Kyle grinned. “Yes, you are. Now put that thing down before a bump in the road fries us both.”
“It woulda looked suspicious going out prospecting without one, you know. We had to get one anyway.” Bobby dropped the nozzle and put his foot on the fuel tank, to stop it from bouncing around.
“Good call. Okay, here’s the plan. We’re going to mess around until nightfall. Then I go into sector E-3. You’ll wait outside in the buggy. I’ll come back for you, and if I don’t, then you take the buggy and go on home. If they ask you questions, tell them I lied to you.”
“Why?”
The less he knew, the better off he was, but Kyle needed to build some trust. If Bobby thought he was out here to plant a bomb or perform an assassination, he might abandon Kyle the first chance he got.
“I want to take some pictures of the chief executive officer of RDC.”
“Blackmail … I bet that pays better than prospecting.”
The kid wasn’t so innocent after all.
“No, Bobby. I won’t be asking him for money. I’ll be taking the pictures back to Altair, and asking them to arrest him.”
Bobby stared at him.
“I think he had something to do with Kassa,” Kyle said.
They rode in silence for a while, anger radiating from Bobby’s gangly frame.
“I’m going with you,” the kid said. Not arguing, not asking, not whining. Just a statement.
War made people grow up fast. Too fast. Kyle almost turned the buggy around and took the kid home, but he knew it was too late. The young man had a right to strike back at the people who had destroyed his home. There was a war on, and Kyle had made his first recruit.
The sun finally approached the horizon, and their suits started cooling off. As hot and uncomfortable as it had been, it was about to become even worse. The heat you could at least shade yourself from, but the cold would reach you no matter where you hid.
“They don’t even allow flybys over this sector.” Bobby knew way too much about Baharain security, and he kept telling Kyle why their mission was impossible. “What if they have guards?”
“I looked, but I didn’t see any ads for external security staff. If they had outdoor guards, they would have to hire new ones on a regular basis. Nobody could do this job long term without quitting.” Running security patrols in a place where the greatest danger was the air around you was the definition of a dead-end job.
“Cameras?”
“That’s why we’re going over at twilight. The rapidly changing contrasts should confuse any automated surveillance. I doubt they have people watching the entire border.”
They didn’t even have a fence. What they did have was a bright orange post stuck in the ground, with a warning sign. The sign was so old it was illegible. Kyle could see another post a hundred meters to the left, and assumed there would be one to the right somewhere.
The buggy’s navcom lit up, telling them they were on the edge of a restricted area. Kyle told it to shut up. He’d already cut off the buggy’s communications with the dome. Although the vehicle was equipped with satellite tracking, it was only for the driver’s convenience. It didn’t automatically report their location to some central headquarters. The government respected the typical prospector’s paranoia about being followed by their competition.
Kyle drove past the signpost and tried not to flinch. This would be a good place for anti-vehicle mines, but he didn’t really expect any. The insurance liability would be too great for a corporation to stomach. Only governments could leave a piece of ground fatally armed for decades. That was one of the weaknesses of government, in Kyle’s view.
They crept through the growing dark, sticking to the valleys and low-lying patches. There was no vegetation to shield them, but the rock formations were complex and jumbled. In the fading light, they almost looked like trees or houses.
A glow from ahead told him they were getting close. The reflected light from the domes hovered like a halo in the sky.
He stopped the buggy at the foot of a small hill.
“I’m going up on foot to see if I can get a clear line of vision. You wait here and cover our line of retreat. You can drive the buggy, can’t you?” he asked as an afterthought, cursing himself for forgetting to check that detail.
Bobby shrugged. “Sure,” he said. He was a terrible liar.
Lugging the camera and its telescopic lens, Kyle clambered up the steep slope. The hill was treacherous, carved with pits and sinkholes. It resembled a coral reef more than a lump of rock.
Creeping over the top, he saw the valley spread out below. The various domes in the complex glowed invitingly, gentle warm yellow leaking through their transparent tops. Kyle had planned his route to bring him to the backside of the one place in the sector the corporate recruiting literature didn’t brag about. He knew all about the suites and recreational facilities of the rest of the complex. By the process of elimination he had figured out this one undescribed patch had to be where the bigwigs lived.
A distant shadow to the right caught his eye, but when he stared that direction, he saw nothing. The twilight was affecting his vision, too. Aiming the camera at the dome below him, he scanned it, looking for clues, hints, or just an uncurtained window.
Stakeouts were a matter of patience. Typically one waited days for something interesting to happen. Kyle had rented the equipment for a week. But when he saw a person standing in an observation deck, looking up at the stars, he accepted his good luck. He felt he was owed some.
The man was the right height and weight for a twin of Dejae. Clicking the zoom factors up, Kyle narrowed in on the face, running the vid recorder at maximum resolution. And blinked. The man was wearing a mask, an extravagant tribal affair with feathers and glittering gems. He appeared to be having a conversation, but a few minutes of observation convinced Kyle that the man was alone in the room, talking to a comm unit.
Was he getting ready for a party? Maybe life in the executive dome was one wearying masked ball after another.
The man turned, as if interrupted, facing a closed door on the other side of the room. The man crossed the room to open the door, his back to Kyle, and as he walked, he took off the mask and hid it behind his back.
A servant was on the other side of the door. She handed him a drink from a silver tray, curtsied, and left. He closed the door. Before he turned around, he put the mask back on.
Kyle was dumbfounded. There was clearly no one else in the room. The conversation on the comm unit was over; the man relaxed on a divan, alone, sipping his drink.
While wearing a mask.
Kyle recorded the whole insane performance, the masked man finishing his drink, setting down the glass, and wandering out of Kyle’s view. A second later the room went dark. Without backlighting, Kyle couldn’t see through the reflectivity of the dome.
He popped the data chit out of the camera and stuffed it in his suit pocket. Slotting in another chit, he prepared himself for a long wait. His luck hadn’t changed, after all.
Why would someone wear a mask, alone in their own house? His futile speculation was cut short by a sound that was not the wind.
Immediately Kyle began slithering down, trying to escape the view of the dome complex, while looking frantically for the source of the harsh click. To his left a monstrous shape appeared, blotting out the horizon. Kyle jumped, heedless of where he would land, and the hulking brute landed where Kyle had been a heartbeat ago.
Sparks flew from the ground as stone chipped and sprayed outward. In the momentary illumination Kyle could see glittering fangs, bristly hair, and legs. Too many legs. A spider twice the size of a man, with faceted eyes that revealed no humanity.
Kyle crashed back to earth, halfway down the hill. The spider gathered itself, a giant barrel sprouting hideous limbs. A meter wide at the body, with legs twice as long. Its claws clattered on the stone, and when it hissed at him, he could see the faint reflection of silver. Its fangs and claws were capped in metal. He could imagine it in the cockpit of the deadly little fighter-craft on Kassa, searching for targets, seeking out men and women to kill.
And now it was coming for him.
