'Okay. Just tell us which way to go.'
'I will, Mike. But there's something else I want you to do first.'
'Sure.'
'I'm going to give you a satellite connection to Authority High Command. Call them. Insist to speak with Della Lu. Tell her everything you know about our tricks —'
Mike's hands tightened on the drive sticks. 'No!'
' — except that we control these two crawlers.'
'But why?'
'Do it, Mike. If you call now, you'll be able to give away our satellite trick before they have proof. Maybe they will think you're still loyal. It will distract them, anyway. Give away anything you want. I'll listen, too. I'll learn more what's passing at their center. Please, Mike.'
Mike gritted his teeth. 'Okay, Wili. Put 'em on.'
Allison Parker grinned savagely to herself. She hadn't driven a crawler in almost three years — fifty-three if you counted years like the rest of the universe. At the time, she'd thought it a silly waste of taxpayer's money to have recon specialists take a tour with a base security outfit. The idea had been that anyone who collected intelligence should be familiar with the groundside problems of security and deception. Becoming a tank driver had been fun, but she never expected to see the inside of one of these things again.
Yet here she was. Allison gunned the engines, and the little armored carrier almost flew out of the thicket of scrub oak where they'd been hiding. She recognized these hills, even with the hovering spheres and napalm bursting in the distance. Time didn't change some things. Their path ran parallel to a series of cairn-like concrete structures, the ruins of the power lines that had stretched across the Valley. Why, she and... Paul... had hiked along precisely this way... so long ago.
She tried to shake free of the painful double images. The sun was fast burning off the morning fog. Soon the concealment the Tinkers were using to such advantage would be gone. If they couldn't win by then, they never would.
In her earphone, she heard a strange voice reporting their position to the Peacer command center. It was eerie: She knew the message came ultimately from Wili. But he was sitting right behind her and had not spoken a word. The last time she looked, he seemed asleep.
The deception was working. They were doing what Peacer control said, but they were also coming closer and closer to the edge of the inner security area.
'Paul. What I saw from orbit is only about six thousand meters north of here. We'll be closest in another couple of minutes. Is that close enough?'
Paul touched his scalp connector, seemed to think. 'No. We'd have to be motionless for almost an hour to bobble from that range. The best trade-off is still four thousand meters. I — Wili — has a spot in mind; he and Jill are doing prelim computations on the assumption we can reach it. Even so, he'll need about thirty seconds once we get there.'
After a moment Paul added, 'In a couple minutes, we'll break our cover. Wili will stop transmitting and you'll drive like hell straight for their bobbler.'
Allison looked through the periscoped hull. The crawler was so close to the security perimeter, the towers and domes of the Enclave blocked her view to the north. The Enclave was a city, and their final dash would take them well inside its boundaries. 'We'll be sitting ducks.' Her sentence was punctuated by the swelling roar of a stub-winged jet that swept almost directly over them. She hadn't seen or heard it till that instant. But the aircraft wasn't strafing. It was loafing along at less than one hundred meters per second, a lowlevel recon.
'We have a good chance,' Wili's voice came suddenly in her earphone. 'We won't make our run until the patrol planes are in good position. We should be in their blind spot for almost five minutes.'
'And they'll have other things to worry about,' said Paul. 'I've been talking to the Tinkers coming in on foot. They all know the site of the Peacer generator now. Some of them have gotten pretty close, closer than we. They don't have our equipment — but the Authority can't know that for sure. When Wili gives the signal, they'll come out of hiding and make their own dash inwards.'
The war went far beyond their crawlers, beyond even the Livermore Valley. Paul said a similar battle was being played out in China.
Even so, victory or defeat seemed to depend on what happened to this one crawler in the next few minutes.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Della slipped on the earpiece and adjusted the microphone to her throat. She had the undivided attention of Avery, Maitland, and everyone else in earshot. None of them except Hamilton Avery had heard of one Miguel Rosas, but they all knew he had no business on a maximum security channel. 'Mike?'
A familiar voice came from the earpiece and the speaker on the terminal. 'Hello, Della. I've got some news for you.'
'Just calling on this line is news enough. So your people have cracked our comm and recon system.'
'Right the first time.'
