Vrel was couldn’t help feeling apprehensive. “You really think you can rely on Terrans that you’re supposed to be fighting?” he said. “Is it wise to trust in them that much?”
“What other choice do we have?” Hudro answered. After a second or two more he added, “Anyway, I trust in their god.”
Having established that much, they got Ramona to call Luodine’s intermediary and pass on instructions for her and Nyarl to fly to Uyali the next morning, setting the regular air terminal as their destination. When they were on final approach but not before, they were to change the landing point to a pad area in the Terran sector, which Ramona said would be busy and crowded all day. Vrel would meet them and take care of things from there. With that, Hudro left for the terminal to find a ride back to Brazil. Vrel stayed the night in Ramona’s “office.”
* * *
The next morning, after preparing them a breakfast, Ramona took Vrel to the part of the Terran sector that she had told them about, which turned out to be a nonstop commotion of people, activity, and vehicles coming and going as she’d promised. Vrel used his phone to summon the flyer that he and Hudro had left at the construction site to the north. It arrived ten minutes later. A little under an hour after that, Luodine and Nyarl’s blue-and-yellow craft appeared overhead, descending steeply. Vrel greeted them as they emerged and indicated his own waiting flyer. While Ramona and Luodine embraced and laughed like long-lost sisters, Vrel helped Nyarl transfer recording and other equipment across. In order not to be lose touch with other events that might develop, Nyarl set a link in the blue-and-yellow flyer’s communications system to forward any incoming messages to a code that he set up in Vrel’s flyer. Even if it were seized and the link code found, it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else. Finally, Vrel thanked Ramona and conceded a hug.
And then they were airborne, heading north to get clear of the area before anyone following the movements of Luodine and Nyarl’s flyer would have time to react to what had happened. To add further confusion, Nyarl had set it instructions to take off again, empty, and head off in a different direction as a decoy. After a hundred miles or so it would land near a village picked at random off the map, and anyone monitoring it could make of it what they would.
They continued northward to be nearer to where anything involving Cade and Marie was expected to happen, and put down around midday in a remote spot past Lake Titicaca. They waited there through the middle part of the day, eking out the fruit juices and snacks that were all the flyer had to offer, talking over the events of the past days, trying to guess possible outcomes, and speculating about future plans. Vrel talked vaguely about making for Asia or Australia, maybe trying to join Krossig. Luodine wasn’t sure she wanted to leave just yet. She was an investigative journalist, after all, and the things that seemed to matter were happening here.
Hudro called around the middle of the afternoon and informed them that the operation would take place tomorrow. He gave no details apart from the map reference of the place where he and the Terran guerrillas would meet them afterward, which was farther north, inside Brazil. Vrel and the others were to head there tonight and were expected. The name of the place was Segora.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
AT LAST, LUODINE COULD BREATHE easily again, not feeling that their every movement was probably being tracked by surveillance computers.
From maps retrieved via the flyer’s communications system, Nyarl had determined that Segora was in a low-lying forested and swampy area around one of the southern headwater tributaries of the Amazon. Luodine had expected it to be something like a village, in the sense of dwellings clustered in some kind of clearing, but it turned out to be more a general name for an extended area of huts, houses, and other constructions loosely strung together beneath the forest canopy with little attempt at forming any identifiable center. It could be an unconventional type of living arrangement that put seclusion before neighborliness, she supposed as the flyer descended out of gray overcast; equally well, it could have been contrived for harboring an illicit militia in a way that afforded anonymity, concealment, and dispersal.