Drift pattern, p.32
Drift Pattern, page 32
“What is it?” Luci asks as Cavazos clumsily slides halfway down the side of the white longchair.
He points behind her, but his hand is trembling so violently, it’s impossible to determine what he’s pointing at. “Yell . . . yell—”
“Yell what?” she asks, rushing over to help him up from his slouch on the floor. “The volume is all the same in here. Shouting won’t—”
“Yellow,” he says, shoving her away. “It’s not red.”
“What’s not—” And then she sees it. Each of the four walls has a yellow neon outline of a dematerialized doorway, including the one that had been red seconds before—the chamber that Roderick was confined in.
~ Four ~
“Could it be a malfunction?” Luci asks, stumbling backward from the sealed doorway. “Maybe he’s still in there?”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Cavazos says, beginning to hyperventilate as he struggles to return to his feet. “Did you hear him? He said he’s . . . been fantasizing . . . about ways he can kill me.” His eyes open wide with fear.
Luci replays their entire visit in her mind. She’s rattled, but her curiosity forces a wary step toward the neon yellow outline. “He said something about my cat Newt hiding in plain sight.” Her thoughts race in contrast to her slow advance. “Maybe it’s a trick. Maybe he’s still in there like how the cat hadn’t really left the backyard. Maybe that’s what he meant by all of that.”
“Let’s go before he comes back with L’inversione!”
“I . . . I have to see.” Her heart skips a beat as she rallies the courage to enter door code 52089. She presses the orange button, and the space in the wall instantly reverts to the opening again.
The chamber is empty, and Luci fights to keep her weakened knees from buckling.
“Come on,” Cavazos pleads, wrangling a leg over the edge of the longchair until he’s standing inside the pod. “We’re not safe here. He knows exactly where we are.”
Luci swallows the lump in her throat, trying to convince her mind of what’s before her. She takes a timid step into the chamber. A second later, she’s compelled to pivot and rush to join Cavazos at the longchair.
As she runs to him, his expression of terror unnerves her even more. He gestures frantically with his hands. “We’ll figure out how he did it later. Hurry up.” And then he says a word that she thought was absent from his vocabulary. “Please.”
By the time she hurdles the side of the longchair, Cavazos is already seated with his back to her. Only the top of his head is visible. “Orange button . . . press the orange button . . . and let’s get away from this place . . . before it’s too late.”
She slams down into her seat, hand trembling as she enters the launch sequence that brought them here. The covering slides into place, and they’re away.
Luci welcomes the darkness, because it represents safety, at least for the moment. She runs through all of Malom’s statements, doing her best to sift the lies from the truth. The entire experience was a tangled ball of confusion, and Roderick didn’t even flinch at the sight of her, not what one would expect when confronting their future murderer. Even worse than that, Cavazos’s childish behavior demonstrated beyond any doubt to her that he’s clearly inept for the challenge they’re facing. In fact, in a perverse way, it was his presence in the chamber rather than Malom Roderick’s that was unsettling at the end. Could anything this murderer said be true?
Still attempting to resolve his escape, Luci asks in an uncertain voice, “Could L’inversione have skipped a longchair in Malom’s chamber after the door was sealed? I know it’d be tight, but I think one could probably fit in there.”
Weightlessness returns to the longchair compartment, and with it, the auditory anomaly is gone. Their voices sound normal again.
“Impossible,” he grumbles, his breathing finally beginning to settle down. “We’d be dead. The whole reason for the foyer is to have a safe area to rest the longchairs. If you put a longchair into the actual chamber . . .”
Luci prompts him when he hesitates, “What? What happens?”
He scoffs. “You obviously don’t know anything about variable SD phase values and receding gain loops.”
“Receding gain loops?” she asks, her mind running through the concept. “So it would cause some kind of temporal feedback cycle and that would keep repeating until—”
“Until the chamber imploded in on itself,” Cavazos finishes snidely. “You can’t have longchair chronal displacement in the same place where time doesn’t exist.”
She thinks on this. “One can’t divide by zero, and Carcerium is an anomaly—technically zero on a linear timeline.”
“Exactly, dearie. It would destroy the entire area,” Cavazos declares. “So, again, no, you can’t put a time-travel device in a Carcerium chamber when the room is engaged if you want to make it out alive.” He adds, “Someone had to know the NBSI destination code, someone on the outside to break him free.”
There’s a brief silence as she runs through the permutations of nine-digit plus one alpha character combinations. There are 141,167,095,653,376 possibilities, so it’s not feasible that someone could have guessed this even with a computer. Luci doesn’t relay the figure to him, but she asks, “Does the chancellor know the code?”
“Of course he does, but are you implying that he had something to do with this?” Before she can answer, he dismisses the notion. “You should give us a little more credit. He wouldn’t share something as important as the NBSI with anyone.”
“Not even with Royse Timmons?”
He scoffs. “He doesn’t tell that tug of a guard anything important.”
Recalling her conversation with Royse about Macer’s odd seizures, she’s convinced that this is likely true.
“He had to have help,” Cavazos says. “It’s the only explanation. It’s common knowledge that he was one of the few that had been banished here.”
“Where are the other prisoners then? All of the chamber door markings were yellow.”
“The other two went insane in short order and were brought back to display on a splash forum. I had it broadcast as a deterrent to potential offenders before dispatching them to the cognitive realignment station for cybo conversion.”
“That’s ghastly.”
He ignores the rebuke. “Don’t tell Chancellor Macer about any of this.”
She turns her head, though nothing is visible in the black void they’re hurtling through. “What? Are you crazy? Malom has already killed me once, and he’s got bloodlust to off you too. This isn’t like your New Australia thing. This is for real. Macer has to know.” She catches herself, recognizing that there’s an opportunity here. She speaks slow and deliberately. “I’ll make you a deal.”
Finally, Cavazos asks, “Deal? What kind of a deal?”
She swallows. Sure, it’s extortion, but with everything that’s been done to her, she doesn’t mind cashing in on Cavazos’s screw up. She didn’t want to come in the first place, and with this major blunder hanging over his head, using it to even the scales feels justified to her. “Back at the Spike, you tried to threaten me with hurting Ish after I return to my time interval.” Saying it aloud gives the words traction. Yeah, blackmailing this creep doesn’t bother her in the least.
She waits for him to respond, but there’s no answer. After an awkward pause, she continues, “If you’ll promise me that you won’t do anything to him after I’m gone, I’ll not tell Macer or Royse about us going to Carcerium and Malom’s escape.” She adds, “Or we could say that you took me there, but the chamber was empty when we arrived. Either way is fine with me, whatever you decide, but you’ve got to promise me that nothing bad happens to Ish after I’m gone.”
Again, there’s no answer.
“Do you promise or not?” For the first time ever, she wishes that she could witness his facial expression. “Answer me. Do we have a deal or not?”
His voice is emotionless. “I can do that.”
Though it’s what she wants to hear, the answer doesn’t bring the relief she thought it would. She prods, hoping to ease the queasiness in her gut, “Say it then—we have a deal.”
“Nothing will happen to Mr. Moyta after you return to your interval.”
This statement feels hollow as well. She considers if a promise from a man who’s lied to millions about New Australia can hold any weight, but she’s got to play the hand she’s dealt. If only there was a way for Ish to return to her time interval with her when all of this was done, then she’d know he’d be safe. As if to lock in the flimsy agreement between them, she says, “Then I won’t tell the chancellor about what happened.”
She still doesn’t trust him, but to push it may only provoke the man to do something against Ish simply out of spite. In the tense silence, her mind drifts to him. She pictures Ish with his sip wand sitting on the sofa scribbling down future skip point calculations for her to review. The daydream is shattered as she realizes that he’s completely unaware that Gicul’s second-in-command is loose and that he may be a target too.
Her body stiffens, and she’s about to call out to ask Cavazos if a cybo stayed behind to guard the guesthouse when she remembers something. Only she, Cavazos, and Ish know about the visit to Carcerium. Her blood runs cold at the idea that Ish may have been captured and even tortured by Gicul’s crew to learn this from him. Is that how they got the Carcerium access code? The analytical portion of her brain quickly reconciles that even if someone apprehended and interrogated Ish, they wouldn’t be able to extract a code that he doesn’t know from him. It makes no sense, but the impossible has happened somehow.
Another horrifying thought invades her mind that is even more distressing. What if Ish is somehow connected to L’inversione? She just as quickly dismisses the notion; if Ish had been sent to assassinate her, he could have done so before she ever woke up from her Jardon blackout. She convinces herself of how ludicrous she’s being by recalling the hurt look in his eyes when he learned that she’d kept the first note a secret from him and how he held her before Cavazos interrupted them. That moment was authentic, she’s certain of it.
She daydreams about the completion of the project, picturing Ish receiving formal accolades from Macer. This time, the chancellor will know his name, unlike before when he was rewarded for his work at the Grange. What did he tell her about it on the first day they met? She still had so much Jardon floating around in her system, it’s a wonder she can recall anything at all from that day. He mentioned something about the canal at the Grange. She strokes her forehead, struggling to recall his words.
It takes a minute, but finally, the memory of it slowly comes into focus. Ish told her how he figured out how to enlarge the aperture of the vortex time portal that the huge plasti-crate containers of food were sent through. She mouths the phrase he’d spoken: “intake vortex in the chronal canal.” After her exposure to DPM, she understands why figuring out how to expand a chronal point is a significant achievement. Her thoughts drift to math, as is her tendency, as she contemplates how amazing it is that the skip point vortex can be manipulated at all.
An epiphany ignites her mind like the light of a thousand suns, and she leans forward in her seat as if a bolt of lightning shot through her. “Oh, sweet God in Heaven!”
“What’s wrong up there?” Cavazos demands.
“Uh, nothing. I just . . . I bit my tongue is all.”
Satisfied with her lie, Cavazos scoffs.
She forces herself to remain quiet, but inside, she’s exploding with excitement. Never once had they considered that the skip points may still be there but only reduced in size . . . not until forty-five seconds ago.
Her concentration races over the ramifications of this possibility as bright fuchsia and aqua blue-green rippling rings of light envelop the longchair. Gravity returns, making her feel heavy again, and waves of static electricity gently wash over her skin. They’ve returned to Relicus City, but she’s still tackling the concept of shrinking skip point junctures when a pressurized, muffled pop sounds on the outside.
She remains in the longchair as the covering slides open, wondering why they didn’t think of this before. Everyone just assumed that Gicul had been obliterating the openings to other time intervals. But what motive would Cyphor have for doing such a thing? She needs more time to write out the formulas, to view them before her eyes.
Obviously, believing her hesitation in exiting the longchair seat to be a result of fear, Cavazos reaches down to her from the platform above. “Come on,” he says with a furrowed brow. “Roderick’s not in here. We’re safe.”
The statement brings her back. “Yeah, okay,” she says, waving off the arm extending into the cockpit to her. Allowing Cavazos to touch her, even like this, is something she wants to avoid. She stands and gives a quick scan of the area. It’s a relief that everything is just as they left it, including the cybo guards. Cavazos is already heading down the platform stairs. It’s good to know that he can move quickly when their lives are on the line.
They hurry back through the labyrinth of restricted-access hallways and narrow corridors, Cavazos wheezing and huffing along the way. There’s a brief pause in a long hallway before they make it to the bank of elevators. Luci believes they’ve halted for him to catch his breath until a side door opens and another three cybos join the original two. Quickly after, the seven-member party enters the enormous service elevator, but this time, the cybos stand front and center with five churkas aimed at the door as it slides closed.
“Where are we going?” Luci asks, panting.
Cavazos pauses before he replies through labored breaths, “I’ve got to return you to the guesthouse before the chancellor knows you’re missing, then I’ll head to my fortified office.”
“The guesthouse? It’s safe from attack, right?”
“It’s safe,” he answers, seemingly annoyed by her questioning. “It’s why we put you there. The chancellor’s home is right across the way from it, and both are in a remote, highly secured area on the edge of the city that’s difficult to get to.”
Luci briefly considers mentioning the notes that the intruders have been leaving and how she nearly came face-to-face with one of them during the early hours this morning. Before she can alert him to this, the elevator doors slide open and the group returns to scampering through hidden corridors and passageways of the Spike building.
When they reach the dock, the cybos immediately fall into a defensive formation with two in the front of Cavazos and Luci, one each flanked on the left and right, and one following up the rear. The cluster is so tight that Luci’s field of vision is restricted to Cavazos’s massive backside and the cybos on either side of her. The group moves quickly around massive support column beams and dripping pipes of the Spike building. They reach Cavazos’s boat, the lone cybo standing at attention just as they’d left her. The docking mechanism releases its hold on the boat with a clang that echoes throughout the vast underside of the building structure. The boat rocks slightly under the extra weight of the cybo guards as they board the vessel. They return to the formation outside the cabin, one behind, two in front, and one on each side.
Cavazos presses his Viatorio from a sitting position while Luci remains standing. “Do those things ever fall overboard? That railing is only waist high, and it’s pretty narrow out there where they stand at attention.”
“Lower center of gravity,” Cavazos explains as the boat’s engines fire up with an immediate purr of assurance.
For the first time, Luci considers the speed of the craft. She wonders if it can outrun any vessel that Malom Roderick and L’inversione may have stolen to intercept them. She studies the onyx controller on his necklace. In her mind, she questions if L’inversione has technology like that, something capable of controlling cybos, something that could turn them against their master.
“What is it?” he asks. “And where was it found?”
The questions confuse her. “What do you mean?”
Cavazos gestures to his ear to indicate he’s speaking with someone else. “Has the chancellor been notified? How many of them were killed?” He pauses. “Good, but you don’t know what you took from them. Is it an explosive device?”
Luci sits, enthralled by Cavazos’s side of the conversation.
His eyebrows furrow. “How can you not identify the components? Is it longchair skip tech or not?” He mumbles to himself, “Multiple chrono signatures?”
Another pause as his expression grows sour. “Here’s an idea,” he begins sarcastically. “The next time you confiscate technology from a band of L’inversione terrorists, find out what it is and its purpose before you kill them all, regardless of how old it looks.”
“Ask them if Malom Roderick was with them,” Luci interjects.
He waves his hand dismissively, and Cavazos’s scowl at her makes her sit back in her seat. He obviously doesn’t want her input. “I’ve just arrived at the Spike from my home,” he lies. “I can meet you in the lab in the north wing to determine what we’re dealing with here. Yes, yes, bring those as well.” He disconnects from the conversation as he rises to his feet with some effort.
Luci asks, “What is it? What did they find?”
“They don’t know yet,” he says, headed for the door. “Some old tech of some kind. But whatever they found was enough to have more than a dozen members of L’inversione guarding it.” He turns and points out the cabin window at one of the cybos, the smallest one of the group. “I’m leaving that one with you.”
“What do you mean? I’m going with you to check out what they found.”
He shakes his head. “You’re a mathematician, not a longchair skip technician. You’d be in the way. Plus, I don’t have the time or energy to explain to anyone who you are and why you’re here.”
“Okay,” she concedes, moving back to take her seat. “I’ll wait here. How long do you think it will be?”
Cavazos activates the onyx controller around his thick neck. “You misunderstand.” The boat sways slightly as four of the five cybos evacuate the vessel to the dock. “You’re returning to the guesthouse. You only need one cybo for that, and the craft is programed to take you the quickest route.”
