Socratic Heresy

Page 1

Michael actually didn't go through the entrance. It was more heavily secured than a similar facility on Earth would be, and he didn't have the right credentials to pass the door. He went instead into a small washroom that was convenient to the service entrance, but still open to the public. Nothing to comment on, but a good way to catch a tail off guard. It would also give him time to bypass the door monitor and leave no evidence of his entry into the sewers. Clever, but Joseph had his own way into the restricted areas. His ScanID would not activate any security, and would be untraceable except to his ‘employers'. By the time Michael had finished his little dance with the entry system at the other door, Joseph was inside, waiting for him.

Michael seemed familiar with the procedure, grabbing boots, gloves, and coverall from the lockers inside the door. Joseph watched from a concealed position, perched in between two gray painted water pipes. He had taken no such precautions, but then, Michael was planning to return to the city at some point. Michael also took a small bottle of some kind of drain cleaner. Also clever. He could spill it on the borrowed gear and just leave it. The drain cleaner would arouse no suspision, but it would also destroy any biological residue, or almost any other traceable evidence. Not that Michael would get a chance to use it this time.

There was a lot of noise in the area, pumps running, valves hissing, and banging, probably from turbulence inside the pipes. All the same, Joseph was silent as a cat, stalking Michael as he made his way through the maze of municipal plumbing. Michael might not make the meeting after all, and that would mean that Joseph would have to get back to his apartment and clean up lest Michael or one of the others wonder where he had gone. But he felt confident. If the meeting took place, then Joseph Peter Arden would have outlived his usefulness, and he would not need to go back. Neither would Michael, for similar, but really quite different, reasons.

Michael was stopping near a control panel, fooling with it. What was he doing? Joseph moved in closer for a better look, ending up perched on the top of a small auto vending cafeteria. Ah, he was turning off the alarm for the seals on the nearest sewer pipe access. He was going into the sewer. Not bad. It would be difficult to follow him inside the pipe, where a tracer would be blocked by the pipe wall. Of course, Joseph wasn't relying on a tracer. It also made it likely that Michael planned to come back this way, to turn the sensor back on when he left. Joseph ran lightly back towards an upstream hatch. It was clear that Michael would head downstream. Further upstream, as the pipes actually got closer to various sources, security measures became much tighter. Not just for the protection of the people at the production end either. The autorities could tell a lot about people from what went down their drains. Most drug users knew better than to contaminate their own toilets, although there were exeptions. One idiot had even tried to flush a murdered body down the disposal. Anyway, downstream it was.

Getting into the pipe was easy. Moving through it was less so. Joseph was soon wishing he had at least stolen some boots. He already had good gloves, but neither they nor his shoes were waterproof. And the smell was terrible. He wished for the coveralls too, mostly for the sake of the small filter mask sewn into the hood. Ah, well, live and learn. He compensated for the lack of boots by straddling his legs across the shallow flow of sewage in the bottom of the pipe. It was still slippery and difficult, but at least he was marginally less likely to simply slide out of control and land on his butt. Reacquiring Michael was easy, since there was no where to go but the one way. The sloshing of the water seemed to fool Michael into thinking that his splashing wouldn't be noticeable, or maybe he just didn't think it likely that anyone would follow him through the pipe.

It was a long walk in the pipe. A mile at least. Not hard on a level, dry, odorless surface. In a sewer pipe it was something else. Unlike most people, Joseph's' nose did not ‘adapt' to strong odors. In fact, his sense of smell was acute enough that he wished it were less acute by the time Michael finally stopped sloshing down the pipe. Joseph closed to the nearest angle in the pipe, and extended his small fisheye periscope around the corner. Michael had stopped underneath another hatch and was fooling with it, not opening it yet. It looked like he was trying to jam the sensors that detected a seal breach. Joseph smirked to himself, and ran back to the last hatch they had passed. To disable the seal alarms, he just took a handful of water and smacked the pressure sensor with it. It took several seconds for the seal sensors to reset after the pressure spike, and by then he was already out of the pipe, securing the hatch from the outside. He judged that it would take a minute for Michael to disable all four of the seal hatches, if he knew what he was doing. In all fairness, he probably did, but Joseph was a little sore about having not gotten protective gear for himself before going into the pipe.

He had no way to solve that problem now, but there was a small cleaning station next to the hatch, just a hose and a cleansing foam dispenser. He got the worst of the smell of as quickly as he could, and then found a place to watch Michael's hatch. Looking around, he could see why Michael had stopped when he did. The hatch that he had chosen to leave through was only fifty meters from where the pipe began going straight down, into a huge pit spanned with catwalks and containing other vertical pipes. This was the reclamation well, where all the sewage in the northern quarter of the city came to be processed. It seemed like an odd place for a meeting, but then, it was an even odder place for Michael to be doing anything else. The locking wheel on Michael's hatch turned right on time, and Michael climbed out. Then he did something that made Joseph quite happy, taking off the sewer suit and stowing it under a grating. No more of that, at least. Michael clearly meant to come back, but he wouldn't.

What Michael did next was less pleasing. He went over to the edge of the pit, and started across one of the catwalks that spanned the well. It would be impossible to follow him across there without being spotted. Probably the reason why he was going that way. Unless he was heading for out to fix some pipes. After only a moment's hesitation Joseph moved. If Michael wanted to use the stinking pipe, fine. If he then wanted to take a stroll across a catwalk, even better. Joseph dropped down to the under flooring and approached the catwalk from immediately beneath the floor level. Hah, there was a lattice work of bracing under the walkway, so it was less difficult then he had feared to gain handholds and climb along the bottom of the catwalk, upside-down over the bottomless pit of the northern reclamation well. In fact, after a dozen yards he had regained some of his equanimity. It was actually quite easy to keep track of Michael, since his every footfall rattled the gratings. Meanwhile, by climbing across the more stable under strutting, Joseph remained silent and undetectable.

Soon Joseph realized where Michael was heading. There was a small service elevator that went right down the well along with all the pipes. It was used for getting at the pipes during their long drop, and had to be here in the well, unlike the express elevators that the reclamation plant workers used. He was going to meet Socrates in the well, where there wouldn't be anyone during off hours. Joseph closed some of the distance between them. He would need to get on that elevator if he wanted to stay with Michael.

There was a tense moment when Michael got to the deep service elevator. It wasn't an express, but Joseph doubted that Michael was planning to stop and fix pipes. The main elevators went down their own shaft, so there was no parallel route that he could easily follow. He decided to use the cable service panel to get in on top of the car. It meant that he only had the time between the elevator doors closing and the elevator beginning its long descent in which to sprint to the panel, hastily work it open, and drop down onto the roof of the elevator. Tight, and he barely made it in time. He didn't bother even trying to close the panel behind him. It was more important to avoid making any noise when he jumped on the roof of the elevator, right over Michael's head, if he had but known.

The ride down was uneventful, if a little bit noisy. Michael was going to a lot of trouble for this, but then, according to Joseph's' rough estimate, Michael was getting the equivalent of about 3.5 billion MDC Marks, more if you counted the value of it being in the form of freely negotiable securities. Cash was frowned upon, but you could use it for anything without being traced. That was why it was frowned upon. And if what you were doing was fighting the MDC, well, you could hardly use MDC Marks for that. Michael was coming for the money. That made it worth his while. And Joseph, as he would be until the completion of his assignment, was coming here for Socrates, the elusive thorn in the side of the mighty MDC.

The cables creaked and sang as they decelerated the car. There was a thumping noise as the brakes jerked the elevator to a stop, and then quiet except for some echos in the shaft. Here, at the bottom of the elevator shaft, there was no access panel for the cables. Of course, he wanted to follow Michael rather than race him, so Joseph just listened for the doors. They opened, then closed. Immediately Joseph carefully drilled a small hole in one of the ceiling panels, peeking through with his periscope on the off chance that Michael was still in the elevator waiting for someone to come through the ceiling. He wasn't. Joseph pulled open the ceiling access, climbed down, and got to work on the door.

Not that it would necessarily be a disaster if Michael had been waiting. After all, Socrates was almost certainly down here somewhere. Unless Michael periodically did this just for fun. He did do a lot of other stuff, aimless walks through the city past concealed cameras or watching group members, odd purchases of curious items, which he then sold to others with micro tags hidden in them. Still, this felt, different. His other such activities were designed not to be obviously illegal, for one thing. If any of the authorities that Michael worried about saw him doing this, they would arrest him and the rest of the group, no further questions asked, so Michael wouldn't do this just to find out if he was being watched.

There, he had his hole in the inside panel lined up perfectly with the manual operation socket in the outer door. Not bad, given the total darkness in the (theoretically empty) elevator. He inserted his fisheye through the hole gradually, to get a look out side. There went Michael, apparently very confident. He was heading down one of several hallways, towards this well's pumps, if Joseph had to guess. Well, in a minute he would know for sure. Once Michael was out of sight around the corner, Joseph pulled out his fisheye and opened the elevator doors using the manual catch. Before he let them close all the way, he put a sticker over the little hole he had drilled. After all, there was a slight chance that Michael would return to the surface today. At least enough chance to justify using a sticker.