"Tread marks," Tirrell told her. "Almost certainly those of a heavy amphibious vehicle."
"This doesn't make any sense," Tonio complained, squinting in the direction the tread marks pointed. "There's nothing but rock over there. No trees, no possibility of a decent cave—how's he going to hide a refinery out in the open?"
"Let's go see, shall we?" Tirrell said.
"But they'll see us," Lisa objected, looking around nervously.
"Don't worry; Martel's still kilometers away," Tirrell assured her. "Let's go—you'll understand in about a hundred meters."
The two preteens exchanged glances. Then Tonio shrugged and they were airborne again, flying low. The ground swelled up into a low rise, and they topped it to find—
Another river.
"Are you going to tell us," Tonio demanded as they landed, "that Martel carts his rocks up one river and across dry land just to ship 'em down another river? Why?"
"I am indeed," Tirrell nodded. "And the why is twofold: first, because this river—a tributary of the Nordau, according to the map—winds up going down the other side of the mountains, which means that at the cost of relatively little trouble he's managed to point any pursuers in exactly the wrong direction. And secondly—"
"Stan!" Lisa exclaimed suddenly. "There's an old metal refinery where the river leaves the mountains!"
Tirrell nodded. "Right. It hasn't been used in probably twenty years or more—not since the mines southeast of Plat City were played out—but it wouldn't take much to get one of the crushers and a cyanidation tank or two back in operation. I'll lay ten to one odds that's where he's holding Jarvis."
"Yeah—with thirty or forty kids to help him," Tonio muttered.
"No, he doesn't have nearly that many," Tirrell told him. "Remember back to the cabin. Even though he left the temple site with fifteen kids and picked up reinforcements on the way, he hit us with only eight or nine—and recall that Weylin wasn't among them. I suspect that those eight or nine have been trusted with the full story of what Martel's planning with Jarvis and are cooperating less on blind faith than on the more tangible promise of sharing in whatever wealth and power Martel hopes to get. Kids like Weylin who have even a scrap of faith left in them would have done fine at beating the woods for Jarvis, but Martel would have had to cut them out of anything past that. They're probably still hunting through the woods east of Rand right now."
"But Weylin was willing to attack a policeman for him," Lisa pointed out. "He had to be pretty loyal to do that."
"Breaking laws in the name of religion and seeing your leader break them are two very different things; and that's an even stronger indication that Martel's not taking any chances at all with his group. So he's probably only got those same eight or nine kids with him. The other side of that, of course, is that trying to talk them into mutinying would be essentially useless. We're just going to have to hit them hard and fast, without any call for surrender to alert them."
"That doesn't sound very... pleasant," Lisa said hesitantly.
"It probably won't be," Tirrell acknowledged. "But with luck you won't have to be there. We're going to head down to the refinery first of all and try to confirm that Martel's there. If we can, Tonio and I will put the place under surveillance while you sneak away and whistle us up some backup forces, Probably from Nordau; it'll be faster than going back to Plat City." He glanced up at the midafternoon sun, already perilously close to the highest mountain peaks. "And we'd better get moving—I want to get things rolling as soon as possible."
Because—he didn't add—if the reinforcements didn't arrive before dark, he and Tonio might just wind up taking on the whole place by themselves.
And that definitely didn't sound very pleasant.
"You'll have to excuse the accommodations, Doctor," Martel said with exaggerated politeness as the two adults walked toward the middle of the huge, high-ceilinged room, leaving the small group of preteens to close the door behind them. "But I'm afraid We really weren't set up for visitors here."
Jarvis passed up the scathing reply that came to mind and instead took a good look around. The room was indeed huge, taking up probably an entire third of the building, and was, in addition, stiflingly hot. Thick-paned, wire-reinforced windows covered three of the four walls, presenting a somewhat dust-filtered view of the mountains to the south and east and the river flowing by the building to the west. The floor space was dominated by what appeared to be a furnace and two large tanks, each liberally wrapped up in catwalks, conveyors, control and power lines, and tens of meters of heavy pipe. Other catwalks and stairways crossed to what appeared to be a glass-walled control room stuck above the windows on the south wall. Other smaller pieces of equipment were laid out in a seemingly random pattern, connected to each other and the tanks by more piping. A handful of troughs cut into the concrete floor—emergency drains—were covered with gratings which, flush as they were against the floor, fortunately presented no additional hazard to travel. Jarvis mentally fixed the locations of everything as best he could and looked back at Martel. "What is this place, anyway?" he asked, though he was pretty sure he knew.
"Oh, sort of a business sideline of mine," the other said airily. "Axel—I want four of your boys outside to watch for company," he called, his voice echoing in the huge space. "One on each side of the building."
Axel seemed to stare at Martel an unusually long time before nodding and turning back to the other eight kids hovering near him. Inaudible words were exchanged, and four boys detached themselves from the group and disappeared back out the door. The other four dispersed to the windows, which they proceeded to unlatch and teek open. Watching their curious glances around the room, Jarvis concluded that it was their first visit to the refinery, which meant they weren't any more familiar with the layout than he was. Offhand, he couldn't think of any way that could help him.
Axel flew over and settled down beside Jarvis and Martel. "Now what?" he asked with more than a little truculence. "We can't stay here very long—we're not that far from the temple site, and that's the first place the police will look."
"We'll be safe enough, at least until dark," Martel said. "At that point we can fly over the mountains to a secluded place I know of."
"And then what? Back at the cabin he said it would take years to figure out if his stuff even worked. You going to sit out there and eat conetree pods that whole time?"
"We won't have any trouble with supplies." Martel was gazing thoughtfully at his preteen aide. "I can keep my business contacts in Rand and elsewhere, and in the next room is the means to finance any purchases we'll need to make through them. We'll be perfectly comfortable out there, I assure you."
"Glad to hear it. And who exactly are you going to find to experiment on?"
"I thought we'd adopt Dr. Jarvis's method, seeing as how it's already worked so well. You and your preteens will simply kidnap some four- or five-year-olds, we'll use whatever trickery the doctor used to keep them from panicking, and that will be that."
"You sure he's going to help us, huh?"
Martel glanced at Jarvis; his frown deepened as he returned it to Axel. "He'll mix up the drugs for us, under the threat of very painful consequences if they don't work."
Jarvis snorted. "You're going to chain me to my bed for ten years, are you? That should be interesting."
"Actually, I have something more sophisticated in mind," Martel said, his eyes still on Axel. "If there are no further questions—"