by Pam Uphoff
"So they really only need three people?" Mercy looked thoughtful. "Me, you and AK could do a gate alone?"
"Yep. The only time we three together failed, either Chauncey was in the group, or you fainted."
Mercy sniffed. "I have a delicate disposition."
"And you don't eat enough." AK shook her head. "You should talk to a doctor about anorexia."
"I am not anorexic. I'm slender. It beats looking like a dairy cow."
Rebeccah fled as the two faced off. A long walk through the grounds was in order.
The ninth try was a failure. So was the tenth. Then Mercy hauled Harry into the lab and showed him Rebeccah's analysis. He had one of his own, but hadn't broken the problem down to the three separate tasks.
"So, you think Chauncey is the Kiss of Death, and none of the Oranges are essential? I've got the schedule for the next few days. Here. Tomorrow . . ."
They worked up predictions for all the groups. Rebeccah shifted uneasily. She didn't like to ask favors, certainly not of one of Them.
"I would like to observe. To see what each of them is doing, and how. To see if I can see how they are working together."
Jason was peering over Harry's shoulder. "I'd like to watch too. I see what you mean about the three tasks. And according to you, tomorrow should be successful."
It was a Red team, the next morning. Charlie Alpha and Paxal Gamma arguing over who was in charge, ignoring Jack Kelso entirely. Barry and Edmund smirked at his red faced attempt to get either of them to acknowledge his presence. Marty and Steve were the last two, she didn't know either of them well.
She sat quietly between Jason and Kevin and worked at not drawing anyone's attention. No one important over here, just ignore us.
They settled in, Paxal and Charlie at opposite ends of the row of computers. The rings wound up and whined. Closing her eyes, Rebeccah watched as Edmund and Barry stroked and squeezed the mag bottle. Being them, they managed to make it look obscene. Rebeccah could see a line of fire rippling down the line of the telies, then arching over to the start. It flowed in fits and starts, and the rings were definitely not singing. Some of the group were pushing instead of pulling, out of sync with the natural ripples. The arc from Charlie back to Paxal was the worst. She opened her eyes and looked at them. Sitting in front of the computers, hitting a few buttons, then their hands going limp in their laps.
They need to be in a circle, with Pax and Charlie opposite each other. And I think eight of them would be able to synchronize with the wave better. She bit her lip. I need to stop helping them.
The rings sang, whined, sang . . . Pax shoved hard, reaching deep.
Rebeccah leaned forward to watch the screens showing the rings. White fog, black dot, widening, a flash of reddish rock, sand, desert . . . gone.
"Ow! Damn!" Edmund dropped the mag bottle and started ripping his contacts off. Barry keeled over and hit the floor limply. She heard a sharp crack from the doors to the right. A whoomph of ignition. Ozone smell, smoke, screaming . . . The fire alarms went off. Rebeccah bolted forward and helped Charlie peel off his contacts, grabbed him and hauled him away, out through the ring room and the fire doors there. Jason and Steve were right behind, carrying Barry. Marty and Edmund were leaning on each other and Jack was following Pax, yelling, demanding to know what they'd done. Dr. Heath came at a run and had them set Barry down. Charlie was shivering, and Rebeccah steered him to the cafeteria. One of the staff was there and grumbled as she snapped at him to heat some soup. She dropped Charlie in a chair and headed for the fridge. She scooped up an armful of sodas and walked out while the cook's assistant protested behind her.
"Get some sugar into you, then we'll go for something hot." As the rest of the group staggered in, she distributed sodas, then reluctantly took one out to where Barry was still on the ground, but moving his arms and mumbling.
"I felt hypoglycemic after my session." She set the can down and backed away.
The doctor pulled out an instrument and pressed it against Barry's arm. "Oh, yes." She popped the can and propped Barry up. "If you can't drink we'll run an IV . . . "
Rebeccah went back to Charlie, and hauled bowls of soup out to the miserable group.
Barry joined them, and Dr. Heath walked around checking pulses and eyes. Her instrument, something that measured blood sugar apparently, had her wincing at the readings. There were sirens in the distance, getting closer.
"Something happened to the mag bubble, didn't it? How badly are the techs hurt?" Jason stared at Heath.
She shrugged. "The other two medical doctors headed that direction, so I concentrated on Barry."
Barry managed a half-hearted leer, then propped his head in his hands and whimpered.
Edmund chuckled.
"I suggest you all go to your rooms and sleep. I'll check you all again before dinner, if I don't see you sooner."
Charlie slurped the last of his soup and stood up. Rebeccah jumped up as he wobbled. As they passed through the front door, she glanced back. They were well in advance of the rest, and she steered Charlie away from his dorm building and into hers, down the first floor hallway.
"Oh, finally, and me in no shape to really impress you."
"I'm just keeping an eye on you." She replied primly. "From very close up."
Two techs had been badly burned. One died later that night.
The mag room would have to be completely rebuilt.
"Rebeccah?" Harry kept a respectful distance. "The staff has discussed the accident at length, but they don't seem to think you telies can be of any help. Would you like me to correct that opinion?"
"I see no reason for the slaves to help the masters. We ought to be celebrating the death of one of our abusers."
"Larry wasn't an abuser."
"No. He was just a human being, completely indifferent to the rights of a sub-human telepath-telekinetic. Who he knew by name, worked with regularly. At least someone bothered to call an ambulance for him. He'll have a nice funeral. The police will look into his death, several government agencies will be all over the DI building, concerned for the other human being's lives. If it had been one of us, the accountants would have clucked reprovingly while someone shoveled out a hole to bury the animal in."
"It's not . . . " Harry turned and walked a few paces away. "Gisele and I are trying to help. We don't have any political clout. All we can do is talk."
"You talk to the wrong people. You wouldn't help any of us by letting our families know where we'd been taken. You wouldn't call and tell them we were all right. All you've done for us is make us into something too valuable for them to ever let go of."
Harry looked back at her. "NewGene was working toward this, from the first. I don't know how they knew what you could do . . . unless they had some older telies they ran tests on."
Rebeccah snorted. "They bribed Russians, avoided their failures and built on their successes."
"Really? Well, they grabbed every single Telie alive. The few emancipated adults who wouldn't work for them, my friends, all suffered fatal accidents. I'm trying to keep all of you alive long enough for the political pendulum to swing back the other direction. You need to be too valuable to kill. And making this work is one way you can gain enough leverage to force them to give you your rights."
It was Rebeccah's turn to walk off a few steps. He's right. We've come too far down this road to turn back. "The women all seem to work best in threes. So I suppose six or nine would be good as well. The guys too. I thought eight, but that was just a guess. And we shouldn't be tied down to the computers, we need longer cables or wireless. So we can get into circles for the mental power flow. When the gate closes, there's a return flow of energy. I managed to hold mine, support the mag bottle until it was used up, or at any rate until the electrons all settled down. But it was difficult. You'll need some way to divert that energy elsewhere, so it doesn't slam back into the mag bottle."
There was a long silence behind her. "Thank you."
"It might also help if obvious incompatibles such as Pax and Charlie are not in the same group."
She heard him walking away. Best of a bad lot. But I have to trust him a little, or life will be even more miserable.
Chapter Eleven
Arkhangelsk Oblast
Russia
30 May 2114
It was a night drop, from high altitude. Wolfgang stretched out into a dive, grinning behind his oxy feed as the altimeter on his wrist spun down and down and . . . almost time. Three thousand. He spread his arms out, spread his legs and watched the altitude. Twenty-five hundred. Two thousand. Nine hundred. Eight. Seven. Reach across and pull. He was jerked as the disposable chute popped open behind him. His location . . . he was a bit too far south, but too low to steer. They hadn't even bothered with steerable chutes. Textured darkness rose up and he relaxed his knees and rolled on lumpy pointed hardness, rolling back to his feet and gathering up the chute as an unthinking reflex. The gossamer compound was transparent at almost all wavelengths used in detection systems, and would begin disintegrating in a half-hour. He shoved the bundle down under the tough low growth that had bruised his ribs, and closed his eyes to look mentally for the rest of the team. They were fanned out a bit, all to the north of him, and the facility they were looking for was barely south and a bit east of his present location. Two guards on the surface, bored and tired. Fitting the decrepit and unimportant look of the surface installation. He moved slowly east, toward their rendezvous point. Checked the team; Thorn was moving slow. The sergeant moved quickly to meet him, then Thorne headed north, away from the facilities, toward their pickup point. Wolfgang reached the rendezvous, and stretched out on his belly. Damned the stunted brush that made it painful. But he could see the shape of the stony dirt out a mile, feel the hard contrasting metal and concrete deep below the innocuous surface installation. A single choke point entrance. Two guards, and these were alert. Four levels below, with just a single egress point. Air? He finally spotted the plastic pipes. Way too small for entry. Human entry. A few noxious chemicals could go far as a way to lower opposition below.
Lopez stepped on him, went to ground. Armond and Hays came next. Jack, Pat, Mike, Snake.
"Thorne did something nasty to his ankle landing on this shit. John, you got it sussed out?"
"Matches with the sat photos, up top. No one seems to be patrolling. There's a hole in the fence."
"Right. Snake look over that hole. I hate the obvious."
The obvious was trapped.
They circled, tested the fence in several spots, then extended and shaped their ladder, forming an arch to straddle the fence. Jack, the smallest, went over first, braced the other side of the lightweight construction as the heavier men climbed quickly over, Snake last. They collapsed the ladder and crept up on the air intakes. Armond looked over the pipes and backed out of the small building.
"I wonder if they have detectors on the air intake. Or a good molecular filter."
"It's a bioweapons research lab. Assume they've got everything." Hays didn't take his gaze off their surroundings.
The entry was in what looked like a rundown concrete garage. Satellite pics had shown the two vehicles used to transfer personnel to and from the nearest town. Large and enclosed, concealing how many might actually be present. The garage doors were open, as usual. The air exhaust from below was inside; filtering it through the building concealed, in theory, the heat signature.
The sergeant waved Wolf forward. He distorted the light ahead of himself warping it and swirling it, hiding behind absolutely nothing. Once inside and out of his team's sight he warped the light more consistently, sending it around him in a smooth curve. But just in front of his head he let the red end of the spectrum leak through. He slipped around the big truck and found the exhaust vent. Much larger than the multiple intake pipes. Below, a fan blew the air up and into his face. What looked like a door to a closet was the first barrier to below. He could feel the electricity in the walls, controlling the four long bolts that stabbed into the door, see the circuits, the alarms. He got out the detection equipment, linked to Hays’ screens by a low power transmitter. In theory, undetectable. He made sure the instruments showed all the circuits, then back tracked to the air exhaust vents. Half the traps, big fan at the bottom. "There's four fans. One going out might not be noticed." It wasn't even a whisper, totally unvoiced, but Hays’ concurrence came back. Snake slipped in and Wolf moved to a watch position.
"Now, I need to go down, carefully please."
Wolf watched with his inner sight as he lowered Snake head first down the shaft. The air flow ceased abruptly, and his rope went limp. "Right, I'm opening the filter cover, now."
Wolf had already secured the rope, he went in head down , wiggled past the fan blades and was on Snake's heels as he rolled out onto a hallway floor. Lopez, Jack, Hays, Pat and Armond came quickly, Mike stayed up top to remove the rope, and replace the vent cover. Snake pointed something up the shaft and the fan restarted.
Their description of the hidden facility was thin, and covered only the first two levels. They spread out, ghosting quietly up to corners. There was only a single bored guard yawning, half his monitors showing nothing but fuzz. Typical of the Ruskies. Cutting all available corners, centuries of illogical budget decisions frozen in their procedures. From around the nearest corner, Wolf deepened the guard's weariness. The man put his head down on his desk and started snoring. Snake disarmed the alarms and locks on the door, in case they needed to depart quickly and they slipped back deeper into the facility. The second level had a complete medical ward, dark and empty. The third level, animal labs. Eyes gleamed in plexiglass cages.
"Samples? Or kill them all?" Wolf asked.
"Kill them subtly. We don't want to leave tracks. Bioswabs of each if you can do it quick and quiet."
Most of the animals looked normal, but one cage of rats . . . looked organized. Sentries, a determined looking wall of huge males between him and the females and the nest of pups he could only see with his inner eye. He sent a sleep spell, opened the cage and put them all in a bubble. A quick swipe with a bioswab from two of them. He bent the latch of the cage door, made marks like it had been forced from the inside, and moved on with a grin. Three baby lambs, or maybe kid goats were romping and too damned cute for words. More swabs. A bubble floated by and he grabbed it. Three lambs. Smart rats. What next? Hmm, a medicine chest. Vitamins and minerals. A very cold chest, dry ice inside. Ah. just what he needed. Slabs of dry ice in every cage, blocking the ventilation slots in the plastic enclosures. Lots of swabs.
He slid back into the team. Armond was copying chips and stripping a computer while Snake worked on the door down to the fourth level.
The fourth level was empty. Prison cells that looked a lot like the cages upstairs showed wear and tear. They been occupied at some point, for quite some time. Jack finished pictures and the rest spread out with bioswabs, then they all ghosted back up. Armond was waiting and led off.
They were halfway up the air vent when Mike's voice sounded in his ear. "The guards up here got a phone call. I see lights on the road."
"They may have tripped over Thorne." Hays said. "Time to hustle, I want us gone when the extras get here. Silent, now."
They hustled. They were out of the garage and flattened in the vegetation as the lights swept the grounds. They backed to the fence between light sweeps, and at the fence Wolf and Armond threw the others over. Wolf heaved Armond over last, no easy chore. Wolf dropped flat in the scraggly vegetation as a vehicle was drove the perimeter, lights everywhere.
He got out of the vehicle's way, and warped light around himself. Time to go have some fun. He trotted quietly down the slight slope to look over the new arrivals.
Six vehicles, close to fifty men. Thorne was in the fourth truck. Drooling and twitching. Damn. The Ruskies had some nasty interrogation chemicals. Wolfgang looked carefully around, stepped away to avoid some soldiers, not to mention snag another bubble . . . T
here were two men guarding Thorne. He waited until they were the only ones in sight and stunned them both with a thought. Scooped Thorne into the bubble, attached it to his wrist, and ran as silently as possible for the now very guarded, but open gate. It was a race, distance and silence against the growing pain in his skull. He eeled out through the gate and into the darkness. One guard snapped around, looking for what had nearly brushed him. There was no high vegetation to get behind he simply had to go as far as possible as his head pounded and vision doubled, then he dodged into the low growth and flattened as the light slipped out of his mental grasp. His head ached, and he lay flat on the cold ground and listened. No one coming, no lights flashing in his direction. He opened his eyes and looked around. Blinked until his vision steadied down to one of each, and then looked back at the gate. No alarm. He crept over the miserable plants, until he was several hundred meters away, then rose up and crouched. Then ran. He and Thorne had a rendezvous to make, and all the lights and alarms going on behind him meant that the primary, close pickup was cancelled. He had some serious ground to cover, and the ground cover was definitely unfriendly. Sometime close to dawn his headache eased. He needed a place to sit out the long day, and picked an absolutely unremarkable spot. He shoved Thorne's bubble down under the limbs of these damned stunted bushes, opened the bubble and anchored the mouth at four points before he slipped in himself.
On the inside the bubble was bronzy, and elastic, closing down around them. He cursed it, and tried for a bit of meditation. Looked deep and quiet, looked for that background noise and found some close. He scanned carefully for the source. Trapezoid muscle. Not too deep. He laid a sleep spell over Thorne's drugged and wandering mind and cut quickly. Antibiotic and glue. He dropped the locator into the lamb's bubble, and climbed back out. He'd better move, just in case they'd picked that up through the opening. A mile away he went back to ground, in the bubble with Thorne. A helicopter came, then another with men and dogs. Wolf cursed, and waited. When they were close he closed the bubble. Closed it and opened it. A boot stepped down inches away. Closed it. And opened it. Everybody was gone. Plenty of footprints. He left the opening open just enough for fresh air and to lock in the passage of time. With the bubble closed it would be easy to lose too much time, miss the rendezvous. Thorne woke up and kept drooling and twitching. Wolf listened again, and found no static nearby. He munched a couple of energy bars, and felt better. As evening fell, he stuck his head out and felt for the team. Twenty kilometers north. They must have really hauled ass. Or moved during the day, a bit risky, he thought. He climbed out, closed the bubble and attached it to his wrist. Time to cover ground. He put the thinnest, easiest light distortion directly over his head and started loping through, over and on the miserable vegetation. His good night sight allowed him to keep up his speed for as long as he could manage. Walk, lope, walk, lope, walk. The vegetation he'd been cursing dwindled to the rare hardy shrub in the occasional crack. They were out on the barrens, with nothing but breaks in the rock and lichens for cover. In another week the fast growing arctic vegetation would have been, well, probably not more than a few inches tall, but at least it would be greenish and their camos would blend better. He closed in steadily on the team, and shortly after midnight finally stopped to take Thorne out of the bubble. Now he was going to have to do it the hard way. He maneuvered Thorne into a fireman's carry and headed north. Walk, rest, walk, rest, walk, rest. Trying to follow lines of rock breaks in the slatey stone in case he had to take cover. Trying to hustle across the too frequent, unbroken, flats.
