“So they had a choice.”
“Not after they were briefed.”
He was driving down a cracked concrete boulevard now with a grass median peppered with patches of dirty snow. They passed a gravel quarry. The area was starting to get seedier. A truck stop stood at the far side, and a large riverfront casino was visible farther on, its brilliant signage threatening to induce seizures in any nocturnal creatures wandering about.
McKinney noticed a low, wooded hillside rising to the left. It surprised her, since she’d always thought of the Midwest as flat. There were obviously some hills here. She took note of the license plates on a passing car: Missouri. That’s right. Kansas City wasn’t in Kansas-it was in Missouri. Or at least part of it was. They didn’t appear to be deceiving her about where they were. She spotted another truck: Kansas plates.
The click-click of the van’s blinker sounded, and the van slowed. They crossed left over some railroad tracks and seemingly straight toward a grassy hillside. Oddly, even a spur from the railroad line curved along with them as the road led toward a white stone cliff face that cut into the hill.
McKinney looked up at an illuminated sign that read SubTropolis. It was bolted above the concrete-framed entrance of a tunnel. Flags of the world were on display on angled poles above the entrance. The opening was at least twenty feet high and fifty feet across. A roadway large enough to accommodate two semitrucks side by side led into the hillside. In fact, McKinney could also see farther down along the well-lit cliff face where the railroad tracks led into the underground as well. Whole trains could apparently enter the hill.
Foxy opened his passenger window and swiped a magnetic card at a reader, and the roll-up metal security gate started to rise.
“What is this place?”
“The office. Got a roof of solid limestone a hundred feet thick. Three times stronger than concrete. No drone missile can hit us down here. Odin doesn’t like to take chances.”
Foxy pulled through the gate and immediately the massive tunnel opened up into a brightly lit grid of solid rock pillars and interior buildings. There were signs bolted to the rock walls pointing the direction and bay numbers for various manufacturing businesses, warehouses, and shipping companies. The roadway curved downward slightly, and then straightened into a main thoroughfare, punctuated by yellowish metal-halide lights. The place was a vast subterranean business park.
McKinney had never heard of such a thing. Every hundred feet or so there was a massive, chiseled column of solid stone, twenty feet square, but otherwise the place just seemed to stretch on endlessly in three directions beneath the hillside-bright lights trailing to a vanishing point. “My God, this place is huge.”
Foxy nodded. “Six miles of road. Fifty-five million square feet of space. Only ten of that’s been improved for use, and only half of that’s occupied.”
McKinney craned her neck to check out the endless rows of pillars. “How on earth…?”
“They’ve been mining limestone here since the forties. Somebody had the bright idea that, since this rock formation has been here for about two hundred and eighty million years, it would be a stable environment for archival storage, data centers, things like that. No worries about tornadoes either. Hell, there are all sorts of businesses down here. Packaging companies, light fixture companies. They can roll semitrucks and rail-cars right inside too. It’s got major advantages for this operation. For one, it’s impossible to observe what we’re doing from the air or satellites, and there are several entrances-lots of comings and goings at all hours. And we’re centrally located-a short flight to most of the country.”
Foxy cut the van left down a side tunnel, and they were soon cruising down another cavern road that led to a vanishing point. “We operate under unofficial cover-oil and gas exploration firms, microwave communications companies. Things like that. Gives us what’s called ‘status for cover’-meaning a reason to be someplace. Allows us to move around in the countryside with heavy equipment without drawing attention. Here we are…”
Foxy slowed the van, and then turned right down another side passage. Here the floor opened out into an endless grid of stone columns-but the lights ended. They now headed off into utter blackness. Their headlights seemed to be swallowed by the vast dark.
McKinney found herself leaning forward in her seat. “I’ll bet there are some interesting fossils in here.”
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t know anything about that. All I know is that it’s a good place for an isolation facility. We’ve got a quarter million square feet far away from all the other tenants. That way we don’t get visitors, and no one notices us. We’re way the hell out in the darkness, and nobody’s going to wander on over to borrow a cup of sugar. Look…” He pointed at the stone floor stretching out beneath the headlights.
McKinney could see a single security lamp in the distance.
“Porch light’s on, so the coast is clear.”
They drew closer to the light and finally pulled up to a rolltop door in a long white corrugated steel wall that rose from rock floor to rock ceiling. It stretched out into the darkness in both directions. Several cameras focused on the entrance. Foxy waved, and the rolltop door began to rise, clattering with an echoing racket amid all the exposed rock.
She could see a company logo for Ancile Services, text with a simple shield shape; the same logo emblazoned on her coat. There was a suite number next to the garage door, along with a mail drop and an intercom. It all looked quite innocuous. Underground buildings apparently had to be fashioned down here to make the spaces functional and comfortable. The perimeter wall looked similar to what other businesses had built, although there appeared to be domed security camera enclosures at intervals along the perimeter.
McKinney was surprised when what lay behind the rolltop gate was just more darkness.
Foxy nodded forward. “Buffer area-a hundred-foot-wide exterior perimeter to prevent anyone listening in on what we’re up to.” He pulled the van through the doorway, and the gate descended behind them.
As they drove ahead into the dark, something came swimming out the blackness. Literally swimming through the air was a small shark, replete with teeth and fins, its tail working furiously as it swam to investigate the incoming van.
McKinney peered closely at it. “What the hell…?”
Moments later several more sharks “swam” out the darkness, converging on the van like a school of fish.
She laughed in confusion. “Okay… what are those things?”
“Air swimmers-cheap children’s toy that Expert Five converted for security purposes. It’s a neutral-buoyancy balloon with a power tail fin. I don’t know how many he’s got flying out here, but they patrol the buffer space for intruders.”
Sure enough, now dozens more of the things were sweeping in out of the dark all around them to investigate the lights and movement of the van, bumping up against the windows as though the van were a submarine.
McKinney couldn’t help but admire them. “They’re swarming.” She noticed also a little payload beneath the shark-shaped dirigibles, a rectangular piece of black plastic-and the reflection of a camera lens.
Foxy nodded. “Yeah, Five’s an AI expert. You’ll like him. From what I understand, his fish here explore a space, memorize the layout, and then they use some sort of routing algorithm to patrol.”
“A foraging pattern. Do you know what species they’re modeling?”
“I sure don’t. All I know is they explore the space and remember the layout. When they encounter something that wasn’t there before, they send up an alarm. Flying around independently makes it difficult to blind them with lasers or other countermeasures. They swim to a charging station too.” He chuckled. “Freaky how much it looks like fish feeding.”
“So an antidrone unit is being guarded by drones.”