The ideal scenario was a live recovery of the information source, with no one the wiser. With what the one-eyed man held in his mind, Mitsuki could maneuver to acquire the choicest pieces of Shadow World real estate, the richest deposits of natural resources, prime arable land, and even more important, it could gain control of strategic routes that would strangle the efforts of the other Globals.
All of the economic superpowers had paid dearly for the opportunity to move their operations off-world. It had taken most of the Globals’ remaining material resources to construct and energize the transfer pathway. In order to finance this last desperate gamble, FIVE had been forced to tell Earth’s one hundred billion at least part of the truth about the Totality Concept and its hope for human survival. This pacification was necessary because when the power was diverted from food processing, from water and air purification, millions of people had died millions who weren’t missed by the CEOs and who were replaced in a matter of hours by screaming, hungry newborns. Millions upon millions more had died when, at the peak of the drain, the power grids browned out, and the populace had gone mad. Recent history had taught them to be afraid of the dark. When the lights went out, bad things happened. Whole neighborhoods got walled in, the trapped multitudes were left to starve or to commit suicide by inhaling carniphages.
Lujan suspected that once the transfer of population began, all the gloves would come off. The treaties that held the FIVE together would be broken. A war would ensue on both sides of the reality passageway for control of the human future. No matter who won, one outcome was certain society on Earth, which had been on the verge of consuming itself for decades, would take the final, irreversible plunge to extinction.
In his visor, the major saw yellow figures slowly unrolling plastic sheeting along both sides the trailer. When that job was complete, the members of his tactical unit used telescoping rods to reach high on the sides of the box and place limpet mines under the slime, on its metal skin. The precisely set charges would blow off the trailer’s roof and peel back its walls to the floor.
As the demolition crew hurried back to the cover of their APCs, Lujan unclipped the remote detonator from his breastplate.
Damm would get no warning. Only shock, shock and more shock. Lujan was about to take his opponents from a place of relative safety and light into the deadliest of darks. A few moments of panic would give him the chance to pull the visitor to safety.
He enabled the detonator and put his thumb on the boom button.
Chapter Nineteen
In the glare of the trailer’s overhead lights, the taller of the two female mercies hunkered down cross-legged on the floor and, right under Ryan’s nose, started to fieldstrip her weapon. He couldn’t help but notice the pair of tattoos on her pale wiry forearms. The one on her left arm said Buy or Die! 2034th MLAB. The one on her right, though it wasn’t easy to read, said FIVE Forever. Her skin was blurred with furrows of waxy scar tissue; it looked to Ryan as if she had tried to scrape off the green, red and purple design with a serrated knife.
The mercie reached to the rear of the stock and dropped the wide, curving magazine into the palm of her hand. When she set it to one side on the floor, Ryan got a better look at its top. He saw nothing familiar there. No stacked rounds visible. Just a trio of silver stubs sticking up out of an upraised ring, which made him wonder if the thing wasn’t a mag, after all.
She detached the entire trigger assembly by pulling a pair of small pins on either side of the pistol grip. After putting this encased unit aside, with a hard half twist she unscrewed the tribarrel and fore-stock, which also came away as a single unit. The removal of two more pins on the receiver below what appeared to be the fire control indicators allowed her to take off the protective housing that sat atop the buttstock.