Mt. Lago Complex
Sub-Level 4
Tuesday, 2:51 AM
After two hours staring at industrial grey paint peeling off the wall a foot from her bunk, Sam accepted the one thing she wouldn’t see again tonight was sleep.
And no way was she spending another hour pacing this room. There was no way to wait patiently to screw over the superpower before they could screw you.
I’m going to jail, Sam thought. For the rest of my life.
Below that repeating thought and accompanying terror was another side of her: the side that wouldn’t back down. Couldn’t back down, not with everything Nariko had built at stake.
Sam hopped of the bunk, drawing her plaid lumberjack shirt across her cold body and buttoning it up for good measure.
“It’ll be fine,” she murmured. They had worked everything out. She was a billionaire’s daughter, and Nariko was world famous. You didn’t disappear nepo-hires and magazine-covering scientists.
Daddy could give away her office. She’d find another job. Nariko might be teaching cutting edge physics at a community college, buthe was willing to be blackballed by scientists and funders, to make this happen.
Suyao maybe would need to change her underwear when she found out about this in the morning, but she’d keep the Americans at bay. She’d get us out of this.
Right?
“I said, ‘it’ll be fine!” Sam blew her hair out of her face.
“I could kill a burger,” she growled at the hair that fell right back over her eyes.
The thought of food cut through some of the fog, and food didn’t have to wait until breakfast. She hadn’t been locked in her room…yet.
She opened the drab steel locker beside her bunk and rummaged for her fleece lined pants.
She hopped one one foot, pulling on her socks. Damn, the floor was cold! Then again, that was the point of building a secret government base under a mountain: plenty of cold, plenty of water, plenty of privacy.
She hopped again and stuffed her legs into pants, silently cursing Katsuyama Corporations scientific crown jewel -AKA her godmother- for taking this contract.
“Because that’s what the world needs,” Sam grumbled while snatching her sneakers from the floor by the door. “More water-gulping AI computer farms!” She opened the heavy door with a grunt.
Sam immediately felt bad for being petty. This was ‘not-enough-sleep-Sam’ ‘talking. Nariko Yoshida had married physics and computational math into an entirely new field of study. What she’d accomplished was brilliant. Like Nari always was, Sam thought. It wasn’t her god-mother’s fault if the world took every brilliant thing and made it dividend-fodder for stockholders or weaponized it for governments.
Sam smiled through a yawn. Consequences aside? If this test worked, Nariko had pulled off a miracle…one that no doubt would make her old man even richer.
That killed the smile. She stuffed one shoe in her armpit and leaned over to stuff the other one on.
“Burger!” she growled.
She was making her bleary way down the hall to the left when she saw the first of the big blue pipes pop out of the wall and join a bunch of other-colored pipes and electrical conduit.
Wrong way, she reminded herself and sucessfully jammed her second, freezing, foot into the sneaker before doing an about face and heading ba k towards the elevator.
The new pipes had been installed just for her geeky-godmother’s science test.
The paint on the blue pipe was new. An entire system of pipes had been installed throughout the facility just for this test, designed to reroute cool mountain runoff far below, to cool the servers a small army of US Army Corps of Engineers had spent last month installing.
The Engineers had disappeared a couple days after Sam and Nari’s arrival, leaving the underground facility feeling even more lonely and unpleasant than it had when they had arrived.
Sam shuffled past her room -again- and down the hall the right way. At the other end of the long haul, she summoned the elevator and prepared for a long wait.
Two stories down on Sub-Level 5, three minutes and several wrong turns later, Sam found the commissary and pushed through swinging doors revealing rows of utilitarian seating from fifty years ago.
She blocked out the buzz and flicker of the fluorescent bulbs that someone had left on overnight and rubbed the sleep from her eyes as she stomped her way toward the kitchen.
Why, oh why, did she pick this place for the project?
Yes, they needed a lot of water to cool the servers, which nearby mountain streams in Oregon’s Okanogan Range provided.
The runoff from said mountains could provide the embarrassing amount of water it took to cool the servers.
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Also, they needed a lot of shielding to block stray particles that could ruin the scientific purity of the tests, and a hole in the ground with mountains all around fit the bill.
Last but not least, their US partners wanted to keep this avenue of research completely to themselves - which required secrecy.
But two weeks in the bottom of a long-shut-down cold war bunker? There were much nicer places she could have gone to tank her career.
“Godmother, you owe me so much,” she grumbled.
She had only been here six days, not even halfway through the two weeks, before everything had gone to shit. Six days of watching her godmother, her assistants and Uncle Sam’s scientists performing mindless systems checks. Six days of boredom waiting for Nariko’s real tests to begin. Si x days with no cell reception. Six days a _long_ elevator ride below the surface.
She pounded through the next set of swinging doors and froze.
A soldier was sitting on the stainless steel prep table in the center of the kitchen. His back was leaned up against an industrial dishwasher, and in his hands were wrapped around--
She stomped up to the table and grabbed the pint container of Chocolate Almond Espresso ice cream in his hands.
Her Chocolate Almond Espresso ice cream.
The soldier held onto the sweating cardboard container and met her eyes, surprised.
She glared at him. “That’s mine!”
The guy smiled, but kept his grip. “I wondered why they had good junk food stocked.”
She tugged at the ice cream. The man held on, and grinned. “Darius Webb,” he said.
“Pissed off!” she snapped back. His grin widened and he shoved one last spoonful of ice cream into his mouth. Then, let go of the tub and put his hands up to either side of his head in mock surrender.
She turned her back on the man and grabbed her own spoon from the circular container build into a shelf below the open service window looking out into the commissary.
She closed her mouth around a heaping spoonful, and stared out at the empty seating.
“Nice to meet you, Pissed Off,” Darius said lightly.
Sugar now pleasing her taste buds, Sam leaned against the counter and looked at the man mock-saluting her with the now-empty spoon.
Webb looked like an air-force poster boy: he wore his hair in a buzz cut with a severe fade, dark-blue workout pants and the dark skin of his arms -just a little darker than Sam’s- stretched the seams of his pale blue air-force t-shirt with the service’s iconic wings embossed over his heart.
The workout clothes weren’t new but they were spotless, and the man moved easily in them. He looked to be in his early thirties. She caught his eyes efficiently evaluating her in return. She decided she didn’t mind the once-over… then remembered she was wearing her big, plaid shirt and fuzzy-lined yoga pants.
What the hell, let him look.
She kept looking, too. Even in the relaxed posture, something about him seemed coiled, prepared to move, but…kind?
Interesting.
Usually Sam got annoyed around soldiers, but this one’s smile -a smile that talked her down from high alert - was brash, cocky, full of humor, genuine.
“Sam-” she started.
“-Katsuyama,” Webb finished. “Project admin for the corporation of the same name. I’ve been briefed.” One eyebrow quirked up. “The file never mentioned Chocolate Almond Espresso, though.”
She laughed, pleased that he was unfazed by her last name. “No? And here I thought the government knew everything.”
Webb pushed himself lightly off the counter, landing silently. “They know plenty,” he said, a dark look passed over his face, then disappeared to reveal his sunny disposition once again. “They don’t share much with the help, is all.”
‘The help?’ The he way he said it convinced Sam: there was a story there. but she decided not to ask so soon after the ice cream debacle. “Can’t sleep?” she asked instead, looking down and digging into her ice cream again.
“Never sleep much,” he answered, and held his hand out. “Sometimes raiding the fridge helps.” He looked at the ice cream and back to Sam.
“Don’t think so,” she told him, and walked around the prep table in the middle of the room to unlatch the massive walk-in freezer door. “You can get your own.”
She pointed with her spoon at the plastic wrapped pallet front-and-center of the freezer. Webb walked up to join her, slowing and whistling when he realized the pallet was stacked with hundreds of the luxury-brand ice cream cartons.
“Forbes called me a supply chain mastermind,” Sam told him.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Webb said, and ripped through the plastic wrap to free a carton for himself.
“Sorry for before,” Sam said, closing the walk-in freezer. “Shitty sleep and bad dreams make me a bitch,” she said.
Webb had just popped the cover off the ice cream when she mentioned her nightmare. He looked up, his eyes sympathetic. “Nightmares huh? Me, too.”
She gestured around them with her hands. “What about this five star resort-” she began…
Webb laughed, digging out a spoonful of the good stuff inside as he finished her thought. “-could inspire bad dreams?” He wrapped his lips around the spoon and pulled it out empty, talking around its cold payload. “I surely do not know.”
She laughed too, and carved another mouthful from her container. “Aren’t you supposed to be scared of me or something?”
“Well, they told me the prodigal daughter would be here to represent, but I guess I was expecting someone…”
She raised both eyebrows, curious to see how he finished his comment.
“Meaner looking?”
She mock-glared at him and waved her hands up and down her body. “Don’t let the power-suit fool you, I’m mean enough.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Webb chuckled. “ You look it, too.”
“That’s better,” she said. “Maybe I oughta wear this little number on my next board meeting.”
The mention of a board meeting reminded her what was about to happen.
The way Webb beamed at her made Sam ponder how the US penal system handled conjugal visits.
“There you are!” shouted a new voice.
Sam jumped, both surprised and annoyed by the new interruption. She grew considerably more annoyed to see Doctor Morales stagger through the door, out of breath. His eyes bulged wide and lips pressed tight.
Morales looked pretty much the opposite of Webb: pale from too much lab-work, thin heading towards emaciated and every aspect of his being _frowned_ at her whenever they met.
Being ‘the suit’ that ran point for Nariko Yoshida, Sam was used to a certain degree of coolness from government and business people negotiating for her services… but they weren’t usually offensive about it.
From the first time she’d met him, in a restaurant in Tokyo during the initial negotiations, Morales had been full of himself, fawned over Nariko, outright dismissive of Sam’s role in the negotiations, rude to the wait staff at every turn and in every other way completely insufferable.
Alas, there were few entities with deep enough pockets to foot the bill her godmother’s research required, and so she’d built up a tolerance to some pretty horrible behavior. Morales, though? He set a new standard.
“Here we are, Doctor,” Webb agreed with Morales in a pained, but good-natured tone. She glanced sidelong at Webb, and he shrugged.
Also not a fan of the good doctor, Sam deduced.
Morales made ‘hurry up’ gestures with both hands and wheezed his way back out the door. “Let’s go!”
Sam shook her head. “That guy!” Sam said.
“That guy,” Webb agreed.
“We need to go!” Morale’s voice squeaked from the commissary. “Now!”
Sam froze, remembering what she and Nari were about to do. She tossed the ice cream back into the freezer by the door and ran out the hall after him.
“Coming, Doctor,” Webb called after Morales, a pained, polite tone to his voice.
Sam grinned at the gently mocking tone, and the look he shared with you… then her grin dried up. She decided she would have liked to get to know Webb.
_No way that was happening, now._
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” Doctor Morales was already at the end of the hall, inside the far elevator. “I need to be onsite for this!”
Sam’s brain was chanting ‘oh shit!’ on repeat, but externally she cocked an eyebrow at Webb as they joined him inside. “Onsite for what? It’s the middle of the night.”
“To tell your mad scientist to stand down,” Morales muttered angrily. “She started the field test without us! Good thing I do my best thinking at night and saw the array coming online on my computer.”
“This is his best thinking?” Webb whispered to Sam.
She swallowed hard, an icy fist squeezing her stomach.
Her godmother had begun their mission without her!
