Kingdom Keepers V(129)
* * *
“He thinks it’s the engine room,” Finn said, reading from his phone.
“Thinks?” Willa inquired.
Finn jumped up and pressed the LL button on the freight elevator. Lower Level.
“We’ll have to take stairs from there,” Willa said, having memorized the ship’s map. “Thinks?” she repeated.
“How should I know?” Finn said. “It’s not the galleys, that’s for sure.”
“The engine room will be hot,” she said. “Tia Dalma.”
“The OT server has a cooler,” Finn said. “It fits.”
Willa led the way out of the elevator to a steep staircase that turned back on itself repeatedly. Down they went.
With each landing, the whirring grew louder.
Willa paused at the door.
“You ready?”
Finn shook his head no, his hologram shoes welded to the floor.
“Finn!”
“I’ve been here,” he said.
“You think too much!”
She heaved open the heavy door. A blast of stuffy heat engulfed them.
The area was spit-shine clean, surprising him, every machine painted and polished. The area was beyond enormous, stretching most of the length of the ship, with bulkheads at regular intervals. There were myriad valves and signs and levers and switches.
Finn checked his Wave Phone. A miracle! He looked up curiously. “How can we possibly have a signal down here?”
Willa pointed above the open hatch in the bulkhead, where a number of small boxes with antennas were mounted. “Wireless access points. So their guys can stay in the loop.”
He texted: where now?
stand by, Philby wrote back.
“It’s like a factory,” Finn said.
“It’s an electric ship. You know that, right?”
He’d never given it any thought.
“They have three massive generators down here, any one of which can create enough electricity to power a small city. Most of it goes to the electric motors that spin the propellers. The rest is used by all of us: lights, air conditioning, the galleys, electronics. Every cruise ship is a floating power plant.”
Finn felt a chill. Excluding the Base, the most recent battle against the Overtakers had been waged at a power generation facility.
“Another power play?” she said.
The Overtakers had long since figured out that with holograms being projections of light, and therefore the product of electricity, she who controls the electricity, including its generation, is the one in control.
“Do you think they mean to take the entire ship hostage?” Willa asked.
“No idea.”
“The server is small. With some kind of cooling device, still no bigger than a trumpet case.”
The two took in the size of the engine deck for a second time. The task ahead seemed daunting, the area to search nearly infinite.
“We could be here weeks,” she said.
“You’re the brainiac. So where do you hide Tia Dalma, if you hide her down here? Where do you locate the server?”
“It’s an amazing place to hide anything,” she said. “Perfect. You could hide a car down here.”
“They’re not hiding a car. A woman. A witch doctor. Who knows why they wanted her on board, but I’ll tell you one thing: she would make a heck of a gatekeeper. With her ability to cast spells, who’s going to get past her to the server?”
“A pair of 2.0 holograms, I’m thinking,” Willa said.
“You got that right.”
“It has to be well ventilated, away from the center aisle, and not easy to find. And you may be right: if we find Tia Dalma, maybe we find the server.”
“I can smell it,” he said.
“Actually,” she said, “I think that’s the machinery.”
* * *
“I’m telling you, I know this place,” Finn said, leaning into Willa so as to be heard.
“Can we discuss this another time? I’m thinking they must have control rooms down here, and emergency exits—sealable doors leading out of this place, and more stairways like the one we came down. It’s huge. Has to be.”
“Then that’s where we’ll start.”
“A control room makes the most sense, but you see those blue wires along the wall there? Ethernet. Any one of those could be spliced and the server put between them. It’s really not rocket science to hang a server off a local area network. So…”
“It could be anywhere.”
“You got it. But not her. If they’re hiding her down here, it’s going to be on the other side of a door. Some kind of door. That’s what we’re looking for.”
“Split up?”
“I don’t want to,” she said. “But I don’t see much choice.”