Armen Gharabegian - Protocol 7

Is that why they took it from me? he wondered now, for the first time. Because I was too pushy? Or because I really thought I could keep secrets from them?

It didn’t matter anymore. He would find out in the next few minutes if he had been right about shielding the electromagnetic pulse at power-up or not.

Andrew’s bulky safe phone buzzed in the pocket of Hayden’s jacket. He pulled it out and barked into it. It was Simon, babbling about the problems with his team. Hayden simply didn’t have the time-or the interest-to tell him that if the power-up test didn’t work up to specs, it wasn’t going to matter who was waiting upstairs or knocking on the goddamn door, the Spector simply wouldn’t have enough power to push itself under the water. He got off the phone as quickly as he could and immediately forgot why Simon had called in the first place.

He had work to do.

“Ready?” Teah said.

“No,” he answered honestly, “but let’s do it anyway.”

She tilted her head in an entirely un-robotic way and said, “Seventeen seconds to power-up.” Huge dynamos, like something out of an ancient Frankenstein movie, ground to life at opposite ends of the room, their whine moving up the scale. And those are just the little ones, he thought.

A huge power coupling attached to the underside of the Spector, thick as his waist, suddenly twitched like a living thing. Good, he thought, though he was startled by the thing’s power. Just how it’s supposed to act.

He moved quickly to the security consoles. This was where he would watch the data on the power-up and monitor the coherence of the shield. Even if the electromagnetic pulse was twice the size that he expected, he could still keep it from being detected by triggering the appropriate counter-pulse by hand.

“Six seconds,” Teah said, rolling up to stand close behind him. It was oddly comforting to have a friend-even a cybernetic one-nearby at a moment like this. “Five.”

“Oh, do give it a rest, darlin’,” he said, scanning the console.

Lightning spidered out of the dynamos. The skin of Spector I glittered, and tiny fingers of lightning rippled all along the surface, making it look as solid as steel one moment and as insubstantial as a semi-translucent insect the next.

The indicators on the console danced for him. Green…green…

“Son of a gun,” he said to Teah. “I do believe it-”

Suddenly, Teah’s massive cylindrical right arm smashed into the console with tremendous power. The clash of metal against metal, of shattering glass and silicon, drove him back. “Teah!” he shouted. “What the-”

She tore her arm free and brought it high. Hayden had to jump away to avoid the swing as she rammed it into the console again.

Suddenly, Teah was possessed, smashing apart Hayden’s creation in some demonic rampage. As he shielded himself from her rage, he knew there was only one explanation: she was being controlled by Remote Access Intervention. The drawback of AIs was that unlike humans they could be remotely manipulated, and this made them both vulnerable and-in the wrong hands-unpredictable and dangerous. Until now though, he’d thought that Teah was shielded from this attack. He hadn’t considered the possibility that RAI was able to penetrate the computer code.

Hayden covered his head as sparks illuminated the walls of the cavern.

“Teah, no!” he said. “Don’t do it, don’t! The shield won’t hold; they’ll know!”

“Power test complete in five seconds,” Teah said calmly, as if she wasn’t tearing the security console to pieces right in front of him. “Three…two…one.”

There was a massive whump as the electromagnetic pulse-the one that Hayden was supposed to counter-boomed through the room and beyond. Hayden could feel it echo through his body, making his bones ring like a broken bell.

The Spector glowed with a ghostly blue light. The remaining indicators still flickering on the ruined console were green. The vessel had passed the test-it was functioning perfectly.

The only problem was that now everyone from here to the orbiting satellite ring would know.

Undisclosed Location

Seventeen miles northeast of the safe house, in a remote location only a few knew existed, the electromagnetic pulse from the Spector boomed like the sudden, unmistakable blast of a not-so-distant bomb.

The junior surveillance officer on duty noticed the spike on six different sensor outputs at the same instant. He almost shot out of his seat as he touched the communications panel and shouted into it.

“Sir! I need you to look at this, now.”

Two supervising officers, Dalton and Bryan, appeared out of the shadows in an instant. They recognized the lights and read-outs without being told what they were looking at.

“What the hell?” Bryan said, almost in awe.

“Hold on a second,” he said to Dalton. “Let’s do a calibration of the system. I don’t have a good feeling about this.”

Bryan requested the computer do a calibration of the sensor array, and then asked the young duty officer if he had a location.

“North Oxford, sir,” the younger man said immediately. “The Spector site.”

“Son of a-”

An artificial intelligence module had leapt to life the instant the pulse hit the sensors; now it had finished its multivariate situational analysis. It interrupted the humans to tell them it had processed all the information available, sent out instructions for more data, and received and processed it in the time they had spoken. “Security breach in Oxford Construction Facility,” the AI said, almost sounding bored. “Counterforce Protocol initiated.”

The AI had deployed an armed counter-insurgency team before the officers even had a chance to recognize that something was wrong.

Four miles further to the north, in a concealed and sensor-shielded airfield, the blades of a specialized chopper were already beginning to turn, and a team of special operations officers in full gear ran for the aircraft, ready for the task. The helicopter itself was pitch black and oddly fibrous, its hull completely invisible to sonar, radar, and mass detector. No military markings or civilian call letters were visible; they couldn’t be, they would jeopardize the secrecy of the safe house.

It would take them less then twelve minutes to reach the facility.

Spector Safe House, 12:29 PM

Hayden turned on his heels and ran.

Teah was still at the security console, pounding it to bits with every ounce of her cybernetic strength. Hayden knew with absolute certainty that the entire plan was blown.

The Spector he had worked so hard to make, the vehicle he was this close to taking for his own was lost to him forever.

He knew all about the Counterforce protocols. Hell, he’d helped to write them years earlier. They were an armed response to attempted sabotage or invasion, and that was exactly what he was doing. He knew where the Special Forces detachment that would respond was stationed, and he knew exactly when they’d arrive.

I have to get the hell out of here, he thought…and at the same time, he was formulating a Plan B-the image of the completed Spector flashed before his eyes, and he saw himself hijacking the vessel bound for Antarctic continent. A last, desperate stratagem that he and Simon and the team just might be able to pull off…

If I can get what I need out of here before they arrive, he told himself.

And he already knew the timing: he had twelve minutes.

* * *

The chopper hovered over the surface of the Thames so low that it churned the water into a gray froth. Seven members of the Counterforce team dressed in black SWAT uniforms and night vision goggles jumped out of the cargo hold and hit the water with barely a splash.