Chapter 20 Losham
LOSHAM
"Try the plasma cutter again," Losham instructed.
The technician, a wiry human named Morven who'd arrived on Thursday's supply run, adjusted his protective goggles. "Same settings as before?"
Why was the guy asking him for technical advice? He was supposed to be the expert.
"Use your best professional guess," Losham said dryly.
Morven shook his head. "I'm not taking responsibility for this. I just do what you tell me to do."
What else was new? Losham was getting tired of having to micromanage every little thing.
"Increase the temperature by ten percent."
Perhaps that was the problem with totalitarian regimes.
People didn't feel safe to take chances and waited for approval before making the tiniest of steps.
That was why progress was painfully slow on the island and other places that were ruled with an iron fist, the reason they were lagging behind democratically run countries and operations.
Or maybe it was simply because people were less motivated to do their best when they couldn't enjoy the fruits of their efforts to their fullest extent.
The technician made the adjustment, positioned the cutting head against the glass wall, and pressed the trigger.
The plasma stream hit the glass with a hiss that made everyone step back.
The cutter maintained contact for thirty seconds, but when Morven pulled it away, the glass showed nothing more than a slight discoloration, a rainbow shimmer where the heat had stressed the surface.
"Shit." Morven lowered the cutter. "That was a high setting. Any hotter and we risk damaging the equipment."
Losham leaned closer to examine the mark. The glass wasn't even scored. Whatever had been used to construct this barrier was more than standard tempered glass. The surface had some kind of coating or treatment that dispersed heat faster than they could apply it.
"What about the laser?" he asked.
Gregor, who'd been monitoring readings on his tablet, shook his head. "We tried that. The beam just refracts. It's like trying to cut a mirror with light."
The corridor reeked of hot metal and ozone, and the whine of ventilation fans filled the silence that followed the latest attempt at this barrier. They'd been at it for days, and all they'd accomplished was to burn through a lot of expensive equipment.
"Lord Losham." Hakum appeared at the corridor entrance. "There's a situation requiring your attention."
Losham's jaw tightened. These 'situations' had been multiplying lately. Yesterday it had been a dispute between two senior commanders over new recruits to their units. This morning, a group of human workers had walked into a restricted area, supposedly by mistake.
His father hadn't needed to deal with such mundane nonsense day in and day out, had he? Others had done that for him.
The problem was that Losham was afraid to delegate in case others started to suspect that Navuh wasn't running things anymore.
"Can it wait?" he asked.
Hakum looked conflicted. "Commander Rashid has detained three construction workers who he claims were stealing supplies."
"Which supplies?"
"Medical equipment from the laboratory. Syringes, specifically. He suspects they needed them for their drug use."
Losham couldn't care less about some humans stealing syringes, and it wasn't something that required his attention, but letting it slide was not an option either. He had to deal with the idiots and use them to set an example so others wouldn't dare steal from the Brotherhood.
He glanced at the glass wall one more time. Whatever secrets lay beneath that sand would have to wait. "Gregor, continue with the diamond wire saw. Try cutting at the corners where the glass meets the frame."
"We'll need to fabricate special brackets to hold the wire at that angle," Gregor said. "It will take time."
"Then get started." Losham turned to follow Hakum out of the corridor.
The walk to the security office took them through the mansion's main level.
Servants scattered at their approach, their eyes downcast, and their postures conveying their subservience.
They feared him even though he had not given them a reason to be afraid.
If anything, he was much more polite and friendly toward the staff than his father had ever been.
But perhaps that was precisely why they feared him.
They didn't know what to expect.
Then again, Dave's presence made everyone uncomfortable, including Losham himself, so maybe that was the source of their fear. The enhanced soldiers who behaved like one entity created an undercurrent of paranoia that infected everyone.
"Has there been any progress made?" Hakum asked as they walked.
"The new equipment hasn't made a difference. The glass has some kind of treatment we haven't identified."
He didn't really expect his father's dim-witted assistant to offer any bright ideas on how to solve the enclosure's mystery, and he responded just to hear himself talk. Sometimes that alone helped him generate new ideas.
"Perhaps we are approaching it wrong." Hakum turned a corner, leading them down a hallway lined with surveillance monitors. "Sometimes the direct approach isn't the most effective."
Losham stopped walking. "If you have a suggestion, make it."
Hakum turned to face him, and for a moment, Losham saw something flicker across his features that was not his usual affable and slightly fearful expression.
"The glass appears to be designed to resist cutting, but every material has a resonance frequency.
If we can find the right frequency, we could shatter it without even touching it. "
That was surprisingly insightful and well informed for Hakum. "Have you been doing some research in your free time?"
Hakum smiled sheepishly. "Lord Navuh allows me access to the internet so I can research all kinds of things for him. There is so much information out there on every imaginable subject."
The mention of his father sent a spike of anger through Losham, even though Hakum hadn't done so intentionally. The assistant was under compulsion to believe that Navuh was in the harem, working from his apartment there and telling Losham what he wanted to be done.
Explaining the enclosure had been a bit of a stretch, something about codes getting lost, but with Dave's compulsion, no one seemed capable of questioning much.
Then again, perhaps Hakum was not as dumb as he appeared, and he suspected that something was off with that story despite the compulsion.
They reached the security office, where Commander Rashid waited with three human workers kneeling on the floor, hands zip-tied behind their backs. Rashid snapped to attention when Losham entered.
"Lord Losham. These three were caught leaving the laboratory building with stolen medical supplies."
Losham studied the prisoners. The men wore the gray coveralls of construction workers, and they kept their heads down.
"What's your name?" Losham asked the older man.
"Pashar, sir."
"Why were you stealing medical supplies?"
"We weren't stealing. I have diabetes, sir.
I ran out of syringes, and the clinic was closed.
One of the soldiers told us that we can get them at the lab.
There was no one there when we walked in this morning, and a box of syringes was right there on one of the worktables. We took a few. Just what we needed."
Losham looked at the other two. "All of you have disabilities?"
The men nodded, but he knew they were lying. A quick peek into their brains revealed the truth. They were drug users, and they'd hoped to find more than syringes in the lab.
Rashid could have done the same thing instead of bothering him.
"Search their barracks for drugs," Losham told Rashid. "If you find any, bring them back for further questioning. If not, give them twenty lashes each and send them back to work."
"Twenty lashes?" Rashid sounded disappointed. "Lord Navuh would have—"
"Lord Navuh put me in charge." The words came out sharper than Losham intended. "I'll handle discipline as I see fit."
"Yes, Lord Losham."
"Lord Navuh would have executed them," Hakum said as they left the room.
"That would have been wasteful. There is still a lot of work to be done on the island."
Losham returned to the enclosure to find Gregor setting up an elaborate framework of metal brackets around one corner of the glass wall. The diamond wire saw, which was as thin as a fishing line but capable of cutting through steel, was being threaded through the brackets with care.
"How long?" Losham asked.
"Another hour to finish the setup. Then we can start cutting." Gregor wiped sweat from his forehead. "But I should warn you, this wire is our last one. If it breaks, we'll have to wait for the next supply run."
"It won't break, and if it does, order ten times as much for the next shipment. I'm tired of having to wait." He got closer to the glass and placed his palm against the surface.
It was cool to the touch, despite the warm desert conditions maintained inside. He could see the sand, golden and undisturbed, hiding whatever secrets his father had buried.
Behind the glass, something seemed to shift in the sand. Just a slight depression, as if something beneath had settled. Losham leaned closer, trying to see if there was any pattern to the disturbance, but the sand remained still.
It had been an illusion, his mind playing tricks on him after staring at that sand for far too long.
"Sir?" Morven approached with a handheld scanner. "I've been running some tests on the glass while Gregor set up the saw. You might want to see this."
Losham took the scanner, frowning at the readout. The display showed a complex wavelength pattern, layers of different frequencies overlapping in a way that made no sense.
"What am I looking at?"
"The glass is vibrating," Morven said. "It's subtle, but it's constant.
Multiple frequencies running simultaneously.
" He adjusted the scanner settings. "It's brilliant, actually.
The vibration makes the glass essentially immune to traditional cutting methods.
Any force we apply gets distributed across the entire surface instantly.
I wonder who designed this system. It must be one of a kind because I've never heard of anything like it. "
Losham stared at the readout, Hakum's earlier words echoing in his mind.
Every material has a resonance frequency.
"Can we disrupt it?"
"I don't know. We'd need to identify all the component frequencies first, then generate a counter-vibration that would neutralize them without shattering the glass.
If we get it wrong, the stored energy in the glass could release all at once, and given the size of this wall, it would be like setting off a bomb. "
Which might trigger whatever fail-safes his father had built into the enclosure.
Losham handed back the scanner, his mind racing through possibilities.
Every approach they tried revealed new layers of protection, new obstacles, which only reinforced his suspicion that whatever was hidden under that sand was valuable beyond his wildest imagination.
As far as he knew, Navuh had never gone to such lengths to protect anything other than his harem.
Perhaps Hakum was right, and they needed to approach this from a different angle. Instead of trying to break through, they should try to find whoever had designed this ingenious vault. There couldn't be more than a handful of them in the world, if that.
"Continue with the wire saw," he told Gregor. "But reduce the cutting speed by half. If the glass is vibrating, we need to account for that."
"That will take even longer—"
"I don't care how long it takes. I want that enclosure opened without destroying whatever is inside."