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NICO
The cloaked solo zips through the water. I won’t tell him, but it’s pretty smart how he’s using the currents flowing off the buildings to keep us from being noticed. We’re past Braesen dome, a brass monstrosity with large-winged animals molded onto the side of it, before I turn off the cloaking device on myself. My eyes have been flitting to the massive crack on the side of the front glass. “Nice crack.” I touch it. A few more blows, and I would have been through. An impressive feat, seeing the glass isn’t supposed to be able to break at all. Then again, neither was the glass on top of the Maelstrom.
“Fuck you. I was trying to help you.”
“I know that now. But in retrospect, it’s a good thing you didn’t.”
He nods and takes a sharp turn to the right, following the faint wake of a solo that passed this way before us. Honestly, he’s good at what he’s doing. He’s picking up everything. He’s piloting almost as well as Holter does.
Darting between two of the agricultural domes, he follows a group of larger fish until he cuts through another two smaller, older domes. Back in Glyden, he wouldn’t say where we were going before the silos. He pulls into a dome that appears flooded. If this is the place he keeps his highest tech, it doesn’t seem safe at all. There was no access code on the opening, and the bottom of the dome is a mess of junk.
“Hold on,” I say.
I’m not strapped in. I’ve been in too many situations where I needed to pop out of a solo and shift, and a restraint would have killed any time advantage. I slide flat against the door as the solo turns on its side. I have to brace my feet against the floor to keep from going flying. The solo rises, and then he flips back flat. Here, there’s air above the solo.
Eros wears a cocky smile. “I did say ‘hold on.’ Stay here. I’ll grab what I need and be right out.”
“No, we move together.” We went over that detail before. Going alone is for heroes, and I’ve had enough of being a hero. We need to get the job done. Get the tech that can analyze the Vitrom governor’s box and get the hell out of here. This mission already had one too many stops.
“Fine. This way.” Eros shines a dim directional light, the same kind we used on missions to keep the light high enough to see but low enough others couldn’t make it out. The walls are damp. He puts his hand on the door, and an invisible biometric scan opens it.
I touch the door. We had some amazing tech on board the Centauri but nothing like this. “I wouldn’t even have seen it.”
“Exactly. The security council likes to keep the best toys for themselves.”
“I can see that.” I’m not often impressed, but that door was something else. The rest of the room is small but dry. There are only a few things on a shelf and a table in the center of the room. Eros pulls a case out of his inside jacket pocket.
He places a device in the center of the table and positions the case in the middle of it. “I’m scanning it first before I open it.” Eros unlocks a drawer with his palm. He places a capsule next to Tristan’s. “This one has poison in it.” He lets it sit on the table for a minute. The two look a heck of a lot alike, down to the shade of paint.
“Damn, they’re almost an exact match.”
“I’m sure that’s not a coincidence. Now you see why I didn’t open it in the apartment.”
“Fuck.” I scrub my hand over my face. “Right. Need me to do anything?”
“Not touch anything. I want to get out of here as fast as possible.”
I nod. I’m not used to being out of my element, but I get it.
He scans it. “Gas. But there’s something else in there.” He opens the drawer and puts it next to the other one. “It’s not a gas I know enough about to open. I think we should leave it here and get the hell over to the silos and back to Zaffiro.”
“Agreed.”
He loads us up with a high-tech trident each. The thing is perfectly balanced. I arch my eyebrow at him. Again, I’m impressed. This is the finest trident I’ve held in my hand. The fact that the security council is holding it back from our military is infuriating.
Leaving, I fasten the safety restraint this time.
“I normally turn the other direction,” says Eros. “You got off easy. But I didn’t want your ass in my lap.”
“Thanks,” I grunt.
The agricultural area of the city is huge, and while we’re heading to the silos, we’re almost as far away from them now as we were in Glyden. This time there’s no airlock, no semi-abandoned dome. We both peel off our clothes. Eros retracts the roof of the solo, and we swim out of it.
This way. He circles up the inside of the silo to an airlock door. We talked about what would happen next. The airlock is rudimentary, an old one. Surprisingly, it hasn’t been replaced. We squeeze in together. It’s just a transition to air, no second lock as a precaution to keep things from flooding and no freshwater rinse.
The airlock opens to a chamber inside the top of the silo.
“It’s about fucking time. You’re getting slow in your old age,” a voice says. Michio and Forrest appear out of the ether. There’s a white disc on the center of each of their chests. The individual cloaking works even better when it isn’t being shared.
