Dom’s mad scramble, avoiding collapsing ceiling and suddenly hungry floor, took him straight toward the window. He had hoped to get by the Blood-Tide, but by now that entire side of the room was slowly moving engine. Even with the edges of the containment nozzle shredded and torn by the impact with the building, it was the only stable refuge left.
He threw himself into a manic dive into the number three engine as the room behind him evaporated into a billowing cloud of pulverized concrete. He slammed inside the bell of the containment nozzle with a force that dimmed his vision; part of the room followed him, slamming across his back and making part of his world fade out.
As Dom sank his left hand into the electromagnetic mesh of the engine, he hoped the pilot wouldn’t fire the thing any time soon. Then he let the world float away.
* * * *
Dom was somewhat surprised that he didn’t wake up dead.
His first conscious thought was that his back and his left arm were screaming pain messages at him. His self-diagnostics were telling him that nothing irreparable had been done to him. It didn’t help much with the pain. Something huge had fallen across his back, pinning him to the inside of the engine.
All he could see was the mesh in front of him. He couldn’t even get a view of what was pinning him down. Wreckage held him in place from the shoulders down. At least the ship seemed to have stopped moving.
Dom pulled his left hand free of the mesh. It seemed redundant to clutch at the engine when he was pinned in place. As he let go, he tried to turn his neck—
“Shit!” he yelled in pain.
He was suddenly aware of what kind of trouble he was in. Wherever the Blood-Tide had landed, there would be marines surrounding the site in short order. He had just volunteered his location-—and he was pretty damn helpless at the moment.
Dom held himself still, letting the pain fade for a moment, and hoped no one had been within earshot of his curse. It was a vain hope. In moments he could hear someone at work behind him, at the throat of the engine.
Dom steeled himself against the pain—even if he severed his spinal column, it was only a sheaf of easily replaced superconducting monofilament—and turned his neck to see the rear of the engine.
He finally saw that what held him in place was a ten-by-two-meter chunk of polyceram-reinforced concrete. Also, to his surprise, the engine was now clogged with wood. Chunks of trees had been broken off and wedged in the engine.
As Dom watched, a large log dotted with purple-orange foliage shifted and started to slide out. It was followed by another. And suddenly, there in a two-meter gap, was Mosasa.
“What the hell happened?” Dom asked.
Mosasa managed to answer that question as he did his utmost to quickly extricate Dom and get him to Ivor’s waiting getaway vehicle before Klaus’ marines showed up.
Mosasa told Dom what had happened aboard the Blood-Tide. Trapped inside the ship, with no way out, Mosasa had climbed into the support system for the contragrav and had wired control directly into the hardware. He had flown blindly north, eventually slamming into the wooded foothills high up on the Diderot Mountains.
Ivor had caught up with the Blood-Tide within a few seconds. His vehicle had been up and ready to bug out on Dom’s orders, and the spinning-out-of-control troopship was hard to miss.
As Mosasa—possessing a strength that Dom didn’t expect—helped move the concrete slab off him, Dom asked about the other team members.
The news wasn’t good. While Random had managed to fuse the access to the hatch controls on the ship, five marines had been aboard the Blood-Tide to ambush the team. Shane had managed to take out the marines when they’d cut through the hatch of the secondary core, but only at the expense of critically injuring herself in a plasma backwash. The life support on her suit was barely keeping her alive. Ivor was waiting to evac her to Godwin.
As Mosasa helped to half carry Dom out of the engine, he said, “We need to get you to a doctor, too.”
Dom shook his head. “We can’t risk travel to the city. They’ll see that. If we’re north of GA&A, we might manage the commune unseen. There’re medical facilities there.”
Mosasa clasped Dom’s arm. “You don’t know. Klaus—”
“I know what Klaus did.” Dom looked up at Mosasa. “We have to get to the commune rendezvous.”
Mosasa looked at Dom and nodded.
Despite the plan going badly wrong, it had worked. Dom knew it had all come together. Badly, and costing more than it should’ve. But it had all worked.
Best of all, the way everything had gone, Klaus was going to assume everyone was dead.
* * * *
EPILOGUE
Economic Indicators
“You are free and that is why you are lost.”
—Franz Kafka
(1883-1924)
* * * *
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Closing Costs
“No one can be quite as annoying as a potential lover.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.”
—Niccolo Machiavelli
(1469-1527)
Kropotkin had dropped below the western horizon. The sky was fading from blood-red to the purple of a deep bruise. Below the ledge where Tetsami stood, the sprawl of Godwin glistened with blacks and browns like some divine compost heap saturated with human insects. From here she could see the speck of the GA&A complex, a small scar in the woods where the Blood-Tide had gone down, and the circular crater where Klaus’ orbital attack had reduced a mountain valley to so much gravel.
Over, Tetsami thought.
That one word covered a hell of a lot of territory. She wished she knew if she’d blown it or not. It all worked, didn’t it?
Didn’t it?
She hugged herself and shivered in the breath-fogging cold.
Somehow they all had managed to pull themselves out of a potential disaster. All except Levy, of course....
“Poor fucking Johann,” she whispered.
It had taken her two or three days to sort out those last fifteen minutes or so. She still didn’t understand it, exactly, and she probably didn’t want to. The only really clear thing about the whole situation was the fact that Colonel Klaus Dacham had lost the final confrontation, and might even be dead.
Somehow, Dom had outmaneuvered his brother. Outmaneuvered him as cynically and heartlessly as he’d outmaneuvered everyone else.
Especially Tetsami.
Why didn’t he tell any of us Klaus was his brother? She slammed her fist into her thigh in frustration. Why didn’t he tell us about the preparations at the commune? Why didn’t he tell us that Levy might have been the one—
Everything had knotted up into a burning little ball in her gut. Most of her anger was directed at her “partner,” Dom.
Dom had seen the attack on the commune coming. He had prepared for it. By the time of the attack, almost all of Dom’s people had moved into the tunnels in the mountains around the commune. Klaus’ recon drone had given Dom’s people enough warning to evac all the above-ground personnel into the retrofitted caverns. The buildings had been reduced to rubble, but only one person had been killed and a few dozen injured when an unstable cavern collapsed in the attack.