The door rises. The gap widens, widens, until Jack and Dino find themselves staring into an abandoned cargo bay. It is at least 500 feet long, 300 wide. Mesh floors, concrete walls, harsh lighting. No soldiers, no guards, no nothing. Abandoned. It must be a mistake. They were given the wrong dock number. Or—
“There,” Dino says, pointing.
“There.” The word bounces back, startling them both.
“There what?” Jack says.
“Air what?” says Jack’s echo.
Dino points. Way down, across the cavern, a large object.
Jack squints, struggling to distinguish its silver surface from the wall behind it.
“Let’s go see,” he says.
“Oh see,” the room responds.
They search everywhere for signs of life but find none. No scraps of paper, no candy wrappers, no spent vaporizer cartridges, not even any dust. Weirder still, the security turrets are turned off, the camera lenses beside them dead black circles. Seems odd to point a plasma cannon at visitors and then give them free reign once they’re inside. Whatever strings Dandy pulled to get this done must have cost a fortune.
The object is a suspension cube, ten feet tall and wide, a fancy shipping container designed for fragile cargo. The surface is grooved metal, the corners slightly rounded and coated in a rubbery material. It appears fresh from the factory, but that’s not surprising given the high-profile nature of the facility. There’s a single control panel on one side, but without the access code, it might as well be a bank vault. Jack flips the lid to the panel, regardless.
“Huh,” he says.
A bit of white tape holds a small black rectangle against the display.
“What is it?”
“A memory stick.” Jack peels the tape away and folds the stick in his palm.
“From Dandy?”
Jack ignores him, calls Justin on his portable. “Get in here with a shover. Bring Stetson. Tell him we need his computer skills.”
Stetson keeps an extensive collection of Frankensteinian portable communicators, most of which are no good for communicating and hardly qualify as portable. The one he brings with him to the bay is about the size of a vacuum cleaner and weighs nearly 80 pounds. The Nation declared it illegal to modify portables ten years ago, so he builds them all from scrap. He calls this particular device Mr. Crackerjack, and talks to it as some people talk to their pets. He turns it on and plugs the data stick into one of its many ports. Jack stands over his shoulder and watches, as if it will make any sense to him. The tech is so old there’s a physical keyboard. The symbols have all worn off, but Stetson goes by feel, typing away with a series of pleasant clicks. A small square lights up on the device’s back, black text on a white screen. A word processor.
Across the bay, Justin sits at the wheel of a shover, guiding the cube into the airlock. Dino follows and directs, shouting occasional commands. “Hold on a minute!” and “I said slow down, man!”
“Hmm,” Stetson says.
“Good or bad?”
“Neither. Give me a minute.”
Inscrutable symbols flash onscreen. Row upon row.
“Weird.”
“What?” Jack says.
“Okay,” Stetson says. “Alright, so, it’s no virus, so that’s a plus. I’m seeing one file, and it’s an old format.”
“Go on.”
“I mean old. I haven’t seen anything like it in years.” He pauses to grin up at Jack.
Jack is unamused.
“Nevermind. You know how they talk about the digital dark ages?”
Jack knows the term, but can’t place it.
“It’s something only museums and hackers care about. See, like, when you want to store a secure message, you’ve only got a couple of options. Find a good hiding place for your data stick, encrypt the file and hope it’s uncrackable—except nothing is truly uncrackable—or store it in an obsolete format. So even if someone steals it, they can’t open the thing, right? Okay. So, the bad news is Bel’s software can’t read it. The good news is, Mr. Crackerjack is old as a dinosaur turd.” He grins again.
“Is that your way of saying you can read it?”
“Yes.”
“Great. And what’s it tell us about our cargo?”
“Nothing. But it does tell us where to take it.”
“Coordinates.”
“Yep. And one more thing. A very short message.”
“Yeah?”
“Okay, so. It lists the coordinates, then it says, um. Well, I don’t think you’re gonna like it.”
“What does it say, Stets.”
“It says, Or your family.”
“Or your family.”
“Yeah. I’m thinking as in, like, take this box to these coordinates, or, you know…”
Jack stands upright, wipes his forehead with a sleeve. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Chapter 16
Stetson leans over the billiards table and eyes his shot. Lana looks on from the corner sofa. The stick makes an artificial clicking sound when he strikes. The holographic ball hits another and the table speakers seem to clap. The spheres bounce around the bumpers but none hit the pockets. Stetson stands back and curses. Hunter clucks her tongue and sets up for her next shot. She sinks two. Sets up again. Sinks one. Sets up again. “Eight-ball, side pocket.” A near miss.
“You get overzealous,” Stetson says.
“Count the solids, grasshopper.”
“I’m saying. You always choke with the eight-ball.”
“Keep talking and you’ll be choking on it.”
He sinks three in a row.
Next shot, Hunter calls eight-ball corner pocket. Misses.
“Son of a bitch.”
“Told you.”
They’ve been holding at the new coordinates, an area deep within the sun’s corona, for three full days as of this morning. They couldn’t have picked a more dangerous spot in the solar system. If they aren’t gone within fourteen days, Bel’s mag shield will run out of juice and the radiation will flash-fry them. Perhaps more telling is that being this close to the sun means nobody without their exact coordinates could find them if they wanted to. Distant broadcasts would be lost in the interference, including an SOS. The first thing they did when they woke from grav sleep was shutter the observation windows. If they could have looked without destroying their retinas, they’d have seen a white sun about six and a half feet in diameter burning insanely close. Even with Bel’s shielding, the radiation bleached a patch of the front hallway yellowish-white. It also fried their exterior cameras and most of their sensors. So until they get to a safer distance and replace the parts, they’re essentially flying blind. In the meantime, Lana wastes the days with Hunter and Stetson in the rec room. They don’t mind that she sits in. Their sniping flourishes with an audience present.
“We should start taking bets,” Stetson says.
“Maybe if you didn’t cheat.”
“I don’t cheat.”
“You programmed a tilt into table. What? You thought I couldn’t spot it?”