Empire

He tried to imagine the architecture of this place. It wouldn’t be like a building, with rooms one after another, divided only by thin walls. They had a whole mountain on top of them. So each room would have plenty of rock between it and the next one, with only corridors connecting them. The really tall corridors would be for mechs to walk along. Stay with the low, man-sized corridors, and they’d be more likely to face opponents that weren’t armored like tanks.

The cavern architecture also meant that corridors could be long and could lead anywhere. This one was sloping upward and turning. The turn made Cole uncomfortable. It meant he couldn’t see all the way ahead.

Then it looked like the corridor ended.

No. As he rounded the last bit of curve he could see that it took a sharp turn to the right. No door this time. No reason to put a lot of doors in here, when you were above the water level and nobody could get in here anyway.

But now Cole had to wonder: What was their mission now? They had headed for the cabin only to reconnoiter. They hadn’t meant to assault the place. Each step along this road, after the firing started, was oriented toward survival. Except… when there had been a choice about which way to run in the flooding tunnel, Cat had chosen to go toward the enemy, not away. And Cole had gone along without a second thought.

They had proof enough that this was where the bad guys were. One of the guys outside had to have taken pictures of the mechs and hoverbikes coming out of those huge doors in the mountainside. Video, too, of the rebels shooting at Cole and Cat on the ladder up to the cabin.

With no one actually shooting at them, Cole gave a hand signal for Cat to wait and keep watch.Then he switched on his transmitter.

“You think that’s still working?” asked Cat.

“Light still comes on,” said Cole. “And it’s supposed to use the ground as a conduit.” Cole coded for Drew first.

And got an answer. “Drew here. You guys okay?”

“Mingo and Benny get through to Gettysburg?” asked Cole.

“Don’t know yet,” said Drew. “But everything and everybody’s coming through those big front doors.”

“More guys looking for you?”

“We killed two mechs with rockets and then they all headed back for home. Trucks are coming out now, driving up and over the dam. Looks to me like they’re evacuating the place.”

“Just cause two guys got inside?” said Cat. “Big babies.”

“They’ve got to believe we’re just the preliminary team,” said Drew. “If they believe we’re just an advance team, and you actually got inside, I think they took that as a bad sign.”

“Besides,” said Babe, “these are the guys who decided against a military career.”

Evacuating, moving to a different location. Why? Because they intended to make this one unusable themselves. “I think they’re planning to flood this whole place,” said Cole. “Genesseret is higher than this whole complex. Run water through it all, ruin everything.”

“Doesn’t eliminate the evidence that it exists,” said Drew.

“If they’re planning to flood this, I want to get a little higher up,” said Cat.

“Tell us when Mingo reports that a strike force is coming,” said Cole. “Make sure you have a radio ready to tell them about the ordnance and personnel that are getting away. Capture it all on the road.” Then he signed off and turned off his transmitter.

Cat slid down the wall to a squatting position. “How long will it take a strike force to get here?”

“I don’t know,” said Cole. “If they come from Nevada or Montana, at least an hour.”

“Carrier off the coast—the Marines might get here fastest.”

“I don’t mind getting my ass saved by the Marines,” said Cole. “Long as they save my ass.”

“If the bad guys are evacuating—”

“In order to flood the whole place?”

“I’ve done enough swimming,” said Cat.

“So—before we move on, what’s our goal here?”

“Stay breathing,” said Cat.

“We could have stayed at the cabin,” said Cole.

Cat thought about that for a few seconds. “Well, we want higher ground if they’re going to flood the place. And my guess is, if we try to go out the front door, they’ll be waiting for us there. Why hunt us down if they know we’ve got to come to them?”

“So we want to go up. If there’s any place high enough in here to stay out of the water.”

“And I was thinking,” said Cat, “maybe Aloe Vera’s here somewhere. Course, he’d be crazy to be here where he couldn’t deny knowing about it.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to deny it,” said Cole. “Maybe he’s proud of it.”

“Here’s where the ordnance is coming from,” said Cat. “Maybe the orders come from here, too. Guy builds this army, don’t you think he’d want to run it?”

“So we’re looking for Verus?”

“Hell no,” said Cat. “We’re looking for command and control. Wipe it out in advance of the main assault.”

It was elementary. Wipe out enemy command and control—it’s what Special Forces were supposed to do in advance of an attack. But he’d never been in an invasion. He’d always worked on hearts-and-minds, recon, small- group assaults. Cat, however, had been there for Iraq in 2003. Different experience, so different stuff comes to mind in a crisis.

Still, thought Cole: I should have thought of it.

“If we do happen to find him,” said Cole, “we need him alive. For the cameras.”

“I think his dead body does the same job,” said Cat.

“Better to pull him out of a hole.”

“Like Saddam.”

“Meanwhile,” said Cole, “I wonder what’s waiting around this corner. You got any grenades left?”

“In my pack,” said Cat. “Floating in that tunnel.”

Cole dropped to the floor and rolled out into the corridor, keeping his weapon pointed down the hall.

There was nothing there. Just more ramp going up and another turn.

“Goes up,” said Cat behind him.

“Just the direction we wanted to go.” Cole got up and ran up the slope. Cat followed him.

The next jog wasn’t into a corridor, it was into a large, heavily braced cavern. This was one of the factories. Not a fully automated assembly line—the volume wasn’t great enough to justify that. It looked like they used teams to assemble the pieces into finished hovercycles, one bike per team, six teams working, plus carts loaded with parts.

But nobody was assembling anything right now. Which went along with what the guys were seeing outside. Everybody evacuated.

On the wall, there was a map of the place with two escape routes marked. One led to the huge front door, the other to the tunnel connecting to the cabin.

“I don’t believe this map,” said Cole. “I don’t think they’d build this place without an escape hatch that didn’t require that the lake be drained.”

“They didn’t expect the tunnel to be full of water,” said Cat.

“But they flooded it themselves. Their defense is flooding the front door, too. No way are they so stupid they get trapped if both entrances are flooded.”

“So there’s an escape route didn’t quite make it onto the map?” said Cat.

“One that trucks can’t use,” said Cole.

“But Aloe Vera can.”

Studying the floorplan, though, there was nothing conveniently labeled “Command and Control.”

“I’ll keep watch,” said Cole, “you look at this.”

Cat looked. “Not like a regular building. Nice rectangular tower, you can spot the gaps when they leave stuff