Suddenly, instead of ten quadcopters, there were twenty. Then forty. The air was full of them, their buzzing grown to a roar. The copters surged forward, light flashing around them like a lightning storm. “This worked in the funeral home,” she said. “Let’s hope it works here.”
Angel held Alex and Sandra’s hands and closed his eyes. It was better not to look. He could still see all of his eyejack controls, and so he tried to teleport to the lab, just like she said. Nothing. Their coordinates didn’t change. Two minutes left.
A loud crash made him open his eyes despite himself, and he saw one of his copters burning on the ground. Several of the prisoners were motionless on the ground, however. The copters were everywhere at once, reacting to any attack by splitting and covering all possibilities. That didn’t stop a number of them from being destroyed. But when they managed to surround a varcolac-controlled individual with their energy shields, it would drive the varcolac out, leaving the human shell lifeless.
The copters were effectively holding back the prisoners, but that didn’t help them teleport out of there. “What now?” Angel shouted over the buzz. “We need to get out of here!”
“You have any ideas?” Alex shouted back.
He didn’t. Running was out of the question, not with Sandra unconscious on the ground next to him. Alex was improving her technique, knocking them down faster, but it didn’t matter if the varcolac was just going to destroy the whole prison complex.
He had to do something. It seemed futile, but Angel wasn’t going to spend the last minute of his life feeling sorry for himself. He brought up the teleportation module and opened the source code. There were thousands of lines of software, none of them familiar. He hadn’t written this code. But he didn’t need to read it all. Instead, he tried to teleport again, executing the module in a debugging mode, which allowed him to see each line of software as it executed. It was a common strategy for finding a coding bug, since it sometimes demonstrated that the software was executing different lines, or with different values, than the programmer expected.
With only one minute left before annihilation, Angel didn’t expect to find anything, but he did. He saw it almost immediately. There was a line in there, an impossible line. It was a simple if-check that had no earthly business in this piece of code. And it wasn’t a bug. The line couldn’t have been put there by mistake. It was sabotage.
He removed the line and recompiled the module. Thirty seconds to go. It was time for goodbye, one way or another. Angel closed his eyes and focused on his lab.
CHAPTER 21
Alex knew they weren’t going to make it. Her skill with the quadcopters was improving as she fought, holding the prisoners back, but it didn’t matter. If Ryan’s timeline was right—which she had no doubt it was—they had only seconds until the whole place was destroyed. Even if she killed all the prisoners, there was no reason to believe that would allow them to teleport again.
Not only that, but she was increasingly distracted by the presence of Sandra so near to her. With so many probability waves forming and collapsing in the near vicinity, many of them under her control, she could feel the tenuousness of the standing wave between them. They were just an unresolved quantum state, a single person with two possible futures. It was becoming increasingly clear to her that the wave stayed unresolved simply through their desire to keep it that way. Which meant that, just as she had reincorporated her own doubles back into herself at the funeral home, she could reincorporate Sandra into herself just as easily. They could become one person again, become Alessandra Kelley, in a heartbeat.
But she couldn’t think about that now. If they both died here, as seemed likely, it wouldn’t make any difference whether their probability wave resolved or not. And if by some miracle they lived, she was pretty sure they both wanted to keep on living separately instead of risking losing themselves in a combined whole.
The prisoners kept coming. It felt almost like a video game, in which she killed over and over again without thought. But of course, they were already dead, weren’t they? The varcolac was killing them, not her. And when, in less than a minute, the whole prison went up in multidimensional smoke, it wasn’t going to matter who had killed whom. They would all be dead.
She was about to apologize to Angel for failing, when he made a cry of astonishment.
“What is it?” she asked, but his eyes were closed, and he made no answer. A moment later, the wreckage of the prison vanished, to be replaced with a cluttered robotics lab.
Alex stared at him. “You fixed it! How—”
“Sandra first,” he said.
Sandra still hadn’t regained consciousness, and her hair was matted with blood. “Teleport us to an ER,” Alex said.
“I don’t have precise coordinates. We could be dropping her from several feet off the ground, never mind the risk of intersecting a car or another person.”
“Call 911, then!”
“I already did.”
Angel’s lab was in West Philadelphia, only blocks from three different university hospitals. An ambulance was there in minutes, and she was in the Jefferson emergency room minutes after that. Alex worried that there would be trouble, that someone at the hospital would recognize Sandra from the news bulletins about Alex, and call the police.
“There’s nothing we can do about that,” Angel said. “She’s not the sister who’s wanted for murder, and she has friends in the police department. She should be okay. What she needs most is medical care.”
The ER waiting room looked newly refurbished, with plush green chairs, racks of neatly organized magazines, and a play station for kids with toys, puzzles, and books. The screens mounted high on the walls showed news images of the demolished prison with the words, “Second terrorist action in two weeks.”
The prison now looked like Citizens Bank Park, the pieces scattered in a complex spiral, none of which were bigger than a chair. The image being shown was from above, from a news helicopter, and the similarity was obvious.
“So… how did you get us out of there?” she asked.
Angel shook his head in wonder. “There was a specific line of code in the module. I can’t imagine who would have put it there or why, but it was no accident. It instructed the software to stop working at 05:40 today.”
“What?” Alex thought she must have heard him wrong.
“Yep. Hardcoded into the software was a downtime coordinated with the varcolac’s destruction of the prison.”
“We were sabotaged? Someone tried to get us killed?”
Angel shrugged. “Looks that way.”
“But who would do that?” Even as she asked, Alex knew there was only one real answer to that question. This was Ryan’s software. And he was the one who had known what time the varcolac’s attack would come.
“So Ryan tried to kill us?” Angel asked.
“I don’t know. But we need to pay him a visit,” Alex said.
Angel took his Higgs projector out of his pocket and held it out to her. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’m going to stay here.”
“But you won’t have a projector,” Alex said. They were down to only one, since Jean had stolen Sandra’s. “The police are going to be here, you know. Sooner or later, they’ll make the connection to Muncy. Probably sooner.”
“All the more reason not to leave Sandra on her own.”
Alex tried to smile, but she was pretty sure it came out wrong. Was he scolding her? Sandra was her sister, after all. Another version of herself. That meant Alex should be the one worrying about her, the one ready to camp out in the waiting room as long as it took. On the other hand, where did Angel get off telling her how to take care of her own sister?