“We get in, we get out, and if we do it right, it’ll be a full weekend before anyone knows we were there.” Orson stood at the head of the Hof’s cockpit data station, a table-mounted computer console that rose out of the floor. Every inch around the monitor and mobile terminal was filled with papers, mostly files delivered by the Tech Liberation Front, intermingled with printouts and maps and gathered notes in Orson’s untidy scrawl.
Franklin stood at the opposite end of the table with Dr. Stan. Enoa and Jaleel sat facing them, half-awake. Pops scowled from the main terminal screen.
“What do you think?” Orson asked.
“I hate it!” Pops spoke loud enough to make Jaleel jump in his seat. “Loathe it. Detest it. Orson, your plan is so bad it ruined my whole day, hell, my whole week.”
“Alright, Pops,” Franklin said. “It’s not that bad. I mean, it’s got to be better than most of the plans we used to make with the original crew.”
“Everything was better then,” Pops said. “And the Liberty Corps is a different flavor of problem. This plan relies on a noncombatant and two kids barely out of their teens.”
“That’s any plan we’d make up, Gramps.” Enoa yawned. “Even if you did the plan. Or do you want us to wait a few years, until we’re older and Dr. Stan goes through a boot camp?”
“You never like the important plans,” Franklin said. “At least not the one-shot-is-all-you-get type plans. You never have, not once in sixteen years.”
“Fine, fine!” Pops said. “Orson, I didn’t mean to ridicule your crazy plan, but I’m worried. We have Eloise and Alec in the hospital, Alec still in a medically-induced coma, their father out of commission. We have Liberty Corps robots everywhere, attacking Sirona in Pacific Alliance territory, other robots attacking all of you, right at the Alliance border. Now you’re in the middle of an evacuation. We’re in a room full of powder kegs, and here’s Orson dancing around with all his fire shit.”
“How is Eloise?” Orson asked. “How are they?” There’d been no time to call, no moment that wasn’t essential for fighting, for planning, for something. But he’d done nothing to help Eloise or Alec, more victims of the conflict with Helmont. He hadn’t reached out to their family. He’d done nothing.
“She’s awake, but she hasn’t started asking about any of this yet,” Pops said. “And that should tell you all you need to know. Alec is a tougher situation with the shrapnel placement. They’re both looking at significant physical therapy, and that’s if we’re optimistic. Robert Sr. needs a real rest. But we can talk about them more, later. Give me your plan one more time, Orson. More detail this round. We’ll hit every step and figure out all the ways your usual bad luck might screw you over.”
“Do we really have to?” Orson began sorting through the paper apocalypse scattered across the table. He made stacks for maps, classic Hierarchia data, modern surveillance, flight pattern information, weather modeling, assorted spreadsheets… “All we need is somebody to listen in on this call. I just wanted to keep you in the loop, Pops. I didn’t call to give you veto power.”
“Don’t get whiny with me,” Pops said. “Either you can trust the Shoshone setup with Helmont’s eye on them or you can’t. Unless McDandy is done with licking spoons, and we have to wrap up the call. No need to bring him into this.”
“Stop it with the nicknames,” Franklin groaned. “Royce is just as trustworthy as anyone else we have in the fold.”
“And that’s why we waited for him to go play cooking show with Ted before we started going over this?” Pops rolled his eyes.
“I trust him to keep any secret I have a mind to tell him,” Franklin said. “That doesn’t mean I want him stressing out.”
“We have finite time.” Dr. Stan interrupted without raising her voice. Her words cut through the argument and silenced it. “Whether or not we agree on this plan, our time to review this matter together is running out.”
The long, curved windshield was mostly tinted to limit the view of the cockpit from outside. Out there, four Shoshone reclamation teams busied themselves tossing deactivated Jims into the backs of cargo hovercraft and skimmers, plus one modified garbage truck. The world outside was turning red and purple. A day had passed at work, in planning, and pondering puzzles with no formal answer.
“Thanks, Doc,” Orson said. “Alright, I’ll take this thing from the top. Like I said before, uh, this is all based on a mix of the information we bought from the Tech Liberation Front and information we have about standard IHSA procedures from our other experience. The Liberation Front data includes their surveillance of old Hierarchia bases and how the Liberty Corps runs their operation.”
Orson drew a long accordioned spreadsheet from the stack, one page taped to another, taped to another... “Step one, we violate the Geneva Conventions.”
“Orson, don’t say it like that.” Enoa sighed.
“The Liberty Corps isn’t a country,” Dr. Stan said. “Neither are we. Stealing uniforms from what is essentially a paramilitary organization would not constitute a war crime.”
“Alright,” Orson said. “The Pinnacle Holdfast gets a pharmaceutical delivery the last Friday of the month. Derzelas Pharmaceuticals is the supplier. They’re independent of the Liberty Corps, but they had some security problems of their own – looks like the Tech Liberation Front helped some guy steal a pharmaceutical printer off of them. Derzelas have modified tractor trailers they drive to the mouth of the Liberty Corp’s Emperor Valley. That’s where they’re met by a fire team with troops from the High Elevation Readiness Corps, aka Summit Scouts…”
“Uh,” Jaleel interrupted. “I thought we agreed to call them ‘Hiker Scouts’. It’s a way better adventurey henchmen name.”
“Is now the time for your silly references?” Enoa punched him on the shoulder.
“Sorry,” Jaleel said.
“Whatever.” Orson sifted through the paper stack until he found his rough, hand-drawn map of the valley. “They’re lead by a Captain from the Inventory Corps. Once the Liberty Corps crew gets the pharmaceuticals, they take the trailers from the Derzelas trucks and drive them back through the valley, on skimmers, to the cable lifts, then up the mountain to the Pinnacle Holdfast. Now, this is where it gets fun and playful. Derzelas Pharmaceuticals isn’t gonna meet any Summit Scouts. They’re gonna meet us.
“We’ll have stolen the Liberty Corps armor and ID when the team leaves the pinnacle surveillance area. We’re going to be highwaymen.” Orson nodded to Dr. Stan and Enoa. “And highwaywomen. We’ll take their armor and gear AND the Inventory Captain’s Card Key. No one will know for over forty-eight hours. Both the Scouts and the Captain complete their rotations with this Pharmaceutical delivery. We know this because of multiple statements made to the Pharmaceutical teams. These were in the Tech Liberation Front’s records.”
“It could be lies,” Pops said. “It could be bullshit. Just because they cycle out, that doesn’t mean you can just swap in for them and not be found. What if one of these scouts is having an affair with a pharma rep, and they have some way to meet off the books? What if some of them are buddies, and the pharma people will know you aren’t who you say you are? The Tech Liberation Front wouldn’t know better. The Liberty Corps might not know better. But it could be enough to sound the alarm and screw over your plan and all of you.”
“The scouts cycle between multiple teams,” Orson said. “It won’t be weird to bring in new people. Only the Inventory Captain is the same, and he’s the one who keeps commenting on the Liberation Front recordings, uh, about it being the end of his week. If they ask me where the regular guy is, I’ll just say he finally got some leave. He doesn’t have regular I.D. anyway. It’s this rank badge he wears, so nobody will say, ‘oh no, you aren’t John Smith!’”
“But what happens if the pharma reps know the number of rotating teams?” Pops said. “Again, what if one of the pharma crew is the girlfriend of the regular Inventory Captain and knows for a fact that he is not on leave because she saw him the night before?”
“There’s no way we’d ever be able to figure it out to that level,” Orson said. “Unless we spend the next year watching them and finding ways to pick up information. But we don’t have that long. Helmont is making his move soon. That one officer at the Crystal Dune Lab told me they were working on a way to get to the Dreamside Road without the keys – whatever that the hell that means. And Helmont knows we got information about old IHSA bases. He thinks I want to stay away from him, but he’ll eventually get wise. He’ll change up his security, and he’ll change the way his operation’s done things for decades, just to keep that information safe. Our one shot at this is during the pharma drop-off in thirteen days.”
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“I thought we were going the end of May!” Jaleel jumped to his feet. “I don’t have time to learn that entire sorting-system manual in thirteen days! Do you think I’m a robot too?” He began to pace, looping from the copilot’s seat back toward the door, until Enoa grabbed him by the sleeve.
“You really believe Helmont can change his computer system in a month and a half?” Enoa asked. “It doesn’t even sound possible. When Aunt Su and I made a digital inventory it took us almost a month, and we never had more than a few hundred items for sale.”
“I do think so,” Orson said. “This is what Helmont does. This is why he got to the Crystal Dune Lab and why he tracked us here. He goes the extra mile all the time. He has blind spots, for now, and we need to use them or we need to go back to the drawing board and think of some other way to find this island.”
“If I just had Aunt Su’s letter…” Enoa rubbed her eyes with the palms of both hands. “We would be there already.”
“I want to do this,” Dr. Stan said. “After what he did to my colleagues and what he attempted here, this is justice. We will take more than his information about this Knightschurch. We will take every shred of information he has about the Dreamside Road, everything he holds dear. We will live in his mind for the rest of his days.”
“That’s kicking the hornet’s nest,” Pops said. “He will hunt you forever, when he finds out.”
“Be real, Pops,” Orson said. “You’ve been doing this for like forty years. Do you really think we get any resolution to this that doesn’t involve Helmont permanently beaten or dead? Really?”
Pops shrugged. Both Enoa and Jaleel sat back down. Franklin motioned to Orson.
“Next?” he said.
“Step two.” Orson nodded. “The real countdown begins.” He shifted pages and arrived at a diagram of a cable car system. “Next, we winch the trailers to the lifts and ride up to the Pinnacle. They use the standard automated inventory system. Once we get the trailers attached, that does most of the work. It’ll separate their goods, but that’ll depend on what they’re getting. We don’t have a full list of what they receive – it could be the same every time, but we do know it includes painkillers and the Delsalt or Neurzodone or whatever they’re calling it. They even get some toiletries that way. We also have an average time – sixty-three minutes.”
“During that sixty-three minutes,” Orson continued. “Enoa and Jaleel will keep the system running smoothly. Jaleel has the old Hierarchia manual. We already had it on the Aesir’s computer.”
“And I can’t learn it in thirteen days!” Jaleel interrupted. “They’re so wordy. It’s almost six hundred pages. And if something goes wrong and I can’t fix it…”
“You’ll do what you can,” Orson said. “When those sixty-three minutes are over, we’re riding that lift back down no matter what. It’s the Inventory Captain who says the delivery is done. The system doesn’t know it. It only cares about where to sort which barcode.”
“But you’re the captain,” Pops said. “If you, the Inventory Captain, leave the delivery to go into the main computer and something goes wrong, you’re all screwed. You don’t need a perfect storm to screw this up, just one error and one nosy Liberty Corps officer.”
“That’s why I’m staying with Jaleel,” Enoa said. “If they don’t send a Master Shaper to us, Jaleel and I will be just fine with one nosy officer.”
“Step three,” Orson continued before he could be interrupted again. “The floppy disk loophole. You’re right, Pops, I will be the Inventory Captain. And I’ll be using his Card Key to get us to the Pinnacle’s Central Computer Terminal.”
“And what happens when using that card gets you noticed?” Pops asked. “Won’t somebody wonder why the Captain running the drop-off is at the computer instead?”
“Maybe,” Orson said. “But the Inventory Captain does need to confirm the drop-off was successful with the computer anyway, comparing his list to the automated list from the barcodes. And I couldn’t find anything in the old Hierarchia procedures guides we have that says the captain would have to stay with the Hiker Scouts…”
“Yes!” Jaleel raised his right fist. “He used the name! I inceptioned his words.”
“Actually,” Orson said. “The manual for the automatic sorting even says no one needs to be there once the system begins. I don’t see anything weird about the Inventory Captain wanting to get done. Then he can go to the nearest village for some brewskies or maybe he has a friend in the pharma team. It doesn’t matter. What matters is, my character might not be breaking the rules at all, and if he is, he’s breaking the rules to be lazy, and there’s nothing suspicious about that.”
“Unless some higher-up decides to reprimand you,” Pops said.
“That’s why we will be borrowing one of the inventory trolleys,” Dr. Stan answered. “I believe Captain Gregory has quite a few devices that render their targets unconscious or… otherwise disabled.”
“I do,” Orson said. “The whole arsenal’s coming with me. I’ll be guarding Dr. Stan while she does the heavy lifting here. We don’t know what specific language that computer uses for these files, but she knows all the big ones anyway.”
“I’m familiar with FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, and ALGOL,” Dr. Stan said. “And some derivatives. Most IHSA systems remain in those languages on their original mainframes, with images stored separately. Any interface capability was equipped in the intervening decades.”
“Exactly,” Orson said. “What’s best, because of that, the Liberty Corps won’t know we took anything. Their, uh, interfaces usually record what was taken, whether with memory disks or drives or anything, but not with ye old floppy disks. That’s how we get them. We’re going way back to the nineties. They can’t store much, and I’ll be spending my next week figuring out where we can secretly get lots of those floppies. But with those, Helmont won’t know what we took. The old mainframe is totally blind to what gets downloaded onto floppies. Helmont will have no specifics about what we did, even after he learns somebody replaced his team.”
“I used to know a couple people who could get the disks in bulk,” Franklin said. “But they’re not cheap and they’re not too close to here. Nearest is not far from the old border, in Tijuana. I don’t think you’re looking for a detour down to TJ.”
“Thanks, Franklin,” Orson said. “I think we’re all set. With any luck, I have a local contact who specializes in communications and can still hook us up.”
“Not Hanna-Barbera!” Pops said. “You can’t trust that cartoon freak.”
“I don’t have to trust him,” Orson answered. “Cathy would be paying a visit to the real Roger if the cartoon one sells us out. Unless the Liberty Corps can relocate him on a different planet, he’s not betraying his contract.”
“Once I have access to their mainframe,” Dr. Stan said. “I will retrieve all data I can locate about Knightschurch Island. I’ll seek their oceanographic telemetry, any reference to that name…”
“And that’s another thing!” Pops interrupted. “Helmont knows the name of this place! You didn’t know that before, did you? Enoa’s aunt didn’t mention that. But Helmont knows it. Who says he hasn’t already been to the place and pillaged it?”
“If he has,” Orson said. “Why would he care if we got there? He might know about it. He might even know where it is, but I don’t think he’s been there.”
“Once I have both the information about the Knightschurch name and the relevant telemetry,” Dr. Stan began again. “Only then will I spread out to any other topic I can find on the Dreamside Road. From the moment the first pharmaceutical trailer connects, we will have fifty-three minutes to reach the terminal and execute the downloads. Travel should take no more than ten minutes, each way.”
“What if they closed the loophole,” Pops said. “What if the floppies do record what’s downloaded or, even more likely, you can’t use floppies anymore?”
“Then we get the location to Knightschurch and move right to step four,” Orson said. “Haul ass. We take what we can, pack the floppies and get back to the lift. Once the drop-off is done, we ride the cable car back to the bottom of the valley and drive out like nothing ever happened. If we’re lucky, it won’t be until Sunday night that the Liberty Corps realizes they have a missing team. By then, it’s too late, and by then we’re long gone.”
“If things go really wrong,” Orson continued. “The Aesir will be powered down at the mouth of the valley, and for the first time in years, I’ll have the beacon set up that we can call the ship if we have to make a getaway.”
Franklin began to hum a slow tune, a rough version of a melody Orson also had not heard in years.
“Don’t start,” Orson said.
“Is it still the password?” Franklin asked, laughing.
“I haven’t changed it.”
“Is what still the password?” Jaleel asked. “What are we talking about?”
“I know that face,” Enoa said. “That’s the expression he makes when someone mentions Sirona and he isn’t expecting it.”
“I’ll explain later,” Orson said. “But you should hope you never have to know. The Aesir will be set up with all of our information about the roof defenses, and we’ll have the full map of secondary exits. There’s a lot of terrain along the mountain where we can escape, and their cannons aren’t designed to shoot at their own mountainside. If we can’t get out, but the Aesir can get in, we can escape.”
“How would the Aesir get in with all those cannons?” Pops asked.
“Again, I’m bringing my whole arsenal,” Orson said. “Lantern included.”
“Lantern.” Jaleel nodded. “You were right, Enoa. This is about fire girlfriend.”
“Told you,” she said.
“It’s not perfect, Pops,” Orson said. “But I think this is as good as it gets. I think this is how we get our foot in the door. Even if we get nothing but the location of that island, we’ll meet the knight Enoa’s aunt wanted her to study with. Once we know one person who has a key, we’ll have leads to more. But we’ll never get that start if we spend forever running from the Liberty Corps. I’ve never had a perfect opportunity or a perfect plan, but if I waited for something perfect, I’d still be doing mediocre work on clunker, junkyard-grade cars for Clark, with almost no money and almost no skills. I know a shot when I see one. This is it.”
Pops took a deep breath, his attention away from the video camera. He drummed his fingers against something out of the monitor’s view, his teeth clenched as if fighting to remain silent.
“Good luck,” he finally said. “I’ll be waiting for my postcard.”
* * *
Kol woke up to his cell door opening, to two guards guiding a long black case into the room. They worked as if his cell were an empty closet, a storage space. They did not look at him.
When they were done and gone, Kol found a helmeted officer standing in the open doorway.
“You’re starting early today,” the officer said. “Open the case and put it on.” The cell door closed.
Kol didn’t try to stop it. He hadn’t stopped the door the night before. His exhaustion had been too complete, too numbing – thought-devouring. He’d slept. Even now, the shadow of that exhaustion clung to him. He felt no anger, no fear, no hope.
Kol found clasps on the shining case and snapped them open. Inside, waited his own officer’s armor, the white plasteel from the captaincy that he’d won and he’d lost. It was still wrapped in Duncan’s tattered poncho that he’d borrowed during his run through the desert.
The armor’s gauntlets were still stained with Duncan’s blood. The marks had browned and faded and smeared across the white of the armor, but Kol imagined his friend’s grip before they’d been pulled apart.
The sight of the blood awakened enough of him to fear for Duncan, for Max, fear Helmont’s eventual judgment, and fear for the fight ahead.
So, he really would be fighting the other Shapers. And he’d be wearing his old armor, still dirty with blood and dirt and his own betrayal.
Kol lifted the gauntlets and slid his thumbs along the metal. Then he put them on.