The Kidnappers
Dan really didn’t much care one way or the other as long as he got his money. He didn’t care why the bigshot billionaire wanted his wife out of Tranquility Park. As long as he was paid he would get the rich man’s wife out of the cyber-virtuo facility where thousands slept their lives away in steel cocoons, dreaming they were living in their own virtual world of their own choosing, playing out the best fantasy program they could afford. If some of the rich got off on wasting their life being in a dream world of 1’s and 0’s instead of living and breathing a real life, that was no matter.
That was where most of the wealthy, the movers and shakers of the world, had gone once it became available and they realized it was so much better than the real world. At first the ‘sleepers,’ as they were called, only came out occasionally to take care of business. Then as time went on, they no longer came out at all, leaving the world to its denizens and the robots that took care of them in their virtuo facilities. The wealthy sleepers’ affairs were run by surrogate employees or automated computer programs while they slept and dreamed vicarious lives. Only the poor or those who opposed the virtual worlds on religious or philosophical grounds remained outside.
Everyone in the assault group knew that if they were caught and not killed, they would be involuntarily interned into a special cyber facility for criminals where they would sleep away their sentences handed down by electronic courts, being mindwashed and rehabilitated.
Tranquility Park was a combination private/government run facility placed on a thousand acres of peaceful woodlands well away from the decrepit cities with their automated factories and slums of unemployed poor. The group’s target was in a 50 foot tall pseudo-granite block building called Annex C on the closely guarded grounds. Most of the guards were automated sentries, defenses, and detection equipment. Few humans guarded the premises and most of those were technicians monitoring the automatic equipment. Coming in by air was out of the question with the airspace over the entire country closely monitored for terrorist activity, so the group was forced to sneak in by land through a wooded, state-owned watershed that bordered the facility and had been allowed to return to the wild.
On the billionaire’s payroll was a human employee of the estate who had access to the maintenance programs. For a sum sizable enough to pay for his own deep sleep in the facility he had agreed to compromise the fence security system. At preset times each section of fence shut down for a microsecond test. The man on the inside had tapped the system to increase the time of the test to a full minute for a certain section. After the shutdown, the whole setup would be reset and all logs of the discrepancy erased. The men had that long to clear the fence.
Hodge called a halt well out of sensor range of the borderline. The other four men waited under cover while he peered at a fence post through infrared binoculars. He checked his watch, then looked again. A red light still glowed on the pole.
“Get ready,” he told the others. “It’s almost time.”
Dan and the others stirred. On schedule, as Hodge watched, the light changed from red to green.
“Go!” he shouted.
The five men got up from their positions and sprinted from the cover of the pines across the cleared security zone between the fence and the forest.
“Hold it!” Jackson said as they closed to within 15 feet of the fence. He threw a rock in an arc over the fence that drew no fire. Then he ran up to the fence and raked a rubber-handled tool across the chain links which drew no spark. He waved the rest of them on.
“Over!” Hodge ordered.
As one, all five scrambled over the fence and dropped to the other side before sprinting into the woodlands inside the campus. Behind them there was an audible click and then the hum of electricity appeared again. But they paid no heed as they rushed through the trees, following their GPS receiver to the appointed location of the building that housed the billionaire’s wife, tramping through small creeks and over scenic, rocky hills. Too bad none of the guests in the facility ever saw the natural beauty of their resting place, Dan thought.
Besides the fence system, each building also had its own monitors and security systems and for this, the group also had a plan. While there were roads for vehicular traffic between the facility’s buildings, most traffic and utilities used underground tunnels. Before they were even in sight of the tall, windowless edifice, the group found an air vent into one of the main tunnels beside a dirt fire road. It was the work of seconds to laser cut the welds binding the steel grating to the intake. Then the five men dropped down into the tunnel.
Down the middle of the underground passageway was a space kept clear for the wheeled service robots. The walls were hung with multiple levels of pipe and conduit carrying everything from power to fluids. The tunnel was brightly lit for those robots that used visual cues to get around.
The group oriented themselves and headed off toward Annex C. They carried a stolen transponder that identified them as a maintenance crewman and his four helper robots to defeat the electronic challenges they received as they neared the doorway from the tunnel to the Annex’s basement. As they approached to within 20 feet, the red access light changed to green and the heavy steel doors slid open. Dan supposed there were occasional emergencies even at night that required a human maintenance man. If there was someone or a computer monitoring the video feeds from the cameras mounted in the system, they were not yet aroused.
Once inside the basement they found themselves among a complex jungle of pumps, filters, pipes, transformers, and supports. Briefed on the floor plans of the building by the man inside, Hodge looked for the access doors to the upper floors where the ‘guests’ were.
“Over here,” he said.
The others followed him to a set of steel fire doors stenciled with “Authorized Personnel Only.” On the wall next to the door was mounted a computerized control panel with flashing lights. It was to this that Arias, the tech whiz went. He studied it for a moment, found an I/O port and plugged in his compact ECM unit. It took a few seconds for the units to interface, then there was an exchange of information and Arias punched in the codes and commands that gave them temporary access to anywhere within the building until the master computer of the entire complex discovered traces of something wrong at Annex C. But Arias put in enough miscues and loopholes in the local slave unit to buy them enough time to get the woman out. Or so they hoped.
“All set,” Arias said as he unplugged his ECM unit.
“Good, let’s go,” Hodge said. He punched the red Enter button beside the double doors and they obediently slid apart. The five commandos went up the stairs, past an unused office for a no longer used human security guard, past the reception area, past the prep rooms that were no longer used because the Annex was at capacity and no one ever left anymore. From there they were given access through another security door into the main cavity itself. Fading signs on the wall in front of them directed them to the various Levels and Wards within the building.
“5-D,” Hodge recited and followed the arrows to a lift. The commandos got in and punched 5. The lift rose through four levels and the elevator doors opened onto another antiseptically clean corridor. Aware of the conspicuous surveillance camera at the end of the hallway, they followed more fading arrows to the entrance to Ward D, an airtight, white steel door with a small, fogged up window in its center. Hodge punched in the override code Arias had instructed the local security computer to obey, 000, and the door opened with a wisp of escaping atmosphere.
Inside it was chilly and dark, the only illumination coming from indicators on the machinery. There were three tiers of large, steel, egg-shaped containers, connected to service units within the walls by myriads of pipes and wires. The upper two tiers of eggs were reached by catwalks. Hodge turned on a night stick and walked down the aisle in the center, flashing the light on each egg in turn until he came to the well-remembered number. He stopped and wiped frost off a name plate tacked on its surface.
“There she is,” he announced.
At this point, Foster, the med tech, took over, while the others stood watch. He read vital signs off a monitor, and then plugged his own unit into the control box on the egg. He punched in a series of commands and codes into the unit. Almost immediately, there was the noise of pumps reversing themselves and metal warming up. The squad waited impatiently while the fluids drained out of the egg and finally of its own accord, with a release of pressure, the recessed door on the front of the unit unhinged itself and popped out. A light came on inside the egg and there was a moan.
“Where am I?” the voice whined. “Where is everybody? What’s happened to me? Angelo? Angelo! Where are you?”
Foster reached in and began to detach tubes and wires from the disoriented woman. Her skin was ashen and pale. All of her fat had been bled away and her muscles atrophied until she was little more than white skin and bone.
“What are you doing to me? Let me alone! Leave me be! Let me go back!” the woman wailed, batting at Foster hands with thin, weak arms. “No, you don’t understand! I have to go back!”
“Hurry up,” Hodge said, glancing at his timepiece.
As if in answer to him, a brilliant red light started strobing high on the walls of the chamber and a booming voice blasted out over the intercom speakers, “Breach in Level 5, Ward D. Breach in Level 5, Ward D.” The entire room was suddenly bathed in full while light from floods overhead while the red lights flashed and the speakers repeated themselves over and over.
“They’re on to us,” Dan stated the obvious.
“No kidding,” Arias said sarcastically.
“So much for stealth and electronic countermeasures,” Hodge said with a frown at Arias, who ignored him.
“Get her out of there,” Jackson said irritably. He flashed a switchblade off his vest and flipped it open. “Here,” he said, giving the knife to Foster, who used it to briskly and methodically cut the tubes and wires connecting the billionaire’s wife to the machine instead of carefully removing them.
The woman began to struggle with him as he lifted her out of the container, still soaking wet from the preservation fluids her body had been immersed in inside the egg.
“No, no!” she screamed, “Let me go back!”
Jackson helped Foster control the woman while the others looked nervously about at the shadows cast by the flashing red strobe and harsh overheads. So far nothing had moved within the chamber, it remained still and quiet save for constant droning of the security voice and the hum of electricity and rush of fluids in pipes.
“Hold her,” Foster said.
Dan took one side while Jackson held the other, as Foster took a hypo out of his chest pouch and plunged it into the woman’s arm. As he pressed the stud that sent the depressant into her system, the woman immediately relaxed and went limp.
The men strapped her onto a flexible stretcher and Hodge said, “Let’s get out of here. No time for no more fancy stuff.”
With himself at point, Foster second, the bigger Arias and Jackson carrying the woman between them, and Dan in the rear, they jogged out the door into the Level 5 corridor expecting to find security bots armed with machine guns waiting for them. But it was empty except for the flashing red lights and the booming security voice repeating itself over the loudspeakers just as it was doing inside the ward. They jogged to the lift but it refused to take any more commands from them.
“Frozen,” Arias said, checking the controls. “They’ve overridden my commands.”
“The stairs,” Dan said.
They left the lift and jogged to the nearest end of the corridor to another door that said “Restricted Access, Emergency Use Only.” It was locked tight.
“Stand back!” Hodge said.
He ripped a three round barrage from his short-barreled, commando-style assault rifle through the door handle and latch and the fire door swung open. Another alarm blared into existence, adding to the cacophony of sound as they raced all the way down the stairwell to the bottom and a door that read “Maintenance Level, Authorized Personnel Only.” With no more time for finesse, Hodge blasted that door open also. They sprinted through the maze of pipes and conduits and structural supports to the tunnel entrance.
It refused to open. Hodge ripped a few slugs through its access panel but it would not budge.
“It’s locked tight!” Jackson screamed to be heard above the din of the alarms.
“We gotta use the front doors. At least we can blast our way out of them,” Hodge said. They reversed course back to the doors they used to get up to the upper levels.
“Hold it!” Arias said. He plugged his ECM back into the main control panel and sent in a specially formulated virus throughout the system. Although it was likely it would quickly be isolated and quarantined by the security program, it might screw up the system long enough to buy them time to get out with their prize. Almost at once the doors to the upper levels opened up.
“Go on, I’ll be up in a minute!” he shouted as he unplugged his device.
“Don’t be long,” Hodge warned as he and the others went on up the stairs without him. As they were leaving, Arias punched in a certain code of his own on the panel that the others didn’t know about, and something he had planned to unleash anyway as they left the building. Once he saw his instructions being implemented by the master console, he hurriedly followed the others, bounding up the steps two at a time.
The team made their way through the security office to the unused reception room at the main entrance to the annex, where Arias caught up with them. The heavy but decorative front doors to the Annex stood open to a rain outside. Floodlights bathed the area around the building in brilliant white light and sirens and alarms blared uncontrollably.
“I hope that program of yours works,” Hodge muttered to Arias as he went out into the rain.
“Don’t worry, right now, they’re getting intrusions and fire alerts all over the complex. They won’t know which ones are real and which ones are false. For a while anyway,” Arias replied. “And it shut down the barrier defenses.”
“You better hope it did, for all our sakes,” Hodge muttered, not as confident as Arias.
Helicopters could be heard in the distance as the men ran with their burden out of the light surrounding the Annex into the dark, rain soaked, landscape of the woods.
Inside the helicopter, it seemed all Hell had broken loose in the complex. The radio chatter, both human and machine voice, was incessant and confused. Scrambled out of a doze in his graveyard shift, the pilot, Neilson, didn’t know what to think. He followed orders to get airborne and await further orders.
“Air 2, head to Annex C, that’s where the initial readings came from. Look it over,” the dispatcher ordered over the radio.
“Roger,” Nielson said and arced the chopper away. He flew low and unlit over the treetops to Annex C. “I’ve got IR readings on the ground away from C making toward the southwest fence,” he told Central as he toggled the protective plastic cover from his Gatling gun fire controls.
Bradley thrust his sword into the air by the beach where he and his forces had succeeded in driving the invading barbarians back to the sea. They swam out to their anchored boats as he and his men patrolled the seashore on horseback for any that dared come back and challenge them. None did.
The conquering hero was eagerly awaiting the interrogation of the captured barbarians when it seemed as if he was in the sea. He didn’t remember getting off his horse and getting in the water, but there he was, wet, and suddenly it was night and pitch black. Gone were the sights, sounds, and smells of the ocean and the battle. In its place was the smell of ozone and antiseptic. A small lamp came alive over his head and he found himself crouched almost doubled over in an impossibly small compartment with stringy things wrapped all around him and clinging to his body. As the last of the fluid drained out the bottom of the container, the door of the compartment popped open and moved aside to a chill of air and a lowly lit chamber beyond. Then he remembered.
“NO!” he screamed.
Hutcherson had just given the concert of his life. The demigod of Rock and Roll had wowed and enthralled the audience like none other before him. He bathed in their adoration before he was hustled off stage by bodyguards and attendants, sweaty and drained but brightly lit up by drugs and alcohol. One of his girls gave him a bottle and another shot him up in the arm with a hypo. Immediately the fatigue of the show left him, replaced by more ultimate exhilaration.
His bodyguards rushed him past throngs of sycophants and willing young ladies by the quickest route from backstage to the limo waiting outside, where three specially selected groupies awaited him with more booze and drugs. He slipped inside the limo and the women were already all over him before the doors were even closed. Escorted by police motorcycles, the limo whisked him away back to the hotel for another all-nighter of lasciviousness. As the groupies closed in on him in the darkness of the limo’s interior, he suddenly felt a chill. Then the groupies were gone and he was clutching himself in a tangle of tubes and wires as the feeling of euphoria left him while the last of the fluid drained out of the bottom of the egg. No longer the greatest Rock and Roll legend to have ever lived, the former accountant began to weep inconsolably.
Everywhere within Tranquility Park, thousands of guests were being rudely awakened out of their virtual fantasies by the second virus Arias had secretly planted unbeknownst to the rest of the team. It shut off the VR feeds, erased the programs that fed the guests their phantom lives, and ordered the life support systems shut down and all the eggs opened. Nothing would ever be the same for those enslaved by their own virtual realities, at least in this location.
“Helicopter!” Jackson shouted.
“Just one!” Dan confirmed.
“Take it out!” Hodge ordered.
Dan took the mini rocket launcher off his back webbing and told the others to go on.
“Central, this is Air 2,” Neilson said over the radio. “I’ve got 6 readings, 5 heading to the fence and one hanging back. Maybe he’s wounded.”
“Roger, Air 2, you have a green light to take them out before they reach the fence,” Central replied.
“Air 3, Air 4, converge on Air 2’s position by the fence near C.”
Nielson too late saw the seventh IR signature as it raced much too fast from the sixth man toward him.
“Mayday, Mayday, Central, I’ve got a heat seeker coming right at me, taking EA!” he screamed into the mic as he pulled the chopper into a steep roll away from the incoming missile and released a spray of flak and heat generating decoys into the air around him. Too late, the rocket had already locked on and followed the helicopter’s roll, slamming into the exhaust vent on the engine as it attempted to get away.
The sky was lit up by the fireball as the chopper exploded and went down. Dan raced to catch back up to the others.
At the fence line sirens wailed and floodlights lit up the cleared areas on either side of the barrier, catching the rain as it flooded the area.
“I thought you said all this would still be dead when we got here!” Hodge said to Arias.
Arias shrugged as he rested beside the sleeping woman on the stretcher. “They must have fixed the virus sooner than I thought they would.”
“That means everything is live. They’ll be on to us,” Foster said.
“No help for it,” Hodge said as he flung a grenade at the fence.
It was caught in mid-flight by one of the automated lasers mounted on the fence and detonated uselessly in the air.
Jackson dropped his end of the woman’s stretcher and said, “Try this.”
He flipped his high caliber assault rifle to fully auto and riddled the fence pole where the laser and scanners sat, aiming for the black box that sat on top. The others joined in and the laser started firing wildly in all directions until it went quiet and its housing fell from the now teetering pole.
“Now try it,” Jackson said.
Hodge tossed a second grenade at the same fence pole and it went off with a flash as the electric fence shorted out and the pole toppled over bringing the rest of the fence down with it. The noise of two more helicopters could be heard in the distance over the pattering of the rain.
“Gotta hurry!” Arias said.
“Hold it!” Jackson said as he picked up a heavy, grenade sized rock and tossed it over the breach in the fence. It was skewered by a bright, crimson flash of laser from the next pole down the fence line. Dan raced breathlessly into the gathering from his appointment with the first helicopter.
“Take it out!” Hodge pointed at the next pole with the active laser.
Dan nodded and put another round into his launcher. In seconds another rocket was away and easily knocked out the pole and the mounted defenses which were not designed to withstand an assault by anything bigger than small arms. Now a sizable section of fence was out of action.
“Gotta go!” Arias said as the noise of the choppers got closer and closer.
Jackson threw a rock over the boundary and nothing happened.
“GO!” Hodge said. “How many more rockets you got left?” he asked Dan as they sprinted for the downed fence.
“Three!” Dan shouted back as they vaulted over the hot metal debris of what was left of the barrier.
“Real hot spot over here,” Air 3 said over the radio, as he and 4 approached the boundary.
“There’s a whole section of fence out of communication down there,” Central told him.
“Big hot spot. They’re out, got six bodies out of the compound into the wilderness area. You want I should take ‘em or let the police round ‘em up?” 213 asked Central.
After a pause and consultation with his superiors, the dispatcher at Central said, “Take ‘em.”
“Roger.” Air 3, with Air 4 following his lead, zeroed in on the escaping intruders for the death blow when suddenly the IR signatures disappeared.
“They’re gone,” Air 4 spoke up.
“I know, you don’t have to tell me that,” 3 snapped back. “Central we’ve lost the IR, repeat, we’ve lost the IR on ‘em. You better get ground troops out here.”
“Roger, Air 3, you and Air 4 continue to hover over the area. We’ve got some guys on the way. We’ve got emergencies going on inside all the complexes.”
The five men and the sleeping woman lay under IR defeating field blankets, waiting for the hovering helicopters to get in range. Dan only had the three rounds left to take out two choppers so a miss could be fatal.
“Gotta hurry,” Arias said, knowing each second they delayed meant ground forces would be getting nearer.
“Gotta wait until they’re in position,” Hodge reminded him.
“Just a little bit more, just a little more, come on baby,” Dan muttered as he watched the screen on his range finder. Suddenly the green target went red. “Gotcha!” he said. He crawled out from under cover of the blanket, leaving only his head, shoulders, and arms exposed. He carefully aimed the rocket launcher at the hovering helicopter as it neared his position. The rocket was a fire-and-forget, once it was locked on, Dan could fire it and get back under cover, hopefully before the other chopper could find his position. He pulled the trigger and the rocket sped away, washing a wave of exhaust over the other blankets behind him.
Air 3 never even saw the missile coming until it was up his exhaust and disintegrated his motor. He fell from the sky like a burning rock.
“This is Air 4, Air 3 is down, repeat Air 3 is down,” the other pilot said as he turned his machine away from the borderlands and rushed back to the compound as fast as his chopper would fly. “I’m taking too much fire, I’m getting out of here.”
“Negative, Air 4, stay in position until reinforcements arrive,” Central ordered.
“The heck with you,” the pilot said under his breath without keying his mic as he sped away. The worst they could do was fire him. He didn’t want to wind up dead like Neilson and Air 3.
“They’re gone. The other one’s leaving,” Dan announced.
“Good, let’s go. Buy us enough time to get clear.”
They all got up and ran through the woods to an old, dirt fire control road in the watershed wilderness area where their stolen vehicle rested. As they ran they threw out heat packs that once activated, simulated the body heat of a human, scattering them in a random pattern.
The truck they had “borrowed” for the mission was a heavy duty ground effects farm truck that would be inconspicuous on the back roads in the rural area even at night. The mud of the dirt road from the rain would have no effect on it and they glided over the wet streams and puddles they came across as they fled over the foothills back into the civilized areas.
They left the watershed reserve that had been allowed to return to the wild and entered a designated agricultural zone mostly occupied by automated farms where a big truck would not be out of place, and sped along a paved road that got them to a country highway. The highway hooked up with an Interstate that entered a tunnel through a mountain a short distance from the intersection. Just inside the tunnel a conventional car stood waiting with its hood up, off to the side.
Hodge, behind the wheel of the ground effects truck, eased it up behind the broken down car.
“Everybody out!” he shouted as he braked to a halt and set the big truck down with a final blast of dust that had nowhere to go inside the tunnel. The other men bailed out with the woman’s limp body and ran to the car amid the settling grit and dirt. Romaker stood waiting for them.
“Man, there’s state police, federal police, army, special forces, private security all over the place looking for some terrorists who broke into and sabotaged Tranquility Park,” he said with a smile.
“No word of any kidnapping.”
“They’ll sort it out later,” Hodge grunted as he hauled the woman into the back of the waiting car.
“By that time, I’ll be in Tahiti where they still surf on a real ocean under a real sun,” Dan said as he threw the rocket launcher into the vehicle’s trunk.
“If they don't put you into one of them eggs first,” Jackson said with a grin as all six men piled into the front and rear seats of the wheeled vehicle and pulled out, leaving the borrowed truck behind under cover of the tunnel.
Jeff Vanderslice
That was where most of the wealthy, the movers and shakers of the world, had gone once it became available and they realized it was so much better than the real world. At first the ‘sleepers,’ as they were called, only came out occasionally to take care of business. Then as time went on, they no longer came out at all, leaving the world to its denizens and the robots that took care of them in their virtuo facilities. The wealthy sleepers’ affairs were run by surrogate employees or automated computer programs while they slept and dreamed vicarious lives. Only the poor or those who opposed the virtual worlds on religious or philosophical grounds remained outside.
Everyone in the assault group knew that if they were caught and not killed, they would be involuntarily interned into a special cyber facility for criminals where they would sleep away their sentences handed down by electronic courts, being mindwashed and rehabilitated.
Tranquility Park was a combination private/government run facility placed on a thousand acres of peaceful woodlands well away from the decrepit cities with their automated factories and slums of unemployed poor. The group’s target was in a 50 foot tall pseudo-granite block building called Annex C on the closely guarded grounds. Most of the guards were automated sentries, defenses, and detection equipment. Few humans guarded the premises and most of those were technicians monitoring the automatic equipment. Coming in by air was out of the question with the airspace over the entire country closely monitored for terrorist activity, so the group was forced to sneak in by land through a wooded, state-owned watershed that bordered the facility and had been allowed to return to the wild.
On the billionaire’s payroll was a human employee of the estate who had access to the maintenance programs. For a sum sizable enough to pay for his own deep sleep in the facility he had agreed to compromise the fence security system. At preset times each section of fence shut down for a microsecond test. The man on the inside had tapped the system to increase the time of the test to a full minute for a certain section. After the shutdown, the whole setup would be reset and all logs of the discrepancy erased. The men had that long to clear the fence.
Hodge called a halt well out of sensor range of the borderline. The other four men waited under cover while he peered at a fence post through infrared binoculars. He checked his watch, then looked again. A red light still glowed on the pole.
“Get ready,” he told the others. “It’s almost time.”
Dan and the others stirred. On schedule, as Hodge watched, the light changed from red to green.
“Go!” he shouted.
The five men got up from their positions and sprinted from the cover of the pines across the cleared security zone between the fence and the forest.
“Hold it!” Jackson said as they closed to within 15 feet of the fence. He threw a rock in an arc over the fence that drew no fire. Then he ran up to the fence and raked a rubber-handled tool across the chain links which drew no spark. He waved the rest of them on.
“Over!” Hodge ordered.
As one, all five scrambled over the fence and dropped to the other side before sprinting into the woodlands inside the campus. Behind them there was an audible click and then the hum of electricity appeared again. But they paid no heed as they rushed through the trees, following their GPS receiver to the appointed location of the building that housed the billionaire’s wife, tramping through small creeks and over scenic, rocky hills. Too bad none of the guests in the facility ever saw the natural beauty of their resting place, Dan thought.
Besides the fence system, each building also had its own monitors and security systems and for this, the group also had a plan. While there were roads for vehicular traffic between the facility’s buildings, most traffic and utilities used underground tunnels. Before they were even in sight of the tall, windowless edifice, the group found an air vent into one of the main tunnels beside a dirt fire road. It was the work of seconds to laser cut the welds binding the steel grating to the intake. Then the five men dropped down into the tunnel.
Down the middle of the underground passageway was a space kept clear for the wheeled service robots. The walls were hung with multiple levels of pipe and conduit carrying everything from power to fluids. The tunnel was brightly lit for those robots that used visual cues to get around.
The group oriented themselves and headed off toward Annex C. They carried a stolen transponder that identified them as a maintenance crewman and his four helper robots to defeat the electronic challenges they received as they neared the doorway from the tunnel to the Annex’s basement. As they approached to within 20 feet, the red access light changed to green and the heavy steel doors slid open. Dan supposed there were occasional emergencies even at night that required a human maintenance man. If there was someone or a computer monitoring the video feeds from the cameras mounted in the system, they were not yet aroused.
Once inside the basement they found themselves among a complex jungle of pumps, filters, pipes, transformers, and supports. Briefed on the floor plans of the building by the man inside, Hodge looked for the access doors to the upper floors where the ‘guests’ were.
“Over here,” he said.
The others followed him to a set of steel fire doors stenciled with “Authorized Personnel Only.” On the wall next to the door was mounted a computerized control panel with flashing lights. It was to this that Arias, the tech whiz went. He studied it for a moment, found an I/O port and plugged in his compact ECM unit. It took a few seconds for the units to interface, then there was an exchange of information and Arias punched in the codes and commands that gave them temporary access to anywhere within the building until the master computer of the entire complex discovered traces of something wrong at Annex C. But Arias put in enough miscues and loopholes in the local slave unit to buy them enough time to get the woman out. Or so they hoped.
“All set,” Arias said as he unplugged his ECM unit.
“Good, let’s go,” Hodge said. He punched the red Enter button beside the double doors and they obediently slid apart. The five commandos went up the stairs, past an unused office for a no longer used human security guard, past the reception area, past the prep rooms that were no longer used because the Annex was at capacity and no one ever left anymore. From there they were given access through another security door into the main cavity itself. Fading signs on the wall in front of them directed them to the various Levels and Wards within the building.
“5-D,” Hodge recited and followed the arrows to a lift. The commandos got in and punched 5. The lift rose through four levels and the elevator doors opened onto another antiseptically clean corridor. Aware of the conspicuous surveillance camera at the end of the hallway, they followed more fading arrows to the entrance to Ward D, an airtight, white steel door with a small, fogged up window in its center. Hodge punched in the override code Arias had instructed the local security computer to obey, 000, and the door opened with a wisp of escaping atmosphere.
Inside it was chilly and dark, the only illumination coming from indicators on the machinery. There were three tiers of large, steel, egg-shaped containers, connected to service units within the walls by myriads of pipes and wires. The upper two tiers of eggs were reached by catwalks. Hodge turned on a night stick and walked down the aisle in the center, flashing the light on each egg in turn until he came to the well-remembered number. He stopped and wiped frost off a name plate tacked on its surface.
“There she is,” he announced.
At this point, Foster, the med tech, took over, while the others stood watch. He read vital signs off a monitor, and then plugged his own unit into the control box on the egg. He punched in a series of commands and codes into the unit. Almost immediately, there was the noise of pumps reversing themselves and metal warming up. The squad waited impatiently while the fluids drained out of the egg and finally of its own accord, with a release of pressure, the recessed door on the front of the unit unhinged itself and popped out. A light came on inside the egg and there was a moan.
“Where am I?” the voice whined. “Where is everybody? What’s happened to me? Angelo? Angelo! Where are you?”
Foster reached in and began to detach tubes and wires from the disoriented woman. Her skin was ashen and pale. All of her fat had been bled away and her muscles atrophied until she was little more than white skin and bone.
“What are you doing to me? Let me alone! Leave me be! Let me go back!” the woman wailed, batting at Foster hands with thin, weak arms. “No, you don’t understand! I have to go back!”
“Hurry up,” Hodge said, glancing at his timepiece.
As if in answer to him, a brilliant red light started strobing high on the walls of the chamber and a booming voice blasted out over the intercom speakers, “Breach in Level 5, Ward D. Breach in Level 5, Ward D.” The entire room was suddenly bathed in full while light from floods overhead while the red lights flashed and the speakers repeated themselves over and over.
“They’re on to us,” Dan stated the obvious.
“No kidding,” Arias said sarcastically.
“So much for stealth and electronic countermeasures,” Hodge said with a frown at Arias, who ignored him.
“Get her out of there,” Jackson said irritably. He flashed a switchblade off his vest and flipped it open. “Here,” he said, giving the knife to Foster, who used it to briskly and methodically cut the tubes and wires connecting the billionaire’s wife to the machine instead of carefully removing them.
The woman began to struggle with him as he lifted her out of the container, still soaking wet from the preservation fluids her body had been immersed in inside the egg.
“No, no!” she screamed, “Let me go back!”
Jackson helped Foster control the woman while the others looked nervously about at the shadows cast by the flashing red strobe and harsh overheads. So far nothing had moved within the chamber, it remained still and quiet save for constant droning of the security voice and the hum of electricity and rush of fluids in pipes.
“Hold her,” Foster said.
Dan took one side while Jackson held the other, as Foster took a hypo out of his chest pouch and plunged it into the woman’s arm. As he pressed the stud that sent the depressant into her system, the woman immediately relaxed and went limp.
The men strapped her onto a flexible stretcher and Hodge said, “Let’s get out of here. No time for no more fancy stuff.”
With himself at point, Foster second, the bigger Arias and Jackson carrying the woman between them, and Dan in the rear, they jogged out the door into the Level 5 corridor expecting to find security bots armed with machine guns waiting for them. But it was empty except for the flashing red lights and the booming security voice repeating itself over the loudspeakers just as it was doing inside the ward. They jogged to the lift but it refused to take any more commands from them.
“Frozen,” Arias said, checking the controls. “They’ve overridden my commands.”
“The stairs,” Dan said.
They left the lift and jogged to the nearest end of the corridor to another door that said “Restricted Access, Emergency Use Only.” It was locked tight.
“Stand back!” Hodge said.
He ripped a three round barrage from his short-barreled, commando-style assault rifle through the door handle and latch and the fire door swung open. Another alarm blared into existence, adding to the cacophony of sound as they raced all the way down the stairwell to the bottom and a door that read “Maintenance Level, Authorized Personnel Only.” With no more time for finesse, Hodge blasted that door open also. They sprinted through the maze of pipes and conduits and structural supports to the tunnel entrance.
It refused to open. Hodge ripped a few slugs through its access panel but it would not budge.
“It’s locked tight!” Jackson screamed to be heard above the din of the alarms.
“We gotta use the front doors. At least we can blast our way out of them,” Hodge said. They reversed course back to the doors they used to get up to the upper levels.
“Hold it!” Arias said. He plugged his ECM back into the main control panel and sent in a specially formulated virus throughout the system. Although it was likely it would quickly be isolated and quarantined by the security program, it might screw up the system long enough to buy them time to get out with their prize. Almost at once the doors to the upper levels opened up.
“Go on, I’ll be up in a minute!” he shouted as he unplugged his device.
“Don’t be long,” Hodge warned as he and the others went on up the stairs without him. As they were leaving, Arias punched in a certain code of his own on the panel that the others didn’t know about, and something he had planned to unleash anyway as they left the building. Once he saw his instructions being implemented by the master console, he hurriedly followed the others, bounding up the steps two at a time.
The team made their way through the security office to the unused reception room at the main entrance to the annex, where Arias caught up with them. The heavy but decorative front doors to the Annex stood open to a rain outside. Floodlights bathed the area around the building in brilliant white light and sirens and alarms blared uncontrollably.
“I hope that program of yours works,” Hodge muttered to Arias as he went out into the rain.
“Don’t worry, right now, they’re getting intrusions and fire alerts all over the complex. They won’t know which ones are real and which ones are false. For a while anyway,” Arias replied. “And it shut down the barrier defenses.”
“You better hope it did, for all our sakes,” Hodge muttered, not as confident as Arias.
Helicopters could be heard in the distance as the men ran with their burden out of the light surrounding the Annex into the dark, rain soaked, landscape of the woods.
Inside the helicopter, it seemed all Hell had broken loose in the complex. The radio chatter, both human and machine voice, was incessant and confused. Scrambled out of a doze in his graveyard shift, the pilot, Neilson, didn’t know what to think. He followed orders to get airborne and await further orders.
“Air 2, head to Annex C, that’s where the initial readings came from. Look it over,” the dispatcher ordered over the radio.
“Roger,” Nielson said and arced the chopper away. He flew low and unlit over the treetops to Annex C. “I’ve got IR readings on the ground away from C making toward the southwest fence,” he told Central as he toggled the protective plastic cover from his Gatling gun fire controls.
Bradley thrust his sword into the air by the beach where he and his forces had succeeded in driving the invading barbarians back to the sea. They swam out to their anchored boats as he and his men patrolled the seashore on horseback for any that dared come back and challenge them. None did.
The conquering hero was eagerly awaiting the interrogation of the captured barbarians when it seemed as if he was in the sea. He didn’t remember getting off his horse and getting in the water, but there he was, wet, and suddenly it was night and pitch black. Gone were the sights, sounds, and smells of the ocean and the battle. In its place was the smell of ozone and antiseptic. A small lamp came alive over his head and he found himself crouched almost doubled over in an impossibly small compartment with stringy things wrapped all around him and clinging to his body. As the last of the fluid drained out the bottom of the container, the door of the compartment popped open and moved aside to a chill of air and a lowly lit chamber beyond. Then he remembered.
“NO!” he screamed.
Hutcherson had just given the concert of his life. The demigod of Rock and Roll had wowed and enthralled the audience like none other before him. He bathed in their adoration before he was hustled off stage by bodyguards and attendants, sweaty and drained but brightly lit up by drugs and alcohol. One of his girls gave him a bottle and another shot him up in the arm with a hypo. Immediately the fatigue of the show left him, replaced by more ultimate exhilaration.
His bodyguards rushed him past throngs of sycophants and willing young ladies by the quickest route from backstage to the limo waiting outside, where three specially selected groupies awaited him with more booze and drugs. He slipped inside the limo and the women were already all over him before the doors were even closed. Escorted by police motorcycles, the limo whisked him away back to the hotel for another all-nighter of lasciviousness. As the groupies closed in on him in the darkness of the limo’s interior, he suddenly felt a chill. Then the groupies were gone and he was clutching himself in a tangle of tubes and wires as the feeling of euphoria left him while the last of the fluid drained out of the bottom of the egg. No longer the greatest Rock and Roll legend to have ever lived, the former accountant began to weep inconsolably.
Everywhere within Tranquility Park, thousands of guests were being rudely awakened out of their virtual fantasies by the second virus Arias had secretly planted unbeknownst to the rest of the team. It shut off the VR feeds, erased the programs that fed the guests their phantom lives, and ordered the life support systems shut down and all the eggs opened. Nothing would ever be the same for those enslaved by their own virtual realities, at least in this location.
“Helicopter!” Jackson shouted.
“Just one!” Dan confirmed.
“Take it out!” Hodge ordered.
Dan took the mini rocket launcher off his back webbing and told the others to go on.
“Central, this is Air 2,” Neilson said over the radio. “I’ve got 6 readings, 5 heading to the fence and one hanging back. Maybe he’s wounded.”
“Roger, Air 2, you have a green light to take them out before they reach the fence,” Central replied.
“Air 3, Air 4, converge on Air 2’s position by the fence near C.”
Nielson too late saw the seventh IR signature as it raced much too fast from the sixth man toward him.
“Mayday, Mayday, Central, I’ve got a heat seeker coming right at me, taking EA!” he screamed into the mic as he pulled the chopper into a steep roll away from the incoming missile and released a spray of flak and heat generating decoys into the air around him. Too late, the rocket had already locked on and followed the helicopter’s roll, slamming into the exhaust vent on the engine as it attempted to get away.
The sky was lit up by the fireball as the chopper exploded and went down. Dan raced to catch back up to the others.
At the fence line sirens wailed and floodlights lit up the cleared areas on either side of the barrier, catching the rain as it flooded the area.
“I thought you said all this would still be dead when we got here!” Hodge said to Arias.
Arias shrugged as he rested beside the sleeping woman on the stretcher. “They must have fixed the virus sooner than I thought they would.”
“That means everything is live. They’ll be on to us,” Foster said.
“No help for it,” Hodge said as he flung a grenade at the fence.
It was caught in mid-flight by one of the automated lasers mounted on the fence and detonated uselessly in the air.
Jackson dropped his end of the woman’s stretcher and said, “Try this.”
He flipped his high caliber assault rifle to fully auto and riddled the fence pole where the laser and scanners sat, aiming for the black box that sat on top. The others joined in and the laser started firing wildly in all directions until it went quiet and its housing fell from the now teetering pole.
“Now try it,” Jackson said.
Hodge tossed a second grenade at the same fence pole and it went off with a flash as the electric fence shorted out and the pole toppled over bringing the rest of the fence down with it. The noise of two more helicopters could be heard in the distance over the pattering of the rain.
“Gotta hurry!” Arias said.
“Hold it!” Jackson said as he picked up a heavy, grenade sized rock and tossed it over the breach in the fence. It was skewered by a bright, crimson flash of laser from the next pole down the fence line. Dan raced breathlessly into the gathering from his appointment with the first helicopter.
“Take it out!” Hodge pointed at the next pole with the active laser.
Dan nodded and put another round into his launcher. In seconds another rocket was away and easily knocked out the pole and the mounted defenses which were not designed to withstand an assault by anything bigger than small arms. Now a sizable section of fence was out of action.
“Gotta go!” Arias said as the noise of the choppers got closer and closer.
Jackson threw a rock over the boundary and nothing happened.
“GO!” Hodge said. “How many more rockets you got left?” he asked Dan as they sprinted for the downed fence.
“Three!” Dan shouted back as they vaulted over the hot metal debris of what was left of the barrier.
“Real hot spot over here,” Air 3 said over the radio, as he and 4 approached the boundary.
“There’s a whole section of fence out of communication down there,” Central told him.
“Big hot spot. They’re out, got six bodies out of the compound into the wilderness area. You want I should take ‘em or let the police round ‘em up?” 213 asked Central.
After a pause and consultation with his superiors, the dispatcher at Central said, “Take ‘em.”
“Roger.” Air 3, with Air 4 following his lead, zeroed in on the escaping intruders for the death blow when suddenly the IR signatures disappeared.
“They’re gone,” Air 4 spoke up.
“I know, you don’t have to tell me that,” 3 snapped back. “Central we’ve lost the IR, repeat, we’ve lost the IR on ‘em. You better get ground troops out here.”
“Roger, Air 3, you and Air 4 continue to hover over the area. We’ve got some guys on the way. We’ve got emergencies going on inside all the complexes.”
The five men and the sleeping woman lay under IR defeating field blankets, waiting for the hovering helicopters to get in range. Dan only had the three rounds left to take out two choppers so a miss could be fatal.
“Gotta hurry,” Arias said, knowing each second they delayed meant ground forces would be getting nearer.
“Gotta wait until they’re in position,” Hodge reminded him.
“Just a little bit more, just a little more, come on baby,” Dan muttered as he watched the screen on his range finder. Suddenly the green target went red. “Gotcha!” he said. He crawled out from under cover of the blanket, leaving only his head, shoulders, and arms exposed. He carefully aimed the rocket launcher at the hovering helicopter as it neared his position. The rocket was a fire-and-forget, once it was locked on, Dan could fire it and get back under cover, hopefully before the other chopper could find his position. He pulled the trigger and the rocket sped away, washing a wave of exhaust over the other blankets behind him.
Air 3 never even saw the missile coming until it was up his exhaust and disintegrated his motor. He fell from the sky like a burning rock.
“This is Air 4, Air 3 is down, repeat Air 3 is down,” the other pilot said as he turned his machine away from the borderlands and rushed back to the compound as fast as his chopper would fly. “I’m taking too much fire, I’m getting out of here.”
“Negative, Air 4, stay in position until reinforcements arrive,” Central ordered.
“The heck with you,” the pilot said under his breath without keying his mic as he sped away. The worst they could do was fire him. He didn’t want to wind up dead like Neilson and Air 3.
“They’re gone. The other one’s leaving,” Dan announced.
“Good, let’s go. Buy us enough time to get clear.”
They all got up and ran through the woods to an old, dirt fire control road in the watershed wilderness area where their stolen vehicle rested. As they ran they threw out heat packs that once activated, simulated the body heat of a human, scattering them in a random pattern.
The truck they had “borrowed” for the mission was a heavy duty ground effects farm truck that would be inconspicuous on the back roads in the rural area even at night. The mud of the dirt road from the rain would have no effect on it and they glided over the wet streams and puddles they came across as they fled over the foothills back into the civilized areas.
They left the watershed reserve that had been allowed to return to the wild and entered a designated agricultural zone mostly occupied by automated farms where a big truck would not be out of place, and sped along a paved road that got them to a country highway. The highway hooked up with an Interstate that entered a tunnel through a mountain a short distance from the intersection. Just inside the tunnel a conventional car stood waiting with its hood up, off to the side.
Hodge, behind the wheel of the ground effects truck, eased it up behind the broken down car.
“Everybody out!” he shouted as he braked to a halt and set the big truck down with a final blast of dust that had nowhere to go inside the tunnel. The other men bailed out with the woman’s limp body and ran to the car amid the settling grit and dirt. Romaker stood waiting for them.
“Man, there’s state police, federal police, army, special forces, private security all over the place looking for some terrorists who broke into and sabotaged Tranquility Park,” he said with a smile.
“No word of any kidnapping.”
“They’ll sort it out later,” Hodge grunted as he hauled the woman into the back of the waiting car.
“By that time, I’ll be in Tahiti where they still surf on a real ocean under a real sun,” Dan said as he threw the rocket launcher into the vehicle’s trunk.
“If they don't put you into one of them eggs first,” Jackson said with a grin as all six men piled into the front and rear seats of the wheeled vehicle and pulled out, leaving the borrowed truck behind under cover of the tunnel.
Jeff Vanderslice
