Outlanders 27 awakenin.., p.15
Outlanders 27 - Awakening, page 15
She shrugged. "Got from guy in ville."
"Somebody in one of the baronies gave you this?" "Not baron, that's for sure! No, from Tartarus Pits. Under the ville. Pit boss. And I didn't say he gave—I said I got."
Robison exchanged a look with Hays. "Indeed," he said, slammed closed the bolt and handed the rifle back to her. She laid it solemnly on her pack—a sign both of trust in her new companions and in her own ability to handle the situation if that trust turned out ill-founded. Despite having allowed Reichert to sneak up on her— which was not exactly a disgrace, since he was a professional, after all, and his snoop-and-poop skills were far the highest of the team, none of whom was slack in that regard—she was clearly a survivor and she knew the ground cold. She was also, well, a local to this time and place. Despite their briefings in the form of Gilgamesh Bates's oddly comprehensive prophecies from the past, and the intel digests produced by UR AI systems from sensor readings made over two hundred years, there was plenty they didn't know and badly needed to. They hoped she could fill in a few gaps.
Now she was getting a close-up look at their vehicles, which obviously pleased her hugely. When Reichert first commed in he was bringing a female indig to camp, Major Mike had been gruff. Now he was acting like a dad whose kid brought home a puppy, declaring at the outset they couldn't keep her and she'd have to go right away, then not ten minutes later wondering aloud what to call her and where she'd sleep.
And where she'll sleep might be an interesting question, Robison thought. She seemed drawn to Reichert, right enough. Which wasn't a surprise; he was the team's youngest and most ingénue member.
"Why'd you get out of your wags to attack the Mags?" she asked, as they moved back to the campfire. The two vehicles were parked with noses away from the fire, each aimed along a high-speed path of escape in case they got jumped and had to drive for it.
"Two reasons," Robison answered. "First of all we needed to take down those choppers as quickly as possible. If even one of them got into the air, we were in a world of hurt. That's why we sent out our young master of disaster Sean to plant shaped-charges on the ones parked west of town. Second, we're basically ground- pounders. Infantry kind of guys. Once we softened the bad guys up a bit with Big Bob's grenade launcher, it was our natural next step to come in on foot to mop up."
"Besides which," Major Mike said, "if we'd just tried to clean out those Magistrates with arty, a lot of the locals wouldn't have survived, and they wouldn't have had much of a town left to live in—even compared to what it was before we blasted it."
"You care 'bout that? Killing dregs?"
"Our job is to rebuild America and restore freedom and the quality of life to its suffering survivors," Hays said, "not kill them."
"But they attacked you!"
"Not seriously enough to cause us any harm," Robison said.
"Except to our egos."
"You're not like Mags," she said. Robison noted her speech seemed to be becoming more complete as she grew more relaxed.
"We'll take that as a compliment," Sean Reichert said.
He hit the luminous switch on his digital wristwatch, then snagged his reassembled MP-5 and slung it. "My turn in the barrel," he said. "If these dirty old men cause you any problems, Domi, just holler. I'll be up above with a sniper rifle."
She grinned and waved. She had already torn open the foil wrapper of another survival meal and was digging in.
"Lord," Robison subvocalized. "She's either got a hyper metabolism or she's going to eat herself spherical in a week if we're not careful."
Major Mike shrugged. He hunkered down near the girl. "So what do you think, Domi? We need your help. We need a guide, somebody who knows the terrain. Hell, we need somebody who knows the world. We need to know what kind of obstacles lie in our path."
"We also need to know what kind of pursuit we're liable to have on our back trail," Robison added.
"Not Mandeville," the young woman said. "They don't dare. Cobaltville—" she tipped her head expressively "—they'll come. Soon and hard, even though they got troubles of their own."
"See?" Hays said. "That's exactly the sort of info you can provide us."
"Coming in." a voice said over his and Robison's comm units.
Hays acknowledged. A moment later Joe Weaver walked into the uncertain flamelight. He carried an AK-108 assault rifle in 5.56 mm NATO and also his .40-caliber CZ-75 in a leather Bianchi combat holster. His hand-built Winchester Model 54 sniper's rifle he had handed over to Reichert. He hated the idea of somebody else using the weapon, but had long since accepted the necessity. It only made sense for the sentry to have a weapon most capable of reaching out and touching someone at long range. The giant MECHEM 20 mm rifle was tripod mounted, in no way portable or maneuverable; the sentry needed to be able to move around quickly and covertly to provide effective covering fire I to his buddies if it all dropped in the pot.
"Who're you?" asked Domi, tearing into a chunk of chicken nugget with her sharp little teeth. They were very white, not something they'd expected to encounter in the Third World bush, which basically was where they were. It was certainly a startling contrast to what they'd seen in their blessedly limited exposure to the denizens of Ozone Hole.
"Joe Weaver," he said with a brisk nod. The tiny fire turned his round glasses to blank flame-colored circles and turned his short crisp hair to bronze. "Pleased to meet you. And you are?"
"I'm Domi," she said brightly. "I'm your new guide."
Weaver looked at his companions, who shrugged. "Welcome aboard," he told the girl.
A beeping came from the loudspeaker mounted on Big Bob's cupola. At the same time the three men by the fire stiffened and reached toward their communicators. All three had begun vibrating for attention.
Hays pulled out his. It was to all intents and purposes a tiny satellite phone, although it also possessed direct radio-broadcast capability. The little digital display screen said, "Message incoming," followed by, "Assemble in LAV in three hundred seconds." The second count began to tick down.
"Better come back in for this, Sean," Hays directed. "I think we're due for another blast from the past." Five minutes later the four of them were planted on pull-down seats in the big armored vehicle's passenger compartment, designed to carry twice as many but still crowded by means of stowed supplies. As they waited, wondering what to expect, the air toward the front of the compartment suddenly shimmered and solidified into a three-foot-tall image, apparently produced from a holo-projector concealed in the deck.
"Hello, gentlemen," Gilgamesh Bates said gravely. "Our projections indicate it is highly probable that you, contrary to explicit instructions to avoid contact, have engaged in some degree of conflict with indigenous forces...."
"SOMETHING," Bry announced.
The others looked at him. He was squinting into his own monitor and his fingers flew across his keyboard. There was a surprising certainty about him, an air of mastery almost. Grant was reminded of a parable Shizuka had told him about a Japanese tea master long ago who had been challenged to duel by a samurai. The tea master, a peaceful man, although nominally samurai himself, went to a kenjutsu teacher, a sword master, intent upon learning to handle a sword well enough so that he would not bring shame upon himself and his family in dying. The sword master, to his surprise, asked the tea master to conduct the tea ceremony. The tea master did. The sword master then informed him he had nothing to teach him—all the tea master need do was imagine himself conducting the tea ceremony when facing his opponent, and comport himself accordingly. Then surely he would make a worthy death.
But when the time came for the duel, the challenger looked into the tea master's eyes—and apologized. For he saw there the absolute, serene confidence with which the tea master carried out the tea ceremony, and lost his own heart.
Perhaps there was more to Bry than the others thought. In this, his element, he certainly seemed confident enough, almost arrogant.
"What's going on?" Kane rasped. Grant wondered if his old comrade sensed the same thing in Bry he did. He had once had firmly fixed opinions as to which of them was the dreamer and idealist, and which one had both boots firmly planted in the swamp of reality. Sometimes of late, especially since taking up with Shizuka, Grant had begun to wonder at their roles, his and Kane's. But Kane was still the point man, still driven by results.
"Whoa," Bry said. He raised his hands palms up. "Whoa. We are getting a signal. And what a signal." "What kind of signal specifically, friend Donald?" Lakesh asked, making a manifest effort not to sound peevish and failing.
Bry seemed not to notice. "A encrypted signal. We don't have a hope in hell of deciphering it. I don't even know what it is."
"What do you mean?" Brigid asked.
"It's a dust code. It's essentially static—nothing but random noise. Seemingly. What it is, is millions—billions—of bits of data broken up into little discrete packets and transmitted. It comes across as nothing but background noise, like some unusually enthusiastic solar activity or some kind of nearby electrical storm might generate. Only if you have the proper key can you pull all the pieces together and translate them into a coherent message."
"How did you spot it?" Kane asked.
"Two reasons. First because Lakesh and, uh, Brigid have had us on a cyber-alert since Brigid figured out someone was cracking into our systems. We've been doing real-time traffic sampling and analysis at random but frequent intervals since. And second, it's big. It's an all- time bandwidth hog. Just stumbling across it I would've taken it for sunspots, as would anybody. But the sun's quiet right now, and mathematical analysis just shines a big old spotlight on its true nature—it's signal, masquerading as noise."
"Can you trace it?" Kane asked.
For the first time Bry looked doubtful. "It's big and loud, you're telling us," Kane prodded.
"You'd think it'd be easy, wouldn't you?" Bry admitted. "I would."
He shook his big head. "But we've got a son of a bitch out there's who's really cute, really clever. He's bouncing the signal in from ground station to satellite to ground station to satellite, and finally to its destination." "Which is?" Kane asked.
Bry pointed at the map and the point of light glowing in western Wyoming that represented Domi's location, and the camp of the four heavily armed strangers. "Right there."
"You can trace it, though," Brigid said. "You're just the man to do it."
Bry looked up, surprised. Brigid had been the first in Cerberus to take him for a traitor, and the most convinced of his treason. Now she praised his abilities. She smiled, a little tautly, and nodded to encourage him. He bent back to his keyboard with a will.
"Speaking of tracing," Grant said, "I can't help remembering that two points define a line. And also—hell, what do they call it when a line starts at one point and travels on out through a second and has like an arrow on the end?"
Lakesh blinked in apparent stupefaction. It was a mathematical question so fundamental he couldn't recall the answer to it.
"A ray," Brigid said.
"A ray." Grant nodded. "So my we take the first point Bry started picking up the scrambled satellite traffic, and then trace a ray through the ville where the Mandeville Mags got busted up. Where does that ray point to?"
Right here," Kane said, "more or less."
THE HALF-SIZE IMAGE of Gilgamesh Bates inside the LAV's passenger compartment flickered once, then vanished in an effect like tiny motes of light being poured upward.
"That's a little spooky," Robison observed, "getting our asses chewed by a guy who's been dead two hundred years."
Joe Weaver was frowning and nodding thoughtfully. "How could he predict something like that? That we'd disobey orders to avoid contact so soon after awakening?"
Robison shrugged. "Well, he did have access to the world's top software experts, and all the processing power he'd ever need."
"That still seems to strain the limits of projection," Weaver said.
“Hey," a voice said from behind them. "Ugly old bearded guy was pretty red-assed at you, huh?"
Four heads snapped around to see one head, with short white hair, poking in the LAV's after hatch.
Chapter 17
"No," Lakesh said. The word echoed slightly in the empty volume of the armory.
"We're going," Kane said. He slammed the bolt home on a G-3 Heckler & Koch assault rifle and set it back in its case.
"Please reconsider, friend Kane," Lakesh said. "It might prove most rash."
"Baptiste finds evidence of systematic intrusion attempts into our systems here in Cerberus, increasing in intensity over the last few months," Kane said. "Then we get these mysterious strangers cropping up out of nowhere and flash-blasting a boatload of Mags and mercies as a little light exercise on their way right here. We catch them receiving mysterious high-bandwidth communications through a satellite communications net I thought we controlled totally. Now, Baptiste is right to keep reminding us that no matter how many conspiracies we run across, the real world is full of real coincidences. But don't you think coincidence is starting to pile up a little deep around here?"
"Oh, I agree altogether," Lakesh said, nodding emphatically. "But hurling yourself against them headlong may not be the optimum means of handling them."
"Hurling ourselves headlong against threats is what we do," Grant said. He was examining a Mossberg M-590 combat shotgun. "I expect you're going to suggest something indirect?"
"Leading with your head isn't always exactly smart," Brigid said.
Kane stopped in place with an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon in his hands. "I'm just not smart, Baptiste. You know that. Otherwise, what am I doing here?" She frowned. In fact she was exasperated as much with herself as with Kane. He was part of her mind, her anam-chara, or soul mate, through the lifetimes. Certainly she found her thoughts drifting incessantly in his direction whenever they were parted. Why did they fight like badgers when they were together? And why was she, as often as not, the instigator?
But she was also too annoyed now to moderate the tartness of her own tongue. "Maybe Sky Dog got it wrong when he named you Trickster Wolf."
"Ah, so fortuitous you should mention Sky Dog, lovely Brigid!" Lakesh exclaimed. "For it is precisely his band I would suggest you gentlemen visit first." Grant shrugged. "Why bother? Domi's going with 'em, so we can always triangulate on her, jump to the nearest gateway and deal with the problem."
"We aren't sure yet they're even a problem," Brigid observed.
"Four heavily armed mystery men making a beeline here, to the tune of secret electronic incursions and unbreakable high-bandwidth communications that we can't trace? Hard to see what's not a problem here."
"That's Magistrate Division thinking, Kane." "Yeah. Well. Magistrate Division thinking saved your tender ass from the Cobaltville execution chamber when Archive Division thinking came up pretty dry, I seem to recall."
"My friends! My dearest friends! We must not squabble!" Lakesh exclaimed. "Consider, though, friend Kane. As extraordinarily capable as you and the esteemed Grant are, do these men seem less so to you?" "They did lay waste to those Mandeville Mags," Grant observed.
"They caught 'em flat-footed."
"Yeah, and how easy was that? The Mags had four Deathbirds and a Sandcat. The wags are still smoking. So are most of the Mags. Even with the help of surprise and heavy blasters, that's pretty close to being what a certain chronic point man friend of mine would call a classic one-percenter. Who else do you know could've pulled that off, except mebbe you and me?"
"Who else is gonna go after them except you and me, partner?"
"That's four against two."
"Since when did you start counting odds?"
"Since I got load of what happened to that strike team from Mandeville. Don't forget Domi's with them." "You think she'd be on their side?"
"I think we can't raise her since she's got her radio turned off. I think that since she's thrown herself in with these boys she'll fight like a wolverine if parties unknown attack them—even if they're us."
"Besides," Lakesh said, "we dare not risk harming precious Demi."
She's not exactly wearing a shadow suit," Grant said, concurring sidelong. "And even when you pick your target you don't always control which way the bullets fly."
"We get her out. Then we hit 'em. If the odds aren't good enough for you, there's always Baptiste."
"Much as I appreciate your surprising level of confidence in my combat prowess," the flame-haired archivist said, "and as high an opinion as I've come to have of my own ability to take care of myself, I'm still not a super-commando. These gentlemen are. I don't delude myself I could beat either of you unless I had total surprise on my side and could flash-blast you without giving you any chance to react. I don't think I could do it to any of them, either—and I bet they're not much easier to catch flat-footed than you two."
"But three of them are old guys," Kane said.
"As in, two of them look older than Grant?" Brigid said sweetly. "And he's such a pushover, pushing forty as he is."
"Old dog does learn a trick or two, Kane," Grant said. "Even that potbellied old fart with the mustache— I kind of doubt he was picked for this mission because of seniority."
"I can't believe you're seriously thinking this is too big for us to handle," Kane said.
"In Asia," Lakesh said, "there is a saying—when two tigers fight, one dies, the other is wounded."
Kane looked at him.
"You are not expendable, friend Kane. Neither is Grant—any more than sweet Domi. We need you. Nor is it too much to say humanity needs you. You have often been injured in your service against the barons and the hybrids as it is. Too often. We face a crisis with the fall of Sam, the imperator. As in the Chinese ideogram, that means both danger and opportunity, in abundance. We cannot risk losing you for a protracted period, far less forever. So I dare not permit you to risk yourself in action alone against opponents as formidable as these have proved themselves to be."
