Redliners by David Drake

“What I want to know,” Ace Matushek said, “is how we got in. My helmet said that bubble over the trap door would fry my brain if I walked into it. God looks at the thing for a few seconds, steps through, and opens the door to shut it off.”

“Manager al-Ibrahimi is a Category Four civil servant,” Lock said quietly. There was an undertone to his voice that Abbado couldn’t identify. “The bubble would have been a Kalendru mental shield. It interferes with any electrical activity that doesn’t match its settings—nerve pulses among them. Manager al-Ibrahimi keyed his brain waves to the requirement, so it passed him.”

“Just like that?” Horgen said.

“Under normal circumstances, breaching a shield of that sort would require destruction of the entire base,” Lock explained. “Category Fours have cybernetic implants coupled to their nervous systems. The manager—and his aide—could calculate the proper and relative motions of every star in the galaxy if they chose to.”

“Jesus Christ,” Abbado said.

“Or God, perhaps,” Lock said with a slight smile Abbado hadn’t expected of him. “I used to think that Category Fours weren’t human. Well, I used to believe a lot of things that weren’t true.”

“We all do, snake,” Matushek said, explicitly accepting Councillor Matthew Lock into the company of veterans. Essie would’ve liked to hear that. Ace chuckled. “That’s how we manage to keep on going.”

They were nearing the entrance to the ancient bunker. Electrical lights and a few campfires gleamed. The remaining bulldozer had enlarged the clearing.

“We should’ve camped back where the snail went through,” Abbado joked. “Now, that was land clearing.”

“No fucking thank you,” Caldwell said.

Lock tensed and stumbled on a clod that’d dropped off the back of a track cleat. Abbado grimaced. “Sorry, councillor,” he said.

The civilian looked back at him. “Don’t ever be sorry for what you are, any of you,” Lock said fiercely. “If you were sensitive gentlemen and ladies, we’d all be dead.”

“Hey, we were all in this together,” Abbado said, squeezing Lock’s shoulder.

Groups of people, colonists and strikers together, were heating dinner. It always seemed to Abbado that the sludge went down better hot. He was sure looking forward to real food, though.

“Was there communications equipment in the base?” Lock asked, nodding toward the encampment. “Or do we still have to reach the intended site to send a message capsule?”

“We got to get to a capsule,” Abbado said. “Well, somebody does. Blohm’ll take out a team while most folks wait here till the flyers come. God says he turned off the jungle. That’s the Category Four stuff you’re talking about, I guess.”

“You know it’s going to be us going out with Blohm, don’t you, Sarge?” Matushek said. “And I tell you, I don’t trust it’s going to be just a hike and a climb.”

“Hell, Three-three’s the experts, aren’t we?” Caldwell said. “I didn’t want to sit around twiddling my thumbs anyhow.”

Steve Nessman and a group of civilians were lining a bulldozed pit with plastic sheeting. It looked like they were trying to build a bathing pool, though Abbado didn’t know how they thought they were going to fill it.

“Hey, councillor?” Abbado said. “Want to eat with us? You spent as much time at the front of the column as we did.”

“. . . if you find one who is true,” Horgen sang as she unlatched one of her bandoliers. “Change not the old love for a new . . .”

Caius Blohm stood at the edge of the bulldozer cut. He pressed the muzzle of his stinger carefully against the resilient bark of a tree that towered almost two hundred feet into the nighted sky.

“Well, I will be,” he said. “Look at that, sweetheart. Yesterday if I’d done that, a thorn would’ve stuck out a yard and a half. See the tip right there down in the bark?”

“You wouldn’t have touched it, Caius,” Mirica said with all a child’s certainty. “You know better than that.”

“You got that right, honey,” the striker said. “But we’re going to have to cut down a tree like this to get up the side of the crater. I wanted to make damned sure God was right when he said it’d be safe.”

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