Markov sat in his office, frowning at the backs of his outstretched hands as Parker and Rachel entered his office.
'Rachel,' he said. 'I'm pleased you came to see me. I notice you've authorised 178,000 credits of supplies for Beacon Station.'
Rachel grimaced. 'Yes, General.'
'Can you check with me before authorising anything over 40,000 credits in future. There are other stations out there in need of supplies too, Alma Station being one of them. We need to be careful about how we allocate our limited resources.'
'Sorry, General. Beacon Station's requests have been ignored for two years. I figured that their previous requests were long overdue.'
'That maybe so, but speak to me first next time.'
Rachel nodded.
'So why did you two want to see me?' Markov said. 'I hope you have some good news for me. I already have enough bad news to last the next five years.'
'This is good,' Rachel said. 'Very good.'
Markov glanced towards Parker who stood beside her with his pink eyes gazing down at the floor.
'It was Rachel's idea,' Parker said.
Markov grunted. 'Really.'
'Jim and Melanie, did all the work,' Rachel said.
Markov raised his hands in mock surrender. 'Okay, I'll thank all of you if this amounts to anything. Can you just tell me whatever the hell you came to tell me?'
'We found it,' Rachel said.
'Found what?'
'The Kamari HQ.'
'I thought that was Havers Compound?'
Rachel shook her head. 'No. That was what we were meant to think. Havers Compound was a research centre but the Kamari hadn't been there very long. It was an old building and it was too visible to our satellite scans. They never intended to stay there for long. The Kamari always had an underground HQ. They needed somewhere that we wouldn't be able to find, somewhere where they could build their armies and killing machines beneath a thousand tons of rock.'
'If it's meant to be so difficult to find, how do you know where it is?' Markov said.
'Rachel suggested using the reconnaissance drones,' Parker said.
'Why? They wouldn't see anything that the satellite platforms haven't already seen, unless you're looking for something the size of a rock.
'That would be true,' Rachel said. 'If the drones were just looking at the surface, but we reconfigured them to look underground instead.'
Markov folded his arms across his barrel chest and gazed back at Rachel from beneath a furrowed brow. 'You're losing me now. How is that possible?'
'We used the same techniques that we use for mining,' Parker said. 'I had to make some modifications to make the equipment more sensitive, but we were able to build up a model of the density variations in the subterranean rock.'
'You can see caves?' Markov said.
Rachel nodded. 'We can now.'
Markov glanced from one to the other. 'Is it possible that the pair of you are not crazy after all?'
Rachel laughed for the first time in a long while. She almost cried too, but she managed to get control of herself before things got too out of hand. It was such a relief to know that Markov was finally taking her seriously, that he knew she was an asset to Central Command rather than a liability.
'I'm not crazy, General,' she said. 'I promise. We've been going through the data model. We've identified one hundred and thirty-eight caves to the south of Cinnamon City.'
'One hundred and thirty-eight? Damn, that's a lot. Did you scan the whole Orange Zone?'
'So far we only have data for the area between here and Beacon Station,' Parker said, his eyes tracking sideways across the empty floor, 'but the drones are still out there, searching for more caves. The scans are going to take a little longer than I expected.'
'Where does this leave us now?'
'We have some good information from the scans already,' Parker said. 'One of the caves is much larger than the others, and it lacks most of the natural features that we'd expect to find if it was a fless cave or some other natural recess caused by erosion.'
'There's too many damn fless caves to the South,' Markov said with a sour expression. 'That much I already know.'
'This cave is definitely man-made,' Rachel said. 'It's huge. We've already picked out individual rooms, corridors and hangars. There is a design to the layout. What's even better is that the location matches the source gate for portal signatures that Melanie and I were able to extract from Drop Ranger data using Riser Trent's custom algorithms.'
'Wait,' Markov said. 'What Drop Ranger?'
'At Havers Compound. Riser Trent used the net-feed droids to record live data of the combat operation. All the data from the droids was sent back to a Drop Ranger, a kind of relay station that pre-processes the enormous amounts of information generated by the Information Cloud before sending a subset of it back to the Sphynx-II controller rack. Mekinet News transmitted the visual logs, but Trent realised that the Drop Ranger contained far more information than he had seen at the time.'
'What does that have to do with portal signatures?' Markov said, looking confused. 'What the hell is a portal signature, and what does this have to do with finding the Kamari HQ?'
Rachel raised her hands to forestall his questions. 'It's quite involved,' she said. 'I worked it all out with Melanie. Trent found the locations of the Kamari bases before we did. He located over thirty Kamari bases, some small and some large. The largest base has coordinates that match the location of the underground cave we found with the reconnaissance drones. It means that we've made a significant find.'
Markov let out a long breath. 'You seem to be working well with the other commanders. I'll give you that. So if all this is true, where is this base?'
'It's ten kilometres south of here,' Parker said.
Markov sat back in his chair and spread his large hands across the desk in front of him. 'So close to the city?' he said.
'Yes,' Rachel said. 'They probably thought we would spend less time searching nearby. I always thought their bases would be beyond the Skybreaker Mountains.'
'They were right then,' Markov said. 'They made fools of us all.'
Rachel's heart sank, but she realised that his comment wasn't aimed at her. They had all been fools in a way. Too often they had searched the distant reaches of the Orange Zone for danger, only to find it already at their door. Havers Compound had been too close to Beacon Station, and now this new Kamari base was even closer to Cinnamon City. It looked as though the Kamari had mastered the art of hiding in plain sight.
'If this underground base is so close,' Markov said. 'Why didn't we detect it before?'
Parker turned his head to face Markov but his eyes gazed straight through him as though he wasn't there. 'The base is deep,' he said. 'Much deeper than anything we've ever seen before.'
'How deep?' Markov said.
'It's four kilometres below ground. With their portal technology, it looks like depth is not a technological challenge. Our drones almost missed it.'
'Good work,' Markov said. 'For the first time since I got here, it looks like we might be able to get a jump on the Kamari. I'm getting tired of chasing their tale.'
'Trent had access to this information too,' Rachel said. 'That must be why the Kamari were trying to find him.'
Markov nodded. 'That makes sense. They didn't want us to find the portal signatures. They thought that we could only track down the location of their bases if we captured Trent.'
'Rachel outsmarted them,' Parker said. 'We found their bases even without Trent.'
Rachel turned to face him. 'I wouldn't have put it like that.'
'You did, Rachel,' Markov said. 'Parker's right. You're one step ahead of them. We need to act now before they catch up. Parker, find out how we can hit this place. Is there any weapon we have that can strike that far underground?'
'No, General. I'm afraid there isn't, but now that we know where the Kamari base is, we can start working on an attack strategy.'