Atlas & Ares book 1: Men of the Red Earth

Hazel swore.

Udike turned from the helm to the rear console where she stood running calculations. Her homemade radio had stopped bursting to life every few seconds, and in the quiet he hear the faint hiss of the August Hawk's engines holding their altitude over Manhattan.

He had felt confined at Teterboro. The tall buildings spiked around the horizon gave him the impression of a palisade. Caging him in. Ridiculous, he knew, but he scrutinized the impression. He'd mapped the city from above to give Cap routes onto the island, and Udike had felt confined then too. There were only a few ways across the rivers. Chokepoints. He hadn't felt this confined outside D.C. Did that have something to do with why Wright had moved the prisoners here?

Udike thumbed the corner of his commonplace book. He remembered a line from a treatise on war. When you are strong, appear weak.

So as soon as he landed he powered down the August Hawk, switched off the lights, let the engines cool, and he hustled both himself and Hazel out of the glass-walled cockpit. In Washington Wright's men had seen three Martians: Cap, a black man, and a young woman. At a distance Udike could be mistaken for Rigsby, and George might pass for Hazel, so as the horses galloped off the runway, Udike kept he and Hazel below deck, hoping if Wright had some plan, it wouldn't account for two extra people.

Udike had guessed right. As he lay on the ramp outside the cockpit monitoring the ship's lateral line by lens, he spotted the infrared glow of a pair of jeeps running hard and fast their direction. He was off the floor in an instant. The engines blazed against the tarmac. In seconds they had ascended three thousand feet into the clouds.

Hazel's radio blared to life, messages peppered across both frequency and amplitude modulations, but Udike ignored their demands. His eyes kept on the radar sweep, watching for surface-to-air missiles. Hazel tried to raise Cap by lens. When he didn't respond, she started checking radar herself. But she seemed to be looking for something more distant, something up in the sky...

Her fist pounded the console. "I don't understand. They're not supposed to have the technology—"

"What's wrong? What did they do?"

Hazel put up the blue hologram of a sphere wrapped in criss-crossing orbits. One orbit lit up. "They changed the course of one of the Argrid's platforms. They closed the gap."

"It's not orbital drift?"

"Gravitational perturbation doesn't work that fast, and it doesn't redirect just one platform."

So Wright had a Plan B. Udike asked, "How did Thomas Kaufman get through the Argrid?"

"Punched a hole with the first rocket he launched."

"How was it different from the rockets everyone else launched?"

"Wright said Redmond Clarke hacked the National Secrets Agency and stole the Argrid's source code. He must have found an exploit no one else knew."

"We need that bug."

Hazel crossed her arms. "We need Cap."

"He's not responding on his lens. Comms are down."

"That can't be a coincidence. We have to find him."

"We have no idea where he is."

"There are only a few places to cross onto Manhattan."

"That's the problem," Udike said. "There were also only a few places near Manhattan where the August Hawk could land, and Wright had people waiting for us. He'd have people waiting at the bridges and tunnels too. It was an ambush."

Hazel blanched. She hadn't thought of that. "We have to find Cap. He was there."

"Where?"

"At Kaufman's launch site in Africa. If the source code he stole is anywhere, it'd be at the Gulch, but neither of us knows where it is and it took the U.N. three years to find it."

"It's under Kaufman's Gap."

"That could be anywhere in equatorial east Africa. We need Cap."

Again Udike thumbed the corner of his commonplace book. "I know somewhere specific."

"We have to find Cap."

"He's not answering his lens."

"Then we wait until comms are back up."

"I don't think comms are the problem."

She bit her lip. "He's in trouble, Marcus!"

Udike turned back to the helm. He gave no argument, and instead answered in three short words. "It's my ship."

Cap escaped the tunnel into Manhattan, but the dim streets were empty of vehicles. Wright was gone. Cap threw back his head and searched the narrow sky for the twin points of light that would tell him Udike and Hazel were safe in the August Hawk. But the clouds roiled without hope.

"She's in shock." Rigsby, at his side, looking back at George.

She had stopped twenty feet back at the end of the tunnel, staring into empty space, and Cap said, "She thought Wright moved the prisoners to the U.N. to send a message to New Yorkers. She didn't anticipate a trap. That's a mistake Mom never would have made."

"We need a lens."

Cap nodded, went to George's side, touched her elbow. "Sis, you alright?"

No answer.

"Sis, we need a lens. Do you have any stashed away in New York? Like the backpack you had in D.C.?"

Again no answer. Cap glanced to Rigsby, unsure, but Rigsby's eyes flicked to George's feet. Her left foot had moved. Cap asked, "This way?" Her other foot moved the opposite direction. Cap took her arm in his. "Let's just start walking, and you tug when you feel like it."

Her foot scooted forward, then took a step, and gradually they walked from the tunnel into the concrete and steel chasms of Manhattan. People were strewn like litter on the street, aimless, blown in the wind, crossing from one side to the other for no reason other than to pass time. The skyscrapers above were unlit but their glass reflected distant light without color. George scuffled along. Cap eyed the loitering strangers, wary of them, protective of George, but no one noticed the interlopers and they continued for several blocks before, at a corner, George tugged.

Cap veered, but George tugged the other direction, and after a few more indeterminate movements she stumbled. He lifted her. She regained her balance and they proceeded up a cross-street. George faltered several more times, each time Cap steadying her, his attention drawn to her needs rather than the roads they took, the occasional turns they took leading them nowhere, a zig-zag here, doubling back there. A random walk. Only after twenty minutes did Cap realize George was doing it on purpose. She was trying to lose anyone Wright had left to follow them. He squeezed her hand. They proceeded a bit faster.

After an hour of weaving between glass and steel they entered a district of brick and stone, a place where bare trees had grown through the pavement to dance like skeletons in the windy moonlight. Cap glanced up at the empty windows. He felt watched. But the streets were empty, the neighborhood more well-to-do, its residents more obedient to lights-out. Leaves skittered on the concrete and fluttered into the air. Cap ran into a low wall.

It hit him across the shins and he fell forward, releasing George. But it wasn't a wall, it was the edge of a fountain, and Cap caught himself splashing in cold water up to his elbows, his head dribbled on by a sculpture of a fish. George tittered. Cap recoiled from the water. He shook wet leaves of his forearms, scolding himself for not watching where he was going. His hand tried to tell him something. He dried his arms on the back of his coat, checking nearby for something more absorbent—

He splashed back into the fountain.

His hand felt the tile of the bath, searching, and it encountered a stone, impossibly smooth. He grasped it. From the fountain he drew out a crystal chunk of water. A lens! Hastily he pocketed it. Again he took George's arm, and she tugged him away from the square. His other hand dialed blindly in his pocket, working the lens by taps and vibrations. No answer from Udike.

Rigsby appeared at his side. Cap whispered, "Comms must be down."

"We should get off this island."

"How? Supposing we've shaken a tail, Wright will have his people at all the bridges and tunnels. You can't swim across a river."

"It's not that big of a river."

"Don't pretend you could do it. I'm saying: it's not humanly possible to swim that far."

"I guarantee you it is possible to swim across the Hudson River."

"It's hundreds of feet."

"It is humanly possible to swim hundreds of feet."

"You couldn't even find a river."

"Of course I can, we're on an island."

"The Hudson River."

"Fifty-fifty chance."

"We are not swimming across a river."

"I didn't say we could swim across a river, I said it's possible for a human to."

"We are not riding anyone across a river—"

"That's not what I'm suggesting!"

"Then what?"

"Nothing, I'm just saying: someone could swim across the Hudson."

"While we stay here."

"Yes."

"How does that get us off Manhattan?"

"It doesn't."

"Rigsby, what in air's name—"

"All I'm saying is it's humanly possible, not that we should do it."

Cap grumbled. "I forgot to notice when you went back to being the dumb one."

"What's that smell?"

"People, Rigsby. The planet has B.O."

"It's worse than usual."

They had walked from the brick and stone neighborhood into an area of low metal buildings and wire fences, and piled around them misshapen heaps of canvas bags. Cap approached one heap and gagged. "How did we end up in the dump?"

"I was following you."

"At least Wright will never think to look for us here."

"Is that the river?"

It was. And moored along a wharf was a garbage scow, bobbing in the evening waves. Cap groaned and released George's arm. "What is it with you and boats?"

Her face relaxed into a smile. "Cheaper to transport by water than land."

Cap rolled his eyes, but his annoyance at her pat explanations was overcome by relief, and he examined her expression in the starlight. "You're okay?"

She exhaled. "I think so, now. But for a while I was scared. I've never gotten that close to being caught. I messed up. I shouldn't have been so predictable. The stakes are too high."

A suspicion flitted through Cap's mind, but he lost it as George climbed the fence between them and the water, dropped down on the other side, and found a solitary post with a locked door. She picked the lock and withdrew a set of keys. Cap scaled the fence and followed, carefully edging between the bags and leaping over a discolored puddle. He stepped onto the scow. Its corner dipped viciously under his weight, and he scrambled nearer to center despite its awful stench. George started the diesel outboards. They couged and backfired. Rigsby cast off the moorings, and the barge sputtered away from land at a laborious two miles per hour.

Cap braved moving off-center, and when the vessel failed to capsize, he made his way to port and held the chains along the edge. He watched the fading skyline pass. George gave Rigsby the helm and joined him. Cap said, "Why did you give me The Scarlet Pimpernel?"

"For your birthday."

"But why that book?"

She massaged a fingertip. "Doesn't matter. Not right now."

"You knew about Judith, didn't you? You needed me to rescue her."

"Something like that."

"That's awfully elaborate, sis, to have a forger on another planet glue together a book in hopes I'd imagine myself as Sir Percival Blakeney and ride to the rescue. You couldn't say, 'Cincy, someone needs your help?'"

"I needed...I needed you to dream bigger. More than Judith deserved your help, but I figured..."

"I would only help someone who was part of Thomas Kaufman's gang."

"You're one of the lucky ones, Cap. You escaped. You see everything Earth has and you hold it against Wright and the U.N. for taking it from you, but imagine having it taken from you and having to live day after day with the people who took it. Everyone here, they didn't get a new world to call their own. They're forced to live as renters, to watch as their abundance is vacuumed up by an aristocracy who already has more than it can ever spend. Abundance taken for no better reason than to be flaunted. There are worse things, Cincy, than emulating Percival Blakeney."

"Blakeney saved aristocrats."

"Blakeney saved the ones who needed saving. You're worried about taking anyone to Mars because they'll be indentured and could become slaves, but on Earth they're already slaves. Better yours than Sampson Wright's. The least they deserve is a choice."

"A choice between slave owners isn't a choice."

"All we have is the choice of who we're slaves to." She breathed the cold night air, the wind whipping her hair around her face. "When Thomas Kaufman announced he was going to the Moon to give humanity freedom, the apparatchiks at the U.N. argued there could be no such thing as freedom on a world without air. You'd be slave to the man with the oxygen tanks. They talked about freedom, but they understood that even the most powerful aristocrat is slave to something—money, celebrity, career, dogma—that there is no genuine freedom, only a choice of slave master. And slowly the apparatchiks made those choices for people. They chose everyone's education, then everyone's careers, then their pay, where they lived, their hobbies, their religion. 'No fate but the state.' That was their motto. And they thought the people accepted it. But no one ever fully resigned to that kind of control, they just didn't know how to fight it. A handgun can't stand up to a tank. The urge for freedom never vanished from the Earth, but it did go into hiding. It hid until Thomas Kaufman gave people something to hope for, and it'll come out again for the right reason."

"And you want that reason to be me."

"I know it's hard to imagine. How could a world put any hope in a visitor? But what you see is the circumstance, not the story. Here." She pointed into the breeze ahead of them. "See that speck, fifth magnitude, below the clouds? That's all anyone can see of the torch of a statue that used to be lit through the night. The circumstance is that a once-beacon of freedom is now barely visible. The story is that when the statue fell into disrepair and was condemned, people didn't treat it like a broken lawn decoration, they got together and one dark night rowed out to the island, broke into the statue, climbed up to the torch, and pounded new gold leaf onto the flame. They couldn't bathe it in light the way it had been, but they could make sure it reflected every photon of starlight. Every year people donate gold from heirloom jewelry, candlesticks, watches, even false teeth, all so that flame can shine a little brighter. They remember that the statue represents liberty, even if they've forgotten exactly what liberties. You don't have to fulfill everyone's hopes and dreams. Just give them permission to have hope again."

He stood from the chains. "Cute sermon, sis, but you know how I felt about Mom's sermons—"

"Yeah, yeah, sermons make Martians angry, but here they work. Every ten days the feeble-hearted tune into Wright's radio address just to hear him foam at the mouth—"

"Please don't talk."

"Cincy, what—"

Then Rigsby was there, helm abandoned, pulling George away and whispering about a house of cards being erected in Cap's mind. Cap examined it breathlessly, mapping it before it collapsed. "Frost."

"What?"

"I know how to evacuate Turtle Bay."

"How?"

He said to George, "We'll have to burn your inside man."

"My what?"

"Your man inside the Secret Servus."

"I don't have a—"

"C'mon, George. You knew about Judith, knew Wright was moving the prisoners, knew he was moving them to Turtle Bay. That's why you were so paralyzed when Wright ambushed us. You thought your inside man had betrayed you."

"He would never do that."

"Our margins are too thin for mistakes."

"We can trust him."

"Good, because I need him to let me into the U.N. General Assembly building."

"Why?"

"I'm going to give a speech."

Rigsby sputtered. "Say again?"

"I'll get on stage, do the podiums, the whole charade, and broadcast it on all frequencies. We'll dial Wright in by lens. When he sees where I am, what I'm saying and realizes that everyone can hear me, he'll send the guards from the Secretariat Building to stop me. That'll drain the prison for you and Rigsby to free the prisoners."

"What if he only sends few guys?"

"He'll send everyone."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because he won't be thinking. He'll be angry."

"About what?"

"About me broadcasting over his weekly radio address."

Jus then, the lens in Cap's pocket sprang to life.

The August Hawk parked sixty thousand feet above equatorial east Africa as Marcus Udike contended with an unanticipated difference between Mars and Earth. Wondering where to find the Gulch, a place-name had surfaced in his mind, not far from Kaufman's Gap. Udike dashed off to find it, expecting to be greeted by a lonely cluster of mountains inaccessible by ground but easily navigated by air. That's how it would have been on Mars, where mountains were solitary. But Earth's mountains existed on a different scale. When the Hawk arrived in the middle of the night, Udike hardly believed its instruments. Below lay four hundred square miles of mountainous jungle ravines, and he had no idea which one was the Gulch.

So that was how the U.N. burned three years hunting Thomas Kaufman. Udike grumbled as he jabbed the glowing console. He didn't have three years. He tried the Hawk's terrain-mapping radar, but all it gave him was a map of the terrain. He ran a thermal scan. Everything was cold. He calibrated the radar to find any large cross-sections that might be seven launch pads. It found every mountain lake.

Hazel wasn't helping. She stood at the front window, arms crossed. She hadn't spoken to him since he abandoned Cap. But as dawn began to pink the tops of the mountains and he still floundered at the helm, she dropped her arms with an an exasperated sigh. "For air's sake, hit the repeater."

"The what?"

She went to the rear console. "The radio repeater, used to guide in supply flights. I assumed a pilot would have heard of it." She poked buttons, within ten seconds had the frequency, and within another ten had triangulated the source. "There, beside that lake."

"Can't be. The shoreline of that lake is too tight against the valley wall to have a launch pad."

"Trust me."

He had more reason to trust her than she had to trust him. He took the Hawk down.

^started

They dropped through a layer of wispy cloud into a verdant ravine, and Udike guided the August Hawk up the winding river valley to the lake. Arranged in the middle of the lake were seven launch pads. Their surfaces were flush with the waterline, hiding them from radar, their concrete still blackened from the rockets of the First Exodus. "Good work," he said.

Hazel stood at the windshield and shrugged off compliment. "How'd you know to look here?"

"This is Rwenzori. Close to the equator, inaccessible. Exactly what Thomas Kaufman wanted in a launch site."

"But why here? Why not some other equatorial mountains?"

Udike looked up at a white peak. "The first Europeans who came here didn't use the local name for this range. They made up their own. They called these the Mountains of the Moon."

Hazel's reflection smiled. "Thomas Kaufman always had a kind of poetry about him, didn't he?" Then, to herself, "I wish he was still here."

Udike circled the Hawk low around the lake, searching for a safe place to land. The shoreline was wide enough, but the docks and quays that had extended out into the lake now canted at odd angles, broken not by waves or rockets but by deliberate force. From tunnel entrances spread wide fans of equipment—desks, chairs, computers, books, fabricators, cables—all once knolled out in a rectilinear grid for inspection and cataloguing, now the arrangement disrupted by time. But Udike wasn't worried about the visible evidence of the U.N.'s raid. He was worried about Peacewarrior's reputation for ensuring an enemy could never use a location. He was worried about mines.

So he scouted the valley for the least convenient place to land, hoping it had been overlooked, and decided on a pile of rocky scree at the base of a cliff. Without landing gear the August Hawk had to set down at a steep incline, her stern on the ground and her nose pointed to the snowy peak, and by the time Udike ensured the position was stable, Hazel had already sprinted out of the cockpit, across the now-level ramp to the galley, and swung at the bannister's hairpin to throw herself down the almost vertical slide into the hold. Then she was out the airlock.

Udike called after her as he lowered himself from the hatch. "Watch for trip wires!"

"I will!"

"And megafauna!"

She halted.

He scrambled down and met her along a narrow parting of the grass. An animal trail. Just standing Hazel panted in the stifling jungle heat. Udike wiped sweat from his brow, not all of it from the temperature. They advanced together, one step at a time, watching both ground and grass for movement or silver gleams. They encountered nothing but the bones of some large animal and the frayed metal of whatever booby trap it had stumbled into. As they neared the lake, the cliff wall became dotted with tunnel entrances, the ground littered with the the tunnels' contents. Udike said, "This is like searching for a needle in a mountain range. If the U.N. couldn't find it, maybe Thomas Kaufman didn't back up the Argrid's source code."

"He backed it up."

"How do you know?"

"Thomas Kaufman backed up human civilization to another planet. He backed up the only knowledge of the way to get off this one." But she sighed. "The question is, how do we find it?"

"What does source code look like?"

"It's binary data. It could look like anything. A hard drive, a soft drive, chromographic noise in an image, branches and bark and leaves on a fake tree. It could be invisible—maybe magnetized metal—or auditory, like Morse code or the sound of a bird. Knowing Thomas Kaufman, he could have found a way to encode it chemically, something we'd have to smell or taste to decode."

"Steganography," Udike said.

"And I'd bet a week's air Thomas Kaufman was as expert in it as he was at everything else."

Udike surveyed the debris at his feet. "Maybe the U.N. did find it."

"Not likely. If they'd gotten what they were after, they wouldn't have torn this place down to the screws. They must've given up."

"A platoon of U.N. Peacewarriors gave up and you expect to find it?"

"Thomas Kaufman wasn't trying to hide it from us. We have to look somewhere the U.N. wouldn't."

As Hazel said it there was a movement in the grass. An animal snaked toward them. Udike jumped back. The air shimmered green and ferocious. Hazel lunged—

—toward it.

Udike tried to grab her but swiped empty air. A specter had materialized, its shades faint in the bright equatorial daylight, edges blurred, but it flew at them with the unmistakable violence of a guard dog. Udike shouted.

To his surprise, the hologram turned and ran. Hazel chased it.

The apparition jogged, but its legs moved out of sync with the ground, feet that should be keeping contact with the dirt instead skiing forward. A holographic recording. Udike ran after it, behind Hazel, searching the grass ahead for a lens rolling on its edge. He had never seen a lens holo that big, nor a lens fast enough to lead a foot chase and smart enough to do it over uneven terrain, and belatedly he realized what Hazel had known the moment it appeared. This was one of Thomas Kaufman's holograms. It was helping them.

It must have lain hidden next to the path for decades, waiting for trespassers to scare off. For as nervous as Udike was about U.N. booby traps, U.N. soldiers would have been even more nervous about Thomas Kaufman's. They would have fled from sudden movement. But Hazel hadn't flinched. She had leapt at it. She needed a result that no U.N. soldier would have gotten, so she did what no U.N. soldier would have done.

Udike's wind was failing as the chase came to the largest tunnel opening. The hologram dodged inside. Hazel slowed as she entered, not from lack of breath but from having to step carefully in the utter darkness. When Udike caught up, he raised his lens and flared it into a light. An ivory beam lanced through the room. Hazel was right to be cautious. The tunnel was strewn with metal cabinets and shelves, equipment smashed and dismantled, the floor torn up. Udike climbed over a tangle of sharp steel mesh.

A haunting yowl groaned from deep in the tunnel. Udike searched with the beam of light. Hazel hissed at him. "Shut it off." He did. A flash of green light disappeared into the wall of the tunnel.

Udike restored their light and they picked their way to where the holo had gone, a thick iron door, half open. It looked like the door to a vault, but the room on the other side was small and empty, the far wall bare concrete with nothing but a single metal panel. The hologram stood aside, motionless, the recording ended.

Hazel grabbed Udike's lens and shone it at the panel. It was a simple fusebox cover, but crossing it were two strips of yellow caution tape. Hazel tore them down. She brushed the dust from where letters had been stamped into the metal.

SELF-DESTRUCT. USE IN EVENT OF INCURSION.

Udike backpedaled.

But again Hazel leapt forward.

"Don't!"

He was too slow. Hazel had thrown open the panel, seized the rubber top of the knife switch inside, and once more did what no U.N. search dragoon would have—

She pulled it.

Udike threw his arms over his face.

A moment later, he lowered them. Nothing had happened except the knife detached in Hazel's hand. "Terrible risk to take."

"Exactly." She held the light at the panel, feeling a slot in the metal where the switch had been. She hooked the edge of something and tugged. Out slid a small crimson book.

Hazel seized it and foisted the lens back on Udike, posing him to shine the light on the book. She fanned pages. "No, no, no, it's just nonsense. Nothing but scribbles."

Udike moved behind her shoulder and bent to look. Line after line had been filled, but only with swirling, unintelligible marks, like someone had been running a pen out of ink. Hazel flipped it closed and felt the cover. She snatched the lens and ran it over the cover, along the edges, across the back. Nothing. She protested. "But this has to be it."

Udike looked to the hologram for help, still paused in the corner. Chasing it in the daylight he hadn't been able to see more than a frightening apparition, then only glimpsed it at a distance at the end of the tunnel. This was his first clear sight of it. It was too short to be a recording of Thomas Kaufman, but neither was it Redmond Clarke. It was a woman. She wore a flight suit covered in zippers, and over her left breast pocket an initial and surname. Udike blinked.

He crept closer to the hologram, afraid it might shut off if he got too near. It quivered, still alive but caught between the last two frames, the woman's short hair flicking back and forth by a millimeter, but Udike had locked onto her name patch. "Does that book have any dots?"

"The lines for writing on are dots."

"Is there anything funny about them?"

She shone the lens at the open page. "Not that I can see." She peered through the lens, using it as both light and magnifying glass. "No unusual size or spacing—"

The lens contacted page. Its light changed. Hazel's face lit up in a wash of color. Shapes and letters danced across her features, flickering too fast to read. "What in ice—" She grinned. "I don't believe it!" She traced the lens over the page as fast as she could, then turned to the next. She laughed in glee. "This is it! This is everything! Kaufman's whole trove. The lines for writing on—they're microdots!"

She downloaded schematics and source code onto his lens. "How did you know?" But she was too enraptured to listen, so instead of answering Udike turned back to the hologram and the patch with its name. The key had been the dot after the pilot's first initial. In one of the two interleaved frames at the end of the recording, the embroidered circle was missing. The paused hologram jittered, and the period flashed. Winking.

Udike reread the figure's name, and he understood the wink.

As he stooped and picked up the lens, the hologram vanished.

The garbage scow made harbor on Staten Island. George steered it delicately against the ocean wind around to the ocean side of the landmass and into a marina cluttered with half-sunken vessels, hulls listing at odd angles, masts tilting, like a graveyard of the dead who had started to rise but forgotten what for and too tired to go back. The scow puttered between corpses. George nosed it into a spot of bare shoreline. They disembarked and sought cover in a small forest.

Cap walked ahead and George left Rigsby mooring the scow to hiss, "You can't do it."

"I'm not."

"You told him where to meet you."

"Yes."

"But you can't just abandon Rigsby or Hazel or your pilot."

"I'm not."

The call on the scow hadn't been Udike as Cap hoped. Instead, the surface of the lens was blank, a redacted number, and the voice wasn't Udike's low pilot drawl but a high and reedy voice that sounded like an unwanted slap on the back.

"Heya, Cincinnati. Hear you got yourself stranded. Lucky for you I'm in the same sitch, but I been preparing for this little potentiality. Found a new bunghole, if you want it. Whaddya say? Give ya a lift out of this friendless charade? Problem is, only got room for one. Yours for the taking."

Cap had listened, named a landing field Udike had considered but rejected as too far from Manhattan, and ended the call. Rigsby at the helm hadn't heard. George kept quiet until he was out of earshot. "You told him to airlift you from Jamaica Bay."

"Yes," Cap admitted, "but it's a distraction. Lonson Boyle is working for Wright. If he wants a rendezvous, it's because Wright wishes he hadn't let us go. He must not have captured the August Hawk like he planned, so now he needs us as hostages to bait Udike back. If he thinks we'll be at Jamaica Bay, he'll have a detachment of Secret Servus laying in wait, which will be one less detachment wherever we'll actually be. I'm a coward, George, not a fool."

"How do you know it was Lonson Boyle?"

"No one talks quite like Lonson Boyle, and I've been suspicious he was involved since Zinser said Gidja Boyle was in the Belt. Lonson has a greenhouse on Ceres. Judith spent four days on her flight to Earth prying him away from a computer. Dollars to dust he'd cracked the Argrid and was scheming how to close it again and make it look like orbital drift. Gidja tried to warn me, but she wouldn't betray him outright, so the best she could do was threaten me to stay off Earth."

"Some girlfriend."

"She's not my girlfriend."

"What happened between you two?"

"She hated that anytime she asked me about myself I was cagey."

"Why were you cagey?"

"I was afraid..."

He hesitated, but George knew him well enough to fill in the blank. "You were afraid if you talked about yourself, you would accidentally tell her about me."

His silence confirmed it.

George sucked on her cheeks. "I'm sorry you had to make that choice."

"It wasn't a hard decision."

"Yes, it was."

He stopped and faced her. "No, it wasn't. I never quit thinking of ways to rescue you. Gidja was a distraction."

Rigsby caught up then and after a brief exploration of the woods all three took cover at the edge of the island where they could monitor the sky, holding hope that Cap was correct in his deduction that Wright hadn't captured the August Hawk and it would soon reappear. Cap turned the lens over and over in his hand. He no longer believed comms were flaky. If Lonson Boyle had taken control of the Argrid, he'd probably hacked comm satellites too. Cap wouldn't hear from Udike until the Hawk was close enough for ship-to-lens.

They passed daylight hours in shadow, discussing in whispers how to infiltrate Manhattan and Turtle Bay, how to mount the jailbreak, what to do with the escapees. They'd have to get beyond the reach of the Secret Servus. George proposed an elaborate scheme to smuggle them to a remote island in the Pacific Ocean. Cap shuddered. But being surrounded by water was safer than being surrounded by strangers.

Not long after sunset the lens in Cap's hand burbled. He snatched it to his mouth. "Udike, that had better be you."

"You're gonna kiss me, bossman."

Not Udike, nor Lonson Boyle. "Say again?"

"Got somewhere I can read you a book?" Hazel.

"I'll ping you."

He trekked through the dark forest back to an overgrown golf course they had found, and ten minutes later the August Hawk sat in a ring of dying grass fires. Its cargo doors opened on the white hold, as brilliant as a glimpse of heaven. A black silhouette greeted them. Cap said, "You've been to the Gulch."

Hazel's grin was audible. "They closed the sky on us. We had to find out how Thomas Kaufman beat the Argrid. And boy did we. Turns out the network has a feature, which Thomas Kaufman, in his fashion, turned into an exploit."

Rigsby, "What's the feature?"

"Counter-countermeasures. It adapts to any defense. That's why no one could sneak through it. Once a missile platform gets a radar lock, it keeps it. You can't distract it with flares or chaff or fancy maneuvers or changing your radar cross-section. If it loses a lock, it widens its search parameters until it finds it again."

George caught a whiff of what Kaufman had done. "How far will it widen the parameters?"

"If it has to, it'll lock onto a high-flying goose."

Rigsby again, "Why would it have to?"

Cap saw the answer. "If it can't find the rocket."

Hazel grinned wider. "The first rocket Thomas Kaufman sent up was unmanned. After the Argrid got a lock and fired a missile, it self-destructed. The Agrid didn't expect that. When the missile couldn't find the target, it widened its search parameters further and further until it found a new target."

"The missile battery."

"Can't let through a rocket just because it disguises itself as part of the Argrid. Those designers were paranoid to a fault, and Thomas Kaufman took advantage of it. All he had to do was waste a rocket."

Rigsby said, "We don't have a rocket to waste."

"Balloons." George, thinking. "Would it try to shoot down a high-altitude weather balloon?"

"Absolutely."

"Then I can get you what you need."

"Can you get a couple dozen?"

Cap worried. "It might not work the first time?"

"Oh it'll work," Hazel answered, "but Wright could close a new gap as easily as he closed the original gap. I don't intend to give him the chance. Thomas Kaufman may have found the Argrid's first exploit, but I found its last exploit."