“What do you mean?”
“And what about this big surprise?” inquired Brigid as she finished tying the bandage.
“That will have to wait until we’re out of sight of the ville.”
Domi chose to do that by driving through thickets, squeezing through copses of trees and jouncing along the bottoms of coulees. She expertly maneuvered the Sandcat up, then down, treacherous slopes. She appeared to know not only what she was doing, but where she was going, so Kane didn’t question her.
Official Cobaltville territory extended in a fifty-mile radius, using the Administrative Monolith as the hub of a wheel. Beyond the rim of that invisible wheel lay the Outlands. Ville law was enforced in the Outlands, of course, but only when deemed necessary by the whim of the baron.
Kane was only vaguely familiar with the topography of the area immediately surrounding Cobaltville, but Domi knew where the checkpoints were. As an outlander, she would have their locations imprinted in her memory. One of the few redeeming characteristics of outrunners was their unerring sense of direction
He caught that thought and glumly tried to chase it out of his head. All of them now were Outlanders, and a slip of an albino girl held seniority, outranking them by dint of her birth and years of experience. In the kingdom of the disenfranchised, she was pretender to a throne.
Checking his wrist chron, Kane saw that half an hour had passed since they’d forded the river. Mesa Verde was an hour’s flight time by Deathbird, so he calculated an overland trek, especially one not following roads and side trails, would take about three hours, traveling at an average speed of thirty miles per hour. Unless Domi knew a shorter route.
He asked, “Do you know a shortcut?”
She gave him a quick, annoyed glance. “What you think this is?”
“The scenic route?” Kane muttered.
Brigid leaned forward, stretching her cramped legs. Gripping the back of the front seat, she said, “We’re out of sight of the ville. Time for your big surprise.”
Kane turned back, and she self-consciously averted her face. He realized she wasn’t used to enduring such physical hardship and was ashamed of her sweat, grime and the state of her clothing.
“All right,” he said loudly. “Listen up, because I only want to tell this once.”
He should have known better. Because of the noise of the wag, he had to repeat himself several times, half shouting to be heard at all. By the time he had related everything about the Trust, the Totality Concept, the gateway in Mesa Verde canyon, the Archon Directorate, his theories on the attempted assassination of Grant and Brigid’s frame-up, he was hoarse and his throat was dirt dry.
Brigid handed him a bottle of water. As he drank from it, he caught Grant’s eye and saw how stunned and angry he was.
“Bullshit,” Grant announced doggedly. “Bullshit, bullshit. Bullshit . How much of that crap did Salvo expect you to believe? How much of it do you believe?”
“To both questions, the answer is I don’t know. The Totality Concept stuff can be verified, at least as far as a mat-trans unit is concerned, so I guess I have to believe that part of it.”
Brigid’s eyes shone with suspicious contemplation. “Why would there be a gateway unit in a smuggler’s slag-hole?”
“To transport the merchandise, remember? Quick and easy.”
“And you figure,” challenged Grant, “that if we get ourselves there, we’ll use it to beam ourselves to this Dulce place?”
Kane nodded to Brigid. “She claims she’s memorized all the gateway codes. Presumably we can transmit ourselves anywhere.”
“In theory,” Brigid responded doubtfully. “It stands to reason that only the active-destination gateways can be accessed. Even if the unit is there, and it’s operable, there may be a lockout on the controls.”
Grant was shaking his head side to side, his expression set. “Listen, Kane. I’ll go along with you on some of this, because there’s a certain amount of proof. Salvo wanted me dead for some reason, then tried to con me that you’d gone over the edge. Okay, fine. He’s following some sort of secret agenda, maybe sanctioned by the baron or these Trust groupies. Maybe not. But I don’t see anything about Archons or aliens or anything else. All I know is I sacrificed everything for you. I owe you my life, and I trust you. But don’t ask me to swallow the rest of this crap.”