One Jump Ahead-ARC Read online

  "Given my nature," Lobo said, still with no emotion in his voice, "trust would be the most efficient option."

  "You're right," I said. "I'll work on it."

  "Good," he said.

  This time, I could swear there was a note of petulance in Lobo's single-word response, and I found it both annoying and oddly reassuring.

  Night had settled in. The forest played a symphony that blended small animal sounds with the soft swishes of branches and leaves moving in the gentle breeze. The old light from distant stars brightened the sky, and for a moment I felt old myself, back again in a place I never sought but all too frequently found, in a jungle waiting to go into battle. I hadn't consciously intended to join this fight, at least not initially, when all I thought I was doing was rescuing a girl in trouble, but whatever my motivations had been, I had to accept that my own actions had led me to this point.

  I pushed aside those thoughts and focused on the plan. I could analyze the past all I wanted when this was over, but right now I needed to rest and make sure I could perform my role as well as Lobo was performing his. Whatever I did, the night would deepen, the time to go to work would come, and I'd either follow the plan or . . . or what? I couldn't even conceive of not trying to make this situation right, so there was no point in pretending to consider alternatives. Nor was there any value in punishing myself about what I might have done. I was here now.

  What I would do next was all that mattered, and what I would do next was rescue Jasmine and make this whole mess better—or die or get captured in the attempt. Regardless of how it all turned out, I knew that as surely as Lobo could not forget the coordinates of this pit, I could do nothing else but try my best to succeed.

  Chapter 28

  As I waited near the water for Lobo, I soaked in the magic of the night. Oceans transform under starlight and reveal their true power and mystery; daylight paints them as less than they are, as friendly and understandable creatures we humans might one day tame. The illusions of daytime vanished as I watched the black waves sprinting to shore and listened to them crash into the land. For a brief time, I felt I was comprehending at last the full extent of a gigantic alien beast, its shape and power normally beyond my ability to discern. Clouds covered Macken's moons and obscured almost all of the starlight, so the water undulated in darkness, bits of soft gray here and there marking the moving surface. I leaned against a tree barely a meter inside the forest line a couple klicks up the beach from my rental house and stared as if hypnotized at the ocean. For as far back as I can remember, oceans have held a special power over me, and I never tire of watching them.

  A pair of blinking red lights up the beach to my left interrupted my reverie. The lights approached at high speed and in a rapid forest-to-beach-to-forest pattern, as if running toward the water, finding it too scary, and jumping back to the trees, over and over. Under the sound of the ocean I heard the low roar of Lobo skimming with baffled jets along the sand.

  "I see you," I said. "ETA?"

  "Ten seconds."

  "Ready."

  Lobo cut the running lights as he pulled beside my position and opened a portal. I ran in, and he closed the door and headed back the way he'd come.

  "Surveillance?" I said.

  "Nothing from the sats," Lobo said, "because Kelco doesn't yet have monitoring rights to the planet."

  I realized I'd been wrong when I'd told Barnes that delaying the Kelco contract for a month would do no good: The FC had taken advantage of the delay to limit Kelco's satellite surveillance capabilities, and those limits were now helping me.

  "The house, though, is another story," Lobo said. "Security personnel and portable sentries are monitoring its perimeter and exchanging reports on randomly changing frequencies with more encryption than we have time to break."

  "Anything different on the ocean side?"

  "No," Lobo said.

  We ran about twenty klicks up the beach and shot across the water, flying low enough that waves were splashing Lobo's hull. Without sat coverage, we should be invisible to Kelco. "Show me," I said.

  Lobo opened a display with a map of the shoreline and the ocean, the house at the shore's center. A wavy but roughly semicircular line with the house at its center and a radius of a little over fifteen thousand meters stretched from the shore on either side of the house into the ocean. The semicircle contained hundreds of red and purple dots. The red dots marked sensors from which Lobo or his sat friend had detected transmissions; the purple ones denoted intelligent mobile mines working in a redundant grid to stay roughly in line despite the ocean currents.

  "The sensors' transmission intervals have shortened," Lobo said, "so they've definitely tightened their security."

  "As we expected," I said. "Lim and Earl?"

  "Both have checked in and are moving into position per the plan."

  I inspected Bob's tank. He swam back and forth, with no more apparent concern for the future than when the Strange Kitty team had delivered him. They'd again proven to be professional in all areas: The new tanks on either side of his head matched his body perfectly.

  "It's our turn," I said. "Give me ten minutes to change and check the gear, then take us to the drop point."

  "One minute to drop," Lobo said.

  Though the combat dive suit was as flexible and thin as modern technology could manage while offering some minimal armoring, it was still warmer than I'd have preferred for land work. It covered me completely, a tight mottled black and gray shroud that blended perfectly with the nighttime water and provided reasonable camouflage on land as long as I stayed to the shadows. My eyes and the skin around them were visible when I lessened the tinting on the built-in mask, but I could run with it almost totally black and use the mask's night- and IR-vision facilities to navigate. The suit and mask sacrificed some processing power for thinness and the ability to function underwater, but not much; it maintained a full comm link with Lobo, and all I needed of the mission profile resided in the suit's local storage. The small air-processing tubes and the backup tanks were also built into the suit, the air-processors running on either side of my neck and the tanks along my back, so I presented as little water resistance as possible. Some drag was, of course, unavoidable, because I bulged from the dive weights and the waterproof cases holding the weapons: the rifle on my back, the pistols strapped to my legs, and the knives belted to my calves. Carrying the extra weight would slow me, but only a little, and I was happy to pay the minimal speed penalty to have them. The remote for Bob was so small I didn't count it.

  "Five seconds," Lobo said. "Opening."

  A hatch slid aside in front of me, and I jumped feet-first into the darkness. I hit the water almost immediately; Lobo had flown as low as I could have wanted. I treaded water, fighting the dive weight I'd later jettison, and watched with night vision as Lobo, the side door already closed, rolled upside down. A hatch opened in his top; then the lid of Bob's tank slid back, and Bob fell a meter or so into the ocean. Lobo's hatch closed, and he accelerated away from me, righting as he went.

  I gave Bob thirty seconds to acclimate himself to the Macken ocean and stretch out, then summoned him. He'd run farther than I'd expected; it took him over twenty seconds to reach me. He bumped my feet gently, then went a bit deeper and circled my position lazily, the blue lines on his back giving the impression of a small school of fish swimming slowly beneath me.

  I dove to Bob and grabbed the rider handles hanging on cables from the mounts on his back. With the handles I directed him down to about three meters and oriented us toward the midpoint of the Kelco house's security arc. After making sure my grip was secure, I used the remote to tell Bob to go.

  True to his racing training, Bob shot forward quickly and accelerated for several seconds before he settled into a pace far faster than any human could swim without assistance. With IR-detection cranked way up I watched his powerful wings flap in the water. Riding above and slightly behind him, seeing his wings work and feeling the rush of the
ocean against my body as we sped through it, I realized I was smiling and having a wonderful time, all the cares of the mission washing away for a few seconds in which I was flying, in the water but still flying, the primal rush of moving at high speed joining with the inevitable juice you get when you move fast in darkness. It was an absolutely wonderful experience. I understood the appeal of ray racing now; maybe I'd try it again if all of this went well.

  We came to a section of the reef that paralleled the coastline on most of this side of the continent, and the ocean burst into life below us. With IR I saw fish in all directions, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, sea creatures of so many different sizes and shapes I couldn't even begin to log the varieties, all schooling through rock and coral and plants large and small. If I switched to the normal light spectrum, most of the fish disappeared, but here and there schools of glowing bodies moved in the watery darkness like light beams magically slowed in space and available for close inspection, almost but not quite within reach. I alternated the views a few times, then settled on IR as we passed over and beyond the reef, the life below us rapidly thinning and then vanishing. The only creatures visible now were the occasional larger fish keeping to the depths, eager to stay away from the huge intruder speeding above them.

  An alarm chimed as we drew within fifty meters of the nearest of the Kelco sensors, and a representation of this section of the sensor line appeared in my display. From the data Lobo was able to gather about the sensors and the information Gustafson had provided us about current milspec tech, we estimated the upper limit of the effective sensor range to be thirty or so meters. Past that, they'd be able to discern at most movement and provide at best some rough IR images. None of that data should cause me any trouble, because Bob's profile and my position relative to him created the impression of a very large sea creature or at least something odd—but nothing that resembled an attack team or ship.

  I stopped Bob at about forty meters out and used the breather's exhaust to let some saliva into the water. I set the nanomachines in the saliva to the task of replicating from the water for a little over a minute, then sent the new mass toward the sensors. Unless we'd misinterpreted the data badly, the sensors were maintaining their approximate relative positions via tiny water jets and making gentle coordinate adjustments as necessary based on data from others in the communicating grid. I'd instructed the nanomachines to disassemble and repurpose anything metal they touched, then use the resulting larger mass to dispatch more swarms left and right in search of additional metal. I'd given them instructions to disassemble as much as possible themselves and stop operation after fifteen minutes, more than enough time for them to do what I wanted.

  I turned Bob left and started him moving in slow, easy circles about ten meters in diameter, just another large fish out for a swim. If the Kelco security team monitoring the sensors spotted us, they'd at least have to wonder why we were taking our time in the water, swimming to and fro with no apparent destination.

  In my display the sensor closest to me vanished, leaving a break in Kelco's security line; the nanomachines had reached it and done their job. I kept Bob moving in the same pattern but now risked a call to Lobo. "Confirm sensor loss," I said. I needed to make sure the data my suit provided was reliable and not hacked or fed to me by Kelco.

  "Confirmed," Lobo said, his voice clear on the encrypted channel. "Continue holding."

  The last bit was our backup protocol; if Lobo hadn't added it, I would have known someone else had compromised the communication. The technique is simple and ancient, but sometimes an old method is the right way to go.

  Two more sensors and a pair of mines winked out in my display. The hole in the Kelco line was now almost forty meters wide. The lost sensors would definitely grab Kelco's attention. I changed Bob's course so we angled toward the sensor-free area. The route kept us more than thirty meters away from both of the two nearest sensors as we slowly drew closer to where some of the disassembled devices had floated only moments before.

  Two more sensors and multiple mines disappeared from my display. The hole was now almost sixty meters wide. The edges of the line now extended past the range of my suit's sensors, so I had to risk getting live data from Lobo. I opened my comm link. "Lobo," I said, "switch to feeds."

  The first one—a complete image of the line with the size of the hole indicated on the display—appeared a few seconds later. We'd agreed that Lobo would send me updates on a quasi-random basis centered on a ten-second update interval. To confuse matters further, he emitted a wide-beam broadcast that swept over a three-hundred-meter-wide area.

  My display flashed a new update: the hole in the sensor line measured over eighty meters wide.

  "Lobo," I said, "what can you read around the house?" Kelco had shielded the house so it yielded little to remote visual or IR probes, but we could still check the surrounding area and, of course, monitor the level of transmission activity; we'd already learned that the place served as a communications hub for Slake.

  "Additional people have left the house and deployed to various locations along the water and around the perimeter of the grounds," he said. As he spoke, an aerial IR view of the place appeared on my display. A couple dozen red dots spread around the building. A large red splotch sat in the middle of the landing facility. "Transmission levels between the sensors and the house have increased. They know something's up and are trying to learn what. I see no transmissions in your area at this time."

  "What's the ship in the landing area?" I said.

  "The IR signature is inconclusive," Lobo said, "as are the visible-frequency images the sat has provided. The available data suggests a midsize corporate near-space fighter, probably four times my size and significantly more heavily armed and shielded than I. Whatever it is, it appears to be squatting hot, ready to run."

  From what I'd seen on Wharf I had reason to believe Vaccaro had managed to keep Slake off-site. The ship could be for his security team to use for air defense, or it could be an escape vehicle. Either way, it wasn't a factor we'd anticipated. Fortunately, the ship's size and Lobo's guess suggested it wasn't built for air-to-ground work, so as long as they didn't use it to take away Jasmine, it shouldn't cause us any problems. "How many people are stationed near the ship?" I asked.

  "None we can spot with the available imaging," Lobo said.

  "The rest of the team will have to watch it," I said.

  "Already warned," Lobo said.

  I had no more questions. I felt a rush of adrenaline as I realized we were done with the preliminaries. It was time to go in.

  I steered Bob to the center of the sensor hole on my display. From here on, speed of approach was vital, because if I gave Slake's men time they'd train monitoring gear on this area and get a solid fix on me. With Bob's remote I checked the booster tanks; both showed operational. According to the Strange Kitty trainer who'd shown me how to use them, the tanks were the latest in racing ray speed mods. They coupled a rapid increase in blood oxygen levels in Bob—courtesy of a blend of nitrogen, oxygen, and some nerve-friendly trace chemicals they injected into his bloodstream—with direct electrical stimulation of Bob's neural system. The result was supposed to be a great increase in speed at minimal cost to Bob's health, as long as I didn't keep it running for more than a few minutes.

  As we headed toward shore, I activated the booster tanks. Nothing happened for several seconds; then Bob's wings picked up speed and we accelerated. The force of the water against my face was strong enough even through the suit's mask that I turned my head downward to avoid the impact. Staring at the muscles in Bob's back in IR I saw the effect of the additional exertion as we shot through the water toward the house. That was all I could see. The sheer speed of our passage combined with the almost complete lack of any visible input to turn this into a joyride of such raw intensity that I whooped loudly and repeatedly inside my mask. I couldn't recall the last time a mission had included anything that was as much fun as riding with Bob. Most of my
mind knew I was headed into a dangerous situation, and the primitive part of me had responded with a liberal injection of adrenaline. At the same time, some of those very same primitive parts were both scared by and greatly enjoying the sheer speed at which we hurtled through the dark water. The combination of all these sensations was heady, and for two minutes I gave myself over to it and simply held on for the ride.