One Jump Ahead-ARC Read online

  Data feeds from Lobo continued to refresh my display as we approached the house. A flashing note indicated we were five hundred meters from the shore, and a course-correction alarm almost immediately joined it in the display. Lobo had plotted a path as far down the coast as we could go and still stay out of the range of the sensors my nanomachines hadn't disassembled. I steered Bob onto the new course, and we sped onward. I aimed for roughly where the line of trees separating the house and the landing area would intersect the water if the trees had grown down to the ocean's edge. The joy I'd taken in the speed of the ride faded as we drew closer to the moment at which I'd have to leave the water.

  A hundred meters from shore I slowed Bob. We came to a full stop about sixty meters out. Even with the high tide we'd counted on to reduce the distance from the water's edge to the house, the ocean was shallow enough here that we stayed as close to the bottom as Bob could manage. I steered him in a small oval pattern with its long side parallel to the beach. The glowing lines on his back would be visible to anyone very near us, but I hoped they wouldn't show to observers on the shore. If they did, I wanted his movements to resemble those of a small school of fish playing in the nighttime water.

  I let go of the handles and slid off Bob. For an instant he stayed still, either trained to wait for his rider or surprised not to be carrying a load any longer. I used the remote to hit him again with a tiny shot of the stimulant. A couple of seconds later, he jetted sideways along the shore and then turned out to sea, picking up speed rapidly. He raced out of view of both IR and visible light scans in less than ten seconds. If everything worked out well, we'd retrieve Bob later and return him to Lankin; Strange Kitty would take him back, though my salesman had hastened to add that there'd be no refunds. If the mission went nonlinear, then Bob would at least get to while away the rest of his days in the ocean here on Macken, a much better fate than the rest of us would have suffered.

  I swam to shore, staying under the ocean's surface as long as I could, until the sandy bottom pressed my back out of the water. I raised my head and looked around. The nearest Kelco guards were at least forty meters down the shore. Even with the suit's shielding and the cooling water around me, I'd show up on any IR scan that covered my position, so I wouldn't be alone for long. I unsheathed the rifle on my back and rose to a crouch. Despite the suppressor on it, the rifle would make enough noise that the guards would hear it, but that shouldn't matter if I focused their attention properly. I sighted on a spot along the shore about sixty meters to my right and fired. The grenade shell exploded in the sand almost instantly, a massive burst of light and sound that illuminated the beach all around it and drew shouts from guards. I stood and rapidly fired four more times down the beach, placing each round five or so meters past the previous one. A line of blazing light now made that section of beach brighter than a cloudless summer day. Guards converged on the burning rounds from multiple directions.

  I dropped the rifle and sprinted for the cover of the trees that separated the house and the landing area. Any members of the security team who looked my way as I ran would see me, but I couldn't help that; I had to hope the rounds would buy me the seconds I needed.

  I reached the trees and stood behind one, forcing myself to slow my breathing. I peeked around the edge of the tree and checked the house. I had a clear line of approach with no guards in sight. Lights mounted on the edge of the building's roof bathed the area in a pale white light. The ground was an uneven mass of soft earth, with only the occasional scrub bush dotting the expanse of dirt; neither the landlord nor Kelco had gotten around to planting the area. I didn't have the time to take out the lights, so after a quick check showed the beach guards were still occupied, I sprinted for the house.

  Before I'd made it halfway there, the ground in front of me shook and six guards in low-thermal-signature combat suits sprang to their feet. Covered completely in black, even to their black hoods and tinted displays, the soldiers resembled wraiths that had clawed their way back from the underworld to seek revenge on the planet they'd been forced to depart. Each pointed a rifle of some sort at me. The weapons were black and draped with black cloth, so I couldn't make out what they were. They knew what they were doing. No one was in anyone else's line of fire. No one's weapon wavered. I stopped as quickly as I could and raised my hands in the air.

  They had me.

  So far, so good.

  All I had to do was hope I'd correctly interpreted Kelco's attack on my rental house and they really did want me alive.

  Chapter 29

  As much as I'd realized the Kelco security team would capture me, as much as I'd needed it for the plan to work, and as much as I'd visualized this moment, the reality of standing alone in front of a squad of armed troops and doing nothing was much more intense and upsetting than I'd expected. In the past, I've fought more than my share of battles with bad odds, but I've always been doing just that: fighting. I've always worked to secure the best position, hamper the opposition, do whatever I could to assure my side would win. I've never offered myself as defenseless bait, and even though doing so was part of a plan I'd crafted, I didn't like it.

  No one spoke, and no one moved. Time slowed, as it always did in situations in which one misstep could prove fatal. Each little movement carried the weight of enormous potential significance. I focused as hard as I could on paying attention and not missing anything. A guard in the center nodded his head first left and then right. The two on either end of the group fanned wide and moved slowly behind me. Each kept his weapon trained on me, and each stayed out of the other's line of fire. They walked well behind me, past where I could see them any longer, and then I heard them approach. Hands gripped each of my arms and wrenched them behind me, straining my shoulders. I felt a tie snap around each wrist. One guard moved beside me on my left, where I could see a tiny bit of the side of him in my peripheral vision. He grabbed the back of my neck with one hand and held a knife to the front of my throat with the other. The second patted me down from behind, working slowly and systematically and missing nothing. In about a minute I was weaponless, and both guards were behind me. Simultaneous kicks in the back of my knees knocked me flat on my face. I tried to fall only to my knees, but the kicks were too hard. They pulled me up so I was kneeling. One grabbed the top of my head; the other cut my suit at the neck and ripped off the headpiece.

  Without the suit's night-vision amplification the world I stared into was much darker than it'd been a moment before, so I shut my eyes for a few seconds to acclimate to the lower light. I could switch to IR on my own, but I'd lose so much of the nuances of the situation that I preferred to work with what I could see in the minimal available normal light.

  With the mask and comm unit gone, I'd lost my two-way link with Lobo. Hundreds of strands of microtransmitters laced my Saw combat suit, so theoretically Lobo should be able to monitor the whole situation as long as I was wearing even a ten-centimeter-long strip of the garment. I hoped the theory held.

  The two troops on either end of the four in front of me fanned out further, their weapons still aimed at me. The two who remained in the center motioned me to follow them and backed slowly to the side of the house. The blazing grenades I'd launched earlier finally fizzled out, and all but one of the lights on the side of the house winked off. Their thinking was obvious: If anyone later asked what had happened, they'd answer that they'd suffered a false alarm, fired a few rounds, and resumed their normal routines. The guards in front of me backed all the way to the house and then moved carefully to their right, until they stood at the edge of the area the remaining roof-mounted light illuminated. They motioned me to stop and rapped on the wall outside the lit area. A door opened. The guards who'd been leading me stepped to either side of it. They motioned me to follow, then backed into the house in single file, one crouching and the other standing, both keeping their weapons trained on me.

  I was vaguely pleased at the star treatment they were giving me, because it confirmed my beli
ef that Kelco still very much wanted to know how I'd rescued Jasmine and escaped from Floordin with Lobo's weapons control system. Of course, the care they were taking also meant they could shoot me many times before I could mount any kind of attack at all, so I walked slowly and carefully and did my best to broadcast complete cooperation and surrender.

  We proceeded this way up a short flight of stairs and emerged into a large kitchen. The lighting was so bright that after the time outside I had to squeeze my eyes nearly shut to deal with the glare. I opened them slowly as they adjusted. As I did so I realized much of the brightness came from light reflecting off the wood that composed the floors, walls, and cabinets, a wood so nearly white I'd have taken it to be some sort of composite were it not for the beautiful, ethereally blue grain running through all of it. Two doors on either end of the wall opposite me led elsewhere in the house. Judging from where we'd entered the building, the kitchen was a couple of rooms behind the foyer in which I'd given Jasmine to Slake. Beyond that guess, however, I had no clue as to where I was.

  The two guards in front of me held up their hands. I stopped. The two behind me moved so quietly that even though I was listening for them I could barely hear them step closer. Another pair of kicks to my knees sent me to the floor again, and this time the fall hurt, even though I curled my shoulders forward to absorb some of the impact and lifted my head to keep it from banging into the floor. A hand from behind me grabbed my head, fingers digging into my forehead, and pulled me to my knees. I wanted to shake my head to clear away the little shocks of pain running through my skull, but the hand held me steady. Resisting it seemed a bad idea.

  The door on the right end of the wall in front of me opened, and a man walked in.

  "Mr. Moore," the man said, "I'm pleased we'll get to continue our discussion."

  Though he obviously knew me, I didn't recognize him at first. He gave me time, apparently in no hurry to proceed. His short blond hair and willowy frame struck me as familiar, but the black combat suit was the same one the others wore and so added no information. Something was missing. I finally realized what it was: the moving Kelco tattoos he'd been wearing when I met him.

  "Amendos," I said. "Are you still auditing Slake? If so, Kelco maintains much stricter financial controls than I'd ever have guessed."

  It was his turn to look confused, but only for a second. He smiled, shook his head, and said, "Not that conversation. I'm talking about the one aboard the satellite, the one you somehow interrupted a few days ago."

  "Of course," I said. Of course I should have known that anyone Slake ordered to get information from me wouldn't give up merely because I didn't satisfy his curiosity the first time.

  "We can save a lot of time and pain, Mr. Moore, Jon"—he smiled as he used my name—"if you'll answer my questions without any additional motivation. You've experienced a few steps of the interrogation process, but I assure you there are many, many options we've yet to explore. You know you'll answer me eventually, so why not now?"

  I couldn't afford for everyone monitoring and recording Lobo's transmission relays to wonder about Osterlad and Johns and how I rescued Jasmine, because otherwise some listener might end up asking the same questions as Amendos. Chung and Xychek were on my side now, but I had no reason to believe they'd stay that way. I've often wondered if I should be more trusting when it comes to people, but with corporations and governments I never have such doubts. You can't trust them for any longer than the brief periods of time when their interests and yours are in perfect alignment, and even those times are almost always shorter than you expected.

  "Not now," I said. "Not ever. Where's Jasmine?"

  He pulled a tiny pistol from a pocket in his pants and motioned to the right with his head. The hand holding my head pulled it hard to the left as another hand pressed down on my right shoulder, exposing my neck fully to Amendos.

  "You can choose not to answer me now," he said, "but we both know you'll answer eventually. In fact, I think we'll take your hint to speed the process and involve Jasmine in your interrogation." He raised the pistol, took a step closer, and aimed. "You'll see her in a few hours, after you wake up."

  He fired. The pain in my neck faded as I lost consciousness.

  I couldn't have been out for even a minute, because when I awoke two men were carrying me, one with his arms under my shoulders and the other lifting me at the knees. Most security forces stock and employ a very limited number of sedative weapons, because for each trank type you use you also have to keep on hand an antidote; rounds of all types go wild during fights. Kelco had stayed with what had worked previously, and the combination of the antidote the Saw lab had prepared for me and the action of the now-prepared nanomachines in my body had cleared my head quickly. I kept my eyes shut and my breathing shallow. If I let them know the trank had failed, I had no doubt they would use another of the many options they almost certainly maintained. Those options would be either ones for which I was not prepared or, worse, deadly. They banged my head into a wall as they turned a corner, and I fought to keep from showing any reaction.

  "Watch it," one said.

  "Why?" said the other. "He's going to get a lot worse soon."

  "Do you want to explain to the boss why you accidentally broke the guy's neck?"

  "Good point."

  We reached level ground, went straight for at least fifteen paces, turned right, and walked another ten or more paces; counting the footfalls with my eyes shut was more difficult than I'd have guessed. Because I'd been unconscious for an unknown amount of time, I wasn't sure where I was, though a basement under the house seemed a pretty safe bet. I heard a door open, and we turned. They placed me on a slightly giving surface, pushed my back against a wall, and wrapped a tight enclosure around each of my ankles.

  "Do we have to stay?" one of the voices said.

  "Nah," the other answered. "Like Amendos said, he'll be out for hours. Let's go report we're done, see if we can get off for the rest of the night, and grab some sleep."

  I heard steps, a metallic thump, and more steps. When the area stayed quiet for several seconds, I counted off a minute, just to be safe, and opened my eyes enough to peek through my eyelashes. They were bound to be monitoring me, so with luck I'd still appear to be unconscious.

  I was lying on a narrow platform in a room with metal bars on three sides. Though I couldn't see it, the wall behind me felt solid enough. Kelco must have either purchased the house or leased it for a long time, because otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to install their very own mini-jail. My cell formed part of one side of a long, narrow, dim hall. Only a few small lights spaced along the wall opposite me broke the dark. A small food dispenser was built into that same wall a bit down from my cell. No security cameras were visible, of course, but I had to assume they were there, watching me. I arched my back a little and moaned slightly, as if I were having a bad dream, and glanced down the hall in the direction of my head. At least two more cells followed mine. As best I could tell from my narrow viewport onto the world, the one next to me was empty.

  The cell beyond it was not.

  Someone stood at the bars on the side facing me.

  I moaned again and arched my back even more. From what I could see in the minimal illumination of the small hall lights, the person was a woman.

  "Are you okay?" the person asked in a distinctly female voice.

  The voice sounded familiar. It could be Jasmine's. I'd heard it live only once, though, and I wanted it to be her, so I couldn't trust my memory to be accurate.

  "Can you talk?" she said. "I can't reach you to help."

  I had to continue feigning unconsciousness, so as much as I wanted to confirm her identity, I couldn't respond. Lobo should be able to do a decent voice match from the few words she'd spoken. We couldn't risk any audio transmitter the Kelco men who searched me might find, but Lobo could alert me by using the communication fiber in my suit and the protocol we'd established.

  Sure enough, a few s
econds later a twenty-centimeter-long strip of the suit warmed my stomach in response to a signal from Lobo: The voice was Jasmine's. We were ready to go to the mission's final stage. I had one minute to call off the attack.

  I used the time to tune in to the food dispenser across the hall. It probably wouldn't be able to give me a lot of information I could use, but it should be in the house's appliance network and so hear the news when Lim's and Gustafson's teams moved in. Sure enough, like almost all modern machines, it was babbling incessantly. I picked it up in midrant.