Logan Harrison's Arc

Chapter 5 of 9

Logan spread the vault's floor plans across a steel desk in the garage. The hazmat gear had arrived. The guards held the lab below. But he did the math and set his pencil down. The contaminated storeroom sat far from the server cores. To reach the cores, he'd need to clear the whole lower level. That meant more gear, more suits, more men. Two weeks, at least. His contract wouldn't last that long. Zelda came in wiping her hands on a rag. She was the Red Hills medic who'd traded away her last favors to build the field hospital upstairs. She'd hauled the hazmat suits down herself. She read Logan's face before he spoke. "You found a wall," she said. "Two weeks of work," Logan said. "I don't have two weeks. The lower level's too big to clear fast. And I can't hold this place with three guards and a broken door." He tapped the blast-scarred garage entrance behind them, its steel panels punched full of holes. The radio crackled. Brad's voice came through, tired and pleased. Brad ran tactical planning for the Rangers, and he'd been north for days. "Logan. Zelda. It's done. Those raiders bleeding us from the north? Gone. Two groups turned on each other, and we cleaned up what walked away. Nobody's coming at you from that ridge anymore." Logan stared at the map. The threat that forced him to rush was gone. He keyed the radio. "Say that again." "North's clear," Brad said. "Heh. You've got room to breathe now. Between you and me, that valley's yours if you want to hold it." Zelda leaned over the floor plans. "Then the clock's a lie," she said. "You were racing a deadline set by men who are dead." She traced the garage, the sealed storeroom, the collapsed route below. "You don't need to rush the lower level. You need to stop treating this like a smash-and-grab." "The contract runs out," Logan said. "Contracts renew. Bases don't build themselves twice." She straightened. "Make this a real base. Refrigerated storage's already here. The hospital's here. A radio dish went up on the roof. Stock the garage, seal that door, post a rotating guard. Then you clear the lower level a room at a time, and the cores wait for you instead of the other way around." Logan looked at the holes in the garage door. He'd read the machine wrong. He'd been reading the whole operation wrong, counting days that no longer counted. "You're right," he said. "We fortify. We turn the garage into a station and work the level slow." Zelda nodded once. "Good. I'll pull the guards onto a rotation." She paused at the door. "Funny what survives when no one's rushing." Logan rolled up the floor plans. The panic was gone. In its place sat a harder problem: turning a shot-up garage into something that could hold a vault for weeks, with a contract that might not stretch that far.