“Where are we going?” Mallory asked.
“The secondary rendezvous point.”
“That wasn’t mentioned in the briefing.”
Wahid shrugged. “Considering what happened to the primary staging area, that was probably for the best. I only knew the place because Parvi gave me the location when she called me.They relocated the staging area to the remains of a bankrupt commune.” Wahid continued, “Parvi called it Samhain . . .”
The idea of going to an abandoned commune named Samhain of all things, made Mallory feel uneasy in a way that had little to do with potential Caliphate hostilities.
Could the primary use of the mercenary team be to draw out the Caliphate? If Mallory’s assessment of the situation reflected reality, Mosasa’s actual site for his Plan B was probably far away from where they were going right now.
Wahid piloted the stolen aircar across the desert barely three meters over the sand, topping three hundred klicks an hour. Samhain was small enough that at the speed they were going, it seemed to appear instantaneously, sprouting from the black dunes. Wahid had to bank severely and turn the aircar in a large loop around the commune before he had decelerated enough to come to a landing.
Mallory knew that outside of the megacorps that dominated the urban centers like Proudhon and Godwin, the main political unit on Bakunin was the commune. On Bakunin, communes were sovereign political entities that he understood, at least on an intellectual level, to be much more diverse than the socialist etymology of the term might suggest. He just didn’t know quite how diverse.
This commune was little more than a village. There were some signs that a dome had covered the site at some time in the past; ocher steel fingers pointed up from the ocean of sand in a rough circle around the perimeter. Within, buildings still stood, beaten an even bone gray by wind and weather. Windows were empty black sockets staring blindly from crumbling facades that once mimicked the Tudor style of medieval Terra.
Wahid parked the aircar in an open stretch of sand that had once been a park, now only marked by eroding statues and long dead trees that clawed, barkless and leafless, toward the rust-colored sky.
Mallory opened the duffel bag on the seat next to him and withdrew the plasma weapon that sat on top. He frowned. It wasn’t much use at long range and sucked energy like an overloaded tach-drive.
“What’s up?” Wahid asked.
“I don’t trust this,” Mallory said. He pulled out a short-barreled gamma laser, replacing the plasma hand cannon. The laser was a matte-black rectangle with an oblong hole cut in one end for a hand grip. Otherwise it was shaped, and weighed, much like a brick. Almost all of that weight came from the power cells; it was as much a power hog as the plasma cannon. However it had the benefit of accuracy, distance, and the ability to overload even military- grade Emerson fields with two or three seconds of continuous fire. He took the laser in hand and shouldered the duffel bag.
“Trust what?”
“Do you think Mosasa wants to risk leading the Caliphate, or whoever, to his real staging area? Does a missile attack on the hangar sound real to you? If they knew what was there, why’d they wait until after the ship lifted off to attack?”
Wahid shrugged. “They got there late.”
“Sure, but they knew where Kugara and Rajasthan were.”
“Yeah, I see . . .”
“Professional paranoia, right?”
“Right,” Wahid dug out his own gamma laser from the duffel next to him. “Though if there’s an ambush waiting, they should have targeted us by now.”
“Maybe they aren’t here yet—”
“Or they’re waiting for the others.” Wahid shot the canopy back, letting in a blast of hot dry air. “Let’s get out of
