From the positions that Corfe had selected, the two mecs commanded a clear line of sight to both of the secretaries’ terminals and keyboards. The result was that by the time Corfe collected the van and left toward the end of the afternoon, he had not only successfully infiltrated the devices needed to commence the operation tomorrow, but he also had on tape the full sequences of codes and passwords for accessing Garsten’s system. He also had an audio record of a lot of gossip and personal secrets between Garsten’s two secretaries—some of it quite entertaining, but nothing immediately relevant to his purpose.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Kevin peered into a deep, crawl-size passage with floor and sides of streaky yellowish metal plastered with globs of oily mud. The ceiling consisted of massive, square-cut slabs of the same metal, set at varying heights along the length of the passage. All but the one nearest to him were wedged with props sawn exactly to length from pieces of paperclip. Reaching in with an arm, he braced one of his steel-jointed hands underneath the last pin of the lock in the old two-drawer file cabinet in Taki’s workshop, and moved it upward in its guide, stopping every few inches—at least, what seemed to him to be inches—to work it experimentally to and fro and from side to side. He felt the friction reduce suddenly, and the lateral play increase. The top of the pin was at the shear line, where it would normally be positioned by its particular notch on the key. Unaided human fingers wouldn’t have felt the change without years of training and practice. But to somebody mec-size, it felt like a boat lifting onto the water as it was pushed off a beach. Kevin used the scale that he had marked on a steel sliver to measure the height of the gap—one of the advantages of mec-scale physics was being able to hold up with one hand a block of solid metal which from its appearance ought to have crushed him.
“Six-eight-five,” he told Taki.
“As good as done.” At the foot of the cross-treaded wooden slat that Kevin was using as a ladder to reach the lock, Sir Real, an order of magnitude larger than the one Kevin was operating, stooped over the piece of 2×4 pine on the floor that he was using as a bench, and began cutting the last strut.
Grownups! Kevin thought to himself while he waited. For a whole week nobody had been able to do anything; now, suddenly, it was on for tomorrow, and everything was a panic. No wonder they dreamed up economic systems that were feast one day and famine the next, and went from boom to bust overnight.
Corfe had e-mailed him a message early that evening finalizing the plan. Eric had gotten involved in something late in the day at the office, and would be leaving for Barrow’s Pass sometime between nine and ten in the morning. Corfe would collect Kevin from the house at ten-thirty, drop him off at Neurodyne, and go on into town to meet Michelle. The two of them would then proceed in the van to Garsten’s office. The spearhead group of mecs was inside with some basic tools. Corfe had taped the access codes and passwords. How he had managed to talk Michelle into joining them, he hadn’t said. He was adamant, however, that Taki wasn’t to be involved tomorrow. Kevin had been unable to disagree about that.
“One length of sixty-eight and a half thousandths coming up.” Below, Sir Real turned and moved back to the foot of the makeshift ladder. Kevin’s perch shook as the larger mec began climbing. It still took a conscious effort to fight down his alarm reflex, although at his weight he could have fallen from the ceiling without damage.
The other nice thing about working through mecs was the convenience of remote coupling. While Taki himself was in his barber-chair coupler, there in his basement where the mecs were, Kevin was controlling the smaller mec from his own house several miles away. That was another new development. Whenever they had operated two mecs simultaneously in the past, such as in their forays against the insect world, they had used the multiple-coupler setup at Kevin’s house. Coordinating them from different locations was something they had never considered until Doug proposed it for the operation at Garsten’s office. It had seemed a good idea to try it out before going live tomorrow.