communications and electronics gear. She thumped her palms against a foamed plastic plate and popped out a section of wall. In they crawled on all fours.
“Wish they’d make the access panels a little easier to access, dammit,” the former mermaid said. “Come on, hurry up.”
“This is a communications substation?” Scotty asked.
“Yes. And if I can change the protocols we should be able to communicate with the outside a bit. Enough, anyway. The voice and image feeds may be scrambled, but we’ve got some emergency hard lines in place. Just vanilla stuff, but I can get to them.”
Darla walked around the dome, holding her wrist out in front of her as if she were dowsing for water. Reading the wiggles on the monitor imprinted on her cuff. An anxious pause and then she smiled. “We have a signal. Xavier is sending files.”
“What kind of files?” Angelique asked.
“Visual files.” Her smile broadened. “Kendra added a note: ‘Sow confusion among the ungodly.’” Her expression grew sober again. “But I can’t do it from here. Someone has to go out into the interstices and find a hard-line video input.” She made a face. “I hate to say it, but I’m the only somebody who can do that.”
“And?” Wayne said. “If the gaps are full of pirates?”
She patted his cheek. “Oh, sweetie. You’re worried about me. I’ll just have to figure something out.”
Darla tapped at the floor until she found a section that thumped hollowly. She used her multitool’s flat- headed wedge to pry up an edge, and slid down into darkness, up to her shoulders. “Seal this behind me,” she said.
“Darla?” Sharmela asked. “How safe are these bubbles? What I mean to ask is, what would happen if the pirates depressurized the dome?”
Darla sighed. “Tell the truth, I’m not certain. By the time the Beehive was opened to the public in a couple months, everything would have been tested. The materials are up to standard… that’s not the problem. The problem is that we’re in kind of a transitional phase right now. May have been some shortcuts to speed things up for the game. I can tell you this: All of the doors are flanged so that air pressure will keep them sealed in the case of a pressure drop. You should be safe.”
“Not you, though.”
“I’ll be right back. Scotty? Seal this door after me, would you?”
“You’ve got it,” Scotty said.
Darla climbed downward. All around her was darkness and vague, hollow echoes.
She wiggled through tight spaces, breathing hard. She climbed up the side of one bubble, and stopped. Listened. Machine sounds. Fluid in pipes. Humming of wires. And distant human voices, fractured into echoes like water trickling over rocks.
She continued to climb, until she reached a stenciled number: 103-G. She pressed the side of her head hard against the wall, and held her breath. From within, a steady, thrumming sound… but no footsteps, and no human voices.
“Easy. Easy…”
She crawled up the side, lost her grip, and started to slide around the bubble’s curved roof. She looked down. It seemed to Darla that the bubble structure went down forever, dissolving in shadows somewhere below in moonrock. She gripped at the walls with fingernail-shredding strength.
“Shit fire!” Pain shot down her fingers, and as soon as she stopped her slide, she sucked at her fingers, disgusted at the tears drooling from the corners of her eyes.
At a spot where the rim of one bubble’s roof neared the floor of one just above, several cables ran out of the bubble’s side, meeting in a knot before branching off again. She used her multitool to tap into a little juncture box, and attached her PDA. If the pirates had scrambled the com field, then they probably had the capacity to un scramble it to scan for intruders. With just a drop of luck, this might fool them.
Suddenly, muffled sounds from the bubble above her. Pirates?
Terrified but determined, she triggered the data transfer, keeping her breathing shallow until an UPLOAD COMPLETE message flashed.
She wiggled back through the spaces, until she reemerged at 100-G, the gamer bubble. She knocked three times, and the door lifted out.
She sealed the door behind her. “I did it.” She rolled over on her back, gasping open-mouthed.
“Good girl,” Scotty said.
The gasps turned into shivers. Darla rolled onto her side and clutched herself. “Give me a minute, hon? I think I’m gonna throw up.”
Wayne’s fingers brushed her cheek. “I’ll buy you a gold-plated barf bag later. What’s our next step?”
Darla swallowed air, forced herself to calm. “We have to let Heinlein know that it’s done,” she said. “Then it’s up to them.”
The Moresnot pirates had combed their way through the rubble of bubble 62-E without finding either gamers or evidence of their passage. In the last hours Thomas Frost had pinballed through a series of emotions: tension, joy, frustration, fear. Anger at Shotz and the mercenaries he had hired. And finally cautious optimism that they had behaved in a professional fashion, creating alternate plans when the old ones went south. They did not fall apart, and that gave Thomas hope.
“Celeste?” Shotz asked. “What do you have on the monitors?”
Thomas watched the big woman check a handheld monitor, switching rapidly from view to view around the dome. Viewing over her shoulder, the monitor displayed rocks, the curve of domes and spidery collisions of light and shadow. The line of her jaw was too strong, too masculine. He couldn’t imagine being in bed with her, although he had the sense that she and the intimidating Shotz were lovers. Nothing said. Nothing in their body language. Just a sense. And that put a picture into his head that churned his stomach.
“Nothing,” she said. “No changes. But no bad news, either.”
“Small favors. Thomas?”
“Right here,” Frost said, grateful that the image of a quarter ton of writhing beef was stricken from his mind.
“Contact your brother, ask if he has received any word.”
Thomas tapped a code sequence into his sleeve’s com link, and waited.
In Doug Frost’s cell, a rusty voice began to sing “No High Ground.” His wallet and its built-in communicator lay in a basket on the table, along with the other contents of his pockets. A star-shaped light glowed on and off and on again, in rhythm with the song.
“No high ground, no high ground, no high ground anymore…”
He looked up, but could do nothing.
“Kendra,” the security guard barked into his communicator. “Mr. Frost is receiving a message from inside the dome. What should I do?”
“I’ll be right there.”
Doug looked up at her with no expression on his long dark face as Kendra entered, breathing hard from her half-kilometer sprint around the dome’s rim.
“What does your brother want, Douglas?”
He peered up at her, expression unreadable. He gestured toward the wallet. “You would have to let me answer to find out.”
She shook her head. “I’m sure you’d like that. Too risky.” She turned to the guard. “Keep him isolated.”
Thomas Frost punched a slender finger down at his PDA, ending its attempt to reach his brother. “I’m getting nothing,” he said.
“What does that mean?” Shotz asked.
“They may have captured him.”
Celeste nodded. “I agree that we should assume the worst. That just makes it more important to catch the Prince.” She turned to Stavros, their communications man. “I want you to open the emergency channel, see if we
