“Heat?” Kendra asked.
“We’ve been raising the heat over the last ten minutes. In a few seconds, a blast of cold air will have an interesting effect.” His smile was vicious.
“Sixty seconds… fifty-nine.” Xavier said. “Wu Lin-bring up the rumble, please.”
Ali’s heartbeat was starting to soar. The floor trembled. Around him, the kidnappers were confused, sweating. “Subsonics,” he whispered, unaware that he had spoken aloud.
“What?” Celeste said.
“I said that these cuffs are hurting my wrists. Can you-”
“Not on your life. Damn!” She wiped at a film of sweat on her forehead. “Is there no way to-” Celeste began.
Suddenly, the dome rocked with dull, thudding explosions, followed by a sharp crack.
The kidnappers lurched, even though the floor hadn’t really moved that much.
“What the hell?” Celeste said.
“The dome!” the kidnapper said. “We must have damaged it when we blew the wall.”
The kidnappers shouted orders back and forth, panicked, Ali momentarily forgotten. Wind howled, and the lights died. Within moments, their flashlight beams probed the darkness.
“Damn! That air’s cold.” Gallop’s growling voice. “Is that a vacuum breech? Is that what it feels like?”
Ali’s eyes shifted to the side as a disguised security hatch popped open. Tiny gaming safety lights gave just enough illumination to see a shape crawling across the floor.
Then Scotty’s voice: “Shhhh.”
“I don’t know what this is.” Shotz’ voice now. “But there is no pressure drop. Repeat: no pressure drop-”
“Screw this!” A panicked opinion, shrill in the darkness.
Scotty dragged Ali back through the hatch, across the struts.
“Let’s go,” Scotty whispered.
Hands bound before him, Ali crawled down through the floor, into the spaces between the bubbles, then into the creche. As he arrived, Mickey and Maud were helping Asako in.
“We’ve got about sixty seconds,” Mickey said. Darla torched Ali’s cuffs until the plastic was soft enough for him to pull them apart.
“We have to move,” Angelique said. “And we have to move now.”
“You shouldn’t have come for me,” Asako said. “Now you’ll be limited to moving through the gaming areas. You could have remained in the gaps.”
“No man left behind,” Wayne said.
“Asako,” Scotty said. “It wasn’t just the kindness of our hearts. You have equipment in your pod that might help us.”
“How?”
“We don’t know. We’re making this up as we go along. Let’s get going.”
27
The mood in Kendra’s nerve center had plummeted from bad to worse, but when Max Piering entered, she found herself feeling optimistic even before he gave her his news.
“We’re pretty much shut out,” he said. “I only see one real possibility.”
“I’m almost afraid to ask.”
“Well,” the big man said, “all of the primary power was cut. They pretty much ran a perfect game there. But they missed something.”
Was there actually some good news? “What?”
“Well…,” Piering said, and leaned toward her.
A precious hour had passed since Kendra Griffin had begun her spiel. In the interim, the mood in gaming control had shifted from glum to almost celebratory. Merry enough, in fact, that Kendra was not amused in the slightest.
Kendra watched Xavier prance between one workstation and another, improvising a happy little dance as he did.
Finally, she could restrain herself no longer. “Mr. Xavier, are you certain you understand the seriousness of this situation? You seem entirely too… entertained.”
Xavier stopped his little leprechaun jig and peered up at her shrewdly. “Am I? I apologize. Sometimes I do forget where reality ends and fantasy begins. Do you think perhaps that’s why I’m so damned good at what I do?”
Then he laughed, and turned back to his assistants.
Kendra turned to her own. “He knows more than he’s telling us,” she said.
“I do hope so. We have to let him do things his way,” Max Piering said. “What choice do we really have?”
“Dammit!” She wanted to punch Xavier’s lights out. “No time for someone else to learn the system. You’re right.”
The Asteroid Belt was its own society, so far from the rest of humankind that they coveted every Earth contact as if it would help them retain their humanity.
In one of the many small living modules, four men played cards, watching the lunar feed on a visual field that filled an entire wall. “Mitch-have you seen this? Is this for real or what?”
His partner laughed. “I say it’s a hoax. A game within a game within a game, man.”
“Yeah, well, put me down for twenty.”
On Earth and around the solar system, the game was racking up unbelievable ratings, rapidly threatening to become the most watched event in human history.
All day Kendra had faced an office full of angry voices and floating faces, and by now she was near exhaustion. “I’m completely hamstrung!” She threw her hands into the air, frustrated. “There are so many overlapping jurisdictions that no one knows anything at all.”
Chris Foxworthy’s long face looked glum. “This is completely unprecedented.”
Piering was just as large and solid as he had been four years before, when he had helped dig Scotty out of a deep, dark premature grave. But he seemed more brittle now, and at the moment very close to his edge. “We’re paralyzed. Who in the hell has the authority to let me go forward? My men can’t act if we don’t know what to do.”
Then… the message-balloon blossomed. A priority executive message, available only for corporate accounts at a very high level. Kendra’s receptionist cleared her throat.
“Ms. Griffin? I have one here you might want to take.”
“Which is?”
“An Adriana Vokker. She has information about your husband.”
“Vokker? I don’t know the name.”
“She says she was one of your husband’s clients.”
Kendra shrugged and pushed the button. “This is Kendra Griffin. What can I do for you, Ms. Vokker?”
The woman appearing before her was very young, blond, pretty in a waifish way. She sat at a dark-stained wooden desk with still-life pencil sketches hanging on the wall behind her. She seemed very worried. “Do you know who I am?”
“I believe a few months ago you caused my husband considerable trouble.”
The girl inclined her head. “I thought he was your ex — husband.”
That took Kendra by surprise. Had she really been referring to Scotty as her husband all day? Fascinating. She wondered what a stress tech would make of that. “How can I help you?”
“The news is everywhere,” Adriana Vokker said. “No one’s talking about anything else.”
“Ms. Vokker, time is at a premium. I need you to tell me what’s on your mind.”
“Yes, yes, yes.” The girl folded her hands on the desktop. “When I heard what had happened, I thought that this might be a chance for me to make up for what happened in Switzerland.”
Kendra sighed. Charming. Scotty had a groupie. This was a waste of time. “And how exactly did you hope to help?”
“Mrs. Griffin, I have access to all of my father’s business interests. It’s part of my education and legacy. And this morning, there were alerts from our cocoa plantations in Central Africa.”
Kendra’s eyes widened. “Central Africa?” This conversation had suddenly become ten times more interesting.
“Yes. The Republic of Kikaya. We buy a million pounds of their cocoa every month, so any internal unrest is a matter of great interest.”
Kendra motioned to Piering to come join them. “And what exactly did you learn in this process?”
Adriana said, “There’s been a news blackout from Kikaya, but through some of our sources we see that the capital is under attack. At the same time, the heir of the throne has been…”