Ugh.
“Time is ticking away,” I say through the drone, forcing more confidence into my voice than I truly feel. “You have sixty seconds before this plague bomb goes off. Your answer.”
With that, I trigger the extra dramatic little bit I added at the last minute. The drone starts counting down in a cheerful voice, its beady little eyes blinking with each tick.
“Sixty! Fifty-nine! Fifty-eight!”
With a growl of frustration, the older woman slams her hands down on the table and pushes to her feet.
“The ayes have it, and as board president, I’m giving my authorization. We’re only going to say these codes once, so listen up.”
“Yes!” Remi hisses, sending another boulder of terraz at the other platform. It crashes down on the corner, tipping the whole thing at a dangerous angle. They’re pulling maz from the air all around us with a fierce joy, reveling in the ability to sling it around without thinking, for once. No rationing needed here. Ania may still be limited by her ware, but Remi is totally in their element.
I prep a recording and tap furiously at my deck, burrowing my way into the drilling system. I enter each segment of the code as the board member responsible for it recites it. The final man hesitates, his reluctance obvious, but a quick glance at the maz glowing in the drone’s belly has him rattling off the final string after only a second. With the last bit entered, the drill interface turns green. I’m in.
“Thanks so very much,” I say, then rush to add, “there’s just one last thing.”
And with that, I send the command to release the spell.
The flash is too much for the camera. The feed goes white, then black. My lenses flood with angry red warnings of damage to the drone, critical system errors, impending failure. After a moment, the drone’s cameras readjust, showing the aftermath with a giant crack down the center of the lens.
Every single board member sits rigid in their seat, slumped over, expressions locked in frozen horror. The only movement is the faint rise and fall of their breath.
Also, minor detail: they all have floppy rabbit ears sprouting from their heads. What the hell?
A few feet away, Remi cackles with glee even as they sling spells at our attackers from behind Ania’s shield.
“What did you do?” I ask, baffled.
“Professor Silva gave me a few tips when I asked about the berserker rabbits in the minefield. The maz I needed to add to make it glow purple is pointless otherwise, so I just . . . got a little creative.”
I snort and reopen the comm channel to make use of the dying drone’s last few seconds of life.
“So, as you may have guessed, you don’t actually have the plague,” I say. “But now you know just how much it sucks to think you might, so maybe consider your life choices while you’re stuck sitting there. Because you are stuck. Little paralysis spell, like what they use to subdue patients in hospitals. Couldn’t have you giving us the codes, then running off to override us or sending the cops, blah blah. The rabbit ears are just for fun. Enjoy! And since I know you’ll have a good four hours to plan and plot and rage internally before the morning guard shift shows up, I just want to offer one last little warning. We still have your secrets, and far more where they came from. We’ll be watching.”
Before I can really nail the threat home, though, the drone gives one last lurch, lists to one side, then crashes into the boardroom table. The feed cuts off with a quick hiss, and I actually feel a quick pang of distress at the thought of my little drone’s death. At least it went out in a blaze of glory.
“RIP, little bug,” Jaesin says, letting go of the steering controls just long enough to fire a volley of stun bolts at the other platform. I smile to myself, grateful for the tiny recognition, then shove it all away. Time to focus on my next job.
The drilling rig is a complicated system of maz engines, heat management systems, slurry pumps, and piping. It’s enormous, several stories tall, and wider at the bottom where the drill bit sits motionless below the surface of the Maz Sea, waiting for orders to dig deeper. Four enormous pylons jut out from its core at forty-five-degree angles, keeping it perfectly balanced above the rift. The controls are complicated—so complicated that for the first time, I feel a pang of dread. People train for years to be able to operate something like this, and they start with much simpler augers and surface-level drills.
I force myself to breathe evenly and go through each menu of the interface one at a time, looking for something, anything that might help. Finally, I come across PREPROGRAMMED FUNCTIONS, and get a genius idea.
Well . . . a better-than-nothing idea.
I open the window, and sure enough, it helpfully lists all of the drill’s most basic functions and the commands that drive them. Copy, paste, bam, too easy. I can work with this.
First things first—I command the drill bit to back out of the rift. No way we can seal it with the drill still wedged inside. With a hiss and a clank from the enormous maz engine systems, the drill slowly whirs to life and begins its slow ascent—
—and a flood of violet maz bubbles to the surface in its wake, overtaking everything around it.
“Go back, go back!” Ania shouts, rushing back to my side. I reverse the command, overriding the safeties to rush the process, and the flood slows. The damage is done, though. The sea around the rift roils with violet maz-15, a lake of poison right where Remi needs to work.
“We’ll have to seal the rift while we stop the drill. If we don’t do them at the same time, we’re just going to make the contamination worse than it’s ever been,” Ania says.
Our platform gives a sudden lurch, then tips sickeningly, nearly spilling us into the sea. I scrabble for a hold on the nearest railing and clutch my deck to my chest until the platform rights itself, Jaesin clinging to the controls for dear life. Just beyond him, I see the problem—another two pods have arrived, and two more platforms are in motion, slipping around the drill to flank us. We’re so screwed.
I grab a fistful of my hair and yank, thinking through the problem. “We’re going to have to time this super carefully. Remi,” I finally say, turning to them. “You and I will have to coordinate. Start on your part and—”
But they shake their head, hands held helplessly at their sides.
“I can’t manipulate the maz from up here, Diz. It’s too far. I can sense it, but I can’t reach it.”
“Take us lower then, Jaesin,” I snap. We’re already drifting lower, but so slow, ugh.
Jaesin pounds a fist on the console in frustration. “I’m trying,” he says, “but there’s some kind of failsafe that won’t let us get any closer to the surface than one hundred yards. This is as far as we go.”
“I’ll work on that,” I say, already backing out of the pod system to dig into the platform’s ones and zeroes. “I can probably turn it off. Remi, how low do we need to get, do you think?”
I turn to look at them, only to find them staring down at the eye of swirling maz at the bottom of the cavern.
“I can fix this,” they say.
Our eyes meet, and Remi gives me a sad, lingering smile as they flick off their suit’s nullifying barrier.
Then they dive off the platform, straight into the contaminated Maz Sea.