Profiteer

Her visor polarized as the mining lasers fired, circling her, slicing through the few meters of soil that separated them from the surface. The scaffolding rang with showering debris. Fist-sized chunks of dirt rained down and shattered on the struts in a controlled avalanche. Shane tightened her grip as dirt and gravel pelted her.

 

Inside her helmet it sounded like ripping canvas.

 

Within a minute it was over, and the sound of raining debris was replaced by the sound of wind whistling past an opening above her. Shane looked up and saw a starry early-morning sky.

 

She was scrambling up the lip even before Ivor said, ‘Move.”

 

Lights blinked on her helmet’s display as she cleared the edge of the hole. The telltales said that her RF field was already soaking up a few thousand kilowatts of Tetsami’s commsat broadcast. She turned around and helped move equipment out of the hole—Mosasa’s long-range stunner, the huge powerpack for it, Mosasa’s tool kit, and the briefcase that held Random Walk.

 

Ivor pushed Mosasa over the lip as he scrambled over himself. Then he scooped up the stunner and the fifty kilo power source. Mosasa grabbed his tool kit, and Shane grabbed Random.

 

No words were passed as they jogged to the western edge of the woods. They ducked around trees, over logs, and scrambled down the gentle slope toward GA&A. Shane almost blundered out into the open when they reached the edge of the woods. There was no thinning before the clearing. The forest simply stopped about a hundred meters from the perimeter.

 

The four of them, Random mute inside his box, faced the curving end of GA&A’s office complex. It filled their entire view out of the woods. A curving concrete wall, seven stories tall, hid behind the spikes of the perimeter towers. It was overlaid by a distorting heat shimmer caused by the defensive screens of the Blood-Tide.

 

Not for the first time, Shane wondered what she was doing here.

 

She turned around, and Ivor and Mosasa had already set up the stunner. The device was an ugly-looking hybrid, cobbled together by Mosasa to fit the requirements of the mission: dropping a marine in full combat armor at one hundred meters without alerting the complex or damaging his suit.

 

Iagreed to this, Shame thought. Am I really saving lives?

 

Or am I simply seeking revenge for my own people shooting at me?

 

“It’s ready,” said Mosasa.

 

“Good,” said Ivor. “Because there’s the target.”

 

Ivor was right. The marine roaming the perimeter had just rounded the curve of the office complex and come into view. Right now, he was the only marine in line of sight. He would remain so for close to ten minutes. Shane got behind the ugly-looking gun and sighted through it.

 

The monster she was about to fire had begun as her own personal stunner. Then Mosasa got hold of it. Among a number of additions to it was the stabilized tripod, the targeting computer and integral sight, and the heavily insulated stock that kept the stunner itself from touching the computer, the tripod, or the gunner. The insulation was necessary because a pair of superconducting cables led from the stunner to a fifty kilo power sink that once was the emergency backup for a Hegira Starliner’s tach-drive.

 

The principle was still the same as for her personal stunner. The small baton generated an Emerson field in a thin paraboloid—the generator at the tip being the focus—and it was programmed so that interference with a normal laser-damping field would create a neural stun field.

 

The difference was before Mosasa got hold of it, the effective range of the stunner was five meters before the field’s parabola became too diffuse. Even at that range, the energy it sucked was on the order of a plasma rifle’s. Mosasa had powered it up. It now carried about four hundred times the wattage and would probably melt when she fired it. The power spike would be so intense that GA&A security couldn’t miss it—if they weren’t having other problems with all their detection gear at the moment.

 

Shane looked through the sight and tracked her target.

 

She wondered if she knew the soldier out there. It wasn’t Conner. The form was wary, not panicky. Shane watched the soldier sweep the plasma rifle to cover the woods. Very methodical. Shane wasn’t worried about being seen. All the sensors on that suit—gray urban camouflage just like her own—would be washed out by RF interference right now.

 

The stunner’s targeting computer, specially RF shielded by Mosasa, locked on the marine.

 

Shane wished there’d been time to test Mosasa’s gadget. Her stunner had relied on a few gigs of sensitive programming to do what it did right. Mosasa had replaced that with his own programming, necessary to keep the stun field from dispersing against the defensive screens of the Blood-Tide instead of the intended target.