Vaughan’s voice cut through. “Decide. Enemy flyby estimated in thirty minutes.”
“Do they know we’re here?” Humphrey asked. “Or is it a random patrol?”
“They know a ship is here,” Orson said. “No doubt about that.”
“There are other vessels in the area,” Vaughan said. “The aircraft are likely following a disciplined reconnaissance procedure around St. Lazarus prior to a larger force landing.”
Humphrey studied Vaughan’s holo map. Athena was five kilometers from St. Lazarus. Anticipating his request, Vaughan plotted a course for the dinghy. “If you leave now, you’ll make the island just before the aircraft get in visual range.”
Kirk cleared his throat. “I think we should do it.”
Humphrey glanced at the Spider. The stocky boy had matured a decade in the past few hours. Elias stood near the door, face stony. He was ready for anything.
“Decide,” Vaughan commanded.
Leslie caught his attention, nodding fractionally.
“Summer, Athena is under your command. Elias will stay with you. Orson is coming with us.”
The man shot up from his stool, body wobbling, face pale. He pressed both hands to his chest. “What? Why?”
“If Athena is boarded, they can’t find the captain of Aphrodite on her.”
Orson fumbled in his pocket for his cigar. “Boy, if they board this bucket, they’ll know she’s Aphrodite in less than five minutes.”
“Maybe so. But as long as you aren’t here, you can’t tell them where Mr. Justin’s Island is. Or where the rest of us have gone.”
The man’s throat convulsed as he swallowed. He looked rather green. “I get it. Well, let’s get on with it then.”
“Change your clothes,” Leslie said to the two Scions who would remain. Both still wore pieces of Scion uniforms. “Cut off the sleeves or something.”
Leslie walked to the holodesk. “I promised Belle I’d stay with her server. If we’re not bringing it, I have to stay.”
“What?” Humphrey said.
“The server.” Leslie patted the black box.
Humphrey blinked, stumped. “Why would we bring it? We’d have no way to power it or even talk to Vaughan or Belle.”
“Then I’m afraid I have to stay aboard Athena. I promised Belle I would protect her.”
“I’ll keep an eye on it,” Summer said.
“I promised.”
“You must take the server along,” Vaughan’s voice cut in. “We know that Dr. Carlhagen has an AI on St. Lazarus. That means there is a network in his facility. Connect me to it and I may be able to take control.”
“What about tracking the fleet?” Summer said, obviously not keen to navigate dangerous seas without Vaughan’s helpful map.
“Connect Madam LaFontaine’s server. I will pass an instance of myself to it and maintain the map. It will also give me a helpful node outside of Dr. Carlhagen’s facility in case I need to utilize a two-pronged attack on his AI.”
“What’ll happen to Madam LaFontaine?” Wanda asked.
“I will suspend her processes. Madam LaFontaine is too loyal to Dr. Carlhagen, anyway. She would certainly interfere.”
“How long will this take?” Humphrey said.
“Not long, but you must hurry.”
Summer crawled under the holodesk and pulled out Madam LaFontaine’s server. She blew dust off the top as she clunked it onto the desk. She fiddled with cables and flipped a switch. “There. She’s on your network. Let me know if you need me to—”
“Instances transferred. You may power down my main server.”
“Yours and Belle’s,” Leslie said.
The 3D map atop the desk flickered, then solidified. Apparently the new Vaughan on the new server had taken over.
Everyone seemed uneasy about the act of flipping the power switch on Vaughan and Belle’s original server. Except Leslie. With a peaceful look on her face, she snapped the switch to the off position. A display on the front of the box began to count down the shut down process.
“I’ll bundle some cables you might need,” Summer said.
Ten minutes later, after a mad scramble to assemble packs of supplies and weapons, the Scions were hefting the dinghy over the starboard rail.
The boat lowered—with Orson already in it—on a pulley and rope system Summer had previously rigged. The Scions rappelled down the hull, wet paint sticky on the soles of their shoes. Humphrey and Leslie cast off the lines and the dinghy bobbed free. Athena towered over them, a gray wall blocking the sun.
Humphrey clicked his walkie-talkie. “Good luck, Summer. Let’s keep radios on, but only use them in emergencies.”
“Understood. Godspeed, Humphrey.”
Summer had trained Kirk on how to operate the dinghy’s outboard motor, a hulk of black machinery that hung from the back. “Hold on,” Kirk said. “Summer said this motor might be a bit overpowered for the size of this boat.”
Humphrey sat on a bench at the bow. Leslie was behind him, hair again flying free, eyes determined. The hard edges of the server bulged from a backpack at her feet.
Kirk revved the motor and the boat crawled forward. Once well clear of Athena, he gunned it. Humphrey slid backward into Leslie’s lap. A corner of the server jabbed into his hamstring. Farther back, the same thing had happened to Orson. He struggled to clamber off Kirk’s feet, chest heaving, face pale as a frog’s belly.
Ahead, St. Lazarus’s prominent peak thrust skyward. The mid-afternoon sun was behind them.
It had all happened too fast. Humphrey hated spur of the moment decisions. This felt exactly like something Jacey would do.
30
Look at the Evidence
“—ing you can do . . . Wanda? Humphrey? Where did you two go?”
The pair had vanished right in the middle of Belle’s sentence. Summer now sat in Orson’s chair. Elias stood in front of the map table.
Vaughan had paused her again.
“Don’t do that without asking me first,” she said to the air. “I was in the middle of a very important conversation.”
If Athena is captured, none of your plans will make a difference. “I needed the CPU.” You must trust my judgment. “Besides. We are now on faster hardware.”
The fleet information had been updated while Belle had been frozen in time. It showed the fleet closer to Athena, and Athena now just south of St. Lazarus. Elias noticed Belle on the holodesk. “Hello, Belle. I didn’t know Vaughan had transferred you, too.” He chewed his lip. “That’s going to irritate Leslie when she finds out.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Vaughan put me on pause again.”
“Vaughan insisted that his server go with Humphrey and the others onto the island. Leslie took your old one, thinking you were in it. Have you found Jacey?”
“What did I just say? I was on pause. I didn’t even know time was passing.” She sniffed the air, reached out with her senses. “I don’t feel any different. Why did they go to the island? I was working on a plan to negotiate with Dr. Carlhagen.”
Elias said, “Ran out of time. We’re about to have a flyby from a squadron of naval planes. Everyone but Summer and I are heading to St. Lazarus on a dinghy.”
“How long until the flyby?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Do you have a way to communicate with Humphrey?”
“Walkie-talkies. Humphrey says only to use them in an emergency. We’ll be out of range soon, anyway. Summer thinks she can boost our signal, but with the navy approaching we shouldn’t broadcast anything.”
“Damn. What are those fools going to do on the island?”
Elias shrugged. “Find Livy, I guess. We stayed on board to keep Athena afloat so they have a way off the island.”
“They have that dinghy.”
“Too small. Too little fuel. No navigation system.”
Too late, Belle realized. She was too late. With Humphrey and the others on St. Lazarus and no way to com
municate with them, she had no way to coordinate a deal with Dr. Carlhagen even if she could find Captain Wilcox.
Belle’s fists clenched at her sides. “Vaughan, I know you’re listening. So pay attention. I do not give you permission to pause me without consulting me first.”
Vaughan didn’t answer. Elias, still at the holodesk, frowned in concern. “He didn’t ask?”
“Increase the walkie-talkie range with Humphrey if you can,” Belle ordered. She left the holodesk and returned to her position in the outskirts of Chicago. Maybe there was still a way to make this scheme work. But first she needed to find Wilcox.
“There’s still hope,” she said, trying to convince herself it was true. She checked the map of her position. “Any new information on Captain Wilcox?”
The professor’s face appeared on the screen. “Nothing. No cameras have picked him up. But an IPA drone recently investigated an explosion out in the barrens.” He showed her video taken from a high angle as a drone circled the smoking remains of an overturned vehicle. “It was a van, the exact kind of untagged, gasoline-powered vehicle Jacey would likely have fled the city in.”
Belle’s heart sank as she studied the smoldering wreck. Debris was scattered all around, a wheel here, a chunk of bent and twisted metal there. Glass everywhere.
“Is she dead?”
“The IPA found a few charred bits of one casualty. Not Jacey. They found blood on the road, away from the blast. ID tests are being conducted. No one was taken for medical care, which suggests anyone else who was at the scene left before the IPA arrived.”
“What are all those little black dots on the road?”
“Small drones, typically used in personal drone swarms for streaming one’s every waking moment to the net. It’s called fame-casting.”
It was the stupidest thing Belle had ever heard. “There are so many of those little things,” she said. “And they’re all dead.”
“Likely taken out by the vehicle explosion. But yes, the IPA drone calculates there were 19,321 of them.”
“So how many people does that represent? How many drones per one of these fame-casters?”
“Four to six drones per person. So that comes out to three to four thousand people. But I doubt any of these drones were used in personal swarms. They’re all modified. The IPA report refers to them as scav drones. Short for ‘scavenger,’ a tribal people who live out here between the city and the fence. Maybe the scavs took the other bodies from the crash site.”
“Bodies?”
“Living. Dead. Bodies either way.”
That wasn’t very encouraging.
The fallen drones were arrayed in a fan shape, narrowest near the charred vehicle. It was clear now that they had been blasted away from the wreck. “Jacey, Jacey, Jacey. What have you gotten yourself into? Let’s assume she wasn’t killed or captured. Where did she go?”
Socrates’s deerstalker hat reappeared. “No cams have spotted either her or Wilcox since this wreck. To be fair, there aren’t many IPA cams out this far. The scavs take them out and repurpose them.”
“Can you tap into the scav networks?”
“I’m looking, but there are not many nodes connecting legitimate networks with theirs, which the IPA consider illegal. The tribes themselves are all fugitives, in a way. They live out here expressly to avoid surveillance. Based on reports I’ve scanned, the scavs have extraordinarily good data encryption. I’m not sure we’ll be able to tap into their systems if we find them. It doesn’t help that we’re sipping dataflow through a straw. Athena’s bandwidth is low to begin with, and Vaughan is hogging most of it.”
So that was it. Belle had run into a dead end.
“Not necessarily,” Socrates said, then cleared his throat. “I want to draw your attention to the distribution of the fallen drones.”
Squinting at the screen, Belle watched as Socrates rewound the IPA drone video. He froze it. A wide shot of the scene. The picture showed the wrecked van on the lower right. The road crossed the screen to the left upper corner. Most of the field of dead drones was visible. The concentration was densest at the center of the screen, then grew sparser the farther away from the van they got.
Belle spotted the anomaly right away. “Right there. Too few drones on the ground in that spot there.” In fact, the drones created an odd pattern at the side of the road. There was a band of dots in too high a concentration relative to the others, and in an odd configuration. They outlined a rectangle of empty ground. No drones at all.
She lowered the tablet, aware that Socrates had teleported her into the scene. The ruined van was far to her right, the road stretching to her left. Socrates had added small spheres to the landscape to mark the position of all the fallen drones. She walked toward the spot in question, feet crunching spheres with every step. She stopped in front of the blank rectangle. “Assuming the drones were blown away from the van, they should have covered this whole spot. But something stopped them.”
“Precisely, my dear,” Socrates said. “They bounced off something occupying that spot.” He superimposed a plain rectangular cuboid shape over the area, fitting it to the empty pattern left by the fallen drones.
“What was it?” Belle asked, walking around it.
“Something this general size that one would find on a roadway. Hmmmm. Whatever could that be?”
Belle wasn’t accustomed to being subjected to her own sarcasm. “A vehicle. I get it now.”
The clue wasn’t much, but it was something. She didn’t know what kind of vehicle it had been, and had no idea where it had gone.
“That’s not true,” Socrates said. “Look at the evidence.”
Belle was about to give Socrates a refresher course in swearing when she realized what he was telling her. It was frustrating, really. Since he was a projection of her own mind, he didn’t really know any answers before she did. But he was tapping into an aspect of her mind Sensei would have called intuition. Odd. She’d always thought the idea of intuition was silly.
She levitated and studied the roadway. What could the evidence tell her about where the mystery vehicle went? This simulation didn’t know anything helpful.
Wait. There.
Her own footsteps from where she’d stepped on spheres showed where she’d been.
She looked at the image of the real-world scene on her tablet. She didn’t expect to be able to see individual footsteps. Drones in the real world were not the same as simulated spheres. But if the mystery vehicle had driven toward the van, it would have left clear tracks through the piles of drones covering the roadway.
There weren’t any such tracks. That meant the mystery vehicle had gone the other way.
“They went south,” Belle said.
“Maybe we should, too,” Socrates said.
Belle flew, fast, skimming ten meters over the blurring road.
31
Just Like Dr. Carlhagen
Kirk’s boat driving skills were childlike and brutal. Summer’s instructions were apparently to hold the throttle wide open, the seas be damned.
As a result, the dinghy full of Scions and one fat man flew across the waves at an odd angle, making the bow tip hard to starboard as they climbed to a crest, then leave the water entirely, only to drop into the next trough. The impact sent water flying away from the boat and compressed Humphrey’s spine into the hard bench beneath him.
At least the pain was keeping his usual seasickness at bay.
The others held on to the gunnels and kept their teeth clenched, nostrils wide, and eyes squinted to keep out the spray.
Kirk whooped every time the boat took flight. Once, Humphrey turned to glare, but Kirk pumped his fist with such enthusiasm Humphrey couldn’t help but laugh.
Orson’s eyes were bunched in, his face yellowish green. What wonderful justice that would be, to see the stupid man hit with seasickness.
Ahead, St. Lazarus had grown into a mass of green. A tangle of trees and vines covered everything except a narrow st
retch of rocky beach. Huge spumes of mist flew up as the sea crashed into the island. If they tried to land here, they’d smash onto rocks and get killed by the tumbling surf. Humphrey motioned Kirk to turn parallel the coast.
Leslie put her lips to his ear. “I see sand!” She pointed ahead.
Humphrey squinted, wishing he’d thought to bring binoculars. Maybe there was a bit of tan along the shoreline ahead, but it was too far away to tell.
He checked the skies. Still no planes.
They had to get ashore very soon or they’d be spotted. The size of their dinghy made its presence here suspicious. It had to have launched from a larger vessel, and the closest one was Athena.
Athena was just a speck on the horizon now, but from a plane’s vantage, she was still near St. Lazarus.
He pumped his hands down so Kirk would slow. The dinghy lost momentum and soon was merely holding station a few hundred meters off the coast. Humphrey stood. The few feet of altitude he gained didn’t help much.
“It’s a beach,” Leslie said. “I see it clearly.”
“Do you see it?” Humphrey called to Kirk.
“No. Just point.”
Leslie pointed.
Humphrey barely got to his seat before the boy rammed the throttle to its max and the boat shot forward.
Somebody lost their lunch behind him. He didn’t need to turn to know it was Orson. Served the man right.
The beach resolved a minute later. Kirk took them straight for it, not slowing even though Humphrey kept motioning him to do so.
Bracing himself to be thrown forward with a sudden stop as the keel struck a reef or rock, Humphrey held his breath.
But the dinghy slid up onto the sandy beach, following the natural incline of the seafloor. Kirk frantically killed the motor, flipped some clamps, and yanked on the top of the outboard motor. It was on a pivot, so the whole thing tilted up, bringing its propeller free of the water. “Time to drag her.”
They all hopped out, water coming to their shins. Humphrey grabbed onto the narrow bow and started to pull. The others added their strength and soon the heavy dinghy was sliding up the sand. The trees ahead would provide cover from the air. And not a moment too soon.
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