But only a short-lived one.
She knew something had fucked the plan when she grabbed the headset off the door. Ivor’s voice was chattering before she could even acknowledge the pickup.
“—ser me girl, we have a problem. A big problem. Tets—”
“I got you. Ice it and tell me what happened. Did the ground team get in?”
“That isn’t the problem.”
“What is the problem?”
“The guard Shane picked off had an augmentation biopack strapped to her thigh.”
One of those? You don’t put something like that on someone just doing guard duty. Unless ...
“Sweet mother Mary and her bastard son Christ—”
“Get the picture? They’re expecting us. We got to abort—”
“Damn it, Ivor, check your time! Dom and his team went in seven minutes ago. They could be at the safe already.”
“Shit.”
“Whafuck took your ass so long to tell me this?”
“I had to subdue a very pissed marine.”
Oh. “Sorry.”
“Forget it. We’ve got to warn our people in—”
“Shut up, let me think.”
Jesus, this was bad. The TEC was expecting them to show up today. Someone in their party was passing info to the—
Don’t think about that now, think about how you can warn everyone before all hell breaks lose.
How?
Of course!
“Ivor, leave it to me.”
“Okay, what do I do with my prisoner?”
“Sit on ‘em. If this goes bad, we can always try an exchange.”
Tetsami stripped the headset and pulled out the groundstation that she’d used to hack the TBC sat. She looked around and saw Flower regarding her.
Why does Random give me the willies and I don’t think twice about the damn alien? Never mind.
“Flower, can you handle a human gun?”
“I understand small arms operation. However, human sighting mechanisms forbid Voleran perceptions, and few arms have triggering mechanisms that are comfortable with—”
“Just tell me, can you shoot that thing?” Tetsami pointed at one of the spare Macmillan-Schmitt plasma rifles racked on the inside wall of the van.
Flower ducked its head and turned it side to side. Flower’s head was hard, conical, and featureless except for the Rorschach yellow and black markings that covered its “face.” Tetsami saw no eyes, but Flower’s head bobbed as if it was scanning the weapon.
“Yes, after a fashion he will let me wield him. The area he covers should compensate for the aiming—”
“Good, grab him—it—and follow me.”
Tetsami was getting sick of Flower’s nasal wheeze. Can you call it nasal when it doesn’t even have a nose?
Tetsami shook her head as if she could shake out all the irrelevant thoughts that were shooting around in it.
She led Flower in a race up the hole to the warehouse level. She nearly slammed face first into the ground a few times, tripping over the transverse support ribs that formed a half-stair, half-ladder up the steep-angled tunnel.
She glanced behind her to see how Flower was doing. She needn’t have worried. Flower was using both legs and one arm in a fluid three-legged jog that made the alien seem to float up the tunnel behind her. Its head hovered in the geometric center of the tunnel, bobbing a meter ahead of the rest of the body. Its wings billowed behind it like a drag chute.
Tetsami was out the hole first with only a superficial scan of the room beyond. If there’d been marines down here, they’d’ve been down on her and the van already. No alarm had been raised yet. That meant that they had something of a chance. That also meant that Random had made it down to the computer core.
Assuming all that—too many assumptions but they were what she had—Tetsami might be able to keep the whole mission from imploding. If she got into the system before the marines on that damn ship woke up from Mosasa’s stun field.
She opened the groundstation and pulled the connecting jacks. In a pinch the groundstation could be used, as a regular terminal. She looked at Flower.
“Guess what. You get to play soldier after all.”
“Something unanticipated?”
“Damn straight. The marines are prepped for combat. They’re expecting us. You’ve got to find the safe team and warn them. You know the layout?”
“I studied every facet of the plan for my research.”
“Then you know where they are—don’t discharge that thing unless you’re forced to. So far it looks like they don’t know we’re here.”
“I appreciate that you believe me capable.”
“Hell, you’re all I got—go!”
Flower bobbed its head and glided down the length of the warehouse, toward the lifts to the office complex.
Tetsami took the leads from the terminal and walked over to a wall panel. The damn thing was restricted access, had a keypad, a red light, and was electromagnetically sealed. How the hell was she going to break into—
The light turned green.
“Random?”
She opened the door and found a jack for the leads to her terminal. Then she ran back and powered up the groundstation. In less than a second she was looking at a fish-eye holo of what had to be the core of the Blood-Tide. She saw Mosasa and Shane, but the voice the terminal relayed was Random’s.
“I had a security flag on the hole—saw you come in, but there’s no audio pickups down there and I’m not great at reading lips when your back’s to the camera.”
“Problem, Random.”
“I figured.”
“We’ve been expected. The marine you took out had a packet of black speed on her. If the guys on the ship are equipped that way—”
“Damn it,” said Random, “I’m sealing the ship. All the bulkheads are coming down.”
Shane said something on the holo screen, Tetsami couldn’t hear it.
“Okay, I think we’ve got a handle on it here. Our babies are locked in, incommunicado. Worse happens and I can pulse the stun field. It’ll lay out Shane, but I’ll still be in control.”
“Try to avoid that.” Shane? What about Mosasa?
“I will—” Random paused for a moment. On the holo both Shane and Mosasa turned toward the now-closed door to the computer core. “You know,” he continued, “your timing is impeccable. Our first marine just woke up, and he seems quite upset.”
* * * *
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Liquid Assets
“Never say the problem is over, never mention what else could go wrong, and never say how lucky you are—there is no surer way of inviting disaster.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Like liberty, gold never stays where it is undervalued.”
—J. S. Morrill
(1810-1898)
07:26:45 Godwin Local
“The easy way won’t work,” Dom said as he backed away from the first door. The three of them stood in one of a few dozen branching chambers sandwiched between the basement of the GA&A office complex and the subterranean warehouse levels.