In less than three seconds the lasers hit the reinforcing rods.
If Random wasn’t in charge of security now, the whole team was in trouble. There were intrusion sensors to detect any breach in an external wall. They weren’t as efficient as an Emerson field, but you couldn’t trust feedback from part of a field that passed through matter—too many spurious readings—so intrusion detection under the complex was a matter of wires, computers, and cameras.
The reinforcing rods that the robots diced apart were also a circuit in the security grid. Now they were so much polyceram dust.
The lasers hit a point where the floor above them was no longer sound enough to support its own weight. A grinding snap filled the small space, and the wall erupted into a cloud of dust. Gravel rained down on the three of them and caused an odd resonant hum as it bounced across the contragrav sled.
The range finders on the mining robots detected the sudden absence of their target, and they ceased firing.
As the dust cleared, Dom queried his onboard computer. The time was 07:25:12. It had taken the lasers ten seconds to slice through the wall. Dom decided to remember that fact if he ever put up another building.
“Let’s go,” said Zanzibar. She lowered her weapon and darted to the edge of the hole, scanning the room beyond. After a second, she waved Levy ahead. Levy had the sled, and as he passed Dom, Dom had to flatten against the wall to let the sled by. It was odd, watching the sled follow Levy. It wanted to stay horizontal, and in the steep tunnel that meant that the front end had the same clearance to the floor as the rear did the ceiling. It could barely get past the robots.
When Dom followed Levy through the hole, he heard the robots begin their withdrawal. There was no sign of alarm, nor even any sign of habitation. So far, so good.
The three of them moved through the silent warehouse level. The warehouse was dark, filled with crates of unsold weapons Dom had ordered fabricated for the fictitious ship Prometheus.
There were a few thousand crates of everything GA&A made, and it gave Dom a moment’s pause.
Why did they use such a big order to cover themselves? Couldn’t they have punched in for a much smaller pretense?
Did they want five hundred tons of weapons?
Dom had yet to allow himself to wonder deeply about what the TEC was doing here. If he had managed to think of it at all, lately, it simply seemed part of his brother’s age-old, possibly justified, vendetta.
But this was larger than his brother.
Even if Klaus had managed authorization for his own games, there had to be some larger pretense for the TEC to support him. Something the old man, Dimitri, would approve of. A TEC operation outside the bounds of the Confederacy was politically dangerous, and there had to be something here to justify the risk.
But what?
For the briefest instant, Dom flashed on the idea of conquest. Maybe the TEC wanted to take over—
That was ludicrous. The operation here had barely a thousand people by now, and only one hundred fifty—at most—had any military training. Something the size of GA&A was about the only thing they could take over. One hundred fifty marines wouldn’t be able to take a moderate-sized commune. Much less a city. Or the planet. And if the TEC imported that kind of force anywhere, especially into non-Confed space where jurisdiction was open to any lawyer’s interpretation, it would count as political suicide.
Planetary self-determination was one of the cornerstones of the oft-bent but rarely broken Confederacy Charter. It was probably the only reason that the planet Bakunin was allowed to exist in its current form.
However, after logically limiting the TEC activity to things less grandiose, he was left with one disturbing fact to consider: There was enough hardware down here to equip nearly a half-million infantrymen. And once they had the new computer on-line, they could make more.
Dom let those thoughts pass and concentrated on covering Levy’s rear. They remained lucky. They wove through ten-meter cubes of boxes stacked for shipping, and saw no one. A few loaders were parked at odd angles, abandoned in the midst of their jobs. It looked as if nobody had been down here since the attack.
As they reached the point where the subterranean warehouse passed under the office complex, Zanzibar held up her hand and waved Dom up to her.
Dom stepped up and saw why Zanzibar had stopped.
“Sir, I just wanted a second opinion on how old this is.”
Dom looked down at the wreckage.
One of the crate-cubes had partially collapsed, completely filling a five-meter gap between it and its neighbor. Both cubes had charred streaks that were signs of laser fire. A corpse was half-buried by the wreckage. In the dry, climate-controlled environment of GA&A’s warehouse, the body was mummifying.
“They just left him here?” Dom asked no one in particular.
“If it’s the Executive Command, I believe it,” Levy said.
Zanzibar nodded.
Dom looked around and saw more scars of laser fire, on the packing crates, on the floor, on the walls. “It looks like he got lost in the general chaos of the invasion. They’d have no idea who they’d captured and who escaped. No reason to go hunting for corpses.” Dom kneeled by the body.
“Did you know him?” Levy asked.
“Harrison Bradley.” Dom’s computer coughed up the data without comment. “Hired him five years ago. He was the foreman down here. Looks like he popped a crate and fired on the marines—idiot.”
“Let’s go, sir.” Dom felt Zanzibar’s hand on his shoulder.
“We have a minute. Go to the lift. If Random’s on the ball, it’s waiting for us.”
“But, sir—”
“Wait for me. I need a few seconds alone.”
“Sir—”
Dom heard Levy say, “Give him his minute,” and he heard the two of them withdraw.
What the hell is this?
Dom knelt by the body of his second-shift warehouse foreman and wondered what the hell he was doing. It wasn’t like he knew this guy. Damn, he’d never even met Harrison Bradley.
However, for some reason, instead of running for it as be was supposed to, Bradley had found a crate of GA&A anti-armor focused plasma jets. Bradley—Bradley and others—if there was only one sniper they wouldn’t have missed the body—had died trying to defend GA&A.
Dom thought that might be why he was crying.
* * * *
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Contingency Plans
“Screwups, like entropy, always increase over time.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“We have seen the bottom of the Abyss, and we fear the end is upon us.”
—William IV
(2126-*2224)
07:31:20 Godwin Local
Tetsami had watched the plan go forward flawlessly. The first try and no bugs.
Tetsami had flown all her life on her instincts. Right now her instincts were screaming at her. Nothing ever goes one hundred percent, and the better things look initially—
She would have almost preferred to have seen one big up-front unanticipated screwup. The longer she waited for it, the more nervous she got. When her LOS comm called for her, it was almost a relief.