Twinmaker

69

CLAIR PUT HER hands over her ears and stared up at the ceiling. The blast of sound was so loud, it seemed to be coming from inside her head.

“What is that?”

“Sounds like a fire alarm,” Jesse shouted close to her ear. She could barely hear him.

They ran into the office and found Ray tugging bodily at the doors.

“We’re locked in!”

Jesse lent his weight to the effort while Clair checked her infield.

There was a message patch from Angela Kadri. Clair winked on it immediately.

“What’s going on? Why are the doors locked?”

“It’s for your own safety,” the head of security told her. “The building’s under attack.”

Clair went cold. The submarine. Turner.

Ending the exchange with Kadri, she called Q.

“Where’s Turner?” she asked. “Has the drone surfaced yet?”

“Yes, Clair. It’s at the old subway station, with the others—what’s that noise?”

“Tell Turner to stand down! They know you’re there!”

“Clair, look.” Jesse was tugging at her arm, pointing at the windows.

Heavy shutters were descending rapidly over the wide expanses of glass.

“Q, tell him to stop! He’s going to ruin everything!”

“I don’t understand,” said Q. “What’s happening, Clair? What’s going on?”

The shutters slammed with a boom. In the same instant, the siren died. A ringing silence fell.

“Q?”

The conversation had been cut off. Clair’s infield was blank. She was severed from the Air.

“I don’t like this,” said Jesse.

“That’s the understatement of the year,” Clair said, rounding on Ray. “What was Turner planning? Tell me!”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Once he decided I was going with you, he cut me out of the loop. Honestly. But he was prepared. If things went wrong with you, he was ready for anything.”

“Too ready, obviously,” she said, fighting the urge to weep with frustration. “This can’t be happening.”

“We don’t know that Turner did anything at all.” Ray put his hands on his hips. “He wouldn’t blow up the building while we’re in it, would he?”

“I don’t know, Ray. You tell me.”

“Maybe the sub tripped an alarm,” Ray said, “and VIA security’s just being ultracautious.”

“Maybe a lot of things. I still don’t like it.”

For five minutes, they pounded the door with their fists to get someone’s attention, but there was no reply. Then they paced from wall to wall, looking for ways out that didn’t exist. Jesse probed every socket and sensor. There were no vents: air was refreshed through the fabber, and food waste was disintegrated into nothing.

There was only one way into the office, and it was firmly shut.

“Maybe the lockdown’s an automatic safety procedure,” said Ray, “to protect Wallace if something goes pear-shaped.”

“So why haven’t they contacted us?” asked Jesse. “There must be some way to talk to Wallace if he’s caught in here.”

“Maybe they’re all busy,” said Ray.

“Thanks to you and your friends,” Clair snapped at him. “This is going to look bad. We’re locked in here like prisoners.”

“We could light a fire,” said Ray. “Set off an alarm for real, and then they’d pay attention to us.”

“Great idea,” said Jesse. “If no one comes, we either suffocate or burn to death. Let me see if I can find a lighter—oh, wait, there isn’t one.”

“Quit it, both of you!”

They were getting on one another’s nerves. The office was bigger than some houses, but it seemed to be getting smaller fast.

“We just need to think,” she said.

Clair went into the tiny service room and checked the fabber’s menus. Its memory contained no weapons, drills, radios, explosives, or anything useful at all. After that pointless search, she checked for more mundane things like food and drink. VIA provided a fine choice of coffees, at least. She ordered a pot and three mugs. They could share it while they tried to find a way out.

Jesse sniffed warily at the coffee and then took a sip. Deciding it probably wouldn’t poison him, or that he didn’t care if it did, he drank the rest.

“What are they waiting for?” he asked. “Are they trying to freak us out?”

“Maybe making us sweat a little is their way of telling us they won’t be pushed around,” Clair said. “If that’s the case, I’m happy to wait them out.”

She sat in a chair and crossed her legs. It wasn’t impossible that there was a camera on them right now, recording their reactions.

Ray checked the door for the hundredth time.

“Guys,” he said, “I can hear something out there.”

Clair and Jesse were at his side in an instant.

Ray was on his hands and knees, with his right ear pressed hard against the right-hand panel.

“Sounds like hammering,” he said, “or gunfire. I can’t tell which.”

Clair crouched next to him and listened, the door coolly metallic against her skin.

For some seconds all she could hear was the beating of her heart. Slowly a less familiar sound rose to prominence: a distant, percussive thudding that lacked the regularity of a machine. Its source wasn’t nearby, but as she listened, she thought it might be getting louder.

Clair ran back to her chair and picked up her empty coffee mug. She raised it above her head and banged it against the door, shouting, “Hey! You have to let me talk to someone! Open the door—please!”

She was picturing Turner and Gemma, armed to the teeth like Ray had been, blasting their way up through the building. Could they possibly be fighting all of VIA on their own, plus the peacekeepers who would automatically come to VIA’s defense? It seemed impossible, unless . . .

Q.

Suddenly she could see it playing out in her mind. If the sub had done nothing more than trip an alarm by docking in the underwater station, triggering the shutdown and an accidental imprisonment of Clair and her friends, Q wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between that and Clair being held captive. And she wouldn’t take it lying down.

Clair suspected Q herself didn’t know exactly what her capabilities were. She lived in the Air; she had access to the entire accumulated knowledge of humanity. Clair wondered if VIA was in the process of finding out exactly what those capabilities were.

And the world was watching. How many people were going to be hurt now? How bad was it going to make the Counter-Improvement cause look?