Other links:
Sapphire Angel, Superheroine (Book 1)
Power Play (Book 2)
Deconstruction (this book - Book 3)
As Devlin's knees buckled under him, he turned his gaze to the guard.
"Get... down... there... and tell them to turn this off!" he snapped between breaths.
With a nod, the guard turned and hurried down the hall toward the far door. Sapphire Angel's knees trembled, and she latched her fingers into the wall grate. She glanced at the guard, who barely seemed affected, before turning her gaze to Devlin, who was on his knees.
Over the din, she heard the door at the other end of the hall open and clang shut as the guard darted through it. Just when she thought she could no longer tolerate the assault on her senses, the sound and vibrations stopped.
"Ooohhhh..." she said as she leaned against the wall, gulping in deep breaths, her costume clinging to her curves as her chest heaved.
"Damn it!" Devlin said again through clenched teeth. He lay slumped to the floor, his head bowed and with both hands to his temples. He had taken it much worse than she had.
"Are you okay?" he asked, looking up at her with a wince.
Sapphire Angel nodded. "I will be in a moment. How are you? And what was that?"
"I'll be fine in a few minutes. I apologize profusely for that. This is the hall where our employees pass at the start and end of every shift. We've fitted it with all sorts of sensors to help us detect whether they are carrying anything they shouldn't — such as our trade secrets."
"They have to go through that twice a day?" she asked, her voice filled with disbelief.
"They wear protective headsets and goggles, and don't feel a thing. It was someone's job to turn this off, so we didn't have to go through it. That person's head is going to roll for this. Fortunately Dirk, my guard, was wearing his helmet. It's one of our prized creations, and provides some protection against sensory assaults, among many other features."
Sapphire Angel pushed herself from the wall, already feeling better. Devlin was still recovering, though, and remained seated on the floor. He looked up at her.
"You had no protection, and yet it affected you only slightly more than Dirk," he said. "And you seem to be recovering quickly. Amazing." He seemed to consider his words as he spoke, giving a slight nod.
Sapphire Angel nodded in return, but said nothing. A sound came from down the hall. She turned to see the guard, Dirk, trotting down the hall toward them. He stopped next to Devlin.
"Give me just a minute," the WarTech CEO said, "and then we can continue."
A moment later he tried to rise to his feet, and Sapphire Angel took his arm, assisting him.
Devlin took a deep. "Thank you, and again, I'm sorry. If you're okay, let's continue."
She nodded, and he led her and the guard down the corridor to the steel door, which he opened with a turn of the handle. Another corridor stretched out beyond the door, with doors and windows on each side.
"This corridor and the rather unpleasant corridor we just left both go straight through the center of the building. There are various rooms ahead to the left and right, which I'll discuss as we go."
"How about the corridor we just exited? What was on either side of the grate walls?"
"Just generators and storage, hence the lack of any windows."
"And there are floors above us, right?" she asked. "This building looked taller than just one floor."
Devlin nodded. "Yes, there are four floors total, if you don't count what I call the Penthouse, which is a smaller area for future expansion. Much of the building, though, is open above this floor. Some rooms, as you'll see soon, extend all the way to the roof. We need that space for work we do on larger items."
Sapphire Angel nodded as they continued down the hall. They passed an empty cafeteria and a room containing employee storage lockers. The heroine continued to prod Devlin with questions as they walked.
"How many employees do you have?" she asked.
"We're actually a small operation compared to most of our competitors. I like to think we're focused. We have under four hundred workers on the production line and about fifty scientists. Then we have about five hundred people in logistics — getting parts and supplies in, and getting the finished products securely into the right hands. We also have many lawyers and lobbyists and things like that, and maybe another eighty in administrative positions. That includes me. All totaled, we hover at right around a thousand, although not all of them work on site."
Sapphire Angel followed as they continued down the hall, coming to a large window on the left wall. A huge room opened on the other side, with men hauling boxes and using forklifts to move crates. Two large garage doors stood open on the room's far wall, leading outside, and another garage door was closed on one of the interior walls. The ceiling in the room loomed high above them, possibly as far as the top of the building. Just below the ceiling, a massive overhead crane spanned the width of the room, sitting on steel tracks. Near the window, inside the room, a man sat at a computer terminal, pecking away at a keyboard.
"Unlike some of our competitors, we don't outsource our work," Devlin said, beaming with pride as he looked upon the room. "Incoming supplies come in through those open doors, and once ready they go out through the closed garage door to the right."
Sapphire Angel studied the massive room, committing its layout to memory, before Devlin led her further down the hall.
"It must take quite a bit to keep this place running," she said.
"It does," he acknowledged. "But we don't sacrifice security. Supplies don't even come inside our fence until we've scanned them. That happens in a smaller fenced-in area beyond the perimeter of the main complex. All supplies go there when they arrive. We inspect them, and scan them for surveillance bugs and things like that, before we bring them in here."
The tour continued as they passed an elevator on one side and a stairwell doorway on the other. She guessed they had reached the midpoint of the hall.
"Let's finish this floor, and then I'll take you upstairs," Devlin explained.
There wasn't much more to see as they continued to the end of the hall. They passed rooms containing various unrecognizable contraptions, before coming to a stretch of the hall with no windows.
"The rooms behind these walls contain projects with tighter security. Many of them are subject to national security clearances. That's why there are no windows. Unfortunately, I can't show those rooms, even to you."
"I understand," Sapphire Angel said with a nod.
They reached the end of the hall, and Devlin turned around.
"Let's head back to the elevator," he said. "The second floor contains offices for our scientists and isn't really worth a visit. The third floor is where all our top secret research occurs, so I can't show you that. Our security there is incredibly tight. And we haven't built out the Penthouse yet, and it isn't too big anyway, so it's not worth visiting. The fourth floor is pretty cool, though. It's where the good stuff happens."
Devlin led her and Dirk, the guard, back into the elevator and placed his finger on a sensor. After pressing the button for the fourth floor, the car rose.
"Great security," she commented.
"Yes. Only authorized employees get up here."
The elevator moved slower than any elevator she remembered, climbing past the second and third floors.
"We never know what our scientists are carrying on the elevator, so I've had it set to move slowly so nothing delicate gets jostled."
Sapphire Angel nodded, but said nothing.
At the fourth floor, the doors slid open. Devlin stepped across a hallway and into a plain rectangular room, with a large glass window and a wide steel door on the wall opposite them. Above the window, someone had hung a wooden sign. Sapphire Angel did a double take upon seeing it, remembering Eric's email to Senator Chappelle. On the signed, carved into the wood, were two words. Enigma Project.
Other links:
Sapphire Angel, Superheroine (Book 1)
Power Play (Book 2)
Deconstruction (this book - Book 3)
AIright, Iooks Iike we got out of that haIIway okay! I thought it wouId've been a trap for Sapphire, but it turned out it was just a very high-security mechanism. I guess I couId say that that wouId keep them safe, but on the other hand, I wish they had some kind of auto shut-off system if unprotected peopIe accidentaIIy waIk into it, Iike what happened with DevIin and Sapphire. Kind of Iike those machines that have those dead man's switch things where a button has to be heId down to keep something working; if it's not, then the gadget stops.
What an interesting tour! Seems Iike WarTech is home to a Iot of compIicated projects.....not sure if I feeI safe that we're not getting fuII access to everything; there couId have been a Iot of things aIong that haIIway that IikeIy couId have been dangerous, or otherwise at Ieast worth a Iook. Then again, nothing obviousIy suspicious has happened yet, so I guess we'II respect their privacy for the time being. DevIin did say that onIy authorized empIoyees are aIIowed on the fIoor containing the Enigma project, so at the very Ieast he's not entireIy keeping it in pIain sight.....wonder if he has a backup pIan in case any of those empIoyees decides to turn taiI and inform random peopIe about it. It definiteIy doesn't seem Iike something you'd want just anyone knowing about.....then again, neither is a Iot of stuff in this buiIding.
DevIin's probabIy going to turn on her if she asks too many questions about the Enigma project.....but at the same time, she's gotten herseIf out of worse situations. And right now, it just seems to be her, DevIin, and Dirk. I'm wondering if the Enigma project has a connection to the superpower-granting device from the first noveI; or maybe it couId just be some kind of superweapon to achieve gIobaI supremacy.
Guess we'II Iearn more in a IittIe bit!