“Let’s go,” he said to the young Indonesian, starting to push at the fallen wall which had sheltered them. And which lifted off with weightless ease: Teguh and two of his assistants stood there, holding it up.
“I still want to know where you got those damn rockets,” Caine said as he clambered out of the trash pile that had once been a shed.
“An’ I tol’ you I promised the guy I wouldn’t say. He’s a prewar black marketeer, Caine. He means business.” Teguh trotted toward the cover of a new building, the one that housed their objective: a colonial-era cistern system.
“Yeah?” Caine replied. “Well, those rockets mean that someone is getting contemporary munitions onto Java, and if equipment is getting here, that means people can probably get here, and that means—”
“Yeah, good thinking—but stopping to think will get us dead right now. We gotta move. There will be more ROVs coming.”
Caine stopped as they came under the building’s catch-roof, and within arm’s reach of the cistern’s half-rotted wooden cover. “No. We don’t have to move. I do.”
Teguh stopped. “What you talking about, Caine?”
“Face the facts, Teguh. Whatever is going on today, the Arat Kur keep finding us because of me. This last time they flew right past the two squads we sent running away as decoys, didn’t even seem to know they were there. But me? They can find me in any building, under any car, in any culvert. We’ve lost three men finding that out. Men we should never have lost at all.”
“Yeah, but we got four of their ROVs.”
“Teguh, listen to me: forget kill ratios. This is not a battle of our choosing. Hell, it’s not even a battle, it’s a—a rabbit hunt. The Arat Kur ROVs are the hounds and somehow, they’ve got my scent.”
“Look, don’t go thinking the world revolves around you, heh? Don’t go bule-crazy, like you did after the kempang. This is just bad luck, and by tomorrow—”
Caine looked at him. “By tomorrow, we’ll all be dead. I’m not bule-crazy, Teguh, not this time. And you know it. You just don’t want me to leave. And I don’t want to, either.”
“Shit, you think you so important I care whether you leave?” But Teguh’s eyes and the set of his mouth told a very different story.
Caine put a hand on his shoulder. “My Indonesian brother, you helped me get my head—well, out of my ass, after the kempang. But today, it’s you who refuses to see what your brain already knows.” Caine waved at the ruined ROV and the streets behind them. “They are after me, Teguh. You know it; you’ve seen it. I want to stay, but I can’t. Maybe they put some kind of transponder in my food when I was on the Arat Kur ship. Or maybe I walked through some kind of nanite-dusted trap that actually works. I don’t know how they are tracking me. I only know this: they can find me wherever I go, and the only other people they’ve attacked today are the ones who got in their way. So you have to get the hell away from me, and I’ve got to go down this hole and hope that they can’t follow me into a tunnel. Who knows? Maybe it will block or at least degrade whatever signal they’re using to track me.”
Teguh shook his head and looked like he might start to cry. “This isn’t right, Caine. You should stay with us.”
Caine put his other hand on Teguh’s other shoulder. “It wasn’t right what happened to all those people at the kempang, but we had to accept that, too.”
Teguh looked away, reached up, patted Caine’s right hand. “You a good man, Caine. You come find me when this is all over. We’ll find some beer. We’ll talk.”
“We will,” Caine nodded, removing his hands and pushing the cistern-cover aside. “Now, get out of here.”
“Hey,” Teguh retorted as he began trotting away down the wreckage-strewn street, “you gone now. I don’ have to take your orders anymore!”
“You never did,” Caine whispered at the receding back of his Indonesian brother. Then he clambered down into the cistern.
Once inside the underground garage that concealed the mobile command trailers, Downing began returning the salutes of the Australian soldiers guarding the largest one: the one that they had taken to calling Spookshow Prime. Only special personnel with insanely high clearance were allowed within ten meters of it, let alone inside.
Downing walked up the stairs to the overpressure hatch of Spookshow Prime, went in, sealed it and felt the atmosphere change beginning: slightly more rich in oxygen, a slightly flinty smell, and—despite being on the west coast of Australia—a slightly higher level of humidity. The green light illuminated over the inner door. Downing went in.
The three junior Dornaani at the monitors nodded faintly as he passed, returning their nods. Entering the combination conference rooms and living quarters at the rear of Spookshow Prime, he found Alnduul sitting in what looked like a meditative pose before a holosphere that showed the area around Jakarta.
“Greetings, Richard Downing. Is there news from the World Confederation Council?”
“Yes, and it’s not good.” Downing sat heavily. “There’s been no contact from the Arat Kur to reopen a dialogue, not even when we paved the way with questions about prisoner exchanges and increased humanitarian aid. So the primary means of carrying out Case Timber Pony—the diplomatic mission—has been scrubbed. Without at least an invite from the invaders, we can’t initiate talks in Jakarta without them becoming suspicious. Which means we have no way to get a diplomatic mission into, or at least close to, their HQ.”
Alnduul laced his fingers together slowly. “So the Arat Kur have not explained their lack of interest in further communication?”
Downing shook his head. “Not a word. The intel brain trust suspects a combination of factors, but Arat Kur uninterest is not high among them. Rather, the preferred theory is that the increasing violence and bitterness of the Javanese insurgency is making the Hkh’Rkh not only more aggressive on the battlefield, but at the planning table. That they are dead-set against any further discussion of terms.”
“It would not be uncharacteristic of the Hkh’Rkh to make their continued cooperation with the Arat Kur contingent upon an unwavering demand for Earth’s unconditional capitulation.” Alnduul stared back down into the holosphere. “Of course, there may be an advantage to such a situation.”
“You mean that there are even greater rifts opening up between the Arat Kur and Hkh’Rkh leadership?”
“Just so.”
Downing could tell that Alnduul’s following silence was intended to be significant. And he understood the unspoken implication. “You still think we went too far by destroying so much of Indonesia’s warehoused foodstuffs and increasing the ferocity of the insurgency, don’t you? And that if we had been more moderate, the unrest would not have flared into a bitter guerilla war that is now keeping the invaders from the negotiations table?”
Alnduul drew his fingers through the air like streamers in a molasses-slow wind. “Perhaps. The rapid increase in the desperation of the island’s population did accelerate the rate at which initially uncoordinated acts of resistance coalesced and intensified into a nationwide insurgency. And that, in turn, has accelerated the speed with which the Hkh’Rkh have become harsh, belligerent, and unmanageable. But I still maintain that this may prove to be a superior outcome insofar as completing Case Timber Pony is concerned.”