John Krygelski - The Aegis Solution

Elias could hear Wilson and Stone catching up, but asked, “What is?”

The smile frozen on her freckled face, Tillie answered, “The deal is…I came here to die, remember? That was the point.”

She glanced past him and saw that the two men were right behind Elias. “Can we keep moving now? I promise to keep it slow.”

She unceremoniously turned her back to Elias and began walking. He followed, and within a minute or two they arrived at the first of the inlets.

“Anyone want a break?”

“Tillie, don’t be a smart aleck,” Wilson snorted testily.

“Just trying to be nice.”

“You have to try?” Stone commented.

Tillie whirled around to face him and stuck out her tongue, blowing a raspberry in his direction.

“Children, please!” Elias exhorted.

Tillie turned back around and continued her pace on the ledge. The others followed quietly until reaching the next inlet. Entering it, she announced, “The riser isn’t far from here.”

Within minutes they were standing beneath the round concrete drainpipe. At the top, the steel grate was visible. Tillie grabbed for one of the access rungs; Elias beat her to it and, still toting the duffel bag and rifle, climbed to the top, with her following right behind. There was no rust, but the grit from the sand had packed into the tight space between the grate and the collar. It took three grunting shoves before the lid broke loose, a shower of fine dust and dirt cascading down upon them. He slid it to the side and climbed up another rung, poking his head above the collar.

“This doesn’t look good,” he barked, once again shouting to be heard over the din of the winds.

“What’s wrong?”

Elias did not answer. Instead, he climbed the rest of the way out of the drainpipe, clearing the way for Tillie to follow. When her head cleared the top, she quickly looked around and, seeing what had occurred, muttered to herself, “Good God!”

Wilson, who was the next to come up, heard the exchange but did not inquire. Rather, he hurried the final distance. Pulling himself out of the manhole and flopping onto the powdery soil, he took in the scene with his own eyes.

As Stone crawled out right behind him, Wilson remarked, “It seems that the wind has picked up a bit.”

“What do you m…?” Stone stopped in mid-sentence as he also took in what had happened. “This looks like the bottom of a dumpster on a construction site.”

The atrium, without the benefit of Wilson’s horticultural obsession, coupled with the absence of any caretaking by the other residents, had been nothing but a desiccated sandbox. But now, instead of four walls and a dirt floor, the area was filled with a jumbled pile of broken steel struts, millions of shards of shiny black glass, twisted and mangled aluminum framing, and hundreds of yards of copper wiring.

“What the hell happened?” Tillie gasped, barely audible above the whistling, rampaging wind.

“Those are the solar panels from the roof,” Elias answered.

“It looks like some giant just swept them into the atrium with a swipe of his arm.”

Wilson twisted around and sat upright, dangling his feet into the storm drain from which the group had emerged. “I’m certain the entire solar collector system up there is…was tied together. The panels would all be interconnected. One weak link, one vulnerable bolt not completely torqued down, would be enough to start a chain reaction. It would violently lift, catching and tearing the adjacent panels as it went. In effect, there would be an avalanche driven by the wind instead of gravity, crashing and ripping more sections as it gathered momentum until it found this atrium, into which it all tumbled.”

Elias stood up and slowly turned around, taking in the details of the disaster. As the others rose, Wilson, his voice for the first time conveying something more than his steady academic tone, said, “I believe we might be running out of time.”

“We’ve lost two Accelerants! How is that even possible, Mr. Killeen?”

The young man, still in his twenties, and for the first time in his brief life feeling that he was in over his head, answered, “I’m still not sure, sir. It’s a little difficult to piece together exactly what happened.”

“A little difficult? Maybe you could provide me with your best guess.”

Stinging from the overt sarcasm, the subordinate began talking quickly. “They might have been prepared for the visit. We found unburned remnants of netting on the perimeter of the area where the shack had been.”

“We already knew the old man was anticipating us, you fool. That’s why he filled his little courtyard with all the vegetation, to slow down our Accelerants!”

“Yes, yes. I know. But it looks as though there were other measures — the netting…defensive barriers…and this.”

Killeen stepped carefully over the heaps of debris and still-smoldering wood until he reached the spot where the porch had once stood. Pointing downward, he explained, “They had an escape route.”

The other man looked down at the opening to the storm drain and said nothing.

“We didn’t discover this until after the fire was out, and even then, not immediately. We had assumed they died in the blaze. The fire caused the roof to collapse, and we were digging through the rubble looking for their bodies when we found it.”

The man stared down into the manhole, feeling his blood pressure rise. “You still haven’t told me how we lost two Accelerants? Are you telling me Charon is that good?”

“No sir,” the younger man replied hastily. “From what we can tell, I think it was a fluke.”

“A FLUKE! We lost two subjects, who were both the result of years of the most advanced immersion and training, to a fluke?”

Sucking in a deep breath, Killeen plunged ahead. “I guess that was an unfortunate choice of words, but apparently one of the Accelerants was wounded from gunfire. The doctor said that the wounds wouldn’t have been fatal. The other had been knocked unconscious before this happened.”

At the end of his sentence, the man had swept his arm around to indicate the overall area surrounding them.

“Evidently, while both Accelerants were down, all of these solar panels crashed into the atrium. With their speed and agility, they probably would have been able to outrun or outmaneuver the metal and glass. But they were both incapacitated before it happened — one from the gunshots, the second from some other cause. They were both crushed to death.”

Before the older man could respond, they were joined by a third. “I may have your answer on why the second Accelerant was unconscious at the time.”

“That would be appreciated, Doctor.”

“After we pulled the heavy steel frame off him…which was the cause of death, by the way…my assistant and I put him on a field stretcher. This area was far too cluttered for us to use our gurney, so we left it outside the atrium, in the corridor. I helped him carry the stretcher to the corridor, and it’s a good thing I did.”

“Why, Doctor?” the older man inquired, trying to hide the edge in his voice.

Oblivious to his superior’s testiness, the doctor resumed, “Out here it was far too windy for me to notice it; however, as soon as we reached the corridor, the smell of Sevoflurane was unmistakable. The front of his tunic reeked of it.”

“Sevoflurane?”

“Anesthesia. One of the two compounds we use frequently.”

“Anesth…! How could one of our Accelerants be anesthetized out here, in the middle of a mission?”

“Really quite clever, actually. And this would explain a couple of other incidents which had us befuddled in the past.”