When Sue's intent gaze returned to me, I gave her a smug grin of vindication and said, "Check it out, Linda. She's cross-reffing everything against the records."
Linda grinned and asked, "How can you tell?"
"That's how she always looks when my past comes up." Giving her a hurt look, I added, "It's like she doesn't trust me or something, y'know? Just rips my little heart out."
Sipping her coffee, Linda chuckled, "You poor thing. You suffer so gracefully."
Sue joined her in a slight grin and asked, "When do we leave, Linda?"
Linda's chuckle stopped instantly. "You're going with him?"
"That's why I said 'we'. He'll need me."
Blinking at her, I asked, "Could you be more specific?"
Nodding, Sue said, "Later. On the way."
With a somewhat disbelieving smile forming, Linda turned to me and asked, "Do you think you'll need her?"
I shrugged. "Might. She seems pretty sure about it."
Turning back to Sue, she said, "You've seen the simulations, Sue. Are you going to be able to deal with it if things turn nasty?"
"I believe so," Sue said quietly.
"You don't sound altogether convinced."
"I am," I said. "She may push, pull, or just get the hell out of the way, but she'll handle it somehow, Linda. Now I have a question for all concerned."
As both ladies faced me, I asked, "Does anyone really believe a bunch of raghead revolutionaries pulled this off and got access to a military facility in Iran, defunct or not? Or even that any military facilities in Iran are defunct? I don't."
Linda's expression turned sharp as she said, "No. Their intel system is damned near as good as anyone else's, and they know at least what the public knows about fields. Probably a bit more than that. In fact, we think they'll be expecting this sort of response."
Setting my coffee down, I said, "Which leads us back to making examples, one way or the other. They're testing us; trying to find out what'll work against fields and what won't. The place will be wired to the hilt. Everybody in the bunker is expendable bait as long as someone can find out how well various things work against field tech."
Nodding, Linda said, "That's about how we figured it, too."
"Has anyone cobbled up a plan yet?"
Shaking her head, Linda made a wry face as she said, "The Feds have 'liaisoned' with 3rd World, of course. Also of course, their stated intent is to appoint negotiators when or if the perpetrators come forward or are officially discovered. In short, they don't want to rock the political boat, and not having absolute evidence to pursue allows them to stall about actions. Sounds familiar as hell, doesn't it?"
"Yup. Sure does."
"That's why I got with some people at 3rd last night and put your name on the table. Two hours later I had a 'go'." She sighed and added, "I guess it's only fair to tell you that I agreed to present this to you as a volunteer effort. The 3rd World brass didn't want me to call this an order."
Reaching to pat her hand, I grinned and said, "You tell 'em thanks, but I wouldn't miss this for the world."
We sipped coffee and discussed various aspects of the rescue effort for another fifteen minutes or so before Linda asked, "So, Ed, now that you've had look at things, what do you think will be your most likely course of action?"
Glancing at Sue, I keyed my implant and said, "No comments, Sue. We'll hand it to them at the other end."
In an almost human reaction, Sue recoiled slightly and asked, "Is there some reason you don't want to discuss..."
"Yes, there is," I interrupted. "Tell you later."
"Ed?" asked Linda.
Looking at her, I said, "Present, ma'am. Just thinking. Some of this intel is a day old, most of it is a few hours old at best. We'll come up with a few possibilities and pick one or two after we get there and have a look at the current situation. Got any interest in going to the beach while you're here? I could do a little preliminary studying. Of sand, y'know. The kind with beach bunnies instead of terrorists and camels."
Snorting a laugh, Linda looked at her watch -- as she always did when she wanted to close a meeting -- and said as she stood up, "You just want to get me into a bathing suit. No, thanks, I need to be getting back to Carrington. I have people coming this afternoon and I want to have things ready."
Although I couldn't envision how she or the Carrington complex could be less than ready, I said, "Yeah, the place needs a good dusting."
Sue said, "You never answered my question, Linda. When do you want us to launch?"
'Launch', she said. Not 'leave' or 'go' or anything so unassertive. Sue really seemed to be getting into this.
Linda stopped by the front door and looked at each of us for a moment, then said, "I'll leave the details of bunker-busting and hostage rescues to you two. Get underway as soon as you can and let me know when you have our people out. By then I'll know where they're going."
She gave Sue a quick hug and me a quick kiss, then opened the door and headed for the driveway with a small wave and a squeeze of her watch. Linda's flitter descended, she boarded it, and waved to us again as she lifted away.
I sipped my coffee as Sue closed the door and turned to look at me. Was that a trace of eagerness in her eyes?
Sipping again as I considered matters for a moment, I said, "Well, it's showtime, milady. You sure you want in on this?"
"Yes."
Nodding, I said, "Then I'll pack a few things and we'll go have a look at the place. What do you think of tunneling in?"
Grinning, Sue said, "I'd have suggested that if you hadn't."
"Gotta be quick, cool, and quiet about it, though."
With a dismissive wave, she said, "No noise, no heat, no radiation, and almost instantaneous. No sweat."
I grinned at her and asked, "How you gonna do it?"
"Sand and rock will become lead. It'll take up a lot less space that way, you know."
"Morphing stuff takes a lot of power, ma'am. We don't want to burn out my flitter and our only ride home."
Her left eyebrow went up just like Linda's. "Your only ride home, actually. As it happens, I've been making a field generator for the last five minutes. You're supposed to be packing, aren't you?"
Oh, yeah, she was eager; it was in her eyes, in her voice, and in her words. I found it fascinating. Where Steph would have been full of automatic reluctance, Sue was chomping at the bit to get going.
Giving her a quick, casual salute, I said, "Yas'm. So sorry, ma'am. Packing now, ma'am," and headed for the bedroom.
No sooner than I'd entered the bedroom, I felt another presence in the house. Stephanie's presence lingered for only a few seconds, then she was gone, along with Sue's presence.
Hm. A quiet conference without me, or an unannounced reprogramming session?
Sue's presence abruptly reappeared in the other room a few minutes later and neared the bedroom door as I tossed stuff in my jump kit and a backpack.
"How'd it go with Steph?" I asked, zipping the bags and heading for the door with them. "Was it advice, caution, or some quick reprogramming?"
"You noticed, huh? Oh, well. None of the above. Steph, Elkor, and I teamed up to move a historic building."
Pausing in mid-reach for some canned soup, I looked at her briefly, then said, "Well, I'm sure you had a good reason."
She laughed. "Yes, we did. Land had been donated for it, but too late to suit the new owners of the property."
"Uh, huh. Did you happen to mention to anyone that you'd be moving it, ma'am? Did everybody run screaming while the building floated to the new location?"
Sue shrugged and said, "We didn't steal it, sir. Stephanie spoke to the new property owners first. She offered to save them the expense of tearing it down by moving it immediately. He laughed and said 'Yeah, sure, lady. Go for it.' Only a few screamed or ran when the building lifted. Most people stared from a safe distance, and the ones inside the building..."
Tossing a few cans of soup in my backpack, I chuc
kled, "Inside? Kewl."
She continued, "Those inside gathered at the windows."
"No doubt. People don't fly in buildings every day. You realize that guy who gave Steph permission probably thought she was nuts?"
"Doesn't matter. There were witnesses."
Shrugging, I said, "Good 'nuff, then." Picking up my stuff, I asked, "Are you still messing around with that generator, or are you finally ready to go, milady?"
"Oh, up yours. The generator is already aboard. The only thing left to load is you."
Sighing, I said, "I'm doing something about that right now, so relax while I make a fresh coffee and tell me how you three got involved with moving that building."
"You really do drink too much of that stuff."
I rinsed my cup as I replied, "Yup. On with the story."
"Elkor became aware of the situation and asked us to assist him in lifting the building. We did so."
When she said nothing else for a moment, I glanced at her and asked, "Could you be just a hair more informative?"
Rolling her eyes, Sue asked, "Could I play it back for you once we're underway?"
Dumping coffee in the mug and adding hot water, I replied, "Just have some patience and tell me the key points. What building? Where? And why was it of interest to Elkor?"
Elkor appeared on the kitchen sink and said, "It was the Lindsey home in Boston, Ed."
"Lindsey? That's a familiar name. There's a Lindsey on the commo staff at Carrington. Any relation to the house?"
Sue laughed softly as Elkor said, "Yes. Amelia Lindsey took leave from Carrington to try to help her brother in the matter. They had a permit to move the house, but permits concerning moving the house through city streets hadn't been approved by the deadline. I enlisted Sue and Stephanie to assist me in circumventing bureaucratic errors."
"That means you airlifted it. How far?"
"Sixteen point nine miles."
I laughed. "Woo! Film at eleven. 'Flying house lands in Boston, misses witch'. Who knew you were going to do it?"
"I saw no reason to inform anyone of our assistance."
Laughing again, I said, "Even better. Good going, Elkor. The headlines will read 'Ghosts Move House!' and the tabloids'll have a field day with it."
Sue chuckled again as I capped my travel mug.
My backpack and ditty bag floated toward the front door as I asked, "Sure you don't want to come along, Elkor? Maybe just to help Sue keep a lid on her enthusiasm?"
"I'll join you later. I will, however, wish you good luck in the interim."
With a grin, I said, "Thanks. Every little bit helps."
He vanished and the front door opened. Sue and I followed my bags to the flitter.
Chapter Five
Once we were aboard the flitter and moving east, I called up maps and other info concerning Iran. Yup. Yazd was right where I'd left it back in 1979, in almost the exact center of the country with the same featureless desert to the north and rocky, barren mountains to the south.
As a bonus, the whole area was dotted with villages full of people who'd been heavily propagandized for the last couple of decades to hate anyone not Iranian and Islamic and to hate Americans and all other westerners in particular.
The actual bunker location was some thirty miles east of Yazd inside a 6,000-foot-tall, rock-strewn mountain that looked as if it hadn't seen a drop of rain in centuries. Field probes had located the bunker's main entrance at the mountain's base.
I tapped up structural info and gave matters some thought. The bunker was roughly two hundred feet wide by three hundred feet long and nearly a hundred feet deep. Its concrete foundation had been laid over bedrock.
Preparing concrete required water. That much concrete would have required a small lake. The diagram on screen showed four shafts reaching down to the water table.
"Sue, I'm thinking about these well shafts, and I'm looking for a bit more than a simple cave-in. Let's say that we create a cavern half the size of the bunker complex directly under the bunker, then fill the cavern with water from below."
She smiled. "Okay, that's do-able."
"Maybe then we could seal the well shafts and heat the water in the cavern to steam. Still do-able?"
Shrugging, she said, "Yes. I can preheat the water while you collect the people and bring them to the flitter. When we leave the cavern, I can leave the generator inside and collapse our exit tunnel. The water will flash to steam and permeate the mountain, which will collapse into the cavern."
"Sounds as if it ought to pretty much dissolve the mountain to sludge."
"It would, but the scalding residue would flow into the valleys on either side of the mountain range. It would be an ecological disaster and there are villages to consider."
"Then why did you let me go on about steam-blasting the place? Come up with something better, lady."
"I have. Let everybody evacuate, then transmogrify the entire mountain; essentially make it disappear."
Gesturing at the two-foot ball on the deck, I asked, "Think you brought enough dynamite, Butch?"
Sue's eyes met mine blankly for a split second, then she laughed. "Got it." Laughing again, Sue took the seat on my right and said, "I'll build more generators. We'll pick up raw materials when we start the tunnel."
Pausing for a moment -- most likely for effect -- she thumbed at the generator and said, "Eight of those generators can transform the entire mountain into any element -- or combination of elements -- you can imagine."
I'd seen too much over the last few years, I guess; godzilla spaceships, asteroid factories, flitters, fields... Hell, I had two field implants in my head and... well, the concept of Sue zapping a mountain out of existence just didn't seem to surprise me all that much.
I said, "Let's keep it quick and simple. I suppose the world could always use a little more oxygen."
Sue shook her head. "Too dangerous. It would flow away from the source and follow the topography. I was considering water."
Shrugging, I said, "Works for me. We can turn the area into a deep lake, and this damned rock garden could sure as hell use one of those. The extra water will run off toward the desert."
I tried to envision the amount of water that might result from converting all that rock and dirt to water and couldn't, of course. A bunch. A big-assed flood. Sue continued with her idea.
"The process will have to be performed carefully to prevent inundating villages in the valleys. We also have to decide how much of the mountain range to convert."
Shrugging again, I said, "Just change however much seems about right." I used an index finger to trace a box surrounding the chunk of mountain on the screen. "Maybe like that. Nobody gave us exact specifications, so we'll just leave a very noticeable gap with a lake at the bottom and call it done."
Sue caused green lines to appear on the screen that firmed up my outline and straightened the sides of the box. She then made the contents of the box disappear and added a splash of water at the bottom.
"Like that?"
With a nod, I said, "Looks good to me, ma'am. You seem to have a handle on the situation, so I'll concentrate on getting the hostages out. How are we going to chase the survivors out of the bunker?"
Glancing sharply at me, Sue asked, "Survivors?"
I met her gaze and said, "That's what I plan to call the people who don't try to stop me."
Looking somewhat disturbed, Sue said, "My probes can find and stun everyone, Ed."
"Then we'd have to haul them all out, Sue, and there's no good reason to do that. They're terrorists and people who work with terrorists. When they realize something's going on downstairs, they'll come running. I plan to take out as many as possible while I have the opportunity."
In a flat tone, she insisted, "You don't have to kill them."
"Did they avoid killing when they blew up those cars? Do they blow themselves up to kill people in other countries? Do they have a laundry list a mile long of other ways they..."
Sue's ey
es seemed to turn hard. In a firm, insistent tone, she reiterated, "You don't have to kill them."
Standing up abruptly, Sue stalked to the rear of the flitter. How cute. Stalking away as punctuation was one of Selena's argument tricks, and Sue did it as well as Selena ever had.
I swiveled my seat to keep her glorious legs in sight as they flashed in the sunlight and she made a point of appearing to find something interesting about the ocean below.
Sipping coffee, I studied Sue from the ankles up and for perhaps the thousandth time silently thanked her for choosing so well in creating the form of her field manifestation.
Knowing she was monitoring my biostats, I continued to eyeball her. After some moments of this, she reversed herself completely without actually turning around and met my gaze.
"Sue," I said, "You're absolutely gorgeous."
"I'm well aware of that," she snapped. "What I don't know is how I can stop you from killing anyone in the bunker."
I sipped again and said quietly, "Without keeping me from going in, you probably can't. But think about this; there's really not a damned thing to stop you from handling this mission on your own, is there?"
"Is that what you want me to do?"
"I didn't say that, did I? I just want to know why you haven't decided to handle everything your way."
Canting her head, Sue answered, "If you'll recall, I was assigned to you, not you to me."
"Ah, yes. Was that as a temporary slave?"
Her gaze sharpened as she replied, "No, not as a slave."
"You're sure?"
"Yes."
"What would you call yourself, then? An indentured servant? A subordinate associate?"
"Either would probably do well enough. You're the one seeking a definition, so you come up with a label."
Shaking my head, I said, "Don't like any of 'em so far. You think of one. If it'll help you decide, make that an order."
Sue stiffened, then disappeared from the other end of the flitter and reappeared less than a foot from my face. Her anger was actually tangible; a strong static field surrounded her that pulled at my clothes and hair.
3rd World Products, Inc., Book 5 Page 5