Hut 2, Eternity Base Camp
Kerri Helfort awoke with a jerk. A scream was building behind her breather mask as a black-gloved hand kept her head down on the pillow until the quietly spoken message, the FedWorlds accent unmistakable, penetrated her sleep-soaked mind.
“Commodore Helfort, sir! Wake up! And for Christ’s sake do it quietly. Commodore Helfort, sir. Wake up!”
Kerri did, and in a hurry. Signaling the black shape, which was almost invisible in the faint night-lights that lit the long hut and its rows of silent sleeping forms, to let go, she turned slowly onto her side, struggling to get her breath back.
“Who the hell are you?” she whispered, her voice shaking with the suddenness of it all.
“Corporal Gupta, sir, 1/24th FedWorld Marines, and we are here to get you out, but not yet. We need to do some work to get ready. You are the senior service officer here, so we thought we’d start with you.”
Kerri could only gape into the matte-black faceplate of the marine crouched on the floor beside her bed as the fear and tension of the last weeks welled up inside her, the tears streaming down her face past her breather mask to drop onto the tattered black T-shirt she wore in bed. She couldn’t speak, only stare, as hope burst into flame inside her, her mind racing with insane joy. She wanted to leap to her feet and tell those Hammer fuckers that their days were numbered, but years of service discipline kept her under control.
Kerri took a deep slow breath. “What do we need to do, Corporal?”
“For the moment, do nothing but think about what it’s going to take to get every one of your people out of here safely when the time comes. We’ll meet you 400 meters northeast of the camp tomorrow night at midnight. Make your way across the creek and wait there. We’ll find you, but you must come alone. Any problems with that?”
“No. There’s nowhere to run to. This is the only place dirtside to get oxygen and food, so the Hammers don’t care about perimeter security. That’s why there’re no fences. Well, except around their compound, and that’s only to make sure we don’t strangle them in their beds. Lots of people like to get away from the camp for an evening, so there’s nothing unusual about that. No, it’ll be fine. Midnight, 400 meters northeast, wait just across the creek.”
“That’s good, sir. But tell nobody just yet. Let’s work out the details first. Are there people you trust? Absolutely trust?”
Kerri nodded. “Sure are. We have a committee. We talk about escape, but not with much enthusiasm of late, I have to admit.”
“Good. Bring their names and the names of any others who can be trusted. We’ll need at least one group leader for every twenty of you when the time comes. Say fifty people and grade them one to three, with one the most reliable. Okay?”
“Fifty names, graded one to three. I’ll have it for you when we rendezvous.”
“Good. And I want a second list. Let’s call it the red list. Anyone you can’t trust, anyone who might betray the escape.”
Kerri’s face twisted. Sad to say, there were more than enough of them. Cowardly, treacherous bastards. “Will be done. Anything else?”
“Yes. We’ve broken into the Hammer’s comms net, and we see that they’ve reenabled neuronics. It made it much easier to find you.”
“Thank God, yes.”
“Fine. Are they monitoring the neuronics datastreams, do you know? We couldn’t find evidence, but we didn’t probe too deep-mission security is top priority.”
“We don’t know for sure. The network architecture and software shouldn’t allow it, but they’ve got some smart software people, they control all the network hardware, and they’ve had both time and incentive, so they might be. We’ve assumed that they wouldn’t have enabled it unless they thought they could break in. So we don’t use it for anything, uh, serious.”
“Okay. Good. Let’s keep it that way. When the time comes, we can use it to coordinate things, but until then we’ll need to depend on your core cadre of fifty. Commodore, that’s it. Moonrise is in less than an hour, and we have to go.”
“Where are you holed up?”
“Sorry, Commodore, you don’t need to know.”
“Oh! Yes. Sorry. Stupid of me. How do I contact you if I need to?”
“Tomorrow night we’ll put a patch into your neuronics software to set up a secure network operating in parallel. It’ll talk to us through a small short-range infrared transceiver we’ll pin to your breather assembly. You’ll codephrase switch between networks. Until we get some infrared rebroadcast units in, you’ll need to stand outside the camp to talk to us. But we’ll explain all that to you tomorrow. We must go. Midnight tomorrow. Don’t be late.”
“I won’t. Oh, wait. Sorry. One more thing. Maria LaSalle, the one responsible for a lander accident. She’s gone walkabout, and we’re concerned about her.”
Gupta grimaced. “Supplies?”
“Enough for a week, we think. She was last seen late Monday.”
“Okay. Leave it to us. We’ll go through the holovid records and see if we can work out when she left and where she went-when the time’s right. Now I must go, Commodore. See you tomorrow night.”
And with that the shapeless phantomlike form of Corporal Gupta was gone as though it had never existed. Twisting in her bed, Kerri thought she saw a flicker of movement across the ground outside the open-sided hut, but that, too, was gone in seconds.