“Stay here,” Adele said as she got out and walked toward the troops. “You, sir!” she called to the Alliance officer.
“The navy doesn’t cut any weight tonight,” said a gunman. He reached for the handle of the van’s concertina door.
“Don’t touch that vehicle if you hope to see the morning!” Adele said, speaking Universal in an upper-class Bryce accent.
She pushed aside the pistol another Zojira rather diffidently pointed at her torso. Her nose wrinkled with the smell of diesel fuel and the feces the jitney’s driver voided when he died.
“I’ll handle this,” the Alliance officer said. He stepped forward to join Adele at the van’s front fender. “Yes, who are you?”
His accent was Pleasaunce, and he quite clearly realized that Adele didn’t sound like a local. He was a young man with a trim black mustache and a tic in his left eye.
“My name doesn’t matter,” Adele said. The officer was uncertain and she was not; she ruled the situation, even though a word from this boy could mean her life in an eyeblink. “The Kostromans in both these vehicles are operating under my orders. Call your superiors and tell them this is code Blue Chrome. If they find any difficulty in confirming my free passage, they are to ask Mr. Markos. Do you understand?”
The officer scowled at her. His tic was worse. “Step back, please,” he said. Adele sneered and stayed where she was.
The officer backed a slight distance himself and spoke into his helmet pickup. Adele couldn’t hear the words, but she saw his lips form “blue chrome.”
It was the code for securing Kostroma. She’d found it in the Alliance message traffic she’d browsed while she waited in the warehouse complex for the Cinnabars to load the van. Nothing in the messages themselves mattered to the escapees, but Adele’s knowledge of the code word gave objective proof of what her accent implied: that she was an Alliance agent working under cover.
Markos’s name didn’t mean anything to a low-ranking officer overseeing a checkpoint, but it would to his superiors. They would be no more likely to question Markos or delay one of his agents than they would stick their head into a hot furnace.
A hot furnace was, after all, a very possible end for anyone who got in Markos’s way.
The officer’s mouth opened silently as he listened to the response to his question. “Yes, sir,” he said loudly. He gave his head a reflexive nod. “Yes sir. Balthasar Three-One out.”
“Make sure we’re not bothered by any of the rest of this rabble,” Adele ordered without waiting for the officer to address her directly. She waved toward the next inspection post along the circle. “And don’t log this. Don’t even remember it, do you understand?”
“Yes sir,” the officer said. “You’re free to go, sir.”
“Go on ahead,” Adele said in a curt voice to the cab of the van. She strode back to the gun truck.
Hogg and Daniel looked as though they were in awe of her. She could trust them both to do a perfect job of acting when it counted.
* * *
Beyond the northern outskirts of Kostroma City the road became gravel and was in increasingly poor repair. The van was so overloaded that its rear springs were bottomed even before a wheel hit a pothole. Daniel supposed the jolts weren’t as bad in the cab as they were in the back, but they were bad enough.
“Okay, there it is,” Hogg said as their headlight swept the corner of a building through a screen of vegetation. “Now, I’m not telling you what to do, sir, but these are probably folks I know.”
“Yes, of course,” Daniel said. “You’ll handle the negotiation if the situation’s as we expect.”
The road turned ninety degrees; Hogg slowed. As the van wallowed through the deep rut on the outside of the curve, its headlight painted a sizable waterfront community of two- and three-story buildings.
“Why, these are real houses,” Daniel said in surprise. For the past several miles the only dwellings he’d seen along the roadside were shacks with roofs of sheeting and walls of scrap wood. “I hadn’t expected . . .”