by Blaze Ward
“What are they?” Alicia asked quietly.
“If a dog attacks you, they are trained to generally go for a forearm to knock you on your ass,” Rob answered. “This will keep you from bleeding if we get surprised, assuming they go for you and not one of us.”
She gulped audibly, but didn’t argue about putting them on.
Rob rooted around until he found the two heavy bundles, carefully wrapped. For Mac, a class three pulse pistol with a laser-dot aiming mechanism on the barrel, while Rob had the heavier four that he preferred.
He had a chuckle about planetary customs. They always cared when you first arrived to be inspected, but after a day or two, nobody even looked up when you pulled a bag of illegal weapons and gear from the ship, just waving at you and probably offering to carry it if they thought you might tip nicely.
Rob attached the holster to his thigh and adjusted it until it was just right.
Then a pair of stun grenades, because he had decided that you shouldn’t ever go to a real party without. Those went into the left side thigh pocket, little eggs he could get to if he needed a bang that would wake up the whole compound.
Or put them to sleep.
The next bag went to Alicia, a compact messenger or a flat purse, depending. All her esoteric electronics gear, most of which was beyond Rob’s ken. He picked locks, but the skills needed to plug something into a port and beat the security protections to death electronically were way beyond him.
But that was why Mac had brought Alicia. Just like she brought him to shoot people.
“Okay, that’s everything for now,” he announced, zipping the bag back up and standing.
He handed it to Alicia to carry for now. He and Mac needed their hands free and their balance normal, and the bag was still heavy.
Pregnant with surprises, as it were.
Rob reached into the cab and retrieved the fob, just so nobody could steal his stolen truck while he was gone.
Never know when the cattle might decide to go on a midnight joyride.
No alarms sounding. No lights suddenly coming on to illuminate the fields.
Rob turned to Alicia as she studied her little scanner.
“So far, so good,” she answered the unasked question a moment later.
Rob nodded.
“Mac, you have the rear,” he said, moving to his left so he could keep the most building coverage between them and the house.
Now was when it got interesting.
28
Good Polish genes would get her through. Alicia kept telling herself that as her breath got heavier and heavier, however much she tried to keep it silent.
She had good boots that were getting squishy with mud, but they were keeping her toes dry and would wash off later. Handsome knew his business, so they stayed clear of big puddles.
She just had to keep her eyes bouncing up and down, watching the ground as she walked and the little sensor unit listening for alarms, radio signals out of the blue, or anything else in the invisible electromagnetic spectrum everywhere.
And not stepping in cow shit.
Handsome moved like her own shadow in front of her. It was kinda eerie to watch. Man made no noise, even in the mud. At least Esme had some hints of noise about her, whispers softer than a hummingbird, but still something.
Do I really want to be a field agent? Pay’s better, but these people are a little frightening.
But there was no arguing the excitement. Actually breaking and entering, instead of just sitting at her desk, down in the basement, waiting for that little bing that told her someone had just delivered a link to a new datacore that needed seducing. Or bashing upside the head.
Good Polish genes had to get her through tonight, though. Tomorrow, up onto the treadmill.
And maybe fewer donuts.
Maybe.
Handsome’s shadow stopped moving. Alicia nearly walked into him, but caught herself short. Not that he didn’t have a nice bottom but she was too busy looking at the scanner right now. And it was too dark to really watch him move.
He turned to her and pointed a gloved finger. Alicia followed his line and saw the camera perched on a tall enough post that cattle couldn’t lick it or rub against it.
Half-dome protected the device itself, so there was no way to see which direction it was pointed right now. Same logic as cops wearing mirrored sunglasses.
Alicia nodded. Time to get sneakier.
She slipped a hand into her bag and flipped the top back. Inside, she rifled a little until she found the thing she wanted.
It looked like a writing utensil, but was really a laser right at the edge of the infrared band.
She started to hand it to Rob, but changed her mind and gestured Esme close.
“Point this end at that dome itself,” Alicia said. “Hold the button down when I say and release it when I get to the bottom of the post. Nobody move otherwise, okay?”
“What are you doing?” Handsome whispered.
“Either it has a transmitter, which I didn’t hear because it’s off, or it’s hard wired through the ground,” Alicia explained quietly. “I can tap the wire and see what they see. Then maybe override it and blind them.”
“Huh.”
He nodded. Alicia nodded to Esme and watched the handheld laser go to work.
Twenty steps. Don’t run or you might trip. Move deliberately. Like fresh donuts have just been slid onto the tray in the cafeteria.
Alicia covered the distance fast enough. She almost felt the laser go off, but that might just be ambient scatter fading.
Standard security camera. The kind her department took advantage of frequently. Not her, because she was mostly crypto, but everyone had those tests at least annually to keep their certifications active.
Alicia found the little box for maintenance and wiring. Wasn’t even locked, just closed with a recessed handle. She pulled it open and pulled a pocket flash from her bag.
Standard. Plugged into a wire that ran to a bank of monitors somewhere. If they had noticed the camera go all fuzzy for three seconds, pulling the plug would just suggest that the camera had suddenly died. If they hadn’t someone might start paying attention.
Would they send out someone to look in the middle of the night, or wait until morning?
Too risky. She pulled out a little recorder plug-in and tapped the line. Currently pointed away from Esme, so maybe nobody had noticed them sneaking up. The image wasn’t even the right direction for the truck, so maybe it was just watching cows.
Alicia told the system to capture two seconds of clear footage, and then replay it on an infinite loop. Good enough, for now.
Later, she might be able to access the main system from the thing Handsome called a show barn, and mess everything up.
Assuming they weren’t running for their lives from German knights at that point.
Just to be sure, she pulled out the scanner again and sniffed the nighttime air with it.
Nothing.
Hopefully because there was nothing, and not because she’d just triggered some silent alarm somewhere and men with guns were going to come running.
She made it back to Handsome and Esme and tried to quiet her racing heart.
They hadn’t even made it inside the building yet.
29
So far, so good.
Rob had had his qualms about bringing Sepeda with them, but she seemed to be holding up. And had the technical chops neither he nor Mac had.
He’d have probably blundered into at least one alarm by now without her.
He listened, but her breath wasn’t much worse than normal. Hopefully this was the wakeup call Alicia needed to exercise more, but it wasn’t his place to suggest it to the woman.
She might not want to do field invasions of hostile organizations like he did.
Rob waited a few extra moments to let her catch her breath as he studied the space in front of them.
They were at the edge of a field, marked off with good, old-
fashioned barbed wire. Four strands horizontal, so they’d have to squeeze through. Rob didn’t see that extra wire on insulated prongs, so he didn’t expect it was electrified.
From some dark recess of his mind, he remembered an instructor explaining that hot fences just tickled cattle when they rubbed up against it. Power was for horses and other critters.
He turned his head to the middle distance. Back of the barn, with a couple of big doors that slid sideways on rails, presumably to let heavy equipment trucks in with cranes when you needed to lift something.
The cattle barn was on his left, with the open side to the quad around the barn to the right. Hopefully, the cows would be asleep.
No bright lights from here. Just little markers on the corners, like you put over the alley door of your shop so you could have a smoke on a break. Lots of shadows abounding.
Rob holstered the class four and studied the ground beyond the nearest fence post. Looked solid and dry.
“Stand by,” he whispered to the women.
One hand on the top of the fence post, and he side-vaulted the top wire cleanly. Rob dropped into a crouch and watched for movement. Mac would be doing the same. Alicia would be listening.
Nothing.
He waited some more.
Still nothing.
“Alicia, you’re next,” he called to the woman, watching out of the corner of his eye but still mostly focused forward.
Wisely, the woman leaned over the fence and sat her bag down before she did anything.
Weirdly, she grabbed the top and stepped onto the second wire right where it connected to the post. A second foot landed atop the post, and then she hopped down like an awkward crane, landing a little hard and stumbling, but not faceplanting.
Rob figured he’d give her a six for that one. Ugly, but effective.
Mac came over the wire like a gymnast, side-vaulting like him and doing it in utter silence.
Nothing.
Alicia gathered up herself and her bag, and Rob moved.
“Mac, you have the right,” he said, nodding her to the corner of the show barn where someone might appear.
He took the middle gap and the far left, with an ear towards the barn doors themselves.
This field had been mowed, but he didn’t know if the machinery was mechanical or just a bunch of cows. Mostly flat here, so he moved quickly, hoping that nobody would string a wire at ankle height.
Breaking an ankle would be a stupid way to blow this mission.
Rob got to the gap between barns and gestured the other two up against the building. Peeking out, he didn’t see any lights on in the main building, nor people moving around.
So if they were coming for him, they were on the flanks. Or getting ready to drop out of the sky. He was back at Puerto Peñasco, wondering when the next surprise was going to rush out of the dark at him firing.
Or maybe he was a little too wound up.
Rob had come and gone earlier through a front door on the show barn, but that was a dumb idea now. The quad wasn’t lit up, but it had enough lights that you could see everything.
“Anything?” he turned to Alicia and ducked out of sight.
She had that doo-hickey in her hand.
“Nothing,” she whispered back. “Not even picking up transmissions around here beyond basic handcomms and a few things that might be cameras. Quiet.”
Rob didn’t like quiet, but there was not a damned thing he could do about it now.
One long look at the quad and he ducked back out of sight.
“Mac, peek around the far end,” he pointed across the back of the barn. “Alicia and I will look at the door.”
They moved.
Barn doors hanging from metal pipes about as big around as his fist. Painted rather than the rust he would have expected, but Tanaka had the money to make this place pretty, when it used to be functional.
Rob watched while Alicia pointed her scanner at everything. She even got down on her knees and then put her head down low enough to look under the door. He hadn’t realized that there was a gap.
Not much, but rodents didn’t need much. Looking around, Rob saw the usual bait stations close against the building. He’d just assumed them earlier, because rats and things had gone just as far as humans had. Maybe farther. If there was a planet humans could exist on, presumably the rats had survived when the people had died out during the long darkness after the Concordancy War.
Alicia stood and moved to one edge of the door, inspected something, and then came back.
“No alarms,” she said simply. “Not even a sensor.”
“What?” he demanded in a quiet voice. “That’s stupid.”
Alicia didn’t argue. Just shrugged.
He gestured Mac closer. Caught the grin on her face.
Rob had been assuming Tanaka was as paranoid as he was. Granted, not many people were, but it just smacked of unprofessionalism.
“Maybe his reputation is enough,” Mac suggested.
Yeah, maybe. Cross that man and he sends ninjas after you.
Assuming he wasn’t in jail or dead.
“Let’s slip the door then,” Rob said.
It was Mac’s case, but this was his raid. He was the expert at breaking and entering hostile places.
And shooting everyone in the bar if he had to.
One hand on the door, slipped into the little gap where he could grab. Other hand holding the pistol in place to shoot someone on the other side.
“Still no communications traffic,” Alicia said.
Rob stopped cold. Smiled at Alicia so broadly she took a half-step backwards.
“You’re listening for headsets broadcasting a signal?” he asked her.
She nodded.
“Brilliant,” Rob said. “Thank you.”
He made a note to talk to Nigel as well as Dillon’s folks. One, to get himself such a sensor. Didn’t matter if it couldn’t crack the codes being used. Just knowing someone was close by and transmitting a signal would often tell him what he needed.
And two, Rob wanted a jammer that would hit all the commercial frequencies and fill them with static. Or some really loud dance music. While he was off on a side band talking.
Evil. Maybe Alicia could build him something on the way home.
Rob pulled the door open a shade with a spring in his step.
Nobody jumped up to get shot, so he stuck his head in and looked both ways. Turning sideways, he got his shoulders in and stepped left.
“Next,” he whispered.
It was a dark cinema in here. Just enough lights that you could make your way to the bathroom or concession stand, but not enough to ruin your night sight. All the requisite emergency lights called for by law.
He’d stepped off a farm and into an office building.
Or a city street, since he was at the farthest end of the tactical simulator. The place where that street petered out into a wall painted like the side of a building.
Rob had been too focused earlier to realize that there had been a garage door down here. Too many things moving and shooting at him.
Mac entered, sliding right. Alicia squeezed in, but it took a little more, since she was thicker through the middle.
“Closed?” she asked him in a whisper.
Rob nodded and paid attention to movement as she moved the door. Stronger than she looked. Tough, just soft on the outside.
Rob didn’t figure she was all that squishy inside, if you pushed the woman. Weak people didn’t join the Service. Certainly didn’t stay long.
Tactical Combat Simulator.
Rob assumed cameras everywhere. And gun turrets.
He hadn’t been to the control room earlier, but his mind put it up on the second floor. You’d want a better vantage when playing with your victims.
Tanaka’s pretty room had been on the left, looking this way, as had the showers. Rob flipped a coin in his head and decided that the other side was probably storage.
Down the side of th
e outer wall of the barn it looked like an alley. Rob gestured the two women to follow. He hadn’t made it this far, but the whole point of the sim was to get into a different alley and escape.
This would be where he put an emergency staircase, in case of a fire or evacuation.
There was just enough light in here to work by, so he saw the back of a metal staircase, open frame style, at the far end. Looking up, he saw a door at the top, as well as what looked like a fire door at the bottom.
Had he come all the way around that corner, instead of just peeking, he might have walked into it accidentally.
Rob kept his grumbles to himself.
A glance back and the women were poised, so he went past the steps and started up them, gesturing Alicia to join him and Mac to cover the ground.
Now was when things would get dangerous.
30
Alicia focused half her mind on the scanner in her left hand and the other half on getting her heart rate and breathing under control.
These two really were secret agents like in the vids. She’d always assumed that it was just a movie, but either they trained to that level to compete, or the movies were more realistic than she realized and people like Handsome Rob were that good.
And that crazy.
Why were they breaking into an unknown building, on no reconnaissance, with a deadline? It was the exact opposite of how espionage was supposed to work.
You spent a month walking around his electronic perimeter, pretending to be a common criminal testing things to see if someone had accidentally left a door unlocked in the computer realm.
Then maybe you snuck in, after a warrant or Finding of Emergency Action absolved you of criminal liability. Look at the evidence quietly in the dead of night, preferably by intercepting a backup stream and making a copy of it onto your own systems.
Enough to justify polite gentlemen knocking on the door in the morning, or maybe kicking it in and arresting everyone.
Everyone called Dolf’s people the Cowboys on Three as a term of disrespect.
Alicia was rethinking that logic. She was a cowboy now. Maybe.
