The matter-of-fact way he asked made Tetsami want to cry again. Whatever he might say, this wasn’t her body. She was an interloper. Their relationship was freakish, even by Salmagundi standards. The whole process was supposed to merge identities, not leave multiple personalities inside the same skull.
“Only if you want to,
” she thought back.
“Then keep at it. I drove all night. I need a break.”
“Great, so I get to feel our legs ache.”
“You asked.
”
“Fly—Tetsami? Get over here.” Tetsami looked up ahead at the sound of Kugara’s voice. Kugara stood at the top of a rise ahead of everyone. The mound was treeless, and seemed to be in front of a clearing. Beyond it was unobstructed rose-colored sky.
As Tetsami climbed the rise next to Kugara, she realized that the mound was too even and regular to be a natural formation.
When she reached the top, Kugara swept a hand toward the view in front of them. “Is
that
supposed to be there?”
“That” was an industrial complex of about thirty buildings surrounded by a twenty-meter-wide defensive perimeter consisting of two tall fences surrounding a no-man’s-land. Perimeter towers rose every twenty meters, bristling with cameras and defensive weaponry.
Tetsami looked over at the navigation display attached to Kugara’s rifle, and had her sinking feeling confirmed when she saw that the coordinates of Dom’s old escape tunnel fell in the center of the mass of buildings.
“Jesus Mother-humping Tap-dancing Christ.”
Kugara sighed. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Some bastard built this—”
“Within the past hundred-seventy-five years. I know.”
Tetsami suddenly felt the weight of uselessness that Flynn must have been feeling. Worse. She had actually sabotaged the mission with her outdated information. They were now vulnerable, on foot, and way too close to Godwin, and the occupying PSDC, than was safe.
She put her head in her hands and cursed.
“Gram?”
“Please, I’m busy fucking everything up right now.”
“Look at the nav computer again.”
“What?”
She looked up and turned to Kugara who was already limping down the rise and saying something about turning back east to take on the mountains on foot. “Can I see that again?”
Kugara stopped, and Tetsami scrambled down and looked at the small map displayed on the navigation computer.
“What are you looking for?” Kugara asked.
“What
am
I looking for?”
“What’s the odds that a random construction project would be perfectly centered on your coordinates?”
“It’s not . . .”
It was.
She brought Kugara back up the rise so she could compare the map to the ground; judging by the topographical features she could identify, the complex wasn’t just plopped down in the middle of nowhere. The perimeter was almost perfectly centered around Dom’s old escape hatch, directly beneath the largest building.
It wasn’t random. The complex was in a natural bowl, surrounded by woods, but in order to be where it was, it had been placed off-center in the natural feature and the construction had done a fair bit of excavating on the north side of the natural depression, where they stood.
The excavation, and the rise they stood on, wouldn’t be necessary unless the builders wanted the complex exactly where they had put it. It wasn’t as if there was any other infrastructure here, the complex was alone in the woods, with only a single road leading south, opposite where they stood.
“Nickolai?” she called down. “Can you come up here and look at this?”
The tiger mounted the rise next to them. Kugara asked, “What are you doing?”
“Can you read any of those signs down there?” Tetsami asked the tiger.
Nickolai started reading off a long litany of safety warnings, and other random bits of signage anyone could expect to find at an industrial site. After thirty seconds of his narration, Tetsami stopped him. “That’s it. Our way into the mountain is down there.”
“You lost me,” Kugara said, “how do you know that?”
“Did you hear him read the company name?”
“Bleek Munitions? So what?”
“That’s the company Dom took over, the one he ran from his headquarters in the mountains. It didn’t cease to exist because we cashed out our shares. They built an expansion centered on one of the main access routes back to the mountain.”
Kugara said, “That’s a bit high on speculation.”
“More than trying to hunt down Dolbrians?”
Nickolai turned to look at Kugara. “I think Tetsami’s right.”
“Why?”
“I can see signs directing employees to a subway system.”
Kugara stared at him a moment, then looked at Tetsami with a grim expression. “I don’t suppose either of you have a good idea how to get in there?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Heaven’s Gate
—
The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Rapidity is the essence of war.”
—SUN TZU
(ca. 500 BCE)
Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
For nearly four hours, Nickolai sat in the crown of a tree and watched the road that led to the industrial complex. Traffic was sparse, small vehicles and vans that were unsuited to Nickolai’s purpose. Most traffic on Bakunin, even after a Pax Proudhon, was aggressively defensive. Anything of value, including and especially personnel, was hidden behind layers of armor. Direct attack, as lightly armed as they were, would do nothing except draw attention to them.
It wasn’t until midmorning that he saw a vehicle coming that suited their purpose. It was a heavy wheeled transport, carrying a large piece of tarp-covered equipment on a flatbed. It was about five kilometers away.
He gestured to the others, and started climbing down the tree. They had about two minutes.
They had set themselves up on the inside of a blind curve that ran alongside a wooded ravine. The inside edge of the road had seen a fair share of erosion, and as he reached the ground, Kugara was shoving the laser carbine into a hand-dug excavation in the earth about two meters down from the road’s surface.
“This better work,” she muttered as she flipped the switch on the trigger guard.
Nickolai ducked behind a tree with the others, and Kugara dove in after him.
Tetsami’s rewiring of the power cell worked as advertised, and the carbine whined and then released all its energy in a solid whoomp that shook the ravine floor beneath him. He looked around the base of the tree as dirt cascaded through the treetops like sleet. The road had been undermined, leaving a nasty crater that took a bite out of a third of the roadway.
“Okay,” Kugara said, “That was our gun. We don’t get a second chance at this.”
Nickolai edged up to the road, pressing his body to the ravine wall and peering through the undergrowth. “They’re still coming.” He could hear the engines now, only a couple of kilometers away. “Get into position, we’ll only have a few seconds.”
The others joined him at the edge of the road as he heard the massive machine’s gears shift and the brakes engage for the upcoming turn. Just as the first wheel passed their position, he heard the brakes lock and the wheels scream as the truck and its thirty meters of cargo tried to stop and avoid the sudden obstacle.
The last tire passed their position, and the cab was already around the turn. Nickolai jumped out onto the road, followed by the others. At this point, with the whole truck in danger of fishtailing off the road, the driver was not going to be paying attention to any rear-facing cameras.
Nickolai ran after the trailer, which was still screeching to a stop, the tires burning a reeking trail of scorched synthetics. He vaulted onto the back, grabbing and tearing free a corner of the tarp. The others were behind him, running, and he reached down and scooped up Brody by the good arm and tossed him under the tarp. Dörner jumped up on her own, and Kugara practically threw Tetsami/Flynn after Brody. He reached down for Kugara, and she climbed his arm as if it was a ladder.
Everything shuddered to a stop.
Everyone froze in position on the back of the bed. Nickolai held his breath and flexed his claws, anticipating discovery.
Instead, the engine revved, and the truck started backing up. After backing ten meters or so, it began to move forward again, very slowly. As it rounded the curve, Nickolai saw the marks it had left in the pavement, leaving the road to avoid their sinkhole and chewing up five meters of ruts on the opposite side.
Once around the turn, the driver accelerated back to speed, and Nickolai dropped the tarp over himself and the others.
Kugara whispered in the darkness, “Okay, that worked, but we still lost our gun.”
After a few more minutes, they rolled to a stop again. Nickolai crouched at the end of the truck bed, under the tarp, holding taut a heavy length of chain that had been one of four that had been securing one of the rear anchor points of the truck’s cargo.
The machine was massive enough that the others had been able to move back and hide within a large recess between a pair of massive tanks. Nickolai stood guard at the rear, the chain their only real weapon. He crouched in the darkness and waited, as the truck sat idling.
For what it was worth, he prayed.
Light leaked into the world under the tarp, but not from his end. He turned his head, keeping the rest of his body still, silent, and ready to pounce.
Someone had lifted the tarp up near the cab. He heard someone talking to the driver. “Glad those Proudhon assholes finally let you out of Godwin.”
“Yeah, how it works, ain’t it? First comes an army, then the goddamn forms.”
“Taxes will be next.”
“Don’t I know it, but whatcha going to do?”
This was Bakunin ... wasn’t it?
Nickolai had no love for the lawless order that he had lived in during the years of his exile. The anarchy seemed fitting, the epitome of the Fallen themselves. But these men were talking in terms that would have been inconceivable to any Bakunin native a year ago. Not just the existence of a de facto State, but the fatalistic acceptance of it.
Could Mosasa’s absence be so critical?
A man leaned his head in under the tarp, shining a light against the side of the machine. Nickolai froze, crouched in deep shadow. The man read off a long serial number aloud. Then he said, “Good. Our fabrication building has been running at two-thirds capacity ever since the old primary power plant decided to melt its core all over the place.”
“You lucked out, this was the last terawatt reactor left in Godwin.”
The tarp dropped. “And to hear management bitch, it was priced like the last one on the planet.”
“Where’s it go?”
“Follow the signs for the auxiliary fabrication building. There’s a lot marked out for you. We’ll get you unloaded within the hour.”
The truck started up and slowly rolled forward. Nickolai whispered to the others, “I’ll take the lead, get ready to follow.”
He wrapped the chain tightly around his forearm, so he could carry it quietly, and crouched down so he could peer out from under the tarp while disturbing it as little as possible.
The truck weaved between buildings and drew to a stop near the center of the complex. When it stopped, Nickolai whispered, “This way.”
They had pulled up next to one of the buildings, with little more than a meter to spare. It gave as good cover for them as he could hope for. The five of them slipped off of the truck, Nickolai in the lead, Kugara taking up the rear and landing with a sharp intake of breath. His muzzle wrinkled when he caught the scent of her wound. It needed attention.
Later,
he promised himself.
He looked along the wall, and neither direction seemed promising. There was no access into the building along the length of the truck, and past the ends of the truck, no sign of cover.
“Down here,” Flynn/Tetsami whispered. He looked down and saw him crouching to look under the bed of the truck. Nicolai looked underneath. A large grate was set in the pavement underneath the truck, part of a storm drain.
“You think we can slip out that?” he asked Nickolai.
The grate itself was big enough to accommodate a human, though Nickolai would find it a squeeze. He shifted through spectra until he could see a large volume of air passing through. “It’s big enough—for most of us.”