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  What wasn’t obvious from the map was that the low hills, if not occupied, offered concealment for anyone threatening the base. Maybe Scatha planned on occupying those hills as soon as possible, but Mele intended throwing a monkey wrench into Scatha’s planning. Whoever had chosen the site had also not taken into account the ground vibrations that the river and the not-far-off wave action would create, allowing Glenlyon’s modified snake to tunnel right under ground sensors without being detected.

  That ancient Old Earther Sun Tzu had a lot to say about how to attack, but most of his advice came down to figuring out what the enemy expected you to do or wanted you to do, then doing something different. Scatha, with all of the effort put into including that antiorbital weapon in their first wave of equipment, had plainly been looking mostly to defend against attacks from above. The setting of the base had shown that Scatha was also concerned about attacks coming on the surface. Mele had looked at those things, then sought out the mining equipment.

  The tunnelpede slowed and halted. “The tunnel angles up from here,” the driver whispered back to Mele. “We should be three meters deep.”

  “Okay. Grant,” she called back in a soft voice, “get everyone off the ’pede and lined up. Riley, get up front with me.”

  Grasping the high-powered hunting rifle she had selected, Mele led Riley up the slope as the tunnel angled toward the surface. The tunnel halted abruptly, ending in a plug of dirt directly overhead that had been left in place by the snake. The scrub roots protruding from the bottom of the dirt revealed that the plug was not very thick.

  Mele pulled out the big combat knife sheathed on one of her hips. That had been one of the easiest things to get manufactured on short notice. She placed the tip of the knife near one side of the tunnel, slid the blade into the dirt, and began sawing her way along the edge of the tunnel. The topsoil offered little resistance, but the tangled roots made the work hard and sweaty, and as she worked dirt rained on her.

  The plug suddenly tilted down. Mele pushed it to the side of the tunnel, seeing night sky above. The distant roar of the surf could be heard. Grateful for the background noise that would block any errant sounds from her team, Mele checked the time here. “O-Dark Thirty. Perfect. Riley, get up here with Ninja’s magic box.”

  Riley crawled up next to her, cradling the thick epad that Ninja had provided. Mele helped raise an antenna just above ground level as Riley tapped the activate command.

  The pad displayed the ancient sign of the hourglass as it worked, strings of code flashing by at the bottom. Mele waited patiently until the hourglass vanished and words appeared. LINK ESTABLISHED. VERIFICATION SUCCESSFUL. INTRUSION UNDER WAY. SUBSTITUTE COUNTERFEIT DATA?

  “Here’s what Scatha is seeing,” Riley whispered, passing another pad to Mele.

  She checked the symbology, which didn’t quite match that used by Franklin but was close enough to be understandable. One section provided an overview, showing exactly where the current perimeter patrol was located. Another section showed what those patrollers were seeing on their helmet displays. Mele put on an earpiece that would let her hear any orders issued on Scatha’s command net or conversations on the patrol net.

  A warning symbol popped up on both sections. Apparently one of Scatha’s sensors had spotted something odd where Mele had opened the access tunnel.

  “Get the false data going,” she ordered Riley.

  He tapped the YES command, and the warning symbol vanished as Ninja’s device scrubbed out the detections from the sensor net.

  “What was that?” she heard one of two soldiers on patrol say as the symbol disappeared.

  “Another glitch,” the other sentry complained.

  “Maybe a wabbit. I think I’ll take a shot.”

  Mele gestured to Riley to stay motionless.

  The pop of a pulse weapon sounded on the surface. She heard the energy bolt hit somewhere in the scrub, but on the fraudulent display that Ninja’s hacking had created the shot didn’t appear. Mele tensed to see if either member of the patrol had spotted the discrepancy, but both appeared too bored and uncaring to notice.

  “Hit anything?”

  “Shut up.”

  Mele eased her head up enough to see the two members of the patrol, bulky in their battle armor, walking in her direction. Their movements and postures were even more casual than the sentries she had observed while planting the surveillance pickups.

  She lowered herself back down into the tunnel and gave Riley a thumbs-up. “They’re sloppy as hell,” she whispered.

  “I don’t get it,” Riley whispered back. “You told us these Scatha guys are really tough about following rules and doing everything perfect.”

  “The bosses are,” Mele explained. “Funny thing. The harder the bosses are, the tighter they try to control everything their people do, the more likely those people will screw off the minute they’re not being watched.”

  As the patrol ambled along its route, she eased the plug of dirt and plants back into place and waited with growing impatience, depending on the relayed images of their displays to know where they were rather than risk exposing her head again.

  The two soldiers from Scatha walked past the tunnel exit, only a few meters from it, but both were discussing how to get their hands on booze rather than paying attention to the landscape around them. Why should they? Nothing had happened since they landed here.

  Mele pulled the plug down again, grasped the hunting rifle, and came out of the tunnel silently. The rifle had a newly made silencer screwed onto the end, which probably wouldn’t hide all the noise but should work well enough.

  One of the soldiers was slightly behind the other. Mele moved like a wraith until she was directly behind the lagging patroller. Her right hand grasped the rifle near the breech, her finger near the trigger. Her left arm came around the front of the soldier from behind, her left fist pushing up the startled soldier’s right arm before he could realize what was happening. Jamming the muzzle of the rifle into the soldier’s exposed underarm, a place where she knew this type of armor had a major weak spot, she fired.

  The soldier jerked as the large caliber bullet tore through his upper chest from side to side. He started to collapse, and Mele let him go and dropped her hunting rifle as well, grabbing the soldier’s pulse rifle from unresisting hands.

  “What was that—?” the other soldier said, turning to look.

  Mele was already raising the pulse rifle. The second soldier only had time to realize she was there before Mele fired into his faceplate, the pulse rifle’s muzzle almost touching it.

  The faceplates were heavily reinforced, but that wasn’t enough to stop an energy pulse at such short range.

  The soldier’s head jerked back, then his entire body fell backward.

  Mele turned back to the first soldier to make sure he was down and saw him jerking on the ground.

  Riley came up, staring down at the first soldier. “What’s he doing?”

  “Dying,” Mele said. “Dying in pain.”

  “W-what can we do?” Riley asked.

  “He’s only got a couple of minutes left, at best,” Mele said, her voice flat. “There’s only one thing we can do to stop his pain.”

  “We should do it then,” Riley urged.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes!”

  Mele braced herself, put the muzzle of her pulse rifle against the stricken soldier’s faceplate, and fired.

  She looked up to see Riley staring at her.

  “Don’t think that was easy,” Mele told him. “Or anything I wanted to do. But if it had been me lying there, dying in pain, no hope, no other way to stop it, I’d want someone to end it if they could.”

  “Th-that wouldn’t happen . . . to you . . . would it?”

  “It might,” Mele said.

  The killing had been quick. Much harde
r was dealing with the emotional aftereffect. Mele paused to breathe deeply, fighting off a sudden feeling of nausea. Them or me. Them or me. I didn’t start this.

  She checked the pad, seeing that according to it the two sentries were continuing their patrol. The alarms that should have sounded when both were killed had been blocked by Ninja’s hack of Scatha’s systems.

  She retrieved the second soldier’s pulse rifle and passed it to Grant as he brought everyone else to the surface. “Obi, take my hunting rifle. We’re going to head for the command bunker single file. Me in front, Grant behind me. Riley, make sure you’re in the middle. Obi, bring up the rear. Only Grant and I should have ready weapons. The rest of you keep yours on safe until I say otherwise. Ninja’s hack will prevent the sensors from reporting seeing us, but we can’t risk a stray shot being heard by someone.”

  While the others were lining up, Mele went over the fallen soldiers and removed a pair of grenades from each, stuffing them into the pockets of her short jacket.

  She led the column toward the command bunker, which was clearly identified on Scatha’s own command net. Mele had to fight down repeated urges to run toward her objective. But if she ran, everyone else would run with her, and too many of her new volunteers might get disoriented in the darkness and do something wrong.

  As they got closer, Mele could see the bunker’s visual observation periscopes resting in their armored mounts, the lenses blocked by protective shielding that would prevent anyone inside the bunker from actually looking at the outside. Shoddy, careless, and complacent. Standard procedures should have called for visual searches to be performed at random intervals as a backup for the automated system. She felt a surge of anger at the sheer stupidity of Scatha’s soldiers, who seemed to be cooperating in their own deaths.

  A short ramp led down into the half-buried bunker, a sealed blast door at the end. Mele squinted at the pad in her hand. “Get Riley up here. Hey, how do we open this door?”

  Riley brought up a menu, tabbed a submenu, studied the blast door, then tapped something else.

  The blast door slid open.

  The secondary door behind it was already open, another sloppy violation of standard rules.

  Mele gestured to Grant, then went into the bunker fast, her stolen pulse rifle ready.

  Two soldiers were sitting at watch stations along a wide set of displays.

  One started to turn at the noise of Mele’s entry. “What are you guys doing back—?”

  She shot that soldier, then put another shot into the head of the other watch-stander.

  Mele and Grant paused, their weapons trained toward an internal door. “Sentry rest area,” Grant breathed to her. “Hard way or easy way?”

  “Let’s see if they’re awake.” Mele edged forward cautiously.

  She kept her rifle trained on the door, so that when it suddenly swung open, she was already lined up for a shot.

  “What the hell was that noise?” another Scatha soldier demanded, blinking to adjust to the slightly brighter red light in the rest of the bunker.

  Mele fired, the bolt hitting the soldier in the chest. As the soldier tumbled backward, Mele yanked one of her stolen grenades from a pocket, primed it, and threw it after the soldier she had shot.

  Grant hit the internal wall next to the door and yanked it closed moments before a muffled explosion sounded, and the metal door dented in several places from grenade fragments hitting it.

  Grant slammed the door open again while Mele went inside in another rush, her weapon questing for targets.

  There had been four other soldiers sleeping in the rest area. The one Mele had shot lay on the floor. The others had died in their bunks.

  She backed out, fighting off another surge of queasiness. “Close it,” she told Grant.

  Mele went back to the entry and gestured the others inside. The bunker had felt roomy, but with twenty men and women plus Mele and the two bodies of the watch-standers it had become crowded.

  The dead were hauled away from the displays, Mele gesturing to Riley to sit where one of them had been. He hesitated, then sat down.

  “Get going,” Mele said.

  Riley wasn’t as good as Ninja (no one was, he had admitted to Mele), but he was very good. Swiping through control displays, he quickly opened paths to critical systems throughout the Scatha base. “Ninja was right. We’re inside everything,” he told Mele. “Past all firewalls.”

  “Plant the malware bombs and be sure the timers for them are all set right.”

  Riley nodded, dropping a data coin into a slot on the console, extracting the destructive software inside it, and directing the malware into every system within reach of the Scatha command and control net. “One hour? Are you sure that’s time enough?”

  “It should be,” Mele said. “I don’t see any signs of problems at the big gun. Make sure their alarms there are disabled and their gates and doors unlocked.”

  “Got it,” Riley said. “The big gun is wide open. Malware bombs planted. Timers are all set. One hour.”

  “Can you tell who is inside the big gun’s site?”

  “Hold on.” Riley swiped through several more screens, then paused to study an image. “Two people. From their outfits, they’re technicians, not soldiers.”

  “Good. Grant, you stay here with your ten. Make sure nobody shows up early and raises an alarm. Set the explosives we brought to destroy this bunker. Here are the detonators for those. Riley, download every Scatha file you can so we can bring them back with us, and if you spot anywhere else in Scatha’s networks we can cause problems, see if you can raise more hell. But make sure none of that hell happens before the malware bombs go off. Obi, you bring your ten with me. There are two techs at the site. Civilians. Make sure we only use shockers on them.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to kill them, too?” Obi asked. She had the look of someone who had already fallen off a cliff and wasn’t trying to pretend otherwise. “Since we’ve already killed these others? If those techs are alive, they could work against us, maybe help repair the weapon?”

  “No,” Mele said. “We shock them, haul them out where they’ll be safe and unharmed when the site goes up, and the civilians with this camp will know they are safe from us. The soldiers here will know that, too. They’ll be mad about their buddies we killed and mad that the civilians didn’t get a scratch. That will drive a wedge between the civilians and military even if there wasn’t one before. Besides, there isn’t going to be enough left of that weapon for anybody to be able to fix.”

  “I don’t know,” another volunteer commented. “We should take them out! Aren’t they all enemies? I wouldn’t shoot kids, but everyone from Scatha—”

  Mele silenced him with an abrupt gesture that held both command and menace. “I don’t conduct debates during a combat op. Let’s put it this way. If anybody kills one of those civilians, or tries to kill them, I’ll kill whoever fired. Does anybody want to try dodging my shots? No? Then follow orders. Shockers only inside the site. Make sure you’ve got your bomb packs. Come on.”

  With the Scatha sensor net and warning systems totally compromised, and in fact under the control of her own people, Mele led her group at a run across the wide stretch of pavement separating the antiorbital site from the command and control bunker. If they were going to take out the big gun and get back to the WinG before daylight, they couldn’t waste time. The rest of the base stretched off to the north and west, the buildings housing families visible as well as the low, rounded dome of the main power plant.

  The gate in the chain-link fence protecting the site opened when she pulled on it. Sensors that should have reported the gate opening and intruders entering the site remained silent.

  The weapon site was an impressive feat of engineering, a massive hexagon with sloping sides of thick multithreat armor. The top was only five meters aboveground, though, because m
ost of the massive particle beam cannon was in big rooms excavated below ground level.

  Mele led the way past defensive infantry firing ports that were sealed closed. The gun site could have been a fortress against a ground attack if any soldiers had been inside. And if every lock and alarm hadn’t been tied in to a central control system that Mele’s people now directed.

  She went through a surface blast door that had already slid open, its impressive thickness posing no barrier. Steps led down to another blast door, which also stood open.

  The pad Mele held showed the floor plan for the weapon site, so she had little trouble finding the operating room nestled into one side of the armored citadel. The armored hatch that should have sealed off the operating room swung open easily when Mele tried it. Looking inside, Mele saw one tech dozing in her chair while the other watched a vid on a personal pad.

  She nodded to four of the volunteers who carried shockers, gesturing for two to target one tech and the other two the remaining one.

  Shocks knocked out both techs before either realized they were in trouble. Part of the charge from one shocker hit the personal pad of the vid-viewing tech and fried it.

  One of the volunteers had come from Glenlyon’s police force and fell to binding the arms and feet of the techs while others wrapped gags around their mouths.

  Mele turned to another volunteer. “Hedy?”

  Hedy dropped into one of the vacated seats, studying the controls and displays. While not a weapons expert, she knew enough about similar systems to have been able to quickly learn all that Glenlyon’s databases had about antiorbital weapons like this one. “Okay. No surprises,” Hedy said. “You can plant the bombs. The preplanned spots should work fine.”

  “Let’s go,” Mele directed. Most of the remaining team followed her out of the control room. On Mele’s pad, locations for each bomb glowed. As they reached each one, a bomb was gingerly removed, placed, then Mele put the detonator in and set the timer.