Chapter 34 #2
He stepped aside, then I opened the door partway, looked, and found the guards walking down an aisle, their backs to me.
I stepped through as quietly as I could and tiptoed to the nearest display of an automaton the size of a van in the History of Amplification Technology section.
Downstairs, I’d noticed that nothing was plugged into a power source, which meant it was all running off batteries, and all batteries ran off Powerworks juice.
I crawled under the automaton as it continued to move and found a battery pack of about ten pounds was magnetically attached to its belly.
Before I slid back out, I noticed footsteps, and I froze. The two guards walked by, then stopped a mere two feet from where I was.
“Hey, Big Bozo’s down,” one of them said.
“That old stuff always acts up. Leave it for the next shift to put in the log. We got enough drama to deal with tonight. Stupid protesters. Probably were high on gin-tin to think they could come in here with weapons.”
“They don’t get smarter.”
The other chuckled. “They sure do not.”
They continued walking again, and I waited for them to get out of sight before I shuffled out from under the machine and tiptoed back to the stairs. I moved to open the door, but it remained firmly shut. I pressed close to the frame and whispered, “Tommy, damn it, open up.”
The door opened a crack, and when Tommy saw that it was me, he let me through. As soon as I was in the stairwell, I pulled out my knife and started stripping the protective polymer lining on the battery pack.
“Um, what are you doing?” Talon asked.
“Softbiotics only buys AAB-grade battery acid,” I said.
“So?” Talon asked.
“Regular battery acid burns decent, but AAB is nasty stuff. Softbiotics likes it because it keeps its juice for twenty years. And trust me, this stuff burns .”
I cut through the lining to expose the five batteries inside.
I pulled out one at a time. The cap was sealed with more liner, and I cut very, very carefully.
With the cap off, I took the tube, eyed the wall, and then gently poured the tube down the wall, slowly from left to right.
It smoked and sizzled. Blisters formed that grew into new blisters that grew into new ones.
“Whoa,” Talon said.
“You’d better stand back,” I said. “You don’t want even a drop of this on your skin. Trust me.”
The most recent New Guy died from being hit with AB acid.
Horrible, nasty stuff, but nowhere near the strength of AAB.
One day a month, we ran AAB through the line.
I’d seen a New Guy get a drop on the skin between his thumb and forefinger once.
He’d been wearing double-gloves, but it’d eaten through that like the rubber was nothing.
By the time we got to the anti-acid kit, the acid had eaten away almost his entire hand.
He had a pinky left, but I didn’t think it worked much after that.
As the acid burned nearly halfway through the wall, I pulled out a second battery and did the same. Just as carefully, I poured it down the wall, and the reaction started all over again. Parts of the wall burned through enough that I could see the other stairs.
“No offense, but I don’t want to go near that,” Andra said.
“Don’t worry, once it’s exposed to air, it burns itself out soon enough,” I said. “But I still advise not to touch it.”
The hole grew not nearly as fast as I wanted, but I also didn’t want to cut open a third tube if I didn’t have to.
We were already pushing our luck. While I stood before the growing hole, I heard boots just outside the stairwell.
I cringed and turned to the others. While Tommy remained at the door, the rest of us ducked out of the way of the sizzling hole.
“What the—” a guard said from the opposite side and touched the gaping hole. Big mistake. He hissed and then started screaming. I’d heard that scream plenty of times at the plant; only here, there was no anti-acid emergency spray.
The screams—and shouting from another guard in the stairwell—brought the attention of the guards walking the museum because they tried to open the door. Tommy angled himself to hold it closed.
Talon muttered something and then stepped up to the hole, raised his blaster, and fired several shots. The screaming stopped along with the shouts. Talon turned back to us. “I think the cat’s officially out of the bag.”
He holstered his blaster, took a deep breath, and very carefully stepped through the hole. His overcoat brushed against the hole’s edge. It began to smoke, and I motioned, “Talon, your coat.”
He examined the hole, seemed to shiver, and then tugged off the jacket. “I paid too damn much for that to be ruined so soon.”
The guards outside were yelling and pounding on the door now.
I hurried over, pulled out my stun stick, and nodded to Tommy.
He let the door come open a few inches, and I slid the stick through, hitting one guard on the arm, but any connection would be enough to incapacitate for several minutes.
I couldn’t reach the other, so I ordered, “Open the door.”
Tommy obeyed, and I rushed through, chasing down the second guard who was unholstering his blaster as I shocked him. As soon as he was done, I grabbed his weapon and then the other guard’s blaster before returning to the stairwell.
Andra was climbing through, with Talon assisting her.
“Let’s go,” I said, handing one of the blasters to Tommy.
I went through the hole next. The wall still sizzled but it wasn’t as intense as before. In another ten minutes, the acid would be mostly neutralized.
Talon and Andra had each grabbed a blaster from the other two downed guards.
“They look like building security,” Talon said. “At least that means the enforcers aren’t here yet.”
We ran up a flight of stairs and out onto a level filled with desks. We hurried to the elevator and climbed inside. Andra tapped the button for the top floor.
“Please scan your authorization card,” a generic voice announced.
“Byte?” I asked.
Byte appeared next to the elevator’s control pad. I’m still trying to connect.
Andra started tapping buttons from the top down. Each time the voice announced, “Please scan your authorization card.”
Ten levels down, the elevator finally accepted the keypress. The door closed and the elevator began rising.
I haven’t been able to hack their security system. It’s not a code I’ve learned yet, and I’m still analyzing it. However, the camera system is the same they use at the data centers. I have frozen all camera feeds throughout the building.
“At least they don’t have eyes on us.” I glanced at the others. “We’ll have to hike up the final ten floors then.”
“Better than all eighty-eight floors,” Andra said.
We were to floor sixty-six when the elevator stopped and the door opened. Andra started pressing buttons, but the elevator announced. “This unit cannot proceed without level-one authorization. Please proceed to the nearest stairway to exit the building.”
“I think our friends are in the building,” Talon said.
We hurried to the nearest stairs, only to find the door locked. Talon fired at the door handle continuously until the blaster died. He dropped the weapon and then kicked the door in.
An elevator chimed, and I turned to see a third elevator—one that was concealed behind the wall—open twenty feet away. At least a dozen armored enforcers ran out, blasters in hand. I ran to the stairs. With no way to close the door, I yelled, “Run!” and started taking the stairs two at a time.
Within seconds, the enforcers entered the stairwell behind us. “Stop!” someone ordered.
We didn’t.
We kept running until a squad of enforcers entered the stairwell above us, penning us in.
“Stop!” one of them yelled.
Talon shot him, but it only knocked him back. Body armor.
With a door nearby, we lunged onto the next floor just as the enforcers opened fire. It was a floor identical to the other office floors—it could’ve been the same for all I knew. I turned and saw Andra slump to the floor, holding her side.
“No.” I ran to her.
“Go. Stop them.” She pulled out the data stick and then cried when she noticed it was half-melted from blaster fire. “We lost.”
I took the stick. “It’s not over.”
Tommy pressed himself against the door to hold back the imminent onslaught. “Go. I’ll hold them off,” he said in the lightest, softest voice I’d ever heard from a grown man. No wonder he tended to stay quiet.
“Hide under a desk,” Talon said, eying Andra. “You sneak out when they’re focused on us.”
Talon and I sprinted across the floor to the stairs at the far end and wished they weren’t filled with enforcers as well. As it turned out, it was a bad day for wishes.