Axis

and Weil in one of those open-topped desert vehicles the locals called 'roosters' for the way they bounced over the landscape like flightless birds. Sigmund took the driver's seat and they drove off at the back of the convoy. Not a comfortable ride. The heat and sun were oppressive even at this hour. All he saw of Kubelick's Grave was a garage and gas depot where rusty automobile parts lay scattered, the drive train of an ancient truck abandoned on the gravel like the spine of some Jurassic creature. Then they were off the main road, rattling over a hardpan trail parallel to the mountains.

An hour passed, broken only by the hoarse shouting of Sigmund as he attempted to converse with someone over a field radio. The talk, what Brian could hear of it, consisted of codewords and incomprehensible commands. Then the convoy came over the peak of a small rill and the Fourth compound was suddenly dead ahead. The military vehicles put on a burst of speed, big tires kicking up geysers of dust, but Weil pulled up short and killed the engine, leaving Brian's ears ringing in the relative silence.

Sigmund began yelling again, first into his radio and then at Weil: something about 'too late' and an order to 'abort.'

'They abandoned the compound,' Weil said to Brian. 'Fresh tracks. Must have been a good two dozen vehicles.'

'Can't you secure the site, at least?'

'Not until we can defuse whatever ordnance they left behind. What happens in these cases, they—'

He was interrupted by a burst of distant light.

Brian looked at the Fourth compound. A moment before it had been a cluster of small buildings around a central courtyard. Now it was an expanding cloud of dust and smoke.

'Shit,' Weil had time to say. The concussion reached them a fraction of a second later, a noise that seemed to swell his lungs until his chest hurt. Brian closed his eyes. A second shockwave, like the beat of a hot wing, washed over him.

The compound was gone. Brian told himself that Lise wasn't inside: no one had been inside.

'… rig it…' Weil was saying.

'What?'

'They rig it to destroy their technical gear and keep us from taking samples. We got here late.' Weil's complexion had turned pale with dust kicked up by the explosion. Sigmund's assault team had turned back, hastily.

'Is Lise—?'

'We have to assume she left with the others.'

'Going where?'

'They won't all be traveling together. From the tracks it looks like a couple dozen vehicles headed in different directions. We'll run down a few of them. With luck we'll pick up Lise and the other major targets. With a little more warning we would have had drones in the air to keep watch. But we didn't have time and anyway every drone on the continent has been shipped to the far west, surveying the fucking oil allotments for earthquake damage.'

Sigmund was still growling into his handset. Then he switched it off and said to Weil, 'The plane's gone.'

Turk Findley's bush plane, presumably. Gone. Escaped. Should he be pleased about that?

'The aircraft, at least, we can track,' Weil said.

And Lise along with it.

Brian looked back at the ruins of the compound. Black smoke gushed from collapsed foundations and small fires burned fitfully in the surrounding desert. Of the brick and adobe buildings that had once stood there, nothing remained.

* * * * *

They spent the night in what passed for public accommodations in Kubelick's Grave, a tile-roofed motel in which Brian shared a unit with Sigmund and Weil. Two beds and a cot—Brian got the cot.

Most of the afternoon and evening he spent listening to Sigmund make and take calls. The name of the Executive Action Committee was frequently invoked.

That night, unable to sleep in his cot, cold despite the banging antique electric heater, it occurred to Brian to wonder whether they had found out about Lise's last call to him.

Were his calls tapped for audio? Lise's callback code had been unfamiliar to him, probably a disposable loaded with anonymous minutes, so they wouldn't have been able to trace it. And there hadn't been anything really incriminating about the call. Apart from the fact that Brian had failed to report it. Which would suggest that his loyalties were divided. That he might not be a trustworthy DGS man.

He wanted to be angry with Lise. Hated her pointless personal involvement in this fucking mess, her obsessive need to sort out her father's disappearance and turn the story into some kind of memoir.

He wanted to be angry with her, and he was angry with himself when he didn't succeed.

* * * * *

Reports on the round-up of fugitive Fourths began to come in before dawn, Sigmund shouting into his phone while Brian hurriedly dressed.

Success had been mixed, he gathered.

'At least half the population of the compound is still at large,' Weil said. 'Our guys intercepted three vehicles carrying a total of fifteen people, none of them the major players. The good news—'

Brian braced himself.

'The good news is, a small plane registered to Turk Findley attempted to refuel at a little utility airport a couple of hundred miles west of here. The airport manager recognized the plane from a legal bulletin—Mr. Findley's former employer wants it impounded for back rent. He called the Provisional Government and somebody there was kind enough to refer the matter to us. Our guys arrived and detained the pilot and passengers. One male, three females, all refusing to identify themselves.'

'And one of them is Lise?' Brian asked.

'Maybe. That's not confirmed. And there may be higher-value targets along with her.'

'She's not a target. I wouldn't call her a target.'

'She made herself a target when she ran.'

But not high value, he thought, clinging to that. 'Can I see her?'

'We can be there by noon if we get a move on,' Weil said.

* * * * *

It occurred to Brian to wonder, as the town of Kubelick's Grave vanished behind them, who Kubelick might have been and why he was buried out here in the badlands; but nobody in the car had an answer to that question. Then the little cluster of buildings was behind them, Sigmund driving away from the mountains toward the razor- flat western horizon. The road ahead quivered in the morning heat like a figment of the imagination.

Sigmund couldn't make his phone work, though he kept banging it with one hand while he steered with the other. Even communication between the widely-spaced cars of the convoy—this vehicle plus three heavy trucks containing hired soldiers—was intermittent and unreliable. Weil couldn't explain it: 'A half-dozen aerostats anchored between here and the west coast and not one of the fucking things doing what it's supposed to do. Lucky we got the news from the airfield when we did. Jesus!'

And it was not only the ruptured communication that seemed remarkable to Brian. He called attention to the steady flow of traffic in the opposite direction, not just oil-company traffic but a number of private vehicles, some so sand-pitted and sun-scarred that they looked barely functional. As if they were evacuating the inhabited outposts of the Rub al-Khali, and maybe they were—some new tremor, maybe.

Sixty miles farther on the convoy pulled onto the gravel verge and stopped. Sigmund and Weil went forward to talk to the leader of the paramilitary company. It looked more like an argument than a conversation, but Brian couldn't make out the words. He stood at the roadside watching the eastbound traffic. Eerie, he thought, how much this part of Equatoria looked like Utah: the same dusty blue horizon, the same torpid daytime heat. Had the Hypothetical designed this desert when they assembled the planet, and if so, why? But Brian doubted they paid that kind of attention to details—the Hypothetical, it seemed to him, were firm believers in the long result. Plant a seed (or seed a planet) and let nature do the rest. Until the harvest… whatever that meant or might one day