Severance (29 page)

Ellen snorted. Griese looked back and forth between his wife
and Bruce. “It’s not little,” he eventually said.

Bruce laughed. He had found them in one of their old
hideouts, where they had spent most of the previous day tinkering with their
smart rifle. A bulky, ugly, and profoundly lethal weapon, it was also a grim
reminder of the ill–fated Breeder raid on the security base they had participated
in a decade earlier.

When they reached the bottom, Bruce moved away from Africa. He
spotted a few people pointedly loitering, but not many, not yet.
Good.
“You
know how that thing works?” he asked.

“I’ve read the manual a few times,” Griese said. “Before bed.
You know. Light reading.”

“I don’t want to know what you guys do in bed.”

“He just reads it, Bruce,” Ellen chimed in. “But he does
read it aloud. Slowly. With a sexy lisp.” She fanned her face, her eyes
fluttering.

Bruce made a pained smile, wishing he hadn’t brought up bed
stuff at all. “Do you even know
if
it works?” he asked, shifting the
subject.

“It messed up that old bed pretty bad,” Ellen said. Bruce
recalled seeing a shattered bed frame in the hideout, but hadn’t asked, because
again, he never could tell with these two. “At the very least, we know when we
pull the trigger something interesting will happen,” Ellen continued.

They reached Flint Street and turned south. This was a
smaller street, a wide hallway really, and was thankfully completely deserted. They
stopped at 9
^th
Avenue, a half block from the closed bulkhead door.
Bruce hoped it would be equally deserted on the other side.

“We should all go,” Ellen said. “This is a bad idea.”

Bruce shook his head and examined his terminal. Three
minutes to go. “Could. But three people will be more noticeable. And you’re not
dressed right. Give me a hand with this.”

Bruce began stripping off the plain coveralls he had been
wearing, revealing a rough approximation of a security uniform underneath. Ellen
helped him ball the coveralls into a bag and hoisted it over her shoulder
before stepping back and examining him. “Well. Okay,” she said, not conveying
any sense of confidence in his disguise. “But I wouldn’t get too close to
anyone. Because you look not a little bit like a stripper.”

“But an expensive one, right?”

“Sure, sweetie.”

Bruce’s terminal beeped. One minute to go. “Get ready,” he
told Griese, who opened up his bag, revealing a sea of red pills inside. “That cost
much?” Bruce asked.

“Personally? No. Just cashed in one real big favor Ellen had
with a guy in a fab plant,” Griese replied. “She won’t tell me how she got it,
so I’m just going to assume it was something incredibly innocent.”

Ellen blushed. “Least I could do for Laura.”

“You could have done nothing at all,” Griese said. “That
probably would have been less.”

Shouts and hollers came from up the street. “Okay, guys,”
Bruce said, punching his friends on the shoulder in an attempt to ward off any
hugs. “Thanks. And if you really want to help out, when we’re done here, get
your little toy and sit tight. Somewhere where you can move quickly. I’ll call
if I need help.”

Ellen sidestepped another shoulder punch and hugged Bruce before
he could escape. He grimaced but didn’t resist. Down the street, he could see
the mob coming, right on schedule. “Come on, I gotta go,” he said.

Ellen released him. “Be careful.”

“Fuck no,” Bruce said, smiled, then turned and jogged down
the street towards the bulkhead door.

When he arrived, he popped the access panel for the bulkhead
door’s controls off and withdrew a probe from his tool webbing. Jamming it into
the controls, he prodded it to override the lockdown. Behind him, he could hear
the mob approach and cursed at the tool, begging it to work faster.

It had taken comically little effort to summon the mob, a
few messages sent to the right people, who had spread the word with no extra encouragement.
There were incentives of course, even aside from the promise of something to do.
As the door finally started sliding open, Griese and Ellen began handing said
incentives out.

“Come get your Brash!” Griese’s voice carried over the
growing roar. “Got an old fashioned Brash Mob here!”

“It’s really happening people! We’re really doing it!” Ellen
promised.

Bruce smiled as the door started to slide open. Technically
speaking, this wasn’t a stupid plan; it was kind of a brilliant one. It just
involved a whole lot of stupid moving parts.

The door out of the way, Bruce stepped over the threshold,
an army of amped up madmen at his heel.

§

She had a plan. All that was left was to actually do it.

It was funny how she was willing to procrastinate when it came
to her freedom. She had never really been the procrastinating type; when she
saw a problem, she fixed it. That she was willing to delay her own liberty
suggested there was something else going on. Maybe it was just comfort, the
comfort of not having to unravel a horrible conspiracy, the comfort of not
being hunted by said conspiracy. The simple animal comfort of having a warm
place to sleep and eat.

For two days she had sat on her robot, making excuses why
her plan wouldn’t work. The security sensor — that was the biggest one. They
would see her escape. She wouldn’t make it very far at all before someone
noticed and forcefully subdued her. So she lay back and slept and ate.

As the news feeds cheerfully reported, something was
different this morning, something that finally broke her out of her spell. This
particular morning, she was pretty sure nobody would be watching her; they would
be watching the three hundred maniacs who had broken through the ‘anti–terrorism
barricades’ and were terrorizing, in their own way, everything south of 9
^th
Avenue. If she was looking for a distraction to disguise her escape, she had
it.

Stein stood up from the desk and returned to the bed,
retrieving the robot from under the blankets. Opening the access panel on the
back, she turned the machine on, then did the same with the terminal it had
thoughtfully come with. The terminal flickered to life and informed her she had
two hundred unread messages. She ignored those, instead activating the robot’s
control programming, allowing her to control it manually. She took a deep
breath, then set it down on the floor in full view of the security sensors.
Let’s
get stupid.

The robot beeped, then scuttled across the floor, following
the instructions she had programmed into it. When it reached the wall, it scaled
the vertical surface, reaching the ceiling and the membrane separating the cell
from the hall outside. There it began cutting through the bars covering the
membrane.

With its small plasma cutter, the robot sawed contentedly
away at the first bar in the grate. It shredded the membrane as it worked,
causing warning icons to splash across Stein’s terminal screen, the smell of
burnt metal and plastic filling the room. She hadn’t considered that; anyone with
a nose even remotely close to the detention cells would know about her escape
before it even got started.

The cutting took an agonizingly long time as the little
robot sawed through the grate. After each bar was cut through on both ends, it
would extend a manipulator, yank the bar from its place, and then drop it down
to Stein with a cheery ‘beep.’ It took almost ten minutes — thankfully, the maniacs
currently running amuck were running
extremely
amuck — but finally all
the bars were cut through. The robot sliced through the membrane next, leaving
it attached on the upper edge so it hung down, semi–concealing the gap.

Then came the hard bit. After tucking the terminal into a
pocket alongside a pair of meal bars, Stein backed up to the far wall of the
room and took a deep breath. She charged at the door, leaping, kicking off of
it, and extending her arms upwards. She frantically clawed for the gaping hole
where the membrane had been, catching the ledge with one hand, then the other.
At which point she immediately let go, the heat of scorched metal burning her
right hand.

“Beep,” said the maintenance robot.

“Go beep yourself,” Stein said, shaking her hand. It was a
mild burn, and she ran it under some cold water in the sink, cursing to
herself. Tapping furiously at the terminal, she directed the robot to briefly
spray the cavity with a cooling foam. “All right, let’s try this again,” she
said, after watching the robot complete its work.

The second try worked better than the first, followed by
some decidedly unladylike scratching, clawing, and hoisting to get herself up
into the membrane hole. A barely controlled, and no more delicate, face–first
fall on the other side was her reward. Fortunately — and by that point
predictably — there was no one around to see her tumble but for the little
maintenance robot. “Thanks, buddy,” she said, rolling onto her back and waving
at the robot through the torn membrane. She got up and examined the door. At
eye–level there wasn’t anything immediately obvious to suggest she had escaped,
though the pungent odor of melted metal and plastic gave away that something
unusual had just happened.

Not that she intended to be around to explain it. Turning
away from her cell, she crept down the hall, out of the detention center.

§

Bruce sidestepped the pair of security officers running out
of the security base, hoping his stripper–esque disguise wouldn’t arouse any
suspicion, or, for that matter, arousal. But the officers continued out of the
base without even looking at him, which he decided, in this particular case
only, not to take as an insult.

Once through the bulkhead door, he had stepped out of the way
into an old storefront, allowing the mob to pass by him so it could spread out
and set to work being distracting. Which it did, comprehensively. Bruce saw
only a fraction of the chaos unfold, but what he did see suggested security
would have their hands full for the next several hours dealing with angry,
partially naked people.

With every available officer seemingly out dealing with his new
friends, Bruce was able to move deeper into the security base without seeing
another soul, quickly making his way to the detention cells. He paused at the
guard station at the entrance to the detention center, where he examined the desk
display. All the cells were empty, save for one labeled, ‘Stein.’ Reaching out,
he tapped the unlock button beside the door, unsurprised when nothing happened.
Unlocking doors would require some level of access that he didn’t have.
Drumming his fingers on the desk for a moment, he began tapping through the
menus, looking for another way in. He had one specific subroutine in mind, one
he almost certainly would have access to. Finding it, he triggered the fire–alarm
test function and stepped back. Down the hall, all the doors unlocked, red
lights mounted overhead flashing. He raised an eyebrow, just a little surprised
that had been so easy. “Well, life’s stupid.” He sauntered down the hall.

Reaching the cell Stein was supposedly in, he looked inside,
finding it empty. He smiled. So, she had found some way out. Curious how she
had done it, he stepped inside and looked around, quickly spotting the severed
metal bars heaped in the corner of the room. He looked up, examining the maintenance
robot clinging to the ceiling and the tattered membrane hanging above the door.
He shuddered at the athleticism required to get through there. He sniffed the
air, smelling the burnt plastic. He couldn’t be far behind her.

The red lights in the hall stopped flashing. He looked down,
watching in dismay as the cell door closed. “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” he groaned.
The fire alarm test apparently operated on a short timer. “I knew that,” Bruce said,
not lying. He banged on the door. “But locking these should really be a manual
function only,” he yelled. “For safety reasons, if nothing else.”

§

Stein retraced the steps the security men had taken when they
had led her to her cell. The base was fortunately, or perhaps predictably,
deserted, all the security forces busy dealing with the riot. She didn’t dare
look up at the security sensors surely embedded in the ceiling, hoping that
they weren’t being monitored.

The detention cells were on the first level, and the route
she had planned was to head for the nearest door, out to the streets, and not
look back. She stopped, frozen, hearing voices around a corner. She looped
back, and climbed up a flight of stairs, ducked into the hall, and entered the
lobby, heading to the second floor exit.

The lobby was thankfully empty, the exit unguarded. But she
stopped short when she reached the door, seeing the backs of nearly twenty
officers standing outside. A muster point, evidently; she heard someone in
charge yelling orders. She clenched her fists, fighting off panic. More voices,
this time from the staircase she had just ascended. She darted across the lobby
and away from the door, heading back into the center of the security base,
still thankfully deserted. Quickly she walked past empty offices, empty
briefing rooms, empty locker rooms.
That’s a thought.
She stopped, then
backtracked to the locker room.

She searched through the lockers until she found a security
uniform that was roughly her size. Slipping it on over her own conspicuously
orange clothes, she pulled the hat as low over her face as she dared. After
checking herself out in the mirror to see how suspicious she looked — very — she
swallowed, then left the room, continuing to the other side of the security
base.

She reached the lobby on the far side of the base, two
guards at the door, shifting anxiously as they looked out on the street. Stein
hesitated, not daring to walk right through them, not wanting to spin suspiciously
in place again. She came to a halt on the far side of the lobby, head down, looking
at her terminal.