Ultraviolet (7 page)

Sighing, I put away my phone and thought about my missing printer, and my missing feedstock, and my deadline.

There was only one place in the city that I knew would have rubidium. Just one. I didn’t really decide to go there, but I was out of options. I made my little scooter appear in the alley and I sat on it for a minute, waiting for a better idea to come to mind.

It didn’t.

So I twisted the throttle and drove silently out into the street and headed toward the only place where I could get what I needed.

The Cygnus Central Warehouse.

Chapter 5
Acquisitions

The Cygnus Central Warehouse was technically outside the city near the airport, but with all the sprawl on the west side it could be hard to tell where the city actually ended and where the restricted areas in the county began. When the housing market collapsed, a handful of investors bought up all the abandoned neighborhoods between Baltimore and Washington, and basically fenced them off. That was about twelve years ago. They say the investors are just biding their time, waiting for the market to come back. From what I’ve seen, I think they’re going to be waiting for a long while.

It wasn’t a long drive out toward the airport, and traffic was light. The old highway was eight lanes wide, but half of them were closed off. The city couldn’t afford to maintain a road that big, and besides, there weren’t enough cars around to use them anyway. So I took my time on the road. All that driving with no helmet was making me nervous. And cold.

It was after seven when I finally rolled up at the fence around the Cygnus warehouse. To my right, I could see a small private jet landing at BWI just up the road. I’d never been on a plane, but it was one of those things I’d always wanted to do. I liked heights, looking down at the world like it was all one big model, or painting, or toy.

Some day.

I rode my scooter around the fence, trying to figure out exactly what I was doing there. It’s not like a store. You can’t just go in and ask for a pound of rubidium. For all of thirty seconds I flirted with the idea of bribing someone inside to bring me what I needed, but that was ridiculous. I didn’t know anyone there, and I didn’t have anything to bribe them with.

And that’s when I realized I was going to have to break in and steal what I needed. Now, maybe it’s obvious to you that I needed to steal it, but it wasn’t obvious to me until that moment. I just went to the one place that had what I needed, and up until then, I still thought I was the good guy, the victim, the all-American hero, pulling myself up by my bootstraps.

Whatever bootstraps are.

But as I stood there looking through that fence, I realized I was just like Cygnus, but on a really tiny scale. Stealing what I wanted, breaking the law, make deals, trying to cover my ass and make some money and help the handful of people I cared about at the expense of everyone else.

I knew it. I really did. I knew I was going down this really shitty path. But I just couldn’t see another way out.

What was I supposed to do? Put my parents on the back of my holo-scooter and drive us all up to Canada? I hear the Mounties shoot Yankees on sight now.

“Lux, off.”

I walked a little way from the fence and sat down behind a couple trees and waited for it to get dark. Around eight o’clock the trucks stopped leaving the warehouse, and the lights were shut off, and then a small shuttle bus full of workers rolled out the front gate and headed back toward the city.

All right then.

I walked up to the fence near the back side of the building, wondering what sorts of guards and cameras and drones they might have here. Security would be scary. After all, this is Cygnus. They kidnap people.

“Lux, sword and shield.”

It may have been a bit much, but I felt better with the huge black shield and the softly glowing sword in my hand. I held the shield up so that if there were any cameras, all they would see in the darkness was a black circle. I figured that the security program wouldn’t think that was a threat, so unless an actual person looked at the feed, I’d be okay. Then I sliced a hole in the fence and went inside.

I jogged across the parking lot, still hiding behind my shield, and then leaned up against the cold wall of the building. I definitely didn’t want to go near the front where all the trucks were parked and the security would be tightest, so I slid along the back wall, looking for another way in. There were three back doors, but I didn’t touch them. There was no way to know what sort of alarms they had.

After a few minutes I still hadn’t found anything except for a metal ladder up to the roof, so I decided to risk it. With my gloves turned off, I climbed the ladder and hopped out onto a huge gravel roof the size of a football field. I saw the fans for the air handlers, and I saw the door to what must have been the stairs.

This feels familiar.

But I didn’t touch the door handle. Instead, I used my sword to pry up one of the metal plates on the side of the stairwell, and I slipped inside through the gap in the wall. Inside I still couldn’t see any cameras, so I crept down the stairs into the warehouse.

I don’t know what I was expecting to see when I got there, but I was just stunned by the size of the place, a vast shadowy cavern of row upon row of towering shelves covered in boxes and crates and plastic-wrapped palettes of smaller boxes. I’d been inside a few big buildings like the power plant downtown, and the old Science Center, but nothing like this. And in the darkness, it was easy to imagine that I had slipped down too far, well below the surface of the earth into some ancient chamber of a lost civilization.

I walked up to the first row of shelves where there was a small sign, but it was too dark for me to make out what it said. And that’s when I realized that my holo-gloves didn’t have any sort of flash light programmed into them. Kicking myself for that oversight, I took out my phone and used the glow from its screen to read the names of the feedstock items on the shelf.

Wood pulp, pine.

Wood pulp, cherry.

Wood pulp, black walnut.

I moved on down the aisle, reading the little signs, working my way through the organic stocks to the plastics, and then finally to the metals. Iron, tin, zinc, lead, copper… more copper… aluminum… way more aluminum than copper…

I had to move to the next aisle, and then the aisle after that to find the rare metals. Lithium… palladium… and there it was, finally. Rubidium. I grabbed five of the slender bars in plastic sheathes and slipped them into my backpack. And then I grabbed three more, just to be safe.

I stepped back.

I did it. It’s going to be okay now.

I turned to head back to the stairs.

“I knew it would be the rubidium.”

The voice echoed through the vast canyons of the warehouse, but it had sounded close. Very close.

I didn’t move.

“When I saw the clips of you online, I was just blown away. I really was. Never seen anything like that sword before.”

It was a man’s voice. I wasn’t sure if he had an accent or not. If so, it was very faint. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, but I pressed up close to the shelf and moved along it toward the aisle as quietly as I could.

“Oh, no, wait, don’t go. It’s okay, I’m one of the good guys,” he said.

Yeah, right. Likely story.

I turned the corner and kept going.

“No, wait, Carmen, stop for a minute.”

I stopped. “How do you know my name?”

“Well, everyone knows your name. From online. I guess someone recognized you and tagged you in the clips.”

I sighed. Of course they did. “Okay, so who are you?”

“Name’s Felix. I’m coming out, so don’t slice me in half or anything, okay?”

A shadow stepped away from the other shadows halfway down the aisle and started walking toward me. He had his hands half-raised to show me they were empty. And when he got closer I saw that he wasn’t much older than me. Short hair, dark clothes, a bag over one shoulder. Nothing special, but nothing scary either.

“Hi, Felix.” I kept my hands at my sides. I had the gloves on, which made me feel better. “That’s close enough.”

He stopped. “Sorry if I scared you.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you. I’ve been here since last night. I figured you might come here, once I figured out how your gloves work.”

I frowned. “What do you mean? You know how they work?”

“Well, not exactly. I mean, once I saw your name, I looked you up. Holographics engineer, Cygnus, terminated two months ago. But then I… well, I pulled up your feedstock order history, you know, to see if I could figure out how you made the gloves, and I saw the rubidium, and I figured that was the key, since it was restricted, and this was the only place you could get more, so I came here to try to meet you.”

“Wait, go back. You pulled up my order history? That’s a private transaction. How’d you get those records?”

“Oh, well, I used to work for Cygnus too. And I sort of kept an access card that I wasn’t supposed to have. I worked right here, actually. I did quality control checks on the metal stocks. I’m a metallurgical technician. Or I was, I should say.”

“Oh yeah? You get fired too?”

“Yes, yes I did,” he said a bit proudly. “And the company was kind enough to alter my employment records just a bit so that now I can’t get a job anywhere, even at the smelting plant.”

“Wow.” Poor guy. I thought the smelting plant never turned anyone away. They always needed bodies down there, fixing the machines, breathing in those fumes. “What’d you do?”

“I invented a new kind of aluminum.” He laughed. “It was kind of by accident, I was just fooling around with some samples in the scanner when it happened. But I came up with an alloy that could replace half a dozen of the expensive stocks, stronger than steel and a better electrical conductor than copper. And it’s really easy to make. I figured it was my golden ticket out of this place, you know? It would make feedstock a lot cheaper for everyone, using my aluminum instead of the pricy stuff. But Cygnus didn’t like that idea so much.”

“Well, yeah, why would they want to replace something expensive with something cheap, and better? That would only be good for everyone else, not for them.”

“Yeah, well, I learned that the hard way.”

“So they got rid of it, and you.” I took a few steps closer to him. I still couldn’t see him very well, but I could see his shy, nervous smile.

“Yeah, they did.”

“When was that?”

“Last year.”

It was weird how nice it was to be having such a normal conversation about my crazy life. None of that serious tone from my dad, none of the hyper-excitement from Dom, none of the sickly sweet pity from Mercy. Just a guy who seemed to get it. “What have you been doing since then?”

“Living at my brother’s place, working odd jobs. I can’t really get anything steady.”

I nodded. “Sorry.”

“Naw, don’t be. I’m not here for me, I’m here for you. What are you up to? I mean, since you’re not working for Cygnus anymore, what are you doing with those gloves now?”

“Actually, I’m selling them to another company.”

“Really? That’s excellent. So your golden ticket paid off?”

“Well, I hope so. Still have to jump through some hoops first.”

“Like what?”

“Like seeing whether these new guys are willing to fight a little legal battle over my patent rights with Cygnus.”

Felix nodded. “Sounds like a big hoop.”

“Yeah, pretty big.”

“So is that why you need the rubidium?”

“Yeah, I need to make another pair of gloves to give to Susquehanna for testing and stuff, but—”

“Whoa, back up. Susquehanna Power? That’s who you’re selling to?”

“Yeah.”

“No, no, no.” He pushed his thick curling hair back as he shook his head. “You can’t go to them.”

“What? Why not?”

“Because they’re owned by Cygnus.”

The world stopped. I wondered if I’d heard him right. He had to be wrong. Cygnus and Susquehanna were both very huge, and both very different.

“Did you hear me?”

“Uhm, yeah.” I nodded. “Are you sure?”

“Sure, I’m sure. See, Cygnus does lots of bulk orders to big companies for feedstock, and there were always two shipping codes. One code for outside companies, who get charged full price, and one code for subsidiaries, who get a discount. Susquehanna gets the discount.”

“But… then why would they do that whole interview with me?”

“Maybe didn’t realize who you were. You know, maybe Cygnus hadn’t put out a major alert on you yet. Or maybe they knew, and they were trying to play it cool, tricking you into turning over the gloves voluntarily. I don’t know.”

I started rubbing my head and pacing across the width of the aisle. This could not be happening. “No, come on, no.” I kicked a crate of plastic rods. The crate didn’t seem to mind but my foot sure did. “Damn it, it’s not fair!”

“I’m sorry.”

I waved him away. I didn’t trust myself to speak. I wasn’t sure if I was going to break down and cry or if I was going to start screaming and tearing off heads, and his was the only head nearby.

“Look, it’s not that bad,” he said. “I worked here for a few years, and I know lots of companies that are totally independent from Cygnus, parts of other corporate families. You can sell your tech to one of them.”

“Are these independent companies big and rich and powerful? Powerful enough to go to court against Cygnus, and win?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Some of them.”

I nodded. I knew he was just trying to help, but he couldn’t help. No one could. Cygnus was holding all the cards and blocking all the exits. They hadn’t just
rigged
the game, they
were
the game, and the house, and all of the other players. There was no way to win.

“There’s really no way to beat them, is there?” My voice sounded really small and far away to me.

“There must be.”

“How? They’ve got all the money. They’ve got the law on their side, and the government in their pocket. They can kidnap people’s families. Break into homes. Throw people in secret prisons.”