The old man said nothing, his body quivering with a barely suppressed rage. Tears of frustration and anger welled in his eyes.
“Dammit, the worst of it is that, no matter how much I would wish to deny it, I know in my heart that you are right.”
He turned on his heel and marched away from them.
“Want me follow him?” Dean asked.
Ryan shook his head. “Let him work it out. He’ll be ready when we are.”
“Not blame him being cranky,” Jak said, watching Doc disappear into a crowd of Crossroads dwellers. “This ache drive mad…” He winced, suggesting that the disease was making greater inroads into his body and mind.
“All the more reason to get it right,” Ryan commented.
From out of the crowd, Gloria and Tammy strode over to the wag, the Gate queen going straight to Jak.
“Hey, honey, how you feeling?” she asked, hugging him. “Let’s go get those fuckers.”
She turned to Ryan. “We’re ready, and the Crossroads guys are as ready as they’ll ever be. So let’s get the plan sorted.”
Ryan told her first about the allocation of Illuminated uniforms, and the manner in which he wanted the attack to be led. He was concerned that the Gate queen would be unhappy at leaving her people in the charge of J.B. and Jak while she, her second in command and her Armorer all traveled on ahead. But Gloria had an instinctive tactical sense, and could see Ryan’s reasoning.
“That’s fine. My girls like Jak and J.B., and they trust them as if they were of us. We trust all of you as if you were of us.”
“That’s good. We need that complete trust if this is going to work,” Ryan said. “So now we need to plot a course that will take us all close to the redoubt without being spotted by sec patrols or cameras.”
Gloria chewed on her bottom lip as she considered this. Finally, she said, “As to patrols, we know from watching them that they don’t come out that often. I guess they may send some out to try and scout for this wag,” she said, slapping the side of the wag they were to use as a Trojan horse, “but I don’t reckon they’re that brave. We can send scouts on ahead to report back, as we always do. Give them enough advance and there’s no reason why the wag should be spotted anywhere near the rest of us. Sure as shit easy enough to hide ourselves.”
“What about cameras around the redoubt?” Krysty asked Gloria and Ryan.
It was Tammy who interjected. “We need to find a route that’ll keep us close to the wag and give us cover. Wait…”
The Gate warrior fell to her knees and began to trace a semicircle in the dust, marking a point within. “That’s the hill where the redoubt is, yeah?” she said. Then, drawing a small circle some way away, she added, “And that’s where we are now, right?”
“Agreed,” Ryan murmured. “So it’s the problem of how we get from there to there—” he indicated the two points “—without running the risk of being spotted.”
“Right,” Tammy said. “Well, I’ve been on a lot of recce patrols around there, and I reckon there is a way of using the cover we’ve got.”
And as the companions and Gloria watched, Tammy sketched in the wooded area where the Gate had originally camped, the hill where Mildred had encountered the landslide and the crops of scrub and trees that lay between.
“If we use the outriders to make sure we aren’t spotted along the way, then we can use the cover until we reach this point,” she said decisively, indicating a line of scrub and sparse woodland that ran almost parallel to the slope of the hill where the redoubt entrance was located. “From here, the wag can carry on down to the redoubt alone, and get let in—that way, we can use this cover and the darkness to remain hidden. No way will any cameras pick us up in the dark and at that distance.”
Ryan looked at the crudely drawn diagram in the dust. “Still some distance from the entrance, though. When we get the sec door open, we won’t be able to hold them long unaided if we’re heavily outnumbered. And if we’re wiped out and the door is closed again, then the whole mission is fucked. You’ll have to be able to move everyone pretty damn quick,” he said to J.B.