“There’s a transport nexus about six kilometers on down that road,” their ally said. “Huge parking area, trucks and vans and buses coming and going all the time, but some park there for hours, waiting for a connection. It’s not much worse than a car to drive, this one.” He looked back and forth from Ky to Rafe.
“Let me look at the controls,” Rafe said. Ky looked back at two of the ops team carrying a slack bald body in the usual prison outfit over to their truck. It seemed to take a long time; she went to the back and saw that the remaining two were far more sedated than the first load. It took even longer to get both of them into the truck. Ky had to stay with them, had to leave Rafe driving the wrong vehicle, with no legal ID and with two dead bodies in the back. If he were caught—she pushed that thought away and concentrated on the task at hand. They would switch trucks at the next warehouse, and since the Weekes City airport wasn’t safe, they’d have to drive different roads to a different warehouse, switch their passengers into a different truck again. Even—if things went very wrong—split them up. She was not going to give up on trying to rescue them all.
The truck moved away from the dock, turned, backed again, then went forward. “We can pick him up at the transport nexus. How are they?”
“Inside and alive. I’ll check with the medic.”
The medic looked worried. “The reversal drug’s not working; it may be more than a simple sedative, or not the same one they used before. Likely they were drugged again.”
Ky looked at the three flaccid bodies, still in their clinic clothes. She could not recognize any of the faces, and set her implant to do an analysis. “Vital signs?”
“Two are fine on that. This one—” She pointed to one; Ky’s implant suggested Yamini with a question mark beside it. “This one’s got problems. Without a full diagnostic unit I can’t be sure what’s going on, but he’s sliding in and out of irregular breathing patterns; I’ve put him on oxygen. There’s a drug that can cause that, but there’s no easy reversal; we’ll have to hope his liver can get the job done in time. The records we yanked have them as Yamini, Lakhani, and Riyahn.”
The truck moved on, slowed in traffic, sped up again. Ky felt chilled; the medic said, “You’d better rest while you can. We can deal with them.”
When she woke from a brief nap, it was almost dark outside, and Rafe was not in the truck. She felt colder, though the cargo compartment was warm enough. They were a half hour from the next warehouse. Yamini, if it was Yamini, was still alive, but still unresponsive. The other two had roused enough to give their names and drink a little water, but could not walk or change their clothes yet.
Rodney, when Ky contacted him back at the Weekes City Vatta warehouse, was not encouraging. “Rafe had trouble at the transport nexus. He says he’ll meet you later and not to contact him.”
“Is he hurt?”
“He didn’t say. Your first five made it to Port Major. The plane had to dodge around a bit.”
They were safer, but were they really safe yet? She knew they would be taken to Joint Services Headquarters, and Morrison had assured her it would be safe, but she still worried. She wanted to know they were protected from the conspiracy determined to kill her, her family, her people. And she wanted to know where Rafe was, and what was happening.
“Your friends—” she began.
“They’re fine. Set up in another location just in case.” He sounded wistful. “Wish I’d been with them. Hawker said the range beam punched through the clouds so fast—they never use full power in training—”
“You had a long-range beam weapon? I thought you were using drones—”
“Well, they had drones, but Hawker said they decided not to take chances—”
Ky could imagine what it must have looked like. On full. “Do you still have a lock on the other two groups?” she asked, pushing aside the thought of any satellites in the way when the beam came on.
“Yes. One is two hours east, still coming. They stopped for a half hour several hours ago; we didn’t have anyone in the area, though, for a visual ID or a communications tap. The other is closer, but it’s been driving in circles for the past hour. Which backup vehicle do you want to use?”
Ky ran through the options she’d set up again. “They may be planning to convoy, or they may be just hoping we’ll do something stupid. Let me talk to Blind Dog Two.”
“Need to grab ’em as soon as possible, separately,” that team commander told her. Both’ll likely be a hard stop. Could be injuries—”
“If those crews panic, there’ll be dead prisoners,” Ky said.
“Right. So we’ll need that backup aircraft—” Not a Vatta scheduled flight, but Inyatta’s father’s friend’s small plane. “—and Weekes City’s emergency services will lend us one of their ambulances.” That was new. Who had been talking to them? But too late to worry.
“Take whatever you need,” Ky said. “I’ll be jumping to another truck in about twenty minutes, heading back your way for the stragglers.”
Iskin Kvannis knew from the first frantic call about the missing personnel that he had been right and his associates wrong: they should have killed the survivors sooner. Just do it, he’d told them; that would be the quickest, surest way. But they had refused. He’d called Ordnay and Molwarp; they’d scrambled the interceptors. Surely that would take care of some of the survivors. As he went through his daily duties, immaculate in his white Commandant’s uniform and to outward appearance untroubled and confident, his mind rehearsed all the careful plans he’d made.
But the style of the rescue bothered him. Quick—and no one was supposed to have known of the date or hour of that truck’s travel except those loyal to the cause. Could the Vattas possibly have hacked his communications? He’d warned the other sites of the first interception; he trusted they would be careful. But then the second shipment had been snatched, this time not on an isolated road but in a busy town, by daylight, leaving two bodies behind and—most telling—Rafe Dunbarger’s ID and money hanging over a rail-yard fence. That proved it was Ky Vatta’s doing.
About the same time, he learned that the interceptor flight had vanished, and a satellite scan showed the heat signature of a beam weapon from a previously unmarked site shortly before. The Vatta flight landed safely in early afternoon, met by General Molosay’s car and several others in convoy, and the nine passengers—which must include the three who’d escaped on their own and an escort—were transported to the Joint Services Headquarters without incident.
Molosay had not called him. That in itself was worrying. If the interceptor pilots had revealed the authorization, which was of course fake, then Molosay might know he was a traitor. Time to enact his own survival plan, the one he had made at the very beginning of this mess.
Safely back in the Commandant’s office, all the doors closed, he unlocked his safe, took out his secured documents case, set it on the desk, and then relocked the safe. The documents case already contained the papers he wanted from the safe. To that he added all the ready cash from the cashbox in his desk drawer and a selection of papers from those filed in another drawer. He didn’t care which, just that it was a big enough wad to hide the other from casual inspection.
A skullphone call pinged him: Quindlan. “Someone’s identified Ky Vatta as being on one of the enemy trucks.”
“Of course she is,” Kvannis said, just managing not to snarl. “Where did you think she was, reading in bed?”
“You can’t talk to me—”
“Yes, I can. Get to the rendezvous—”
“But this isn’t what was supposed to happen! You said it would be—”