44. Chain Lightning

This time he woke to seven AM by the wall clock and Nigel poking him. He wondered if he’d been dreaming, but he rolled over and almost broke the tea mug he’d salvaged.

“Hurry up and get ready! I’ll lend you a tie if you need one.” He was whispering and it was still pretty dark in there with the curtains pulled.

“Yeah, can’t talk about computers with no tie,” Mateo mumbled into his backpack/pillow, but peeled himself off. Being late was a freaky enough idea to wake him up but good. He shook out his pants — ok, not too wrinkled from sleeping in them and at least it was too chilly to sweat — and started scrambling into what passed for business casual back now. He had to be quiet, the place had dudes in their bunks trying to get into REM after the night shift or sleeping in before the second shift. They didn’t have off hours for the whole facility, Nigel had explained the day before. They just didn’t have time.

“Bathroom’s across the hall, right?” he whispered back. He was pretty sure his hair was doing something wild and he definitely needed a shave.

“Yes. Right down there.”

“Cool beans.” He picked up his backpack and shuffled off.

He opted to pretend he was going to church and fancy up that much, except nobody much wore a tie to his. So church plus a tie. Definitely a shave. He managed to figure out the freaky murder weapon of a razor they used back now, mashed down his hair with some water and leftover hair oil still in there, and went off to look for Nigel.

They’d talked a lot about what Mateo could only think of as “information laundering” the night before he left 020. Or well, Three-Eyes and Short and Goodacre had talked about it, with some Nigel thrown in for flavor. Mateo had mostly listened. It was weird to see those three actively trying not to trick you into spilling something secret, but when it came to Station X, that’s what they did.

What they hashed out was that he’d be posing as an assistant/specialist foreign advisor to Nigel, and Nigel would steer him into places where what Mateo did know would be useful. The problem was, he didn’t know exactly when all this crazy vacuum tube stuff took off. He’d been kinda interested in how this stuff worked, but not that much about exactly when Colossus and stuff actually started the R&D phase. So sue him, he’d been in his senior year and more interested in dates than dates.

So Nigel and him would play this by ear best they could until he was “in a position to sweep in like Jeeves with a brilliant idea” as Short put it. (Looked like Tineye didn’t like this Jeeves guy either, whoever he was, but he didn’t get distracted.) Anyway, they decided that was the best way to handle it.

“The design side of new machines is probably your best bet,” Nigel said quietly as they hurried down the path around the lake to the gingerbread mansion and the trailers. Huts. Whatever. A couple more tea mugs on saucers were floating on the lake.

“Fortunately I work in the same area,” Nigel added. Mateo wrenched his attention back to the important stuff.

“Yeah? Yeah.”

“So I can keep you around it. You have basic mechanical skills, so we can put you on relay maintenance since that always needs doing. And you can just, er, keep quiet and keep your head down.”

“Right. 10-4. Will do.” He was jittery.

Nigel eyed him. “You don’t have to wear a tie while you do maintenance,” he offered. “Surely that counts for something in these evil days.”

“You know man, I’ll take what I can get.”

Next