The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 502

Chapter 502: 502 | A Single Live Wire

"Anybody. Steele. Steele would have burned that whole office down for you." Felicity’s throat worked. "She would have. That’s the thing, that’s the actual, that’s, ugh." Her hands came up and dropped. "You didn’t even ask."

"That doesn’t matter right now." Camille heard herself say it and kept going, because somebody had to, and because it was true. "Wes. Look at me. Not at her, at me." He looked. "Steele and Dravid are holding a thing in the central plaza. Twelve feet tall, white, six horns, wrong all over. It hasn’t moved yet. Do you know what that is?"

His face went the color of the wall.

"They called it the asset," he whispered. "I heard it on the channel once. They said the asset doesn’t get deployed unless the primary shows. That’s all I know, that’s all I ever heard, I swear."

Sloane’s fist tightened in his collar. "The primary. Radiant."

"Yes."

"He’s not coming." Sloane’s voice had dropped into something Camille had never heard out of her, and Camille had heard Sloane Fitzgerald scream through a concrete wall. This was under all of that. "He’s downtown. He’s not coming, and that thing is standing in a room with two instructors and forty kids, and when it figures out it’s not getting what it came for, what do you think it does?"

Wes didn’t answer.

Camille turned to the case and crouched in the water and put her hands six inches from the housing and let her passive open all the way up.

It came in a flood. It always did. Stress concentrations, fastener load, the exact torque on the mounting plate, the hairline where the fiber tap had been crimped by somebody who did not understand fiber. She saw the whole thing the way she saw a wall, which was to say she saw where it wanted to break.

"Hard interlock," she said. "Say the words. Exactly the words."

"Shutter bus is slaved to the jammer’s power stage." Wes’s voice steadied slightly, because he was a technician and technicians were always calmer explaining a system than explaining themselves. "Drop the jammer, the bus reads it as a catastrophic fault and the shutters lock in position permanently, no manual release, no override, you’d need a cutting crew on the outside and six hours. That’s the interlock. It’s not a bluff. That’s why nobody’s opened this room."

"So we can have comms or we can have doors," Sloane said.

"You can have neither. That’s the design."

Camille kept looking. There was a shape in the mess that she was almost holding.

"No," she said.

Felicity crouched next to her. Her shoulder came against Camille’s and stayed there, and Camille let it, which surprised her.

"Talk," Felicity said. "Out loud. Say it out loud, sometimes that helps."

"The interlock’s watching the power stage. It’s not watching the emitter." Camille traced the run with one finger, an inch off the cable, not touching. "Right here. This coax feeds the broadcast array. If I cut that, the jam dies, but the power stage keeps drawing, so the bus never sees a fault. It just sees a very expensive space heater."

Wes made a strangled sound. "That’s, that’s actually, yes. Yes. That would work."

"How much slack."

"Six inches of exposed shield, right where you’re pointing. But it’s live at two thousand volts, and if you nick the wrong side you’ll arc into the tray and the whole room goes."

"Obviously." Camille flexed her fingers, and orange light gathered at both palms and stayed there. "That’s why I’m doing it and not her."

Sloane’s hands would have blown the wall out. Felicity’s hands couldn’t touch anything. Camille had spent two years learning to put three nails through the same hole from thirty feet because her mother had looked at a cracked kitchen cabinet when Camille was eight and said, well, at least you know what you’re good at. She could put a rivet through six inches of live coax without touching the tray.

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