Casimir Hypogean: Chapter Five
(Catch up on previous chapters here)
Chapter Five
“You wanna cup of soup or anything?” Dan Garner asked his coworkers in the Kajipe power hub. He was already pulling on his coat over his broad shoulders and bored to tears facing another twelve hour shift. He sure in hells wasn’t planning on doing it while hungry.
“We aren’t supposed to leave, numbnuts.” Bennett Combs was his fellow guard, a middle-aged, slightly overweight man with a weak chin and reedy voice. In Dan’s opinion, the chin matched Combs’s personality.
“Sure, I’ll have soup if they got any.” Alim, the stocky, snub-nosed tech, didn’t even glance up from his datapad. He was watching something, though the Wires were restricted in here. But he was an egg-head, so Dan figured he’d found a work-around.
“I’m hungry,” Dan said to Combs, “My lunch is meager as shit since Kira’s mad again, and I’m gonna grab something before curfew closes everything down.” He glared at Combs, though it was mostly for show. The guy didn’t have enough spine to report him and Dan had seniority anyway.
“Fine, get me something crunchy and maybe some fresh tea? Stuff they got in the back is crap. Should be enough on that.” Combs dug out a plastic WIC card, handed it over to Dan, and then slumped in his chair. The position did unflattering things to his already puffy gut.
Dan hid his grin and punched the open button for the door. It slid back and he looked down at a slender woman with crazy black and white face paint who was kneeling on the floor. She had an electro pistol in one gloved hand, pointed right at him, ready to spit paralyzing current.
For the space of a shaky breath he just stood there, staring at her. Her eyes were brown, flecked with purple and strangely hypnotic. He tried to cue up the PUDI, get a call out, but it felt like static in his head. Jammer. There had to be a jammer nearby. He felt as though the world had slowed down, as though this was something happening to someone else and he were stuck watching.
“Yo, Danny, that door’ll close on you.” Combs couldn’t see around him, Dan realized, but his voice broke the freeze and time sped back up again. Dan started to reach for his gun, fumbling with the safety snaps.
A shadow to the side of the door resolved itself into man, who stepped up behind the kneeling woman. His hair was short and silvered with age, but the man’s body was still thick with muscle and his dark face was painted in the same terrifying black and white patterns.
“Don’t be a hero,” the man said in a gravelly voice.
“The hell? What’s going. . .” Combs squawked from behind Dan but was cut off by Dan’s sharp gesture.
He backed up slowly and the man and woman followed him, letting the door slide shut behind them. “What do you want?” Dan managed to croak out.
“For us all to sit tight here,” the man replied. “You,” he said to Alim, who was half-rising from his seat and reaching for the console controls, “sit back down.”
The woman didn’t speak. She pulled out a handful of plastic twine from a cloth bag at her waist and started tying Alim to his chair while the man motioned Combs and Dan back against the wall.
“What’re your names?” he asked them.
“Daniel, uh, Dan Garner,” Dan said.
“Shut up, man,” Combs hissed at him.
“They don’t want to hurt us,” Dan said, putting emphasis on it. He prayed it was true. Names helped, right? Personalized you to the attacker. He couldn’t remember what they’d told him in training. All he could think about was Kira’s puffy face and how dying on the job would just make her angrier. She’d probably yell at his corpse and then go shopping with her lazy daughter. Dan quickly shoved those thoughts away.
“That’s right, Dan. We don’t want to hurt anyone.” The man smiled and his teeth looked like fine polished bone.
The woman, who still hadn’t spoken, removed their guns and turned first Combs, then Dan gently around, tying their hands behind them and then easing them into sitting positions and tying their feet. Combs grumbled and started to resist her, but she jammed her thumb into his throat.
Dan didn’t resist at all, he couldn’t give Kira and his step-daughter the satisfaction. Her gloved hands were strong on his shoulders as she helped him sit and he caught the scent of something sweet and almost flowery underneath the stronger smell of the paint on her face. When she turned away he had to stifle a little gasp.
She didn’t have the x-shaped scar or small interface jack in her neck. A woman without a PUDI? Everyone got them when they were five. People turning criminal, sure, he knew about that. Living below the grid and all. But to start that young? Dan shuddered, more worried now about who these people could be.
Dan still couldn’t figure what they wanted, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it but memorize every detail of these people and hope to get out alive to report later. With him and the other two secure, the invaders seemed to relax and do nothing. The woman fiddled with the control console a little, but seemed satisfied to mostly stare off into space. Like they were waiting for something. Or some appointed time. Dan shivered, testing the bindings. Tight. He forced himself to take deep breaths and wait. They couldn’t remain here forever.
The worst part of it was, he was still damn hungry. Dan swallowed hard and prepared for a miserable night.
* * *
Hex and Sif found the door they wanted. It was a reinforced steel door, built to nominally fit in with the rest of the doors in the hallway, but any close inspection revealed it had been replaced long after this building was constructed. There was a keypad inside a plexi box with a slider for a magnetic keycard on the side.
“We need a keycard,” Hex told Ryg over his PUDI.
“Sif has it,” Ryg responded.
Sif was already stepping up to the door, a thin piece of plastic in her hand. She swiped it and waited. Nothing happened. In Hex’s head he heard the muttered string of curses from Ryg, who’d left the communication channel open.
“Give me a moment to think,” Ryg added.
Sif shrugged and pulled out a knife, looking at Hex with a raised eyebrow.
“Alarms?” he asked her over sub-vocals.
In answer she jammed the tip of the blade under the edge of the plexi box and used her superior strength to jimmy it open. The plexi cracked and then broke open.
“Sif! Damnit.” Ryg started another string of curses. “We’re trying to leave minimal trace.”
Hex shook his head and kept an eye on the hallway. No audible alarms were going off yet and no security drones came buzzing out.
“Fine. Here, use this code,” Ryg again.
Sif punched in the code as he fed it to her PUDI. This one worked and the door slid open. Quickly the two of them ducked inside.
“I thought this was supposed to be an auxiliary office. Administrative and such?” Hex said, looking around.
There wasn’t any furniture in the room. It was a large space, as though walls had been removed to combine offices and Hex found where a second door had been cemented over. Against the far wall was a bank of servers, humming away in the near darkness. They stretched from floor to ceiling and had a thick rope of wires patching them into a gaping hole in the far wall.
“This is, different, than I expected,” Ryg muttered, seeing the room through Sif’s forehead camera. “When I found the leak, I thought. . .” he stopped himself, as if realizing what he was saying.
“What leak?” Sif’s voice was deceptively soft over the PUDI. Hex read suspicion in her face that was reflected in his own.
“What are we doing here, Ryg?” he added.
“I’ll tell you later,” Ryg said, sounding resigned. “Just stick the chip in and get the programs running. We’re on a timer here with those patrol drones.”
“Later,” Sif said, making the word a promise.
Hex pulled the chip with the programs on it out of his jacket pocket and found a port on one of the servers. He slotted it in.
“Good?” he asked Ryg.
“Yes, I’m in, just. . .” Static cut Ryg off.
“Ryg? Hey?” Hex tried to re-establish the connection and met the hard silence of a jammed signal. Not good.
Sif met his eye and they melted into the shadows of the room, taking cover behind the server banks as red lights came on and the air filled with the whirring noise of Hunter-killer drones. Nasty little things, Hunter-killers were fist-sized and carried three lethal darts each. Whoever had set up the security here wasn’t messing around.
Hex slid his gun out of its holster as quietly as he could and took a deep breath. No job ever went perfect. If he got out of this alive, he and Ryg were going to have a very, very interesting chat.