Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Marco Schmidt: Under Pressure

When we saw the soldiers, that's when I really started to believe it was serious. Even fighting for the faculty budget, guns would be going a bit far. But it was obvious enough that there was competition to get at this Box. I stopped thinking about myself then, even about my graduation. If there were guys with guns involved, I was going to end the game as quickly as possible, and all my friends would be safe.

So, once I'd barricaded the corridor I went to the Wargames Society's room. They were mostly into their board games, huge things taking up a whole tabletop, but they did some reenactment stuff as well, and that's what covered most of the shelves. The walls were an Aladdin's cave of bits of costume and period accessories. I looked at helmets, and armour. They had a variety, from the thirteenth century to present day. More recent than anything in our club room, but there wasn't an easy way for me to tell what was an antique or a replica, or if any of the stuff would provide actual protection.

In the end, I just grabbed a multi tool that someone had left on a shelf, figuring that I might need some kind of leverage to open the Box, and a little hand truck that we could use to move the Box around.

When I got back, Ferrari was explaining to Dwayne that someone else was after the Box, but she was convincing enough that I could believe she had no idea why. I didn't pay them that much attention, because I'd already seen the soldiers on the way up. I was more interested in getting a look at the Box, because I'd been losing myself in running circuits when everyone else saw it for the first time. The crate was a little battered, and there were the faded remnants of shipping and customs labels in a few places, but no other signs of damage. I didn't know if this was the same crate they used every year, or if the people responsible made a new one. It looked fairly solid, but not new enough that a fresh mark from levering the top off roughly would be noticeable.

While I was examining the Box, Dwayne came up with the idea of putting it on the freight elevator and then cutting the power between floors. Locking it in a metal box with no easy access seemed a great way to keep it safe from other societies until we could get to it tomorrow. We could only hope that the soldiers would leave if they couldn't find it, maybe we could somehow lead them to think we'd already removed it from the building, although I was hard pressed to think of a way we could give them that message without facing down someone who wanted to shoot us. Especially after Ferrari had thrown one of them down the stairs. Every minute I went while not in immediate danger made that response seem more and more like something we'd come to regret.

I don't remember if it was me or Ferrari who said that we couldn't get to that elevator without going through the soldiers. Probably me, because I knew the guys following me on the way over here would be waiting right outside the elevator doors. But Dwayne thought of everything, I couldn't believe it. I mean, he'd been a fast thinker when we somehow ended up only having one bokken for a show we were supposed to be doing at the summer festival the year before, but this degree of planning in just a few minutes was incredible. It's like the more pressure he's under, the smarter he gets. He said we could put the Box into the elevator on the roof, I hadn't even known there was access up there. But then I remembered a picture in the prospectus where they had a huge dinosaur sculpture on the roof of the building, visible from the square. That thing wouldn't have fitted through a normal-width door even in pieces, so of course the freight elevator went all the way to the roof. The architects must have thought there would be a need to take heavy things up there quite often, but it was good for us now.

Dwayne geeked out for a minute, talking about the electronics in the elevator. There were no buttons outside at the top, but he said if he got to the control room he could open the doors. Then we could just load the Box in, and send it down. It was a great plan, I was amazed. And grateful to Dwayne too. I knew he wasn't thinking in the same way I was, I was sure he just wanted to keep the Box safe like the instruction sheet said. We could have stayed there and discussed the details, but I kept catching myself looking at the door, expecting armed Russians at any moment. I still didn't know how they were involved, or what the Box meant to them, but I was more concerned with getting this situation over with than learning the truth now. We needed to move.