Drift pattern, p.41
Drift Pattern, page 41
She glances back at Yuma, who looks like he’s awaiting a verdict from her.
“Trust me,” Beaumont says.
Jonn chimes in from behind him in his low, booming voice, “Yuma is really good at things like this, Doctor.”
Miguel, the man who brought dry clothes to Luci and Beaumont, says apologetically, “I looked for a work apron in the shop to make you look less conspicuous, but I couldn’t find anything.”
“Thanks,” she says. “At least the clothes fit well.” Luci recognizes the awkward twenty-something as the one nervously checking her churka from before. “I’m Luci.”
She nods. “My name’s Sari.” The girl falls in beside Yuma, studying his every move with big, doe-like eyes.
Beaumont gestures to a muscular, light-skinned black man in his thirties who is nearly standing at attention while waiting to be acknowledged. “And this is Cline. He’s been with us from the beginning.”
Cline responds with a slight bow of the head. “Dr. Gaudiano.”
“And coming this way with the remaining churkas is Danica,” Beaumont concludes.
At first, Luci thinks it’s Ley who’s returned for some reason. Only as Danica moves closer can Luci tell that the spikey-haired woman is taller and not as stocky as Ley, though she could pass for an older sister or cousin.
As Cline and Miguel break from the group to retrieve their churkas from the approaching Danica, Beaumont addresses Luci. “So, outside of this building is an auto-transport hauler that Yuma has programed to take us near the sector that Technician Moyta’s being held in. Though it’s a decommissioned model and a little worn from use, the hauler shouldn’t draw too much attention to itself.”
Yuma butts in, saying, “I’ve set it to take a route off the main lines and then a direct path for the return back here, since we anticipate the city going red after Totti’s upload to the splash forum.”
Beaumont lifts a patient hand, silencing the teen. “Yuma, Jonn, and Cline have cleared out the cargo container for us to ride in there. It’ll be cramped, but we’re bringing light, and the ride is only a few miles from here.” He places his hand on her shoulder. “Where we are is an industrial part of the city—a low traffic area, so we shouldn’t encounter too many people as we make our way to the hauler a few blocks over.”
Luci nods, impressed by the thoroughness of the strategy. “You came up with all of this in the short time after Ish was taken?”
“Well, yes and no,” Beaumont answers humbly. “We’ve been using the hauler transport to move around the city in secret for some time now.”
She gnaws her bottom lip. “Hey, I want to apologize—”
Beaumont tries to wave her off.
“No, I came down pretty hard on you in front of everyone earlier about not helping Shar.” She sighs. “I had no idea of what Macer was up to. It’s still hard to imagine that he—”
“No apology is necessary, Luci. The evil within Waleen Macer is difficult for any decent person to comprehend. There are some members of L’inversione that theorize that he went mad due to taking too many leap skips.”
“That’s a thing?” she asks, shocked to learn of a potential side effect to time travel. She recalls the odd seizure that he had. “Is that what you believe?”
After a pause, he says, “I believe that the seed of lust for power was in his heart all along.” He shakes his head. “No, I don’t think doing leap skips had anything to do with it. He just embraced the evil inside of him instead of resisting that part of his nature.”
Luci glances over to Sari and Yuma edging their way closer to them. “Sir?” Yuma asks with a respect that Luci thought was beyond him. “We should be going.”
“Right,” Beaumont answers as if awakened from a dream. He twirls an index finger in the air. “Team, let’s head out.”
The eight of them take the shop’s solitary service elevator, which, judging by the metal creaks and groans of the gears and cable hoists, must be on its last leg. She’s grateful when the doors finally slide open to the street level. Beaumont exits first, scans the area, and then motions to the others.
As she exits, Luci is surprised that it’s nearly dusk. The neighboring shop structures reflect deep orange hues of the sun setting on the sea. In the far distance, the Spike building defiantly extends into the sky.
The group moves in a quiet tension, scanning the area while attempting to not be obvious that they’re scanning. The narrow, overlapping mishmash of tempered plastic bolted to metal that passes for streets here are empty of people. This is a relief because Miguel couldn’t find anything to conceal her loudly colorful cowgirl outfit. Part of the success of the operation hinges on going undetected, and she definitely doesn’t blend in with Relicus City fashion like the rest of the team.
As they round the corner, Luci gets her first look at their ride. The hauler is colored lime green and as nearly as long and tall as a city bus. It’s curved like a giant metal shark with the dorsal fin and tail removed. A metal pipe twice as large as a truck axel runs the length of the cut-away midsection. This suspends a corrugated steel container that Luci would not give a second look if she saw it on a railway cart back home.
Yuma races ahead of the group to the harsh, blunt front end of the hauler.
Beaumont drops back in the formation to instruct Luci. “He’s initiating the sequence. The container will open for us, and we’ll go in.”
“Yeah, okay,” Luci nervously answers as if she’s done it a thousand times before and all of this was a part of her daily routine.
All but Yuma congregate before the steel container, dangling from the center beam of the vehicle in anticipation.
“What’s wrong, Yuma?” Beaumont asks, scanning for onlookers. “Why isn’t it opening?”
Luci tenses while surveying the area for signs of an ambush, aware that she’s the only one without a churka.
“It’s worked before—many times,” Yuma proclaims nervously. “Nothing’s wrong. It just—”
“Obviously, something’s wrong,” Danica argues.
Luci notes that it’s the first time the woman has spoken. While her voice is firm, it’s different from what she imagined from her, not gruff or raspy like Ley sounds.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Yuma protests again but walks over to strike the container with the butt of his churka.
The sound startles Luci, and she jumps. Her insides churn nervously at the notion that this inept crew is in charge of rescuing Ish from a squad of cybos. “We’re wasting time here,” she says.
“She’s right, Noah.” Miguel begins moving beside Beaumont. “You know that we can’t stay out in the open like this for very long. It’s not safe.”
Luci mistakes a loud beeping sound for an alarm until she realizes it’s an alert from the container that the wall panel is lowering. She sighs. This is the second time in less than an hour she’s mistaken this type of sound for a danger notice. As the panel continues to lower, she glances over at Beaumont, who offers a shrug.
“See, I told you nothing was wrong,” Yuma declares.
Groans echo through the group at his remark, but Cline confronts him. “I don’t want to get trapped in there, you understand me, little man?”
Yuma backs away from him, protesting, “We’ll be able to get out. It’s just old, that’s all.” Still on the defensive, he adds, “It’s the first time it’s ever given us any problem in all the time that we’ve used it.”
Creaking like a drawbridge over a castle moat, the steel wall is two thirds of the way down.
“Old or not, I need to know that this box is going to open for us when we get there.”
Jonn joins in, and as if he needs to point it out, he says, “I’m a big guy, Yuma. I don’t like being confined into small spaces. Cline is right.”
The beeping continues, occasionally punctuated by pneumatic hisses as the panel lowers.
Beaumont intervenes, “Before I signed on at the Spike, I used to work freight. There’s a manual-override wheel located in the front panel of these models. It’s a safety put there for someone who may be working alone. We’re not going to get trapped inside.”
The lip of the panel touches the street, making a connection with a slight scraping sound. The beeping stops, and what was the side of the transport is transformed into a short ramp inside.
Satisfied with Beaumont’s assurances, Jonn and Cline hurry to follow Sari, Miguel, and Danica into the pod container while Yuma fiddles with a device.
Luci keeps time with Beaumont as he grabs Yuma by the arm.
“Sir?” Yuma replies in a voice that could be mistaken for a whine.
“When we get there, leave the panel down in case it’s slow to respond again.”
“But it’s not my fault. The regulator is—”
“I know, I know, but every second counts, Yuma. Just leave it down, ready for us to re-board.”
“Yeah, alright,” Yuma acquiesces as he steps onto the steel slope of the ramp.
Beaumont helps Luci in as he says for only her to hear, “It really will be alright, I promise you.”
Once inside, Cline unfastens the front panel to confirm the manual-override wheel that Beaumont mentioned. To her, it looks similar to the apparatus in every submarine movie she’s ever seen when the sailors have to seal off an area. The strong smell of vulcanized rubber and a faint hint of citrus fill the container, though there’s no sign of any fruit or tires. Luci wonders about what the previous cargo hauled in this thing.
Cline snaps the covering back into place and positions himself in the corner.
The beeping alert from the ramp wall rising back into place stops, and the vehicle engages. Yuma and his eager would-be assistant Sari have fastened four slim magnetized lamps to the steel walls of the compartment for light.
Luci wonders if Yuma has even the slightest awareness that the girl is sweet on him. It’s probably the reason she took this detail instead of going with Totti’s larger group.
She thinks of Ish and wonders what could be going through his mind, wherever he is. It all must seem hopeless to him. There’s no way he could ever imagine that she’s headed toward him involved in a rescue mission at the behest of Cyphor Gicul himself.
Sari studies Yuma with puppy-dog eyes as he checks and rechecks Cavazos’s PQX inhibitor device. Luci shudders to think that if Yuma’s tech misfires or is delayed like the container opening, they’ll likely all be dead by cybo churka fire within the hour.
One thing that Beaumont failed to mention to her is how the container isn’t bolted to the carrier transport. To compensate for the swaying from the left to the right of the compartment, all but Cline, Jonn, and Beaumont have slid down to a sitting position on the bare steel bottom. Obviously, the inside was constructed for maximum cargo loads, not for the comfort of hidden passengers. As the container dips and swings in response to corners taken by the hauler, the two bigger men of the group look as if they’re engaged in a balancing contest with their legs spread wide like surfers. Beaumont crouches but hasn’t yet yielded to sitting flat.
Yuma pauses his inspection of their cybo-salvation mechanism to look up at her. “What you said back in the warehouse, was any of that true?”
“Is what true?” Luci asks, attempting to sift through the tangled memories of everything she’s learned today about Relicus City.
“Pre-Hi no Kawa Iryland, 1646.” Yuma shifts his weight to straighten his back against the container wall. “You called him Cornwall or something.”
“Cronwall,” Sari volunteers incorrectly.
“Oliver Cromwell,” Luci answers. She pauses to consider what the world must be like for this young man just getting his start and the horror that is to come if Waleen Macer isn’t stopped. Tears swell in her eyes as she swallows the lump in her throat. She bites her lip; the mild self-inflicted pain focuses her. “Yeah, well . . . it does get pretty bad.”
Both Sari’s and Yuma’s wide eyes gape back in confusion and distress. A previously unknown source of compassion bubbles up from inside her toward them. Sensing their emotions on the verge of heartbreak, Luci consoles them, “Cromwell’s army is brutal to the Irish, but the worst of it will occur a few years after the leap skip there. I don’t plan on sticking around.” Luci forces a smile that unexpectedly turns genuine for her. “You and Sari should join Ish and me. When all of this is done, I’m going to have him travel from Ireland and head to Florence, Italy. I speak enough Italian to get us by.” For the briefest of moments, the sway of the container doesn’t bother her. Her voice is sincerely cheery. “I understand that there’s a lot of great art happening in that part of the world around that time; plus, it would be interesting to visit Arcetri where Galileo lived out his remaining days.” She knows that if they haven’t heard of Cromwell, it’s doubtful that they know where Arcetri is or why Galileo is important, but it comforts Luci to say these things, and self-medicating with a little hope of her own can’t be a bad thing.
Yuma and Sari both nod as if considering Florence to be a better destination plan.
Luci catches Beaumont mouthing the words “thank you” to her where the couple can’t see him.
She looks away, slightly embarrassed that he’s seen through her attempt to lift their spirits by giving them a hope to hang on to.
“Noah, why didn’t L’inversione just get me at the lecture in Baltimore?”
“That just shows how desperate Waleen Macer was in trying to get you here to stop Cyphor,” Beaumont says. “You lived in a city over a thousand miles from there—”
“Chicago,” Luci interjects.
“Right, but the skip point juncture was in Baltimore and was only open for a period of 146 minutes.”
Luci recalls the conversation with Macer in the limousine. “He said he sponsored the lecture through Vincent DuPont years before. So that was just to get me to 2032 Baltimore so they could snatch me?”
“That’s right,” he answers. “We didn’t know why he’d done a leap skip to Luxembourg 2030 until after you were abducted and brought here six days ago. You gotta hand it to him, he is very clever at achieving his goals.”
Luci mulls this over. “You came to get me—the older me—with Shar the first time?”
He nods.
“That was at the behest of Macer, right?”
“No one knew about him or his plans back then,” Beaumont answers. “I’m ashamed that we didn’t see the signs of what he was doing back then.”
“Constructing his deity of Relicus the Great?”
“We had no idea. Shar and I were following orders of the directorate.”
“Led by Macer, of course.” Luci adds.
“Yes, the chancellor, who we believed to be Waleen’s son at the time, sent us to retrieve you in 2045. In retrospect, we believe that he did this to isolate your knowledge of drift pattern mathematics from anyone in our time.”
“Isolate my knowledge? That’s why Macer had Cavazos put her in Carcerium?”
“Yes, but Malom freed her from Carcerium,” Beaumont says.
“Only to deliver her—me to Cyphor.”
There’s an uncomfortable pause.
Yuma breaks the silence. “We’ve got two and a half minutes until we reach the destination.”
“Luci,” Beaumont says, standing to his feet, “I’ve never met Gicul myself.” He gestures around the pod. “In fact, none of us have, but Malom says that Gicul has told him to bring your technician friend and you back safely to him. Malom says that no harm is going to befall you when we all get to the Antarctica juncture. The only reason that he’s not with us in this container is that Malom wasn’t sure that you’d trust him, given what lies have been told to you—lies told about him from the other side. We need you to help convince Technician Moyta that it’s safe to come with us.”
“How can he or I believe anything that you say is true when you never even told Shar, your own niece, what was really going on?”
He sighs and stumbles to the left as the cargo container sways. “My father impregnated a woman other than my stretch. My stepsister is Shar’s stretch. It’s something that we’ve been fortunate enough to keep out of city Basin files, and since I’m not on any wanted lists, it’s worked to the benefit of L’inversione.” He pauses. “Shar felt guilty when things went badly from the time before, so when Macer said the circumstances changed and you—this version of you—had to be put in a safe place for your own good, she volunteered.” He takes in a slow breath. “Malom and I made a judgement call about involving her in what we were doing. While she opposes the use of Carcerium chambers and is anti-cybo at heart, her lack of knowledge about L’inversione allows her to be able to pass random subconscious V-scan analyses.”
“What’s that?” Luci asks, remembering the severed earlobe in the guesthouse elevator. “There are random Viatorio scans of the wearer’s brain?”
Yuma answers for him, “Yes and there’s no way to counterfeit or mimic pure memories in order to avoid detection of someone being involved with L’inversione.”
Beaumont inspects his churka. “We needed someone on the inside who was authentic. Because of her feelings for you, we were able to test your receptivity to the idea of leaving Macer.”
“Testing by having Shar leave the notes for me?”
“I’m not proud of it, but I was instructed to leverage her guilt that she had from before to do that. You know she loves you, right?”
Luci looks away, stopping the reflex to pull the hand-engraved plastic from her front pocket. She swallows and says softly, “Yeah, we spoke.”
It’s peculiar, but Luci’s grateful to feel the transport beginning to slow and come to a stop rather than being forced to speak of the tragic events of Shar Ryson. If all goes according to plan, Ish will be with her soon, and they’ll be able to leap skip away from this city once and for all. Maybe the two of them can devise a way to rescue Shar before they travel into the world’s past.
Rising to her feet along with Yuma, Sari, Miguel, and Danica, Luci says, “There’s one thing that I still haven’t been able to figure out about all of this.”
