Chapter 35
July 1, 2394 AD
Sol System, Mississippi
Friday, 5:45 PM, Earth Eastern Standard Time
Friday, 12:45 PM, New Tharsis Standard Time
'Jack, you ready for this?' Penzington asked the mecha jock. She knew that Boland was probably revered as one of the greatest pilots in the fleet, but what they were doing was 'wet work,' up close and personal. She wanted to make certain that the pilot would kill up close as easily as he could through mindview targeting sights. The distance made it easier for some people, and for some it didn't matter. Nancy never trusted people who could easily kill. She just wanted them to be able to do the job when they had to.
'I'm good, Nancy.' Jack slapped the ammo magazine into his HVAR and stepped on the pad with her.
'Good,' Nancy said. 'We'll take care of the Tangiers first. I know where Elise stays. If they are under attack, then she'll be in her safe house in the mountains. I was a member of the Tangiers inner circle for a while. I know them pretty well. I have her AIC's EM signature saved. As soon as we get near her, I'll be able to pinpoint her.'
'Good. By the time you get back, I should be well enough to join you,' President Moore said. He had squirreled away one of the original QMT prototype pads more than a year prior, as if he had been planning this all along. The pad was in an old abandoned airport outside Jackson, Mississippi, near where he had grown up. Nancy thought that he was a very resourceful and clever man. He would have made a good spy. He made a great marine, and not too bad a president.
'I've had my AIC train yours, Dee's, and Sehera's external AIC on the operation of the pad. All you have to do is tell them what you want, and they can get you where you need to be. We managed to put backdoors in all the QMT pads known to us. So we can operate any of them, anywhere, and bounce between the network of jump pads. From here, we can QMT through ships or Mars or out to the Oort, and from there anywhere forward and back with a snap-back algorithm. I think this must be what Ahmi was trying to figure out how to do, but she didn't have the advantage of having access to all of the QMTs everywhere. We'll see you in a bit.'
'Good hunting, Nancy, DeathRay.' Dee waved to them. Then the pad lit up and they were gone to Mars for a fraction of a second, then through the Oort Cloud facility to the big one at Tau Ceti.
A fraction of a second later they were in the northern mountainous region of the Tharsis continent of Ares, inside a hallway with hardwood floors and lavish interior decor. There were paintings on the walls that Nancy knew were priceless, and there were sculptures, suits of armor, and other artifacts aligned down the hall that were each artifacts of antiquity from human history.
'Look at all this shit.' Jack whistled softly.
'Elise is a collector. If it is expensive, she wants two of them. You should see her antique cars.' Nancy scanned each direction to get her bearings. 'This way.'
The two of them slipped through the halls until they came past several suites and then an elevator. The elevator had a stairwell to the right of it. Nancy eased the door to the stairwell open and poked her HVAR around the doorjamb.
'Clear. Come on. They'll be two floors down, in her shipping operations room.'
'If you knew that, why didn't we go there?'
'I couldn't be sure I had the coordinates right. We didn't want to teleport into a wall or something. I had measured where we came in before because I was going to fly a bomb in there if I ever got the opportunity. I never got it. But what I did get is her SIF encryption sequence. Even though she changed it, she follows the same algorithm. Allison just cycled through the algorithm until she hit the right key code. Ergo, we're in.'
'I see.' Jack widened his eyes and tried not to grin. 'What is this place, anyway?'
'Bunker, hideout, ski resort, spa, whatever she wants it to be. She has more money and power than God. The only person she answers to is Elle Ahmi herself. They are tight, apparently. I didn't find that out until six years ago, and it nearly got me killed then.'
They
