She kept her overhead map active. Though she had no Internet connection this far underground, her position still updated thanks to her internal accelerometer, and she watched the blue dots of the party creep underneath the streets and cargo containers that surrounded the headquarters until they reached an adjacent neighborhood two blocks away.
The tunnel sloped steadily upward.
Ahead, sunlight poked through a long, horizontal line, where the exit hatch was open a crack.
“Seems our assassin friend forgot to shut the door,” Will commented.
Keeping her pistol in her right hand, Rhea activated the Ban’Shar in her other, employing disk mode. Then she approached warily.
When she reached the exit, which was built into a horizontally sloping shed of sorts, she manually gated her vision, drastically reducing the brightness levels so that the horizontal line of light nearly became invisible.
Wait, Will transmitted on a mental channel over the mesh network. If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this right. I’m coming in on your right. When you kick open that door, you go low, I go high.
How about I go high? she returned, not liking the idea of Will exposing himself above her shield.
Fine, he replied.
She felt him brush against her right elbow, and knew he was in place.
With her foot, she shoved the sloping metal door open to reveal the empty street beyond.
Since she’d already gated her eyes, the sudden change in brightness didn’t blind her, and she swept her pistol from left to right.
Meanwhile, Will had dropped to one knee beside her, and was similarly scanning the neighborhood from the ground.
The streets proved empty, while the lean-tos and cargo containers lining it were completely still. Apparently everyone had either retreated inside when the robots swept through, or they had gathered on the southeast perimeter of the neighborhood to watch the assault on her headquarters.
She could hear a distant buzzing, and the occasional clattering thud, like a toppling Texas barrier.
At her feet, the two Wardenites who had been planted to guard the exit lay dead next to their front operation—a shish kabob kiosk. Large plasma holes were burned into their chests, and their weapons were only half drawn from the holsters.
“Bill and Philip,” Renaldo said sadly. “They were good men.”
Rhea looked away. Though she didn’t know them, she still felt grief: the men had essentially died for her.
She gazed farther down the road. The getaway vehicle was still parked in the expected location.
She raised her hood over her head and leaned forward to peer past the upper edge of the shed that harbored the exit. That shed was squeezed between two cargo containers, and past their rooftops, toward the direction of the compound, she could see octocopter drones hovering in place—the source of the distant buzzing.
She quickly ducked once more and pulled her hood lower around her face. Then she emerged from the opening and, keeping close to the walls of the bordering cargo containers, she moved at a crouch toward the vehicle. There were no security cameras here—the Wardenites had specifically chosen this neighborhood for the exit because of its lack of monitoring.
Will and the Wardenites followed close behind her.
She reached the vehicle and unlocked it via the remote interface, which she was able to access via her mesh network. Then they piled inside.
The vehicle activated, and drove forward slowly, staying close to the bordering line of cargo containers. She was happy with the speed—any faster and they might draw attention to themselves.
The vehicle reached an intersection and turned northwest, heading away from the compound. Though she couldn’t see the headquarters itself, Rhea kept an eye on the drones above it via the righthand rearview mirror, and she watched the octocopters recede.
When the vehicle turned onto a side street and the drones vanished from view entirely, she exhaled in relief. Still the vehicle maintained its slow pace—spy satellites were recording everything from orbit above, and they definitely didn’t want to seem in a hurry. She kept expecting a drone to come over at any moment, to investigate them or to order them to step outside for identification purposes, but evidently the robots were still ransacking the compound and hadn’t concluded she had escaped yet.
The vehicle ground to a halt next in a neighborhood that was still only partially rebuilt since the Hydra attack. The Wardenites had chosen this district for the safe house again because of the lack of cameras.
On the dashboard in front of her sat a special AR visor designed by DragonHunter; this visor had a comm node that bounced data across hundreds of different encrypted nodes across the world, with each node providing a spoofed location and ID, making it almost impossible to trace. That cyber obfuscation technique was similar to what Veil had used when she had Mayor Grandas send messages on her behalf. It was also highly illegal.
Rhea retrieved the visor and handed it to Horatio, who slid the device over his own built-in visor.
“How’s it look?” she asked.
“A moment while I pull up the Sat Displacement Map,” the robot answered. That was a satellite position calculator, used to compute the positions of spy satellites based on the hour of the day. Horatio had all the satellite positions stored internally already, courtesy of DragonHunter, but the robot used the obfuscated visor to augment that data with live drone information—the other Wardenites would be keeping watch on the skies, and marking out the positions of any nearby UAVs, even those traveling at high altitudes overhead.
“I have two spy satellites overhead,” the robot said. “They have a partial angle on the street. There’s also a high-altitude drone in a holding pattern above the compound. I’m aggregating the data feed with that of the satellites, and as
