| |
I took the debonder from my pocket and held it up.
‘This can cut through anything. Find me something, I’ll show you.’
We settled on, of all things, a food brick. I took it, wrapper and all, from Pitr and placed it on the floor. I didn’t want it going straight through the brick and then on through whatever hand held it. I needn’t have worried. There was no bright beam of light, just gentle haze around the work point, and no matter how I tried I could not get the debonder to take off more than a couple of millimetres at a time. I could vary the width of the cut, but not its depth.
‘And what were you planning on doing with that,’ said Pitr. ‘Dig through the floor?’
‘Maybe,’ I replied, deadly serious. ‘Or through the wall. I haven’t worked out the route yet.’
‘That will take days,’ he protested.
‘I don’t think it will,’ Alyssa argued, after thinking for a few minutes. ‘Unless the walls are absurdly thick it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. So long as we cut the edges of the hole, not the whole hole.’
‘Hours! I can’t hold that thing steady in a circle for that long.’
‘We can take it in turns, as long as we can as often as we can.’
‘And then what?’ Pitr asked.
I offered him the most irritating grin I could. ‘Trust me.’
I asked the drone to find us a route that would get us to the back doors without being seen by the guards we normally walked passed, or by the guards on the grand staircase. They were dressed different to the guards at the back door, and I was hoping they belonged to a different team. The drone came back with nothing. The back door was on the opposite side of the staircase to us. I shared the bad news. Pitr looked glum, but Alyssa frowned.
‘How sensible is it being?’
I got her point, and told the drone to be creative. It didn’t answer for ages.
‘A direct route is not possible,” it reported. ‘If physical surveillance exists at the locations indicated.’
‘What about an indirect route?’ I asked.
‘A possible route may exist, but there are sections for which precise records do not.’
‘Show me’, I said, before I told the others.
‘We have to try it,’ Alyssa said almost before I had finished talking. ‘Or we just stay here.’
‘Or we wait for something better,’ said Pitr. I didn’t say anything. He knew the clock was counting down. I told the drone to show me where we should start to cut. I showed Pitr what to do, but when he tried to copy me, his hands shook and the debonder went all over the place. Alyssa took it from him and settled down at the wall, and her hands were steadier than mine. I left her to it and took Pitr into the bedroom and got him to start talking the instant-clothes machine into making us outfits that looks as close as possible to Messengers. While he worked, I spelled Alyssa at the wall. We made good progress, but the debonder started to get hot. We tried wrapping things around the handle, but it soon got too uncomfortable to work with and we had to take a break.
Pitr had the first outfit ready. It looked close enough to me, so I sent him back to make the same outfit for Alyssa and I, whilst we went back to work with the debonder.
It took three hours to scratch the plug of material out of the wall. The debonder got too hot to use twice more, and that was what cost us an extra hour as we waited for it to cool. When we had made cut all the way through, I squinted along the crack at the top, looking for movement, then listened carefully. The hole would take us out into a service corridor sandwiched between the rooms. I could see there was light on, but not if there was anyone or anything outside. I stood up.
‘Time to get our stuff,’ I said.
We all looked at each other. Pitr took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. We had already changed into our messenger outfits, and Pitr had checked that the packs were well loaded.
‘I think we’re ready,’ he said. Alyssa nodded. I dropped back down to my knees and slowly pushed the plug of material out of the hole, going as slowly as I could so it didn’t fall with a crash, or roll away and hit something. As soon as it was out of the way I tried to lie as still and as quiet as I could, listening, then I dragged myself through. Once my legs were clear, I rolled away and checked around. The corridor was empty. The two packs came through next, which I grabbed and carried away as Pitr started to wriggle through. By the time Alyssa joined us, Pitr and I had the packs on our backs and I was asking the drone where to go next. It seemed simple enough; along the corridor to some stairs, then up. The corridor was plain and there were pipes and cables all along the walls and ceiling, but the floor was clear and we all ran as quietly as we could.
The stairs were bare metal mesh, and it suddenly stuck me how we were going up when we were already on the top floor. But that was what the drone said. The stairs were in a metal mesh cage, so I used the debonder to burn away the lock and we started climbing. The noise was terrible, so we all slowed down. At the top, where the drone’s map ended, the floor was still metal mesh but was closed in with boards. I hurried up to a corner I could see ahead of me, turned it, and stopped.
When the others joined me, there were sounds of dismay. In front of us was a lattice of lightweight metal struts wrapped around the translucent dome. The gangway we were on stopped at a locked gate, but beyond that there was nothing except a two meter drop to the dome.
‘Now what do we do?’ said Pitr.
‘Could we drop down onto the dome?’ I suggested.
Alyssa shook her head. ‘Look how much light shines through. You don’t know how thick it is. You could fall all the way to the ground.’
I hadn’t thought of that, and from the way he was looking over the rail, I guessed Pitr hadn’t either. I was just about to ask the drone what to do when Alyssa took my arm.
‘Look,’ she said, pointing. ‘Does that look like it’s supposed to move to you?’
I followed the line of her finger, and there was something that looked like it might fold down and connect to our platform. ‘Does that help us?’
Alyssa flashed me a fierce grin. ‘Give me the debonder.’
I handed it over. Alyssa pushed it deep into a pocket, then jumped up onto the rail and grabbed a strut over her head. She pulled at it, presumably to test it would hold her, then she wrapped her arms and legs around it and started to shimmy along. She was fast. When the strut she was on joined another, going up, she swung herself around and started to climb. About three metres above her was a wider beam. She pulled herself onto it, stood up, and started to walk along it, arms outstretched. Pitr made a choking noise.
Then she wobbled. I tried to gasp, and found out I was already holding my breath. Alyssa’s arms windmilled, and she stuck a leg out sideways. If she fell from there, five metres above the dome, she would almost certainly crash through. My heart hammered until Alyssa got her balance back. As though nothing had happened, she almost ran along the beam, slid down another strut, and swung herself down onto the walkway on the other side of the gap. Pitr punched the air and hissed ‘Yes!’
I started to feel frustrated as we waited for Alyssa. She had to burn through a lock to get to the mechanism that lowered the walkway, then burn through another to open the gate at her end. Eventually, she ran across and opened our gate. ‘That was fun,’ she said, smiling widely.
Without another word, we set off across the top of the dome and back into the service tunnels on the other side. The drone led us down to a door on the second floor.
Now all we had to do was get past the guard at the back door. I was putting a lot of faith in what Walter had told me about nobody interfering with a Messenger, and I had figured it unlikely anyone would worry about a messenger leaving a building. Entering it, maybe, but if you were on the way out surely you had been there for a reason in the first place. The plan had holes though, and they were what scared me. Three messengers leaving at the same time could look odd, especially if there was supposed to be nobody but us in the building, and then there were our packs. I hadn’t seen anything like them in Go-yen-tan, but I couldn’t think of anything other than to take them out in the open.
I made the drone put the map in front of my face and studied it. Out the door, left, down two flights of stairs to the bottom, exit straight ahead. Not bad. Outside was more complicated. As we went left the building, none of us could be seen to stop, or even slow down that much, but the route was complicated and I didn’t have it in the drone so I could show the others. What made it worse was that I didn’t want to go first. I started to explain the path they had to take, but Pitr interrupted me with the one question I hoped he wouldn’t.
‘Why don’t we follow you?’
I took a deep breath. ‘Because I have to go last. To distract them if they try to stop you.’
Pitr started shaking his head straight away. ‘No. You have to go first.’
I started to argue, but Pitr kept talking right over the top of me.
‘No,’ he said again. ‘You have to go first. You have to go when there is most chance you will get through. We can follow you.’
‘He's right,’ said Alyssa. ‘The only reason we are doing this is because we want you to succeed. If we didn't, then we might as well stay here and make the most of what we can get. That's why I have to take the other sack.’
‘What?’
‘Nobody will have seen these before,’ she said, echoing the thought I had already had. ‘If you carry one, they may stop you. If we carry them, we might be able to talk our way through. You know we can't afford to leave them.’
I didn't have an argument. They knew they were right. If Pitr managed to get through, there was a chance that he could go on the rest of the way, but there was an even better chance he would get caught before he made it out of Go-yen-tan. After all, these people had buggies. They would hunt Pitr or Alyssa down before they could run a couple of kilometres. I nodded slowly.
‘OK. I'll go first. But you have to come out quickly behind me. As soon as you do, turn left and look for me ahead. I'll go as slow as I can, but I won’t be able to hang around.’
‘We understand.’
‘Just a minute,’ said Pitr, and he reached under his jacket and pulled the crystal over his head. He turned to Alyssa and looped the thing over her head, letting it fall to her shoulders. ‘You take this, and go second. I stand more chance of distracting them and getting you out if I go last. So you need to look after this for me.’
Alyssa didn't say anything, but pulled her long hair out from under the thong, then dropped the crystal under her jacket. When her head came back up, she looked into Pitr's face for a very long time, and I was sure her eyes looked moist. Pitr's face was flat, emotionless, but he held the gaze as long as she did.
‘I'll leave it to you when you start up,’ I said. ‘Alyssa, you might be better almost right behind me. While they are looking at me already leaving, the might not see you coming from behind. Whatever they say, whatever you hear, don't stop.’
We each held the others hands, then I let go and started off.