He nodded, still looking confused, and slowly climbed out of the transport shell. He glanced around. “Where are we?”
“The edge of BTC headquarters. There’s a security gate ahead, but the chief AI construct has agreed to help us.”
“Hold it, what? Let me get my bearings.” He stopped as he saw the six armor-clad operators lying in an unnatural gravity field against the wall—blood now pooling around several of them at an impossible angle. “What the hell…?”
“It’s a long story, and I don’t have time to tell it. Hey, wake up!” She slapped him.
“Ow! Okay, I’m awake.”
She opened the cargo hold of the transport shell and found his makeshift gravis and helmet. “Put these on while we’re moving. AIs will have noticed these guys flatlined, and we need to be long gone by the time reinforcements arrive.”
Grady nodded. “Okay. How much of the plan worked so far?”
“Enough. We need to get to the Gravitics Research Lab.”
“And security?”
“Either it’s not a problem, or it’s impossible. And we won’t be able to find out by standing around here.” With that she activated her gravis and started gliding down the well-lit corridor toward a sealed vault door. There was a large number sixteen etched into it, and a control panel to either side.
As she stopped, Grady came up alongside here, powering down his own gravis.
Alexa looked up at the vault door. “Varuna! Let us in.”
“There are already security elements headed this way, Alexa. I cannot restore your access privileges, but I can switch your biometric profile with that of the nearby deceased team leader…”
The vault door boomed somewhere deep in the rock and then started rolling aside.
“This will be discovered soon enough, but it should buy you some time.”
“Thank you, Varuna.”
Alexa ran into a white corridor surrounded by equipment rooms with armor and uniforms in racks. Nearby was what appeared to be a security post. It was vacant. Klaxons were sounding and lights flashing. “Where is everyone?”
“I activated a radiation alert for this section minutes ago.”
The massive vault door rolled closed again behind them.
Grady gave her an ominous look. “I hope you trust this thing.”
“We have no choice.” Alexa holstered her pistol and placed her hand on a scanner near the security station. A rack of psychotronic weapons close by unlocked, and she grabbed two of them, tossing one to Grady. “You know how to use these?”
He rolled it around in his hands, trying to figure out which way to hold it. “I know how to get shot by them. Does that count?”
She turned it around and wrapped his hand around it, then powered it up. “Aim the dot at your opponent’s head. It’ll put them to sleep—unless they’ve got armor on.”
Varuna’s voice interrupted. “The most direct route to the Gravitics Research Lab from your location is down elevator shaft eleven. Go straight, and I’ll guide you there. Unfortunately, I will also have to try to kill you along the way.”
Grady gave her a confused look. “How is that helping us?”
“I’ll explain later. Just move…” And she grabbed him and ran down the corridor, weapon drawn and scanning for targets.
As they ran through the deserted corridors, Varuna’s voice guided them left and then right—finally saying, “There is a ceiling-mounted laser turret ahead. It’s capable of fifteen thousand fatal pulses per second. There is no chance of a human getting safely past it or firing a weapon fast enough to hit it before it kills.”
Grady grabbed Alexa’s shoulder. “Why the hell are we listening to this thing?”
“It needs to try to kill us or they’ll shut it down. It’s juggling a lot of contradictory actions to keep antisingularity controls off its back.”
“The performance of such a weapon system would be seriously degraded by carbon fiber smoke. There is a supply of carbon microthreads in the lab across the hall.”
“Thank you, Varuna.” She got to the corner of the hallway and drew her positron pistol again. A glance at the side of it confirmed only a three percent charge left. It was already on its lowest-powered setting.
Grady nodded to the pistol. “You do realize how reckless it was for the BTC to build that, don’t you? To explode, a nuclear weapon requires a complex chain reaction—but antimatter is just itching to explode—any contact with matter and…” He spread his hands. “BOOM.”
“Yeah, thanks for the safety lecture.” She flipped down his visor. “This is going to be loud. Get down, cover your ears, and open your mouth to equalize overpressure.”
Grady did so, and Alexa aimed the pistol blindly at a diagonal at the far wall some twenty feet away. A light squeeze of the trigger sent a trillionth of a gram of antimatter into the white polymer wall—which detonated with the force of ten kilos of dynamite, throwing Alexa down the corridor past Grady.
In a few moments he was helping her back to her feet. “I rest my case.”
As she got up, billowing black smoke filled the hall, and now sprinklers had kicked in. “Varuna, are we good?”
“I am regrettably unable to kill you with my laser turret.”
“C’mon.” Alexa led Grady around the corner and through the smoke, coughing as they groped their way along the near wall. In a moment they came out to the far side and up to a bank of elevators—all with red lights above them. As they reached it, one of the elevator doorways opened, revealing a shaft.
“You need to go down forty-six floors to level B-ninety-four. The elevator is currently locked far below here.”
Alexa leaned in to look upward, and the vertiginous shaft looked clear, emergency lighting revealing a series of landings that receded to a vanishing point. She motioned for Grady to keep back and activated her gravis—putting it into equilibrium. “Follow me. And stay as close as you safely can.”
Grady had already activated his own gravis. “How big is this place, anyway?”
“Big enough.”
They both fell through the opening at roughly half speed. Grady looked around. “No elevator cables?”
She nodded. “Elevators were one of the first uses of your invention.”
It took under a minute for them to reach level B-ninety-four. The label was stenciled next to the sealed doors.
Varuna’s voice reached them. “Beyond these doors is the entrance to the Gravitics Research Lab. I’ve escalated the team leader’s credentials to grant you access. But security personnel are closing in quickly. You must act now.”
The elevator doors opened, and Alexa fell through them, Grady close on her tail. She decided to keep falling, tearing out ceiling tiles in the wake of her gravity field, and as they approached the first set of clear diamond security doors, she could see the Kratos logo of a lightning bolt coming from the stars. The doors slid open silently to admit them.
Alexa glanced up at half a dozen laser turrets arrayed in the ceiling and walls. “Varuna, why are these turrets not firing on us?”
“It is increasingly difficult to conceal what I’ve done, Alexa. I’ve locked down these turrets directly. You need to hurry. There’s no longer time for subterfuge.”
“You shouldn’t have done that! What about you?”
“Don’t fail, Alexa.”
They passed through another set of diamond security doors. The place was deserted—with Klaxons sounding and warning lights flashing. Alexa recognized it as lockdown. They shouldn’t even have been able to move from section to section. To do so in lockdown, Varuna would have had to give them emergency clearance codes. She had no doubt what it would cost Varuna if she failed.