Profiteer

“How the hell?”

 

A leg appeared, sticking up at an unnatural angle, the hand gripping the upper thigh. The hand tossed it, and the leg—just the leg, by itself—fell over with a thump, landing by Shane’s feet.

 

Shane took a step back and another leg was tossed out of the hole.

 

Then a left arm.

 

As Mosasa’s dragon-tattooed torso chinned itself into view, Random said, “You see, Mosasa’s as much a construct as I am.”

 

<>

 

* * * *

 

CHAPTER THIRTY

 

Capital Expenditures

 

 

“It is a fundamental inequity of the universe that, while you have only one life to give, you can take as many as you damn well please.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

 

“The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

(1803-1882)

 

 

07:24:30 Godwin Local

 

“Thirty seconds,” Tetsami said over the comm.

 

Dom looked down the steep hole and could barely see the commuter tunnel. In less than half a minute he would be back in GA&A. A familiar calm frosted his nerves. The same icy stillness that had gripped him when GA&A had been taken over. Not numbing this time—

 

Exhilarating.

 

“Twenty seconds.”

 

The three of them were in position behind the trio of mining robots. Levy was in the center; Dom and Zanzibar were leaning inward against either wall.

 

Each of them carried a Dittrich 1.5 mm Hyper-Velocity Electromag, a low profile weapon. An HVE wasn’t the most powerful handheld projectile weapon, and it didn’t have the greatest range, but firing 300 monocrys steel fléchettes per second it could probably handle anything they’d run into—without causing a hideous energy spike. The only problem with the Dittrich HVE was that the ammo disappeared in a distressingly short period of time.

 

“Ten seconds.”

 

They also all had backpacks filled with Levy’s equipment. And trailing behind them was a buzzing contragrav sled. It was custom-made, and the most expensive piece of equipment going into the complex—if you didn’t count Random Walk, who was priceless. The sled was five meters long and two wide, a simple platform anchored on top of a toroid contragrav generator that was rated for nearly two tons. It was led by a taut cable whose handle doubled as a control panel. The sled was made of an aluminum-diamondwire composite and had only ten kilos of inertia.

 

“Now.”

 

His companions turned away, but Dom kept staring at the concrete underside of what had once been his building. The photoreceptors scaled down the dazzling input as he watched the mining robots cut into the concrete at the top of the shaft. Three beams of intense light darted across the concrete, too fast to distinguish as single beams. They cut a repetitive grid pattern in the triangular concrete face.

 

Gravel sheeted off the wall, showering over them and down the floor of their tunnel. Dust billowed up, making Dom want to sneeze.

 

In less than three seconds the lasers hit the reinforcing rods.

 

If Random wasn’t in charge of security now, the whole team was in trouble. There were intrusion sensors to detect any breach in an external wall. They weren’t as efficient as an Emerson field, but you couldn’t trust feedback from part of a field that passed through matter—too many spurious readings—so intrusion detection under the complex was a matter of wires, computers, and cameras.

 

The reinforcing rods that the robots diced apart were also a circuit in the security grid. Now they were so much polyceram dust.

 

The lasers hit a point where the floor above them was no longer sound enough to support its own weight. A grinding snap filled the small space, and the wall erupted into a cloud of dust. Gravel rained down on the three of them and caused an odd resonant hum as it bounced across the contragrav sled.

 

The range finders on the mining robots detected the sudden absence of their target, and they ceased firing.

 

As the dust cleared, Dom queried his onboard computer. The time was 07:25:12. It had taken the lasers ten seconds to slice through the wall. Dom decided to remember that fact if he ever put up another building.

 

“Let’s go,” said Zanzibar. She lowered her weapon and darted to the edge of the hole, scanning the room beyond. After a second, she waved Levy ahead. Levy had the sled, and as he passed Dom, Dom had to flatten against the wall to let the sled by. It was odd, watching the sled follow Levy. It wanted to stay horizontal, and in the steep tunnel that meant that the front end had the same clearance to the floor as the rear did the ceiling. It could barely get past the robots.

 

When Dom followed Levy through the hole, he heard the robots begin their withdrawal. There was no sign of alarm, nor even any sign of habitation. So far, so good.

 

The three of them moved through the silent warehouse level. The warehouse was dark, filled with crates of unsold weapons Dom had ordered fabricated for the fictitious ship Prometheus.

 

There were a few thousand crates of everything GA&A made, and it gave Dom a moment’s pause.