Dom scanned the room. He had to make the offer. Levy looked a little nervous. The bird-thing’s head was bobbing on a serpentine neck in a very inhuman manner. Mosasa’s dragon tattoo showed more expression than Mosasa did.
No one backed out.
Dom nodded. “Good. Since this is the first time you’ve all been together, let’s have some introductions— Tetsami?”
Tetsami stood. She was going to have to bear the brunt of the presentation since it was, for the most part, her plan.
She ran her hands through her hair. She looked as though she’d been missing some sleep. “Well, you all know me—in fact you’re lucky if I haven’t pumped you for information in the past sixty-four hours—but for formality’s sake, I’m Kari Tetsami.”
Funny, though it was in her file, it was the first time Dom had ever considered her first name.
“I’m coordinating this expedition. If you have a problem with the plan, you talk to me.”
Tetsami waved at Ivor. He was putting away his third sandwich and washing it down with a mammoth container of coffee. “This is Ivor Jorgenson, the best pilot I know of on this rock. He’ll be the one extracting the surface team from the complex.”
She continued, counterclockwise around the table. Next to Jorgenson was Shane, who was nursing a large bruise on the side of her face. “Kathy Shane, she’s our marine. She was kind enough to defect with a full load of body armor. She’ll be the one to get the ground team into the ship.”
Mosasa was next. “Tjaele Mosasa is our expert on communications, electronics, security systems, and so on. He’s already done worthwhile work on the transponder in Shane’s armor, and he is going to make sure that the folks holding GA&A don’t see us coming.” Mosasa nodded politely, the glow from the holo projector reflecting off his scalp.
Floating next to Mosasa was a squashed metal sphere carrying what looked like an oversized briefcase in one of its manipulators. “The robot is actually being run by Random Walk, an artificial intelligence.” Dom felt he heard Tetsami’s voice lower a few degrees. “Random will be responsible for taking charge of the computers aboard the Paralian ship in the landing quad.”
Johann Levy was next, short, balding, and perpetually nervous. Dom also noted that he was sitting between the two nonhumans. “Johann Levy is our demolition expert. He has the most important job, cracking the safe.”
Next was the bird, a creature who had been getting his—her? its?—share of stares. “Flower is a Voleran,” just in case they hadn’t guessed; “it—please don’t call Flower ‘he,’ that would be an insult—is our informant on the design and weaponry of the drop-ship that we have to deal with. Flower will not go in on the ground, but our success relies on it as much as on any member of the group.”
Then there was Zanzibar. “Mariah Zanzibar knows the hardwired security setup in the complex. She’s also combat-trained and will back up the team going into the safe.
“And, finally, Mr. Dominic Magnus, the man whose money we’re stealing.”
Dom nodded at the rest of the assembled team.
“What’s at stake here,” said Tetsami, “for each of us, is a flat twenty megagrams. Or an equal share of a corporate takeover.” She smiled. “Now that we know each other and why we’re involved, shall we get down to what we’re going to do?”
* * * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Press Conference
“Mercenaries may not win as many wars as fanatics do, but they live longer.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Gold is everything; without gold there’s nothing.”
—Denis Diderot
(1713-1784)
Sometime during the introductions it hit Tetsami. It was actually going to happen. This heist she had been planning—at least half out of desperation—was actually going down.
Until now, standing in front of the eight other team members, she’d been deep-down convinced that this whole idea was hypothetical. Something to mark time while she or Dom thought of some way to get out from under the Confed guns.
They weren’t marking time, it wasn’t hypothetical, and it was probably the only way to get a defensible position. Dom—damn the diabolical logic of all this—needed a corporate base to defend himself and “his people.” It was that or everyone whom Dom even breathed on would have to dig a hole and hide until the TEC decided to leave the planet.
A vain hope when she had no idea why they were here in the first place.
She manipulated the holo and started reviewing the whole plan for the first time, all the while expecting the inevitable, “You’re kidding,” or, “That’ll never work.” It took an extreme effort on her part—especially with Ivor there—to avoid showing the nerves that tied her gut in a knot.
She consciously imitated Dom’s control.
“First,” she told the eight others as she called up a holo image of the current layout of the GA&A complex, “Here’s the nut we’re going to crack.”
She zoomed in on each detail as she described it. “The complex is surrounded by a two-hundred-fifty-meter diameter circle of twenty perimeter towers. Each is—was— fifty meters of diamondwire-reinforced concrete, sensors, antiaircraft, and Emerson field generators.”
She moved the pointer to the west side of the complex. “Here’s the good news—half got scragged by TEC missile fire. The entire ass-end of the residence tower—the tall building west of the quad—is hanging out over Godwin. Ditto what’s left of the old security HQ, and the extreme north end of the office building.
“The TEC is trying to fill the gap with their own equipment. The scragged perimeter towers, most have been chopped off at twenty meters for them to mount their own weapons and sensors. They’re more twitchy about a ground assault than an air attack. There’s enough computer-aimed hardware on the Blood-Tide to take out a decent airborne assault without waking their command. Their problem’s that the Blood-Tide is useless versus ground-pounders. So the nests on top of those ten scragged towers carry plasma cannons. MacMillan-Schmitt HD350, I think—”
Shane nodded and some of Tetsami’s audience whistled in appreciation.
“Again,” Tetsami continued, “we got good news. They only have the ship’s computers, and those are overloaded. They have warm bodies manning the plasma cannons, and they don’t have enough marines to man the perimeter and patrol the interior.”
Tetsami nodded at Shane. Shane elaborated for her, “There’s a one-hundred-twenty-marine complement in there, and the HD350 requires a gunner and a tech to run. That’s half the active-duty personnel at any one time.”
Tetsami nodded. “Add to that the minimum of five people stationed aboard the Blood-Tide, and another ten marines lost to injury or misadventure since this began, there’ll be ten marines on generic security as long as GA&A isn’t on some sort of alert—”
“At which point an extra seventy marines land on us,” muttered Zanzibar.
“—so with the exception of the perimeter and ship itself, we’re dealing with civilian security.”
“Until the alarm sounds,” Zanzibar said.
“I hope to avoid that.” Tetsami adjusted the focus of the holo so that everyone was looking at the central portion of the complex. She moved the pointer about, highlighting the buildings in turn, describing GA&A’s layout, until she focused on the central landing quad, where the hundred-meter-long Blood-Tide barely fit. “Now, I want to get back to the TEC ship. Flower?” Tetsami prompted.