Cold Welcome

^{CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE}

Merced Tolganna frowned as a light blinked orange on the third box, second row, of a stack positioned in the last row. No lights ever came on there; she’d been told they were old tech, kept for scavenging spare cubes and connectors, but nobody had ever touched them, at least not on her shift in her twenty years in Central Data’s secure vaults. She looked up the manual she’d been issued the day she arrived, and scrolled along until she found the list. Inactive reserve units, outdated, no maintenance needed. Right. Then the curly mark that meant a footnote somewhere.

“Should a unit spontaneously activate, inform supervisor—” followed by a list of names and dates. Her current supervisor was Nils Rolander. The one time she’d called him for an anomaly, he’d chewed her out for interrupting him and threatened to dock her pay if she called for “a simple matter you could have taken care of” again. She couldn’t afford to lose pay, not with Stan’s cough getting worse. “Include serial number, time of activation, and type of code.”

Code? The box was ancient; she had no idea what code it might have started with. She called up the schematic, looked at that serial number, then walked over to the stack where she could see the original blinking light, just as it had been mirrored on her display. On, off, on off, very simple. Orange. Serial number… yes, the same.

Maybe she could fix it herself and not have to call Rolander. At least she could check if some mischievous person on another shift had reconnected it to power, but the boxes fit snugly enough in the rack that she couldn’t see behind it. She put her hands on either side of it and tugged. It didn’t move. Been there so long it had grown onto the shelf. Probably the footpads had deteriorated into black goo. She tried to lift the front a little, break the contact. No movement.

Back at her desk, she had a thin metal strip she’d used before for unsticking recalcitrant boxes. She fetched it and worked it under the front of the box. Sure enough, she could lever the front up a little, and as she’d suspected the footpads stretched a little. They needed to be replaced. She worked the metal strip vigorously until she had the footpads separated from the short front legs of the box, then—holding the front up perhaps half a centimeter—tugged hard. Harder. The box made a sort of scrunching sound and the blinking orange light turned red.

Clearly it was malfunctioning, and the sooner she disconnected its power supply—if this wasn’t due to some chemical deterioration inside—the better. Merced braced herself and yanked hard, with all her strength. She felt the back legs come loose and staggered back just as the box disintegrated in a bright light that was the last thing she ever saw.

Alarms went off, emergency lights flashed all over the building, a recorded voice announced “Evacuate! Evacuate! Evacuate!” Not until all the regular employees had left the building did anyone enter the room where Merced had worked. One man stopped at Merced’s desk and called up the activity log for her shift. The mess at the far end of the stacks offered no more information than the log, but that was enough.

“Stupid woman,” the man said. “Why didn’t she just inform her supervisor? She’d looked up the procedure in the manual.”

The second man sighed, fogging the faceplate of his protective gear. “Now we’ll have to do a new background check on her. Maybe she suspected something.”

“Or maybe she was just bored.”

They cleaned up the mess, and by the time they’d satisfied themselves the area was safe once more, Nils Rolander had arrived. By then, another of the boxes was blinking.

“What a shame about poor Merced,” he said. “I would never have suspected her of initiative.”

“We’ll have to do another background check—”

“Yes, of course, Ted. And I see there’s another signal gone off. Someone’s messing with our systems—”

“Bet it’s that old woman.”

“Old—?” Rolander raised his brows.

“Vatta. She must’ve gotten around our fellow in AirDefense finally.”

“Or her niece is alive. Or both of them—”

The three men looked at one another for a long moment.