Zentas considered it, trying to read me, probably. This was the moment that mattered. He flinched but didn’t give in. “What do you need the missiles for?”
I was ready for that question and answered without hesitation. Sounding confident mattered. “The Mark XIs can kill individual hominiverts, but with only twenty-two of them, depending on how the battle goes, we take out maybe a couple hundred ’verts before we get overrun. I don’t expect that that will be enough to make them quit, and I don’t know if you turning off the transmitters will cause them to leave or if they’ll keep going in the same direction. It’s hard to predict the results of a free-for-all. You can’t have a set of transmitters near the dome to stop them, because there’s too much chance that someone will discover them, which will expose your plan. So I need some explosions to add to the chaos and scare them away. Give them a better reason to turn around.”
Zentas started to speak, but I cut him off.
“And if everything goes to shit—and everything always goes to shit—I can target the primates directly with the missiles and kill a bunch. Call it a backup plan.”
He stayed silent for almost a minute, thinking. “So you’re not going to use the missiles to try to attack the low-frequency broadcasters.”
Of course I was. “No. There are too many of them, and I don’t know their locations. It would be pointless—literal shots in the dark.” It wasn’t a total lie. It would be an almost impossible task. That didn’t mean I didn’t intend to try. “And while we’re discussing things that you’re not going to like, I actually do want four FL-207s. And before you say no, hear me out. You can send them up without ammunition. But they’re faster and more maneuverable than drones; plus, they’ve got better AI, which I need since I’m working this solo. They’re perfect for this mission. I need eyes in the air to help me target.”
“No ammunition?”
“I just need the camera feeds so I can see where to target the missiles to drive off the bulk of the hominiverts.”
“And if you try to change the deal midway through?” asked Zentas.
“I’m sure you’ll take care of that part.”
“That’s pretty cynical.”
That didn’t make it wrong. He’d have a fail-safe to make sure I died valiantly. “I don’t expect you’ll leave things to chance,” I said.
“No, I won’t.”
“Then we have a plan?”
“We have a plan. Two days. Make your final arrangements for what you need with Ms. Eddleston. I have business elsewhere.”
I wanted to know where he’d be when the mission happened, but I couldn’t ask. It might tip him off that I wasn’t playing straight. He suspected that, of course. He’d expect me to try something, just as I expected that he’d try to kill me. But his ego would tell him that he was smarter than I am and that he’d be a step ahead. Maybe he would be. I guess we’d find out.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
My guards showed up for my walk, which I hadn’t expected after screwing over Eddleston. Either she wasn’t bitter or she forgot to tell somebody to turn it off. That was good, because I needed the opportunity to do something ridiculous. On the surface, the idea of doing something stupid is counterintuitive. But in this case, I needed it. Zentas thought he held the winning hand; however, he’d think a level beyond that. He’d know that I also knew he had the winning hand, and then he’d get suspicious of why I didn’t fold, which would make him reevaluate. I couldn’t have that.
I needed a diversion.
My plan relied on misdirection. I needed Zentas looking one way while I manipulated things somewhere else, and a single diversion wouldn’t do, because he’d expect it. I needed him to think he’d found the diversion so he wouldn’t expect the next one. Diversions within diversions. The more moving pieces I had, the harder it would be for him to tell the cover play from my real move.
Unfortunately, I had to manipulate some ground-level grunts to make it happen by taking advantage of the trust I’d built up with the guards. While I didn’t take pleasure in it, I could live with myself. They’d chosen the wrong team.
The same two soldiers came to get me—the man and the woman. I still didn’t know their names, and I didn’t ask. Not knowing made it easier to screw them over. We walked for a bit, and I stayed quiet, waiting for them to make the first move. They would. I had no doubt. They’d been left in the dark, and soldiers in the dark would always seek out illuminating information.
The woman spoke first. “So . . . any more information on the big mission?”
“Looks like it might be all automated,” I said.
“They’ve got us preparing weapons like we’re part of it,” said the man.
“Backup, maybe? I’m not sure. How fucked up is that? I’m planning this thing, and they don’t even tell me.” I left the fucking civilians unsaid, but they got the message. “Hey, what’s up there?” I asked, as we walked by the ramp up to the airlock.
“Airlock,” said the man.
“To the outside?” I asked.
“Yeah. Of course.”
“Damn, I thought we were way underground. I haven’t seen daylight in a week.”
“You get used to it,” said the woman.
“Not sure I ever will.” I let it go for another two laps. I couldn’t push it too hard. We made small talk, until I brought it back around. “You think I could look outside?”
They glanced at each other, uneasy. “We would, sir, but cameras.”
“Who’s going to care? There’s a window there if there’s an airlock. I just want to see the real world. Come on. What am I going to do? I don’t have an enviro-suit. It’s not like I can run away.”
It took three more laps around the compound, but they finally gave in. The ramp up was wide—big enough to accommodate a large primate—and had a shallow grade. It leveled into a wide platform at the top, probably so they could receive goods, cycle the airlock, and then worry about distributing them down into the base proper. The inside door had a small round window, and through it I could see that there were no enviro-suits inside the airlock. That worked for me. I moved to cycle the door.
“What are you doing?”
“Having a look.” I didn’t stop, and they didn’t physically move to intercept me, so I entered the airlock. It was large for an airlock, maybe four meters in diameter, to allow for large deliveries. It had two doors to the outside—a standard personnel door, and a lift door. I moved to the personnel door because it had a window, which fit the story I’d given them for being there. The door behind us thunked shut, and the pressure pushed against my ears.
“It’s funny, how you miss this kind of thing,” I said.
Neither responded, but the man tapped his foot and looked back through the other door, as if he expected someone to be there any second. Someone might, for all I knew. It wouldn’t matter.
“Thanks. I needed that.” I stepped away from the window after half a minute and stretched. As the woman moved toward the door to cycle us back in, and both of them lost focus on me for a second, I sprang toward the bay door, turned the handle to unlock it and hit the button to open it.
Klaxons blared and a red light flashed.
The three of us stared at each other, but nobody moved. The door rose slowly behind me with a rumble. “What the fuck did you do?” yelled the woman over the hiss of the vents spewing air trying to keep overpressure.
I shrugged. “Sorry.” I turned and ducked under the rising door.
I ran.
They hadn’t expected it. How could they? No sane person would run into a contaminated environment without a suit. They couldn’t know that I wanted to appear less than sane.
A hard-packed dirt road led away from the underground facility and I followed it. Jungle loomed on either side, and if I wanted to hide, I could have gone either way. Problem was, I couldn’t hide. I didn’t have a suit on, and exposed to the climate and fauna of the planet, I could measure my life span in hours. But so could my e
scorts. How they reacted would determine what happened next. If they chased me, they’d catch me, being half my age and in better shape. But their training conditioned them to fear the outside—correctly—so maybe they’d hesitate.
It didn’t matter. If they caught me, it still served my purpose. I’d told Zentas that I’d sacrifice myself, so by trying to escape, it made that look like my plan. I acted beaten, then tried to bolt.
I slowed to a fast jog. I had no idea where I was going, but the road led somewhere, and anywhere would do. If I could find any government-controlled camera on this Mother-forsaken planet, someone might see me. That would be even better than getting caught, even though Zentas would probably kill me before any rescue arrived, to keep me from talking—
Something slammed into me from behind, and I went down hard. Not something. Someone. It was my male escort. “You asshole!” he said. My head rang and my eyes whited-out for a split second as he punched me in the back of the head. I rolled to my right, trying to throw him, but he held on with his legs and drove what felt like a forearm into my neck, driving my face into the dirt.
“Just zip tie him,” said the woman from behind me. “Stop beating him up.”
“This fucker just sent us all to quarantine,” complained the man.
“That’s the least of our worries. We’ve got an audience back in the airlock. We’re in a shitload of trouble,” she said.
“I really am sorry,” I said. “Ow!” The zip tie dug into my wrists. I couldn’t blame the guy.
“Shut up,” said the man.
“They’re going to kill me, you know. What was I supposed to do? Sit there and wait?”
“We all do what we gotta do,” said the woman. “Get up, or I’ll have McCombs drag you.”
“Stay down,” said the man. “Do it. Fucking try me.”
No, thank you. I struggled to my feet, awkwardly, since he’d bound my hands behind my back and I was still a little woozy. They marched me back to the airlock where six or seven other people waited, all in full enviro-suits. I guess they had a plan to deal with runaways.
I spent the last full day of what might be the rest of my life in a makeshift isolation room. They wrapped my cell in plastic. Apparently, the facility didn’t have a true quarantine. They probably took the two guards somewhere that had one. Either way, I never saw them again.
Eddleston came by to see me—probably to watch me suffer. They had rigged a speaker system so she could talk to me from outside. “Why’d you do it?”
“There’s no way that Zentas lets me live through this mission. I figured I had better odds in the jungle.”
She considered it. “Maybe. Or maybe you had another reason.”
“Yeah? What reason would that be?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got a team out there sweeping the area, making sure you didn’t drop some sort of transmitter.”
“I didn’t.” I hadn’t even thought of it, and even if I had, I didn’t have one. I didn’t care that she didn’t believe me. The search would make some soldiers miserable, which lowered the morale of my enemy. One more small thing that might help me win. “We’ll see.”
It impressed me that she didn’t mention what I did to her in front of her boss—how I’d made her look bad. I’m not sure how she did that. It had to be eating her up on the inside. Or maybe that’s just me. That would be another one for my shrink, I guess, if I ever talked to her again. It didn’t seem likely. Perhaps that was why Eddleston could let it go. She knew I was going to die and could take comfort in that.
By the time I got out of quarantine, they’d finalized the plan. I got a lot of what I wanted, but not everything, which was to be expected. The first two domes—the sabotaged ones that we expected the ’verts to destroy—were unoccupied. There were more sabotaged domes along the way, but Zentas had finally agreed to let the ’verts bypass the one with the greatest number of people on duty. At least that’s what they told me. I couldn’t verify it, so I let it go. I had to fight the fight I could and not the one beyond my control.
My fight would come at what would hopefully be the end of the whole thing, in front of Dome 19B, a research center for a non-Caliber company. Records showed peak population for the dome at eighteen, but the main shift would have cycled out more than two hours prior, leaving seven people on duty. Maybe. I didn’t exactly trust the source of the information. The number didn’t matter. This was the dome I could save if I did things right, and whether seven or eighteen, I’d try to save everybody in it.
I understood that it might be a last stand for me, that Zentas intended it to be. I could live with that. Or die with that, as it was. I might have saved some lives, so if my time was up, at least I’d have used the last days doing something worthwhile. Make no mistake—I didn’t intend to follow the plan. But even my version held a lot of risk. Thinking about all that the night before the mission should have had me keyed up, but I slept, peaceful and dreamless for the first time in forever.
Chapter Thirty
It rained on the day I was scheduled to die. Because of course it did. An enviro-suit was waterproof, obviously, but the water running down my faceplate would screw with the way my heads-up display looked, forcing me to concentrate harder to do even simple tasks. And I had a lot of tasks. I’d sold the plan to Zentas as me on the ground directing the entire operation. It stretched the boundaries of what I could manage, especially when half of it was a deception. I also had to watch for the moment of Zentas’s treachery. I could have used a good executive officer helping me manage the less important parts of my plan, but you fight with what you’ve got, not what you wish you had.
I asked to get to the site early so I’d be set when the ’verts arrived, but Zentas said no. He wanted to maintain the illusion that we reacted after the attacks started, and I couldn’t blame him for that. I had to try, though.
I got reports of the first two domes falling via the comm in my helmet. I didn’t have access to the camera feeds that someone had hacked from the two facilities, but I could monitor the Ops net. They hit the correct two domes, and both were, as planned, unoccupied. The compromise of the facilities would set off alarms when the ’verts breached it, but alarms went off all the time, and no dome had ever been breached. There would be no rush to check them, and when they eventually did, they probably wouldn’t immediately alert the military. That would fit Zentas’s plan and allow the ’verts to get deeper into settled territory before Oxendine’s team tried to react. That was the good news.
The bad news: there were enough ’verts involved to draw audible “oh shits” from the Ops crew.
I got the unarmed FL-207s up in the air first, which gave me four video feeds that I set to cycle through in the top right corner of my display, shifting through the cameras at three-second intervals. I gave each bot a search sector, quartering the zone where I expected the first ’verts to appear. I needed early warning and needed to track their speed and direction so I could predict their arrival. It also projected what anyone watching would expect me to do with them, and I had no doubt someone was watching.
I had initial estimates on where to expect the ’verts from the work I’d done on the map, but no plan ever lasted long in the real world, and I couldn’t afford to mistime my moves. At the moment, though, how many concerned me more. The more that came, the more destructive I’d have to get. The fewer of them that attacked, the fewer I’d have to kill to get them to leave. I hoped for the best but planned for the worst, because it usually went that way. I’d try to save them, but as always, if it was them or me . . . it was them.
I waited in the airlock, sitting in a cart that would take me to my first ship. I had two. One carried twelve Mark XI combat bots and three missile launchers, while the other carried the remaining ten bots. We waited a few more minutes after the attacks on the first domes. When someone played back the radar tracks after the fact—and someone would—they’d see me reacting to a crisis.
I couldn’t say for sure what the militar
y would do when they got their first report, but they wouldn’t react in time. I didn’t know much for sure, but that part . . . I’d have bet a lot on it. Oxendine would look for more information, especially after being burned with our covert mission on the hidden dome. Much like me, she’d employ sensors, but without drones, she’d be stuck trying to get a view from satellites, which wouldn’t find enough information through the jungle cover. Time would tick by as she gathered intel, and by the time she acted, the battle at Dome 19B—my dome, twenty-four klicks away from Dome 1—would be over. She’d consider air assets, but the ’verts would be too close to the dome for her to use missiles without destroying it. After that, she’d finally dispatch ground troops, just in time to find the aftermath. I’d try to leave them a sign, but Zentas would expect me to do that, and he’d have a plan to stop it.
I had on a Caliber enviro-suit and helmet, and they could monitor everything I saw and heard. The second I even flipped to a wrong frequency, they’d push a button and turn my helmet into dead weight. A brick. At least I’d found his location. He’d be watching everything from the Ops center.
That was probably how they intended to kill me—with the suit. It wouldn’t take much. A small explosive in the helmet somewhere near the temple, and I’d be dead. That’s how I’d have done it, had the roles been reversed. Zentas had surely thought through all my possible moves. I’d certainly thought through his. I had no choice but to play it straight.
Or make it appear that way for as long as possible.
As if to accentuate the point, Zentas showed up at the inner door. He had on a headset and spoke into my helmet on a private channel. “I’d like to think in another situation we’d have worked together willingly,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“We’re a lot alike.”
“Probably.” I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t really deny it, given my history. I’m a hypocrite a lot of the time, but the odds in front of me made me introspective. It seemed pointless to lie to myself.
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