The Slave Warrior Page 10

  After a few moments of shocked murmurs and discussion, the group got down to business. For the next two hours, Brogan discussed with the BL rebels a variety of ways to assassinate Priest, destroy the cyborg army, and destroy whatever efforts Priest might be making toward building nuclear warheads. They sent word to the Buffalo BL cells to let them know their code was compromised.

  At the end of the two hours, the group had some rough plans. One of the members had a vid-phone with him, so Brogan called General Veracruz to let him know their status and plans. Using BL code, she told him she and Sandra had arrived in Boston and enlisted the help of a BL cell to accomplish the three goals. “Please advise,” she concluded the message. Within an hour, General Veracruz responded.

  “Understood. Will convey info to Claudette. Going to San Antonio to look for original cyborg and nuclear weapons plans. When located will send you shut-down protocol. Keep in touch. Good hunting.”

  Along with the message, General Veracruz sent vid-phone coordinates to connect with Claudette, as well as her apartment address. Using the Aunt Pat moniker, Brogan sent Mouse a message saying, “Coming to town. Can’t wait to see you again. Meet at apartment at 7 pm. Remember your friend, Bee, from UTA? Surprise! She’ll be with me. Lots of chocolate chip cookies, too.”

  With the help of the BL cell, Sandra and Brogan located Claudette’s apartment, managed to find some chocolate chip cookies, and waited on a nearby bench for her to arrive home from work. To continue the Aunt Pat illusion, Sandra now dressed as an elderly woman. Brogan remembered seeing pictures of Aunt Pat, so she helped her with a disguise; a gray wig over her bald head, rimless glasses, a cane, and an old-fashioned style dress. Members of the cell scrounged around and found items she needed for the costume. Brogan dressed in a typical UTA college jumpsuit and wore a long blond wig to cover her shaved head.

  As Claudette approached her apartment, Brogan jumped up and proclaimed loudly, “Mouse, how are you?” If Brogan had called her “Claudette,” she might not have recognized her since she hadn’t seen Brogan since she left Van Horn. By calling her by the name used by BL rebel forces, she knew immediately it had to be Brogan.

  “Oh, my God!” Claudette responded. “Bee, it has been too long. How are things? And, Aunt Pat, how are you doing? The trip surely wore you to a frazzle. Let’s get you both inside and I’ll make a cup of tea to go with those chocolate chip cookies I’m sure you brought with you.”

  To anyone observing the three women, they were simply family or friends uniting after a long absence. They all played their parts perfectly. The trooper assigned to watch Claudette, sighed and clicked off his augmented eye implant recording the exchange. Another long, boring and useless night of surveillance ahead of him.

  Chapter Ten

  The Hazards of Research

  General Veracruz and a handful of White Warriors under his command approached San Antonio just after midnight. It was August, with very high humidity, even in the middle of the night. Although their rebel spies assured them Priest’s soldiers left after the Battle of Austin, they took no chances.

  At least they did not need to deal with a congested area of the suburb. Scott’s dad told him the UT’s research division worked on artificial intelligence during the last century, using the huge Southwest Research Institute facilities located on the west side of San Antonio. During the height of its research, the 1200-acre facility was one of the largest in the country with more than 2700 scientists, engineers and support staff. One of the general’s aides told him the assassinated prime minister used the facility to develop much of the fire-power and intelligence which led to the winning of World War III.

  The rebels shut down their motorcycles about a half mile outside the gated research facility and quietly moved forward in full alert. No lights showed at the facility. Whether it meant it was no longer in use, or it was shut down for the night, the general decided to take no chances. Using hand signals, the troops carefully moved toward the sole security gate. Although there was no sign of anyone living, old, dusty bones littered the ground. It was too dark to tell if they were human or animal.

  Finding no security guard and the gate unlocked, they continued to move forward, spreading out, laser guns drawn and faceplates down looking for heat signatures. Nothing. Based on Scott’s dad’s directions, they moved toward a large building in the center. Originally called Thomas Baker Slick Memorial Library, the plans were supposed to be inside the building.

  “Dad said there is an underground vault below the library for the most sensitive, top secret research plans,” Scott told the general. “Only he and a couple of other scientists had codes to the vault. Fortunately, it does not require eye or handprints, only the code. But, he also said there are all kinds of booby traps hidden in the area, so we need to be cautious. They were activated during the war to prevent terrorists from accessing sensitive documents.”

  General Veracruz was very uneasy. Such an important research facility and no guards? Something wasn’t right. He held up his fist in the symbol for “stop,” and motioned for everyone to hit the dirt. His instincts were right. About the same time rebels hit the ground, a laser array shot out from a rather drab looking building just ahead of them. If they had been standing, they would have been hit. Even with their laser resistant body armor someone could have been killed.

  He was proud of the rebels. Without hesitation, they quickly crawled forward on their bellies. Three White Warriors approached the building. When they were close enough they lobbed grenades, stood up and ran away from the building. The rest of the warriors dodged behind other buildings for cover. The building exploded.

  Finding no other resistance, the rebels quickly moved to the library. A contingent stayed outside, alert for any imperial soldiers. A handful of warriors did a quick search of each of three floors but found no one and encountered no traps. Once they gave the “all clear,” the rest moved toward the underground vault. The general walked down the steps to the basement, after several of the warriors repelled down the stairwell to make sure it was safe. Finding no resistance, they carefully approached the ten-foot-high vault door.

  Scott entered the long code from his dad. With a click the door began to open. Before anyone entered, Major Ridge indicated everyone should stop. She threw a smoke grenade into the room. Immediately a heavy steel gate with sharp points on the bottom slammed down, just past the vault door; another potential death trap. Apparently, the gate was released by a motion sensor.

  General Veracruz ordered several of the White Warriors to stand guard, half upstairs and the other half by the vault door. He was uneasy the enemy might have been alerted by the sounds of the explosion when they entered the facility. He wanted to take only Major Ridge and Scott with him into the vault to retrieve the cyborg and nuclear plans. He saw Scott was pale and trembling. This was not what Scott signed up for. He was an engineer, not a warrior. He saw him gulp hard, trying to control his nerves.

  “You okay, Scott?”

  Scott swallowed, threw back his shoulders and said quietly, “Yes, Sir.”

  “Good man. Any ideas, Major?”

  Before the major spoke, Scott tapped the general on the shoulder and pointed to a small keypad to the right of the steel gate.

  “Ah, good eye, Scott. Let’s see if the same code will work to release the gate.”

  On shaky legs, Scott walked over and entered the identical code into the key pad. The gate lifted.

  “Major, what do you advise as our next step in this gauntlet?”

  Major Ridge pulled out a large knife. The major was about 5’8” tall, beautiful and very muscular. She was often underestimated because of her beauty. But, the major was an expert in hand-held weapons and karate. Her long auburn hair was kept tightly wound into a bun on the back of her neck.

  She carefully tossed the knife on the floor. At first nothing happened, and then with a loud crack, the floor simply collapsed.

  Now what? The major, who grew up on one of the few remain
ing cattle ranches in west Texas, pulled out a thin nylon rope from one of the pockets on her body armor and made a lasso. A heavy steel half-column stood on the other side of the now non-existent floor, topped with a keypad. She expertly tossed the lasso across the cavern and missed. After the third attempt, the lasso looped over the column. Pulling carefully on the rope to tighten it, the major swung herself across the hole in the floor. Once across, she punched in the code and the floor came back up.

  “Good thing you are an experienced cowboy,” the general laughed. Before they stepped on to the floor, the major tossed the end of the lasso to the general.

  “Tie the rope around your waist, General. Wouldn’t want you falling in case the floor goes out from under you.”

  The general carefully walked forward with the rope around his waist, Scott following close behind, one hand on the general’s shoulder. The floor stayed put; a one-time trap. With the three of them safely on the other side, Scott looked around. No door and no apparent way forward. He knelt and inspected the floor. He saw faint scuff marks from where a door scraped it. Putting his hand on the wall in front of him, he carefully moved it back and forth, gradually moving higher. At shoulder height, a virtual key pad suddenly appeared. Again, he entered the code. The trio moved back as a door began to move.

  “Good job, Scott! We’ll make a soldier out of you yet!”

  Scott blushed at the praise. His shaking had diminished. Ahead of them were rows and rows of filing cabinets, each cabinet about seven-feet high, two-feet wide and four drawers. As they walked down the first row they noticed labels on the front of each drawer. Drawers appeared to be in alphabetical order, so they began looking for “artificial intelligence,” and “nuclear.” Nothing.

  The general remembered something Brogan said in her last message: “Sandra indicated AI units more cyborg than AI.” He quickly moved to “c” section. There were dozens of filing cabinets with “cyborg” labels on the front. He shook his head at the thought of the people who developed the cyborgs so long ago relying on written information rather than encrypted electronic data. Although, they wouldn’t know until they started looking if the plans were printed or were in electronic files.

  “Okay, we obviously can’t take everything with us. Major, call your warriors and ask five of them to join us. Tell them about the traps and how to disarm them. We’re going to need some help going through these files. Scott, what do we need to look for, specifically?”

  The major stepped to the entrance and made a call with her radio while Scott and the general started looking through files.

  “Sir, my dad said we should look for any design sketches or plans for the units, plus anything written that talks about shut down or words like, ‘fail safe’ or ‘termination’. Looking for the nuclear bomb making info should be easier. Any electronic files should be labeled.”

  “Okay, why don’t you start at the far end and I’ll start at the beginning and focus on cyborg files. You work your way toward me. When the other warriors arrive, each will work on a different section, with some of them looking for nuclear bomb-making files. It’s a good thing we insisted the warriors all know how to read.”

  Within a few minutes the other warriors arrived. After giving them instructions and dividing up filing cabinets, the group went to work. Piles of possible useful information and electronic discs began to accumulate on the floor behind them. It soon became clear someone needed to make some judgement calls on what was relevant and what wasn’t. Since Scott was the only engineer in the group, the general pulled him away from looking through files to begin narrowing down what they collected. The group had been working for a couple of hours when they heard a yell from Scott.

  “Eureka!” Almost buried in mounds of information where he sat on the floor, he had a huge grin on his face as he waved a large schematic drawing above his head in one hand and an electronic file in the other. They gathered around him.

  “This drawing shows every switch, connection and pulse to make cyborgs work,” he said excitedly. “And this electronic disc is labeled as the design schematic and probably includes not only how they were built, but how to turn them off.”

  “Okay, so how do you turn them off?” the general asked eagerly.

  “Well, it’s easy, really,” Scott said. “The drawing seems to indicate you just quit feed electricity to their battery packs. They must be recharged with solar energy every eight hours or they begin to lose power. So, if we can shut down their access to power, they cannot function. It also means only eight hours of juice. If we get them into a battle situation and keep them fighting for more than eight hours, they will freeze up.”

  The general was stunned. “You mean to tell me it is a simple as shutting off a light switch?”

  “Well, not exactly, since their power storage unit is on their back with eight hours of power. I guess if you can disconnect the storage unit, then yeah, it would be like turning off a light switch. Although, I’m not sure I’d want to be that close to a seven-foot tall, virtually indestructible cyborg,” Scott laughed nervously.

  The other warriors laughed with him.

  “Now I just need to find information on nuclear bomb making,” said Scott as he untangled himself from a huge mound of data files. He walked over to the warriors working through nuclear files.

  “Find anything yet?” he asked.

  One of the soldiers looked up with a quizzical look on his face. “I’m not sure, sir. I’m not an engineer, so I’ve just been looking for nuclear fission.”

  He held up a manual with “SILEX” stamped on the front. “I don’t know if this helps, or not, but you might want to look at it.”

  Scott started looking through it. Suddenly he collapsed to the floor.

  “Are you okay, sir?” the trooper asked.

  Scott managed to squeak out the words, “Get the general over here. Fast.”

  The trooper ran over to the general, who helped to stuff papers into backpacks. Scott was in a daze as he continued to leaf through the manual. Suddenly a loud voice broke his attention.

  “Well, what is it, Scott?” It was the general.

  “Sir, you should see this. If the process Priest is using to enrich uranium is SILEX, we are in big trouble.”

  The general leafed quickly through the manual, but it was all Greek to him. He handed it back to Scott, who got slowly back to his feet.

  “Give me the cliff notes version, Scott.”

  “If I remember my brief nuclear physics studies correctly, back in the late 1900’s a company in Australia developed a process to separate isotopes by laser excitation, called SILEX for short. The process had the potential to be a threat to global nuclear security because it greatly shortened the uranium enrichment process. The process was purchased, secured and basically banned by the Atomic Energy Act in early 2000. This looks like the original manual explaining the process. We don’t know if this is what Priest is using, or if it is all a bluff on his part to scare us into surrendering.”

  “Great work, Scott,” the general said as he slapped him on the back. He turned to the other warriors. “Now, let’s get out of here. Scott, you need to come up with some guidance for Brogan on what to look for, so she knows if Priest is using SILEX process or some other old-style process to build a bomb. We must know the time needed to respond and how to stop him. Send this information to Brogan and Sandra ASAP. Scott, what’s the quickest way to contact them?”

  “I’m guessing Mouse is our best resource.” He turned to the major. “Major, can I use your vid-phone to send her a message?”

  The major handed over her vid-phone and Scott quickly sent an encrypted message to Claudette telling her what they found and asking her to convey the information to Brogan and Sandra. In the message, Scott told them he needed to do more research on the nuclear question and get back to them with the info as soon as he had it.

  “Okay, Scott, let’s go. Grab what you need for the answers to your questions. Brogan needs to know.” The genera
l turned to his troops. “Great work, everybody. Let’s head home.”

  Before they left, the general gave instructions to destroy information in the room, rather than risk it falls into the wrong hands. They set timed explosive charges and the rebels headed back to Laredo to continue to move the rest of their forces and citizens away from Laredo, just in case Priest followed through on his threat to bomb them.

  Chapter Eleven

  A Reluctant Villain

  Emperor Priest paced the floor in his exclusive suite at the top of the glass pyramid serving as his headquarters. His two cyborg units stood at attention by the door. Dr. Herbert Schneider sat nervously at a small desk, his hand-held vid-recorder ready to give his report to the emperor. Herbert had only been in the position of nuclear advisor to the emperor for a week. The only reason he got the job was because he just happened to be around at the time the emperor made a surprise appearance in the public relations office very early one morning. While Herbert repaired one of the supervisor’s computers, the emperor showed up, about a week after the last PR director had been murdered by the cyborg.

  Herbert mentally kicked himself for not slacking off as so many of his colleagues tended to do. If he hadn’t shown up earlier than anyone else, he might have missed coming to the emperor’s attention. A diminutive man in his 50’s, barely 5’5” tall, skinny and shy, Herbert spent his whole life in obscurity; which was fine with him. He always wore rumpled beige tunic and trousers, usually covered with ink or other unnamed substances. His rarely combed, thinning gray hair tended to stick out all over his head. Bushy gray eyebrows hung over deep-set brown eyes. His years of study and work with computers gave him a perpetual hunch in his back.

  He chose to hide in the library of his home town of Ipswich as a child, since the bullies would never think to look for him there. He was the only son of a poor laborer who cleaned streets for a living. The only person he felt close to as a child was his mother. After she died when he was twelve years old, his father became an alcoholic and Herbert was left to fend for himself. He lost himself in books at the local library, imagining himself the muscular hero, fighting to protect beautiful damsels in distress. The head of the library, Mrs. Hess, whose only son died at a young age, took him under her wing. She made sure he was fed and clothed and showed him the joys of exploring other worlds than just fantasy.