Chapter 6

The executioner turned out to be almost too easy. A retired Peace Keeper, he was almost a legend among those still on the job and he had a soft spot for prole hookers. Flash a little leg, slip him a mickey and take out his tongue. All Katy had to do then was leave him chained in a half-filled tub with his own whip activated. She later heard that it was 3 days before the smell alerted the neighbors.

The real problem was the Governor. She had been watching, waiting and learning everything she could about the man. He was well guarded, insulated from the peons by the best layers of security that money could buy. There had been 4 serious and a dozen less capable attempts on his life this year. None of them had come close to working and they had resulted in five more public executions.

Katy was 16 now and while she was head and shoulders above her ex-crèche mates, she was still an untrained teenage girl in a city filled with people who had spent lifetimes committing crimes much more complex than anything she had managed so far. She had to face the facts. She needed help, or she would have to give up all together.

Since running away from the crèche, she had been living in the basement of a collapsed building on the edge of the industrial zone. The area offered several advantages for someone living off the grid. The industrial zone was active twenty-four hours a day, so activity on the street was not unusual at any hour. The amount of power needed to keep the factories, processing plants, shipping and warehousing industries active was staggering. Katy was able to tap into the local power grid with very little chance of being discovered. Over the course of a year, she had outfitted her "home" with some basic appliances, a few discarded rugs and a bed of blankets and pillows she found or was able to steal. She lived a very basic, no-frills existence that relied on her ability to steal enough food and money to get by. She had developed a tense, quasi-friendship with a merchant who was not very picky about where his merchandise came from, and was able to set some credits aside to fund what she had named, 'The Crusade'.

Katy spent the days prowling the city, watching the Governor's office, his mansion, the offices and homes of the Governor's closest associates, and planning for the future. Her nights were spent skulking around the industrial zone, learning about what was made there, where it was stored and how it was shipped. She had been able to steal small pieces of equipment that she night need, and her nocturnal jaunts had provided her with no small skill in breaking and entering without being discovered.

In the office of a machinists' shop, she found a set of file drawers filled with schematics for a thousand little bits and pieces used in other equipment. She was fascinated by the minute detail and intricate drawings on the plans, and would steal copies when she could find duplicates of the original. She would spend hours, in her snug little basement, pouring over the designs and trying to figure out what they did. This fascination led her to focus part of her time on the offices of the buildings she burgled and eventually netted her a trunk full of diagrams.

She had schematics for public Comm consoles, for braking systems on public transport trains and for a new shower head design. She also found something that gave her the germ of a plan for killing the Governor, a set of maps that laid out the city sewer system. The maps had been included in a set of design plans for an inspection droid that would travel through the sewer, inspecting for damage and notifying the maintenance crews of potential problems. The design team had included a map of the sewers in the specifications so that the build team could insure the droid could navigate the various twists, turns and pipe size changes. It wouldn't do for a droid designed for traveling a 12" pipe to be stymied by encountering one larger, or smaller, in diameter.

She had developed a clear mental image of the industrial zone. She knew what businesses were where, who made what and, more importantly, whose security was easy to bypass and whose inventory control was more lax than it should be. She began to gather the equipment she would need to finally get the Governor where she wanted him, in a grave.

Getting her hands on real explosives was problematic at best. Access to explosives was tightly controlled and inventory closely watched. Even if she could steal some, there were sensors on almost every modern building that were designed to detect those substances, along a plethora of other deadly equipment. Guns, for example, were available, she had the two pistols she had stolen from the Mousy Man and the Executioner but carrying them and being discovered was out of the question. She had come up with a way to get near the Governor when he was the most vulnerable, but she wouldn't be able to get close enough to kill him personally. She needed a way to kill him from a distance. She wasn't sure she could both find a rifle and becoming adept enough with it in time to do any good. In her mind, all that was left was explosives of some sort.

The industrialized zone contained a plethora of material marked flammable, corrosive and or explosive. The trick would be identifying which substances could be combined into an effective device and obtaining enough of the material for her plan. She began methodically reading the safety documentation that each company was required to keep for the storage and usage of dangerous substances. Most simply had generic warnings like 'Do not expose to open flame." or even "Caustic liquid, avoid exposure to fumes." Not very helpful. Some, however, were a little more involved. Cesium and Calcium, for instance, posed an explosion hazard if exposed to water.

The Canton Precision Fitting and Gauge Company of Barda, LLC, prided itself on creating the most accurate and durable gauges for industrial equipment. They also created a wonderful line of medical gauges used in the most precise equipment in the finest hospitals in the sector. They had a staff of skilled researchers, a host of talented engineers and a sales force that was second to none. What they didn't have was a decent security system. They relied on mostly mechanical locks to secure both the grounds and, more importantly, the chemical storage buildings in their factory.

Once Katy had identified the materials she wanted, it was almost child's play to obtain a small sample. Slipping into the factory and filching a sample only took an hour and the rest of the night was spent gathering the materials she would need to build a small device to test her theory.