Eve looked at the team and was impressed with how professionally they went into action. These people knew their business.
“Is there anything you know of this kind that wouldn’t show up on our sensors?” she asked Corby.
“Oh, hundreds of things. Most likely, though, would be a security barrier. Wouldn’t be much of a security system if it showed up on scans and pointed burglars right to it, would it? Might be a pain if the thing’s on full with total body DNA recognition, so I’m prayin’ it’s off when somebody’s inside. That’s the norm.”
“If it’s on, could you still get in?” John asked him.
“Oh, sure,” Corby responded casually, still tweaking his probe, “but might take a while if it’s in good order and we ain’t got a while.” He twisted the probe and had some problems getting it to rotate to just where he wanted it. “Ungh! Either I’m gettin’ old or this thing is. Okay now, though. You two stay back here on either side and provide backup.”
“Backup?” Robey repeated. “You mean…?”
“I mean backup. If they got a security vault this sophisticated then there’s no tellin’ what they keep in it, is there? God’s welcome to call me home any time, but the devil, now, he gets a fight.”
And, with that, he stepped down into the irrigation canal and began walking steadily along it, his frame tall enough that even somebody viewing him walking in at a right angle could see his shoulders. He held the probe in both hands to steady it and walked slowly but deliberately forward, looking mostly straight ahead but glancing down from time to time to check that the footprints of his predecessors were still clearly visible in the soft mud.
The display lights kept dancing around, apparently guiding him or telling him something in a specialist’s code, and the readout screen fed him more data, but he never stopped or wavered.
He walked straight into the barrier and it almost knocked him down. The probe, of course, touched it first, but it also acted as a conductor of some sort allowing energy to flow back to the handle base and then to the holder of same. The shock wasn’t serious, but it was unexpected because he’d gotten no readout at all that anything was coming up.
“Brother, are you hurt?” Ruth called.
“Only my dignity, and maybe the seat of my pants,” Corby grumbled, getting back to his feet. “Well, so much for the unlocked door theory. Here—somebody give me a hand up! We’re going to see how far this thing goes.”
Robey was the largest of the waiting agents and ran along the bank, past Erin, and gave the big, gaunt man the lift he needed to be pulled from the fairly deep ditch.
He was now filthy, covered with mud, but he looked more angry than embarrassed. “You women! Come on up here! Young man, you go on further on this side with Erin, and, young woman, you go along the other side with Ruth. Keep even on either side of the ditch. I’m going to make some adjustments. If anybody comes out of there, just freeze. They may not even know we’re here or look back. If they do, then do whatever you must.”
“That’s the best instructions I’ve had in a long while,” Robey commented. “ ‘Do whatever you must.’ I like that.”
Corby paid no attention, adjusting his probe and then making a number of passes over the spot where he’d been shocked, only from the upper bank. “Got’cha!” he muttered to himself, smiling grimly. “Won’t shock me again like that. Huh!”
“What is it?” Robey asked him.
“It’s only three meters deep and it stops about twenty-point-three centimeters above the canal. Damned clever. When they need to irrigate it just runs right underneath. And that’s their first line of defense, too. Got idiots like me standing in the wet grounding ourselves when we run into it.”
Erin wasn’t impressed. “You mean they’re both squeezed into something about the size of a private bathroom? Sounds more kinky than threatening.”
“No, I doubt if that’s the case. The odds are it turns and goes into the bank and under. Second line of defense. A bit of a maze.” Corby sighed. “Let’s see if I’m lucky enough to at least be on the side that matters.”
He began slowly passing the probe over the dry, hard-packed dirt and smooth rock in a broad sweep. “Nope. Not my day,” he sighed, and looked over at the opposite bank. “I have no particular desire to jump back down into that muck or go back and walk around,” he told them. “Ruth! Catch and do a sweep!”
With that, he threw the probe across to his assistant who caught it rather nimbly. Within a few minutes, Ruth was doing much the same as he but over on her side, and coming up with the same results.
“Sorry, Brother Corby, but there’s nothing registering here, either!”
“Got to be!” he snapped, not so much at her as at the problem itself.
“You mean they really are in a three-meter-square box we can’t see?” John asked him.
Corby brushed off the comment, too busy working the problem. The large hands waved in the air as he mentally worked out various theories. Finally, he called, “Ruth! Throw the thing back here! Got a theory to test before they pop back out!” She started to just throw it, but he yelled, “No! Wait! Not across the damned thing! Back here!”
He walked a few meters beyond where he’d worked out the “vault” or entrance or whatever to be, and then she threw him the probe and he caught it. Now the display started to flash as if defective, and they understood that Corby and his computerized probe were very much mentally intertwined at that moment. Finally, he nodded. “Got to be. Okay, people, let’s see if we can crack this safe!”
He sent Erin back to bring him some more devices from the saddlebags and, incidentally, to hide the scooters in the corn. She then brought back a number of small cubes, no more than eight centimeters square, which he proceeded to put all around the invisible vault. Then he drew them even farther back, and close to the rim of the ditch on either side.
“Now what?” John asked.
“Now we wait, damn their eyes! I got other things to do!”
Eve, on the other side, just shook her head. “I never believed anything was truly invisible or could be. How is this possible?”
“It’s not invisible, not in that sense,” Ruth told her. “It’s just projecting a false and very convincing picture of what you’d expect to see there. If you saw a visible vault there but found that you could pass your hand through it, you wouldn’t think that odd, would you?”
“Of course not. A hologram.”
“Exactly. Well, same principle, only it’s not the vault that’s the hologram, it’s the area around it. Nonreflective, probably gives the signature of whatever we’re seeing to any probes. The only time it might be detected would be when it opens, but that’s for a very brief time and the energy involved would be so slight that you’d have to know where to look to detect it.”
“But—where are the two men? Certainly not inside there.”
“We’ll find out when we get in,” she said matter of factly. “Providing, of course, we don’t blow it.”
Eve was fascinated at the very idea of a vault. They didn’t have such things in her area of The Mountain, nor would anyone need them. You’d have to have something of your own worth stealing. Only Doc and the security staff and the Ordained would have anything like that, and it wouldn’t be something of this sort.
But how did these people get such a thing? And what did they own that had to be protected?
“The people farming here—they would have to know that this was here, wouldn’t they?” Robey asked Corby.