John Krygelski - The Aegis Solution

Tillie jammed the screwdriver into the first screw head and began turning. Moving close to her, Elias whispered, “Do you know what…?”

She paused and held the screwdriver in front of her lips to shush him, before returning to her work. Soon, all of the screws were neatly lined up on the floor. Placing the screwdriver next to them, she gripped the sides of the front panel and lifted and pulled. With a THUNK the panel came away. Inside the box was a transformer of some sort, Elias knew. By the size and the steady hum coming from it, he guessed that it was fairly high voltage.

Ignoring the gear inside, Tillie turned the front panel around and leaned it against the wall. Fastened to the inside of the panel was a vertical metal tray, open at the top. She reached inside and pulled out a several-inch-thick sheaf of large papers, bound on one end by a blue wrapper. Elias recognized the papers as a set of plans.

Cautiously, she laid the plans out on the floor and rolled them up, whispering to Elias to reattach the transformer panel. As he did, she found three rubber bands and gently slid all of them onto the roll, careful not to catch the edge of the top sheet and tear it. This task completed, Tillie hefted the bulky roll, grabbed some supplies and, with a final glance around, exited the area which she had made her home for the past several years.

Boehn, hoping his face did not betray the fact that he felt like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, attempted a casual grin. “Good evening, Doctor Kreitzmann. I must be developing a case of OCD. I was certain that I had neglected to file my report. I couldn’t sleep until I checked.”

Kreitzmann’s smile was wary as he responded, “I see. Everything’s in order, I trust.”

“Quite so. Now I can get some sleep.”

“Excellent. I’ll see you in the morning, then.”

“Yes! Bright and early.”

Boehn walked off in the direction of his quarters. Kreitzmann stood at the door to the lab, staring at his associate’s retreating back. After the man had turned the corner, Kreitzmann opened the lab door and entered, walking directly to the terminal Boehn had used minutes before, placing his hand on the back of the flat-screen monitor, and feeling the residual warmth from it.

To himself, he muttered, “He did tell me that he was using it.”

Switching the system on, Kreitzmann waited for the login sequence to complete before he entered his personal password. Triggered by his top-level access, the monitor displayed a much different interface from what Boehn had seen minutes earlier. He selected the icon labeled “security admin” and waited a moment for the new screen. He then clicked on “tracking.” Defining the parameters, he chose “search.” In the blink of an eye, the monitor was displaying, in raw form, all of the activity which had occurred on this station beginning at 6:00 p.m. this evening and ending a minute ago.

The last entry showed that the terminal had been used to access Doctor Bonillas’ most recent reports and lab notes, and that they had been moved to the USB port, an action which would normally delete them from the system. He was glad that the system was configured to delete nothing. Doctor Bonillas’ work was safely archived onto a separate file system simultaneous to her upload.

While he stared at the screen, Kreitzmann’s eyes narrowed and the muscles in his jaw clenched, as anger began to slowly build within him. The task had been executed under Dr. Bonillas’ password, not Boehn’s, and the timestamp on the activity showed that the file transfer had taken place minutes ago, obviously at the time Boehn was in the lab and Bonillas was not.

He keyed the internal phone system, and a voice answered instantly.

“This is Doctor Kreitzmann. Please meet me in Lab 1C immediately.”

Kenneth Mortenson parked as close as he possibly could to the entrance. The intensity of the wind was beyond anything he had ever seen in his entire life, despite having grown up in El Paso. Now that he had parked, his Camry bounced and shook as if it were positioned atop a fun house platform instead of solid pavement. Making a point of parking his car so that the driver’s door was on the leeward side, he grabbed his backpack from the passenger seat, slid one arm through the canvas loops, and opened the door.

Despite the car’s orientation, the door was instantly jerked from his grip and pivoted violently, disintegrating the steel stops on the hinges. Mentally preparing himself, Kenneth climbed out and was almost knocked to the ground. Using the side of the gyrating car for support, he circled around it, turning directly into the face of the wind.

As he trudged on, leaning far forward, he was barely able to see the turnstile due to the dust stinging his eyes, his route cluttered with the shattered and twisted remnants of the solar panels which had ripped from the roof of Aegis. He had to dodge chunks of debris from this wreckage as the incessant winds caught pieces and rocketed them through the air. Taking fifteen minutes to traverse a distance which, in normal conditions, would have taken one or two, he discovered that as he reached the final twenty yards before the entrance, the wind lessened and he was able to walk in a somewhat more upright position. As this was his first trip to Aegis, he had no idea that he was standing where the plywood tunnel had been constructed, an earlier casualty of the gale. He stopped at the turnstile and looked back in the direction of the parking lot and the surrounding desert, surprised to see several more vehicles, headlights on, braving the tempest.

Marilyn stared out the window, looking at the tailings from the open-pit mining operations south of Tucson. Her plane was minutes away from landing, and her mind wandered back to the lie she had told to Faulk this morning. Knowing that her boss controlled the communications to Elias, she could think of no other way to get a message to him other than personally. Knowing Faulk’s propensity for checking out what people told him, as it had been a task assigned to her many times since he had taken over the position formerly held by Elias, she kept her story vague about needing to visit an old friend who was ill.

Uncharacteristically, he had not inquired as to the name of the fictitious old friend, and she neglected to supply it. In fact, he seemed vaguely distracted as she talked to him, almost as if he did not care whether she left or not.

Elias, Wilson, and Tillie were huddled around a scarred dining room table in one of the apartments in ZooCity. They had agreed that this was not to be their new base, but should give them some privacy for a time while they figured out their next move. The blueprints were spread out on the table before them.

“When I was preparing to come in, I had a few pages showing the overall layout and the raceways, but nowhere near what you’ve got here. How did you get these?” Elias asked.

Tillie told them about her first day at Aegis and the chance meeting and chat with the contractor who had built it.

“Just as he was leaving, and after the main door had been set, he remembered that he had left his inspection set of plans inside. At that point the door had been closed, and it was impossible for him to go back in and retrieve them; it was too late. So, he told me where they were and that I could have them if I wanted.”

“You knew how to read plans?”

“I learned,” she told Elias, a hint of pride in her voice. “I must have spent about a thousand hours staring at them, flipping between the pages, walking the areas they corresponded to. Eventually, they started to make sense. I never did decipher the gobbledygook on the electrical pages, or the mechanical stuff. Most of the plumbing was fairly obvious. But the real gold mine was on the ‘A’ pages and the civil engineering pages. That’s where I found the layouts and accesses for all of the secret passageways and the storm system. It’s all there.”