25 - Sam #2
Sam looked at the synthetic feathers on the hummingbird on his shoulder. He picked up the drone with closed wings and swiveled its chest feathers in a circle inside the mouth of the water bottle.
“As soon as I do this, they’re going to know we’re coming,” Sam told Nico. “Noble One or Keahilani—put one out and we’ll negotiate with the other.”
Nico gave a single nod, his swarms ready above him.
Sam smeared the hummingbird’s chest on the sensor button, and the elevator doors slid open.
It looked like the interior of a regular elevator car, its rear set of doors closed.
Maybe Sam was wrong about this? It just looked like a regular elevator.
There was a security camera in the corner, but it wouldn’t see anything but a blur of colors because of Ari’s bracelets.
Maybe that was the problem. Maybe Keahilani and Noble One’s bad guys needed to see whoever it was to verify it was a legit villain entry, and then they opened the back doors.
Sam and Nico were definitely not a legit villain entry…
“Maybe we can do something to force the back doors open?” Nico started to walk in, but Sam grabbed his arm to stop him.
“Wait.”
Sam didn’t trust it. He tossed the hummingbird drone lightly so it would land on the elevator car floor. It went straight through, falling down a real elevator shaft.
“Fuck! It was a booby-trap,” Nico said as Sam activated the hummingbird drone and flew it back up to them. Again, the drone went right through what looked like a solid elevator car floor.
“It’s some sort of hologram,” Sam guessed.
He thought it through. There had to be a real elevator car that was there for authorized people to use like a bridge. And that real car would let the rear elevator shaft doors know they could open safely.
There was nothing like an oven rack around.
“How are we going to get across and open that?” Sam wondered.
“Something’s projecting this.” Nico used his controller to merge his bees into a tight circle by the far elevator wall.
Light hit the dense swarm all around. Nico spread out the circle, opening space in the middle.
The bees blocked the hologram, and they could see the real elevator shaft door now.
Nico worked the bees lower, creating a hollow barrier to see what was real on the floor level on the opposite side of the shaft.
“That’s a ledge for the doors to slide on,” Nico said. “I can jump to that.”
Nico
1149
Time toImpact: 10min33sec
Nico ran back to the fire hose cabinet they’d seen in the hallway.
He twisted the handle to get the thing open and hand-over-hand loosened the accordioned hose to free it.
He tested the attachment to the standpipe with a hard tug.
Looped an extra knot of hose around the red handle that would open the water valve, just in case it needed to hold both him and Sam.
Back at the elevator shaft, Nico circled the hose around Sam’s chest. “I’ll go first,” Nico told him, then looped it around his own chest, under the hive backpack. “Like mountain climbers,” he told Sam. “If one of us falls, the other can save him.”
“Don’t you dare fall,” Sam said as Nico programmed the two bee swarms that were holding back the hologram, prepping them to shield him and be ready to attack in case Noble One or Keahilani were right there when he opened the elevator shaft doors.
“I got this.” Nico gave Sam a quick kiss.
Sam got down on the floor, bracing his feet against the wall so he could hold Nico’s weight if he had to.
That ledge was pretty narrow, but Nico had made precision jumps before.
Nico leaped—
The metal track bit into the ball of his right foot through his boot as his body slammed into the steel door. A BOOM echoed up and down the shaft.
So much for their element of surprise.
He had to move fast. Nico’s back muscles screamed at him as he pried the doors open, but at one inch apart the door restrictor clicked into place.
Shit!
“There’s a thin metal pole above the clutch,” Sam said. “Try lifting it.”
Keeping his balance, Nico did. It unlatched.
Damn, Sam was so good at figuring out the logic of things, even mechanical ones.
Nico pushed the elevator shaft doors all the way open. Red emergency lights flashed inside.
BAMP—PHSSST! BAMP—PHSSST! Someone was shooting at them.
Same darts? Nico wondered as he dove in, bees swirling in a shield in front of him. He pulled the hose taut and turned back. “Now, Sam!” Nico called.
Sam took a running start and leaped—Nico could see the math of it—he was too low! Nico pulled on the hose as fast as he could. Sam’s chest hit the elevator shaft right at floor level, and his fingers scrabbled for a hold on the polished concrete floor.
Nico grabbed the fire hose at Sam’s back and hoisted him over the edge, to safety.
BAMP—KI-CICK
A dart got through the bee drones and bounced off the hard case of Nico’s hive backpack.
He jumped on top of Sam to protect him.
Sam motioned to the alcove on their left. “That way!”
“Now!” Nico cried and, holding each other, they rolled out of range and into the alcove.
“What are they shooting at us, Byron?” Nico shouted.
“Working on it,” Byron said in their ears.
“Bees.” Sam got Nico to focus as he unwound the fire hose from Nico and then loosened it enough from around his own chest to step out.
With the controller, Nico directed the swarm into the vast interior space.
It was a control center, three giant curving counters with ten workstations each stepping down to a wall of monitors showing maps and TV broadcasts with scenes of chaos from around the world. One monitor showed a countdown:
T IME TO I MPACT : 07 MIN 29 SEC
The workstations were all empty. They could see a stream of people running south to some emergency exit.
Sam raced the hummingbird drone ahead of them, scanning their faces.
“Donuts,” he said, like it was someone’s code name.
The woman on screen that Sam recognized seemed frightened, which Nico didn’t expect.
Then again, he and Sam had just crashed the bad guys’ lair.
“It’s just henchmen,” Sam told Nico as the hummingbird got to the front of the line.
“We can mop them up later,” Nico said. Like the guards at the Institute, he knew stopping them wouldn’t stop all this. “We need to find Noble One and Keahilani.”
Nico flashed on the memory of when he’d been powerless in the intake chair, tied down with Dr. H. lording it over him, and how that sparked the idea for these bee drones, full of tranquilizer. Byron had made his idea a reality, and Nico was going to take back some control in his life. Right now.
At the front right of the control center, two people ran into a steel-framed glass panic room and locked the door behind them. It was empty, except for a fringed red-and-tan Persian rug on the cement floor—and Noble One and Keahilani.
They’d found them.
Sam
1154
Time toImpact: 05min23sec
Besides Keahilani and Noble One, who’d just boxed themselves in—literally—the control center was clear.
Sam landed the hummingbird on top of one of the monitors on the wall so it could record video and sound. The other monitors displayed scenes of people freaking out all around the world, but that monitor showed a countdown clock:
T IME TO I MPACT : 05 MIN 21 SEC
Nico by his side, Sam walked down the rows of empty workstations to confront the villains. Maybe they could get a confession that would be proof enough to calm the world down.
Noble One smirked from behind the glass. “Can’t get us now.”
Keahilani held up her tablet. “We control it all from in here.”
Sam thought about how that wasn’t a good long-term plan.
They’d eventually need to eat. Go to the bathroom.
But this wasn’t a siege. If Keahilani and Noble One pulled off something truly heinous as the aliens at Impact Hour and Sam and the others couldn’t get proof, if they couldn’t stop them, maybe it wouldn’t even matter that he and Nico were there.
The world was on the edge, and these bad guys just had to give it one more push…
Sam leaned close to Nico’s ear and whispered. “They’re breathing, so there have to be air vents…”
Nico circled the queen bee drone around the glass room’s roof to find the venting. There!
On the controller, they could see a duct of thin metal maybe three inches wide attached to the top of the glass box.
Nico hopped onto the nearest workstation counter and with a running start leaped onto the glass-and-steel roof of the panic room.
Sam marveled at how kickass Nico was. The stunt was so Bond.
Nico crossed the glass roof and with his work boot slammed against the thin metal. PAM PAM PAM —he’d made a tear in the duct. Big enough.
Nico streamed his bee drones into the air vent and massed them inside the glass room above Noble One and Keahilani, just below the sprinkler heads. Noble One grabbed the tablet from Keahilani and swung it wildly at the swarm, knocking out a handful of bees.
Nico had lots still left.
He slid off the glass roof and stood by Sam. Nico set up drone group A with Noble One as the target, finger poised above the A TTACK button.
“She is allergic!” Noble One pushed Keahilani behind him, giving her back the tablet so he could use his whole body to protect her.
It was a pretty noble moment, Sam had to admit. The guy did love her.
Nico pressed A TTACK .
Keahilani’s fingers flew across her tablet as half of the bee swarm lunged at Noble One.
Suddenly the sprinklers in the ceiling above the control room and inside the glass box opened up, spraying everything—Sam, Nico, and on the other side of the glass, Noble One and Keahilani. But it took the bees down too—the whole swarm of them. Drone wings too heavy with water to fly.
They’d lost their leverage.
And were soaking wet, like they were standing in a shower.
Electronics shorted out around them. A third of the monitors on the wall went dark.
“You still seeing this?” Sam asked quietly.