“I leave those maneuvers to you,” Chang said. “I will remain in Mexico to complete my work, then—”
“Then what?” Pav said, an edge in his voice. “Run back to China in case we fail? Make sure you’re out of the blast radius?”
Chang blinked. When he spoke, he sounded tired. “I’m sorry if you feel I’m abandoning you, but I’m a journalist and a rather famous one at that. My absence from China has already been noted. My association with you is public. If someone sees me here—”
“They’ll know we’re here, too,” Rachel said. “You’re right, Edgar. You’ve worked wonders getting us this far. From this point on, the smaller our team, the greater our chance of surprise.” Rachel saw that Colin Edgely was looking away, as if trying to pretend he hadn’t increased the size of her team by twenty percent.
Rachel turned to Xavier. “The burden of this falls to you and me.” Both still had friends and even family in Free Nation U.S., most in the western half of the country. They would use their time in Mexico to make contact, and hopefully find one who would shelter them as they prepared for an assault on this Aggregate weapons facility.
Zeds’s comment was, “I am troubled that we have the potential to be detected and detained at almost any point.”
“So it’s a good thing that’s the whole idea, right?” Xavier said.
Jo Zhang, their co-pilot, emerged at that point, a broad smile on her face. “We’re right on track and on schedule.” She was, Rachel judged, in her midthirties—her own age—but seemed to possess a rangy confidence that Rachel lacked, much like Tea; maybe you had to be that kind of person to operate high-tech flying machines. Or maybe operating them made you confident.
“What about defenses?” Rachel asked. “If we ran into Free Nation forces off India, I would expect a lot more right off California.”
“We have access to, ah, certain information about Free Nation vessels. There are bases to the north and especially to the south, at San Diego. We’re pretty sure we’re tracking them all, and there are no threats at the moment.”
“How about aircraft and missiles?”
Jo shrugged, looking, for a moment, quite fatalistic. “They’re more difficult to track, especially since there’s no international air traffic control data here. And with missiles, well, they can be on the ground one minute, and in your tailpipe the next. But we see no unusual air activity at the moment, and if we do, our decoy makes a run for it and draws them off.”
We hope, Rachel thought, as Jo slipped away, into the lav.
Before leaving Guam, Rachel had insisted on thanking the pilots, not just Jo and Steve, who had skillfully flown them from Bangalore to Darwin to Guam, but the two who were to fly that decoy plane.
The decoy pilots turned out to be two grim ex-military jet jockeys, one of them originally from the U.S. His name was Benvides, and he was twenty years older than Rachel. “I remember your father,” he said. “I was just out of flight school when the Keanu mission happened. And the Objects hitting. That must have been . . . awesomely weird.”
“Let’s just say I was unprepared for it.”
Benvides laughed. It turned out that he and his family had been stationed in Japan when the Reiver Aggregate invasion occurred. “We wanted to go home, to join the fighting, if nothing else. But we couldn’t. There was no real war . . . it was like a total collapse within a few weeks.”
“Taj said it was like trying to climb a tree that had rotted from within.”
“If you realize that the rot happened overnight due to outside forces, yes. Anyway, I’ve been waiting twenty years to poke a stick in the Aggregates’ eyes, assuming they have eyes.”
The other man was a younger Aussie named Quentin. He told Pav he came from a family of bush pilots. “Hoping to get back to that after this,” he said.
When Rachel first learned of the two-plane approach requiring the decoy to somehow make it all the way back to Hawaii, she had been terrified for the pilots. But both Benvides and Quentin assured her that they could not only make the trip, they would have a margin. “Your bird’s a Gulfstream,” Benvides said, “and it’s got a lot of range. But we’re driving a Dassault Falcon 9 with even more, and we’re packing extra fuel instead of passengers and cargo. Don’t worry about us.” He smiled. “Just make sure you kill all the Reivers.”
And now Benvides and Quentin were flying directly above them at the common altitude of ten thousand meters while Rachel’s Gulfstream had descended to two thousand and would go even lower.
Jo flashed a smile and a thumbs-up as she emerged from the lav on her way back to the cockpit.
And now Yahvi was up, seemingly cheerful. As she ate breakfast, she looked out the portside windows. “I keep thinking I see land, but I’m not sure.”
“It’s out there,” Rachel assured her. She patted her daughter, then worked her way to the rear of the plane, where Pav had gone to ground.
“Something up?” she said.
Pav wore his secretive face and used his quiet voice. “I didn’t want to tell the others, but about an hour ago we got a link to Keanu,” Pav said.
“What did you tell them?”
“That we didn’t have anything new, except that within three hours we expected to be . . . on station.”
Rachel smiled. “Have you heard from your father?”
Pav shook his head.
“Are you worried?”
He shrugged. “We’re only linked by cell phone, and that won’t work until we’re close to land.”
Rachel touched her husband’s hand. He seemed nervous. “There’s something else.”
Pav actually glanced over his shoulder, as if he had to worry about being overheard by Zeds and Xavier. “The Beehive is alive again.”
Among the many startling bits of news Rachel had heard in this past week, or, indeed, in her life, that was high on the list. “No shit.”
“Yes, shit,” he said.
“And?”
“They don’t know yet. I mean, nothing has come out of it. It’s just . . . active again. Glowing.” He made an eerie sound and waved his hands.
“Did they do anything to fire it up?” Pav shook his head. “Then what’s changed?”
“I’ve got to believe it has something to do with Dale Scott,” Pav said.
At that moment the cockpit door opened. Steve, the male pilot, stuck his head out. “We’re descending, making our turn. Everyone buckle in.” Unlike Jo, who, based on her accent, seemed to have been raised by Americans, Steve Liu’s English was halting and unfamiliar. He was a stocky, serious man in his thirties who reminded Rachel of Zhao, the quiet yet capable former spy who had eventually become one of the Keanu community’s leaders. Zhao gave the impression that he knew arts and possessed skills beyond ordinary humans, and Rachel saw a bit of this in Steve. Perhaps she was simply hoping.
As she and Pav took their seats and watched Edgely and Chang buckling in, Rachel felt that sudden, now-familiar rush of adrenaline. It had happened to her so often since leaving Keanu that it was becoming her natural state—and surely a bad sign. You could burn yourself out operating at that level.
She glanced at Pav across the aisle. He nodded an okay as he strapped in. She turned to Yahvi, in the seat next to her, who said, “Is this going to be dangerous?”
“No more dangerous than anything else we’ve done,” Rachel said. “A lot safer than landing Adventure.”
“That’s not saying much.” The girl was trying to act brave, but her voice and eyes gave her away. Rachel just squeezed her hand, noting, as she often did, that giving reassurance actually reassured her.
Why it did, she couldn’t say. It wasn’t as though the universe somehow looked more kindly on humans who offered comfort to others—the universe should, Rachel believed, but there was no evidence that it did.
She was, in fact, appalled at how little she knew of the universe, even though her experience of matters beyond Earth—beyond anything seven billion other humans could ever hope to know—should have given her some insight, some special sense.