“Pervs,” Jak declared, as if that settled the matter.
“Yeah, even stickies protect their own young,” Dean added. “The whitecoats here must have been triple fruit-brained.”
“Merely ruthless and greedy for a fat government contract,” Doc rumbled hatefully. “I have dealt with the ilk of such dastardly men before in a similar abattoir.”
Walking across the lab, Ryan stood before the second door. “Anybody check this?” he asked, gesturing at the bare steel portal with the flamethrower.
“Never had the chance,” J.B. said, ambling closer. “We got jumped the minute we entered the lab.”
Taking a stance, Ryan aimed the flamethrower. “Do it now,” he directed.
Getting out his tools, J.B. got busy, but the metal door wasn’t locked and was free of traps. Proceeding inward, they found the next room was a small office with tall windows overlooking the downtown shopping center and theater district. On a bentwood hat rack hung a white lab coat, with the artistic symbol of the Protoculte Corporation on the right breast pocket. A sofa stood near a compact bar, the array of bottles thick with dust on the shelves in the corner. Some sort of a multicolor chart covered the remaining wall situated alongside a Spartan desk of three chrome legs supporting a thick sheet of tinted glass. There were no drawers or files for documents, just a slim briefcase-size comp with a beige mouse on a plain pad. The power cord and phone line were wrapped in a silvery tube that went across the glass and down a chrome leg to reach an outlet. A black leather chair stood behind the desk; some bronze coins lay on the dark cloth seat.
“Still warm,” Mildred said, turning the machine around and checking the ports. The CD drawer was empty, but a red diskette was sticking out of a slot, the 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 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.
“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 longest. As the woman hit Enter, the password screen went away and the word processing program began to expand.