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  All characters and events portrayed in this book are a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons or events are coincidental.

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  For my father

  Akropolis

  Book 3

  Sanctuary

  The Escape

  Retracing her steps was the only option left to her. She walked with a purpose, or at least with the semblance of purpose, as she had no plan in mind other than to not be caught.

  After realizing that she was far from Akropolis, in the bowels of the sanctuary that they called The Mountain, she had to calm her racing mind. First was the panic to corral, that animal in her brain that only wanted flight. When she was able to leash it enough to think properly, the second thought was still escape.

  Claire knew she had to go back to the tunnel where the giant object was being assembled. It occurred to her that to build such a behemoth, the massive amount of materials had to be brought from the upper levels of the sanctuary, or even from the trade routes.

  Having an eidetic memory made going back simple, but along the way she continued to poke her head through doors, looking for anything that might assist her.

  After about five minutes of this she actually came to an empty locker room. Claire couldn’t have asked for a better bit of luck. Immediately, she began to open the lockers one by one. A half dozen later she found an actual pair of boots. She put them on, lamenting the fact that they were at least two sizes too big, but knowing they completed the disguise.

  It sure beat having to answer some passerby as to why she was walking around barefoot. Lacing them up tighter helped a bit, but she was resigned to the fact that blisters were probably in her near future.

  At the bottom of the locker was also a pen. She used it to wind her hair up and tuck it beneath the helmet, then took some grease from the bottom of the left boot and smeared it all over her face.

  Claire found an adjoining bathroom, frowned at the urinals, and chose the stall at the end to conduct her business. Now she knew why the boots were too big; she was in the men’s locker room. There was the humorous thought that out of all the books she had read in the Akropolis library, not a one of them discussed how the heroine or hero was close to wetting their pants. If she ever escaped from here, she would definitely include that in some sort of writing, maybe her memoirs, if she ever reached such an age.

  When she was done, Claire drank long from the faucet then inspected her face in the mirror. With the goggles on she didn’t even recognize herself. She was just another worker on the floor. Feeling more confident now, Claire left the locker room and made her way back to the assembly tunnel.

  It didn’t take long. She knew she was getting close when she felt the rumbling in the floor through her boots. This time the noise wasn’t so deafening. Having become slightly accustomed to it, she was able to separate the sounds of machines and equipment from the shouting and hum of conversations.

  Standing once again on the girded walkway, Claire felt as if she had taken two steps back for each one forward, but it couldn’t be helped. She realized that her previous destination had led her to the end of the sanctuary, perhaps the oldest part of The Mountain. Those blast doors had probably not been opened in over three hundred years. She didn’t know what lay beyond them but she surmised radiation and certain death.

  The hustle and bustle in the enormous tunnel was just as chaotic as before, except this time Claire saw the order amidst all the bedlam. She again did her best not to stare, but rather let her gaze sweep over everything, searching for some sort of clue.

  When she came to the branching tunnel she had originally emerged from, what felt like a lifetime ago, she bypassed it and saw a set of stairs that went to the ground floor. She opted to take these, even though she craved the solitude of the girded walkways. Down at the bottom she could blend in with ease, a cog within a myriad of wheels, and she knew from the mag-lifts and sleds that were carting materials to the opposite end of the tunnel that she was probably right in assuming that some cargo elevators had to be up ahead.

  No one stopped her, or even spared her a second glance. Claire weaved in and out of the pods of people, sometimes moving aside to allow a mag-lift by, or ducking beneath an overhanging set of wires protruding from a part of the massive object. Once, a giant drum clattered to the ground not ten feet from her and made her scream out loud. Luckily, her shout coincided with the angry yells of several workers and went unnoticed.

  The congestion became thicker, with human traffic tossed to the sides of the tunnel, the middle an unspoken roadway for the giant mag-lifts that were carting huge casings and hollow drums that could fit a couple of elephants in them, if there had been any left alive to test the theory.

  Each person was carrying something, a handful of cables, couplings and pipes, electrical box casings; just about everything that was needed in constructing an entire building was being transported by hand and lifts, which made for a very busy avenue. At times Claire bumped into someone so roughly that she stumbled, saved from a spill to the ground only by bouncing into another person heading the opposite way. Her mumbled apologies were ignored or fell on deaf ears, as it seemed everyone was in too much of a hurry to spare the niceties. In retrospect, it was a bit of a blessing. With everyone so intent upon the job at hand, they might overlook a straggler taking a cargo lift up.

  A few minutes of navigating the oppressive wall of people, she was finally given a glimpse ahead. Taking a breather off to the side, pressed against the wall so as to avoid any more collisions, the crowd thinned out for a couple of seconds, long enough for her to see what she’d been expecting sooner or later.

  Two huge elevators descended up, nearly side by side, towards the ceiling. One was empty and the other occupied with a couple of burdened sleds and four workers. As the lifts rose into the air, the rotating yellow lights illuminated the darkened ceiling long enough for her to see that it was nearly a thousand feet up before they disappeared from view.

  Claire remembered reading that there were two main areas to The Mountain. The sub-level extended far below the mountain to neighboring peaks, expanded upon over the centuries. It housed production and maintenance facilities, contained algae fields fed by underground springs that had never seen the light of day, and finally the Red Zone, the equivalent of a classified section, which she no doubt was in.

  The ground level, closer to the original entrance was less vast and contained mostly living quarters, schools, the market, and recreational facilities. It also segued to the outside, where a dome had been built against the mountain itself. Here there were parks, museums, a library, and partitioned ecosystems. Some of the Old World had been saved there, built before the last war and hence untouched by the ravages of radiation. A desert the size of a football field was at one end, complete with holographic projections of sky and sun. Another section housed the rainforest, peppered with Brazil Nut and Wimba trees towering over the local fauna and ferns, a lazy river that wound through it all, and even a faux rock face with a beautiful waterfall descending a hundred feet. From what she remembered there was also an arctic pole section, but she had gleaned this all from readings and never actually seen the dome.

  Claire noticed that the waves of people passing her were finally starting to thin out. With the lifts gone, the workers were off with t
heir goods back to the giant object, and pretty soon she would be left alone with the few stragglers seeing to other business. What had been a couple of hundred people in the last five minutes had trickled down to less than a dozen, ambling about the base of the lifts or engaged in small pockets of conversation.

  After a couple of workers glanced her way, perhaps wondering why she wasn’t with the rest of her electrical crew, Claire realized that she needed to make herself less obvious and find something to do as she waited for the cargo-elevators to return.

  It was at that moment that she received her second stroke of luck. Just as she turned away and was glancing about for anything to excuse her presence, someone laid a hand on her shoulder.

  “Hey, Journeyman,” a voice interrupted.

  Claire turned around to see a stout woman before her, dressed in the same garb but with light green stripes across the chest.

  “Me?” Claire ventured, looking around in her immediate vicinity, disheartened to find she stood alone.

  “Yeah you,” the woman reiterated. “I need your help coupling the Maglev-Train. Those boys in the main hub can’t be bothered to send out one for our field-effect transistors and valves. Low priority they say, so we’ve got to use one of the old engines.”

  “I’m, uh, not assigned to this section,” Claire replied, hoping that this would be enough discouragement.

  “No shit, Journeyman,” the woman retorted, slinging a thumb over her shoulder. “But I’m the propulsion foreman here and these synths are worthless, so you’ll make do. All I need are a set of eyes. After that you can head back up.”

  “Yeah…sure,” Claire agreed.

  The opportunity to look as if she belonged had presented itself, not to mention the possibility of what the train might entail.

  “Lead the way,” she said, trying not to appear too eager.

  The foreman smirked then turned away and headed to the left of the elevator platform. There was another connecting tunnel, only about twenty feet high, that Claire hadn’t noticed before. It was dark and situated in a dimly lit area, which is why she overlooked it.

  Claire, following along, bumped into the woman as she stopped abruptly just a few yards in.

  “Not so close, Sunshine,” the foreman said. “Looks like they shut off all power down in this section. We’ll have to flip the breakers first. Nothing to stumble over down here so you don’t have to ride my ass.”

  “Sorry,” Claire mumbled, backing up a few steps as the woman in front clicked on a high powered flashlight that bathed the entire tunnel in white light.

  They walked for a couple of minutes, a straight tunnel carved out of the rock with a gently sloping floor, until they came to what must have been a mostly unused chamber. The foreman made a beeline off to the side and began scanning the rock with her flashlight. After a few seconds she found what she was looking for, a large circuit breaker box the size of a human.

  “Here we are,” she said, handing the flashlight to Claire so that she could grab the handle beside the box with both hands.

  With a grunt, she pushed the lever up. A giant buzzing noise came from all around them, and like a stack of dominoes falling, lights flickered on in long rows overhead, illuminating the large chamber they stood in.

  Claire couldn’t help but feel a jolt of hope when she realized that they were standing at the entrance to the trade hub, albeit an older version. It was considerably smaller than the one she had seen in Akropolis. There were only two tracks running parallel into darkened tunnels, presumably one for incoming and the other for outgoing. Two sleek Maglev-Trains, looking very similar to the bullet-nosed objects she had seen rise from the desert floor, were parked there, each pointing in opposite directions. The one facing in had two cars attached, while the other facing the tunnel was just the engine. Off to the side were adjoining rails with extra cars on them.

  The cavern held a stand-alone control room pod that was all glass off to the side, but only the desks and chairs were visible. The holographic or VR display screens were shut off, just as everything else seemed to be.

  “I’m Amanda by the way,” the woman spared a moment, holding out a hand for a shake.

  Claire took it, surprised by the strength of the grip.

  “I’m…Sara,” she said after a momentary pause.

  It was the first name to pop into her head.

  “You look as fresh as a daisy,” Amanda commented wryly. “They pick you up in general population?”

  Claire nodded vigorously, thankful for the way out.

  “Yeah, I’m filling in for a few days. Family affairs I think.”

  “Must be pretty good at your job to get a clearance that fast, especially being human.”

  “I guess,” she replied, uncertain if it was the proper answer.

  Amanda shrugged.

  “Kudos to you. You and I are one of the few down here who aren’t synthetic.”

  The woman turned away and walked towards the control room, leaving Claire with a mystified expression. She was surprised she hadn’t noticed that all those workers were QUBITs. It made sense in a way, as the synthetics were able to work longer hours under more strenuous conditions, and whatever they were building in that tunnel looked like the most massive undertaking since the construction of the sanctuaries.

  Claire, realizing that Amanda was staring at her from the control room with a look of impatience, hurried along to the glass opening that served as the door. Once inside, she watched as the foreman’s hands fluttered across the control panel to turn on the projection screens. A few deft movements of her fingers and the Maglev-Trains in front of them turned on and lifted a half of foot into the air.

  “Okay, so what we need to do is pull the main engine forward about thirty yards. When you do that I’ll switch the extra cars over to the same rail and then you can back them up as I couple them.”

  Claire threw the woman a panicked look, at which the reply was a chuckle.

  “Don’t worry; it’s a lot easier than it sounds. Most of the systems are automated anyways, so it’s tough to screw anything up.”

  Claire followed smartly on Amanda’s heels this time as the woman left the control room.

  “Is security supposed to be here for this?” she asked, hurling the question above the din of the buzzing and humming that the train produced, worried that additional company would reveal her deception.

  “Usually,” Amanda answered offhandedly. “But this train is going out empty. We’re sending it off to Akropolis for the cargo. When it comes back it’ll be stopped in the main hub just like all the others before it hits the Red Zone.”

  The words ‘main hub’ made Claire realize that she was not standing in the actual trade hub, but most likely an off-branch of it, or perhaps even the original one, before it had been expanded to accommodate all the shipments.

  When both women arrived at the lone engine, Amanda pressed a singular button next to the outlined door, which slid open immediately.

  The control room for the train was rather small, with only two seats and not much room for anything else. Another door separated them from the rest of the engine.

  Amanda pointed to the panel in front of them. There were three levers and a handful of buttons surrounding a couple of switches, which was of some relief to Claire. It didn’t look too complicated.

  “This here is the velocitator. Swing it forward to go forward, pull it back to reverse. This other handle next to it is the flux; it controls how fast you move. Don’t worry about speed though because once I flip this switch,” Amanda said, and then flipped the switch furthest to the right of the panel, “you are at the slowest speed possible.”

  She pointed to the singular lever to the right.

  “That’s your brake. You won’t be needing that. These Maglev-Trains operate by levitation so that even a child could push one along the rails.”

  “Then what’s the brake for?” Claire couldn’t help but ask.

  “Basically, to keep the train f
rom floating away when you turn on the rails, and to couple and uncouple trains. Mostly you get the train cruising and then hit the auto-pilot switch right here,” she said pointing to the singular switch above the rest. “But please don’t do that. You’ll be on a one way trip to Akropolis and there’ll be hell to pay for both of us.”

  “You can’t stop the train from the control booth?” Claire asked, feeling her heart give a leap.

  Amanda shook her head.

  “That’s just for turning on the rails, switching cars, and monitoring incoming and outgoing trains. If there’s a problem the train shuts down by itself or you can hit that big red button. Like I said, everything is pretty automated.”

  She reached down and flicked another switch.

  “That’s for us to communicate. Why don’t you go ahead and give her a test run before we get this show started?”

  Claire nodded, pushed forward on the handle for the velocitator then pressed lightly on the flux.

  “All right, now release the brake,” Amanda said.

  Claire did so, and felt the train creep forward slowly.

  “Okay, now pull back on the velocitator and pull the flux lever towards you. That will shift it into reverse. When I tell you to, push the brake.”

  Easing the levers back, Claire felt the train come to a stop and then shift into reverse. Amanda let her go a few seconds.

  “Okay, hit the brake.”

  Claire pulled on the lever, bringing the train to a full stop.

  “I’m not going to lie, that was kind of fun,” she admitted.

  Amanda grinned.

  “Like a kid with a new toy. Do you think you got it all?”

  Claire nodded her reply.

  Amanda turned and stepped through the door.

  “I’ll let you know when to pull forward.”

  “Amanda?” Claire stopped the other woman before she could take more than a step.

  “Yeah?”