He sighed. “Look, we’re a bunch of exiles seventy thousand light-years from home, kicked out because we chose to do the right thing instead of the smart thing. We don’t have it in us to stand by and watch a species die when we can save them.
“And yeah, there’s a lot fewer of us than you might think, so we are hoping to lean on you guys for hands and bodies in the future—as allies. We’ve been close enough to slaves ourselves that nothing else is an option.
“Now, I’m out of time to answer questions, so you can either help me or sit down right there and wait for Warmest-Waters’s people to come get you. What’s it going to be?”
“The command center is also here in the mountains,” Dancer-In-Darkness told him in response. “While the ground access would be difficult and guarded, there are other options…”
Other options turned out to be frankly terrifying for humans. Vistans’ echolocation had a decent but finite range. They could only really pick up things out to about two hundred meters—beyond that, they saw motion with their eyes and used technology.
“Fear of heights” was not something they generally suffered from. The helicopter Dancer-In-Darkness had stolen from an access cave at the top of the prison didn’t have such amenities as a floor.
Or walls. Or doors. It was a pair of seats attached to an engine and a set of scanners that fed an artificially long-ranged echolocation into the pilot’s ears. There were at least seat belts and air supplies, but Octavio was hanging out in the air with nothing between his feet and a six-hundred-meter drop into half-frozen water.
He was half-tempted to ask what the ground access looked like, but Dancer-In-Darkness turned out to be a capable pilot. She flicked the fragile aircraft out of the cave at the top of the prison and danced it out over the lake before he could change his mind.
“Won’t this draw attention?” he asked.
“Air traffic control is a confused mess,” Dancer replied. “Two centers are taking orders from Warmest-Waters’s ‘interim authority.’ The third is ordering everyone to land and stay down until they can sort out what happened to the Chosen Mothers.”
“Other than you, what did happen?”
“I don’t know.” The old Vistan was silent for several moments, focusing on her flying as she slid them along the cliffside toward some destination Octavio couldn’t see.
“I want to hope that my sisters are still alive, but if Warmest-Waters is to justify this, she must claim that you killed the Chosen Mothers. We may have limited time to save them, or they may already be dead.”
“Why wouldn’t she kill you?”
“I am the Voice-Of-The-Chosen, the one who declares our decisions to the people,” Dancer replied. “If she can convince me to support her, claim I was injured and that caused the delay in my reappearance, she gains a legitimacy no one else can give her.”
Even over the engines, he could make out her agitated chirping.
“Certainly, a legitimacy her cabal of traitor generals cannot give her.”
“Can you talk to your people?” Octavio asked. “Would you be able to convince them she is betraying them?”
“If I reveal that we have escaped and are on an aircraft, this vehicle will be destroyed almost instantly. Look ahead, Captain Octavio Catalan. We approach the defense center, and it is well protected.”
As she spoke, she twisted them into a narrow gulley carved into the cliff by a million or so years of rain and glacier melt. That flow of water had been redirected now, but the cleft in the cliff remained.
Fifty stories of concrete and steel filled it now. Octavio could spot multiple hangars for aircraft and helicopters visible on the front of the fortress, alongside a dozen antiaircraft missile launchers.
Turrets hung out from the outer walls, ranging from lighter missile launchers to machine guns to what he was pretty sure were crude railguns.
“The Iron Peaks Central Command,” Dancer-In-Darkness told him. “The traitors who have joined Warmest-Waters have already seized it. There will be no loyalists inside, Captain Octavio Catalan. Only traitors, with access to every weapon, sensor and communication network the Iron Spears have assembled over the centuries.
“Your plan had better work.”
“My ‘plan’ is ‘get me to a data cable heading to the main command pool,’” he pointed out. “From there, I can take control of the automated systems and bring my people in. I don’t know what to do about the fortress!”
Dancer-In-Darkness studied the monumental structure ahead of them as she brought them in toward the highest hangar.
“Then we swim identical waters, Captain Octavio Catalan, and must hope for the currents of fate to bear us to safety.”
Great. Two of them against a nation’s military headquarters, and his only companion was a bloody fatalist.
27
The hangar was thankfully empty and quiet. There were several helicopters similar to the terrifying contraption they were flying in, along with a number of larger vehicles that had actual armor and weapons.
“We are two floors from the top,” Dancer-In-Darkness told him. “This is the hangar they bring VIPs through, so it should be clear which way to go. How close do you need to get?”
“Depends. Do you know where the computer cores are?” Octavio asked.
The Chosen Mother chirped sadly.
“No.”
“Then we need to get pretty close,” he admitted. “Do you know how to use this?” He held the rifle out to her.
“I was a helicopter crew chief in the Iron Spears,” she told him. “There are few hand weapons we possess I am not trained in. I am rusty, but it fits my hands better than yours.”
Thankfully, the two species’ hands were similar enough that Octavio could use the pistol just fine. The rifle was designed for someone with a very different torso, though.
“I would prefer not to have to kill anyone,” he told her. “But then…what is Warmest-Waters likely to do if she isn’t stopped?”
“There aren’t enough bunkers to save everyone,” Dancer said. “She will have bought her allies with promises of safety for their Clans. She will leave the rest to die, believing them better dead than slaves.”
“Fuck me,” Octavio muttered. “Even the ones she gets into the bunkers will just die later.”
“That is why I am helping you,” the Chosen Mother told him. “Come.”
As they left the hangar, he understood what she meant by it being clear which way to go. Vistans might not care about colors, but they did care about their feet being warm and either wet or on soft surfaces.
Only one of the corridors had carpet, thickly piled fabric cut into three-dimensional decoration. The carpet had clearly been made by someone with no idea of color, which gave it a strange esthetic appeal regardless.
The lack of guards made him nervous.
“Shouldn’t there be some security?” he asked.
“The traitors will not be able to rely on many of the Spears for now,” Dancer replied. “They will have sent everyone away from the headquarters, and they need many of the Spears they can rely on to keep order. There may be very few guards here.”
That would help…for a while. Once he started screwing with their systems, they were going to start looking for him.
“Let’s at least get onto the floor with the command pool,” Octavio suggested. “Then I’ll start looking for access panels.” He shook his head. “A communication center nearby would be perfect.”
“I think I can manage that,” Dancer told him. “I’m only familiar with the top floors of the Command Center, but there is a set of offices here for the Chosen Mothers with a full communication setup.”
“Perfect.” Of course, unless the traitors were stupider than he expected, that would also be the first place they looked for him.
Sufficient unto the day is the affliction thereof. It was time to clear a path for the Marines.
Whoever was running security for the mostly abandoned command center turned
out to be competent. Once they were on the top floor, Dancer pulled Octavio out of the hallway and covered her own gills.
There was only so much a Vistan could do to silence their echolocating chirps without risking their health, but she was muffling herself as best as she could—and Octavio was able to see the two Spears walking down the corridor with rifles in hand.
The head -forward posture of the guards would have been cavalier incompetence in human guards, but Vistans’ sonar gave them three-hundred-and-sixty-degree awareness. They knew everything in the corridor. Looking around wouldn’t have helped them.
Well, it might have helped them spot the movement of Octavio dodging back behind cover before their chirping forms got close enough for him to worry.
Listening to their echolocation chirps also let him know once they were past. He waited, as patiently as he could, for the patrol to pass out of hearing, then gestured for Dancer-In-Darkness to lead the way again.
They had to dodge another patrol before they reached the offices, but their target itself was unguarded.
It was behind a sealed security door that would have frustrated a reasonable number of explosives, but it was unguarded. Octavio was about to start hacking into the door’s systems when Dancer stepped up to it and tapped a series of raised symbols he’d taken for decoration.
Apparently, the Vistan version of keypads covered a good chunk of the door. He’d have to remember that.
The security door slid open and he looked over at Dancer.
“We good?” he asked.
“That depends on how intelligent my traitorous sister has been,” the Chosen Mother told him. “My codes are active, but if Warmest-Waters set an alert on them, we may not have much time.”
“Wonderful.” Octavio shook his head. “Show me the com setup.”
The space set aside for the Chosen Mothers was probably gorgeous by Vistan standards. Decorative statuary and carvings were everywhere, and there were jets built into the walls to fill the space with warm water.
The space wasn’t filled with water right now, and Octavio’s focus wasn’t on the artwork. As he was led toward the com center, he was studying the holographic projection his tattoo-comp was putting up.
It would be near-invisible to his hosts and pursuers, but it was showing him roughly what cables and conduits were hidden in the walls and floors around him.
“Here,” she told him, gesturing to a door. “The communication center is through there.”
Octavio had hoped that the Iron Peaks designers had followed what he’d regarded as sensible protocol, which said that there’d be at least two completely redundant sets of data connections to a space like this—but that each of those sets would be complete and running through a conduit together for ease of access.
He’d been right. It looked like the set of cables he could see running into the com center kept going to the main command pool.
Following those cables, he stepped into the communication room. It was…recognizable as a coms and computing center, but none of the equipment was meaningful to him. He could recognize the speakers used for “visual” transmissions by Vistans, he could see what were probably the main computer keyboards…but he couldn’t see anything he could use.
Like the rest of the spaces set up for the Chosen Mothers, however, the walls were covered in gorgeous three-dimensional artwork. Plaster artwork…covering plaster walls.
“I need to borrow the rifle,” he told Dancer. She seemed confused but handed it over.
She trilled in horror as he used the rifle butt to smash through the artwork and the wall behind them. A few more strokes cleared away enough wall for him to see the data conduit.
“Can you call out from here without attracting attention?” he asked.
“There is no call I could send that wouldn’t attract attention,” Dancer-In-Darkness pointed out. “Not that would have value.”
“Okay.” There’d been a knife in the gear of the guard they’d stripped. Vistan hands weren’t shaped quite like human ones, but it was usable enough for Octavio to open the conduit.
A mess of cables greeted him and he sighed. One of the fiber-optic cables in there linked to the command pool. One linked to the communications equipment in the room behind him and on the outside of the command center.
Unfortunately, there were at least a dozen cables, and he had no way to tell which one was which until he’d attached to it and cracked the system.
“Hold off on sending a message just yet,” he told Dancer. “It’s going to take me a bit to ID the systems I need.”
The good news was that the Vistans’ security software was crap even for their crude tech base. Once he was linked into the defense controls and the communications systems, he would own their systems.
He just had to find them first.
28
Third time was not the charm. The first time was, a little bit, in that the very first cable he attached his tattoo-comp to was the communication controls.
He left that cable attached and extracted the second cable from his arm as he worked through. The second cable was the internal life-support systems for the base. The third was the lights.
Fourth was the information systems, giving him full access to the archives of the Iron Spears—a spy’s wet dream and absolutely useless to him. Fifth was internal e-mail.
By the time he hacked into the sixth system, he was ready to grab the gun and go shoot his way into the command center. As his holographic system interpreted the data stream, he realized this was the jackpot.
A bit of poking around and his translation software was talking to the high-level interface…and his hologram was now showing an illusion of the entire mountain. Icons were scattered up and down its height, from miniature missile launchers on the fortress to the dozens scattered around the city.
From the data summaries he could access, there were over five thousand individual antiaircraft batteries guarding High Mountain. The Iron Peaks really had built a defense to stand off against every threat on the planet.
Paranoid xenophobes didn’t make for great neighbors, he presumed.
He found the override that would disable them all relatively quickly. Setting up his worms to make sure that they couldn’t disable that override took longer—and allowed him to realize they could bring a lot of the systems back up on local control and even local power.
“I can’t shut them down permanently,” he finally confessed aloud. “I think I can knock the entire system out for at least an hour, though.”
If nothing else, he could make it so they’d have to completely shut down and reformat to bring the systems back up under local control. The defensive planes would have to land, the missile launchers would be unable to fire.
It would buy time.
“Then we will have to use that hour effectively,” Dancer-In-Darkness replied. “I suggest we each speak to our respective allies and see what storm we can unleash.” Her chirps were sharp with emotion. “Your own people are few, I am guessing?”
“They can take control of this facility and shut down the main defenses,” Octavio told her. “But the defenses around the city will be back up in an hour. What can you do with an hour?”
“Enough,” the Speaker for the Chosen Mothers told him. “Enough that I do not believe I need to ask you to bring in the Shining Spears. I believe I can restore my country myself…so long as your people can get here before Warmest-Waters’ people break in here and kill us.”
“If you can get loyalist troops moving against her, I can get Marines in here to get us out,” Octavio promised.
He was only about half-sure of that, but the truth was that both he and Dancer-In-Darkness were expendable. If they had to die to make sure the people of the Iron Peaks got evacuated, well, that was what would happen.
“Get ready to transmit,” he ordered as he switched his tattoo-comp to link into the coms. “Let’s bring some friends to the party.”
Octavio might have been transmi
tting from an array that Scorpion had flagged as hostile, but he had the codes to attach to the radio transmission to identify it as from him—and the fact that he was sending from his tattoo-comp and only using the Vistan system to transmit meant he was sending it in ESF formats.
That meant he got through to Aisha Renaud.
“If this isn’t Octavio Catalan, someone had better start explaining really quick,” she said harshly the moment the channel opened. “Because the only way someone can access his tattoo-comp would be to cut—”
“Aisha, it’s me,” he said, interrupting her before she got into threats of orbital bombardment. “These people’s cybersecurity sucks, and I had the translation program loaded on my comp already. I don’t have long before this starts attracting attention, so what’s our status?”
“Lieutenant Major Summerfield is dead,” Renaud stated. “The shuttle she was aboard was blown out of the sky along with twenty-two Shining Spears jet aircraft. Two made it out, so we’ve got a pretty detailed analysis of the missile defenses.
“The Shining Mother is trying to get the Chosen Mothers to admit to anything, but we’re just getting radio silence. I’ve got Tran manufacturing precision munitions, but it’ll be days before we have enough to take down the defense network.”
“I’m inside their systems,” Octavio told her. “I can bring everything down for forty-five minutes to an hour. The Chosen Mothers aren’t answering your call because they’re dead or detained.
“One Mother and her generals used my visit as an opportunity to get everyone in one place to take them down. I have the senior Chosen Mother with me, and we’re holed up in their command center. As soon as I start affecting anything, they’re going to start looking for us, and they’re going to find us.”
“Once the Marines are close enough, they can track your beacon—and we’ve located the building you’re transmitting from,” Renaud told him. “If you can bring down the defenses, we can have boots on the ground in five minutes. Not sure how long after that to reach you…but that doesn’t solve the Iron Peaks problem.”
Refuge Page 17
