Protocol 7 (10 page)

“Why, Hayden? Why stop it when you’re so close?”

He shook his head, absolutely despairing. “I have no idea. None. Maybe because all they ever wanted from me was a prototype. Maybe because of something Oliver and the others did on their ‘special assignment.’ All I know is…they stole it from me, Simon. And god help me, I want it back.”

Simon’s mind was whirling. He had seen the plans for the Spectors. He had often wondered why it was taking so long to make one, even as he marveled at the capabilities these newly combined technologies could offer. He moved closer to the vehicle in the far cradle—the one being completed even now by the robot workers.

“What’s the crew component?”

“Twelve. Fifteen in a pinch.”

“And all the specs I’ve seen apply? The fueling system?”

“Virtually inexhaustible. Might need to be rebuilt every five years, but I doubt it.”

“Depth limitations?”

Hayden snorted. “Go on, now. Aren’t any…maybe at ten thousand feet.”

The closer he moved to the submersible, the more he realized how massive the vehicle really was. The skin of the vehicle seemed to be deep blue and black at the same time and glittered insubstantially when he didn’t look directly at it. It seemed, somehow, to be both reflective and translucent at the same time. He reached out to touch it, completely in awe. The massive frame resembled a cross between an insect and a submarine, with heavy, unusual treads. It was an amphibian vessel that collapsed into a smooth submarine when the treads retracted into its main body. The reflective outer skin was unlike a submarine. It resembled a digital display that was both semi-transparent and reflective. These outer surface modules were the “intelligent skin” that mimicked the environment, making the vessel look invisible.

“Careful,” Hayden said. “It’s charged.”

Simon pulled his hand back and looked at his colleague. Hayden had somehow found a half-empty bottle of scotch and was pouring a liberal portion into a chipped white mug. “You’re kidding,” he said. “You worked out the invisibility modules? I thought you were having problems.”

Hayden took a healthy sip and smacked his lips. “Simon, you don’t realize how much you’ve contributed to this project. While you were still playing with your theories, we were adapting them into the prototypes.”

“Are you saying this thing actually works and can become partially invisible?”

“Almost entirely, actually. To radar and sonar it looks like a golf ball.”

He simply couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You mean to tell me,” he said, “that all these years, in all those seminars and papers and reports…you were hiding this?”

“Well…yes. But it wasn’t a waste of time, Simon. Not at all. The discoveries you made were immediately integrated into the work. Your exotic materials advance? They are real, Simon. Right here, in this vehicle, and the others like it. I chose to keep you away from this part of it for your own safety.”

“Safety?” Simon echoed, feeling the anger rise in him. “You lied to me, slowed me down, and crippled my research for my own safety? What the hell did you think was going to happen if you’d brought me in, Hayden? If you’d told me the truth?”

The scientist’s eyes bored into his own. “The same thing that happened to your father, Simon. Or worse.”

That stopped him. For one moment, he had forgotten everything that had happened in the last few days and weeks, and for the first time he understood the hell that Hayden must have been going through, all alone.

He put a hand on the older man’s shoulder and squeezed. “All right, Hayden,” he said. “I understand but…”

All the scientist could do was nod. He didn’t trust himself to do more.

Simon walked deeper into the facility and tried to look everywhere at once. “Where’s Teah?” he asked. “I thought she was by your side at all times.”

“I sent her on an errand,” Hayden said. “Thought you might want to see this for the first time all by yourself.”

Simon nodded slowly as he looked around. “Yeah,” he said. “I appreciate that.” He turned back to Hayden and said, “It’s incredible. Truly. But what good is it to us—what are you trying to tell me? Neither ship is finished, and you said they’ve cut off supplies.”

“I also said they were idiots. No one seemed to notice that there may not have been enough parts to make two more Spectors here, but there are more than enough to complete one more.”

Simon frowned at him. “One more?”

“Yes. Don’t tell me you didn’t notice the empty bay. Spector I is complete. It’s in the hold of a cargo ship, the S.S. Munro under the command of a captain named Doug Donovan, en route to the Southern Ocean for its test voyage right now.”

“The Southern Ocean? Off Antarctica? Why so far?”

Hayden smirked. “That power source I developed? Very experimental and quite powerful. It may work perfectly; it may not work at all. Or—worst case—it will work far better than we intended, and melt the Spector I and everything else within a ten-mile radius. So, the Southern Sea seemed like a logical location for a test run. Far from civilization, far from prying eyes…and inside the Antarctic ice.”

Simon blinked at that. It was just beginning to sink in. “My god,” he said. “It’s done.”

“Done and gone, yes,” Hayden told him, nodding. “But we can build our own.”

Simon looked around, still stunned. “Here? Now?”

Hayden gestured at the robots sliding between the two cradles. “It’s already happening. The peering eyes think this entire facility has been decommissioned. They ought to; I spent three days isolating it, making it look dead, and then instructed all the reactivated ‘bots inside to begin work on cannibalizing Spector II to complete Spector III. They will finish the job in less than twenty-four hours.”

“And then what? How do you plan to get this thing out of here without some massive airlifter that everyone can see?”

Hayden grinned. “Simon, we’re not just underground. You wouldn’t know it without looking very carefully, but we’re underwater as well. More than a hundred feet under the bottom of the Thames. And these,” he pointed to a series of huge hatches, each one taller and wider than a large vehicle, and tightly closed, “can let in the water at any time, while that—” he pointed to the curved dome of the ceiling. “—can open like the roof of an observatory.”

Simon didn’t know what to say. He looked at the roof, at the water valves, at the Spectors themselves hanging mutely in the air like massive steel thunderclouds. “Do you mean to tell me,” he said, “you can finish this ship in less than a day, then just open up the room and float it into the Thames, with no one the wiser?”

Hayden beamed like a schoolboy. “That is exactly what I’m saying. With the help of my friendly and obedient AIs and the technology you and I and others like us built unawares…that is exactly what we can do.” He was looking up at the massive submersible as it slowly came together. “Hey!” he called, his Scottish brogue growing thicker the more he drank. “What’s the estimated time of completion?”

A harsh mechanical voice spoke from the empty air: “Sixteen hours, thirteen minutes.”

“That’s it then,” he said, turning back to Simon with a mischievous grin. “And when it’s done, we’re goin’ t’ steal this bastard and float it roit outta here.”

Simon couldn’t stop looking at Spector III.

This changes everything, he thought.

A car horn blared at the front gate, and Ryan nearly jumped out of his skin.

“What the devil?” he said. He pushed himself away from the most succulent pork roast he had enjoyed in a month. “Already?” he said to his soon-to-be wife, Sabrina, and the cook, who hovered worriedly at the dining room door. “I thought they said eight o’clock.”

“Well,” Sabrina said with fragile good cheer, “your friends always have been rather…exuberant.”

He smiled in spite of himself and put his linen napkin to the side. “Exuberant,” he repeated. “Spot on.”

The car horn honked a second time. “Why doesn’t he use the bloody intercom? My god, you’d think he was raised in a tube.” He stalked to the mullioned window and looked out over the spacious front lawn of the estate. A massive black car, Andrew’s Range Rover, was hunched just outside the wrought iron gate, lights glaring, and engine roaring.

The window swept down, and Andrew thrust his wildly tangled blonde head out. “Hoy!” he shouted, ignoring the electronic device almost at his cheek. “It’s me!”

“Idiot,” Ryan said, grinning. He lifted his head and called into the open air, “Fiona, would you please open the front gate for our guests?”

“Yes, Mr. Ryan,” replied the housekeeper AI. There was a distant grumbling as the iron wings spread wide; a moment later the Range Rover was racing toward the oval driveway. It lurched to a stop right in front of the entrance.

Like many of his closest friends, Ryan was very good—brilliant, in fact—with cybernetics. In his case, he was a near-genius when it came to a nasty little sub-branch of the discipline known as Remote Access Intervention, an almost entirely theoretical field that postulated methods of exerting control over artificial intelligences at a distance—robot mind control, to put it bluntly. Ryan also happened to be the scion of one of the country’s oldest and richest families, and with the recent death of his mother, he now found himself the beneficiary and prisoner to one of England’s larger fortunes.

What he loved most about his friends from university is how they really, truly, didn’t give a shit about his elevated class or his mountain of money. Sometimes, though, they could be a bit much.

Sabrina—neat, quiet, steely Sabrina—hovered in the doorway. “All of them?” she said quite seriously. “At once?”

He smiled apologetically. “I’m afraid so.”

The front door burst open, and Andrew flew in, a skittering mass of beer-fueled energy. Simon came in after him, far more calmly. He had his fists thrust into the pockets of his raincoat, and there was a weight, a grimness, about him that Ryan had never seen before. Samantha was close behind Simon, as beautiful and watchful as ever. Hayden, looking even sour, brought up the rear.

Sabrina looked from face to face and resisted the temptation to shake her head in dismay. Above all things, Sabrina was cordial. Well-bred. Polite to a fault. But she had no education in science, physics or otherwise, and even less interest in them. She recognized that her husband-to-be needed friends of his own, especially those who are accomplished in their own fields, but still…still.

She hadn’t wanted to host this little get-together. She had done her best to quash it before it began, but Ryan had been surprisingly and uncharacteristically insistent. “Simon wants to see me,” he said. “He wants to bring Hayden and Andrew and Sammy along. So that’s what we’re going to do.”

Sabrina resented it. She was not the type who enjoyed surprises. She liked—she required—that every detail of a social event be planned well in advance and executed flawlessly. Just throwing a few crackers onto a plate with some store-bought cheese slices and cracking open a keg was not acceptable. And yet, here they were, dripping dirty rainwater in her alcove and just waiting for her to leave.

The things we do for love, she thought bitterly.

Samantha was the first to speak. “Sabrina,” she said, stepping forward and smiling warmly, “I apologize for us barging in like this. I do hope we’re not causing too much of a problem.”

Sabrina smiled thinly. “Not at all,” she lied.

“Are there snacks?” Andrew asked, peering into the sitting room to one side.

Simon stepped forward and kissed Sabrina briefly on each cheek. “Thanks for the hospitality.”

“It’s nothing. May I ask why you didn’t use the intercom at the gate? If it’s broken…”

“No,” Hayden said. “It’s fine, I’m sure. We just…we didn’t use it, that’s all.”

The truth is, Simon said to himself, you don’t have a super-secret spy-phone that’s safe from eavesdropping, and we don’t want anyone to even know we’re here, so…god, this is getting complicated.

Sabrina slipped away to prepare the sitting room, and the rest of the group followed down the corridor, gradually taking off their topcoats and scarves as they went. It was an imposing place—all polished wood, mullioned windows and ancient, heavy furniture. Simon half-expected a wizened retainer in a tux to step out from behind the array.

The library was almost a parody of the book-lined studies seen in a thousand BBC dramas, stacked floor to ceiling with shelves completely filled with dusty tomes no one had opened in a generation, overcrowded with comfy chairs and discreet reading lamps. As he peeled off his coat, he said, “Ryan, we’re in a bit of a situation here. We need to talk.” He leaned close to his friend and spoke so no one else could hear, “And we don’t want to alarm Sabrina.”

Simon had to give Ryan credit: he didn’t gape at the mere mention of a crisis. He cast a guarded, concerned look at his impeccable bride-to-be, who—to her credit—noticed the expression and read it perfectly.

“Well, all,” she said with a little smile, “I know this is important, and I’m quite sure I won’t understand a word of it. So, I think I will leave you to it for the evening.” She paused briefly, as if searching for words. “Whatever it is…I wish you the best of luck.”

With that, she stepped backwards through the double doors and slid them shut, leaving the rest of them alone.

The silence in the room was deep and deafening. Simon was the first to break it. “Do you have an AI active in here?”

Ryan, who was staring distractedly at the door where his fiancée had disappeared, shook himself awake. “Of course.” Simon looked over to Andrew who was already playing with his gadgets to scramble and confuse the AI in the room. Simon pulled the memory card with Oliver’s message imprinted on it from his breast pocket and laid it on the table.

Andrew cocked an eye at him. “We all good in the big ears department?” he asked obscurely.

Simon tapped the same breast pocket, where he held Andrew’s device. “Never leave home without it,” he said, smiling grimly. A roiling black cube appeared above the end table as the data from the card loaded. “I could try and explain all this to you,” he said. “And I will. But I need to show this to you first. Just…watch.” He tapped the card, muttered, “Play,” and his father’s eerily smiling face appeared.