“Are we having fun yet?” Blake asked.
“Ask me in a few minutes.”
With so much gear to gather and, more often, to cobble together—without doing anything to arouse the suspicions of those inside the compound—they had managed only a single test run. A hemisphere away, where it was late spring. In full daylight. With winter almost upon them here, determined to act now, there had not been time for a second rehearsal under more realistic conditions. Mostly Dana had practiced in a flight simulator, also improvised. How good could that be?
“Trust me,” Antonio had said of his improvised trainer. “It’s only physics.”
Quit griping, Dana chided herself. Had the harvest not been complete, she’d have had to prepare with nothing but simulation. And scolded herself again: stay focused on the here and now.
On her specs, a red disk represented her target, the settlement’s puddle of illumination digitally replaced to protect her night vision. Even by starlight she could sense where the sea must meet the sky. If she saw horizon, so did her specs. As camera and processor identified individual buildings and interpreted their foreshortened appearance, the specs overlaid in dim red: contour lines, distance and bearing, altitude and ground speed.
Antonio had called retrofitting nav mode into the specs simple physics, too.
Borne along by the wind, the air seemed still. But this was late autumn, and the ground had long since surrendered the day’s scant warmth to a cloudless sky and back into space. Dana, shivering, cranked up the current to the heating elements of her flight suit.
“Um, Dana?” Blake said.
“I know.” The higher they rose, the farther the wind pushed them off course. But she needed altitude. “Trust the pilot.”
“With my life. Every time we launch.”
They had yet to reach the altitude she wanted, but the range to the target kept changing and not for the better. She muttered, “Close enough for government work.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s time,” she translated. She armed and smacked the seat release. Freed of their weight, the balloon bounded away.
Plummeting to the ground, Dana declared, “Now we’re having fun.”
*
Sooner than her specs advised, trusting her instincts, Dana yanked the ripcord.
Nylon fabric whipped from her backpack, grabbed by the air stream, heard and felt more than seen. The paraglider, like the balloon they had just jettisoned, like their flight suits, was all black.
Air rammed into the glider’s cells. With a brutal yank the inflated wing braked their fall—and knocked the breath right out of her. Her specs went flying into the darkness. Grabbing the risers, she flattened their angle of attack. Shifting her weight, she started them on a slow, banking curve toward the island of light below.
“I need your specs,” she told Blake.
“I lost mine, too,” he said. “Damned inferior straps. You should fire your engineer.”
“Not a problem,” she assured him.
That we don’t know what we’ll find once we’re down? That this is my first night jump, ever? That apart from the one practice run, I haven’t paraglided since college? More than fifty standard years ago! In a sane universe, I’d be taking up knitting.
Those were problems.
*
No one’s looking, Blake kept reminding himself. If someone were, this is the dark of night. We’re all in black. They’d never expect us to arrive this way. And anyway, we’ll be on the ground soon.
As buildings loomed out of the darkness—as he and Dana fell out of the freaking sky!—that became too soon.
“Get ready,” Dana whispered into his ear. “Legs together. Knees bent.”
Turning into the wind, their boots all but grazing the top of the stockade, they swooped toward the open end of the playground. He felt a jerk as Dana flared the wing. They were coming in fast! Maybe a meter off the ground, she hit the brakes again. Hard.
She hissed, “Hit the deck running.”
He did, and somehow their feet tangled. They tumbled to the ground, Blake on the bottom with the wind knocked out of him. He heard the paraglider flapping.
Dana unclipped them. Faster than he could climb to his feet, she had off her backpack. He helped her squeeze air from the paraglider cells, wincing at every wheeze and faint whistle. Together, they crammed the flapping, deflated wing into her pack. She shrugged the pack back on.
“My turn,” he mouthed.
“Li? Is that you?”
Carlos’s voice! He wasn’t in sight—yet.
They sprinted across the playground, Dana hanging onto his arm and limping. She had injured herself, doubtless his fault from his clumsy landing. They flattened themselves against the childcare center, between windows.
She took out her air gun. Blake, lacking her training, not trusting himself with a lethal weapon, left his air gun in its holster. He went for his improvised shock device, of use only up close.
Carlos emerged from behind the childcare center, cigar in hand, its tip aglow, to peer into the playground. “Li? Is that you?”
Blake tased him.
Carlos folded, spasming.
They had rehearsed takedowns. In the instant after Blake cut the circuit, Dana had her knee in Carlos’s back and his arm twisted behind his back. Blake slapped tape over Carlos’s mouth, then offered Dana one of their improvised plasticuffs. She bound Carlos’s wrists together behind him.
Blake pocketed his weapon’s spent cartridge and reloaded before he and Dana hauled Carlos to his feet. With current no longer flowing, Carlos was already recovering. His eyes round, his gaze darting from one captor to the other, Carlos followed meekly where they led.
Toward the bunker.
Now it was Blake’s turn.
*
The bunker door sensor flashed green at Carlos’s handprint, lifted weeks earlier from a datasheet. Who could have guessed they would end up in possession of Carlos’s actual hand?
“I thought that would come in handy,” Blake whispered. His own handprint might still have been in the system. And it might have triggered an alarm.
Dana did a slit-her-own-throat gesture. As in: shut up.
He had never doubted he could bypass the lock—security on the bunker
