Overthrowing Heaven-ARC Page 17

  I felt as if I were in a sanctuary.

  "Would you like some tea?" Matahi's voice was soft and low, and when I glanced at her she was gazing slightly downward.

  I kept to the truth. "No, not now, but thank you." My reply came out as quiet as her question.

  "Would you perhaps like to return here with me at some point?" she said, still not looking directly into my eyes.

  "I might," I said, though I wasn't sure why. The simple space somehow demanded reverence and care, but in turn it granted calm. I didn't understand why I felt so good being in it, but I definitely did.

  "Then perhaps we shall." She indicated the doorway behind me with the barest nod of her head.

  I stepped out.

  She followed, shut the room behind her, and put on her shoes. When I did the same, she opened the exterior door and once again nodded almost imperceptibly.

  Only when we were both out in the hallway and she'd shut the door did she look directly at me.

  "You felt it," she said, half statement and half question.

  "I think so," I said, "though I'm not quite sure what it was that I felt."

  She shrugged. "I can't precisely explain it. All I can say is that for those people for whom the tea room works, it works very strongly."

  "And the other rooms?"

  "Each appeals to its intended audience, as you'd expect. Most, though, are more directly focused on obvious client needs than this one." She pointed to the wall at the hall's end. "Shall we proceed?"

  A door opened in it to reveal another staircase, the twin of the one we'd used previously. I followed her up it. She stopped at the third-floor landing to show me another long hallway of carpeted floors and plain walls broken only by dark doors. The fourth floor was the same. It was also the end of the line for the stairwell.

  "Why doesn't this go the rest of the way?" I said.

  "Partly for security," she said, "and partly because I rarely share the roof with anyone else."

  I shouldn't have pushed the issue, but curiosity got the best of me. "Why are you willing to let me go there?"

  "You asked," she said. She started down the hall, and I again went after her. "It's also part of what you need." She stopped a few meters short of the other stairwell and turned toward the wall on our left. A door opened to reveal a very small elevator. "After you."

  I went inside and leaned against the rear wall. After she joined me, the door wouldn't slide shut until she stood so close we were touching. Her scent flooded the small area, and I couldn't help but react to her. I couldn't tell how much of the effect was something the elevator caused and how much came from my own desires. I closed my eyes as we slowly rose.

  "Is it always so slow?" I said.

  "Security. Multiple layers of armor have to move to make way for the entire cage to rise above the roof. Check out my building from above—as I'm sure you will after this visit—and you won't be able to spot the elevator shaft." She turned her upper body toward me as much as she could, smiled, and said, "Is the ride so bad?"

  My face felt warm, and I looked away. "No," I said. "That's not it. It's just that—"

  The door opened and she finished my sentence, not precisely correctly but close enough. "You were feeling a bit uncomfortable." She smiled. "That's fine. We're here."

  The sound of running water greeted us. The elevator stood level with a lush green yard. As I stepped out, I glanced behind me; atop the cage four thin metal beams held aloft a rectangle of grass. Scattered around the roof were half a dozen small trees, none more than three meters tall, each bare of lower branches but possessing a thick canopy. An off-white, stone, waterfall fountain, the source of the sound, stood halfway across the space from us, water pouring from above into a bowl that resembled a lagoon seen from a ship on its way to orbit.

  Matahi walked over to the fountain, dragged a hand through the water, and then faced me.

  "When you jump," she said, "do you still love the experience? The stars, the void, the gates, all of it?"

  "Yes," I said, thinking of how much each jump still moved me. "Every time."

  She dropped to her knees as if suddenly reeled in by an unseen fisherman, her movements quick and graceful, then stretched out on her back on the grass. She patted the ground to her right.

  I joined her. We lay like that for several minutes, not speaking, simply staring at the sky.

  "I have you," Lobo said over the comm. "I waited for you to signal me, but when you didn't, even though I assume you're in no danger, I felt we should check in. What are you doing?"

  I ignored him. "What's next?" I said to Matahi.

  She rolled on her side to face me. "We enjoy this time a bit more, and then you leave. If you decide to see me again, we'll work on figuring out what you want." She draped her arm across my chest and moved closer to me. "One of us might as well understand it, don't you think?"

  My heart pounded. I couldn't decide whether I was feeling attraction or lust or confusion or all of those or something else entirely. I nodded unconsciously.

  "Good," she said. "I look forward to it."

  "I hate to interrupt your tender moment," Lobo said, "but how does this help us get Wei and save any of the surviving captured children?"

  He was right. I wasn't here for me. I had a job, and I'd learned as much from Matahi as I would today. The image of Pri crying in the marketplace as she stared at the boys slammed into me. I didn't believe her son—Joachim, I would make myself use his name—was still alive, but I had to hope he was and try to save him.

  She sat up. "It's already over, isn't it?" She stood. "I don't know what you were thinking, but everything about you changed. I'll show you out. You let me know if you want to meet again."

  As I got up, I stared at her and felt suddenly guilty, as the potential damage of my necessary deception struck me again. Unless I found another way to snatch Wei, I would have to return, but that visit would be nothing like this one, and after it she would never want to see me again. Only then did I realize how very much I hoped to have the opportunity to spend more time with her. Nothing in my experience suggested this would work out, but I could hope.

  "I will," I said to her, meaning it.

  Then I pushed aside my desire and focused instead on how I'd break into this place if it came to that, if I had to trash her home to do my job. She didn't deserve it, she'd done nothing wrong, and I liked her, I liked her very much, and yet I knew that if the only path to my goal went through here, then I'd take that path, no matter what the cost.

  I didn't like myself very much just then, and so I left as quickly as I could and headed back to Lobo and a colder, more familiar place.

  Chapter 23

  Darkness owned the sky as well as my heart by the time I reached Lobo. I'd taken my time, wandering through the streets, walking down switchbacks and dead ends and finally turning off the comm so Lobo couldn't keep correcting my course, but I still hadn't sorted out my feelings. I stopped on the edge of the facility where Lobo awaited me, stared at the stars above as if they could beam me answers, and then headed to Lobo.

  The moment the door closed, both of them were on me.

  "Why did you turn off the comm?" Lobo said.

  "What happened," Pri said, "and why were you gone so long?"

  I stared at Pri and couldn't speak. I closed my eyes and stood there, vibrating with repressed energy. I wanted to turn and leave, or to yell at them, or to retreat to my quarters. Couldn't I have something private, maybe a little time to digest my visit with Matahi?

  No. Of course I couldn't. I was on a mission, they were my partners, and I owed them data.

  "I needed time to think," I said, "and I trusted you'd use the secondary comm if something went wrong, so I turned off the primary." I opened my eyes and looked at Pri. "Matahi accepted my gift and decided to take me as a client. Her first sessions are long, and to support my cover I had to behave as a client would."

  "So you had sex with her for our collective good?" Pri said. "
That's one I haven't heard before."

  "What?" I said. "What are you talking about?"

  "You said you had to maintain your cover," she said. "That's what she does with her clients."

  I tilted my head and shook it slightly in confusion. "That's not all she does with her clients," I said, "or, at least, it's not what she did with me. We toured her house, which gave me useful mission data, and we talked. That's it."

  "All you did was talk?" Pri and Lobo said in unison.

  "And take a tour of the house," I said.

  Over the machine frequency, Lobo said, "Remind me to give you some basic pointers when we can talk privately. You seem to be lacking some fundamental human knowledge."

  Pri continued to stare at me.

  "What she does with each client is different," I said, "and tuned to that client's specific needs. I found the entire arrangement confusing, and I had to focus on gathering as much recon data as possible, so she read that as me being unsure of what I wanted. So, we talked." I didn't feel it wise to add that I truly could not decide what I would like from Matahi.

  "What did you want to do?" Pri said.

  "Enough!" I said. First she lures me into this mess, then she turns into an inquisitor? I couldn't even begin to keep up with what was happening with Pri, but one thing was certain: I'd had all I could take. "I had a goal: To learn her house's location and gather as much information about it as possible so we could snatch Wei from it if we got the chance. I accomplished that goal. Now, do you want to focus on our job and let me review that data, or do you want to continue to attack me?"

  "As best we can tell from our surveillance passes," Lobo said, "Wei is still on the island. We haven't heard anything to the contrary from Pri's colleagues, and there's been no action on your job application. I can't imagine the data review will take much time," he paused for two seconds, "so I'm for continuing to attack you. Just watching you and Pri interact is the most fun I've had all day."

  What a jerk. Distinguishing between sarcasm and genuine cruelty with him was getting harder and harder.

  Before I could respond, Pri stepped next to me, put her hand on my shoulder, and said, "I'm sorry. I had no right to push you, and I understand that I haven't yet earned your trust. More importantly, though, you're right that I lost focus. Please go over what you learned."

  "Oh, fine," Lobo said. "Who wants to have fun when we can work?"

  I ignored him, took a deep breath, and nodded my agreement to Pri's request. We walked up to the pilot's area. "Lobo," I said, "Do you have the exterior measurements from tracking me?"

  "There's no need to be insulting," he said. "A little sarcasm, and suddenly you question my competence. Of course I do. I have a complete holo ready to go."

  "Wait," I said. "Matahi owns the building to her left as well as the one I entered. More precisely, her building encompasses the space of both; the facades simply make it appear as if there are two buildings."

  "I've adjusted the plans," Lobo said, "from the footage I gathered of the surrounding buildings." After a second, he added, "As any competent system would."

  "I never doubted you," I said, trying to make peace and move on, "which is why all I did was supply the information you couldn't possibly possess otherwise."

  The holo image of the two buildings appeared between Pri and me. The roof featured miniatures of all the bits I had seen, including the elevator cage.

  "Let's start with the first floor," I said, "and work our way up, which is what I did on my tour."

  A blank section of the building separated itself from the rest and floated to a position to the right of the main holo.

  I pointed at the door through which I'd entered. "She took me in here."

  We went to work.

  "Wei is on the move," said the same man Pri had contacted earlier. He began without preamble, the moment the display snapped into view. "Three vehicles. All appear to be ground-level skimmers. We assume he's going to see Matahi; he doesn't seem to leave the island for anything else."

  I stood out of his visual range. Pri glanced at me, and I mouthed, "His route?"

  After a night in the safety of orbit, we'd spent the morning on our usual recon runs of the island's perimeter, so we should be close to any path he'd take out of there.

  "How much do you know about his route?" she said.

  A map with a red dot on a short yellow line appeared beside the man's image. "Here's where Wei's convoy has gone so far. He started out headed away from the city, then turned onto back roads, so our guess is that he'll follow this route." A blue line extended from the yellow, meandered through a forest, then switched gradually toward the city.

  "That projection seems reasonable to me," Lobo said over the machine frequency. "Based on typical ground speeds, the good news is it's about as slow a route as we could hope for. The bad news is, he'll be out in the wild for less than an hour."

  "Can you snatch him?" the man asked Pri.

  "Muting," Lobo said aloud.

  Pri looked again at me.

  "Given a windows that narrow," I said, "it's extremely unlikely. I don't think we should try, because if we fail we may scare him into hiding. What we can usefully do is see if we can learn a little about his team while not spooking them." I considered the issue a few seconds longer. "Tell your guy we can't, but they should still stay away from Wei because we'll use this chance to gather some information on our possible future options."

  She leaned away from the display so the man wouldn't see her talk to me. "They'll hate that," she said. "They want action."

  "Tough," I said. "We're wasting precious time. Relay my message, and end this call with them. Lobo, find a spot in the forested section of the road where you can drop me."

  "Moving to it now," Lobo said.

  Pri stared at me for a few seconds, then leaned back so she was on camera.

  "Audio re-engaging now," Lobo said.

  "We can't do it," Pri said. "Not enough time to plan, and not enough data."

  "How much warning do you want?" the man yelled. "We gave you all we could. You know there are three vehicles, and you know the route. Do your job, and try to take him."

  Her discomfort was obvious, but I had to give her credit: She didn't falter under pressure. "I don't make the decisions. We hired a pro, and we're following his commands. Right now, we're going to gather data. I have to sign off."

  "No," the man said. "We need to talk about this."

  "Not now," Pri said. "We—"

  Lobo cut the comm before she could say more.

  "What did you do that for?" she said. "Now, he'll be furious at me."

  "He was already angry," Lobo said, "and you were right: We're following Jon's orders. We're almost at the drop-off point I chose. It's heavily forested, and at least according to the surveillance sat friends I've made, nothing in the sky is monitoring it."

  I didn't always like Lobo's attitude, but I often agreed with what it caused him to do, and I sure couldn't fault his research. "How long before Wei reaches this point?" I said.

  "Twenty-one minutes from when I touch down," Lobo said, "in ninety seconds."

  "I need a thermal camo cover, a trank rifle, and ammo for it." I ran down the hall past the med room and into the small area where Lobo kept the handheld weapons.

  "What are we going to do?" Pri said.

  "You and Lobo are going to fly ten klicks further down this route and stay just above the trees," I said. "I'm going to see how his convoy team behaves."

  "We have another potential complication," Lobo said.

  "What?" I said.

  "I enlarged the search area and detected over a hundred children and about twenty adults on what appears to be some sort of group trip in a cleared area less than a kilometer away from where I'm dropping you."

  Great. We'd have to monitor them as well, because I couldn't have a class or youth group wander into the middle of any kind of action. "Should we move further down the highway?" I said.

  "No," Lo
bo said, "because we'd then be dangerously close to some clusters of buildings that line the road. A better option would be to hit them hard right here and then leave quickly."

  "Negative," I said. A wall panel slid aside. I grabbed the rifle and the camo blanket. "You might kill Wei. We don't know what kind of backup is trailing them, which matters because we're in the middle of nowhere and so they could easily attack hard and in numbers. Plus, we can't be sure how long it would take, and if the conflict were to go on for more than a few minutes, the noise could attract some of those children or their chaperones."

  "Shouldn't the adults in that group go the other way if they hear shots or explosions?" Lobo said.

  "Yes," I said, "but that doesn't mean they'll all act sensibly."

  "The very fact that no one else is in the area means we could attack the convoy fast and heavy," Lobo said, "and thus finish before any visitors could arrive."

  "Yes, we could hit them hard," I said, "but then we'd end up putting Wei at risk, which we can't afford to do, and killing people, which I'd prefer to avoid. Plus, if they're broadcasting status video back home, as I'd expect a good team would, any attack would give away your identity, so we'd have to leave the planet immediately. Otherwise, once they know you're involved, with Wei's friends in the government we might not make it safely off this world. The day we let them see you, we have to plan to run permanently and have our escape route already in place."

  "Fair points," Lobo said. "And we're there. I have to point out, though, that eventually any attempt on our part to kidnap Wei will result in collateral damage."

  A side hatch opened to reveal a road cool from the shade of the overhanging trees that lined both of its sides. A small opening above us was one of the few breaks in the coverage.

  "I know," I said, "but I want to minimize as much as possible the number of people we hurt and try hard to avoid fatalities. A full firefight practically guarantees some deaths. No, I'm sticking to recon now." I hopped out. "Wait ten klicks down the road. I'll call when I'm done."