The four children scrambled through, and Debs threw herself after them, her pack catching briefly on the door.
A heart-wrenching scream, this time human, made Eagle pause. He turned his head in time to see an enormous thing bearing down on a comparatively tiny enforcer. It was something from a nightmare—a hairy thing with a twisted bearlike face and claws that were as long as Eagle’s fingers. His brain told him it had the mass of an elephant and automatically calculated the result of its impact on the human. The enforcer’s assault rifle barked out an angry-sounding rat-tat-tat. The bullets seemed to have no effect as the creature slammed into the man, sending him flying backwards with the impact. Its maw opened, crunching down, and blood spurted over the ground.
Sickened, Eagle turned away and pushed through the hole, pulling the metal cover back into place. The enforcers would find it soon enough, but hopefully not before they got away. Maybe the two guards would be able to get out as well, though he wasn’t hopeful after seeing the beast. Even if they got free of the enforcers, who could defeat that?
Thane and Nova hurried heedlessly through the rubble of the empty zone, and Eagle had to force himself to sprint. “Stop!” he called as loudly as he dared. “Stop!”
Glancing behind her, Nova saw his face and pulled Thane to a standstill.
Behind them, Debs also stopped, whirling around to challenge him. “We have to hurry!” Her voice came with effort and her face was so flushed it would be comical in another setting. He suspected the old woman wouldn’t be able to take much more.
“No,” he said. “They’ll have drones out. If they get close enough, they’ll detect our heat signatures. And Santoni is so small, I’m betting they’ve pulled in reinforcements from other towns, which means more drones. Our only chance is to hide until I figure out how to get us safely to the tunnels.”
Nova paled and scanned the sky, as if expecting to see one of the drones poised above them.
Eagle could see the full electromagnet spectrum, but that was only useful if he had direct sight of a person or object, which would be too late for a drone warning. Otherwise the lights bending and distorting around objects simply confused the issue. A piece of metal warmed by the sun might seem to emit the same light as an enforcer. Or an enforcer using his suit’s cooling mechanism might emit less light than a pile of rubble.
He wished he could send up one of his own drones, but without activating the fringer T-link addition on his special glasses, he couldn’t do that. Activating it was out of the question until it was reprogrammed so that Dani’s unit couldn’t track his. But maybe there was another way . . .
“Nova, give me your iTeev.” As an illegal rip-off, it already had protocols in place to keep from being noticed by the main Teev feed, and a little on-the-spot adjustment might make it compatible with his drone. Too bad he’d have to do it manually instead of through the neural connection to his special glasses, which her iTeev didn’t have. The iTeev’s emissions would still be detected by a drone, but with their own drone up, they could power her device down if one got too close.
Eagle dug in his bag. “I might be able to send up our own little spy.”
“Their drones will sense another drone,” Nova said.
“Not this one.” From a small container, he dumped out a tiny object twice the size of a mosquito. “It doesn’t radiate more heat or electrical emissions than an average real-life bug, so the drones should overlook it.” He hoped. He tapped on Nova’s iTeev screen, working around the protocols to connect the bug. “It can’t send back images, only short number texts, but it’ll pick up electrical radiation within a thirty-meter radius. Well, it has to be fairly strong emissions, but all the enforcers have iTeevs, so it’ll register them, as well as the spy drones.”
“This is taking too long,” Debs complained. “They’ll be on us soon.”
Eagle didn’t look her way, though the light she was emitting increased with her anxiety. “It might be the only chance we have.”
“That’s not much,” she said bitterly.
“No,” he agreed, “but it’s more than we had.” He finished the connection and the bug arose from his hand and flew off. “Good, it’s working. When we receive numbers from it, I’ll be able to plot a course around them.” Already his mind showed him the way to the tunnels Thane had taken them through, like a 3D map only he could see. They might have to deviate to avoid drones or enforcers, but they would be able to make it—and within thirty minutes.
“Nice,” Thane said. “Too bad you can’t equip it with a mini gun or explosives.”
Eagle smiled at the teen’s eagerness. “It’s tiny, so weight’s an issue.”
Nova reached for the iTeev. “I’ll tell you when the numbers come in.”
When, not if. He was glad she understood their danger. “I’ll lead,” he said. “Thane and Nova. Take up the rear. Have your guns ready.”
As the teens moved back, the little girl slumped to the ground and began crying. “I want the doctor,” she sobbed. “I hurt my foot.”
Eagle leaned over and picked her up with one arm. His ribs ached, but she really wasn’t very heavy. He let his rifle dangle on his shoulder, replacing it with a pistol instead. “Let’s go.”
He took the most direct course, which didn’t include revisiting the place where Thane had them stop to drink water. The farther they moved away from the house, the more hope he had.
But what about Reese and Jaxon? He had no way of warning them without the T-links. Should he risk contacting? If they didn’t have their T-links on, he would be exposing his group for nothing.
No T-links, he decided. Not yet. If the doctor was with Reese and Jaxon, he’d probably take them to the tunnels anyway, or to the hidden lair Eagle suspected was located in the tunnels. Of course, if the doctor wasn’t still with Reese and Jaxon, that might be a problem. Anger at Dani flared inside him. She’d always been one to strike out on her own, even back in the Coop. Her impulsiveness had brought down as much trouble on them as children as it had saved them.
Nova ran up to him. “Numbers,” she said, holding her folded iTeev screen up for him to see. His enhanced glasses easily picked out the numbers and translated them to his brain. “Its height says it has to be a drone. Let’s turn by that green slab and angle along our same direction for a while. That should keep us away from its path.”
Nova wrinkled her nose. “Green slab? They’re all gray or blackish.”
“I mean that slab there.” He pointed ten meters to his left and started forward.
While people generally understood his inborn ability to judge distance, velocity, depth, volume, and weight with a glance, seeing electromagnetic emissions was harder to explain, so he usually didn’t.
By the time they reached the slab, his body ached from the effort of walking and carrying the child, but he’d endured worse his last few years in the Coop. Life outside the colony had made him weak.
“More numbers,” Nova said, still at his side.
Three, in fact. Two near the ground that must be enforcers and another in the air that would be a drone.
“No deviating around both of those,” he said. “We need a place to hide.”
She looked around carefully before pointing to a skeletal building. Eagle didn’t like the huge gaps in the concrete, but maybe inside they’d find something thick enough to mask their body heat from the drone.
Seconds later they were hunched together inside the building under a slab of concrete that leaned against one of the remaining sections of the wall. Eagle calculated the rate of approach and then powered down Nova’s iTeev until the drone flew by and was far enough away so it couldn’t detect the emissions. After turning it back on, he verified that the other two numbers were changing regularly, showing that the enforcers, or at least their iTeevs, were still approaching at a constant speed.
“They’ll pass far enough from the building that they won’t detect us,” he said, “But wait here just in case. I’ll check it out.” To
Debs, he added, “Keep the kids quiet.”
She nodded. The old woman was nicer to him now that he’d helped them avoid the drones, but he didn’t trust her exactly. Non-enforcers often let panic drive them in stressful situations, and he didn’t want to lose control now.
He left the building and headed toward a large pile of concrete he’d noted as they entered. He crawled up it, slowly, avoiding loose rubble that might give him away. Once near the top, he rested, closing his eyes briefly and fighting the desire to sleep. A piece of metal jutted uncomfortably into his stomach, and that helped.
Voices came to him faintly, and he opened his eyes. In that instant, his brain put together pieces of strew rubble, reforming it, and showed him a 3D image of what the area might have looked like pre-Breakdown. Before the bombs, before the killing, before the CORE. Half of it was from estimation of the rubble, the other half from his own inventiveness. This city would have been one of the greats. How many people had died here?
For a moment he felt doubt. The CORE Elite’s highest goal was to create a world in which another Breakdown could never happen. Fighting against them . . . it was either insane or the bravest thing he’d ever done.
The enforcers came into view. Regular ones, not Special Forces, a man and a woman. But they weren’t alone. Namon, the guard Eagle and his crew had first seen peer over the metal fence was in front of them, his hands cuffed behind his back. His face was bloodied and beaten, and his clothes full of dirt. As Eagle watched, he stumbled to his knees.
He said something Eagle couldn’t make out, but the male enforcer gave him a drink from a skin of water. Then the woman jabbed her rifle into him. “Go on,” she ordered. “Or you’ll end up like your friend.”
Calculating their direction, Eagle surmised they were heading to the tunnels in a path roughly parallel to the one Eagle had calculated. At least for the time being. Namon was either planning to sell out his fringer buddies, or he was trying to find the courage to die. Eagle didn’t care to guess which.
He waited until they started walking again to slip down from his perch. He hurried as fast as he dared back to the ruined building. “Bad news,” he said. “The two enforcers have your friend Namon.”
Debs perked up. “Is he okay?”
Eagle shrugged. “For now.”
“What can we do?” Urgency made her voice sharp.
In light of her expression when she’d made the choice to leave him behind, Eagle wasn’t surprised. “We have to stop them, one way or another. He’s leading them to the tunnels.”
Thane frowned. “How do you know that?”
“Because their direction is parallel to ours and I was taking us back to the tunnels.”
Thane gaped at him. “I thought you were just avoiding the drones. You didn’t say anything about the tunnels.” He paused before rushing on, “You were blindfolded, so how do you know where the tunnels even are?”
Nova sighed in exasperation. “He’s from Colony 6, remember? Like the doctor. Eagle’s brain is weird, that’s all.”
Fear rose in Thane’s eyes, which Eagle thought might be for the best. “So that’s why you didn’t fight the blindfolds,” Thane muttered.
“No, we didn’t fight because we wanted you to help us.” Nova put a hand on his arm and the boy settled. Eagle would have teased them about it in another setting, but now he grabbed his bag and pulled out his enforcer uniform.
“What did you mean, when you said we have to stop them one way or the other?” Debs asked.
“Just that. We can’t let Namon take them to the tunnels.” He pulled out Reese’s uniform as well from the bag Thane had been carrying. It wouldn’t fit Nova, but Thane could make it work. Jaxon’s would dwarf the boy. He tossed the uniform to Thane. “Put this on.”
Thane looked down at the uniform, taking a moment to realize what it was. “You guys stole enforcer uniforms?” His voice held both envy and awe.
Eagle gave Nova a warning stare. “Something like that,” he said, digging inside the bag again for battle helmets.
Putting on his own uniform was more painful than Eagle expected, and by the time he’d finished, Thane was ready. The top looked odd where no breasts filled it out, but a carefully situated rifle strap and the strap of an emptied bag made it work.
“Nova,” he said, “give me your iTeev. And you make sure everyone stays put.” He finished his preparations by filling his pockets with his favorite explosives.
Debs jumped up to grab his hand. “Please, bring my son back to me.”
Her son, he thought with a mental groan. That would make what he’d have to do worse if things went sideways.
“I’ll try,” he said. He glanced at Nova, whose somber face showed understanding. He hated that she had to understand such things at all.
“Come on,” he told Thane. “Keep up.”
Chapter 15
EAGLE JOGGED THROUGH the rubble, skirting around obstacles. Thane followed willingly, a happy expression on his face. Eagle hoped the boy could still smile after it was over.
“Where are we going?” Thane asked.
“Around to confront them from the other side. Shouldn’t be too hard. They can’t make Namon move fast after beating him so much, and they apparently don’t have a shuttle.”
“The shuttles are useless in this area,” Thane said. “Too much rubble they’d have to move. They use them in other areas of the empty zones, though. They visit those areas mostly for target practice.”
“You’ve watched them.”
“Yeah. Some.”
Eagle’s chest hurt, his back was on fire, and he pretty much wanted to die. Later, he promised himself.
“That should be enough,” he said after ten minutes. “But we’re not far ahead, and I still need to do a few things. Come on.” He cut into the path he expected the enforcers to come along in three point four minutes.
“Wait here,” he told Thane. He jogged down the path where the enforcers would approach and planted a charge inside a tangled mass of metal and concrete on the right side. Farther down, across the narrow passageway, he planted another one. Finally, he planted two more on his way back to Thane.
“Stay here with your back to the path like you’re walking. When they show up, they’ll see the uniforms and think we’re friendly. We’ll let them catch up to us. By the time they see our faces and think to check for CivIDs, it’ll be too late.”
“What if they shoot us in the back?”
Eagle winced internally. “It’ll hurt, but you’ll live.”
Turning, Eagle sprinted ahead to the nearest ruined building. The structure was already so damaged that it wouldn’t take much to collapse the rest, but the calculations couldn’t be off by much or it would fail. If he targeted the weakest areas, it could definitely work. He ran a mental 3D simulation three times to be sure.
Next, he hurried to a pile of rubble with an overhanging slab and did the same thing. This was his backup. Not as good a location as the building.
He was almost back to Thane when the enforcers came into view. They paused and waved. He waved back. He’d chosen this spot specifically near a bend in the path through the debris so the enforcers would be able to see their uniforms without iTeev magnification. Otherwise, they might check his CivID and find it and his face masked by his skin tag.
“It’s time,” he said to Thane. “Keep quiet, and when things start exploding, stay in the middle of the path away from my charges, even if I run elsewhere. Got it?”
Thane nodded and rotated slightly to glance out of the corner of his eyes at the oncoming enforcer pair. “Are you going to tell me when to shoot?”
“No shooting, but if you have to, make sure you do it in their face or neck. Otherwise their uniforms and helmets will protect them.”
Thane nodded firmly, but the fear was back in his eyes. I shouldn’t have brought him, Eagle thought. But searching the empty zone alone wasn’t exactly protocol, and Thane’s presence gave him legitimacy. Besides, he needed Na
mon’s cooperation, and he might not remember Eagle from their brief meeting in his civilian clothes.
The enforcers were upon them now, the woman occasionally prodding their prisoner to encourage him to move faster. Recognition flared briefly in Namon’s eyes when he saw Thane, but he lowered his gaze almost instantly. Was it only Eagle’s imagination that he looked like his mother? Certainly their light emissions were nothing alike. Namon’s emissions were brighter, those of a man terrified. Probably not a man about to make the ultimate sacrifice, which meant he was taking his captors to the tunnels.
“Hey, you guys find anything?” asked the male enforcer.
“Nothing, but it looks like you guys have,” Eagle said.
The woman nodded. “You one of the guys from Riverton?”
Had they really made it that easy? But he couldn’t agree in case they noticed the Armarillo Enforcer Division patch on his shoulder. “Sort of,” he said. “My team was nearby conducting some training when the call came. We’re glad to help out.” Eagle made a show of studying Namon. “We were just debating if we should head back to the shuttles. Is that where you’re taking this fringer?”
“Not yet,” the woman said. “He knows something, and he’s taking us there. We keep having to do a little convincing, but he’ll spill it in the end. We showed him what would happen to him if he didn’t.”
“This punk let a monster loose,” the man added. “One of those things changed by the radiation from the desolation zone. It killed two of our guys. Ripped their heads clean off.” He kicked out at the fringer’s leg. “Whore wrangling, fringer clud has no feelings for his own kind. Then again, we’re not his kind, are we? What do you bet, he’s also been changed by the radiation? Probably has twelve toes or an extra stomach. He’s certainly not human.”
The woman laughed. “Maybe he eats rocks. We could shove a few down his throat and see how they go down.” She swept up a small piece of splintered concrete, pelting Namon in the head with it. Blood welled from a new cut the rock made on his cheek.
Were the enforcers he worked with like this? Eagle didn’t think they were. But then, most of his work memories were from back east where life was so regimented that enforcers there dealt primarily with jukeheads or disgruntled kids studying for their certificates.
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