Guardians Inc.:Thundersword (Guardians Incorporated #2) (20 page)

“Oh, yes you do.” Mr. Pianova took another sip from his coffee. “Just like when she tells me that sometimes you’re just a crybaby. She means it too.”

“What?” Thomas asked. A crybaby? He wasn’t a crybaby!

“A crybaby,” Mr. Pianova repeated. “A whiner. A scared, little boy.”

Thomas was shocked. “She says all that about me?”

“You just called her a bitch,” Mr. Pianova said, “and you’re right. So why can’t she call you a crybaby?”

“But I lost my whole family!” Thomas yelled.

“So you do act like a crybaby sometimes, just like she acts like bitch.”

“It’s different.” Thomas was getting mad now.

“Of course it is,” Mr. Pianova said. “No one is arguing that. She knows how hard it is for you, and that’s why she doesn’t call you a crybaby to your face. She doesn’t mean it in a hard sense. Now, Thomas, do you really mean it when you call her a bitch?”

“No,” Thomas said, the anger subsiding. “Not really.”

“So it’s all really out of frustration.” He walked toward him. “Sometimes she acts like a bitch, because what you need is a bitch. Are you getting this?”

“I guess,” Thomas said.

“She really likes you, Thomas. I haven’t met many people she cares about as she cares for you. It really…hurts her when she has to shock you like she did with the classes or the Halls of Remembrance. But it’s what you need to keep going and not only for us, but for yourself.”

“I…” Thomas didn’t know what to say.

“Don’t say you’re sorry, Thomas,” Mr. Pianova said. “You mustn’t feel sorry for what you’ve lived through. It wasn’t your fault. She’s not going to ask your forgiveness and you shouldn’t either. You just need to understand each other. Keep that idea, okay? Digest it.” He waited for Thomas to nod in agreement.

“Now, let’s move on.” Mr. Pianova yelled, “Lights!”

Rows upon rows of fluorescent lights illuminated the Engineering Vault, and the robots whinnied and appeared to be waiting for Mr. Pianova’s command.

“Ask me for a machine, Thomas,” Mr. Pianova said. “Any machine: past, present, a concept just drawn by an engineer. Those go over there.” He pointed to the right aisle that extended into infinity.

“Do all of them work?” Thomas asked.

“All that are feasible work,” Mr. Pianova said. “Of course I also have many that don’t but that are very cool. I have a collection of starships that don’t really fly, but wow! Anything that you saw in anything that began or ended with ‘Star’ is here. Wars, Treks, Gates. And almost all of them are life-sized machines. I mean: The Works. So ask. Go ahead.” 

Thomas gazed upon rows and rows of boxes. Could the vault really hold any type of machine? He wanted to test Mr. Pianova. “A time machine,” he said.

Mr. Pianova scoffed. “Which one, H.G. Wells? The De Lorean? The Doctor’s TARDIS?”

“Whose TARDIS?” Thomas asked.

“That’s right.” Mr. Pianova smiled.“Blue box and every interior the Doctor has roamed in.”

“Doctor who?” Thomas asked again, He had never heard anything about a time travelling doctor, and he doubted Mr. Pianova referred to Doctor Franco.

“Exactly,” Mr. Pianova said, deepening his confusion. So Thomas decided to let it go.

“Do they work?” Thomas asked instead and started to get excited. There were so many things he could do with a time machine, but Mr. Pianova immediately killed the excitement.

“No,” he said. “No one has a working flux capacitor yet, and the time machines that we've actually tested are completely different. They don't fit in a DeLorean, but if what you want is a cool car I can bring in any Batmobile, a Bugatti, or any concept car. You still want to see one?”

“If it’s just a car, not really. I have a better one.”

“I see,” Mr. Pianova said.“So?”

Thomas scratched his head, thinking about what machine he would really love to see. The starships would be cool too, but they would be just life-size models. Smaller machines, like computers or construction tools, were a little too familiar.

“I don’t know,” he said. “There are many I’d like to see, but I don’t know where to start.”

Mr. Pianova raised an eyebrow. “That’s funny; my wife bet me that that you would be asking for a certain submarine as your first choice.”

The Nautilus! Thomas’s mind raced. He had read two more volumes of
The Adventures
of Captain Nemo
that had never been released to the general public but that were available in the Library Intranet. It had been his favorite book since he was a kid. He realized just how much Mrs. Pianova knew him.

“Yes!” he said. “Do you have the
Nautilus
?”

Mr. Pianova smiled. “I have twelve of them, but I’m guessing you want to see the original?”

“Captain Nemo was real?”

“Well, Prince Dakkar was. And he was quite angry with the East India Company.” he clapped three times loudly and the mechanical arms in the Engineering bay snapped at attention. “Item RC18CPDNautilus001-A!” he yelled. The large arms at the center of the Hall began to move toward the back of the vault.

“This is the one built by Prince Dakkar in the 1700s with some technical help from the Guardians and Fauns. The prince was an explorer, but he became a revolutionary and began using it to destroy the ships of the East India Company. He tried to stop the Company from controlling the Indian subcontinent, but the Mughal Empire was already in decline.”

Prince Dakkar. Thomas knew that Dakkar was the real last name of Captain Nemo from the books, Nemo being the adopted name of the Prince in his adventure years and which meant “no one” in Latin.

Thomas heard the robot arms picking up something in the distance, and then he saw the arms carrying a large rectangle platform that looked to be made of foam. “Is that a box?” he asked as the arms approached.

“It’s a composite foam material,” Mr. Pianova said. “We use it for preservation; it’s nonreactive, recyclable, biodegradable and seals in vacuum. Quite tidy, really.”

The large arms set the box in front of them. Thomas measured the box to be at least two hundred feet long by some thirty feet high. Once the large arms had retreated, smaller arms built like needles punctured the box and a whooshing sound began.

“They are pressurizing the inside,” Mr. Pianova told him. “The whole outside and inside surfaces were coated with a preserving agent.” The whooshing stopped and the arms retracted. Four more arms appeared from the top and sides, and orange lasers began to crosscut the box. “Now we cut the foam,” Mr. Pianova explained. “The laser frequency only reacts with the foam material.”

Once the foam was cut another set of arms grabbed the foam. “A little pull and voila!” The arms pulled in unison, taking the foam away and revealing the submarine inside.

The
Nautilus
was an impressive machine, but it wasn’t at all what Thomas had imagined or seen in any movie or drawing. He approached it, and then ran his fingers along the surface. It felt rubbery, but also firm, not like metal, more like a car tire. The main body was like a flattened cigar, wider than taller. The front of the submarine didn’t have a serrated edge on top, but a wide leaf-like prow aimed to the front, surely to be used as a ram. Below the main ramming weapon, the prow had large, tube-like forms that integrated into the main body at about the first third of the ship. The main viewing port was a wide ellipsoid window embedded into a spherical frame. The body of the
Nautilus
became sleek and more flat at the end, and Thomas couldn’t see a propeller, but he saw twin openings on the back, much like the turbines of a jet plane. There was no upper bridge like in present submarines, or periscope, and no flat planes to control the submarine depth. Instead, the elongated form became almost wing-like at the back of the submarine.

Thomas stepped away from the
Nautilus
to see it in its entirety. The more he walked away, the more he realized that the
Nautilus
resembled a giant squid. The ram at the top was formed by one of the two largest tentacles in a squid, and the tube-like structures in the bow resembled tentacles. The viewing port resembled the large eyes of the squid, while the structures he’d thought were wings were in fact the head and fins of the squid. Even the rubbery skin was painted in hues of red.

“What do you think?” Mr. Pianova asked.

“It’s amazing!” Thomas said, “But it’s really different from how Verne describes it.”

“Well, Verne saw the third version, which was much more of a scientific craft, more ‘whale-like’ and without the skin covering the metal frame. Prince Dakkar designed this one with help from whale fauns to be an attack craft and to inspire fear in sailors. Just Google ‘squid attacking ship’ or ‘Kraken’ and you’ll see how powerful that image was. Verne wrote more about the adventures of this one, but he described the one that Dakkar used for scientific purposes. Does that make sense?”

“Yes.” Thomas already knew that Verne had been a Guardians Inc. collaborator, and in addition to creating stories with his wondrous imagination, he had also been a historian and biographer of those that humanity at large couldn’t, or shouldn’t, know about.

“Can we go in?” Thomas asked; the
Nautilu
s’s organic shape invited him in.

Mr. Pianova extended a thick book to him. “Of course we can,” he said. “And if you learn this by heart, we can take it for a little spin sometime.”

Thomas took the book; it was the manual and specs of the
Nautilus
. “Really?” he said excitedly.

“Of course!” Mr. Pianova said. “This is not a museum, Thomas. This is the counterpart of the library. The knowledge and ideas are stored over there, and over here we keep all the applications of that knowledge. I keep all machines humanity has ever created, a chain of unbroken human creation from the first bow and arrow to the Large Hadron Collider.”

That raised a flag for Thomas. “Even bombs?” he asked.

“Yes,” Mr. Pianova said. “Just like my wife keeps
The Necronomicon
and maybe even more evil texts. I keep machines made for war and even torture devices. And, like her, I keep them locked away in the darkest, most secure corner of the engineering bay, but they are part of humanity’s heritage. We can’t turn a blind eye to history, however painful or evil it is or we run the risk of repeating it.” Mr. Pianova winked at Thomas.  “And why keep technology, or something like the
Nautilus
if we can’t use it? Of course we are going to need a Mage to turn on the engine, or change the engine to something more technological, but we’ll get there. Now go ahead and explore it, because in two hours you have to work.”

“Where?” Thomas asked.

“At the library with my wife; she’s been expecting you all week.”

Thomas sighed. “I don’t know if I can do that yet.”

“Yes, you can,” Mr. Pianova said.

Thomas wiggled the book Mr. Pianova had given him. “Is this something like a bribe?” he asked.

Mr. Pianova looked away, as if he was up to something.

“So it is a bribe!”

“Oh my...” Mr. Pianova said micheviously. “You need a better one?”

Thomas sighed again. 

“Come on Thomas!” Mr. Pianova slapped him on the shoulder. “You two can’t stay mad at each other forever. You need to save the world, remember? She’s a bitch sometimes, but only because she loves you.”

“Okay,” Thomas gave in. “I’ll go.”

“Great!” Mr. Pianova said. “Now remember, no apologies needed. You’re an adult; you’re the Cypher, okay? In a very real sense, my wife, myself, and everyone at Guardians Inc. works for you, including Doctor Franco, but don’t let him know I told you that.”

Thomas had never thought about it that way. In a way it was true; he was the reason of Guardians Inc.’s existence, so he was the most important person in the company.

That brought a mischievous smile to his face.

Mr. Pianova smiled conspiratorially. “That’s my boy!” he said. “Now go check out your new toy.”

“Thank you,” Thomas said as he ran toward the
Nautilus
.

      “By the way, Thomas!” Mr. Pianova yelled. “She didn't ask me to talk with you. I was just tired of hearing her…you know…about you being angry with her.”

Thomas only had a little more than two hours before his shift at the library, and two hours later, having just begun his discovery of the
Nautilus,
he left the Engineering Vault and entered his library station.  

Mrs. Pianova was setting up some books on a shelf when she saw him. “So you've finally decided to return to work, Mr. Byrne,” she said icily and without looking at him.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said, logging into his computer. “I went to the Engineering Bay today.”

“You did?” Mrs. Pianova asked. “You were supposed to know about it only after the Crypto Zoo and Methopia. Which, by the way, you haven't visited because you're behind in your studies.”

Thomas kept typing. “I was invited by a certain Mr. Pianova...”

There was a longer pause. Thomas could swear that Mrs. Pianova sighed. “And?” she asked. “What do you think about Mr. Pianova?”

“He's a very nice man,” he said, “but...” He turned around to look at her. “He’s not my favorite Pianova.”

Thomas actually savored seeing Mrs. Pianova’s usual stern face become brightened by the softest smile, even if it just lasted a second. “It's good to hear that, Mr. Byrne,” she said.

“Have a good night, ma'am,” Thomas said, returning the smile.

“Good night, Thomas, and remember to log off from your station when you're done.”

Mrs. Pianova was still smiling as she opened the doors to the library, and Thomas shared that smile.

And just like that, things were back to normal between them.

A Measure of Last Resort

“Dammit!” Tony yelled after the Watchmen team on site confirmed that Morgan’s team had entered the vicinity of the Bulguksa Temple in South Korea. The Azure Guard had modified their methods. Instead of sending Morgan and his whole team after Thomas, they’d sent in a Mage, who like Elise could sense if the Magic present in the area was from the Oracle or not. The Mage would disappear into their portal if there was no Oracle Magic present.