to explain himself as much as answer the question.
“And have you heard Carl’s plan for destroying the Rhine-Temple?” she asked. Her eyes narrowed. “Do you agree with him?”
“In fact,” Miller said, cocking his head to one side, “I helped him to come up with it. So yes, I suppose you could say I agree fully with his plan.”
He flashed her an impudent grin and Tania suddenly felt like a long-suffering mother of two mischievous brats.
“What are you doing here, Tom?” Carl asked, at the same time as Tania’s, “How did you get in?”
Miller looked from one to the other, then decided that he’d better answer Tania's question first. He was obviously smart enough to know who he had to get on side.
“I have standing permission to enter Carl’s laboratory,” he said. “Probably because, until now, there hasn’t been much of…interest going on here.”
There had never been another moment when Tania was so happy she didn’t sport a fair complexion. Despite this, her cheeks felt as if two spears of hot metal had been pressed against them. There must have been a dull flush evident under her brown skin, however, because both men suddenly grinned at her.
Maybe noting that her embarrassment might quickly turn to irritation, Miller quickly continued. “And I’m afraid time’s running out, Carl. Soon, the Rhine-Temple will be too big and dispersed for us to destroy completely. We must start the job now. That’s why I’m here. To help.”
Carl’s lips tightened. “How much time do we have?”
“My team and I think we have no more than two cyber-days.”
“And you brought it?”
Miller pulled something from his back pocket and held it up. It looked like a thick rectangular enclosure of some sort, perfectly sleek with rounded corners. Tania tried focusing more clearly on it but the object defied such examination, pulsing brightly through a gamut of colours. It was impenetrable but beautiful. It looked like Miller was holding a carved shard of starlight in his palm.
“What is it?” she asked, her voice hushed.
“This is the software we hope will destroy the Rhine-Temple,” Miller said. “But there are two problems with it. Due to time constraints, this is the one and only original. I can get a backup sent down the line but that would take too much time. And,” he added, walking past the other two to put the gleaming block on the desk, “this comes without a handshake shell.”
Carl scratched his neck, an unconscious movement that Tania had noticed months before, from the time they first met. He always made that gesture while deep in thought.
“Okay,” he said, “here’s what we do. Tom, make two copies of that software here. I know it’ll take hours, but it’ll still be much quicker than waiting for a backup real-time. Tania and I will craft a shell for it. Once we’ve tested it, we’ll cover your software with our shell then…we go. And Tom,” he angled a look at his friend and Tania caught the softness in his gaze, “thanks for coming. I appreciate it.”
That softness hadn’t been there three “real-time” days ago. Tania bit her lip. She thought about how much had changed. How much
could
change, if only they survived this.
“Right.” Miller slapped his hands together and the sound reverberated through Carl’s workroom like a gunshot. “Let’s get to work.”
The next “day” passed in a haze of work, argument and counter-argument. Tania found she’d lost the urge to sleep, napping only for an occasional thirty minutes now and then. She commented on it to Carl and they agreed that her power naps were more a psychological effect of the Blue rather than a physical imperative, much like his ageing.
She
Maggie Brendan
Barbara O'Connor
Jan Washburn
Terri Blackstock
Norah Simone
Barry Kemp
G.P. Taylor
Alan Cumyn
Linda Barnes
Lisa Jackson