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writing on the label faded with age.
"Pity," the woman said, returning the disk. "When we blew the power to the
lab, we killed the computer. This might have told us where the gateway is."
"No fix?" Jak asked, inspecting one of the bronze coins. It was a token of
some sort. Odd.
"Not without a power source."
"How about this?" Dean asked, walking in with the nuke battery from a droid in
his hands.
"That should have enough voltage," Mildred said. With help from J.B., she
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wired the battery to the surge protector, and when she hit the switch, the
screen began to glow and the device loudly beeped.
"We're in," Mildred said, watching numbers and weird lines of coded text
scroll by as the old comp sluggishly booted.
"How can this thing work?" Dean demanded curiously.
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"Building must be shielded against an BMP blast," his father said as the
laptop gave a flourish of trumpets and a picture of a busty girl in a very
skimpy bikini appeared on the screen. "Same way the redoubts are."
"Called a Farraday Cage," J.B. explained. "Sort of an electric fence against
mag fields."
Jak blinked. "That work?"
"Better believe it. But a Farraday uses a shitload of power. Megavolts to
protect even a small house."
"Think the location of the gateway might be in a file?" Krysty asked
pointedly, watching over their shoulders.
"No," Ryan replied sourly, turning the device around for them to see better.
There were no icons on the wallpaper of the pretty blond girl at the beach.
"The files have been erased."
Sliding into the chair, Mildred took the laptop. "Erased or deleted," she
said, bringing up the waste-basket and checking the contents.
"Success," she announced, restoring the files. "Nothing marked redoubt,
gateway or anything like that yet. Ah, a word processor program. Let's see if
any text files are still listed."
Using the mouse, the physician shifted the cursor and double-clicked on the
icon of a book only to have a pop-up screen appear demanding a password.
Typing clumsily, the physician tried several of the most common passwords
getting no results.
"Fuck this," Ryan said, standing erect. "There's a million passwords he could
have used. This is a waste of time."
"Just a minute," Mildred said, lifting the mouse pad to check underneath.
There were several alphanumeric sequences on a yellow sticky note, and she
tried the
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longest. As the woman hit Enter, the password screen went away and the word
processing program began to expand.
"We're in," Mildred reported, typing steadily.
Rubbing his cheek with the edge of a hand, Ryan grunted in reply. "The idiot
wrote down the password?"
"Lots of folks used to do that," she admitted sheepishly, having done the same
thing herself at the hospital. "Corporate security always keeps changing the
passwords, and so folks write them down somewhere convenient to not forget."
Reviewing the text files, there was still nothing marked redoubt or gateway,
so she shifted to the disk and brought up a large file marked "important."
"Okay, the man who worked in this office had the National Guard haul the
supplies from the armory to this building," Mildred said, compressing the
broken sentences and random words. "Then had his technicians carry it to the
redoubt."
"Where is it?" Ryan demanded.
Mildred shook her head. "He doesn't say yet. This is very badly typed with no
spelling whatsoever. I wonder if he was dying, it's so muddled. Ah, here's
something. He also shipped all of the live 'pilots,' he calls them, to Mature
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Island.
It has nothing of military importance, so his children should be safe there.
Goddamn son of a bitch actually calls the poor muties his children!"
"The whitecoat is aced," Krysty said gently. "His crimes have been paid for."
"Not enough for me," Mildred argued.
"Why gateway redoubt here?" Jak asked frowning. "Broken?"
"Cave in," the physician reported hesitantly, as if unsure of the event.
"Apparently six technicians died trying to dig through the rubble before the
scientists decided
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to leave and assemble the gateway as far away from this island as possible."
"Strange to go when they were so close," Dean said, standing at the doorway to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]