Mike Stackpole - Ghost Book Two - The Death Machines

I stepped up to one of the stands and took a closer look at the armor. I’d seen ceramic armor before — big, bulky stuff bolted onto heavy–duty leather — but this stuff was something else. The overlapping plates were as thin as window glass and bonded to what felt like a slim Kevlar suit as fine as spider silk. It seemed impossible that something so light and supple could protect like the heavier stuff, but Thrasher’s bullets had proved that looks could be deceiving, so I was willing to give it a try.

I pulled the torso armor off the stand and slipped it on. It fit close and seemed to cinch in even tighter as I zipped up, almost as if it was grafting itself to my skin. The plates covered my soft bits and overlapped at the joints to minimize exposure. I waved my arms around and twisted at the waist. It all felt easy and natural. Next came the legs, just as snug and protected all the way down to the ankle, and just as easy to move in.

I looked around at the others. They were all doing the same. All suited up in our skin–tight new gear we looked like some shiny superhero team from a pre–apocalypse comic book, which wouldn’t do at all. It was more embarrassing than going around naked.

After a shared laugh, we quickly got dressed again, pulling on our dirty jeans, leathers and boots over the pseudo–chitin armor until we looked like our old selves again.

Much better.

The big energy weapon we’d found was missing some parts, but we grabbed the two LAW rockets, then split up to explore the rest of the base, and me and Athalia took that as an excuse to go off together alone. At least that what I thought we were doing. Athalia seemed to have decided it was a race, and was pacing ahead of me, moving down the dark hallway almost at a trot, her rifle at the ready.

“Hey,” I said, calling after her. “What’s the hurry?”

“Sorry,” she said, but she didn’t slow down. “Now that we’re geared up, I don’t see the point of searching anymore. We should be heading for Cochise. I just want to get it over with and go.”

“Yeah, but you never know what you’ll find in these places. We found the sec pass to Darwin in here, remember? If all the bases were part of the same government organization, we—”

“I know. I get it. I just get anxious is all. All those robots are still killing people out there. I feel like we’re—”

She broke off with a squawk as she peeked through a door, then backed up and fired a burst from her AR into the room.

I ran forward, gun up. “What? What is it?”

She waved me back, shaking her head. “I’m sorry. I… I thought it was a robot.”

I leaned in for a quick look through the door. It was an office. There was no robot. She had shot a computer terminal. I looked around at her.

“Are you okay?”

She shrugged, embarrassed. “We were talking about robots. I… Sorry. Just jumpy, I guess.”

I didn’t get it. She was never jumpy. Even when I’d dragged her into situations where she should have been screaming and diving for cover she had been as cool under fire as a marble statue. So what had changed? Was it us getting together? Was she trying to protect me or something?

There was no chance to ask her about it, because her shots had brought all the others running. They came into the hallway from both ends, guns at the ready.

I held up a hand. “False alarm. Stand down.”

Vargas holstered his piece. “What happened?”

Athalia hung her head. “I shot a computer. I thought it was a robot.”

Angie grunted. “That’s not so good. We need to look in those things. See if they’ve got any info we can use.”

We stepped into the office with the shot–up computer. There was a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet and a poster of a kitten clinging to a rope with the words “Hang In There!” printed across the bottom.

Vargas motioned at Athalia and me. “You two check the desk and those files. We’ll keep searching.”

Athalia looked hurt. “But—”

“Don’t worry. I’ll call you if we find any robots.”

I gave her a pat on the shoulder as the others left the room. “Forget it. Nobody died, right?”

She sighed. “Right. I’ll take the files, you take the desk.”

“Sure.”

There was nothing important in the desk, just a stack of “Employee Orientation Packets,” a sheaf of “Non–Disclosure Agreements” and a book of cartoons about a sad–sack office worker whose boss was a dog. At least I think that’s what it was about.

Athalia slammed closed the bottom file drawer.

“Nothing,” she said. “Employee records and tax information. Also an empty bottle of—”

A piercing whistle interrupted her, followed by Vargas’s shout.

“Ghost! Sister! This way!”

We ran out of the office, ready for action, but when we found the others they were in another office, standing around another computer terminal.

Vargas waved at Athalia. “You’re good at this kind of stuff. Make it work.”

“Just don’t shoot this one,” said Angie.

We stepped around the desk and looked at the monitor. It was on, with a window in the middle of it that said, “Enter Password.”

Athalia held up her hands. “I can read and write code, and I know what to do if a computer is broken, but I’m not a cryptologist or a hacker. I can’t guess a password for you.”

“You can’t get around it somehow?” Vargas asked.

Athalia shook her head. “Sorry. Not my thing.”

Vargas sighed. “Alright, fine. Maybe we can find one without—”

Thrasher cut him off with an upraised hand. “Stop.”

We all stopped and looked around at him. Thrasher spoke so rarely it was always a bit of a surprise when he did — like hearing Bigfoot talk.

“Que pasa, Gilbert?” said Vargas.

Thrasher pulled the desk’s top drawer all the way out and turned it over, dumping the contents on the floor. Taped to the bottom of the drawer was a three–by–five card with a single word on it. “Mellon.”

“Try that,” said Thrasher.

Like I’ve said before: hidden depths to that boy.

Angie sighed as she sat down at the desk. “Stupid guy didn’t even know how to spell melon.”

She typed the word into the password field and there was a friendly “Bing!”

The desktop appeared and Angie opened the file structure and started poking around, then looked up at the rest of us. “This is gonna take a while. You keep searching.”

“I could do that, if you want,” said Athalia.

Angie shook her head. “It’s fine. I’ll call you if I run into any problems.”

Everybody except Ace — who stayed with Angie to protect her? help her? canoodle with her? — filed out of the office and split up again, wandering around in the dark halls of Sleeper One, digging through closets and lockers for anything interesting.

Well, there was only one more interesting thing down there, and I’m the one who found it.

It was in a big room marked “Simulation Training Department” which looked more like a computer workshop or a lab than any training room I’d ever seen. There were workbenches with bits and pieces of computers all over them, as well as soldering irons, tools, goggles with wires running out of them, gloves with battery packs taped to them, things that looked like white plastic wands with light bulbs on the ends, and more tiny little screws than you could shake a stick at. The interesting thing, however, was in a shed the size of a bank vault in the center of the room.

Athalia and I peeked inside the shed, expecting I don’t know what, a robot? A giant gun on wheels? Instead we found something that looked a lot like an old pre–apocalypse kiddy ride like they used to have outside supermarkets back when there were supermarkets. It was a cockpit of some kind, with lots of controls and gauges and switches, but it wasn’t connected to any vehicle. Instead it was sitting in the center of some kind of gyroscope–ish structure that looked like it could turn the cockpit in any direction, and all that was connected by heavy cables to a computer set against one wall of the shed.