We filed out of his office, stepping onto the conveyer. Walking was encouraged except in emergencies; most of the halls had strips of moving floor that could be adjusted to various speeds. I pathed it to the lockers and upped it a few notches; we’d get there in a matter of seconds rather than the two or three minutes it would have taken us to walk.
Sometimes those minutes make the difference.
Jirathe was waiting with our lattes—the informal term fo
r booster shots—and didn’t bother wasting words as we suited up. She gave us each a jolt, watching our reactions carefully. I don’t know what’s in them; she told me once, but the chemical names meant nothing to me. All I know is that they provided an extra juice that left you feeling like you’d had ten hours’ sleep on a mattress so wonderful even Hans Christian Andersen’s snotty princess couldn’t kvetch about it, but without the crash and burn that you usually wound up with.
We stepped onto the platform at the edge of the lockers. The huge automatic doors slid open, revealing the prehistoric Earth beneath us, the last rays of dying light filtering in, along with a breath of fresh air. Jirathe burst into a thousand colors behind us, and we Walked.
“Did your world have movies? Because there’s this movie from my world called Mission: Impossible, and it has this really catchy theme music—”
Jai gritted his teeth, knuckles turning white as he clasped his hands in front of him. “Kindly cease your superfluous prattle,” he muttered to me, not taking his eyes off Jakon. “This requires an inordinate amount of concentration.”
“Sorry,” I responded. There wasn’t much else I could say. Jakon was scaling the outside of the building while Jai made her invisible. Or, as he’d explained it, “Depreciated the probability of her being discovered.” He wasn’t making her invisible so much as he was surrounding her with the belief that she couldn’t be seen. It was hard to believe, considering we could all see her as she made her way up the wall, but Jai had explained that we were able to see her because we knew she was there already. What I didn’t know was how she was climbing it; the building was glass and metal, and straight as a ruler. She was apparently accomplishing it on nothing more than clean thoughts and pure intentions.
J/O spoke up, confirming that Jakon had successfully planted the microchip that would scramble the security system. He put a hand to the panel next to the door, eyes unfocusing for a moment as he sorted through the command system.
After our last attempt, we’d decided to try a different approach. We knew they had the advantage of numbers—well, they always had that, but this time by hundreds instead of dozens—but we had something we hadn’t bothered to use before. All their attention would be diverted to keeping the new Walker contained, and no one would expect us to come back soon after our harrowing escape just this morning. The Binary were all organic computers; they calculated what was logical, and likely. They were the closest thing to the Borg we’d found—well, except for Universe YY?2373, which most of us just called the Trekiverse. At any rate, we were humans (most of us), and we had emotion. We also had determination. Last but not least, we had the element of surprise.
We also had a shot each of latte, which was probably how Jakon was able to literally climb the wall.
“Let’s go,” Jo said, bouncing a little on her toes. She was acting more like Jakon than her usual calm, slightly sarcastic self.
“Not yet,” I cautioned, though I was just as eager to get this over with as the rest of them. “Wait until J/O—”
“Got it,” the cyborg said, his eyes refocusing as the doors slid shut. “Jakon’s upstairs in a vent, but her portable scrambler will keep her hidden from the patrol bots. The Walker’s on the same floor as the information we need.”
“How fortuitous,” Jai said. I couldn’t help but agree with him, and that worried me. I wasn’t sure if I was just being paranoid or not, but the last time I’d been worried on a mission, my entire team had been captured by an elaborate HEX-laid trap. “Just keep an eye out,” I cautioned, earning a semidisgusted look from J/O.
“Do you doubt my sensors?”
“No, I just don’t want all of us to end up in a HEX sandwich again.”
“We’re dealing with the Binary this time, not HEX.”
“It would probably taste the same: bad.”
Jo giggled, and Josef laughed. Even Jai smirked a little. We were all a bit loopy. Our senses were working well enough, though. Twice on our way up the stairs we used Jai’s “we’re not really here” trick to avoid a clone patrol, and once J/O projected an image of an empty hallway to fool a patrol bot. In some ways, the Binary was easier to deal with than HEX; computers made more sense to me than magic, even though I wasn’t full of nanochips like J/O was.
There were downsides, however.
“Crap.”
“You’ve got how many dictionaries in your head, and that’s all you can come up with?…What’s wrong?”
J/O simply pointed. At a wall.
We stared for a moment at the wall, then at one another. Then at J/O.
“Did you blow a fuse or something?” Jo finally asked. “What are we looking at?”
“What does it look like? It’s a wall,” J/O said quite helpfully, and I think someone would have tried to strangle him, if he’d needed to breathe. Luckily for him, he continued before any of us could come up with a more effective way of venting our frustration. “It’s supposed to be a door, guys.”
“Not all of us have the floor plans in an embedded mission file,” I snapped.
“Not my fault.” J/O looked smug.
“Just project it, already.”