No Going Back (33 page)

I nodded my head. “Absolutely. The second show is about to begin, and you’re part of it.”

She kissed me briefly. “Thank you.”

Passion walked off the stage, hugged Zoe, and moved on.

Zoe turned to follow Passion but stopped and looked back at me with a big smile. “You won’t mind if I wake you, will you?”

I forced a smile in return. “Not a bit.”

She nodded and left.

Too bad I’ll be gone
, I thought.

I walked toward Lobo as quickly as I could without drawing attention to myself.

It was time to break into a cottage and hope to discover more about the prisoner—and if she really had been Jennie.

CHAPTER 43

Jon Moore

M
uted sounds of conversation drifted from the main house toward the cottages. The light wind carried laughter and music to me from the crew’s party in the landing area. I was stretched on the ground in the shadows of a large tree, my activecamo overalls adapting to the dappling of light and dark the leaves in the trees cast on the ground.

“Assuming correct information from the power-management systems,” Lobo said over the comm, “you are directly above the permacrete conduit that protects the main power cable. My analysis suggests the acid you took will neither stay focused enough nor proceed quickly enough to reach the cable.”

“I’m going to help it with digging and the tubes I brought,” I said. I wasn’t going to do that at all, at least not yet but it was the best story I had for Lobo. If this worked, we wouldn’t be coming back here, so the story wouldn’t matter. “Just keep an eye out for staffers headed this way.”

“Of course,” Lobo said. “It’s not as if I can do only one thing at a time.”

The closest of the cottages stood about ten meters away. No external signs gave away that its security systems were functioning, but I knew from the full-spectrum feed Lobo was supplying the contact in my left eye that they were.

I dug up enough earth to fill my hands. I focused, spit in the dirt, and instructed the nanomachines to stay active. When I first discovered the ability to control them, it was by accident. Through small experiments I learned that I had only to visualize clearly what I wanted or to describe it in words in my mind, and whatever mechanism in my head gave me this ability did the rest. I told them to form a cloud as wide as two of my fingers and to move straight downward, disassembling the dirt into dust and carrying the dust out of the hole and onto the ground in front of me. Once the nanomachines had dropped the dust, they were to join the cloud again. I visualized the permacrete conduit and instructed the nanomachines to eat through it and then to stop and disassemble themselves.

The hole opened quickly before me and moved downward, almost as if the dirt were dissolving in a hurried effort to get out the way. I directed a pinpoint light at an angle into the hole and watched through the increasingly thick cloud as the hole grew deeper. When I could see no more, I turned off the light and waited. In the shadow of the tree, the nanocloud was a barely visible local darkness that swirled and threw smaller clouds of dust on the ground in front of me.

The nanocloud began to thin; the nanomachines must have struck and taken apart the permacrete. After a few more seconds, the cloud was gone. I stuck the small light in the hole, covered all but a tiny bit of the hole, and turned on the light. A layer of dust covered the bottom of the hole. I picked up the finger-thick, meter-long metal tube from the ground beside me and fed it into the hole until I felt it touch something. I pulled it back slightly and blew hard through it. I shined the light into the hole beside it and could see what appeared to be the top of the cable.

I picked up the vial of acid from where I’d set it on the ground near me. I pushed the tube down until it touched the cable again. I carefully poured all of the acid into the tube. It would etch some of the tube as it flowed over the metal, but most of it would reach the cable and continue downward. When the acid container was empty, I rolled onto my side and heaved it into a stand of shrubs off to my side and five meters closer to the house. It landed with the thunk of heavy glass hitting dirt; no one in the house would hear that sound.

I dropped the tube into the hole and waited. Acid vapors emerged from the hole, so I crawled backward a meter or so. If this worked as it should, great. If not, I’d use the nanomachines to eat through the cable as well. I hoped for the acid to do the job, though, because the residue it would leave around the cable, along with the tube and the empty container I was leaving as clues, would help anyone who later looked into this incident to see it as a completely explainable event.

“Good job,” Lobo said. “Primary power is gone, and the backup cable in the cluster is flickering. Check the feed in your contact: That rush of activity you see is the power-supply systems and the security monitors crying for help.”

I stared into the darkness. My right eye showed me what was there. My left presented dense multicolored waves running from each of the cottages to the house. As I watched, I pulled dirt and dust from around the hole into it, obscuring the tube and creating a small cover for the hole. It wouldn’t stand up to any close inspection, but if they left the diagnosis of the problem until morning, it would keep them from realizing what had caused the outage.

The waves my left eye showed me intensified and then vanished completely, both eyes now showing the same images.

“They’re out,” Lobo said. “You’re good to go on the cottage.”

I pushed off the ground and ran for the farthest cottage.

Lobo would alert me if anyone came out of the house.

When I reached the target cottage, I kept going to its far side and turned the corner so I wouldn’t be visible from the house. I was also out of sight of Lobo. The secondary power had kept the building’s security systems online long enough that they would have locked the doors and windows into position, so I either had to punch a hole through the wall or a door, or break through the glass. The windows and the doors in a place like this would certainly be armored, but for the walls they had probably assumed, as the people who built Omani’s house had, that permacrete would be secure enough. I could use my nanomachines to get in, but then there would be no clear explanation for the intrusion. So, I was going to do it the old-fashioned way.

I pulled a laser cutter from the duffel I was carrying and started on the wall about a meter off the ground. It made a sort of sizzling noise and threw a bluish light into the darkness, but back here, no one should see it. I’d brought a large power supply in the duffel, so the laser worked fast. Even so, I felt the time it was taking like a pressure on my chest.

“Any update?” I said.

“Would I not tell you if there was?” Lobo said.

“Of course,” I said.

I was being stupid. If I’d been breaking into a building on any other mission, I would have stayed focused and not worried; the laser could cut only so quickly. Instead, I was letting myself get torqued about the fact that I might well be about to enter a room where my sister, whom I’d thought must have died long ago, might have been living only three days earlier. Getting excited would only lead to errors, so I focused on breathing slowly and calming myself, bringing down my heartbeat and staying on task.

After another few minutes, I completed the cut and turned off the laser. Ideally, I would have pulled out the section of wall, so I wouldn’t accidentally push it onto anything of interest inside, but time was short. I shoved it into the house. It fell with a small crashing sound onto the interior floor.

“Cut is complete,” I said.

“Three men have left the house and are walking your way,” Lobo said. “Do not enter the cottage. Move to the trees.”

“I just finished pushing the wall section into the house,” I said.

“You said you could handle the guards,” Lobo said. “If they search thoroughly, you’ll have to do that. Handling them will be easier if you’re outside in the trees. None of them has a weapon visible, though, and they’re all walking slowly, so I believe they don’t consider this a serious issue. If you’re lucky, they’ll do only a cursory check—in which case you will be fine.”

I dashed into the trees a dozen meters in front of me.

“They’ve reached the first cottage,” Lobo said, “and are splitting up.”

Lights played along the near side of the cottages as the men separated and each one checked a building.

The first man walked around his cottage.

The second turned the corner on his.

The third man drew even with my cottage and played his light across its front.

He stepped to the far corner.

When he turned the corner and checked the back wall, he’d see the hole.

I crept to the edge of the trees.

The man leaned forward, shined his light across the top of the rear wall, and turned back. Into his comm mic he said, “This is stupid. Clear. Let’s go.”

He waited a second, his head cocked as he listened to his comm, and then walked back to his colleagues.

I waited in the trees until they were out of the shade of the tree near the first cottage and past where I’d cut the cable.

None of them looked back.

I dashed back to the cottage and crawled through the hole in the wall. I turned the small light to a dim glow, cupped my hand over it, and played the faint light around the front room I’d entered. Chairs and a sofa focused on a wall opposite the front door. A large display was built into the wall above what I recognized as an old-fashioned fireplace. Pieces of art, pictures in frames and pieces of carved wood on small shelves, decorated the walls. Old money loves old stuff. I’d spotted no chimney on the house, so I doubted the fireplace worked, but I searched around its edges and up inside it as far as it went.

I found nothing.

Nearer to me on this side of the room were a desk, a showpiece of dark red wood and fine carving, and a chair carved to match it. Enough dust coated the desk that it was doubtful anyone had used it recently. A wooden chair, an old-fashioned rocking chair on curved bottom struts, sat alone opposite the desk and away from the other cluster of furniture. Its light wood gleamed even in the faint illumination I provided; there was almost no dust on it. Whoever had been here had definitely used it, unlike the desk.

I moved through an open archway into an eating area. Two food conveyor slots, both now sealed shut by the security systems, were built into the far wall’s right side above a counter. A table and two chairs of the same dark red wood as the desk were opposite the counter. At the other end of the room, a very simple desk—four legs, one flat piece of wood on them—composed entirely of beautifully grained, almost white wood sat under a window. A yellow vase of some sort of ceramic, wilted flowers still in it, stood on the desk under the window. A few more pictures and carvings adorned the walls here as well.

I walked through a doorway into the back portion of the cottage. The door was withdrawn into the left wall right now. It was metal, solid and thick and completely out of character with the rest of the house. It was probably the simplest way to turn the back room into a prison cell.

This final third section of the cottage was its biggest part. A small bathroom filled the right side. The larger part of the area was the bedroom. A huge bed, easily three times as wide as my cot, dominated the space. Its dark wood frame matched the wooden dresser and wardrobe that stood against the opposite wall. There were no closets, no built-in storage, no nods to space efficiency. More pictures, more carvings, the measured use of art as planned decoration consistent from room to room. The entire space was intentionally built like something on a frontier world. I checked the dresser and wardrobe, under the bed, and in the bathroom, but I found nothing.

Schmidt’s staff may not have cleaned up after their prisoner to the satisfaction of the food conveyors, but I found no personal possessions, nothing that didn’t look built-in except the flowers.

If the prisoner, Jennie or anyone else, had been left alone and unmonitored enough, she might have been able to hide something in the walls or under the floors, but it was unlikely that the security systems wouldn’t have reported such modifications to the room. In addition, nothing I saw appeared to have been marred by tools.

Time was passing, and I still had found nothing. Everything that remained in this place appeared to have been part of it by design.

I ran my light again across the bedroom walls, checking for any signs someone might have hidden something, but I saw only the art. Each picture showed either something from nature or a building. When I looked closer at them, they had small tags identifying them and tying them to the estate in some way: a garden fifty years ago, the first guest cottage, and so on. History fans sometimes added guest-activated commentary to their displays, so I ran my fingers along the frames of a few of them. Nothing happened. In case they were heat sensitive, I took off my gloves. The pieces depicting trees and flowers and gardens did nothing. Those showing buildings, however, glowed softly and began to provide information on their topics, their batteries still working.

The carvings were all animals. Nothing happened when I picked them up or ran my hands over their surfaces.

I checked the art in the kitchen. More of the same.

I moved to the front room and checked its art. Also more of the same, except one piece on the front wall, in a corner no chair faced, that caught my eye. It was a picture of an island, an island with a mountain in its center. Rocky terraces jutted out from the mountain here and there all over it. Grass grew on the rock. A small village sat at the base of the side facing the viewer.

The picture wasn’t very good, the artist’s technique primitive, but I didn’t care about that.

I knew this island.

Its name was Pinecone, and I had grown up on it.

I lifted it from its hanger and examined it carefully.

Nothing.

I removed the backing of the frame and studied both it and the back of the picture.