The Two Fangs

Chapter 10

Valle shared the illicit model with Grid when she had time to rest from her conditioning, and together they contemplated their approach.

The Osah complex was located in one of the contested England/France domes. Deep within miles of office blocks. Dresden's model showed them the roads that passed it, sewers, nearby utility tunnels, drone entrances. No indication of what different entry points might lead to, though Valle had his guesses at some.

The complex had its own umbilical to a free-floating bubble, which was not uncommon. And like many corporate bubbles, it was completely undocumented. Valle had never been to it, though he knew for certain that his brother had, even when they were young. He assumed it to be the meeting site for the OSA's omnipotent committee, or, more likely, the servers that allowed its members to convene remotely, and to monitor the underclass.

Grid joked idly about planting bombs there. Revolutionary habit, she said. Valle imagined the two of them being casually swatted away by inconspicuous Veritas sentries the moment they entered the dome carrying anything explosive.

Even so, it wasn't as though he hadn't thought about it many, many times.

At the end of their stay, Dresden saw them off with a firm handshake and drawn expression. Valle wasn't sure whether the hyenid was more concerned for their safety, or saddened that he would never have a hand in such espionage. They returned down the umbilical, into the much darker Germany dome, from which they had to find their own way to continue on.

Grid had a plan for that.

Once they were back within in the grimy and poorly lit sprawl of the lower city, the bird found a public comms terminal deep in a noisy and crowded market street. With music of all kinds blaring, hawkers pushing cheap tablets and peasant food from carts, and children crowding around adjacent terminals to play games in their alotted five-minute increments, she accessed it with Valle blocking the view the best as he could. All he saw was that she navigated to an article about some folksy crooner from a century ago, on a publicly curated information site he didn't recognize, and made an edit to the list of citations. He couldn't begin to decode the message she hid in it.

When she was done, Valle fed enough globals into the terminal that the kid waiting behind them (a young elk-model zoan fidgeting impatiently) could play for a week on end, to make sure no one had the chance to follow their tracks before the terminal cleared its cache. He would have enjoyed the commotion when someone noticed, but Grid dragged him along.

The meeting she had somehow arranged was to take place the entrance to a run-down factory elsewhere in the dome.

"We use those a lot," she explained as they waited for a car to take them to it. "They're loud and they're hard to monitor; and they have access to the deepways and distribution lines and anything else we might need."

The factory in question was a single, featureless gray block set in the middle of a packed industrial district and surrounded by intricate scaffolds and cranes that worked with unending, automatic fervor. There were no lights at street level, whether because Grid's contact had disabled them in preparation for the meeting, or because no one who needed them was expected to be near. Bird and bat snuck in to a service entrance by a dim red light she projected from her tablet.

There was light inside, enough at least for machines that navigated by conventional camera. Much like the pump station in Atlantis, the interior was a vast network of catwalks, stairways, ladders, and overlooks moving between blocks of pulsing machinery so dense that a living engineer couldn't see what their innumerable arms were doing. Grid, who seemed to know the layout, kept to the tight passages on the ground level, until they passed through a pair of doors that led to the entrance of a dark tunnel. She stopped before the well-kept concrete floor abruptly became cracked and old.