“But, sir, the dish” a sec man began, pointing above them.
“Can be replaced,” the baron snapped, studying the towering structure. “There’s nothing special about it. We simply need a big dish antenna to communicate with the Kite. Moving the comps is easy. They hardly weigh a thing. Couple of hundred pounds.”
“Any ideas where, sir?” a lieutenant asked.
The baron started to speak when he noticed an old slave shuffling past the electric fence. “We’ll discuss this inside,” he muttered softly.
Returning to the throne room, the baron directed his staff around a table piled with maps, some plastic, a few hand drawn on deerskin, one or two made of yellow paper. Shifting the map of Tennessee to the bottom of the pile, he pulled another showing the East Coast of predark America. Corrections had been made to the coastline and land with a brown ink of some kind. “These are the other locations of big antennas,” he stated, watching them lean in close to see. “Silas could have used any, but chose this one because it was the first dish he found.” And it was near a redoubt, but that was none of their business.
Suddenly alert, Collette watched the baron’s face, sensing he was withholding important information, and wondered what it was that she had just missed.
“Of all the possibilities,” Sheffield said, stabbing the map with a finger, “these thirteen are our best bets.”
“Ah, my lord?” a sergeant interrupted him.
“What?”
“Sir, I’ve been hunting over here in Georgia, and there’s nothing there but desert and some cannie mu-ties. Little green bastards got a taste for horse and damn near got me. Ain’t no dish, though, sir.”
“You dare to correct your baron?” Collette snapped, reaching for her blaster.
Magnanimously, Sheffield raised a hand, stopping her. “Thank you, Sergeant. Fresh information is always useful. Any other corrections?”
The staff officers studied the maps and finally decided that one mistake was the only flaw.
“Good, that saves us a lot of time,” Sheffield said, blacking out the site of Georgia Tech College. “Time we do not have to spare, or waste. I’ll send two squads to recce the remaining six. As soon as they find one, they come back and I’ll decide whether we go, or wait for a better location.”
Conversation stopped as a slave girl entered the room with a silver tray of sandwiches. Sheffield flipped over the top map, and the blue shirts waited in silence until she had returned to the kitchen.
“Lieutenant Brandon?”
“Sir!”
“Take ten men with you. It’ll be crowded in the wag, but you’re sure to lose some along the way.”
Coldhearted bastard. “Yes, my lord.”
“Sergeant Campbell, do the same. Load the wags with all the fuel and ammo needed, then take what food can be stored inside. You can always raid villes for more.”
“We’re giving them the wags?” Collette admonished.
“Yes,I am assigning them wags,” Sheffield corrected harshly. “My troops cut the time by half this way. It’s a gamble, but one that I am willing to take.”
“As you say,” Collette demurred. The emphasis on certain of his words hadn’t been missed by anybody in the room.
Rolling up the plastic map, Sheffield looked hard at the sec men. “You’ll each receive a copy of the map just before you leave. Concentrate on your mission and don’t worry about the other wag not coming back. I can monitor every word of conversation spoke inside them with the Kite,” he lied. “Anybody goes rogue, and I’ll melt the wag with the men inside.”
“So we can ask you for help, sir?” Campbell asked.
Clever bastard. Sheffield frowned. “Doesn’t work like that. I can hear you, but you can’t hear me. Amplifiers, you know, system feedback.” The baron had no idea what the words meant. These were simply things he had heard Silas say once while trying to fix a cassette player.
The men nodded in understanding, nudging the sergeant for asking a stupe question. Only Collette knew it was all a lie, but to the sec men, tech stuff was always accepted without question. She knew that most of the blues didn’t know how an engine worked, or even their own blasters. Electronics was magic as far as they were concerned.