Day of the Predator - Alex Scarrow [100]
Cartwright watched in silence as the older of the two girls was wheeled away on a hospital gurney, and the other one, younger, Asian or Indian by the look of her, was escorted down the backstreet towards the containment van.
He ordered the remaining three agency men in containment suits to stand guard outside the shutter door once they’d made a sweep and reported that the archway was clear. Good men, trusted men … but still better they knew as little as possible.
He stood alone now in front of a giant perspex cylinder of water, metal steps up the side and what looked like a toddler’s swing seat fixed at the top. Obviously something to do with time travel … like the bank of computer equipment, the other tall thin perspex tubes in the back room, the power generator … all these things clearly played some part in the process.
He wandered back to the long table – a pair of scuffed office desks pushed end to end and cluttered with monitors, a keyboard, a dozen crumpled cans of Dr Pepper and a few empty pizza boxes. He could hear the soft whirr of activity from beneath the desk and ducked down to see the muted glow of blinking green and red LEDs. It looked like there were a dozen or more PCs, the kind you could pick up from any Wal-Mart or PC World, linked together into a network.
Beside the desk was a battered old office filing cabinet. He pulled out one drawer after another, each filled with nests of tangled cables and bits and pieces of electronic circuits, like somebody had ripped off a RadioShack store for bits and not yet figured out what to do with it all.
He felt a small stab of disappointment. In his mind’s eye he’d imagined this moment; he’d conjured up visions of some futuristic arrangement, technology from centuries ahead, something that looked like the bridge of the USS Enterprise set up in this old brick archway. Instead, everything he could see here seemed to have been obtained from the present.
He sat down in one of the office chairs and it squeaked under his weight.
The answers to this place, why they were here in New York … why they were also in the Cretaceous past, how all this machinery worked, and what it could do … all of those answers he presumed were on these quietly humming computers. He picked up the mouse and slid it across the desk. One of the screens flickered out of screen-saver mode and lit up to reveal a relaxing desktop image of an alpine valley and, right in the middle of the screen, a small square dialogue box.
> System lockdown enabled.
Cartwright cursed under his breath. The older girl, the one with the frizzy reddish hair, had barked something out just before he’d tasered her. He’d thought she was calling out to someone else in the arch, but he realized now that it must have been a voice-activated command.
He tried to remember what she’d said. Oh yeah …
‘Omelette,’ he said into the desk mic.
> Incorrect activation code.
‘Dammit!’
> Incorrect activation code.
He tried a dozen other candidate words and phrases: egg, broken eggs, scrambled eggs, boiled eggs, Easter egg, fried egg. Egg hunt, egghead, egg-nog. All of them produced the response on the screen.
Absently he tapped his fingers on the desk. If he was being honest, this wasn’t how he imagined the moment of discovery was going to be: two scruffy kids, a computer system that looked like some bedroom hacker’s dream set-up, and that big plastic cylinder making this place look like some kind of homemade brewery. And this locked-down computer system was obviously not going to tell him anything. He decided it was time he had a little chat with the girls.
He stepped out towards the open door and punched the green button on the side. The metal shutter started to clank and rattle slowly down.
‘No one goes in, or comes