A cacophony of horrified squeaking from base greeted this ghastly tale, but I didn't bother to have Ba-Karkar translate. Following my lead, Gogatar told the controller that the slab on which his own aircraft rested was also sinking slowly into the bitumen morass. There was no possibility of escape.
"Now tell them goodbye," I commanded.
He started up from his seat. "Nooooo!"
I cut him off in mid-scream. "That was very good. Even the last bit. Do him, Ildy."
The small dart took him between the shoulders and she caught him as he fell.
"Not necessary!" Ba-Karkar protested.
"Expedient," I said. "All the prisoners will awake at about the same time tomorrow morning."
Ildiko hoisted the medic with ease and took him away in a fireman's carry.
The pirate shot me a glance of bitter resentment. "You plan render me unconscious, too, for sake of putrid expediency?" He was probably having second thoughts about cooperation after seeing his compatriots mowed down.
I asked him, "How long will it take you to repair the landing gear on your starship?"
He seemed caught by surprise. "Two human equivalent days. Maybe significantly less time if boomer-mountain help me. I have all parts."
"Do the job and don't make trouble. Then you won't be rendered unconscious or put into shackles. I'm going to take this aircraft and go fetch my enemies who are hiding with the Haluk. Two of my people will go with me, and two— including the boomer-mountain—will stay to guard you and the other Qastt."
"Eeeeee. What if you die far away, Asahel? What happen to us then?"
"Then you and the others will be in a shitload of trouble, so you better pray to your Qastt gods that I have nothing but good luck. Does that translate?"
"Significantly," said Ba-Karkar.
I slipped into the bench seat before the alien control console. There was more room for my boomer physique than there had been in the privateer's flight deck. I wouldn't have to fly the tuqo with my knees tucked under my chin, provided that I sat just a wee bit sideways.
Ba-Karkar watched me uneasily as I pulled an e-book out of my pocket and began to compare the aircraft instrumentation with diagrams flashed consecutively on the book's small monitor.
"You fly Qastt tuqo before—yes, Asahel?"
"No. But I'm a fast learner."
"Eeeee! Crazy boomer you!"
"Probably," I agreed, sighing. "You feel like giving me some flight instruction?"
"I think it better I go back to my starship and pray."
Chapter 8
His gods must have been listening.
After performing a complete external and internal inspection of the tuqo, I did a thirty-minute checkout flight at minimum altitude, skipping over the tarmac like a stone and dodging among the pressure ridges, getting the feel of the craft's controls and fuselage clearance. The bus wasn't hard to fly once my mind sorted out the fact that antigrav and propulsion weren't linked, the way they were in a human-designed hoppercraft. It was moderately tricky keeping a suitably delicate grip on the child-sized double joysticks and avoiding a ham-fisted boomer tendency to overcontrol.
When I was satisfied, I returned to the crash site and told Zorik to jury-rig the external units of our specialized scanning and stealth devices on the outside of the tuqo. Back on Seriphos, when the Rampart ExSec Equipment Manager had asked what we wanted to take along, I'd described Dagasatt's terrain without identifying the planet and told him to give us whatever he thought might be useful for a small-force assault. He'd assembled half a ton of costly gear, which we'd picked over and marveled at while Chispa was en route. Some of the stuff we had was so cutting-edge that we never could figure out what it was for. If Operation Q tanked, it wouldn't be for lack of top-line equipment.
Inside the privateer, I found the cargo bay had been converted into a makeshift brig by Ildiko and Mimo. Clamshell pods lined with bubblewrap padding had been made into beds for the unconscious agents of mercy, who were already tidily sacked out. Other empty containers of varying sizes made an improvised table, seats, and even a toilet cubicle for their use.
Ildiko and Ba-Karkar had been stowing away packets of Qastt food, containers of water, and other spartan necessities for the prisoners. The two of them finished as I made my inspection, and Ildiko sent the exhausted, grumbling little pirate to his cabin to take a breather.
"What next?" she asked me.
"Why don't you give Zorik and Ivor a hand. And see if you can find a way to mount guns on the outside of the tuqo."
"I have my doubts," she said, "but I'll do my best."
Mimo was stacking unneeded and empty pods outside the starship to give the five Qastt captives as much room as possible. "I don't anticipate any difficulty with them," he remarked. "After all, they're rescue technicians, not soldiers. If everything goes well, we can allow them outside for exercise. They might even help Ba-Karkar with the repairs. Just the sight of Ivor will probably frighten any notion of misbehavior out of their heads."
"Wait till daylight before contacting Joe with the laser-corn," I said. "The smog will thicken as the night goes on, and the laser's UV will make the particulates fluoresce. The beam could be visible to passing aircraft if somebody's looking sharp. I'll get our team's relay set up as soon as I can tomorrow."
"How long do you plan to be gone?" Mimo asked.
"Give us three days. Seventy-two hours. We'll try to keep in contact via LC relay, but there may be blackouts, depending on the terrain. If we don't get back to you at the end of the three days, you can assume we've bought it. Hit the trail as fast as you can."
"Helly, don't be so pessimistic. I agree that the privateer should leave the system if you're delayed, but there's no reason why Chispa shouldn't stay. She'll be in no real danger unless the opposition calls in heavy reinforcements. Even then ..." He smiled craftily, knowing full well that the Y700 could fly rings around any starship in the cosmos.
I flipped a hand, conceding the point. "All right. You and Joe lurk out there in your overgunned blitzboat until hell freezes over if you feel like it. But remember that Ba-Karkar's unauthorized departure is certain to alert Dagasatt Ground Control, and they might pass the news along to the bad guys. We don't know what kind of liaison the Haluk facility has with the locals. Or with Galapharma."
"We'll cope. Don't worry."
"Got to. It's my job." I tapped my friend on the shoulder. "Well, I'm out of here. I'll send Ivor back when he's finished with the loading. You two can deploy the camouflage filotarps and then kick back with a bunch of beers. Be sure to give old Ba-Karkar a major snort of exotic booze, too. He's okay. Take care of yourself, Meem."
"Vaya con dios, Helly."
I left him standing on the ramp, thoughtfully chewing on an unlit Montecristo No. 2.
The distance between our crash site and the presumed position of the Haluk facility among the high redstone buttes was roughly 380 kilometers. I hoped we could get within striking range and find a good hiding place before dawn, thirteen hours away, since our wave-bender would not be able to conceal us from observers using powered optics. A more efficient vehicular stealth system required more power than the tuqo could supply; and even our small bender, being a species of force-field, sucked juice like a black hole. I was gambling that the Haluk installation wouldn't have very-long-range perimeter sensor arrays, and that their optical lookouts would only be stationed near the building compound itself, or possibly atop the adjacent buttes.
Our tuqo was equipped with a simple radar navigation system that would have pinpointed us to the foe like a bug on a bedsheet: useless. So I was obliged to utilize my own skull-mounted wetware, augmented by a rather decent photon-amplifying system in the bus's windshield that I'd been happy to discover during my study of the specs. Without it, a night approach by starlight would have required me to wear power optics all the way, leaving me with poached eyeballs.
The aerial photos and the holographic terrain maps made during our overflight i
n the privateer were invaluable guides. Even so, we had some narrow escapes early on when I misjudged our airspeed and had close encounters with deceptive bits of the local geography. As the night progressed, my tuqo piloting improved. Zorik and Ildiko had sense enough not to backseat-drive, but I could tell that the ex-commander was sorely tempted.
Our carry-on detection equipment included a powerful wide-angle light amplifier scope, as well as a scanning system that would warn us of the more conventional types of intruder alerts such as PHBA. Luckily for us, the really high-tech sensing defenses had blatant signatures that would have been easily spotted from space, so they weren't an option for a clandestine installation such as this one. I figured that the worst thing we might encounter was a platterstack EUV-laser micropulse array; but if I flew no higher than ten or twelve meters, even that would never tag us.
Zorik and Ildiko took turns operating our detection gizmos and sleeping, while I drove on and on and on, listening to old-time country music on a portable stereo—Willie and Waylon and Kenny and Garth, Reba and Patsy and Barbara and the Austin Lounge Lizards, singing about a simpler world long ago, where the heartaches and the frustrations and the laughs bore a curious correspondence to those of the twenty-third century.
The nightscope didn't reveal a single living thing abroad on the bitumen, nor were aircraft of any sort flying overhead— which was to be expected since the only other Qastt settlements in this remote region of the continent were situated far to the north. Eastward, in our direction of travel, lay only a wilderness of petroleum deposits, the narrow Barrier Range of volcanoes, the eponymous Empty Sea, and a hidden Haluk facility that might or might not harbor Oliver Schneider.
I tried not to think about the very real possibility that Operation Q was only a dangerous wild goose chase. Or that the facility would be so secure that our small force wouldn't have a prayer of penetrating.
The smog finally blew away, improving visibility. We zoomed along like a hovercraft, close to the surface of the ground—making good time over the lakes and flats, wafting more cautiously among the pinnacles, ridges, untranslatable stump mountains, and rugged areas. Our average speed was only 45 kph, about as fast as a four-wheeler moving on a rocky dirt track in the Arizona backcountry, but we were keeping well within our designated time frame.
We ran into the first array of ground-based automated PHBA motion sensors when we were 120.3 kilometers from our hypothetical destination. Ildiko shut off the scan alarm and I brought the tuqo to a jolting midair halt, then retreated until we were out of range.
"It's okay," she said. "We barely touched the signal underbelly before backpedaling below its horizon."
I mentally gave thanks that I had been forced to slow down to a relative crawl by a thicket of the black mushroomlike outcroppings. A few minutes earlier we'd been bombing along over a lake at 200 kph.
Zorik had been awakened by the scan alarm and came forward. "Think they made us, Chief?"
I'd told him to call me Helly at least half a dozen times. He still hadn't loosened up enough to do it.
I said, "No. We were still in the ground clutter zone."
"Here's a fascinating thing," Ildiko pointed to the monitor, which was in replay mode. "The six units of the phased array within range are precisely three klicks apart. And they seem to form a perfect arc of a circle."
I blinked. For an installation that was supposed to be hidden, the implication was ridiculous. "A circle? Galapharma engineers must have supervised the sensor setup. They wouldn't be that stupid."
Ildiko had a marvelous silvery laugh. "Why not? The ground-based dissimulator hides the facility from space observers. Landside, all they have to worry about are naive little Squeak snoopers and the odd human smuggler flitting around. The horizon break fits the numbers pretty well, given the rough terrain. I'll bet you a tenner cash money that this array encircles the target precisely one hundred klicks out!"
"Compute it," I said.
A few minutes later she marked the holo printout of the area with a stylus and drew a bull's-eye around it. "Your Haluk facility has got to be right there. Small fuzzed-out open area surrounded by high rock formations that poke through the dissim umbrella."
"The dumb galoots!" I chortled. "They might as well have hung out a Kick Me sign."
Zorik smiled minimally. "Methodical to a fault."
Now we wouldn't have to waste valuable time just searching for the target inside the area shielded by the GBD. I was happy as a burro eating prickly pears.
"Okay, Ildiko. You get your winnings when we're back aboard Chispa. Now analyze that coverage and figure what we need to ooze through it."
She had the answer within a few minutes. Zorik fed the data into our wave-bender generator, which he had mounted on the aircraft's site-lamp pylon, and the tuqo continued stealthily on, now invisible to automated high-band sentinels. We passed within spitting distance of one of them, and I had Zorik shoot a holo of it amidst the xeno landscape. The unit was camouflaged from overhead observation by a wave-permeable fake-rock umbrella, while the sides of the hide were wide open. We could even see the Sheltok AC logo on the antenna housing.
We found identical perimeter-defense rings at twenty-kilometer intervals the rest of the way in. Their coverage overlapped and a bat couldn't have overflown the area without being detected. There were no EUV-laser platterstacks or other gonzo sensor systems. The two innermost phased array installations had automated Kagi guns as well as motion sensors.
We crept past the blaster emplacements while holding our collective breath, but the bender did its job flawlessly and the tuqo got through scot-free. However, I was afraid that our good luck wouldn't last much longer. Sooner or later we were bound to run into sensors that the bender couldn't foil. Or guards with eyes. I was gambling that it wouldn't happen before we were within striking distance of our target. Ground-assault striking distance, that is. It had proved impossible to mount weapons on the outside of the tuqo, and the only option left to us was penetration on foot.
The aircraft now moved among huge sandstone buttes, some of them over a thousand meters high and eroded into spectacular turreted or perforated shapes, like the formations of Monument Valley in the ancient Navajo lands of the American Southwest. They thrust up from a dead-level, faintly wrinkled black surface that looked suspiciously like an immense pool of molten tar capped by a thin dry skin. Here and there were smaller versions of the smooth concentric formations we'd seen from the approaching privateer. We speculated that these might be fresh upwellings or even the remains of "popped" bubbles of petroleum distillates. Stranger yet were the huge bones that protruded from some of the ebony flats, remains of monsters engulfed ages ago and now upthrust again by the churning bitumen. In a few places the bones were so abundant that they looked like some alien Elephants' Graveyard.
The air had become calm with the approach of dawn. Rags of mist hung motionless among the formations like tired phantoms. The eastern sky was turning gray, and landscape features had become clearly visible through the aircraft's un-amplified side windows.
Zorik was doing a final sweep of the rock tops with the big nightscope, which would shortly become useless as natural illumination intensified, searching for observation posts or spy-beam antenna towers. Ildiko continued to study her scanner intently, giving regular verbal reports as I had requested.
"Clear at nineteen klicks. No change in the phased-array freq. No laser beacons or gravitation scans."
We were very near and we needed solid ground now, a place to conceal the tuqo while we did our final reconnaissance afoot. I wanted to get as close to the target as possible, so I threaded a slow course among the buttes, doing my best to keep solid rock between us and the facility. We were now well within line-of-sight range from the top of formations that surrounded the place. If a photon or graviton beam swept us, we were dead meat.
But there were no beams, and Zorik found no rocktop structures.
"Clear at seventeen klicks," Ildiko said. br />
She had her own copy of the topo plot. Once, when I began to skirt a small butte clockwise, she said, "Go right, Helly. Better cover." She was correct and I was wrong, and I cursed silently and had to concede that after a stressful all-night drive, my judgment was slipping. Tension and fatigue made me ache all over, and my eyes were strained from the constant focus-shift back and forth between the windshield and the printout I was using as a map.
I called out, "Zorik, secure the nightscope and break out the powered day-glasses. Then come forward and help me navigate. I'm whipped."
"Right." He sounded almost pleased.
I didn't care.
Ildiko said, "Clear at fifteen klicks." And then, "Clear at fourteen. Approaching margin of dissimulator field. It's not a very strong one: a permeable smudger, maybe a GBD-2H, only about forty meters high."
More and more rock formations thrust up from the bitumen. As we moved beneath the dissimulator field, the higher portions of the outcroppings and crags assumed a faintly distorted aspect, but there was none of the "sparkle" effect typical of stronger force-fields.
"Clear at twelve klicks," Ildiko said.
"Zorik, call out the nature of the surface as it changes. I've gotta concentrate on dodging these damned rocks."
"Affirm. Surface is mixed petroleum and gravel."
The eastern sky had pinkened. Qastt have more sensitive vision than humans, and when external visibility reached a "bright dusk" level, I knew that the windshield light-amplifier system would automatically shut down. Then my tired eyes would be on their own.
Zorik said, "Rock needle dead ahead."
"Got it." I steered around the deceptive formation with a meter to spare.
Ildiko said, "Clear at ten klicks. Passing between Kagi-armed antenna units identical to those at the Twenty Perimeter. But now they're only half a klick apart."
"Surface is sand, gravel, and tar," Zorik said. "Is it wise to go much closer?"