DIRE : SEED (The Dire Saga Book 2) Read Online Free Page B

anyone watching who cared about us.
    “Safe to come out, but get inside quick,” I instructed Martin. I’d left a change of clothes in roughly his size in the backseat before I launched this operation, and he tugged on his faded flannel shirt and too-large jeans as he got out of the car and stretched.
    “Man, I feel like a damn lumberjack. You got a belt for these? I don’t do the pulldown pants thing.”
    “They’re better than the prison jumpsuit. Come on.” I tapped the keycode into the number pad I’d installed on the door, and led the way inside. “Lights,” I said, stopping a few feet into the darkness, and with a soft hum the hanging tubes flickered to life.
    He whistled. “Okay, this is more like what I expected.”
    The inside was a mechanic’s wet dream. Bits of salvaged scrap and machinery coated every horizontal surface that wasn’t the ground. Tables and crates and shipping containers had been turned into workbenches for various projects. Mechanical arms crafted from smaller cranes whirred along tracks set in the rafters, spot-welding a project out of sight in the center of four shipping containers, while old computer monitors flickered and charted through the Computer Assisted Drafting programs I’d used to set the construction bots to task.
    None of it looked particularly illegal. I’d made sure to hide the defenses from casual view. If someone snuck a look in through one of the high, open window slots on the walls, they’d see nothing worth calling the cops over.
    Maybe a few things worth stealing. In which case, once they stepped foot inside, they’d have to deal with pop-up turrets, directional screamers, taser grids, and— depending on the timing— me.
    The lair drew a bit more power than would be expected from the low-tier industrial shop it was registered as, but I was supplementing the draw with a couple of homemade generators hidden in the shipping containers. Generators are a lost art, I’d found. With broadcast power so reliable for so long, the technology hasn’t been significantly developed over the last few decades.
    That was changing now, in the aftermath of the Y2K incident.
    “The living quarters are upstairs,” I said, gesturing to a flight of metal stairs up, and a short catwalk that led to an enclosed area, with shuttered windows. He followed me, staying well clear of the moving armatures, and the tables full of junk.
    I flipped a light switch on. Upstairs, it wasn’t much. A couple of offices, a few cots tucked in them, some stores of meals-ready-to-eat that I’d located at military surplus shop, a laptop computer running Portals ninety-five, and a few guns. Standard types that fired bullets and not particle beams. I had no real plans to use them unless things went very wrong, but in my short time that I could remember, well, things had gone very wrong.
    Fake ID that withstood the background checks for the guns had been easier to acquire then the fake ID that allowed me to set up the computer’s Gridnet connection. That said a lot about this nation, right there.
    One wall was filled with nothing but televisions, screens open to different channels. One screen was talking about the current troubles in the Middle East. Another screen detailed the rising cost of gang warfare in Icon City. Twelve others showed everything from soap operas to sports games to children’s shows. Martin cracked a smile when he saw it. “Okay, this is stereotypical evil genius shit, right here. You seriously watch TV this way?”
    I nodded. “Turns out her powers are useful for paying attention to and comprehending multiple feeds at once. Which is good, because she’s got decades of popular culture to catch up on, in order to blend in well with this society.”
    “Wait, is that Mister Roberts?”
    I looked at the screen. A middle-aged, fatherly looking man played with puppets and told me how special I was.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “You’re watching Mr. Roberts?” He snickered.
    “Every