Laura Jo Phillips (35 page)

Darck drove through the little town, obeying all of the speed limits and stop signs, which was unusual for him.  As soon as they were outside of the town, he pulled off the road and began cutting through the desert.

“Plug that cable back in,” he said to Lenny.  “I don’t want any nosy town people wondering where we’re going.”

“Yes, Sir,” Lenny said.  He bent down and fumbled around on the floor for the cable, finding it just before Darck’s patience ran out.  He plugged it in and the car suddenly slowed significantly.

“How far out do you think we should go before its safe to turn off the Blind Sight?” Darck asked Garid, watching him in the mirror.

Garid was surprised at the question.  Personally, he didn’t think it mattered, but he frowned thoughtfully as though giving the matter serious consideration.  “Thirty miles should do it,” he said, pulling a number out of nowhere.

“Yep, that’s what I thought too,” Darck replied.

Garid turned to look out the window again, struggling to hold back his laughter.  Sheara 3 was looking very, very good.

***

By the time the sun was fully up Grace had walked several miles at a good pace.  She reached for a bottle of water at her belt and emptied it, trying hard not to remember how good the water had tasted icy cold from that stream they’d found. 

She considered tossing her empty bottle away but decided not to.  Better to play it safe and carry them, she decided, as she paused to tie the bottle back in place.  The bottle slipped from her fingers and she crouched down to pick it up just as the sound of a motor suddenly reached her ears.  One moment the desert was silent, the next it was filled with the roar of an engine.  She froze, her heart skipping a beat. 

She turned her head, looking for the source of the sound, instinct warning her to move slowly.  She spotted a ground-car racing toward her from the north and she knew that whoever was in it, she didn’t want them to see her.

She lowered herself further until she was lying on the sand, her eyes searching frantically for cover as the ground-car rapidly approached her.  She saw nothing but brush and cacti around her, none of it big enough for her to hide behind even as small as she was.  She shifted her position so she could look behind her and was relieved when she spotted a group of large creosote bushes growing amid a scattering of large rocks just a few yards away.  She spun around, then looked over her shoulder to see that the ground-car was much closer now, perhaps a quarter mile away.  How had it gotten so close to her so quickly without her hearing it? she wondered.  Had her mind been that preoccupied?  Careless, she berated herself as she raised herself to a crouch and began moving as fast as she could toward the creosote bushes.

She dropped down behind one large bush just as the sound of the ground-car became so loud she was afraid it was on top of her.  She crawled a couple of feet until she was safely between some large jagged boulders.  The ground-car could run right over the brush, and even some of the smaller cacti.  But it would not fare well if it tried to run over boulders.

Feeling a little safer, she raised her head and peeked over the edge of a boulder and between the branches of a bush just in time to see the ground-car fly over the spot where she had crouched just moments before.  It sped past her so quickly that she barely caught a glimpse of three figures inside of it.  Three male figures, she guessed from their size. 

The ground-car continued on without slowing, so she knew they hadn’t spotted her.  What was troubling was the knowledge that, on its current course, she was pretty sure it was going straight for Hope’s camp site.  It was impossible to be sure out here in the middle of nowhere without much in the way of landmarks.  But Grace had experience in the wilderness, and her gut was telling her that, unless that ground-car altered its course, it was going to come very close to where Hope and Karma were camped. 

The vehicle was going very fast, too fast for the terrain considering it was an ordinary ground-car, not meant for what it was being used for.  She spent a moment wishing it would smash up against a boulder or fall into a ravine, but as fast as it was going, she had a feeling that whoever was driving it probably knew the lay of the land well enough to avoid such disasters.

“That car is going to reach Hope in about forty-five minutes,” she said to herself sadly.  “I can’t warn her, I can’t stop it, and I can’t get to that airfield fast enough to do a damn thing about it.”   

***

“Unplug that cable,” Darck ordered as soon as the nav display indicated they were thirty miles from the town.

Lenny unplugged the cable and the ground-car instantly sped up, which eased some of Darck’s tension. 

“And get that damn thing working!”

“I’m trying,” Lenny replied.  “It’s complicated.”

“Garid, take this thing from this idiot and get it working,” Darck ordered as he reached over and grabbed the unit out of Lenny’s hands and tossed it into the back seat.  Garid caught it, barely. 

“Hand me the rest of this thing, will you?” he asked Lenny calmly.

Lenny passed the manual, box and a bundle of cables over the seat, glad to be relieved of the job.  Garid spent a few minutes reviewing the manual, then studied the unit.  “Easy,” he said softly once he had it figured out.  He sorted through the bundle of cables and began connecting them.

“This needs to be plugged into a power source,” he said, handing one cable to Lenny over the seat.  A moment later the unit began blinking in Garid’s hands.

“When do you want to activate this?” Garid asked Darck.

“We only have one Look Down, so we need to make it count,” Darck replied. 

“How far outside of town are we now?” he asked.

Darck glanced down at the instrument panel, then looked at Garid in the rearview mirror.  “About thirty-three miles,” he said. 

“I think we should go another ten miles,” Garid said.  “If they walk thirty miles a day, which might be pushing it, they still won’t be within thirty miles of town.  I think we have a better chance of getting them in the unit’s scan range if we go another ten miles before sending up the Look Down.”

“I agree,” Darck said, relieved that Garid knew enough to figure this out because he sure as hell didn’t.  He relaxed a little and hit the accelerator.  The sooner they recaptured those women, the better.

***

Grace stood up and brushed herself off, keeping her eyes trained on the dust trail speeding away from her.  She hitched her pack up a little higher, then turned back toward the airfield.  What she hoped was an airfield.  She felt a little nervous now, after that car had come up on her so quickly, so she kept looking around, checking for movement and dust trails.  She was so focused on looking, that it took her a moment to realize that she was once again hearing something.   

She instantly crouched down, her heart in her throat as she glanced quickly around her, searching for the source of the sound.  She couldn’t see a thing and was beginning to panic when, finally, she looked up.  There, heading in her direction from the west was a VTOL.  She spent one indecisive moment worrying if the bad guys were in it before deciding it didn’t matter.  She had to take the chance.

She got up and hurried toward an area free of brush and rocks and waited for the VTOL to get closer.  It appeared to be headed straight for her, so perhaps it had infra-red or something like it, and already knew she was there.  But she wasn’t going to take any chances.  She lowered her pack to the ground and untied one of her blankets.  She shrugged the pack back on, then shook out the blanket and began waving it in the air.  She didn’t think it would be possible for anyone to miss a giant bright blue flag waving against the beige desert landscape, and she was right.  A few minutes later the VTOL landed in a clear area twenty yards from her and the cabin door slid open.  Grace jogged toward it, startled to see a very pregnant woman standing in the doorway, waving one arm, beckoning her forward.

Grace broke into a full out run, a sense of urgency communicating itself from the woman in the doorway.  A huge man appeared beside the woman and held his hands out.  Grace leapt up and the man caught her and lifted her easily into the cabin.  The moment her feet touched the floor, the VTOL lifted off again.

***

“Set it down right there, on the roof,” Jarlek ordered the pilot, silently thanking Stalnek for purchasing Blind Sight from the Xanti.  He had secretly disapproved of the exorbitant price tag, especially when he’d realized that Stalnek was purchasing dozens of units for use on ground-cars, VTOLs, and space yachts instead of the one unit he had initially announced he was buying for Redoubt.  But now, as he exited the VTOL and hurried toward the stairs of Darck’s apartment building, he was glad of it.  Without it, he never would have been able to set a VTOL down in Los Angeles on top of a residential building without attracting all sorts of unwelcome attention.

He used his pass key to enter the apartment and closed the door behind himself.  He paused, looking around in shock at the mess.  It looked as though there had been a brawl in the apartment.  Furniture was knocked over, dishes lay broken, clothes, trash and other debris covered the floor. 

He worked his way through the rubble to the bedroom, then the bathroom, but all he saw was more of the same.  There was too much confusion for him to begin to assess what had happened.  He stepped on something in the bathroom and when he picked his foot up, he saw that it was the remains of a vox. 

Well, that explained why Darck hadn’t returned any of his calls.  He turned around and went back into the living room, trying to identify the items strewn all over.  He spotted the transfer machine and picked it up, turning it over so that it was right side up.  Having nowhere to put it, he set it back on the floor.  As he stood up, he noticed there was a sheet of paper in the feed tray.  He bent down and retrieved it, realizing at once what it was.  “Damn,” he said softly.  “He went and pulled those potentials.”

He shoved the sheet of paper into his pocket and left the apartment, running for the stairs.  He climbed into the VTOL out of breath, but that didn’t stop him from shouting at the pilot.

“Get us to the old compound as fast as this thing can go,” he ordered.

“Yes, Sir,” the pilot replied, lifting off before Jarlek even got his safety harness buckled. 

***

Garid put the window down, checked the hand-held launcher for the Look Down infra-red sensor, then stuck his hand out the window, aimed straight up into the sky, and pulled the trigger.  The tiny unit shot into the air and Garid pulled the launcher back in and raised the window.  He pulled the unit onto his lap and waited for the sensor to begin sending an image.  It didn’t take long. 

“Got it,” he said a few moments later.  “Hmm...got two of them, anyway,” he corrected.  He reduced the image so he could see a larger area.  “There’s a third one,” he said.  “Looks like they split up for some reason.  I don’t see a fourth though.”

“Damn,” Darck said.  “All right, let’s go after the two, then the one.”

Garid would have suggested going after the one closer to town, but it was too late now that Darck had already expressed his preference.  He gave Darck the compass bearing and range for the two, and went back to watching the screen.  A few moments later he noticed that the two people on the screen, represented by two red dots, were not moving.

“Maybe one of them got hurt,” he suggested.  “That would explain one being so far ahead of the others.”

“Hell,” Darck muttered.  The idea of one of those women being seriously injured under his care, and the ramifications of that, made him break out in a sweat. 
Berezi
were very rare, and therefore precious.  His best hope was that if one was hurt, she would not be a
berezi
.  But if one died, and they were never able to determine whether she’d been
berezi
or not....

“Are you sure they’re both alive?”

Garid glanced up in surprise at the nervousness in Darck’s voice.  “Yeah, they’re both alive,” he said.  “This unit picks up heat.  If one was dead, she wouldn’t have any heat.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Darck said.  “Good, that’s good.”

Garid started to add his thought that perhaps the reason there were only three women showing was that one of them had died, but he came to his senses in time and remained silent.  If that was the case, he did not want to be the one to tell Darck about it.

He looked back at the screen and frowned.  There was something very different, but it took him a moment to sort it all out.  When he did, he was shocked.  “Oh hell,” he swore. 

“What?” Darck barked.

“A VTOL just landed near number three,” he said. 

“What are we gonna do?” Lenny asked, his voice rising in panic.

“Shut up,” Darck snapped.  “Let me think.  Garid, let me know the second that VTOL lifts off.  I want to know what direction it’s going in.”

“Yes, Sir,” Garid replied, his eyes glued to the screen.  A few seconds later the VTOL began moving.  “It’s coming toward us,” he said.  “My guess is they’re going for the two left behind.”

“Lenny, plug the Blind Sight back in,” Darck ordered.  “And hurry up about it.”

***

Grace turned to face the small pregnant woman. “Thanks,” she said.