Dangerous Data (The Meridian Crew Book 2) Page 6

  “Of course, of course!” said the male scientist, gesturing for Sasha to come to the front.

  Amelia shot another look to the rest of the group, and they began to move toward the massive bank of computers on the other side of the room.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Thank you, thank you,” said Sasha, taking his place at the brown podium at the front of the room. “As you all evidently already know, I’m Doctor Sasha Vasiliev. You a—”

  He was cut off by thunderous applause. After a moment, he held up his hand.

  “Thank you, thank you.”

  Amelia, Benkei, and Sam rushed over to the computer. With a few finger taps, Amelia accessed it, the display of the clear monitor flickering to life and bringing up the computer directory.

  “Ah, where to begin,” said Sasha, his eyes fixed on the group as they huddled around the computer. “How about with tachyons? Yes, let’s start there.”

  The crowd murmured approvingly.

  “Ah, tachyons,” said one.

  “I do love to hear about those,” said another.

  “So, tachyons…” Sasha went on.

  Amelia typed at the computer, doing her best to figure out how to access the data.

  “Anything?” whispered Benkei.

  “No,” said Amelia. “Sasha’s the computer expert. I’m pretty much flying blind here.”

  “Let me try,” said Sam, tucking a stray lock of red hair behind a freckled ear.

  Amelia backed away from the computer and let Sam go to work, her slim fingers dancing softly on the keyboard.

  “Hm,” said Sam.

  “There are many tachyons in space,” said Sasha. “Each more mysterious than the last.”

  “What’s ‘hm’?” asked Amelia.

  “Well, I’ve found the directory that we’re looking for, but there’s something off about it.”

  “What?” asked Amelia, her eyes on the crowd, the sea of mostly white hair still enraptured by Sasha.

  “He told us that this is farming data or something, right?”

  “Yeah, and?”

  “This doesn’t look like farming data. Or farming technology data. It looks like weapons data.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Um, no. Not entirely. Everything’s really encrypted.”

  “Well, get it on the drive and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Sure, sure,” said Sam, and another flurry of keys later, a blue bar began to move across the screen and rising percentage number underneath it.

  A few moments later, the bar was filled, and Sam uploaded the data to her slate.

  “Done?”

  “Done.”

  “Now to get the golden boy out of here.”

  Amelia pondered how to get Sasha off of the stage, and settled on waving her arms over her head and pointing at the door.

  “Ah,” said Sasha, trying to find a stopping point. “In conclusion, tachyons are a subject of great contrast. I apologize, but I must be on my way.”

  Disappointed sighs erupted from the crowd.

  “I apologize. But perhaps I can return at another time to finish this little presentation.”

  The murmuring in the crowd became livelier.

  “Thank you so much to Doctor Vasiliev,” said the female doctor as Sasha walked off the stage, waving.

  The three companions moved back to the other side of the room and met Sasha by the front door.

  “Can we go now?” he asked, as though exhausted.

  “Yes, please,” said Benkei.

  Sasha gave one final wave, the women nearest to him reaching out as if to touch him, and the group left the room, the door whooshing shut behind them.

  “Nice work, pretty boy,” said Sam, playfully elbowing Sasha in the ribs.

  “Do any of you have any idea how much nonsense I was talking up there?” he said, his face flustered, his sandy hair loose and draped around his face.

  “Why not just tell them what you’ve been studying?” asked Benkei.

  “What, and tell them all about my latest tachyon research? Please—pearls before swine,” he said.

  “Whatever,” said Amelia. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “That’s it?” Sasha. “We’re done?”

  “It would seem so,” said Benkei as the four of them walked down the hallway. “We were hired to get the data and go. Why, hoping for a shootout?”

  “Not even a little,” said Sasha. “Could go for some more pizza, though, if you guys are hungry.”

  Sam groaned.

  The four companions made their way down the lab hallway then to the main, multi-tiered floor.

  “Does it seem like it’s busier down here, or is it just me?” asked Sam, wrapping her fingers around the white, metal railing and leaning over on her tip-toes.

  Amelia took a look. Sure enough, it seemed as though there was more of a hurried bustle among the dozens of scientists and guards on the main floors.

  “Maybe the arrival of our golden boy is causing quite a stir.”

  “Huh?” said Sasha, fishing a chocolate-colored energy bar out of his lab jumpsuit and eating it in a few quick bites.

  “No,” said Amelia, stepping next to Sam. “This looks different.”

  The scientists seemed to be gathering near the many entrances to the lab, forming single file lines as guards looked over and scanned their information. The scientists all wore expressions of either confusion or wariness as they chatted among each other.

  “Looks like they’re checking documentation,” said Amelia.

  “Well,” said Benkei. “The information the client has given us has worked so far. No reason to think it shouldn’t continue to do so.”

  “Yeah, and it’s not like we have any other way to get out of here,” said Amelia. “Let’s get down there before we start looking suspicious.”

  The four of them made their way down the stairs and onto the main floor, forming up in one of the lines. As they thought, the guards up at the front were scanning IDs and sending scientists out through the entrances, clearing the facility.

  The line continued to move, and as it did, the bustle around the group grew.

  They were noticing Sasha.

  “Oh, great,” said Sam. “Too famous around these dweebs for your own good.”

  Scientists shook his hand, talked to him about work that he’d done that they’d particularly liked, all as the line moved closer and closer to the guards.

  “Hey, B,” whispered Amelia. “You get a chance to see what name was on his ID?”

  “No, but if it’s anything like mine, it’s not his real one.”

  Sam looked at Benkei and Amelia with a worried expression on her youthful face. They moved closer to the end of the line, Sasha’s identity clear to anyone who was within earshot.

  Finally, it was their turn, and one of the guards – who seemed to be envious of the attention Sasha was getting from his female admirers – snatched the ID out of his hand and scanned it. “Doctor Richard Brannigan?” he asked, incredulous.

  “Um, yeah,” said Sasha. “It’s, ah, an alias?”

  The guard looked at him, then back at the ID, then back at Sasha, then back at the ID.

  Then a moment passed.

  Benkei, with a sigh, lifted his intertwined hands and brought them down with a crash onto the top of the guard’s head.

  "Always the hard way," he said, disappointment heavy in his voice.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Go, go, go!” shouted Amelia as she clambered into the sleek body of the car, pulling the door down and shut just as a pair of caseless rounds hit the outside of the door with knocking thunks.

  “I’m going!” said Sam, pulling out of the dock, the flashing red emergency lights of the space strobing the interior of the car.

  More rounds cracked off from the guards who were now massing in the dock, the bullets slamming into nearby parked cars, the glass of their windows splitting and shattering and tumbling to the ground in gliste
ning waterfalls of shards.

  “Ahhh!” cried Sam, the engine struggling to life.

  “Too damn famous for you own good,” said Benkei while shaking his head a Sasha, who was curled into the corner of the car, the expression of a mischievous scamp on his face.

  With a rev of the engine and a lurch, the car came loose from where it was parked, falling backward and rushing headlong at the ground before Sam could steady it.

  “They’re coming after us,” Sam said, watching as three pairs of guards entered three red and black cars two apiece.

  “Then we’re gonna have to lose them out there,” said Amelia, pointing at the crisscrossing rush of traffic just outside of the dock.

  “Just be careful,” said Benkei, strapping himself in. “That’s…quite the drop.”

  Amelia took a look down, and he was right. Just down to the canopy had to be five-hundred feet—over a thousand more to the true ground level.

  “Here we go!” said Sam, whipping the car around, the exit growing larger and larger in her view, and the car screaming out and into traffic.

  Sam dipped the car to avoid the first stream of cars, the honking and yelling from the drivers rising and fading as they moved past it. With a spin and a dive, the car moved just under a blinking orange advertisement for instant noodles, and with a look back, she saw that the three security cars were flying in hot pursuit behind them them in a tight triangle.

  Then, the car lurched as a trio of bullets slammed into the back bumper.

  “What the hell? They’re shooting at us?” said Amelia, her head low.

  “Whatever’s on that data, they’re not messing around with not letting it out,” said Benkei.

  “Farming data, my ass,” said Amelia.

  In a long curve, Sam whipped the car around the nearest tower, an angled building of blue glass that reached up into the clouds. Amelia could see the office workers through the windows as they passed, crowds gathered along the window passing by like one long, blurry suit. Sam moved closer to the building, dipping the car just around a scaffolding of mechanically-augmented construction workers, the men shaking gleaming steel-colored fists at them.

  “They’re getting really close,” said Sasha, his voice a tone of mild interest.

  “Yeah, I see that!” yelled Sam.

  “Uh, Sam?” added Amelia. “That’s a walkway up there!”

  A long corridor connecting one building to another grew closer by the second, and Sam seemed to be driving in a path that would bring them crashing right into it.

  “No side-seat driving, please!” said Sam, the corridor becoming bigger and bigger as they flew, the dense knotting of Midtown towers forming a solid wall of glass and steel just beyond.

  Sam flew up and over the corridor at the last second, the trio of security cars splitting up, two flying over it, one flying below. Amelia watched as another drew a bead and popped off a round, this one going wide.

  “Sam, I know you’re kind of busy, but tell me you at least have a plan?” said Amelia, her eyes locked onto the blurry streaks of passing buildings and advertisements.

  “I do! Right there!” she said, and pointing at the yellow and silver skeleton of a super scraper under construction, orange pops of arc welding lighting up along the frame of the thing.

  “Why do I feel as though I’m not going to like this one bit?” asked Benkei, tightening his straps.

  “Probably because you’re not!”

  The framework of the building grew closer and closer, the security cars tightening behind them. But just before they were able to draw another bead, the car crashed through the scaffolding of the building, smashing through the under-construction floor, and pulling up, into the empty space of the not-yet-filled elevator bank, the sky far above a power blue coin cross-hatched with rebar and steel beams.

  Amelia felt the pressure of the rise as she looked back. She saw one car fail to make the pull upwards and crash into a pile of construction equipment, the workers scattering. But two cars followed, and Amelia knew that in the tighter space of the elevator bank, they’d be sitting ducks.

  “Hang on again!” said Sam, spinning the body of the car, angling it such so that a jutting steel beam passed under them harmlessly.

  The same couldn’t be said for one of the pursuing cars, which caught the beam, a trail of sparks lighting up where it hit before the car lost power and crashed into one of the empty floors, leaving one car in pursuit.

  The circle of sky above became bigger and bigger by the second, and warning lights began to sound as the car reached the capacity of its climbing ability.

  Then, they reached the top. The car crashed through the thin grating at the top of the elevator bank, traveling upwards in a slow, lazy arc as the engine stalled. Amelia looked back, and saw that from this height she was able to see the entirety of the outline of Manhattan, the island packed dense full of buildings that stretched into the sky like massive shards of blue and clear glass, the squares and rectangles of parks on the canopy surface between them, lines of cars moving like black blood cells, the glittering water of the East and Hudson rivers sparkling with the midday sun.

  Then the car began its fall, and Sam slammed her hand on the control panels, trying to shock the car back to life. Amelia saw that their final pursuer faced the same problem as them, though that car was unable to make the same climb that they had, and instead fell backward into the elevator bank that they had just escaped from.

  The buildings below rushed toward them, Sam continuing to slam onto the control panel as Amelia felt her stomach smash against her rig cage.

  With one final slam of her palm, the car sputtered back to life, the control panel display flickering alight once again.

  “There!” yelled Sam.

  With a pull of the steering wheel, she straightened the car, aiming it at the buildings that rose from the Midtown area. A pair of police drones zipped up from the city, honking their dissonant, diminished-chord sirens and flanking the car.

  “Attention: you are at an unsafe altitude,” spoke the recorded voice. “Return your car to traffic level immediately, or face a traffic fine.”

  “Don’t have to tell me twice,” said Sam, following the drones back down to the city level.

  “That was…a hell of a ride,” said Benkei.

  His face turned green and Sasha pulled open the back flap of the seat in front of him to sputter out a small burst of upchuck.

  “That’s the least you get for getting us into this mess,” said Amelia.

  “Hey,” said Sasha, wiping his mouth with his sleeve as Sam pulled the car back down to traffic level. “Don’t hate me because I’m famous and beautiful.”

  Amelia used every bit of restraint she had to not slap him upside the head.

  CHAPTER 13

  The car slid into the parking spot at the luxury tower, the engine groaning and straining from the stress that it was recently put through. When it finally came to a stop and the doors opened, Amelia couldn’t help but stumble out, her vision blurry, her stomach queasy.

  “Nice, nice flying, Sam,” said Amelia, steadying herself on the car next to Benkei, who was doing the same.

  “Anytime!” she said, her voice chipper as she walked toward the entrance to the building, her steps light and lively.

  “Well, we might as well get on with this,” said Benkei.

  “Yeah, hopefully Geff isn’t too upset that we got found out.”

  “Well, we got the data,” Benkei replied, walking away from the car with slow, measured steps. “He didn’t say anything about not getting detected.”

  Sasha following behind them, the team made their way back to the apartment and collapsed onto the circular couch. Sasha made a quick trip to the bathroom to brush his teeth before setting upon the leftover pizza that was still in the box on the chrome-colored coffee table.

  “How can you eat at a time like this?” asked Benkei. “My stomach couldn’t even handle an antacid.”

  “I made roo
m in the car,” Sasha said, piling lukewarm, discarded pineapple onto his slice.

  “Gross,” said Sam.

  “I’m calling Geff. Try to look at least kind of professional,” said Amelia.

  Sam sat upright, and Sasha took another slice and went into one of the bedrooms. “Call me if you need anything,” he said.

  “Are you kidding me?” asked Amelia. “Sash, they’re gonna be looking for us.”

  “Ugh,” he said, sitting down on the couch. “At least let me have some lunch first.”

  Amelia shook her head and dialed up Geff, his face appearing on the screen moments later, his eyes still obscured by those same frameless sunglasses.

  “I see there’s been some activity in the last few hours,” he said. “I hope that means good news.”

  “It does,” said Amelia. “Kind of. We got the data, but we got made during the escape.”

  A moment passed as Geff considered the information. “That’s what I figured. No matter, the data is what’s important. But they’ll be on the lookout for you. Just stay put for now. You should be fine in the safe house.”

  “How can you know for sure?” Amelia asked, disbelieving.

  “You’ll have to trust me on this. I have the identity of the apartment owner well-hidden. They won’t think to look for you there, assuming you weren’t followed.”

  “We weren’t,” Sam chimed in.

  Amelia thought back to the police drones, but they were automated, and not likely to be too concerned with who they were escorting back to the traffic level.

  “I’ll have your car removed and replaced immediately,” said Geff. “But, like I said, just stay put for now. You’ll be able to leave in your ship before too long.”

  Amelia opened her mouth to respond but caught a glimpse of something outside of the apartment window. It was a convoy of cars, but not belonging to the NYPD- they were the same black cars with white trim of the security cars and soldiers that they had just evaded. The series of squat, boxy, heavily-armed cars floated slowly, as if on the lookout for someone.

  “What did we steal, Geff?” asked Amelia, watching the convoy fly past, and noticing that two more were visible among the skyscrapers, though they were further off.