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CLEA
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As we left the room, I was a cavalcade of thoughts. Mara’s true origin was not what I was expecting, and I was feeling guilty that I still hadn’t let any of them know about what I was…especially Chance.
He walked next to me as we headed back to his room, “What do you think of this revelation?”
“It’s fascinating. Is she a person who became a machine or a machine that gained humanity? Either way, she is definitely a person; her self-doubt about her status proves it. Nothing inhuman could feel like that.”
He nodded, “A very good point. What about her fears about another group?”
“You’ve seen what Old World technology can really do when it comes to spying and sneaking…Who knows how long this other group could have been active before you woke her up.”
We entered the room, and he began undressing, then he paused, “You’re quite a bit more than just a spy…you know how to manipulate social events..”
“Yes?”
“So, there had to be a purpose for creating someone like Lord Malcolm and providing him with weapons…why would you do it?”
“What?”
“Someone like him is a blunt object, no real delicacy to his actions. Assuming that whomever is behind his surgery are not complete fools, what would you use a man like that for?”
As I was thinking about that particular mystery, I began to undress as well, and then we wrapped towels around ourselves and headed to the showers; after we returned to the room to dry off and get dressed, I thought I might have an answer.
“Fear.”
Hmm?”
“You asked why? Malcolm and his followers were brutality incarnate. They reveled in it,” I continued. “They caused fear to everyone that had heard the name of the Dark Warriors.”
“Why would these phantoms want to cause fear?”
“That’s easy. Because when you’re scared, you either want to run away from the thing you’re scared of…or you want to lash out at it. Now, let’s just say I wanted to cause some trouble, and I needed to move things to a location or set something up to my advantage. I would set up something that would draw the eye and the reactions to a source that is clearly not me while I did what I needed to do in the background. If the people run away, that’s excellent! They’ll be so busy running they won’t have time to look around…if they lash out…Well, I can honestly say without your equipment and Mara, I don’t think you would have won, and neither would anyone else with the paltry amount of forces that are available to the various enclaves in the frontier.”
“That means whoever they are, they are probably based in the frontier as well?”
“That would make sense…or they are doing something in the frontier, and they don’t want hunters, traders, or travelers stumbling across it. When you were traveling, did you try to stay away from known raider areas?” I asked.
“If I could…the Dark Warriors I encountered that chased me in here were considerably out of their usual area. I had heard about them and was trying to avoid any meetings.”
He had finished dressing in rough work pants, shirt, and boots. I was dressed much the same, with my hair combed out so it would dry properly and I could braid it.
“So there you have it,” I replied as I handed him a wool sweater, “They wanted to cause fear.”
“But,” he said after looking at the wall for a moment. “We performed a great deal of drone flights around Malcolm’s city as we readied for the raid and saw nothing Old World. This bunker is an exception; for its purpose, it was built to be well-concealed. According to Mara, most of the main bunker designs were not…at least not to searches from as close a range as we were doing. So if his purpose was to scare people away from the site of something, what is that something if not Old World? I see your logic and understand and agree that fear is the reason, but why the fear is needed is now the mystery.”
He finished tying his boots and stood from where he was seated on the bed, “I am certain we will figure it out, though.” He looked at me, “I am off to open a safe, and your plans?”
“Spread some very believable lies.”
He kissed me. It was a very good kiss and involved a great deal of contact; when we broke it off, we were both slightly winded, “I like doing that.”
“Then it’s a very fortunate thing that I enjoy it as well. Meet you for dinner?” I asked.
“Certainly.”
We exited, he heading down to the workshops, and I ascended to the Surface.
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BONCHANCE
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Entering the Systems level, I saw Mara lifting that large Old World material box onto a cart before waving me over. Then, she pushed it to a workbench in the section she used for her private use.
“Is that it?” I asked. I remembered her packing it aboard one of the Guts, but I hadn’t seen it since.
“Yes…” she paused and looked at me. “I don’t know…”
I could guess what was coming, “You don’t need to say anything more. You’re still, and always will be, Mara to me.”
She stepped forward and hugged me, “Thank you, Bonchance.”
“What are friends for?”
She let go and stepped back to look at the safe, “Now, how are you going to open it?”
“I’m going to cook it.”
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“What? A plasma knife will go through this, but it will destroy the contents as much as explosives would. Only instead of shattering, the setting required will superheat the air inside before it gets through.”
“I am assuming a plasma knife is a form of cutting torch?”
She nodded.
“A torch produces a very tight spot of flame that is conducted away by the layers, so it needs to keep pouring heat in until it finally burns through. Because it’s a point source, it can focus that heat on a tiny spot, hit a column of layers, and heat and melt them effectively simultaneously. Do you have anything here that can heat a large area, like the back side of the safe, evenly?”
“Probably.”
It took a little time, but the next day, I ended up building an electric resistance heater. I liked that because we could control the temperature precisely, and we laid the safe on top of the elements to let it cook.
“So the polymers between the layers are thermally stable until a certain amount of time heating has passed, and then they just crumble?” she said as we watched and waited.
“Yes. The outer doors are just as vulnerable. This method with a wood fire is how I destroyed the emergency exit coming in. Don’t worry about that hole; a month ago, John and I welded several pieces of plate steel to cover it until we could figure out something better.”
Finally, it got hot enough, and I began bending the metallic layers away like I had done to the door. Mara just stood there as I worked. As I got deeper, it was clear that the heat had been reduced by the multiple insulating layers of polymer, as Mara called it. We had just known it as ‘resin’ at the Academy, so the heat hadn’t turned it to dust, but its flexibility was gone, and it was far easier to shatter.
A few judicious blows from a hammer, and then I was able to actually tear through the severely weakened laminate.
“Long low heat…” Mara said. “Who would believe it?”
“Somebody figured it out long before I was born. This is how the Guild opens long-lost bunker doors.”
Mara reached over, her synthetic skin not bothered by the residual heat, and pried the metal away; reaching inside, she pulled out a strange-looking cloth shoulder bag that wasn’t even scorched. I had had the temperature exactly where it needed to be.
Opening the bag, she slid out a flat metal and Old World composite case.
“What’s that?”
“An AF/P-107 Commset transceiver, an old style. It was taken out of service about a year after I enlisted. Very reliable, though.”
She fiddled with it, and it unfolded, revealing a screen, a keyboard, and some other things.
“And it has an encryption module on it…Oh! An echo transponder,” she looked at the ceiling, “you’re not going to be calling home from here.”
“What are those?”
“The C-mod encodes and decodes any communications. Anybody who tries to listen in will hear garbage. The Echo waits for a particular signal, then broadcasts an ‘I’m here!’ response. You saw them in emergency radios a lot.”
“So they can find it?”
“Not under all this stone; the safe would have blocked any signals, too. We have repeaters set to the units we use that will get the signals outside, but this unit can’t do that. If we had opened that safe outside, they would have locked in on it very fast.”
“So, is it useful?”
She typed away on the keyboard and nodded, “He didn’t bother to secure access…why would he?” she said to herself. Then she looked at me, “Malcolm never cleared the message log.”
That sounded interesting, “Audio recordings?”
“No. However, there is a list of calls made and received. Ah! Here are some detailed text messages. Those are mainly received messages asking him to concentrate raids on various areas, followed by Malcolm’s responses to the affirmative. Some messages from Malcolm requesting ammunition and replies from elsewhere listing coordinates and times for dropoffs. The raid requests are every few weeks, and the ammunition requests are every two to three months. The last messages are requests from outside to respond; there are three of them.”
“So, how useful is this?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. The base hardware itself is nothing really special. It was in surplus stockpiles everywhere, and various countries were probably building knockoffs and even licensed versions. The echo is the same…now the C-mod is a lot rarer; military use only. Now, why would they bother with that? It’s not like people down here are performing SIGINT on the frequencies and data format that this uses…or could they? I’m a HUMINT …that’s direct Human Intelligence…and Intelligence Analysis specialist, talking to and lying to people and then figuring out the big picture. Not SIGINT or ELINT, Signals Intelligence and Electronic Intelligence…”
“Monitoring radio, telegraph, and telephones?”
“Exactly,” she looked at me. “Is New World tech up to that level?”
Now I had to think back, “This most definitely is not my field of expertise, but maybe? I seem to recall learning that most radio transmissions are between 200 kilohertz and about 300 megahertz. Does that device fall into that range?”
“Let me look that up…” she went back to her tablet, “30 to 88 megahertz. So that matches…only a forty-kilometer range, though?”
“So they’re close?”
She shook her head, “They could be using repeaters…those were those devices I had you deploy with Master Clark and on the way to Rice. One of the drones that we keep airborne is always in ‘repeater’ mode, too.”
I looked at her tablet and saw the nicely laid out schematic on it; then I noticed something in the device description, “Spread-spectrum time sliced?”
“What?”
Pointing at the words on the display, I said, “I think I’ve seen something like that in documentation on Old World technology. I don’t exactly remember what it means, but I don’t believe we currently use it, as it probably requires some of those microcomponents we can’t manufacture anymore. If it uses something like that, I don’t think any of our current technology could make any sense of what this radio uses, even without encoding.”
“So why put a C-mod on it? It’s clearly newer than the Dash 107, so it wasn’t original to the unit issue. Because they could?”
“Because there is someone else out there who might be able to interpret the signal?”
“And they know it and are worried about it,” Mara said finally. “So, not counting us, there are at least two groups with significant amounts of Old World tech, and like us, they are trying to stay unnoticed; unlike us, though, they’re a lot better at it as we are now a clear target. I’ve made some terrible mistakes…using Ceedo as the name is probably the worst.”
“Well, what about Clea’s idea to spread false information about how we got this technology? Shouldn’t that affect other groups as well?”
She looked thoughtful, “It should,” she said. Turning back to the device, she opened its access panel and removed a component from inside it. ”That’s the Echo module. We can take the Dash 107 to the surface now, and it won’t be trackable until it sends a transmission.”
“You have a plan?”
“I do; we’re going to need a Gut and an Assult drone for it. Also, we need to get one of the tunnelers up and running.”
“The machines that dug the bunker?”
“There are two of them, and they’re under that wall of dirt at the far end of the warehouse. They’re automated and would have been abandoned after they’d finished their jobs, but with some repairs and power, they should still work.”
“Why do we need one?”
“Do you think all the materials and supplies R-34 has were brought in from the top? This place was made from the bottom up. The last job those tunnelers had was to collapse the lower access, and we’re going to need to dig some new tunnels.”
“What if any of these other groups show up?”
“Then we do the best we can, but…they clearly like stealth and to stay in the shadows. They will come in quietly to see what they can see first.”
She closed up the transceiver and looked at me, “We need to get that tunneler…you need to get that tunneler in operation.”
“Me?” I was surprised.
“I am generally familiar with what they are and how they work, and I understand the universal things that any soldier would know about their forces’ equipment, and I can read a manual. But I’m not a combat engineer or a mechanic or any kind of tech, really. Most of the stuff you see me doing is pretty damn basic. You’re trained on how to understand technology and why it does what it does…and with all the work you’ve been doing here, you have at least as much familiarity as a recruit out of basic training on the general principles it works on, to be honest probably a lot more familiarity because you bother to pay attention to what you’re doing and what it means.”
She turned and headed out of her workshop, “Let’s take a look at your new project.”
Heading up the stairs that led directly from the workshops on SM to the warehouse, we headed to the far wall, which was solid dirt and compressed by time settling it down.