The Strike Trilogy (43 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

I
n the loud, rocking ballroom on the tenth floor of the Trident, Strike, Keplar, Scatterbolt and Orion stood at the bar, watching the dance floor. As the band ripped into another song, the partygoers laughed, celebrated, and sipped their champagne.

“Okay,” Strike said. “As much as I’d like to stay here and enjoy the ‘End of the Earth Jamboree,’ I think it’s about time we split up. You guys ready?”

“Yes,” Scatterbolt replied. “Let’s do this. I can’t wait to look like myself again.”

“You?” Keplar said. “You know how many dance requests I’ve had to turn down? I guess Rytonians like the big broads.”

Orion looked toward the elevator at the end of the room. “Okay, you guys head into the basement and get to hacking. Tobin and I will head up to the 105th floor and see what we can find there. Don’t forget: we meet up at the extraction point in thirty minutes—not a second longer. Good luck, everyone.”

Two and a half minutes later, Scatterbolt and Keplar were heading to the basement in the elevator, with Scatterbolt crouching down and typing furiously on a tablet computer. The computer was hooked up to the control panel of the elevator by blue and yellow wires.

“You know, this is working out great,” the robot said. “Just like I thought, from here I can access almost every computer in the skyscraper. It’s tough but I figured it out.”

Keplar watched the robot. “Whatever you say, just hurry up. The fact that I’m supposed to be your mom is starting to be the only thing that I can think about, and I think I’m starting to lose my mind.”

The screen on Scatterbolt’s tablet blinked with static. Then, after a moment, it was quickly filled in with the various security camera feeds of the skyscraper.

“Ha ha!” the robot laughed, pumping his fist. “Yes! I’ve got it. Every security camera on the 105th floor and basement have now been put on a loop.” With a grin, he pushed a button on his tablet. “I’ve rewound all the cameras on those floors four hours and pushed play, and we are good to go.”

“So if anyone looks, they won’t see me and you down here snooping around?”

“Exactly. But who knows how long that will fool them, so we have to be quick.”

The elevator opened.

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Keplar said. “Let’s do this.”

“Right. One question, though: when we’re done, can we stop and get ice cream?”

Keplar looked down at Scatterbolt. “Why are you asking me that?”

“You know, because you’re my—”

“Okay,” Keplar said, holding up a hand. “Stop. That’s enough.”

With a grin, Scatterbolt stepped out of the elevator and into the basement hallway.

“I’m gonna kill Orion,” Keplar grumbled. “I really am.”

On the 105th floor, Strike and Orion made their way through a small lobby and toward a security station that led into the Space Travel Research labs.

“Okay, remember what I told you, Tobin. We just so happen to be lucky enough that the owner of my identity is also one of the skyscraper’s scientists, so we will have access to the labs. I’m going to tell them that my nephew wanted to see where I work, and hopefully that will be enough to get us through.”

Strike casually walked by a trio of scientists who were heading toward the elevator. As they passed Strike and Orion, the scientists nodded and said hello, then headed down to the party.

“I still can’t believe we’re able to just walk around the place like this,” Strike said. “It’s insane.”

“I know. Between the blowtorch and these identity-fakers, we owe a lot to Junior and Wakefield. We wouldn’t have been able to do any of this without them.”

“Is it wrong that I really wanna go up to one of these hot Rytonian chicks and hit on them, just to see if I could get them?”

Orion chuckled and shook his head. “Yes, it is wrong. Incredibly wrong. It’s really scary sometimes how much you’re like your dad when he was your age.”

“Is that what he would have done?”

“That’s
exactly
what he would have done. Except probably a lot worse.”

Strike laughed. Looking ahead, he could see they were almost at the security station for the Space Travel Research labs.

“Okay, here we go,” Orion said. “Just let me do the talking.”

The security guard for the Space Travel Research labs—a well-built man in his late thirties—greeted Strike and Orion, standing behind a waist-high desk with a computer built into it.

“Hello there.”

“Hi,” Orion said. “I just wanted to bring my nephew in to see the labs. He’s dying to know what we do here.”

“Oh, okay. Were you guys at the party, or...?”

“Yeah. I’ve been telling him for weeks that I would show him where I work, so I figured we would just come up here real quick so he could see.”

“Oh, okay. Well, of course I know you, Mr. Peterson, but I’ll just need to know his name so I can write it in the log.”

“Oh, sure,” Strike said, realizing that was his cue. “It’s Kurt Peterson.”

The guard typed on the computer keyboard. “Okay, there we go. I didn’t know you had a nephew, Mr. Peterson.”

“Yup,” Orion smiled. “Sure do.”

“Okay. And Kurt, are you registered in the city population ledger?”

Strike looked to Orion. “Uh, yeah,” Strike replied. “Definitely. Yup. Uh-huh.”

The guard reached forward and turned a black device resting on the desk toward Strike. “Okay, Kurt, so if you could just place your eye here and give it a scan, that would be great.”

Strike looked down at the device. “Uh, what is that?”

“The eye scanner. I just need you to scan your eye, that way it will match up with your file in the city’s main record, and then it will record that you visited. Don’t worry, your uncle does it every day. Plus, until I scan both your eyes, that door won’t open anyway.”

“Oh,” Strike said. “Okay.”

The boy looked to Orion. The old man shook his head and mouthed the word “no.”

“Are we ready?” the security guard asked.

“Uh, yeah,” Strike said. “Yeah. Let me just…”

Strike leapt forward and grabbed the back of the security guard’s head, before bringing it down and bashing it against the top of the desk. The guard was immediately knocked backward and fell to the ground, unconscious.

Orion watched, shaking his head, as Strike stepped around the desk and lifted the knocked-out guard up by his armpits.

“Okay,” Strike said, “let me just do this…”

Strike pried open the man’s eye with his finger and then placed the man’s face against the eye scanner.

“Access granted,” the computer said in a woman’s voice. “Thank you.”

The doors to the Space Travel Research labs slid open.

“You know,” Orion said, “I’m sure we could have figured out another way.”

Strike placed the unconscious guard back on the ground and underneath his desk. “Hey, we got in, didn’t we?”

They walked through the open doors.

“Yes. But let’s just hope Scatterbolt got the security cameras turned off in time before you did that.”

“Oh yeah,” Strike said. “Probably should have checked on that first, huh?”

“Probably.”

Keplar and Scatterbolt carefully made their way down the sterile, white-walled hallway of the basement. Luckily, thanks to the party upstairs, they hadn’t passed a single person, but they both knew that wouldn’t last.

“We gotta get where we need to be fast, SB. Even in our disguises, people are gonna be awfully suspicious if they see some mom and her kid down in the computer mainframe.”

“I know,” Scatterbolt said. “Only problem is, look.”

Scatterbolt pointed ahead. A security guard was standing in front of a closed door.

“That’s the room we need to get into,” Scatterbolt said.

“Okay. We figured this might happen. Hit him with the Sleeping Spider.”

“You sure? Is anybody else around?”

Keplar looked down the hall toward the elevator. “I don’t know, but like you said, we don’t have much time. We gotta deal with this now.”

“Okay. Here goes.”

Scatterbolt gripped his left hand with his right hand and began to unscrew it. Soon, his left hand popped off at the wrist and became detached. Crouching down, he placed the detached left hand on the floor and let it go. Suddenly, the hand’s fingers straightened out, and it stood up like a spider. After the spider-hand scanned the hallways, it skittered across the floor and crawled up the nearby wall, eventually reaching the ceiling. Clinging by its sticky fingers, the hand dashed toward the guard’s location, upside down, and when it was directly above him, it let go of the ceiling and dropped to the floor.

Hearing the clinking of metal, the guard looked down and saw a detached, moving, crawling, robotic hand near his feet.

“What the hell...?”

As the guard reached for his gun, the spider-hand reared back on its palm and spread out its fingers. In a red flash, a dart zipped out from each one of its fingertips, flew through the air, and stuck into the guard’s neck.

The guard quickly grabbed at the darts, but it was too late. Like a scarecrow made of hay, his legs went out from underneath him and he dropped to the floor, his eyes rolling into the back of his head.

Keplar and Scatterbolt dashed to the guard.

“Nighty-night, security man,” Keplar said, as he lifted the man by his arms. “How long is he gonna be out?”

“A few hours or so,” Scatterbolt said, quickly scanning the hallway. “I’m not worried about that, I’m worried about where we’re gonna put him while I hack into the mainframe computer system.”

“We’ll have to bring him in with us.”

Scatterbolt grabbed a card from the man’s belt. “Okay. We’ll need his key card to get in.”

“Okay, let me see,” Keplar said, taking the card and sliding it into the door’s lock. A message popped up on a screen near the door: KEY ACCEPTED. PLEASE SCAN PALM.

“Son of a bremshaw.”

“Now we gotta scan his palm,” Scatterbolt said. “Come on, we gotta hurry.”

“Okay. Help me stand him up.”

With Keplar holding him by his arms, the dog and the robot placed the guard on his rubbery legs and attempted to get him propped up. Reaching forward, Keplar awkwardly grabbed the guard’s hand and placed it against the scanner.

However, before the scanner could read the man’s hand, a second security guard came around the corner and stopped in his tracks, directly in front of the door to the computer mainframe.

Of course, this guard didn’t see Keplar and Scatterbolt. Instead, he saw a 300-pound blonde woman in a pink-and-yellow dress helping her adorable nine-year-old son prop up an unconscious security guard next to the palm scanner.

“What the…?” the second guard asked.

“Hi,” the 300-pound woman said, her hands still tucked under the unconscious guard’s armpits. “We are just...not doing anything suspicious at all.”

“Nope,” her son said. “Not at all.”

The guard reached for his walkie-talkie.

“Krandor,” Keplar said. He let go of the unconscious guard, walked across the hallway, reared back, and punched the second security guard in his face. Before he could alert anyone, the second guard dropped to the floor, knocked out, with his walkie-talkie skittering across the hall.

“You do realize,” Scatterbolt said, “that as far as that guy knows, he was just punched in the face by a very large woman?”

“You’re damn right he was,” Keplar said, rubbing his knuckles. “Anything you can do, a woman can do better. Now let’s drag this sorry son of a bremshaw in there with his friend.”

In the quiet, dimly lit Space Travel Research Department, Strike followed Orion toward the end of a hallway.

“Do we know which room we are looking for?” the boy asked.

“Yes, according to my contact, I believe it’s...this one.”

Orion pointed to a closed door.

“How are we going to get in?” Strike asked.

“We hope they let us in.”

“That’s it? That’s your plan?”

“That’s about it. It’s like I always tell you: sometimes simple is best.”

“Orion, that works with a grilled cheese recipe, I’m not sure it applies here.”