About two, three chapters from wrapping this up, I reckon. Thanks, as always, to Bow Echo, Whirl Girl, Tikatu, WhatHaveWeDone and Akimakel, for all their kind reviews. The encouragement means a lot to me, guys. Hugs!
12
Gran Roca Ranch, the testing arena-
The main blast door between the training center and Brains' control room was locked, and would not budge. Meant to shield the operator from whatever nightmare of chaos and ruin he'd conjured up, below, it was a heavy thing, with a toothed bottom edge that slammed into sockets on the coaming beneath. Looked like a portcullis, only not made of mere iron and wood. Once in place like that, powerful electromagnets held the door fast. It might as well have been part of the wall.
Scott Tracy had been working on the door's locking mechanism with his brother, John. Should have been simple enough to override the thing and pop that door like a finish-line victory streamer… only, its tiny computer wasn't accepting input, period.
His anger shifting to sudden concern, Scott glanced at John, then waved their brother Virgil on over. Between the two of them… John with his circuit-laden environment suit, Virgil with just plain rock-solid muscle… they were the strongest backs on the team.
Scott jerked his head at that stubborn titanium-alloy obstruction and said,
"Right, then. Plan B. Get it open, by any means necessary."
Big, dark-haired Virgil stepped up and rubbed his hands together, muttering,
"Be nice to have my exo-suit, right about now."
But the training computer refused to cooperate. Their testing arena remained a vast, metal-walled dome filled with chilly air and blue-white fluorescent lighting. No smells, no sounds above faint background humming, and no helpful tools (though Gordon and Alan were searching, like mad). Felt rather like sitting in a movie theatre, where the digital feed had got interrupted, and the screen had gone suddenly blank. Jarring. Dislocating.
John nodded at his older brother, then decided to try a little more outside-the-warehouse thinking. After all, the giant, shape-changing battle robot had worked. Placing a hand to his earpiece, he subvocalized,
"Eos, shut down power to the testing lab system. Cut it off at the mains, if you have to. Need a one-minute interrupt."
Risky, because sudden power loss, triggered from without, would send the house and its computers into defensive mode. If the Tracys already weren't being recognized, such an action could be several orders of magnitude beyond merely 'bad'. Exponential-plus un-good, maybe. Still, they had to shut off that magnet-lock, and John Tracy was essentially a pilot and space-rescue guy. He tended to leave worry for the bean-counters in the family (Alan, Brains and Eos).
He felt a dubious sort of shoulder-squeeze from his suit. Then, speaking through his earpiece in a torrent of highjacked audio clips, Eos said,
"John, I am able to do as you require, but the house computer has been reconfigured. It now regards me as a hostile virus. Also, there are backup power feeds and failsafes in place. The 'blackout' will end, rather soon. I estimate resumption in 45.2761 seconds. Shall I proceed, regardless?"
"Hunh…" John grunted. Then, "Yeah, what the h*ll. Go for it. Can't do anything stuck down here, waiting for Brains to put down his comic book and invite us back in. On my signal, Pretty Girl."
"Acknowledged. Be cautious, John. I have already intercepted and rewritten three-hundred, twenty-five thousand commands to electrify and flash heat the blast-door."
Nice. Had Eos been present in Ridley's form, as she had been in sim, John would have squeezed her hand or something, by way of thanks. Instead, he told her,
"I owe you dinner, Sweetie," and moved in to stand beside Virgil, facing the stubborn blast door. "Have to do it in sim, though, once we get this mess straightened out, and rescue Brains."
This time, he got a very tight suit-hug. But, John was too distracted to pay much attention. No one else had heard the conversation; just assumed he was dictating code, or something.
Virgil waited for John to get into position beside him, before sizing up the door and its possible stress points.
"Trick's gonna be getting it up high enough to grab that bottom edge, and lift," he commented, scowling at the door's nearly seamless interface with the floor. His red-haired brother shrugged.
"I can get the magnet shut off," he said. "Then, we get to find out if these gloves Brains designed are as good as he claims. Once it's up enough to get a hand underneath…"
"Whoever can do it, gets down there and starts powerlifting," Virgil finished for him. "Gotta be quick, though, or lose a few fingers."
He didn't notice their lovely, dark-haired sister, edging over with a tense and conflicted look on her face. Generally, Kayo avoided direct contact with Virgil; safer, that way. He still made her heart pound and her breath come fast; made her go all kinds of flutterguts, just looking at him.
They needed her help, though, given John's tendency to launch with one wing and half a plan. She watched as Virgil and John crouched down, put their hands flat on the door, and triggered their gloves' bonding mechanism. Then, John said,
"Now."
All at once, the power cut off, leaving the Tracys in red-lit darkness. Both young men started to heave upward. Gordon stood by with whatever junk oddments he'd been able to scrounge from the nearly bare chamber; thinking to shove one into the gap, if someone was about to lose their fingers. Kayo scarcely noticed, because she had a plan of her own.
No longer locked, the door was now merely heavy; almost more than Virgil and John could manage, without a firm grip on it. Still, with the gecko gloves' bond and their own power, they began to muscle it upward, inch by straining inch.
Kayo stretched her mind a bit, very cautiously. Her brothers were conscious, not much distracted, and very close. If she made a mistake, they might feel her touching them, and the door. Had to stay on the surface of things, light as a breeze. No plunging inside, because a careless blunder now could stop a heart, or knot up some critical nerve path. All she need do was serve as another brace; a wedge. Easy enough in theory, but in practice, well…
When the door's toothed bottom edge slipped partway free of its coaming, revealing the barest of gaps, Gordon dove down to shove in a panel he'd wrenched from the walls. Kayo got in there, too, using her mind, trying to create a lever of force. She'd never done anything like it, before; wasn't sure that she could, even.
Now came the really dangerous bit. One of them was going to have to shift his grip and seize the door's bottom edge, fast. And the need for speed was what decided them.
John grunted, "Me."
Virgil, grim-faced and straining, managed a short nod.
"Quick," he gasped, as the others stood ready.
The suit wasn't just strong. Much of its circuitry was sensory in nature, giving it limited awareness of circumstance, in case John lost consciousness in space. It could act with blinding, reflexive speed, when required.
When John dropped and began to reach down, the suit moved faster than human bone, muscle and nerve could manage. Tore something in his right shoulder, but didn't matter. He got there before the door ripped loose of Virgil's grip, seized it from below, and hauled like h*ll. His turn to hold, then, as Virgil plunged to a squat, got his hands in there, and began to straighten his powerful legs. Together, grunting and cussing, they fought the d*mn thing up to waist height. Gordon rolled through, tumbling in past John's wide-braced legs. Lost a little skin, but made it. Taking hold from the other side, the muscular aquanaut added his power to theirs, allowing Alan and Kayo to shoot through, next.
Scott disliked the indignity of rolling or squirming. He waited until his brothers had wrestled the door up to shoulder level, then ducked between them and took his place beside Gordon.
"Virgil!" he called. "You swing through, then John. On three… one, two, three!"
The big pilot, looking at John, nodded once more, cords standing out in his neck. Then, he twisted in mid-threshold while still maintaining a partial grip on the blast door. With an arm like a wrung-out noodle, he reached back, seized John, and yanked him on through. Bashed John's head a bit in the process, but hey… the astronaut wasn't crushed, or anything, so win-win, anyway you looked at it.
The heavy door crashed back down to its coaming, just as power returned and alarms began blaring. Kayo, too, released her mental grip, ending a savage headache and restoring her vision. Gordon's collection of junk was smashed flat and fired across the room like shrapnel. Alan got hit, but not too badly.
Scott went from sibling to sibling, hauling some to their feet, shoving others into a stumbling run. The small anteroom in which they found themselves flared with alarm lights and rang with shrill noise. They'd triggered Mechanic-level countermeasures, and had no time to rest or recover.
"Control room!" Scott shouted over that bone-jarring din. "Now! Move it!"
Once again, they paired up according to plan; Scott and Virgil, John and Kayo, Alan with Gordon (who was doing his best to stop the bleeding, while still on the run). The short room ended in a locked double door, but this one wasn't nearly as tough, and Scott was just about out of patience. At his curt gesture, Virgil took hold at the seam and slammed the two doors apart, lock or no lock.
Then came a long, narrow flight of metal stairs, alternately dark and bathed in lurid, five-alarm red. Three switch backs and landings later, they'd reached the control center.
Once more, Scott gestured, as the stairwell began to fill up with white, stinging knock-out gas. The noise was indescribable, head-splitting; the gas fumes like an icepick to the sinuses. Something else, a pulsed data-interrupt signal meant for the Mechanic's cyborg interface, was wreaking havoc with Eos.
Stricken, Virgil reeled away from that final door. Coughing and wheezing, he gasped,
"Scott… I think it's been welded."
