Chapter 95: But History Is Witness
The whole thing was a conversation.
I don’t think I’ll ever get over the fact that the end of the entire south of a country turned out to be a man following a step-by-step tutorial from a passive-aggressive vending machine in his own skull, understanding not one word of what any of it did.
-Ding!
{
Location: Western Gallery.
Component: Manual Control Wheel.
Required Action: Rotate clockwise ×4 turns.
Note: Resistance expected after second rotation.
Proceed.
}
I found the wheel, turned it, and found it resisting after the second, exactly the way the System said it would, and I put my back into the last two without even knowing what it did.
-Ding!
{
Location: Western Gallery.
Component: Third Breaker, Left-to-Right.
Required Action: Switch OFF.
}
[This is insane...] I couldn’t help thinking, wiping the sweat off my brow.
There was no cost meter, no confirm-Y-N, no thank-you-for-your-business, just a schematic at the corner of my eye and a red node deep in the middle of it that got a little redder every time I obeyed, and the System reading me directions in the same flat register it uses to sell me shotgun shells.
I moved through the plant, following the System’s advice down to the letter.
And after a while, I hit the first real problem, and it had a dead man’s fingerprints all over it.
-Ding!
{
Advisory: Manual intervention detected in Primary Loop.
Safety Systems Restored: Multiple.
Current Facility State: Partial Controlled Shutdown.
Assessment: Deceased operator completed approximately 40% of controlled shutdown procedures prior to termination.
Remaining Hostile Personnel: 0.
Required Action: Reverse completed safety-restoration procedures before continuing catastrophic failure sequence.
}
I stood there in front of a bank of valves the old man had gotten to from that console alone.
That’s what Brandt had been doing the whole time, wasn’t it, the entire time I was killing the room around him.
He hadn’t just been pressing random buttons and switches.
He’d been winning, getting to forty percent of the way to putting this plant to sleep, and now every one of those forty percent was a switch or valve I had to walk back by hand, a safety I had to strip back off, undoing the last work of a man who never stopped even as he drew his last breath.
"Okay, old man, you were actually impressive," I said quietly to the valves, and got to it.
-Ding!
{
Procedure:
Primary Loop Valve A: OPEN - Full.
Primary Loop Valve B: CLOSE.
Execute sequentially.
}
It took time.
Brandt had done good work, careful work, the kind you have to unpick one deliberate turn at a time, and I unpicked all of it while the pump throbbed under me and the plant fought back the only way it knew how, which was to be built, top to bottom.
Every safeguard I stripped, another one woke up under it.
Automatic systems that saw what I was doing and tried to correct it, while the System told each one as it came, telling me which handle killed them.
And slowly, one after another, I worked backward through years of other people’s caution, the plant’s own dead keeping me company as I did.
The Infected came slow, grey and swollen and tripping over themselves, a plant-jumpsuit shape unfolding out of a doorway toward the light, and I put it down with three rounds to the chest with the M110A2, quiet as a cough, before it got close.
Another came in a stairwell, on the way down, while two more stumbled in a hall I had to cross twice. And I shot them all dead.
[Body shots... No time to be pretty... No TK to waste either...]
-Ding!
{
Sequence Status:
Schedule Conflict: Ghostbird arrival in approximately 15 minutes.
}
I stopped, one hand still on a wheel, and let out a slow breath through my teeth.
[Right on time...]
I’d sent that bird to Halden to be the loudest, most interesting thing that city had heard since the world ended, and it had done its job, and now it was coming home, low and thunderous, dragging every hungry thing in Halden behind it like a tide behind a moon.
Fifteen minutes until my own ride came back over the roof.
And behind it, close, hopefully a million of them.
"How much is left?" I said out loud, and it came out harder than I meant.
-Ding!
{
Remaining Actions: 6
.
Estimated Completion Time: 11 minutes.
Completion Estimate: Optimal execution.
}
Eleven minutes of work. Fifteen until the bird.
The math was fine.
But history is witness: the math was fine right up until it wasn’t.
Right up until one valve stuck, or one safeguard took an extra minute, or one thing went the way my life usually goes, and I felt my heart climb up a notch.
So I moved faster. Wheels, breakers, the panel behind me, me going down a level, along the loop, the System calling it clean and flat while I unpicked the last of a dead man’s mercy with my own two hands and the plant screamed its automatic warnings into rooms nobody living would ever hear them in.
Soon there were only five actions left.
Then four.
Then three.
And before long I had forgotten the time.
And that’s when I felt it come up through the soles of my boots and into my teeth, the thing I’d been outrunning the clock on, rolling in low over the roof six floors above me, building from a hum into a hard climbing thunder that shook dust off the pipe runs.
-Ding!
{
Asset Status:
Ghostbird: On Station.
Position: Facility Helipad.
Flight Mode: Holding.
Warning: Hostile Mass Converging.
Estimated Composition: Multiple hostile groups.
Facility Ingress: Multiple structural entry points compromised or accessible.
}
Three actions left, and a building full of open doors, and hopefully a million things outside now turning toward the one loud beautiful thing in the world, which was hovering directly above.
"Booger," I said, and drew a breath, and put my hand on the next wheel. "It’s about to get real rude in here."
"Mea."