of them find a way on board, maybe they will find the secret of zero-point energy that the Bright have supposedly harnessed. And then, as far as I'm concerned, you really do have the end of the world, just like Wilber predicted. The Archimedes can't be allowed to fail into any of their hands.'
'It won't,' Buddy said quietly. 'Once we're there, in a couple of days' time, we'll be gone for ever, no trace left. We'll be somewhere better.'
For all your sakes, I hope so. 'I know you will,' Kendrick replied, trying to sound reassuring. 'But I remember a time when you wanted to nail Draeger just as much as I did. Are you telling me that's no longer true?'
Buddy looked distressed. He seemed about to say something a couple of times but changed his mind each time.
'Christ, fine,' he said at length. 'How long will this take? It's not like we aren't in a hurry, and there's Caroline to take care of. So how long?'
'I don't know. A day, maybe?'
Buddy groaned and covered his head with his hands. 'Shit, shit, shit,' he muttered. 'Right, listen – a day, and that's it. Any longer and I'm out of there, do you understand me?'
'I'm not asking any more than that. But, yeah, we do have to take care of Caroline first.'
'It doesn't need a cryptkey. Just plug and go.'
Kendrick held Buddy's wand next to the node set in the dashboard and waited until the wand had established a connection. Wide scrubby plains blurred past them a few hundred metres below, the sun low on the horizon behind them. They were on their way.
In the meantime, Buddy rummaged around until he pulled out a crumpled eepsheet. Kendrick took it from him, smoothing it out. He aimed the wand at the eepsheet and it beeped quietly, confirming that it had successfully transferred the link from the helicopter to the 'sheet.
In response, the crumpled page of electronic paper lit up, a logo blurring rapidly across it. Images of politicians and actors appeared in rapid superimposition, one fading into the other, before presenting the front page of Buddy's default subscription newsfeed.
'What are you expecting to find there?'
'After we finally got out of the Maze, I found that a lot of records had been deleted or destroyed. But whoever did it wasn't quite thorough enough. The Maze extends for several kilometres under the jungle, and it goes down a hell of a way as well. I've seen a lot of schematics over the years, but they're all different. Most of the original designs were stored in Pentagon databases and they disappeared during the civil war.'
'Different how?'
'I need to take a look before I remember.' Kendrick tapped an address into the eepsheet's search box. A couple of seconds later he heard the sound of crackling, followed by a graphic of flames burning away the 'sheet's main information display, a widening pixellated inferno that eventually revealed a demonic face. Insane laughter issued from the eepsheet.
'What the fuck is that?' asked Buddy, bemused.
'Ssh.'
'Who dares summon the sleeper in the dark, that they may seek knowledge?' The voice was a deep baritone, the face itself dark red with wide, staring eyes and a half-crazed grin filled with sharpened teeth.
'I seek knowledge,' Kendrick replied laconically.
The demonic eyes grew wide and round, before sliding from one side to the other, as if checking whether anyone was eavesdropping. 'Are you prepared to pay the price, mortal?'
'Yes,' said Kendrick, in a resigned tone. They'd redesigned the front end, and although it looked slicker it was taking almost twice as long for him to get where he wanted to be than he remembered from previous visits.
Still, it could have been worse. The kind of information he was after wasn't something you could get out of any public newsfeeds. For this kind of thing, you needed hackers. 'I'm looking specifically for information on the Maze. I need a schematic of the whole thing, downloadable to this eepsheet.'
The face wiggled its eyebrows. Somewhere out there, maybe in Kazakhstan – which was functionally an anarchist state – was a real live computer geek with a micro-lens mapping the movements of his face to this devil animation. Probably not even speaking English, since some top-end translation software was virtually undetectable. 'Such schematics are available publicly,' the devil pointed out.
'Not the ones I'm looking for. Check the records for the World Court proceedings, charges of genocide, accused President Wilber and General Anton Sieracki, 2090.1 don't have the exact date of the investigation to hand, but there was a question of missing schematics concerning to the Maze, how it was built, who contracted it.'
Of course, Kendrick had found his way to such schematics before during his lengthy researches into Draeger's background. They weren't legally admissible as evidence since they came only from highly illegal sources.
Which, of course, didn't mean they couldn't be found, so long as you knew who to ask and were willing to pay the price. The fact that the schematics had disappeared from every official database, server and Washington office where investigators might have reasonably expected to find them, along with untold terabytes of information and incriminating data, had done nothing except convince Kendrick that someone had set out to deliberately destroy evidence of a direct, explicit connection between Draeger and the Maze.
'Mm-hmm' said the face after a short pause. ' Veerry interesting. You accessed this information once before, yes? 12 March 2093.'
'Yes, but I don't have access to it any more. I deleted it.'
'Very wise. Also, I note your current position near the border of the former United States, moving approximately south-east. Flying in the direction of Venezuela, perhaps?'
Shit. 'Please don't spread that around,' Kendrick said earnestly. He hadn't expected this.
'Of course not. Well, not unless someone pays us to know where you are right now.' The face grinned evilly. 'Here are your schematics.'
The face was replaced by a new animation of a taloned hand shaking a dented tin can. Kendrick pointed Buddy's wand at the eepsheet and watched as a substantial amount of money transferred itself to the hacker's account.
A look of alarm spread across Buddy's face. 'Christ, Kendrick, that's a lot of money. I'm not rich-'
'If you're right about the Archimedes, you won't need the money much longer, will you?'
Buddy blushed red. 'Yeah, true.'
'Look, once we're in LA I can arrange a fund transfer from my account if you like-'
'That won't be necessary.'
Kendrick looked back down at the eepsheet. The taloned hand had gone and had been replaced by a list of files. Most of them were useless, the same publicly available schematics he'd seen before. But he persisted, delving deeper, finally finding what he wanted: rooms and corridors that didn't exist in other schematics, laid out in a three-dimensional array that he could study from any angle. He zoomed the POV outwards until he saw tunnels stretching far, far beyond the main body of the complex, their dimensions delineated in crude planes of primary colours.
'Look at this,' he said, holding up the eepsheet.
Buddy squinted at it. 'You blew all my money on this?'
'Yeah, and for a good reason. There are tunnels leading several kilometres away from the Maze. They're well hidden. Los Muertos might know about them, but then again they might not.'
Buddy let out a long, descending sigh. 'You're going to get me killed, I absolutely know it, and for some reason I'm still going to follow you in there.'
Kendrick grinned. 'We'll be fine.'
Kendrick half-slept as Buddy simultaneously piloted the craft and fired out messages via the helicopter's ancient gridnode. Kendrick woke when the constant drone of the rotor blades above his head changed subtly. He
