Lobo brought up images he’d collected as we had flown in. No solar collectors were visible. “Based on what I could see and what construction plans I can find, I do not believe so,” Lobo said. “Certainly, the amphitheater does not.”
“How are we getting power here? Broadcast or cable.”
“Via underground cables that run from the estate’s main power centers to the amphitheater.”
“Do you detect any evidence of power broadcasts to the cottages?”
Lobo overlaid the holo of the outbuildings with a series of wave images of various colors. “No. Data, of course, is moving back and forth on various frequencies, but not power.”
“So they’re also receiving power via underground cables.”
“That is the logical conclusion,” Lobo said.
“Given that the three cottages are in a group together, away from the house, it’s most likely that a single main cable brings power close to them, and then smaller cables split from it to each cottage.”
“That’s how most software would design it, but we cannot be sure.”
“Are the power-management systems hardened?” I said.
“At the estate’s power center and in the main house,” Lobo said, “yes—as I would expect given the level of security here.”
“What about the power management centers for the guest cottages? Those buildings appear newer than the estate and certainly not up to its standards in most ways.”
“Checking,” Lobo said.
After a few seconds, he said, “No, those power-management systems are not hardened. They employ standard home security, which is at a level I can attack reasonably quickly.”
“They would have data on their power cable connections, right?”
“Yes,” Lobo said.
“So, we have a plan: You break into the cottage power-management systems and find out where the main underground cable from the house runs. After the show, while most of the security staff is working the party, I slip out and cut that cable. Power goes down to all the cottages. No power, no security systems.”
“At which point the security team comes running to check the cottages.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but maybe not. Once their security and power-management systems verify that all they’re experiencing is a power outage, given how much they have to do with the party and the fact that the cottages are empty, they may well just leave the problem alone until morning. Worst case, they send a guard or two to stand by each cottage. I can handle that.”
“If you do that, at some check-in point they will notice a guard is missing,” Lobo said. “We’ll then have to leave immediately. No time for farewells.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know: without even a chance to say goodbye to Zoe. Look, I lose her no matter what.”
“Not necessarily,” Lobo said. “As I suggested, we could stay with the show for the rest of the tour, maybe longer.”
I shook my head and stood. I would not come this close to where Jennie might have been and not learn all I could. “No. I’m going in.”
“Then there’s one more problem with the plan,” Lobo said.
“What’s that?” I said.
“You have to sever a cable that’s probably one to three meters underground,” Lobo said, “but you don’t have time to dig a big hole.”
“We have acid in our stores,” I said, “and all the tools I’ll need. You find the location of the cable, and I’ll take care of it.” I couldn’t tell him that I could use my nanomachines to create the opening and eat through the cable.
“I’ve been working on it since the moment you asked about the cottage security systems,” Lobo said, “but it will take a while.”
My comm went off. Zoe.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I have to get back to work.”
* * *
The rehearsal was the longest yet of the tour, partly because we loaded in so quickly that we had over ninety minutes of spare time, and partly because Passion was never satisfied with her performance. No matter what people may claim about themselves, the vast majority of them change their behavior and become more nervous than usual when they are in the presence of serious wealth or power. Tonight’s audience had plenty of both.
Zoe noticed Passion’s jitters, of course, so she had to spend part of the rehearsal calming our star and a lot of time after it reassuring her. While Zoe was doing that, I was in Lobo, checking with him and assembling what I’d need to break into the cottage. He had indeed wormed his way into the power-control systems of the three cottages and, using the information he obtained from them, located the main cable running from the house to the cottages.
When I met Zoe backstage to watch the show, she put her arm around my waist. I put mine around her shoulders. The early evening air had turned brisk, so standing that way was both warm and surprisingly comfortable. Not since my time all those years ago with Omani had I simply stood this way with a woman, enjoying each other’s presence while at the same time focused on something else. I tried to imagine many more days like this, and though the thought was initially pleasant, it turned sour as I also had to picture her reaction to me never growing old as she aged her way toward death.
When the announcer ran onto the stage and introduced Passion, the reaction was polite applause, so very different from what we normally experienced. I wondered if the wealthy were actually that less impressed and excited than most people, or if they felt they had to act that way.
The musicians walked to their instruments, their faces already concerned after that reaction from the crowd.
Zoe let go of me and ran to Passion. She hugged the singer and said, “One song. Less than one song. You’ll see. One song, and they’re yours.” She kissed Passion on the cheek. “Good show.”
Passion nodded, stepped back on her right foot as she always did, and ran onto the stage.
More polite applause.
As lights illuminated Passion from behind and above, all the other lights snapped off. She stared at the stage and began to sing. She was opening with the first song from our first show, one I’d learned she rarely sang. After she finished the first line, the musicians joined in. Passion lifted her head, ever so slowly, as if she’d been stuck but now the music was saving her. Eventually, she faced the audience head-on, both on the stage and on displays on both sides of it and on whatever displays the audience members carried. The music grew louder. Her voice rose, too, always staying both above and with the music. She sang once more of a girl who loved a boy, a boy who had to go, a boy who didn’t return, and of the girl who waited and hoped. This time, I could not help but think of Zoe, standing next to me, holding me, trusting me not to go, and having no way to know that soon I would have to leave her.
I hated myself then. I wouldn’t change my mind—I owed it to Jennie to find her, I owed it to Omani to save her if I could, and staying would never work, because Zoe would have to grow old watching me remain always the same—but still I hated myself.
When Passion finished and the last notes of the song faded into the night, the stage went dark, and lights illuminated the crowd. Just like our first audience, this one was on its feet, the rich and the powerful standing, cheering, and staring into the darkness for a glimpse of the star whose music had just shined inside them.
“Told you,” Zoe said softly.
I hugged her closer.
* * *
When the show ended, Zoe turned to me but held onto my hand. “I have to go to this party, Jon.” She looked into my eyes. “You understand, right?”
I nodded my head. “Absolutely. The second show is about to begin, and you’re part of it.”
She kissed me briefly. “Thank you.”
Passion walked off the stage, hugged Zoe, and moved on.
Zoe turned to follow Passion but stopped and looked back at me with a big smile. “You won’t mind if I wake you, will you?”
I forced a smile in return. “Not a bit.”
She nodded and left.<
br />
Too bad I’ll be gone, I thought.
I walked toward Lobo as quickly as I could without drawing attention to myself.
It was time to break into a cottage and hope to discover more about the prisoner—and if she really had been Jennie.
CHAPTER 43
Jon Moore
Muted sounds of conversation drifted from the main house toward the cottages. The light wind carried laughter and music to me from the crew’s party in the landing area. I was stretched on the ground in the shadows of a large tree, my activecamo overalls adapting to the dappling of light and dark the leaves in the trees cast on the ground.
“Assuming correct information from the power-management systems,” Lobo said over the comm, “you are directly above the permacrete conduit that protects the main power cable. My analysis suggests the acid you took will neither stay focused enough nor proceed quickly enough to reach the cable.”
“I’m going to help it with digging and the tubes I brought,” I said. I wasn’t going to do that at all, at least not yet but it was the best story I had for Lobo. If this worked, we wouldn’t be coming back here, so the story wouldn’t matter. “Just keep an eye out for staffers headed this way.”
“Of course,” Lobo said. “It’s not as if I can do only one thing at a time.”
The closest of the cottages stood about ten meters away. No external signs gave away that its security systems were functioning, but I knew from the full-spectrum feed Lobo was supplying the contact in my left eye that they were.
I dug up enough earth to fill my hands. I focused, spit in the dirt, and instructed the nanomachines to stay active. When I first discovered the ability to control them, it was by accident. Through small experiments I learned that I had only to visualize clearly what I wanted or to describe it in words in my mind, and whatever mechanism in my head gave me this ability did the rest. I told them to form a cloud as wide as two of my fingers and to move straight downward, disassembling the dirt into dust and carrying the dust out of the hole and onto the ground in front of me. Once the nanomachines had dropped the dust, they were to join the cloud again. I visualized the permacrete conduit and instructed the nanomachines to eat through it and then to stop and disassemble themselves.
The hole opened quickly before me and moved downward, almost as if the dirt were dissolving in a hurried effort to get out the way. I directed a pinpoint light at an angle into the hole and watched through the increasingly thick cloud as the hole grew deeper. When I could see no more, I turned off the light and waited. In the shadow of the tree, the nanocloud was a barely visible local darkness that swirled and threw smaller clouds of dust on the ground in front of me.
The nanocloud began to thin; the nanomachines must have struck and taken apart the permacrete. After a few more seconds, the cloud was gone. I stuck the small light in the hole, covered all but a tiny bit of the hole, and turned on the light. A layer of dust covered the bottom of the hole. I picked up the finger-thick, meter-long metal tube from the ground beside me and fed it into the hole until I felt it touch something. I pulled it back slightly and blew hard through it. I shined the light into the hole beside it and could see what appeared to be the top of the cable.
I picked up the vial of acid from where I’d set it on the ground near me. I pushed the tube down until it touched the cable again. I carefully poured all of the acid into the tube. It would etch some of the tube as it flowed over the metal, but most of it would reach the cable and continue downward. When the acid container was empty, I rolled onto my side and heaved it into a stand of shrubs off to my side and five meters closer to the house. It landed with the thunk of heavy glass hitting dirt; no one in the house would hear that sound.
I dropped the tube into the hole and waited. Acid vapors emerged from the hole, so I crawled backward a meter or so. If this worked as it should, great. If not, I’d use the nanomachines to eat through the cable as well. I hoped for the acid to do the job, though, because the residue it would leave around the cable, along with the tube and the empty container I was leaving as clues, would help anyone who later looked into this incident to see it as a completely explainable event.
“Good job,” Lobo said. “Primary power is gone, and the backup cable in the cluster is flickering. Check the feed in your contact: That rush of activity you see is the power-supply systems and the security monitors crying for help.”
I stared into the darkness. My right eye showed me what was there. My left presented dense multicolored waves running from each of the cottages to the house. As I watched, I pulled dirt and dust from around the hole into it, obscuring the tube and creating a small cover for the hole. It wouldn’t stand up to any close inspection, but if they left the diagnosis of the problem until morning, it would keep them from realizing what had caused the outage.
The waves my left eye showed me intensified and then vanished completely, both eyes now showing the same images.
“They’re out,” Lobo said. “You’re good to go on the cottage.”
I pushed off the ground and ran for the farthest cottage.
Lobo would alert me if anyone came out of the house.
When I reached the target cottage, I kept going to its far side and turned the corner so I wouldn’t be visible from the house. I was also out of sight of Lobo. The secondary power had kept the building’s security systems online long enough that they would have locked the doors and windows into position, so I either had to punch a hole through the wall or a door, or break through the glass. The windows and the doors in a place like this would certainly be armored, but for the walls they had probably assumed, as the people who built Omani’s house had, that permacrete would be secure enough. I could use my nanomachines to get in, but then there would be no clear explanation for the intrusion. So, I was going to do it the old-fashioned way.
I pulled a laser cutter from the duffel I was carrying and started on the wall about a meter off the ground. It made a sort of sizzling noise and threw a bluish light into the darkness, but back here, no one should see it. I’d brought a large power supply in the duffel, so the laser worked fast. Even so, I felt the time it was taking like a pressure on my chest.
“Any update?” I said.
“Would I not tell you if there was?” Lobo said.
“Of course,” I said.
I was being stupid. If I’d been breaking into a building on any other mission, I would have stayed focused and not worried; the laser could cut only so quickly. Instead, I was letting myself get torqued about the fact that I might well be about to enter a room where my sister, whom I’d thought must have died long ago, might have been living only three days earlier. Getting excited would only lead to errors, so I focused on breathing slowly and calming myself, bringing down my heartbeat and staying on task.
After another few minutes, I completed the cut and turned off the laser. Ideally, I would have pulled out the section of wall, so I wouldn’t accidentally push it onto anything of interest inside, but time was short. I shoved it into the house. It fell with a small crashing sound onto the interior floor.
“Cut is complete,” I said.
“Three men have left the house and are walking your way,” Lobo said. “Do not enter the cottage. Move to the trees.”
“I just finished pushing the wall section into the house,” I said.
“You said you could handle the guards,” Lobo said. “If they search thoroughly, you’ll have to do that. Handling them will be easier if you’re outside in the trees. None of them has a weapon visible, though, and they’re all walking slowly, so I believe they don’t consider this a serious issue. If you’re lucky, they’ll do only a cursory check—in which case you will be fine.”
I dashed into the trees a dozen meters in front of me.
“They’ve reached the first cottage,” Lobo said, “and are splitting up.”
Lights played along the near side of the cottages as the men separated and each one checked a building.
The first ma
n walked around his cottage.
The second turned the corner on his.
The third man drew even with my cottage and played his light across its front.
He stepped to the far corner.
When he turned the corner and checked the back wall, he’d see the hole.
I crept to the edge of the trees.
The man leaned forward, shined his light across the top of the rear wall, and turned back. Into his comm mic he said, “This is stupid. Clear. Let’s go.”
He waited a second, his head cocked as he listened to his comm, and then walked back to his colleagues.
I waited in the trees until they were out of the shade of the tree near the first cottage and past where I’d cut the cable.
None of them looked back.
I dashed back to the cottage and crawled through the hole in the wall. I turned the small light to a dim glow, cupped my hand over it, and played the faint light around the front room I’d entered. Chairs and a sofa focused on a wall opposite the front door. A large display was built into the wall above what I recognized as an old-fashioned fireplace. Pieces of art, pictures in frames and pieces of carved wood on small shelves, decorated the walls. Old money loves old stuff. I’d spotted no chimney on the house, so I doubted the fireplace worked, but I searched around its edges and up inside it as far as it went.
I found nothing.
Nearer to me on this side of the room were a desk, a showpiece of dark red wood and fine carving, and a chair carved to match it. Enough dust coated the desk that it was doubtful anyone had used it recently. A wooden chair, an old-fashioned rocking chair on curved bottom struts, sat alone opposite the desk and away from the other cluster of furniture. Its light wood gleamed even in the faint illumination I provided; there was almost no dust on it. Whoever had been here had definitely used it, unlike the desk.
I moved through an open archway into an eating area. Two food conveyor slots, both now sealed shut by the security systems, were built into the far wall’s right side above a counter. A table and two chairs of the same dark red wood as the desk were opposite the counter. At the other end of the room, a very simple desk—four legs, one flat piece of wood on them—composed entirely of beautifully grained, almost white wood sat under a window. A yellow vase of some sort of ceramic, wilted flowers still in it, stood on the desk under the window. A few more pictures and carvings adorned the walls here as well.
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