Conflict

Part 3, Chapter 15

"How the heck did they do this?" Rick muttered under his breath.

Strip heard a wrench fall to the ground, followed by a string of garbled swearing. He opened his eyes and tried to peer around the wall of the repair bay module. The machine seemed to complain at his movement in a series of recalibrations and angry, blinking red lights. He settled back into place and it resumed its job. Steadily, methodically, the pain started to go away.

Somewhere to his right, Rick had Chick strapped down, stripped of every weapon they could find, trying to comprehend the racer's overly complex duplicated wiring harness. By the sound of it, it wasn't going well.

Lightning sat parked across the room, well of out the way, trying to take in his surroundings. The repair bay was massive. At least a dozen automated repair machines lined the walls, machines that could do everything from bodywork, to critical systems repair, to maintenance. He didn't know such things existed. The end of the room he sat in was fully equipped with manual tools and a library of repair guides and diagrams. Off to the side, the King sat still inside one of the repair machines getting his damaged and missing flight panels replaced. Directly before him, a pink Charger Daytona and a white Power Wagon from the fifties were fussing over Chick's wiring situation while the Buick dozed the afternoon away under the influence of a fresh dose of anesthetic.

The rookie struggled to understand the massive scale of the manufacturing operation. No one else had batted an eye as they'd disembarked from the airplane, but the sheer mass of architecture on the grounds astounded him. There had been a full runway between buildings so tall he couldn't see beyond them. There was no horizon, just more intimidating buildings looming in the distance. He couldn't tell the difference between them, what they were used for, or if any of them were inhabited in the least. The grid seemed unescapable. The Chrysler site looked more like a fortified city than anything. Employees drove this way and that, all knowing exactly where they were and where they were going. He felt lost.

"Wait, wait, wait!" Izzy's urgent voice snapped him out of his thoughts. "You can't do that. That runs down here, see?"

She and Rick were both up to their axles in deep mechanics underneath Chick's hood, searching for any hints of a way to at least disable Stephen's control through the secondary network.

"This wire doesn't do anything except connect these to that channel there," Rick pointed out in exasperation. "No use. Except to become part of the vital circuit."

To the side, Strip's repair bay slowly whirred to a silent halt. With a click, his restraints released and he rolled forward onto the shop floor, eager to be free. If there was one thing above all others that drove him crazy, it was being physically unable to move. Restraints made him panicky.

"What's the word?" he asked, approaching the medical disaster before him.

Rick backed away and tossed a tool to the side dramatically. Izzy shot an aggravated look in the truck's direction and shook herself in annoyance. She pulled Chick's hood down to give him some decency as Rick turned to Strip and started to rant.

"I can't undo it," he said in a tone that only one unused to failure could articulate. "The whole point of designing a vital circuit is to minimize dependencies and opportunity for failure. Stephen went at it from exactly the opposite direction. I found the module that's receiving and transmitting external commands, but I can't so much as touch it without a risk of killing him. I can't. I can't do anything. I can bring you back from death's doorstep, but heaven forbid I clip a few wires here. Cars are supposed to be manufactured in such a way to keep this sort of thing from happening."

"Hm." Strip kept an even temper as he looked to Izzy. "What do you think?"

"It is what it is," she said, organizing the tools on the rack next to her. "I specialized in medicines and physical therapy. I know the wiring harness basics, but this is beyond anything I've ever seen. I'm useless here. My humble opinion? He's a lost cause. I guess we can say we tried. Should probably do the ethical thing and put him out of his misery."