was as thin as a hairpin, and a hairpin was an apt comparison. For just as a hairpin was lodged just inches from the brain of a human being, so could this stick be easily inserted into the core of any artificially intelligent system. Thin as a hairpin, and yet it contained what might well have been the weightiest book ever written: the
Chronica
.

Heron and his men were now outside the facility, and had correctly identified it as their target, for all of its drab, unremarkable exterior. The key to keeping Sierra and Max safe, at least for now, was to get Heron and his men inside, closer to her, and Sierra and Max locked outside. But she had to take care not to make Heron's entry too easy – that would set off his suspicions, sooner or later.

Appleton came into her room. She had alerted him. "I'm ready," he said.

***

Heron knew what he was looking at. It was cleverly camouflaged, but it really looked nothing like the small, dilapidated shack or whatever it was supposed to be. For what would a structure like this be doing here, anyway, in a square otherwise bustling with restaurants, produce stores, and beauty salons? Heron was no businessman, but he knew that a building like this would be snapped up quickly and converted into another trendy shop, replete with scenic seagulls coasting overhead at no charge.

But that didn't mean this structure would be easy to enter – or, in his case, break into. Heron pulled the code cracker he had acquired in New York out of his pocket, and got to work. He could see immediately that this would take some time. "Make yourselves uncomfortable," he said to the supervisor of his four-man team.

The supervisor told his men to look around the building and the square. About five minutes later, the one closest to Route 6A called in. "I've got an old man here, speaking some gibberish, but something about his accent seems wrong."

The supervisor told his agent to indeed bring the old man to him. He in turn brought the man to Heron. "Pardon the interruption," the supervisor said to Heron and cleared his throat. "Does this man mean anything to you?"

Heron turned around, annoyed at being interrupted. Then his face lit up with pleasure. "Mr. Appleton!"

***

Sierra and Max, from the other side of Route 6A, saw a younger man and an older man walk further into Foster Square. But the backs of these men were turned, nothing seemed unusual about them – the younger man had his arm around the older man – and nothing about them explicitly aroused suspicion. Still, something about the two men bothered Sierra on a subliminal level, not quite in her awareness.

***

"He was carrying this," the agent who apprehended Appleton handed Heron a manuscript. Heron looked at it – the
Chronica
! Another copy, still in Greek, but the
Chronica
!

"Burn it!" he ordered one of the agents, who promptly complied with a laser that incinerated the manuscript in seconds.

Heron spoke up to the shack. "Whoever you are who is in charge in there – I will kill this man right now, if you do not let me into the building."
 

One of the agents put a weapon to Appleton's head.

"No response?" Heron asked. "I am going to kill him in about three seconds, then." He looked at the agent with the weapon. "On my count of three, shoot him. One, two—"

The front door of the shack, which had been bolted shut, noisily swung open. Heron and his four agents entered with Appleton.
 

"Didn't you just get the book that you came for?" the supervisor asked Heron. "Why don't we just kill this geezer and leave?"

"Too easy," Heron replied. "There must be more to this."

***

"That was Mr. Appleton!" Sierra said as she and Max crossed 6A. "The old man with the young man."

"How can you tell? We could barely see them," Max said.

"I've seen him many more times than you have," Sierra said. "I'm sure – trust me!"

"Who was the other man?" Max asked.

"I don't know," she said.

The two ran as fast as they could to the little building at the end of the square.

***

She could see everything that was happening from her vantage point three levels below ground. So far, all was proceeding as she had hoped. Sierra and Max were outside the building, not in imminent danger as yet from Heron and his men, who were inside the building now, looking for more of the
Chronica
.
 

The only thing she wasn't pleased about was Appleton's condition. He hadn't exerted himself too much, sitting in a chair, moving through a tunnel that brought him to Route 6A. She made sure no one was looking when he emerged, in back of a bathroom in an electro-charging station. But even the short walk back to the facility, escorted by Heron's man, had taken a toll. She didn't know how much more of this Appleton could take, in his declining state. The key to keeping Appleton alive, she knew, was ending this as quickly as possible.

It hadn't been easy constructing this complex facility. The abundance of sand in the ground on Cape Cod made any underground construction a challenge. Fortunately, some good old-fashioned nanotech had done the job. As for the town and its building ordinances, it had been easy to manipulate records to give this facility the cover of being a dormant oceanographic annex affiliated in some unclear way with Woods Hole in Falmouth. As long as the taxes were paid on time, no one paid much attention to the little Foster Square Facility at the end of the square.

The facility was outfitted with automated weapons which would have been able to eliminate Heron and every one of his men in seconds. But, as she had expected, Heron and his men were dressed in smart clothing, which scrambled the telemetry of her armaments, and made the men impossible to clearly target. She was devoting a substantial part of her capacity now to coming up with a way to get around the scrambling, but she doubted it would be completed in time.

Her problem was with Appleton so close to Heron and his men, she couldn't risk even just a slightly inaccurate shot hitting the publisher.

***

Heron considered his options on the dusty ground floor of the structure, which was recessed about half a level. "You wouldn't happen to know if there are any other copies of the
Chronica
here, and where they might be?" he asked Appleton.

"No," Appleton replied, weakly but firmly, "I would not."

Heron resisted the impulse to kill the meddling old man, who had brought him such grief, right now. But he needed Appleton alive.

There was an open second floor in this building, which Heron could already see was more complex and nuanced on the inside than the outside. But his scanner showed nothing but several offices on the second landing, furnished, with no people or digital devices there. He could see no scrolls or manuscripts in those rooms, either. They almost seemed as if they were there for show. There had to be more to this place, but what and where?

"Go upstairs and see if anything strikes you as interesting," Heron instructed the supervisor and one of his men. "Sometimes the naked eye can see better than any instrument." Heron smiled to himself when he said that – if he recalled correctly, Aristotle had made a similar point about trusting what you see with just your eyes more than what is conveyed by any instrument. And the Church had relied upon that to the very day that it had started persecuting Galileo for what he had seen through his telescope.

The two men nodded and walked quickly up the stairs to the second floor. "Nothing here," the supervisor radioed down a few minutes later. "Just empty offices that look unused, like rooms in a model home."

"Ok, come back down," Heron said.

The two men appeared at the top of the stairs and began walking down. Shots of some sort suddenly lit up the stairs. Heron grabbed Appleton and pushed him to the ground. The two men near Heron withdrew their weapons, stood over Heron and Appleton, and looked all around.

One of the men on the stairs, shot in the shoulder, was crouching down. The other, the supervisor, shot in the neck, had fallen down the stairs and cracked his skull. He was sprawled out dead on the first step.

Heron cursed, pulled out his device, and frantically set in new camouflage codes for their clothing. It would take whoever was in charge of this facility at least a little longer to crack those.

Then he took a gun from one of his men and pointed it to Appleton's head. "Listen to me," he said to Appleton. "You're going to tell me, right now, about what's really going on in this place, or I'll not only kill you, but kill every trace in history of anything you've ever done. I'll make it my life's work to root out every book you've ever published, every success, large or small, you've had with any author. And once I've finished extirpating those weeds and any impact they may have had, no one will know that Appleton's or any of your damned books ever existed."

***

She believed Heron enough to initiate the next step. The floor swung open, a rectangular structure emerged, and her voice rang out. "That's an elevator. You can take it down to see me," she said. The doors to the rectangular structure opened.

Heron was happy to hear the voice, but scoffed. "How do I know I'll get out alive if I walk in there?"

"Take Mr. Appleton with you," she replied.

Heron nodded, reached in his pocket, and pulled out a small container with pills. He gave one pill to each of his men. "This should counteract any noxious chemical you might want to release in the elevator, should that be your plan," Heron said to the disembodied voice. "The only one who would now be rendered unconscious by that is your Mr. Appleton."

"That was not my plan," she responded.

Heron told his wounded agent to stay in the lobby, and keep alert. Heron, his two unwounded agents, and Appleton entered the elevator.

She opened the front door of the Foster Square Facility at just that moment, so Sierra and Max could enter. She had this timed to the split second, and believed the two had the prowess to overcome the one wounded agent.

***

Sierra and Max rushed through the open door, knives drawn. They saw a man near a rectangular structure, which was slowly receding into the floor. The man was half turned towards them—

"Friend or foe?" Max hurriedly whispered to Sierra as they were running.

"Let's subdue him and find out later," Sierra replied.

The agent turned fully as Sierra and Max were almost upon him, and managed to get off a shot.

Max's sleeve burst into flame.

Sierra and then Max tackled him, slashing with their knives, before he could fire again. Sierra slit his throat a moment later.

"Maybe we should have questioned him," Max said.

"Too dangerous to keep him alive," Sierra said, then noticed Max's arm. "Are you hurt?" She smelled no flesh in the smoke, just fiber.

"No," Max replied, just realizing that he had been hit. He touched his smoking shirt. "Ouch!" Then he grinned at Sierra. "Still hot. Good thing the vogue in 2096 is baggy clothing."
 

Sierra looked back at the dead agent, and retrieved his weapon. "Do you know how to use this?" she asked Max, and handed the gun to him. They had not been able to purchase any guns in this enlightened age, which she usually was more than happy about.

"Not as much as the knife," Max replied. "But it can't hurt to have a little laser power on our side." He surveyed the recessed floor and noticed the other agent stretched out dead at the foot of the stairs. "Here," he handed the laser gun back to Sierra. "Keep this for yourself. He likely has one of these, too." Max walked over to the stairs. "Yep," he called back to Sierra, and picked up the second weapon.

***

She sent the elevator back up to Sierra and Max, as soon as Heron, Appleton, and his thugs had exited three floors below. She knew the two would walk into the elevator, and go where it took them. The key was the precise instant she opened the elevator door for them. Timing continued to be crucial, down to the nano-second. The last thing she wanted was Sierra and Max walking into gunfire as they exited the elevator three stories below – that couldn't be the end of their story. She reflected that that was a pun, but it wasn't the least bit funny.

***

Max and Sierra saw a large rectangular object, about 20 feet tall and 15 feet wide on either side, emerge from the floor on which they were standing. They looked at it, not sure what it was, until a door in it opened.

"Should we walk into it?" Sierra asked.

"We're not likely to find Appleton just standing here," Max replied. "But the guy we just killed is likely Heron's, and we could be walking into a death trap."

A voice spoke before Sierra had a chance to respond. "It's safe," the voice said. "Please enter right now."

Sierra and Max both recognized the voice – it was the voice of the female androids Max had encountered in London, and he and Sierra had both worked with, fought the same battles against Heron with, in ancient Alexandria.

"I can't be sure," Max said, "but one of those androids may also have blown up the Parthenon Club in London, with Synesius and me inside, and another android re-set the event and killed the first android before she set off the bomb. Synesius was vague about the details, but he told me at some point that he was having dreams about something like that."

Max and Sierra had talked about this before, many times, in particular about memories that remained after re-settings. "You can't be certain about those memories," Sierra said.

"Still, if this android comes in both good and evil Heron-controlled models, how do we choose?" Max asked.