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Rick worked his jaw for a few seconds as he took one final look at the gravesite, then turned and headed back for the police car. He, Dr. Evans and Oles each took a mask off of the hood of the car, grabbed the rest of their gear and headed down into the building from whence they had come. Though the rush of adrenaline and the sheer panic during the struggle with the Russians had left Rick temporarily unaffected by the rancid smell in the building, he, Oles and Dr. Evans had all felt violently ill during their trip back up.
Passing through the halls and down the stairs, Rick stayed in the lead until they reached the bottom server room where he stood back and let Oles and Dr. Evans sit in their seats. Both were still nursing their wounds, but a quick bandaging of each other while Rick had been digging was all they had been able to afford due to their short timetable.
“So you have the codes.” Rick looked at the pair. “What do we need to do to broadcast them out? Swap out this server with another one and use the dedicated line?”
“No,” Dr. Evans shook his head, “when we were in the system we saw that it had specific authorization to work over their internal network. If there is another authorized system, we have no way of determining what it is.”
“Hm.” Rick turned and looked at the darkened servers—purposefully ignoring the shape of Jacob’s body still lying on the floor—as he pondered their situation. “Are all of these systems clean? Or have they been compromised by Damocles?”
Dr. Evans used his feet to push his wheeled chair over to another desk, then pointed at a box mounted to the wall. “This whole room is sealed off from the outside world, and the only way to allow a connection through is by manually joining the cables together with this box. One and only one system can connect to it at a time. So no, I don’t see how any of these could have been compromised by Damocles.”
“Good. Where are the access keys for Damocles?”
Oles produced a small thumb drive from his pocket. “Dr. Evans and I made two copies before the system went down. I have one, and he has the other.”
“Oles, give me your drive. You and Dr. Evans make sure you don’t lose the other one. The pair of you get upstairs, get to the car and get the inverter hooked up and ready for me.”
“What’ve you figured out, Rick?” Dr. Evans narrowed one eye at him, as if he could read Rick’s mind. A sly smile passed across Rick’s face and he looked back at the servers.
“Hopefully saving our asses. Now hurry up.”
Outside, Oles and Dr. Evans worked together, each favoring their injured arm. The inverter was retrieved from the trunk of the police car, a power strip was retrieved from a nearby building and they even managed to get a small folding table and chair set up, too. They were just about to go looking for Rick when he staggered out of the front of the building, his head concealed by the server and monitor that he was carefully balancing in his arms. He turned to the side to check where he was going, saw the table near the car and beelined for it, huffing and puffing in his mask.
Thud!
The table groaned and creaked under the impact, but held firm. Rick ripped off his mask and threw it to the side before collapsing into the chair. Sweat poured down his face and neck, and he unzipped his jacket and unbuttoned the top of his shirt, pulling on it to help circulate cold air across his skin. Dr. Evans handed him a bottle of water and Rick took a few sips after his breathing slowed, then he zipped his jacket back up and looked at Oles and Dr. Evans. “It’s been a long time since I had to haul one of these things anywhere. I forgot just how doggone heavy they are.”
“Rick, I hate to say this,” Dr. Evans began poking at the equipment Rick had retrieved, “but what good is a server, monitor and all this cabling and such going to do?”
Rick smiled at the question, leaned back in his chair and pointed at the top of the building across from them. The glare from the sun was bright, but they could still make out the edge of the flat roof and the antennas mounted on top. “When I sat up there with Ostap, I noticed that they’ve got a lot of communications equipment up there. Not surprising, right? Well, one of the devices they’ve got up there is an LKN Series VI short-range broadcaster and receiver. State of the art, dead simple to use and can transmit and receive radio to satellite and basically anything in between.”
“Don’t you need specialized equipment to connect with something like that?”
“That’s the brilliant part. We worke
d with the prototypes of these for some of the work my company did in the autonomous car field. They accept half a dozen types of connections and the interface is a simple command line you can get to through almost any OS. They can draw power from the host system and anything you tell them to do is run through their internal system so there’s no specialized software required.”
“Wouldn’t something like that have been infiltrated by Damocles?” Dr. Evans shielded his eyes as he looked up.
Rick stood and grabbed a thick bundle of cabling that he had wrapped around the base of the monitor. “Only one way to find out, eh?”
Chapter 11
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“How much battery’s left?”
“At least four more hours before we deplete the main cell. The two backups might give us a couple more hours, tops.”
“Good. We’ll make land by then for sure.” Commander Palmer nods in satisfaction as he climbs back down the side of the module and goes to check on Ted. Seated on one of the floats, next to the jury-rigged outboard motor, he clings to both the float and the motor like his life depends on it.
Thought of in a spur-of-the-moment inspiration before leaving the space station, the idea for the motor was born out of pure necessity. Landing in the water would, as Commander Palmer put it, leave them stranded for “who-knows-how-the-hell-long” unless they had a way to get back to shore. Makeshift paddles would work, but pushing the module filled with life-sustaining supplies to the shore with paddles had not been on anyone’s wish list. So, before setting off for Earth, they stripped down spare parts from the inside of the station, pulling apart any and everything that looked like it might be useful in constructing a makeshift motor.
“Plastic still holding tight?” Commander Palmer kneels down on the float across from Ted, looking at the motor in the water.
“Seems to be. Haven’t had anything short out yet.”
“Excellent. At the rate we’re going we’ll be there in a few hours.”
