Freedom (17 page)

The guards motioned for Ross to follow as they headed across the storeroom and unlocked a large interior door. Ross grabbed his dispatch case and followed. One of them handed Ross a red hard hat with built-in hearing protectors from a rack on the wall. Ross donned it as the guards put on white hard hats of their own.

Warder_13 pointed to the headphones and spoke again. Moments later the translation came through Ross’s bone-conduction mic, despite the loud noise. “Don’t take your earphones off. It gets loud in there.”

Ross nodded, and they opened the steel door onto a vast manufacturing floor filled with zapping and popping industrial welding robots. Two engineers wearing bright green coveralls and white hard hats were waiting for them at the first row of machines. Call-outs above the men’s heads identified them as a tenth-level Sorcerer named
PlineyElder
and a ninth-level Fabricator named
WuzzGart.

PlineyElder looked at his watch as they approached. He also spoke in Mandarin. “You’re late.”

Ross shrugged. “There was traffic.”

“There’s
always
traffic. This is Shenzhen.”

Warder_13 handed the wooden box to the sorcerer, who opened it and inspected the contents closely. He then looked up at Ross. “I hope you have your spells ready. I don’t have all day to deal with this.”

Ross nodded. “You just do your part, and I’ll do mine.”

PlineyElder grunted and motioned for Ross to follow him. WuzzGart was right on their tail. The guards stayed behind. The new trio headed off through aisles of turning, rotating, sparking robot arms. Brilliant flashes of light punctuated Ross’s view. Each line of mechanical arms crowded over an assembly line, moving in a symphony of activity, ducking in and out of metal assemblies about the size of a washing machine. With each motion the welding bots would stop, pop a series of precise welds, and then spin on to the next position. Human workers moved among the rows monitoring the equipment. Some of these workers had darknet call-outs, but most did not.

But all of them ignored the suited Westerner moving through their workspace.

Soon Ross and the engineers came to a corner of the factory where a lone robot welding arm stood next to a project pedestal. There was no assembly-line conveyer belt here, and the numerous half-finished objects on the shelves nearby gave it the feel of a prototyping or test area.

WuzzGart, the fabricator, put on white gloves and removed the titanium half-rings and the single crystal from the wooden box. He cleaned each one carefully with a lint-free cloth and spoke to no one in particular as he placed each into a jig bolted onto the scorched project pedestal. “Why do all the powerful items require
titanium
?”

PlineyElder looked at his watch. “Come on, I have a meeting in twenty minutes.”

“This must be done carefully. The pieces must be cleaned or the chlorine from human sweat will impact the weld. Titanium is a very reactive metal.”

The sorcerer just tapped at his watch dial impatiently. “Then stop talking, and let’s get on with it.”

Ross leaned over WuzzGart’s shoulder to watch as the man placed the single crystal within the end of one half-ring and encased it by pressing another half-ring into the first. Only one of the rings had this receptacle for a crystal. “Did you ever ponder just how strange the world has gotten since Sobol’s game world leaked into reality? I mean, we’ve gathered here essentially to create a magical item.”

“That’s the plan.” WuzzGart tightened the jig around the pieces and then stepped away. “I’ve already uploaded the welding script. We are ready.”

PlineyElder was manipulating unseen D-Space objects on a private layer of his own, but he took a moment to gesture to Ross, snapping his fingers, and motioning like a wedding photographer. “Rakh! You stand
here
.”

Ross left his dispatch case on the floor and stood equidistant from the other two men, forming the points of a triangle at a distance of ten feet from the project pedestal.

PlineyElder kept motioning forward, then left, then back—and finally gave a thumbs-up. At which point he raised his hands and began a series of complex somatic gestures, tracked in 3-D space by touch-rings on each hand, as he spoke his unlock code to the Daemon’s manufacturing bots—in this instance it was game world elvish:
“Davors bethred, puthos cavol, arbas lokad!”

The welding arm suddenly came to life and moved forward to circle the pedestal at close range.

He then began a long chant, moving his hand in a circle, and the robot arm followed suit in a show of slavish mimicry. For more than a minute PlineyElder continued his chant, and then he suddenly stopped and pointed to WuzzGart.

WuzzGart stepped forward and began to cast a spell of his own. Ross knew from the specification for the Rings of Aggys that this was the masterwork spell—creating a D-Space receptacle for the darknet power that the objects would soon receive. PlineyElder’s spell was meant to imbue the D-Space nozzles on the welder with permission to edit virtual space.

WuzzGart’s spell was quite involved, and he failed at his first attempt. Apparently he hadn’t moved his arms in the right combination or perhaps got some of the verbal unlock code wrong. When he finished the last syllable and stood expectantly—nothing happened.

PlineyElder threw up his hands. “Idiot!”

WuzzGart just flipped him off and started again. This time he was successful, and on his last syllable of the enchantment a soft D-Space glow emanated from all four half-rings. “Aha!”

He stepped back smiling. “We’re cooking with gas now!”

As he said this, the welding arm moved in swiftly and zapped each of the four rings once with a blinding flash. Sparks flew from the pedestal and scattered across the floor.

Ross knew this was his cue and ignored PlineyElder, who was waving frantically. He moved toward the rings and held his hands over them, motioning in counter-rotating circles while speaking the darknet incantation that would permanently bind them with the spell. He’d practiced it many times in the shower at the hotel, and he hoped he’d get it right on the first try.
“Fasthu, agros visthon, pantoristhas, antoriontus, pashas afthas.”

Happily, as he finished, each ring pulsed with D-Space light.

Ross stepped back, and the welding robot zapped each of them again, this time in a different place. As it withdrew, Ross moved in again and repeated his spell.

The process was performed twice more, and as he spoke the last word, PlineyElder and WuzzGart were already next to him, holding their arms over the pedestal and chanting the words of a fictitious language of a fictitious race of people that had probably been thought up by some writer in a cubicle at Cyberstorm Entertainment in Thousand Oaks, California.

Nonetheless, the Daemon had imbued these words with power.

As the three reached a crescendo and simultaneously completed their chants, a brilliant D-Space light emanated from all the rings and slowly cooled, fading and ultimately disappearing. Now, however, the individual D-Space call-outs above each half-ring had been replaced by a single D-Space call-out, centered above the lone crystal on the parent ring.

PlineyElder grinned. “The masterwork is a success!”

They all shook hands, and Ross stood by eagerly as WuzzGart extracted the finished rings from the jig and dunked them in a bucket of water. He placed all four of them on a ShamWow he found on a nearby workbench and showed them off to Ross and the sorcerer.

“Behold the Rings of Aggys!”

The cloth held two sets of matching rings, one set smaller than the other. All were still steaming. The lone call-out on the ring with a crystal was an inscrutable alphanumeric sequence.

WuzzGart pointed. “Note the quality of the welds. No alpha phase or swirling. You could get those buffed anywhere, and they’ll shine up like white gold.”

PlineyElder nudged Ross and pointed up at his call-out. “Congratulations.”

Ross just then noticed that he’d gone up a level. He was now a seventh-level Rogue. He’d missed the alert in his HUD display amid all the excitement. He nodded to both men. “Thank you, gentlemen. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”

WuzzGart placed the rings in a small velvet bag and handed them to Ross.

PlineyElder pointed at the bag. “Those are powerful rings, master thief! Do not use them lightly or they will destroy themselves. Or even
you
.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

WuzzGart started cleaning the pedestal with the ShamWow. “You must have a use in mind for these rings to go through so much trouble.”

Ross nodded. “I’ll need them for a journey—through hostile territory.”

“If it’s so hostile, why go there?”

“Because I need to.”

WuzzGart looked into Ross’s eyes, then he looked to PlineyElder. “I’ll bet you a thousand credits it’s a woman.”

Both men laughed.

“You have my thanks, gentlemen.” Ross put the velvet bag in his suit coat pocket, nodded once more, and headed for the exit.

“
S
ir! We need immediate air support! We are being overrun!”
The panicked face of the lieutenant filled the monitor, his head distorting on-screen as it darted side to side. Staccato gunfire chattered in the background.

“Air support? Where the hell do you think you are, son, ’Nam? You’re in Illinois.”

“Where’s your commanding officer?”

The Major sat in a windowless operations center thousands of miles away in an office park in Bethesda, Maryland.

The screen broke up for a moment.
“We need evac! We have been surrounded and are being overrun!”

Gunfire in the background was suddenly much louder. There were screams of wounded and the sound of roaring engines—a sound that The Major was all too familiar with.

“Son. I need you to calm down and provide a concise report.”

“Report, goddamnit!” The Major hit the MUTE button on the console and turned to a nearby technician. “What group is this?”

“Optimal Outcomes, sir. An outfit out of Dallas.” The technician brought up a map on his own screen that showed a satellite view of a planned community. “They’re bivouacked in a half-finished housing development in Huntley, Illinois.”

“Panicky fuckers.” He let up on the MUTE button.

The lieutenant was taking deep breaths.
“We are being engaged by unmanned elements of the Daemon.”

“Razorbacks?”

“How many?”

“What do you want, a Phalanx cannon? You’re not a military base. You were supposed to lay low and wait for orders.”

There was more mayhem and screaming in the background. The lieutenant on camera leaned out of frame and fired several bursts from a weapon.
“Somehow they found our location. We are being overrun, sir!”

“Yeah, I can see that. Have the local police gotten involved?”

The Major hit the MUTE button again and spoke to a nearby technician. “I need a mop-up crew down there, ASAP. Get them government credentials, and make sure they round up all the Daemon equipment they can find.”

He switched off the MUTE button and spoke to the screen. “How effective were fifty-caliber rifles against these things?”

“The Barrett rifles. Are they effective against razorbacks?”

The guy tried to control his breathing.
“Yes. Yes, sir. But the snipers were quickly taken out by return fire. Deadly accurate return fire.”

One of the technical advisers next to The Major leaned in. “Could have been acoustical triangulation or infrared muzzle-flash detection systems. They can track a projectile back to its source. It makes sense if Sobol was dipping into our research pipeline—we’ve got some prototypes in the field.”

The lieutenant shouted.
“Sir! We need help. Now!”

Several Weyburn Labs consultants were still scribbling notes.

One of them leaned into The Major’s ear. “The inertial flywheel on the razorback that powers the blade arms is a problem in close quarters. Hundred thousand rpm rotation. If it gets cracked, it’ll turn into a shrapnel bomb. Ballistics tests show it’s safer to take them out at a hundred meters or more.”

More note taking.

“We just have a few more questions, son. . . .”

“Well, then. You’re dismissed.”

Suddenly the lieutenant glared into the screen.
“You fucker!”

There was nearby screaming, and the lieutenant turned to open fire offscreen. There were desperate shouts for help and the roar of engines. Then the lieutenant fled—a swift blur crossing the screen on his tail. After a few moments, of loud engine noise, there was suddenly comparative silence.

The Weyburn Labs team in the control room also sat quietly for several moments, still jotting notes.

“Have we determined yet whether these razorbacks are remotely piloted, autonomous, or semiautonomous?”

One of the consultants responded. “Surveillance recordings show them vacillating between fight-or-flight behavior and advanced problem-solving.”

“Which means?”

“Which means razorbacks can apparently operate independently or under the remote control of a pilot or remote AI—perhaps a cloud-based logic. A single operator could conceivably shift his control from one razorback to another—like jumping between avatars in a game.”

Another technician nodded. “They’re a promising concept. Razorbacks don’t require ammunition, and they terrify the populace. It’s the perfect crowd control weapon. Surgically precise.”