Stormhaven Rising (Atlas and the Winds Book 1) (9 page)

He didn’t have to feel good about it. In fact, he was close to terrified. The stately dance that he’d spent all his time creating, from the initial composite blending, to the last thermal rivet had been exclusively his responsibility.

As impressive as Mica was, it was about to rewrite every step of the operation. He looked down on the floor and asked Saint Vidicon, the cybernetic patron for all technology, to watch over and protect his robotic children.

In the distance, Sophie and her husband Glen, who worked in the shop as one of the engineers, were the only other humans in the building. They’d tethered their work sled to the railing above the floor.

“Ok Mica, it’s all yours.” Daryl closed his eyes and waited.

“Initiating download,” it responded.

Everything on the floor stopped. And stayed stopped.

He looked around, trying to see any sign of movement. Nothing. The ringing of the presses down one of the lateral heavy feeder lines echoed into silence. Time stopped. Daryl held his breath.

“Is anything moving over there?” he shouted across the chamber.

“No, nothing,” came Sophie’s reply. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, maybe she overloaded something trying to pick it up?” He'd started toward the control room when the ringing of the presses started again. Getting louder and faster as it ran through the start up cycle. Instantly he knew it was running hotter than before.

“Too fast,” he said. “The handlers will never be able to keep up at that speed.”

Then an army of whirling dervishes exploded into life all over the room, spinning and pirouetting in a terrifying dance of improbable motion. He watched the hundreds of autonomous robots slip past each other so closely that he expected to see twisted pieces of equipment lying in smoking heaps on the floor.

Several times he watched two gargantuan autobot haulers squeeze together by slinging their loads into a spinning cartwheel that made it look like the giant machines were physically passing through each other. He grabbed the rail, sucking in gasps of air each time they slid toward what looked like a sure collision, only to blow it back out a second later when they twisted themselves past and rolled on about their task.

He stared down on the demonic square-dance for several minutes until he realized that Sophie was trying to pry his fingers free from the railing. “Come on. You look like you need to get out of here,” she said.

“No,” he said. His eyes were huge, white edged in a caricature of terror that refused to be torn from the intricate waves of near cataclysmic encounters playing out below.

Laughing at his frightened expression, Glen grabbed his other arm and pushed him toward the control room. “It’ll be ok, she speaks their language.” Putting himself between the bulk of the fabricator’s body and the railing, he gave a firm shove and the two of them marshaled him away.

Inside, he stared in shock. Instead of the glowing consoles and visual readouts of the system monitors, everything was dead. Mica interfaced directly with everything, so keeping the screens active had been unnecessary. The control room was a silent and darkened crypt, a dozen onyx slabs that had formerly been command consoles, now stood as tombstones.

Frozen by the strangeness, he looked at the two of them. “Oh my,” he croaked. Glancing over Glen’s shoulder he saw the top of an autobot swinging its load of hull panels over its head while it rotated towards some other unlikely dance partner.

Sophia grinned and tried to keep from laughing. “Maybe you should call it a day. What do you think?"

He shook his head, but this time he managed to look away from the window. “I spent two years writing the codes for the ‘bots. I really didn’t expect there to be that much—"

“Difference?” Glen offered, trying to keep Daryl moving toward the door.

“Yeah that too, but they’re doing things that are just impossible.” He studied the floor fighting the urge to look.

“Actually it’s pretty cool,” Sophia said, pressing her face to the window and whistling in amazement. “Damn, those things had to scrape against each other that time.”

“What?” Daryl gasped, shaking loose from Glen to jump to the window.

“I assure you Dr. Creswell, I have maintained a twenty-five centimeter proximity tolerance because of uncertainty in the friction coefficient of the floor surface,” Mica responded.

“Twenty-five centimeters?” Daryl gasped.

“Yes. I set this distance as an acceptable safety margin given the variability of the environment. Unfortunately, this has limited the increase in operational efficiency to 296%, and not the 300% I had projected."

“So, in five minutes you’ve tripled the production rate out there?” Glen watched the insane ballet for a few seconds.

“Not precisely true, but a close approximation,” it replied. “Within the hour I will have collected sufficient data from movement vector analysis to reduce this tolerance to five centimeters, and provide a cumulative five hundred percent increase."

“Don’t bother.” Daryl sat on the corner of one of the deactivated consoles, rubbing his forehead. “Our suppliers won’t be able to keep up."

“Perhaps we should offer to assist them in improving their efficiency?” Mica suggested, almost managing to sound disappointed at its lost opportunity to show off.

***

Northern Arizona:

The storm was worse on the ground than it had been in the air, and Agent Shapiro’s attitude had slipped steadily as a result. On the ground, without exception, the roads between Phoenix and the high mountain plateau that was his destination, had been closed.

This was Arizona. It was
supposed
to be desert, not frozen tundra.

Forced to accept that the weather had trumped the urgency of his mission, Shapiro found a Best Western in a little town just below the rim of the plateau and got a room. Calling in to explain his delay, he spent a night trying to sleep. What he’d originally planned to take just over an hour to drive, had now become an extra day of adventure. His only consolation was that if he couldn’t get in, Cavanaugh couldn’t get out either.

Just after noon the following day he pulled his SUV onto a graded dirt road that cut through a barren wasteland that looked like it had been transplanted from Mars. Glancing at the autonav he swore under his breath. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. Rutted and frozen, the road was just one more annoyance to him as it wound past the scrub juniper and into a vast open range that looked too barren and inhospitable to support life.

“Who in their right mind would put a corporate headquarters out here?” he grumbled.

About to turn back, he topped a ridge and caught his first sight of his destination. Spreading across a low-lying depression that might have once been a drainage basin, a series of concrete arches and earthen ridges sprawled for what appeared to be almost a mile.

His instincts suddenly urged that caution was better than bravado, so he slowed, pulling out his digital binoculars and tossing them on the seat.
More eyeball information might be useful
, he realized.

In the hope of finding some cover and a vantage point from which to do a little recon, he turned off the road onto a broken trail that headed east up a narrow cut below a small ridge. Bouncing and slipping forward, he instantly questioned the wisdom of his choice. The truck pulled hard, the four wheel drive light blinking on his dashboard as it scrambled, struggling for traction.

Feeling the ground giving way beneath his tires, he swung up the bank away from the rut and slid to a stop, his wheels tearing deep gouges in the slime. Thick globs of mud hurled up the sides of the vehicle. Slamming into reverse, he rocked down the slope until the back bumper dug into the ground behind him.

“Shit!” he hissed. Jamming forward again with a lurch and hoping to catch momentum, he floored the accelerator. Bouncing over what felt like buried boulders, he bounded onto the flat ground with his front wheels, but the back end hung in the muck with enough determination to stop him dead.

The sound of tearing metal marked the end of his motion with a bone-jarring finality. The white top of the main building of Stormhaven was visible over the tilt of his hood.

“Don’t these people believe in civilization?"

Swearing, he stepped out into the biting wind to survey his options. A small river of red-black liquid bled down the rutted embankment, pooling on a patch of snow. Transmission fluid. He stared at it, recognizing the gravity of his predicament.

The engine was still running even after he’d stopped, so at least he could use the heater to keep warm. He registered that as an important detail when a gust of wind knifed at the edges of his suit coat.

The buildings in the distance were within walking range, but standing here staring at them in the naked light of day, they possessed an odd certainty that lent the appearance of strength. A fortress, standing in a moat of harsh terrain. The direct approach might not have been his best course of action before, but now he wasn’t going to be putting on a good shock-and-awe act when his suit was already covered with mud halfway up to his knees.

All he could do was call for backup. If nothing else, the wait would give him time to do some old-fashioned eyeball surveillance. Hauling out his satlink, he sent a request for help, and then patched into the Homeland Security Surveillance Network. While the connection authenticated he sat on the hood of his SUV studying the buildings in detail. His field glasses linked into the computer and fed enhanced data into his view, while also sending real-time imagery from his back to the DHS network.

What he was seeing with his eyes wasn’t what the hardware was detecting. His computer struggled to analyze the images but kept coming back with a
“No Data Correlation”
message.

The satellites overhead had no better luck, reporting on radio signals emanating from the main area of the building. DHS systems in Virginia tried to cross match the RF signatures with known sources, but all he got was another
“No Data Correlation”
response.

Spectroscopic data from the satellites also showed substantial polymer outgassing behind several of the largest out-buildings. He couldn’t see them from his vantage point but it appeared to be some kind of plastics manufacturing facility. Whatever it was, it didn’t fit anything in the files, and their computers couldn’t venture a guess as to what type of work was really going on inside.

“Nobody’s tagged this before?” he wondered out loud. An alert message popped up in his field glasses asking if he required additional analysis. He sent a response up the system in search of expert help.

He expected he’d get a detailed report from the analysts in the Hole, but instead the reply advised him to stand by for tactical support units being dispatched from Colorado, with a projected ETA of twelve to twenty four hours.

He glanced at his watch. Tomorrow.

Rather than fuming in frustration, he decided this turn of events simply gave him an unavoidable opportunity.

Unfortunately the frigid wind-swept plateau provided no cover. So he sat in the open, in a previously shiny black government-issue spy-mobile, feeling like he should plant a flag announcing his arrival.

***

Chapter Six:

More Questions than Answers

ISS Alpha:

Scott floated away from the workstation. The email he’d just received was at the very least, strange. Reading it over several times, he still wasn’t sure he’d understood what it meant. There was something between the lines that he was missing.

Set up a direct line-of-sight transmission to Capcom? What reason could they have to send a message without running it through the TDRS?

He’d already received instructions to make sure that all communication from the station was encrypted, and now this new message had come with no explanation as well. He was chewing his way through possible justifications for it, when Susan Winslow stuck her head into the module to confirm the station’s com systems were secure.

Because she had no formal responsibilities on Alpha, he’d assigned her the task of double-checking the computers. “We’re tight Commander,” she announced.

“Thanks Sue,” he said in her general direction.

Floating the rest of the way into the Command Center, she brushed his arm, startling him back to reality. “What’s up? You’re a million miles away.”

“Not really,” he said.

“Sure?” she said, prodding.

“I just got an email from Lange.” Grabbing onto the panel’s mounting handle he frowned at the screen. “He waited until we were encrypted, and now this new message makes no sense."

“Maybe it didn’t decode right,” she suggested.

“It’s readable,” he said. “It’s just pointless.”

“Lange’s known for plain speaking,” she said.

“That’s what’s so weird about it. It didn’t say anything except to wait for a line-of-sight transmission from Mission Control,” he said, staring at the message still displayed on the screen. “I’m supposed to lock an antenna to track Houston, and then wait until he calls.”