I came in across the roof of the massive building. After analyzing the blueprints and aerial photographs, we figured it would be the cleanest. Overall, it was actually more like seven distinct roofs rather than one, and they were all pretty much wide open. Except one.
So I approached from a parking lot behind the building, moving into the shadows around the base of it and scaling its walls between camera arcs. Easy, at least if you have ape DNA. And fingernails that can pierce the soft steel of wall siding.
Once when I was a teenager, my instructors made me climb El Capitan in Yosemite—at night—without ropes. This was nothing.
Still, I was cautious as I moved over the rubber roof of the massive structure, my enhanced biological senses straining the night for danger, my microscopic nanites alert for the slightest indication of technology, Earth-based or alien.
The roof was very warm, waves of stored sun rays rising from the black rubber all around me. It confused the infrared receptors in my corneas but I took solace that it would also baffle manmade thermal detectors just as much.
The night sky overhead was clear, just a sliver of a waxing moon to aid the stars in providing me with natural light. Nowhere near as light as a full moon, but much better than overcast. In fact, there was just enough light that I thought I saw a shadow moving far, far away. More a hint of motion than any real shape or anything. But I froze, dropping low, letting my kneepads absorb the soft impact with the roof. Frozen, waiting, watching. A minute ticked by, then another. Nothing. No further motion, no other shadows, no sign that I had actually seen anything real at all. I waited ten minutes, then crept farther along my path, moving half as fast as before.
There was still a long way to go, as the entire roof was over three hundred yards long, and my objective was about half that distance away. Our review of the building plans had shown that the westernmost end of the building rose higher than the rest of the structure, its roof a traditional peaked variety rather than the flat-topped version that I was currently creeping across. In fact, the raised portion stuck up high enough to have its own set of windows, which, on the backside, looked readily accessible from the flat roof I was on. At least, if you could climb up the metal-sided walls to get to them, as they were about ten feet off the flat portion of the roof.
The shadow that I had possibly seen had been in this direction, close to my objective, and so I took my sweet time approaching. But nothing shifted or moved, and nothing seemed out of place—till I got closer. One of the three windows visible to me looked different from the others, but it took me almost standing directly underneath it to see what that difference was. It was open… just slightly, the bottom edge pushed out, maybe half a foot. The other two were clearly closed tight, which I had been prepared for, my entry equipment up to the task of jimmying a locked window. Now it looked like that wasn’t needed, which meant all of my instincts were suddenly on edge.
It’s perfectly possible that it had been either deliberately or accidentally left open by one of the building’s normal daytime inhabitants. Our photos of the building showed various windows open at various times of the day, and this portion of the building was, to our best knowledge, part of the administrative offices for the complex.
And actually, it might be a huge piece of luck not to have to pry on a sealed window, to avoid making those extra sounds. But it still felt off to me. Like someone was here ahead of me.
The open window was the righthand one from my position, nearest the corner of the admin tower as I had decided to call it, even though it rose only seventeen or eighteen feet above the rest of the mammoth building. In fact, it was the window I had preselected as the easiest to climb up to, which I did now, moving slow and stealthy, senses straining, as my extruded claws poked through the tips of my gloves and sank into the metal siding.
When I got up to the open window, I touched it lightly with one gloved hand. It easily moved outward, swinging another foot beyond the six inches it was already opened. The top was hinged and the bottom pressed out by a gear-driven arm, but that arm was disconnected, thus the greater range of motion. That didn’t seem normal.
Peering into the building, I listened, looked, sniffed, and felt. Nothing to see except desks, file cabinets, and a copier. Nothing to hear but fans cooling computers, along with the ticking of a wall clock. And the only smells were of the humans who worked here, the cake that had left crumbs under and on the table against one wall, and the smell of old coffee from the battered pot that was also on the table. And something else. Something faint. A human, among other human scents, but different. Fresher—earthier. Male. Young. Healthy.
I waited, but nothing changed and the clock was still ticking, literally, right up on the wall in front of me. I folded myself over the edge of the window and onto the floor, all my motions silent and controlled.
At ten, I was certified as a yoga instructor. At eleven, I had passed beyond my dance instructors and my gymnastic coaches in controlled movement. By twelve, I had mastered qigong and tai chi chuan. That training was all for exactly this kind of moment.
Feet on the floor, I moved silently, eyes looking for any detectors that my nanites might somehow have missed, but there was nothing to impede my forward motion. While crossing the roof, I hadn’t detected any trace of the powerful wave I had experienced in the car with Agent Jay, but I had also been very careful not to pass over the portion of the building that housed LOA’s storage area and not to reach out with my machine senses.
A fire door led into a stairwell, which took me down three flights of stairs to the ground level. The stairwell door led to a hallway with more doors, which the blueprints had shown to be mostly more offices, but one went back into the main portion of the building. That one I took, and it opened into the rest of the massive structure. Still no alarm switches or motion detectors in this portion, although I knew from our planning that the exterior ground floor doors and windows were alarmed, even if these interior ones were not. My plan was to avoid those if possible.
The door led me to a vast open space dominated by massive overhead crane gantries and the gargantuan machinery of shipbuilding. I slipped silently between presses and lifts, massive vent-hood-covered units, and more than a few robotic devices. Halfway across the cavernous space, a hint of sound caressed my ears, freezing me in place. It was just a whisper, like paper or cloth rustling.
Muscles locked tight, I listened, smelled, and looked. Not another sound, and only the overwhelming scents of oil, ozone, steel, industrial paint, plastic, and rubber. No motion, no shapes other than hulking machines. Still, I waited. Perhaps there were mice or rats, cockroaches or other vermin in the otherwise empty building. Any of those could have caused the noise I heard, but the fact remained that I hadn’t scented any such creatures and my sense of smell was easily able to detect pests like those.
No further sound came in the dark so I moved again, unlocking tense muscles and shifting back into fluid movement. Carefully, cautiously, I moved through the exact area where the sound had come from, finding nothing and no one to blame.
Without so much as a whisper of sound, I continued forward. The end of the huge space loomed ahead of me, a wall twenty feet tall with a green metal door at the base. That door should be the one that let us into LOA’s portion of the building. Crouching, I studied it from twenty feet away. Shut tight, multiple dead bolt locks lined up above the doorknob. The steel skin of the door itself was dirty, metal dust from the shop accumulated so thick, I could see it in the dim light of the factory. And there were no smears in that grime—the door hadn’t been opened from this side in years. I moved closer, my eyes focusing in the pallid light. But wait. There were markings in the shop filth, tiny smudges around the topmost deadbolt.
A tiny shift of air was my only warning, not even a breath, just an infinitesimal wafting. Reflexes took charge and I jumped, sailing backward through the air as a black form slammed down onto the concrete floor right where I had been standing, a gleaming length of blue-black steel sweeping through the space I had just occupied.
My own blade popped into my hand as if summoned, nine inches of dark Damascus steel, a Bowie etched with the howling wolf head symbol of Mack Sutton’s brand. Pulling my Glock was the better tactical answer, but guns, they go bang. Loudly. Knives are so much quieter.
The figure straightened, a compact form only a bit taller than me, clad in black from head to toe, just a pair of dark eyes staring at me from the opening of the black strip of cloth wound round its head.
We stared at each other for the space of three whole seconds, then, as if by mutual agreement, we leapt straight into attack.