Profiteer

Tetsami took the leads from the terminal and walked over to a wall panel. The damn thing was restricted access, had a keypad, a red light, and was electromagnetically sealed. How the hell was she going to break into—

 

The light turned green.

 

“Random?”

 

She opened the door and found a jack for the leads to her terminal. Then she ran back and powered up the groundstation. In less than a second she was looking at a fish-eye holo of what had to be the core of the Blood-Tide. She saw Mosasa and Shane, but the voice the terminal relayed was Random’s.

 

“I had a security flag on the hole—saw you come in, but there’s no audio pickups down there and I’m not great at reading lips when your back’s to the camera.”

 

“Problem, Random.”

 

“I figured.”

 

“We’ve been expected. The marine you took out had a packet of black speed on her. If the guys on the ship are equipped that way—”

 

“Damn it,” said Random, “I’m sealing the ship. All the bulkheads are coming down.”

 

Shane said something on the holo screen, Tetsami couldn’t hear it.

 

“Okay, I think we’ve got a handle on it here. Our babies are locked in, incommunicado. Worse happens and I can pulse the stun field. It’ll lay out Shane, but I’ll still be in control.”

 

“Try to avoid that.” Shane? What about Mosasa?

 

“I will—” Random paused for a moment. On the holo both Shane and Mosasa turned toward the now-closed door to the computer core. “You know,” he continued, “your timing is impeccable. Our first marine just woke up, and he seems quite upset.”

 

<>

 

* * * *

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

 

Liquid Assets

 

 

“Never say the problem is over, never mention what else could go wrong, and never say how lucky you are—there is no surer way of inviting disaster.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

 

“Like liberty, gold never stays where it is undervalued.”

—J. S. Morrill

(1810-1898)

 

 

07:26:45 Godwin Local

 

“The easy way won’t work,” Dom said as he backed away from the first door. The three of them stood in one of a few dozen branching chambers sandwiched between the basement of the GA&A office complex and the subterranean warehouse levels.

 

Dom had tried his personal comm-code on the safe’s keypad. Predictably, it didn’t work. However, the attempt had shown him that the keypad was dead. It didn’t flash “invalid command.” It didn’t flash at all. The invaders had burned the controls rather than reprogram it.

 

Levy looked at the keypad. “They did a low-level EMP on this. It would wipe anything volatile. They froze the doors in place.”

 

Everyone unshouldered their burdens. Dom set up one of the high-power cutting beams on a tripod. Then Levy pulled out a small device and delicately placed it on top of the nose of the laser.

 

“Stand back,” Levy said.

 

Dom backed up. Levy tapped a few keys on his master holo and there was a lightning-flash pulse from the laser. Dom’s photoreceptors compensated immediately.

 

“The test burst worked. This thing is calibrated.”

 

Zanzibar was behind them, guarding their back. She said, “You’re going to cut through that with that?”

 

Dom saw Zanzibar’s point. The outer door was only a delaying measure. Even so, it was a square, featureless, brushed chrome wall that reached five meters to the concrete ceiling, and five meters to the side. It was recessed a meter back from the wall itself. The edges of the opening were faced with black metal. If there had been almost anything else in this safe, the outer door would be enough. Even with the lasers at their disposal it would take hours to cut through.

 

However, the fact was that they had no intention of cutting through the door.

 

Levy, grim and wordless, tapped at the holo display. The display showed a computer model of the wall’s internal structure. Levy ran his hands over the controls, and the motorized tripod swung the laser into a new position. The graphics on the holo changed as well, to show the area now covered by the scanner on the laser’s nose. The laser moved up and right a few millimeters. Once the laser stopped moving, Levy began flipping through layers of his display. Dom saw hoses and pumping equipment.

 

Eventually the holo showed a single two-dimensional section of the interior under the safe. The laser and the scanner were pointed down at a forty-five-degree angle. Central to the picture was an S-shaped tube. Dom was looking at a slice from it, and inside the black skin on either side of the pipe, Dom could see a grayish solid.

 

“What are you doing?” Dom asked.

 

“Time’s important. The size of the hole depends on density, pressure, viscosity and so on ...”

 

He trailed off and Dom didn’t interrupt him again.

 

A pair of green crosshairs focused on the center of the tube on the holo, and Levy tapped keys until he had a circle superimposed on the crosshairs about two millimeters wide. Levy pulled out a pair of smoked goggles and put them on.

 

“Now,” he said.

 

Dom powered his photoreceptors down to minimum intensity and was briefly blind.