Blackquest 40

PART FOUR

I hear something. The hum of a hard drive? A faraway voice? It's better than sixteen, but still not that helpful.

She'll have to go for a ride.

This will not be easy. I can't cut her loose with path-finding; she may zip right into Oleg's boot. I'll need to control her manually, and Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt is no Nintendo Game Boy. Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt has no steering wheel, no buttons. I'll have to turn, accelerate, and decelerate by text command, all blind, guided only by lat-long coordinates. I'll need to get my Hot Wheel close to the large open areas of Three, where Oleg might be talking, but not so close as to arouse suspicion.

I inch her forward, ACCELERATE, 2—two being a scalar value between one and ten. I listen closely to her audio.

A soft bump.

She's hit a cubicle border or a wall, I'm guessing. I send the command SPIN_BACKWARDS, 5, 2, then ACCELERATE, 2 again. She goes another few seconds before crashing again.

Driving like this is maddening. For five minutes, I tap out commands and the souped-up Hot Wheel dutifully executes them. Finally, a dull tone in the audio feed rises out of the background to a discernible level.

A male voice.

Oleg's.

"...challenging, but achievable," he is saying. "Now you are rested. Great obstacles lay before us, but that is good. Great teams arise out of great obstacles."

A voice I can't identify asks, "What were all those noises? I—we thought we heard a gunshot. Or maybe a car backfiring?"

"Not a car," Oleg responds soberly. "It was a gun."

This causes an uproar. Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt's speaker explodes in gasps, shrieks, exhortations.

Paul's voice breaks through, his monotone gone wild. "Is Deb dead, did your men kill her? We all have eyes—we see she isn't here!"

The feed goes silent. I imagine Oleg looming over the collective anxiety, drinking it in, feeding off it.

"Miss Bollinger tried another escape," he says. "When a facilitator confronted her, she took his weapon and used it to kill him."

"Deb? Deb shot the gun?"

"A subset of our personnel carry firearms as a precaution, but under no circumstances do their rules of engagement permit them to discharge the weapon."

Confused murmurs meet this complete and total heap of donkey dung. Where is Susan? There's no way she could have slept through that racket of Raven's demise, the pursuit of me, the gunshot. Did she try to put her foot down Have they locked her in some kitchenette?

And Carter? He was shaken last night—I think he has remorse about this horror show he punched our ticket for—but if it came to a bare-knuckle brawl between Susan and the Russians, which way would he tip?

Oleg continues, "Loose talk in the workplace can be as dangerous as on a battlefield. Rumors take us further from our shared goals. This is why I have told you all about Miss Bollinger—to remove any need to speculate. The project becomes more difficult without her. No question. With this in mind, we have reconsidered our previous decision to forego injections..."

He outlines a series of draconian measures. Now I'm thinking Susan has to be detained; her previous concessions—the outside emails, the showers and clean undies—are out the window. All meals will be taken at workstations. Not only are forfeited stock options possible; now, any team member who fails to fulfill his or her module role risks demotion.

On the upside, Elite facilitators will now be working alongside Codewise. Their full-throated assistance will simulate the missed presence of Miss Bollinger.

Stunned, I lose my grip on Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt. The noise knocks about the ducts, and I miss several seconds of the droid-Hot Wheel's audio.

When it comes back, the third floor is in revolt. Paul demands to see Susan. Prisha, with fervor I've never heard in her voice, wants to know who will define "fails to fulfill."

Oleg provides neutral, dispassionate answers. "Much of this would be unnecessary were Miss Bollinger present. Despite her actions, we would accept her back if she returned. If any of you had information...information that might be used to, eh, persuade Miss Bollinger...the reward would be handsome."

What crap is this? I am trying to puzzle out what the creep has in mind when I hear new shuffling. I think it originates closer to the mic—big, honky noises subsume the feed, then fade just as quickly. Someone sneers. Someone else gasps.

A single pair of footsteps becomes audible.

Prisha calls, "Don't! You pig, what are you doing?"

Oleg waits out the commotion, then says, "You have information for us?"

The voice that answers is nasal, aggressively bored. Now I think I recognize those footsteps too—slow, draggy.

"I know what'll bring Deb in."

Jared: the irredeemable human phlegm-ball himself.

I bend near Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt's speaker to hear, wondering what he could possibly claim to have on me. Will he threaten to reveal some inflammatory comment? I did one time say I would sneak cyanide into all the bags of T.G.I. Friday's Cheddar & Bacon Potato Skins in the vending machine—he's the only purchaser—if he made one more suggestive groan about Susan's attire at a town hall.

The protests become louder, though, and now I can make out nothing but galled, generalized anger toward Jared.

Oleg's voice cuts through. "Perhaps we need to step into the command center."

I can just see that preening look on Jared's face, glancing back at the other engineers with relish, acting like he's just scored big-time when in fact he's entering the worst vipers' nest any of us have known.

They must disappear together because in the next moment, the droid-Hot Wheel's audio loses them completely.