Orson Card - Empire

“I don’t know,” said Cole. “If they come from Nevada or Montana, at least an hour.”

“Carrier off the coast—the Marines might get here fastest.”

“I don’t mind getting my ass saved by the Marines,” said Cole. “Long as they save my ass.”

“If the bad guys are evacuating—”

“In order to flood the whole place?”

“I’ve done enough swimming,” said Cat.

“So—before we move on, what’s our goal here?”

“Stay breathing,” said Cat.

“We could have stayed at the cabin,” said Cole.

Cat thought about that for a few seconds. “Well, we want higher ground if they’re going to flood the place. And my guess is, if we try to go out the front door, they’ll be waiting for us there. Why hunt us down if they know we’ve got to come to them ?”

“So we want to go up. If there’s any place high enough in here to stay out of the water.”

“And I was thinking,” said Cat, “maybe Aloe Vera’s here somewhere. Course, he’d be crazy to be here where he couldn’t deny knowing about it.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to deny it,” said Cole. “Maybe he’s proud of it.”

“Here’s where the ordnance is coming from,” said Cat. “Maybe the orders come from here, too. Guy builds this army, don’t you think he’d want to run it?”

“So we’re looking for Verus?”

“Hell no,” said Cat. “We’re looking for command and control. Wipe it out in advance of the main assault.”

It was elementary. Wipe out enemy command and control—it’s what Special Forces were supposed to do in advance of an attack. But he’d never been in an invasion. He’d always worked on hearts-and-minds, recon, small-group assaults. Cat, however, had been there for Iraq in 2003. Different experience, so different stuff comes to mind in a crisis.

Still, thought Cole: I should have thought of it.

“If we do happen to find him,” said Cole, “we need him alive. For the cameras.”

“I think his dead body does the same job,” said Cat.

“Better to pull him out of a hole.”

“Like Saddam.”

“Meanwhile,” said Cole, “I wonder what’s waiting around this corner. You got any grenades left?”

“In my pack,” said Cat. “Floating in that tunnel.”

Cole dropped to the floor and rolled out into the corridor, keeping his weapon pointed down the hall.

There was nothing there. Just more ramp going up and another turn.

“Goes up,” said Cat behind him.

“Just the direction we wanted to go.” Cole got up and ran up the slope. Cat followed him.

The next jog wasn’t into a corridor, it was into a large, heavily braced cavern. This was one of the factories. Not a fully automated assembly line—the volume wasn’t great enough to justify that. It looked like they used teams to assemble the pieces into finished hovercycles, one bike per team, six teams working, plus carts loaded with parts.

But nobody was assembling anything right now. Which went along with what the guys were seeing outside. Everybody evacuated.

On the wall, there was a map of the place with two escape routes marked. One led to the huge front door, the other to the tunnel connecting to the cabin.

“I don’t believe this map,” said Cole. “I don’t think they’d build this place without an escape hatch that didn’t require that the lake be drained.”

“They didn’t expect the tunnel to be full of water,” said Cat.

“But they flooded it themselves. Their defense is flooding the front door, too. No way are they so stupid they get trapped if both entrances are flooded.”

“So there’s an escape route didn’t quite make it onto the map?” said Cat.

“One that trucks can’t use,” said Cole.

“But Aloe Vera can.”

Studying the floorplan, though, there was nothing conveniently labeled “Command and Control.”

“I’ll keep watch,” said Cole, “you look at this.”

Cat looked. “Not like a regular building. Nice rectangular tower, you can spot the gaps when they leave stuff off the floor plan.”

“So if you were in charge of this place, where would you put the command center?”

“Up high,” said Cat. “They got three levels higher than this one. Not a lot of routes leading there.”

“I bet Command and Control is four levels up,” said Cole, “since the floorplan only shows three.”

“Bet you’re right,” said Cat.

“So which way up you want to use?”

Both he and Cat had memorized the map while studying it—part of their training, to be able to memorize maps so they didn’t have to carry them around.

“Not the ones that lead toward the front door,” said Cat. “Let’s avoid the crowds.”

They ran into only three people on the stairs they took—all civilians, from their clothing, and two of them women. One of the women cried and shrank away, but the other armed herself with her shoe, brandishing it at them as they passed her and moved on up the stairs. “You can holster that shoe now,” said Cole as he passed her. She didn’t seem to think it was funny.

The stairs ended at the top level on the map. But this level was smaller than the others. There were plenty of offices on this level, mostly in the form of cubicles. Every computer’s cpu had been blown up by a small enough explosive that it was contained entirely inside the case—but smoke was coming out of many of them and most were splayed out or otherwise deformed. Not much data was going to come out of those computers now, but you never knew what a hard drive was going to live through. Might still be something retrievable. Unless they were heat bombs, and then all the plastic inside would be melted. That’s what I’d use, thought Cole. So that’s probably what Verus used.

His infra vibrated. Somebody calling him. “Cole here.”

It was Benny. “As soon as we gave the word, they took off from Montana,” he said. “By now they’re probably only fifteen minutes away.”

If the Progressive Restoration had observers with the forces in Idaho, which was likely enough, then that would explain why they started evacuating this place when only a couple of soldiers had penetrated it. Cole thanked Benny and signed off.

“You see any controls for that big front door?” said Cat. “Or for flooding that tunnel we were in?”

“We didn’t see controls for opening the trap door in the cabin, either,” said Cole.

“And there’s got to be a control for sending water from one lake into the other.”

“What do you want to bet,” said Cole, “that wherever those controls are, Verus is sitting there waiting to raise the water level of Chinnereth just as our attack force is moving through the big front door.”

“That would be mean,” said Cat.

“And then he’d use the secret back door that isn’t on any of the maps. The one that’s camouflaged and opens up on the slope of the mountain somewhere on the Genesseret side.”

“That would be smart,” said Cat.

“Well, only semi-smart,” said Cole. “Smart would be to give himself up peacefully and denounce us for violating Washington’s neutrality.”

“Nobody’s gonna buy that now,” said Cat.

“Come on,” said Cole. “People buy any lie they want bad enough to believe. We’re the U.S. Army. When we screw up, everybody thinks it’s on purpose and some of us should go to jail. Even when we win, they think we screwed up. What Army were you in, anyway?”

“My bad,” said Cat.

“One level up from here,” said Cole. “Gotta be a stairway somewhere.”

“Maybe not,” said Cat. “Maybe just a closet door.”

“Leading into Narnia?”

“Leading to a stairway.”

There weren’t all that many doors, but all of them were locked. In the movies, people always shot doors open. But shooting a deadbolt lock didn’t withdraw the deadbolt from the socket. And these were heavy doors, with lots of metal. Bullets could ricochet. Shrapnel could fly. You could kill yourself shooting at doors like these. Not to mention they didn’t want to scare Verus into jumping down his rabbit hole—if he had one.