A light flicked on, and Isabella saw the mayor standing in a pool of light. He wore a black leather half-mask that covered the top half of his head, a leather harness across his chest, a pair of leather briefs, and leather boots. He held a small remote in one hand, while the other hand's thumb was hooked into the waistband of his briefs.
With the light on, she could start to make out the rest of the room's contents. Shadowed furniture extended back into the blackness, made of leather and wood and steel. Behind the mayor, she could see a large metal frame with leather straps hanging from chains attached to the corners.
This is the Faraday cage room. No way for radio signals to get in or out. From what Holly said, there's no computer access in here, either, except for the door's access pad.
That means if my collar triggers because of the implants, it won't alert anyone else.
"Welcome to the Black Hole," the mayor said. "When the Council built these special retreats, we put in one room like this in each. No radio can get in. No outside access. No way to record what happens. What happens in here, stays in here." He grinned viciously. "Maybe I'll just leave you in here when I'm done with you. What's left of you." He touched the remote and turned up the lights a bit more, and she could see all the way to the walls now. About a dozen pieces of furniture designed to restrain people were scattered around the room. The walls had low cabinets along them on one side. A tray to one side of the metal frame held small metal tools, but she couldn't be sure what they were at this distance. Hanging from the side of the tray was what looked like a coiled rope, or possibly a whip.
Isabella tested the handcuffs as subtly as she could. There was no give at all in them, and they had been tightened down so she couldn't slip loose.
"You think you're better than me, because you've got your fancy implants. Well, now you learn that they'll hurt you, too. You're just cattle like the rest of them." He held up the remote with a flourish. "Your implants can be turned against you, and it's just this easy." He pressed a button on the remote.
Isabella felt the clicking sensation that Phineas had put in to indicate that somebody was trying to use the Agonizer on her, and laughed. The mayor jabbed the button again, and she felt the clicking again.
"We upgraded the implants, Mayor," Isabella said with a smile. She started to stalk toward the mayor, toeing off her slippers as she did so. The bare concrete floor felt cold on her feet.
She brought her implants online, and the clicking sensation came back. Need to disable that before I leave the room, she thought.
"Fine," the mayor spat. "Try this, then." He pressed another button, and a flash of a burning sensation washed over her. And then, her implants kicked in, and the pain went away entirely.
"Nope," she said, dropping down into a crouch, at least as much as she could with her hands cuffed behind her. "So now the question is, are you going to unlock these cuffs now, or do I have to beat the shit out of you first?"
"With your hands tied behind your back?" the mayor asked nervously, looking around.
"Do you think I can't do it?" she asked, slowly approaching him. "Even without the implants, I'm a better fighter than you are."
The mayor backed up toward the metal frame, then leapt back and grabbed the coil. Shaking it out, he revealed it to be a long bullwhip. "Still think you can take me?" he asked, cracking the whip out toward her.
She sidestepped, the implants giving her plenty of time. "Yep," she said, more confidently than she felt. He cracked the whip again, and she watched it move. She balanced on her toes, coiling herself to strike.
"Fine. No more playtime," he said, and the whip snapped straight at her. She spun forward, kicking the whip downward while she leapt over it. She continued the spin, flashing toward the mayor faster than he could react, and kicked his wrist, making him drop the whip. She leapt aside and continued the spin, and even as he slowly turned toward her, her leg lashed out and kicked his knee. She felt the bone shatter and cartilage tear through her bare foot. An O of surprise came on his face as he crumpled to the ground.
"You're right," she said with a sneer. "No more playtime."
The mayor lay on his back, holding his knee, tears in his eyes. He was fighting to keep in the scream of agony that she could see welling up in him. She leapt over to the tray, which held surgical scalpels, along with various clamps, needles, and pins. Off to the side, she saw a pair of handcuff keys, which she turned around and grabbed. It took just a moment to release one side of the cuffs, and she rolled her shoulders to loosen the tightness in them as she moved her hands around in front of her. The second cuff opened even more quickly.
The mayor was just trying to pull himself to standing, leaning on the side of the frame. "Why?" he asked.
"You seriously need to ask?"
"I'll never walk right again," he said.
"And how does that compare to what you had planned for me?"
"But you're just..."
She grabbed the front of his harness, pulling him toward her as he unsteadily balanced on his good leg, still holding the frame for support. "I'm not just anything." She let go of the harness, then ratcheted a cuff closed on the wrist he was supporting himself with. With a smile, she closed the other side of the cuffs onto the frame itself.
"Hey!"
"That'll keep you from going anywhere. Why don't you have a seat, Mayor? You're going to be here a while."
She made sure there wasn't anything useful within his reach, then investigated the rest of the room. She turned off her implants, and the clicking in her shoulder stopped, more notable by its absence than it had been in the heat of the moment. If I leave the room without disabling the collar, it'll broadcast whenever I use my implants. Let's see what I have to work with here.
The tools on the tray wouldn't be useful on the collar, unfortunately. She walked over to the cabinets on the walls, opening one; it held medical supplies.
"It'll never work," the mayor said, sitting on the floor and leaning against the side of the frame. "As soon as you leave this room, your collar will broadcast whenever you use your implants. They'll see you on the cameras. Even if the shocker doesn't work on you, it'll work on all your friends."
She ignored him.
The next cabinet held a few basic tools - not much, but all she'd need, most likely. She didn't need to worry about the collar broadcasting anything in here, so she could just break it open. It'd try to shock her, but she'd already seen that that wasn't effective. She rooted through the tools, finding a few screwdrivers. There was a small mirror, which she used to size up the connections on her collar. It looked more or less like a standard model, although there was an odd thicker spot on one side.
"You'll see," the mayor said. "You might as well just surrender now and make it easier for yourself."
"Shut up unless you want me to break your other knee," Isabella said, looking in the mirror. She wedged one screwdriver into the latch, and then used another to lever it open. The shocker kicked in, and she felt the clicking in her shoulder that indicated her implants were active and blocking the pain. She knew the collar was sending out alerts on every frequency it could as well, indicating an escapee. "You know, when so much of keeping slaves from escaping is based on radio transmitters, bringing them into a Faraday cage is really not a clever move. What idiot thought this one up?"
"It wasn't my idea," the mayor said defensively. "I just liked using these rooms."
"And now," she said as she levered the collar open, "it's going to let me escape." She pulled it away from her neck, and the clicking stopped as her implants no longer needed to block the pain. She peered into the collar, and disconnected the battery. The lights on it went off, and she smiled. "Now, let's see what other toys you've left me here."
A small box on the counter held leather restraints, gags, and chains. She rolled her eyes, and looked underneath. A small case next to it contained an electronic shock kit, and she grimaced. Inside the cabinet, however, she found her palmtop computer, along with the clothes she had been wearing when they brought her in.
"Seriously?" she asked. "What, you were worried this was going to call home?"
"I don't know," the mayor said. "Probably."
She picked up the palmtop and a few screwdrivers, and carried it over to the doorway.
"What are you doing?" the mayor asked nervously.
"Taking this place over. Again." She inspected the door's keypad, nodding to herself.
"Won't work," the mayor said.
She turned and glared at him. "Seriously? I'm Echo Three. Electronics and computer hacking. This little thing doesn't stand a chance." She gently pried the cover off the keypad, then pulled the access cable out of her palmtop, hooking it into the exposed wires. A moment later, she'd taken over the small computer inside the keypad, and was working her way back into the building's central control computers. She re-added herself as an administrator, and quickly patched the recovery files so that her changes couldn't be easily overridden. A quick check of the keypad system showed that all three doors to the control room were set up with DIMMER charges that would trigger if anyone other than Knox or Archer tried to open the door; she disabled that, and pushed the change into the recovery files.
She brought up the camera views throughout the complex. Lieutenant Knox was sitting in the control room, looking bored as she scanned the monitors. The lieutenant who had led her to the Black Hole was sitting in the lab's lounge area, poking idly at his phone. Ferb and Doctor Tjinder were in an area marked 'Pen B Lounge', which looked a lot like the lounge she'd sat in and talked to Holly. Holly and Erik were sitting in the Pen A Lounge.
"There we go. Everything under control again, Mayor. See? No problem at all."
Lieutenant Kimberly Knox sat back in the control room of Building 22, her eyes casually flicking across the monitors. Nothing unexpected. The scientists were safely in Pen B, the research subjects were in Pen A, and she'd seen Lieutenant Rockwell escort Echo Three into the Black Hole, where Mayor Abercrombie was waiting. After that, Rockwell had gone to the lounge to wait until the mayor was done.
She pursed her lips in disapproval. She hadn't had to deal with Abercrombie herself before, but her parents had told her about him. The Council had two major factions internally, who called themselves the Patriots and the Royals. The Patriots had primarily gotten involved with the coup in order to fix the ways they had felt the country had gone astray. It was clear that the country needed an existential threat to restore its citizens' faith. She and her parents were part of the Patriots faction, which was just under half of the total Council membership. Most of the people who were involved on the military side were Patriots.
The Royals were just under half as well, with the remainder being undecided and switching back and forth depending on their whim. The Royals had funded the coup because they felt that they had a natural right to be in charge, and most of them were in the political side of things. They had pushed through the slavery laws, because they needed to prove their control down to actual ownership of people. Some of them took that to extremes, wanting to not only own others but do so cruelly. Abercrombie was one of those, and she'd heard the horror stories of what came out of the Black Hole at Sanford Central when he took someone in there. She almost felt sorry for Echo Three, to be honest.
A flicker on one of the screens, showing the corridor outside the Black Hole, caught her attention. She watched it for a moment, but there wasn't anything there. She frowned, then shrugged. This building had been pulled out of mothballs after the Southwest surrender six months prior, and they still hadn't had a chance to fully upgrade it to modern security and monitoring standards.
Another flicker, this one in the hallway through the Council residential bloc. Okay. It could be coincidence that I'm getting flickers in the corridors between the Black Hole and here. But...
How the hell would Echo Three get into the computer system from there? There's nothing but the keypad...
Fuck. She's that good. And we left her little computer in there to keep it from broadcasting. Knox pulled up the keypad system. It looked okay, but she couldn't be sure. Just to be on the safe side, she re-dumped the system from its safe restore state. It'd take just a moment to reboot, and hopefully would keep Echo Three from getting anywhere. The cameras for the residential bloc came back up - the hallway was empty, as was the lounge. She scanned through the four residential suites, and there wasn't anybody in any of them.
Must be seeing things, she thought. The communications system beeped, and the base security center monitor came on the screen. "Lieutenant Knox? Everything okay there? We caught a momentary disconnect," the young sergeant on the far side said, her dark skin lit by the glow of her monitors.
"It's fine. I caught a glitch and did a reset just to be sure," Knox said. "Thanks for checking up on us. I'll notify the general."
"Okay. I'll log it on this end, then." The sergeant reached forward and the screen flickered off. Knox glanced over the monitors again. Lieutenant Rockwell had stood up, and was heading toward Pen A. She sighed, almost wishing she could turn off the monitors in there as well. As someone who worked with Abercrombie, Rockwell was almost certainly in the Royals faction, and probably was going to take out his frustrations on the slave girl, Holly. Hopefully he'd remember that he was supposed to leave her mostly unharmed for testing purposes.
Isabella checked her palmtop computer, hooked into the bathroom lighting system, with a sigh of relief. She'd been just about to go through into the control room when the system had reset, and she'd dashed into the bathroom just off the lounge as a hiding place until she could regain control. Fortunately, the backdoors she'd placed into the system restore state had worked perfectly.
She knew that Knox would be watching for another flicker now, so she brought her implants back up to full speed. Her stomach growled at her, and she grimaced. She hadn't eaten since last night, and using her implants had burned through a lot of her energy stores. She couldn't risk messing with the cameras again, so she'd have to just rush in and hope. She drew her DIMMER, checked its load, and brought up the palmtop again.
The control room door was right next to the bathroom door - it was only the extreme soundproofing throughout the building that could have kept Knox from hearing her go in. She'd have just a couple seconds to exit the bathroom, sidestep to the control room door, open it, and stun Knox with the DIMMER before Knox would see her and sound the alarm. Isabella checked the palmtop again, looking at what Knox was doing. She'd just reassured base security that there wasn't a problem, and was now poking at the system files. Isabella had hidden herself well, but not well enough to keep out a determined attacker. Time to go now.
She hit a button on the palmtop, and a five-second timer appeared on the screen. She disconnected it and replaced it in its holster, readying her DIMMER. The bathroom door and control room doors simultaneously opened. She leapt out, bringing her DIMMER to bear. Knox was good, Isabella had to give her that. She wasn't going for her own weapon, knowing that Isabella was faster, but was instead turning toward the panic button.
Not good enough. Isabella's shot hit her in the shoulder, and she slumped onto the floor, her hand sliding off the control panel after coming within inches of the large red button.
Isabella checked the monitors. The other lieutenant wasn't where he had been - she saw him just entering the slave pit where Holly and Erik were watching the television.
She tapped the pad to bring audio up from that camera. "You. Bedroom. Now," the lieutenant said, gesturing toward Holly.
Holly was talking to Erik and keeping a casual eye on the door back from the lab area where Isabella had been taken. The door slid open, and she saw Lieutenant Rockwell come through. She looked at him expectantly, waiting for Isabella to follow him.
"The mayor isn't done with her yet. I'm just bored. You. Bedroom. Now," he gestured toward her with a control remote.
"Seriously, Jake?" Erik said, leaning back on the couch. "You've been hanging around Dutch too long."
"Shut up, traitor," the lieutenant said.
"I'm the traitor?" Erik asked incredulously. "I'm the traitor?"
The lieutenant hit a button on the remote, and Erik cried out as he fell onto his side, then rolled off the couch, clutching his collar.
"Maybe we don't even need to go to the bedroom," the lieutenant said with a leer. "Why don't you just strip down now. This loser can watch."
Holly stared at him for a moment, and he held up the remote. Sighing, she pulled her top off, dropping it on the couch. I've been expecting this ever since they put a collar on me. I'm surprised it's taken this long, to be honest. Behind the lieutenant, Erik was whimpering as he climbed back onto the couch.
"Very nice," the lieutenant said. "Now the pants."
The door to the lounge opened, revealing Isabella. She raised her weird pistol and fired, and the lieutenant went down like a sack of potatoes.
"Sorry it took so long," Isabella said. "We don't have much time before the rest of the base figures out we're loose, so let's get those collars off you, and then go grab the boys from next door." She gave Erik a long look. "We'll settle up later."
General Archer paged through the log items for the day, ignoring most of them. Nothing important in them in general.
The number 22 in one entry caught his eye, and he looked back at it. Security had called into Building 22 because of a network blip. Glaring, he printed it out and stalked over to the security office.
"Sergeant Alvarez," he said, marching to the communications desk, "why was I not notified of the incident in Building 22?"
The young black woman looked up at him, startled. "Lieutenant Knox told me it was nothing. So I logged it and went on with my duties."
"Is there not a standing order to notify me of any security incident involving Building 22?"
"I...I'm sorry, sir. Lieutenant Knox said she'd deal with that."
He frowned at her. "Bring up Lieutenant Knox, please, so I can find out why she didn't, then."
The sergeant tapped some keys and brought up a view of the control room in Building 22. It was empty.
"Lieutenant Knox isn't there, sir," the sergeant said.
"I can see that." He paused for a moment. "I'll go see what's going on, then."
He quickly rounded up a couple soldiers to escort him over to the building. As they drove up into the hills to the building, he saw the garage doors open. The hovercar they'd moved inside the garage flickered and vanished as it started to move out.
Leaving the guards at the door, he ran into the building, quickly finding the control room. Lieutenant Knox was unconscious on the floor. He shook her briefly, and she groaned but didn't awaken. He brought up the security office on the screen, where the sergeant was looking back at him. "Sir?" she asked.
"Sound the alarm. The prisoners are escaping in a cloaked hovercar. They're on their way to the border."
Ferb sat in the copilot's seat of the hovercar, watching the sensors as Isabella piloted them back toward safety in Canada at 400 km/h. Two blips appeared behind them, approaching fast, the heat as they sliced through the air shining brightly in the infrared.
"Two interceptors at 6 o'clock," he said.
"Oh, it's only fifteen-hundred," Doctor Tjinder said from behind him, "we have plenty of time to cross the border."
Holly, sitting next to the doctor, said, "That's not what he means. He means they're coming from right behind us."
"Coming up fast. Even if they can't find us, they have a good idea where we are," Ferb said.
"Should have headed off the direct route," Isabella said. "Sorry."
"The longer we're in American territory, the more ways they can stop us," Ferb said.
The radio clicked on. "Unidentified hovercar," a voice said over it, "you are ordered to land immediately."
"This thing's unarmed, Ferb," Isabella whispered.
"How far to the border?" Ferb said.
"Fifteen minutes," Isabella said.
"We have you on targeting radar," the voice said. "Turn off your cloaking device and land now. You have thirty seconds to comply."
"Shit," Isabella said. "Sorry. I hoped we could make it." She reached for the stealth switch.