Bridgebuilders Read online

  And yet ...

  Surely there were many people in this timeline who objected to constant tracking. Sarah was certain those people had already tried everything to block or cancel the signals, or otherwise skew the readings. She itched to know what had been done, what worked, and what didn’t. She only had one chance, and not much time.

  She could build an EMP emitter, but if they hadn’t shielded their chip against EMP disruption, then they weren’t smart enough to be dangerous.

  Of course, blocking the signal probably wasn’t a great idea, anyway. If the signal stopped, they would check at once to see why.

  So. She wanted a duplicate signal that would remain in the lab, while she blocked the signal coming from her arm.

  Yes. That made it easier.

  Wait. It does make it easier. Sarah sat up straight with the relief that flooded her. All I need is the frequency.

  She leaned over her keyboard, and with quick taps, began to build a search program.

  ~~~

  Dinnie’s hands were shaking as she walked away from Sarah’s lab. The space station. My God. The space station.

  She could never tell what made her leap to that conclusion, but she knew. As soon as she’d seen the coordinates on Sarah Andrews’ computer screen, she knew. Feldman was using Sam and Sarah to build a transporter. He’d said that much. But not to place equipment and soldiers in strategic places around the planet, as guards against an interdimensional invasion. Not even to send an invasion force to the other timeline.

  He was sending those explosives to NISS. He was going to blow up the space station, and she was pretty sure he would make it look like the rebels had done it. Failing that, he could pin the blame on the other timeline. Either way, Sun would be given unlimited resources and authority to wage an all-out war. Against everyone.

  ~~~

  Andy peered into the microscope, watching each movement as he constructed a scrambler for Sam’s tracking chip. He remained aware of the guard, but had relaxed as he realized the man did not know what Andy and Sam were supposed to be doing. While Andy knew he couldn’t talk freely, he felt sure that he could do just about anything with the equipment, and the guard would just assume he was working.

  So he’d scrounged up bits and pieces, and set about making the scrambler. Sam continued his work with the STM. He had not tried to explain what he was doing. His atom-message just said, “trust me.” Andy supposed that he would have to.

  He added a drop of neodymium and stepped aside to let it settle. He took the time to stretch, rotating his shoulders and shaking his arms to throw off the effects of fine-motor work. The guard watched him, as if glad for something to look at. Had to be a boring job, sitting there with no one to talk to, nothing to read or watch, just a couple of people peering into microscopes.

  By now, he knew that the guards rotated every two hours, to keep them alert. He thought he’d wait until the next guard, O’Brien, was back on duty. He was a kid, more likely to do what he was told during an emergency, rather than stick to the rules. Andy needed someone malleable.

  Sam was not going to like Andy’s plan, but Andy had not bothered to explain it. Sam was going to have to trust him.

  Chapter 26

  Moira felt her mind shutting down again, just as it had done when her stepfather showed up at school. She seemed to be looking down on herself, as if she’d flown up to the security camera. Then her hand closed in a fist and she scolded herself. Not again. Come right back here and deal with this.

  Her mind cleared with an abruptness that made her body jerk. Her hand shot out and snapped the button for the second floor. When the lift stopped, she slid through the door before it finished opening, dashing for the stairway across the hall. Once inside, she hunched over against the pain in her stomach, but did not slow down until she reached the basement. Vast laundry machines filled the space, two of them spinning water and fabric. Pipes lined the ceiling. She heard voices to her left, so turned right, her soft shoes soundless on the concrete.

  She turned right again at a corridor, then left. At the far end was a short flight of steps rising to meet a door. The words “Way Out” glowed red at the top. Fear masked her pain as she raced past stacks of boxes and shelves of linen. The lights were dim, and dark shadows on the floor seemed to shimmer with a water-like glint, making her skip past them to avoid slipping. At the door, she hesitated, hands resting on the metal bar that would release the catch. Was a guard waiting outside in case she tried this very thing?

  She drew a quick, angry breath and slapped against the handle, hurling out the door, into cold rain. Blinking the water out of her eyes, she saw she was in an alley at the back of the hotel. Good. To her right, the alley stretched for a few hundred meters, with several large dumpsters against the hotel wall, overflowing with boxes and broken dishes. To her left, the alley ended a scant ten meters away. She turned right, just far enough to reach the dumpsters, where she stopped, ducking between two of them. Holding her nose against the smell, she caught her breath, and thought.

  Did they know who she was? No, her mind said. Ask that later. Right now, ask how you get to safety. There were cameras in the alley. She needed to get by them. For that matter, there’d been cameras in the stairwell and the basement of the hotel. But she couldn’t do anything about that, now. It was the alley she needed to worry about.

  Andy had told her about his trick to get into her yard in Chelmsford. She didn’t know how to hack into the security system, but there was some sense to just acting normal. The rain had stopped, so she pulled her Pad from its pocket and called up a game. Better to actually play one, than just pretend to play one. Once the game was going, she ducked her head and focused on the screen as she started a distracted ramble down the alley. Her walk was slow as she maneuvered her character through an obstacle course. She even stopped once, heart banging against her ribs, to get over a difficult spot. Nothing going on here, she thought to the cameras. No one’s in a hurry in this alley.

  At the street she turned left, away from the hotel. Two blocks down, she stopped amid a crowd of pedestrians and glanced back. The men from the lift appeared, running around the corner from the hotel entrance. They stopped. One was reading a Pad, the other looking up and down the street, as if searching. She saw him spot her just as a bus stopped to disgorge a passenger. He tagged his partner and they headed for her at a run. She stepped through the crowd and onto the bus, waved her chip over the payment sensor, and forced herself through the standing passengers to the middle of the bus.

  She sighed in relief as the bus moved forward, but it stopped again before it reached the next corner. Mutters of complaint worked their way down from the front of the bus, but people quickly fell silent. Moira peered past bodies and backpacks, and caught a glimpse of one of the hotel men talking to the driver. Stifling a moan, she turned and began pushing her way farther back.

  Her movement was oddly easy. Purses and briefcases were held closer to bodies, feet shifted and hips swung back as she squeezed by, then everything surged back into place after she passed. Shouting reached her from the front of the bus, she felt the tension of the crowd as everyone reacted to what was said. The sense of it had not yet reached the back of the bus when she stopped at the back door, closed and guarded by a uniformed porter. He blocked her hand as she reached for the handle, and she dared to look at him, trying to judge if she could sneak past him.

  He met her eyes. In her peripheral vision, she saw that everyone else was staring ahead, refusing to see whatever transpired. She understood. They had done what they could to help her, but it was all she could expect. Behind her, she felt the shifting of bodies as the men forced their way back. The porter stared at her for the space of a breath, then his eyes shifted forward as he declined to see her. The door slid open a few inches. She turned sideways, squeezing through just as the muffled shouting became a clear command to “lock down all exits by order of Security.” Then she was through, her pack catching as the door slammed closed.
It tore free at the last nanosecond. Desperately hoping the men could not see out the bus windows, she ducked into the nearest store.

  Her stomach screamed in pain, and tears streaked her face despite her best efforts to stop them. Her behavior did not pass unnoticed. Several people glanced at her, then looked away, maintaining their ignorance. But she knew the cameras remained focused, so she looked down, swiping her cheeks with the end of her scarf. This was a store for cheap clothing, sparsely furnished with shelves of sweaters and pants. Hoping there was a door to the alleyway, she moved further in, as if looking for something specific.

  Halfway back, an open corridor connected this store with the one next door. She turned into it, seeing crowded tables that held a conglomeration of tools and metals stacked in haphazard piles. Fighting her anxious stomach, she weaved in and around the tables and spied a door at the back. She hurried toward it, but an annoyed clerk blocked her path, smirking at her past his nose. “This store is not a throughway,” he said. “If you are not purchasing, you can’t go that way.”

  “Okay,” she said, her voice high. “I’ll just look over here.” She stepped past him to the third table a row closer to the door. Her hands shook as she rummaged through what looked like lug nuts. He watched her, his lips pursed in disapproval. She slipped behind the pile, hoping to keep an eye on him without having to turn around. As soon as she did, she saw her pursuers hurry through the corridor, looking in all directions. She gasped and the snotty clerk turned in her direction, not quite out of the way of the men. More alert this time, they avoided him, heading for Moira unimpeded. Frozen in place, she commanded her muscles to run, jump, dive ... do something.

  Abruptly, her muscles obeyed. Both arms shot out, shoving the pile of lug nuts onto the floor in front of the men. She didn’t stay to watch, although she did catch a glimpse of one man grabbing for a shelf filled with fishing tackle as he fell. The crash behind her was very satisfying.

  Chapter 27

  Dinnie hurried toward Sarah’s lab, her attention on the numbers her Pad displayed. A door opened just in front of her and she stopped with an inch to spare for her nose. “Bollocks!” She couldn’t stop the startled exclamation, but she swallowed any further retort as Albert Feldman stepped through the doorway. She backed away, hands and Pad raised in apology.

  He glanced up. “Dr. Warner, good. How is our special team proceeding?”

  She wondered if he’d even noticed that he’d almost brained her. But then, when was the last time she’d noticed stepping on a bug?

  “Altair and Green are making good progress on the neutrino manipulation,” she said. “Mr. Green is working on the substrate, and Dr. Altair estimates he’ll have enough neutrinos within the next few hours. Miss Andrews has a completed diagram for a container, but she did say she needs to know the mass before she can finalize it.”

  “We won’t have exact numbers until we’re ready to transmit,” Feldman said. “I don’t believe we need to know until then. The container just needs to hold about two thousand pounds. Say enough for ten men with light equipment.”

  Feldman’s army. Dinnie’s fingers shook as they skimmed over her Pad. “I’m on my way to her lab now. I’ll give her the message.”

  “I want to meet with all of them at two o’clock. I’ll come to the lab in 3B. Bring Miss Andrews there at that time.” He turned toward the lifts without waiting for an acknowledgement. Dinnie kept walking, thinking of bugs.

  ~~~

  Andy turned from the microscope, with a chip held in tweezers. He slid a Petri dish toward him, letting it stop just at the top corner of his Pad, on the side facing away from O’Brien, the young guard who had just come on duty. He dropped the chip into the dish, adjusting it with delicate pokes of the tweezers. It fell into two pieces, and without changing his rhythm, he picked up one and brushed the edge of his Pad just enough to send the chip into the assimilation slot.

  It disappeared into his Pad.

  He gave the chip in the Petri dish a last poke and a satisfied nod, then moved the dish back to the center of the table. Noting that Sam was engrossed in a pattern on his computer screen, Andy turned to peer once again in the microscope, silently counting the seconds.

  Three minutes later, a strangled cry from Sam made him look up. Sam had stiffened on his stool, his left arm jerking in rapid spasms. The blood had drained from his face, leaving a mask of agony as he grabbed at the arm. He fell from the stool just as Andy reached him.

  O’Brien was two steps behind, his gun drawn and shifting from Sam to Andy, and back again. “Get away from him,”

  “He’s got chip shock.” Andy eased the jerking body onto the ground and backed away with his hands up. “I’ve seen it before.”

  “I know what it is,” O’ Brien said. “I’ve alerted Medical that we have an emergency, they’ll be here in a minute.”

  “He could die in a minute!” Andy stepped forward, but stopped as O’Brien ‘s gun snapped back to him. “Turn it off. I know you have the control for it.”

  “It’s not allowed.”

  “He’s not going anywhere, damn it!” Andy had to shout over Sam’s sudden screech. He sank to his knees, oblivious of the gun, and put a hand under Sam’s head to cushion its repeated bangs against the floor. Sam’s eyes rolled up into his head.

  “Shit!” O’Brien grabbed his Pad and pressed a short series of buttons. An alarm began to ring at the security desk. Sam’s body stopped jerking, except for a slight tremor in his left arm.

  “It’s off,” O’Brien said. “Check him. Is he breathing?”

  Andy could hardly hear over the alarm and the panicked roaring in his ears, but he could feel Sam’s heart pounding under his hand, and as he bent over Sam’s head, he felt the brush of air past his cheek. He nodded. “Yeah, he’s breathing.”

  “All right, get away from him.” The gun gestured. “Over there.”

  Andy slid away until he reached the table behind him, watching Sam for any more signs of distress. O’Brien silenced the alarm and over the silence they heard steps running down the hall. A few seconds later, the door burst open to admit another guard and two women wearing medical scrubs, one of them pushing a crash cart.

  “I shut the chip down,” O’Brien said as the women knelt on either side of Sam.

  Andy stood and sank onto a stool, relieved to see O’Brien holster his gun. He rubbed his hand where it had hit the floor under Sam’s head, certain there would be a bruise starting. He glanced up as another man entered the room, and both guards came to stiff attention. Andy started to stand, but he noticed the nervous fear in O’Brien’s face, and decided it would be best if he didn’t move at all. The women ignored everyone, one of them giving Sam an injection, the other one watching a blood pressure monitor.

  Rage reddened the man’s face as his gaze touched everyone in the room. “What happened here?”

  Andy blinked in surprise. Whoever he was, the man sounded truly upset.

  O’Brien answered without moving, his gaze steadfastly forward, looking at nothing. “He went into chip shock, sir. I made the decision to turn his chip off, based on his apparent condition.”

  Andy shifted his gaze back to the man, who was regarding Sam with an odd expression of regret and amusement. “No doubt that was the correct decision, Mr. O’Brien. He wasn’t going to escape during chip shock.”

  O’Brien remained stiff, but his eyes flickered once in Andy’s direction as he nodded. “Thank you, sir.”

  Sam stirred, lifting his right arm to touch his left. “Bloody hell.” His voice was just a whisper.

  One of the doctors tucked a pillow under his head. “Stay still for a few minutes. You had a bad shock, but you should recover in a bit.”

  Sam gazed at her, his expression bewildered. Then his face cleared and his glare turned to the man. “What the hell was that, Feldman?”

  Andy watched with increased wariness as Feldman knelt next to the doctor. So this was Sun’s mysterious executive. One of the most powerf
ul men on the planet, if you believed the rumors. Andy suspected there was a lot of truth to rumors.

  “We call it chip shock,” Feldman said. “It’s not very common, but it happens often enough that we can treat it quickly. Essentially, the host has an incompatibility with the security chip, which degrades and delivers a shock. O’Brien disconnected your chip to stop the shock, and Dr. Russell has given you a shot of adrenaline. How is he, doctor?”

  The woman next to Feldman sat back on her heels, regarding Sam with tight lips. She kept watching him as she answered Feldman. “He’s fine. No burns beyond the local injury surrounding the chip. His heartbeat was erratic, but has settled into a normal rate. He has a bump on the back of his head, from his fall.”

  “He was banging his head pretty hard on the floor,” O’Brien said. “Mr. Green used his hand to cushion it best he could.”

  Feldman’s glance flickered to Andy, then back to Dr. Russell, who turned toward Feldman.

  “I need to remove his chip,” she said. “It’s fried, for one thing. But I don’t recommend implanting another one, sir. We don’t know enough about his universe. There could be differences at an elementary level that we haven’t seen yet. The next chip might kill him.”

  “All right.” Feldman stood, gazing at Sam before turning to Russell. “Take it out. I want a full analysis on it, and your report this evening. Make it your priority. Can he return to work?”

  “I want him to rest for at least fifteen minutes, but after that, yes.” Russell was already pulling supplies from her kit while her assistant swabbed Sam’s arm with alcohol and an anesthetic.

  “Fine.” Feldman turned to go, but Sam reached out his free hand.

  “Wait. What about Sarah?”

  Feldman turned back. “What about her?”

  “Take her chip out too. I don’t want this to happen to her.”

  “We don’t know what caused ....”

  “You’re damn right.” Sam said. “You don’t know, and you have no right to take chances with her life. Take it out.”