Rhea led the team into an alcove between two cargo containers to wait it out. She kept an eye on the overhead map, and in about a minute a portion of the Texas barrier, and the street leading up to it, turned green.
She peered from her cover, confirming that the route was a go.
Time to move, she transmitted over the mental channel of their mesh network.
Sticking to the green area of the street, the group hurried from cover and rushed to the Texas barrier. By the time they arrived, the green swatch had already begun shrinking.
They quickly helped each other over. Too weak to pull himself up on his own, Renaldo had to hold onto Horatio’s back while the robot carried him to the top and down the other side.
Rhea was one of those giving boosts to the others, so when the last of them had gone, she leaped up, grabbed onto the top of the barrier, pulled herself over, and leaped the entire distance to the ground.
They quickly disseminated into the ruins of the city beyond the settlement, taking cover in the remains of a mid-rise building as another UAV swept past.
When it passed, they continued into the shattered streets, keeping to the green zones. Because there were no glow lamps out there, the light levels were low, forcing the team to move very slowly. Rhea and the others activated their night vision, which was a passive sensing mechanism, and that helped. More than once she avoided slamming into a protruding rod of rebar or other obstacle thanks to said night vision.
Soon the jagged and broken skyscrapers were towering above them, eating up the stars. That was good, because it meant they were far less exposed to the satellites and the patrolling drones. Indeed, the way forward was entirely green. But also bad, because the streets were even darker, with their night vision barely penetrating in some places.
None of them dared use LIDAR, but since Will had some map data cached from the last time he traveled this way, they didn’t have to: Will shared the data, which caused the view to partially fill out with white wireframes. He warned them that the ruins could have easily changed since his last visit—pieces were always crumbling away from the skyscrapers, and sometimes buildings collapsed entirely.
Will also launched Gizmo, which he had repaired since the encounter with Veil, so that it could track any UAV scouts the Wardenites in the settlement couldn’t see, thanks to the skyscrapers that now blotted out the sky. The drone ascended silently, until it was above the altitude of the highest building, and then proceeded to shadow the party from above.
Horatio led. The robot kept its hands held in front, in case the map data had changed. Horatio also aggregated the positional data from all three sources—the satellites, the Wardenites, and Gizmo—to compute the final map of go and no-go zones, which updated every fifteen seconds. Though Gizmo was too small to be detected by the spy satellites, the drone was careful to stick to the green zones nonetheless, Rhea noted.
Thus, they made their way through the ruins of the city that had once thrived before the Great Calming, the city that Rust Town and Aradne had replaced. They were officially in the Outlands, even if the rocky plains of said region were still a few kilometers out.
They neared the outskirts of the ruins; beyond, the land was completely red—in full view of the spy satellites.
The team was forced to retreat inward, toward the Aradne wall. According to Rhea’s overhead map, a swath of green lay immediately adjacent to the wall, all along its outer edge. That was the cover they needed.
“We could stay here, and wait for our ride to Mars,” Renaldo suggested.
“No,” Horatio said. “It’s better to stick to the Warden’s plan. While we’re in the green now, tomorrow morning this entire area will be red. Unless you’d like to hide inside the ruins of an unstable building?”
“Ah, no thanks,” Renaldo said. “We follow the Warden’s plan.”
As they grew closer to the Aradne wall, Rhea called a halt. She retrieved the AR visor from Horatio and made a call to DragonHunter. Voice only.
“Were you able to take the wall’s external cameras?” she asked. He’d taken them before, to allow the mini tankers to return undetected from the pipeline, but when she’d told him about her latest plan, he’d warned her that he wasn’t sure whether or not the cameras were still his.
“Like a stallion takes a filly,” DragonHunter replied. “I found out that city employees tried to patch the software a few weeks ago, but apparently they didn’t realize I installed a sandbox. So these dudes, they go and log into my sandbox, install a patch, and call it a day. Meanwhile, the real environment remains unpatched. So yeah, still mine. I never lost the cameras. You won’t be spotted.”
“You’re certain?” she pressed. “Because we have the CommNixer pistols…”
“I’d advise against using them,” Will said. “Especially in a rather quiet area like the city outskirts. When a bunch of cameras go down in a row, that’s a big red flag to any observing AI.”
She disconnected and returned the visor to Horatio.
They continued forward, leaving behind the cover of the skyscrapers, sticking to the go zones, until they were walking inside the green band next to the Aradne wall. It towered to their left, blotting out the stars.
She often searched the sky nervously as she advanced, but no octocopters came racing to their position.
Will had no cached data of this area, but DragonHunter routed the LIDAR from those cameras through to Horatio, who in turn distributed it to Rhea and the others so that they could see
