“I’m into the basic coding,” she told Kane without looking up, “but the whole thing is encrypted. Whatever’s in here is either very important or it’s the diary of a very paranoid teenager.”
Kane looked at her, brushing concrete dust from his short, dark hair. “Thinking of anyone in particular, Baptiste?”
“What?” she asked as her fingers sped across the keys. Then she looked up, seeing the sly grin on her colleague’s face. “Well, don’t look at me. Do you think I ever had time to keep a diary when we were in Cobaltville?”
Kane shrugged, laughing to himself as she went back to work on the computer code. As he did so, they both heard shots coming from a little way down the corridor, and Kane took two swift steps across the room to the closed double doors, the Sin Eater appearing in his hand.
There had been six shots, fired rapidly as if from an automatic. No further noise followed, and Kane risked opening one of the double doors, pushing his back against it as he raised the pistol in his hands.
“Grant?” he called tentatively. “Grant? You okay?”
Grant’s deep, rumbling voice echoed back along the corridor. “Just fine. Rodent problem, but I dealt with it.”
Kane stepped back into the room, his pistol returning to his sleeve as he walked across to stand behind Brigid.
She didn’t look up as she spoke. “I don’t feel safe here, Kane.”
“We’ll be out of here in a few minutes,” he told her.
Just then, Grant came running through the double doors, clutching his Sin Eater. “We have got a problem,” he announced, a scowl across his dark brow.
“What now?” Brigid asked in exasperation.
“Unless I am very much mistaken,” Grant told them, “there is no mat-trans in this facility.”
Kane and Brigid looked at Grant, their eyes wide as they took in his statement.
“No back door, people,” Grant reiterated, shaking his head.
Brigid shook her head, as well, as she continued working the keys of the computer terminal. “Worst plan ever,” she growled without looking up at Kane.
Chapter 2
Kane was pacing the computer room like a caged tiger, head low as he tried to think through the situation. He had assumed that this installation would have a mat-trans, but there had been no guarantee of that. “There’s got to be a way out,” he assured the others. “A back door. Something.”
Brigid watched him over the rims of her glasses as she sat at the computer terminal. “This place has been buried for two hundred years, remember?” she told him. “Any back doors that might have existed are long since sealed. Essentially, we’re sitting in an archaeological dig.”
“Then we go out the same way we got here,” Kane decided. “We use the shaft.”
“We get the shaft, you mean,” Grant rumbled. “You heard what Brigid said when we came in. That route is a bottleneck with fifteen, maybe twenty armed millennialists just waiting to take a pop at us.”
Kane reached for the gunmetal flask that hung from his belt. “So we’ll use the same trick, the dead man’s switch.” He smiled. “They won’t shoot me while I’m holding the dead man’s switch.”
Grant shook his head. “Oh, yes, they will.” Kane shot a questioning look at the huge ex-Magistrate, and Grant began counting off points on the fingers of his free hand. “One, they know exactly where we’re coming from this time. Two, they’ve had time to think about it. Three, they’ve had time to set up sharpshooters.”
“Four,” Brigid chipped in, a sour smile on her face, “they’ll most likely shoot your arm off at the elbow.”
“What makes you so sure?” Kane asked, his tone abrupt as angry frustration bubbled to the surface.
“’Cause that’s what you’d do,” Grant told him, locking his gaze with Kane’s fierce stare.
After a moment, Kane looked away, shaking his head heavily. “Yeah, you’re right,” he admitted.
Stepping over to the double doors, Grant pushed his way through and glanced warily down the corridor, waving the Sin Eater in a slow arc before him. As the lights flickered, he made out the slumped form of the gunman he had disarmed, still lying unconscious close to the rabbit-hole exit. “I don’t think we have a whole lot of time, either,” Grant told the others as he came back through the doors. “I met a hostile outside. He’s out for the count, right now, but…” He shrugged, leaving the sentence hanging.
Turning from Grant, Kane addressed Brigid. “How’s the computer hack going, Baptiste?”
“Slowly,” she admitted. “Even with a ville full of luck, it could take all day to stumble on a lead that takes me anywhere. Plus, Lakesh didn’t really know what we were looking for. It’s like secret Santa—you hope it’s something good but you have no idea what it’s going to be till the wrapping’s off.”
Kane tilted his head as he assessed the black metallic base of the computer terminal. “Then we’ll take the whole unit with us,” he decided. “Can’t weigh more than twenty, thirty pounds. Shut it down, and let’s get the thing unhooked.”
Brigid flashed him a withering look. “Do you know anything about how computers work, Kane? This is a delicate piece of equipment and it’s attached to—”
Kane held up a warning finger. “Stow it,” he said firmly. “It’s survived the nukecaust and two hundred years of dust. We’ll take what we can and get out of here alive.”
Brigid looked plaintively to Grant, and the huge ex-Mag returned her look.
“Wrap it up, people,” Kane said, raising his voice as he walked across the room to the double doors. “We’re moving out in two minutes. Grant, you carry the computer.” With that, Kane disappeared through the doors, Sin Eater in hand, to scout the corridor for opposition.
Once Kane had left, Brigid muttered to herself as she powered down the computer terminal. “He’s actually gone insane,” she stated.
Grant crouched beneath the computer desk and began unplugging connections, including the jury-rigged power that the millennialists had attached to get it running in the first place. “Insane or not,” he told Brigid, “would you trust your life in anyone else’s hands?”
Brigid didn’t even need to think about it. A dozen images jockeyed for position in her mind’s eye, situations where Kane had covered her back, taken care of her and saved her life. A hundred further instances were rushing through her head as she helped Grant unwire the base of the computer. Photographic memory could be a double-edged sword when you wanted to be mad at someone, she decided.
“Any idea how we’re getting out of here?” she asked as they discarded leads and Grant pulled the blocky computer from the desk.
“None at all,” he told her, smiling broadly, “but I’m not worried. Kane’ll do something. He always does.”
Brigid grabbed the TP-9 pistol from where she had placed it beside her on the desk, and she and Grant walked briskly across the room to the double doors and out into the corridor.
Kane was waiting for them just by the door, the gunmetal flask back in his hand. Grant took one look at the flask and shook his head. “That’ll never work,” he warned his friend as the lights flickered above them.
Kane started off toward the hole in the wall at a fast trot, trusting the others to keep up. “Oh, I’ve added a little something-something this time,” he said, grinning maliciously as he stepped over the unconscious gunman on the floor and headed for the