As the chapter title says.


Chapter 3: Progress

“Come in, Nick,” Judy called at the knock on her door.

That door opened and the fox trooped in, dragging some kind of rolling table behind him.

“So that’s what that other noise was,” she thought.

“Develop x-ray vision, Fluff?” he asked as he stopped in the middle of the big living room.

“Now wouldn’t that be something,” Judy said as she stood up. “But, no. You, one; have a particular way of knocking that my other visitors don’t and, two; I could hear your paw steps, again, a pattern distinct to you, a few seconds before you got to the door.”

Nick went to one side of the room, grabbed a table that was there, and pulled it out to the center of the room. He, then, began pushing all of the other furniture up against the walls.

“I know rabbits are supposed to have…grunt…good hearing but as I tend to be light on my paws yours has to be bordering on exceptional. Has it always been like that?”

“Hmmmmm, its always been pretty good but, come to think of it, I think it’s become better since I arrived here,” she said as she helped him push one of the big sofas to a wall.

“I think you should be tested. I can set up an appointment with the site audiologist for tomorrow if that’s alright with you.”

“Mmmmm, sure, why not,” she replied as they shoved the second sofa to the wall.

“What’s this all about?” Judy asked.

“Give me some more time then I’ll explain,” he said

With only the one table and that rolling one at the middle of the room, Nick began pulling items out of boxes and bags lying on his cart. Four fine grillwork surfaced cylinders a little over a foot tall and about four inches in diameter were placed at the left and right ends of the table. The two furthest back were a couple feet in from the ends while the other two were centered depth wise and a couple of inches from the ends. Four more such cylinders, on tripod stands, were set up; two some eight feet, each, to the left and right and four feet forward of the table. The other pair were set some ten to eleven feet in front of the table and almost even with its ends.

“Bit of news for you, Jude…”

“Jude! Where did you hear that?!” she demanded. “Only my dad called me that!”

“He did, though the full version was ‘Jude the Dude’.”

Judith’s ears flamed in embarrassment.

“Okay, fox boy, where did you…”

She stopped as a mental ‘click’ in her mind got her attention.

“That was in my records?!”

“Sure is. Thing to remember, Fluff, is that ole J. Edgar’s mammals did serious in depth investigations on the mammals assigned to your complex,” Nick said as he pushed that rolling table to the back wall. “That included nicknames and pet names.”

Judy was about to retort in anger when she suddenly came to another conclusion.

“Nick’s seen my security records, those are classified! If he has access to them, that means….”

“Nick, I know I’m not supposed to ask but…what’s your security clearance rating?”

“You’re right, you shouldn’t ask, and I shouldn’t tell you. But, seeing as that your clearance is the same as mine, telling you won’t be a problem. My rating is 5 Alpha,” he said.

The expression of astonished disbelief on Judy’s face was priceless; 5 Alpha was just one step, a small one, if the shop talk was to be believed, below that of the President’s clearance rating!

“That’s not my rating! It’s…”

She stopped just in time. Still, she had built up a ‘head’ of mental steam and had to let it out somehow.

“Theoretically, it’s 3 Beta!” she got out.

“That it was, until a little over three hours ago. I talked Chief Buffalo Buns into jacking it up to my level.” Nick said as he set a one-inch-high by two foot by two-foot silver metallic case at the center of the table top.

The last thing Nick took off that roll about was a bare bones straight-backed chair which he set in front of the table.

“Have a seat…Jude,” he said with both a visual and tonal smirk.

“Uuuugh!” she growled in aggravation, but sat on the chair.

From there, she looked up at…her fox.

“Alright, assuming that what you have told me isn’t some kind of concocted tale, why would you go to the trouble of elevating my rating? I know that is not a remotely easy thing to accomplish!” she says.

“Kind of easy if the ‘ducks’ all line up right. Judy, that rating change is necessary because you need access to stuff that your previous one does not allow for.”

He sat himself on the table.

“Item; secret complex working on various projects requiring serious levels of energy has something go haywire. There are four calls made to the surface security mammals. Only one of those calls gives any remotely useful information.”

He got off the table and then opened up that case. The top swung up on a back set of hinges to reveal a screen that looks similar (except for its smaller size) to the big flat screen TV that hung from one of the room’s walls. In the bottom part of the case is a keyboard. Nick taps a key and the screen lights.

“Face the screen and sit straight upright,” he instructed as he tapped a few more keys.

Judy did as instructed, and Nick stepped back from the table to stand behind and to her left. From all eight cylinders came the clacking sound of a military telephone, then….

“Security, here.”

“This is Judith L. Hopps, service number 0784237. I am on the 23rd level speaking from phone number 2309.”

Judy heard the tension in her own voice.

“Something is happening down here. There’s sounds of mammals yelling and calling out and I think some of them are running for some reason. There are other sounds that I can’t identify but, if I didn’t know better, I’d say we were under some kind of attack!”

“Miss Hopps, are you sure of all of that?”

The questioning doubt in the talker’s voice was plainly evident.

“Quite sure. The sounds are getting louder and…”

Even though she knew what was coming, Judy shrank backwards in the chair. The blood chilling shriek of a mammal who was utterly terrified issued from all of the speakers! That sound changed the security guard’s attitude in an instant.

“Miss Hopps! You are to egress to the surface immediately! Get to any emergency exit you can and get out of there, now!”

“Understand. Leaving this phone off hook.”

“Whatever! Just get moving!”

“Judy, close your eyes and just listen,” Nick told her.

She did. Nothing, nothing, noth…. Her ears twitched, there was something there, something that she could just make out. Some kind of padding sound. Then, it was gone.

“You heard it,” Nick said.

“Yes, I did,” she replied.

She opened her eyes to look at him.

“What’s making the sound?” she asked.

“No one has any real idea of whatever it is looks like, but a few years ago, they developed filtering and sensing equipment good enough to isolate that sound. They gave it to a team of bioscience, computer, and robotics mammals to try to duplicate it and after nearly a year’s worth of work they came up with this.”

Stepping forward, Nick tapped on some more keys. The screen lit up and on it was something that had eight articulating legs, four each on opposite sides of its central body. At the end of those legs there were pads of some type. It moved, more like loped, along on a floor that looked to be the same as the ones in the complex.

“Its’ a little over eight feet long,” she heard Nick say. “Weighs 417 pounds, and the sound it makes is a dead on match for what got pulled off of the security tape.”

Nick looked at Judy.

“And it was going the same way you went down that corridor.”

The hackles on the back of her neck stood at full attention and it felt like every bit of her fur was puffed out as well.

“I…it needs one…no, two pairs of arms,” she said.

Nick froze the screen, then enlarged the image.

“Where?”

“Here, here, here, and here,” she said, pointing to spots on the screen.

She was silent for a few heartbeats.

“Nick, will you stay with me tonight?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Because I know I’m going to have that nightmare once again.”