Empire (Empire 1)

The next jog wasn’t into a corridor, it was into a large, heavily braced cavern. This was one of the factories. Not a fully automated assembly line—the volume wasn’t great enough to justify that. It looked like they used teams to assemble the pieces into finished hovercycles, one bike per team, six teams working, plus carts loaded with parts.

But nobody was assembling anything right now. Which went along with what the guys were seeing outside. Everybody evacuated.

On the wall, there was a map of the place with two escape routes marked. One led to the huge front door, the other to the tunnel connecting to the cabin.

“I don’t believe this map,” said Cole. “I don’t think they’d build this place without an escape hatch that didn’t require that the lake be drained.”

“They didn’t expect the tunnel to be full of water,” said Cat.

“But they flooded it themselves. Their defense is flooding the front door, too. No way are they so stupid they get trapped if both entrances are flooded.”

“So there’s an escape route didn’t quite make it onto the map?” said Cat.

“One that trucks can’t use,” said Cole.

“But Aloe Vera can.”

Studying the floorplan, though, there was nothing conveniently labeled “Command and Control.”

“I’ll keep watch,” said Cole, “you look at this.”

Cat looked. “Not like a regular building. Nice rectangular tower, you can spot the gaps when they leave stuff off the floor plan.”

“So if you were in charge of this place, where would you put the command center?”

“Up high,” said Cat. “They got three levels higher than this one. Not a lot of routes leading there.”

“I bet Command and Control is four levels up,” said Cole, “since the floorplan only shows three.”

“Bet you’re right,” said Cat.

“So which way up you want to use?”

Both he and Cat had memorized the map while studying it—part of their training, to be able to memorize maps so they didn’t have to carry them around.

“Not the ones that lead toward the front door,” said Cat. “Let’s avoid the crowds.”

They ran into only three people on the stairs they took—all civilians, from their clothing, and two of them women. One of the women cried and shrank away, but the other armed herself with her shoe, brandishing it at them as they passed her and moved on up the stairs. “You can holster that shoe now,” said Cole as he passed her. She didn’t seem to think it was funny.

The stairs ended at the top level on the map. But this level was smaller than the others. There were plenty of offices on this level, mostly in the form of cubicles. Every computer’s cpu had been blown up by a small enough explosive that it was contained entirely inside the case—but smoke was coming out of many of them and most were splayed out or otherwise deformed. Not much data was going to come out of those computers now, but you never knew what a hard drive was going to live through. Might still be something retrievable. Unless they were heat bombs, and then all the plastic inside would be melted. That’s what I’d use, thought Cole. So that’s probably what Verus used.

His infra vibrated. Somebody calling him. “Cole here.”

It was Benny. “As soon as we gave the word, they took off from Montana,” he said. “By now they’re probably only fifteen minutes away.”

If the Progressive Restoration had observers with the forces in Idaho, which was likely enough, then that would explain why they started evacuating this place when only a couple of soldiers had penetrated it. Cole thanked Benny and signed off.

“You see any controls for that big front door?” said Cat. “Or for flooding that tunnel we were in?”

“We didn’t see controls for opening the trap door in the cabin, either,” said Cole.

“And there’s got to be a control for sending water from one lake into the other.”

“What do you want to bet,” said Cole, “that wherever those controls are, Verus is sitting there waiting to raise the water level of Chinnereth just as our attack force is moving through the big front door.”

“That would be mean,” said Cat.

“And then he’d use the secret back door that isn’t on any of the maps. The one that’s camouflaged and opens up on the slope of the mountain somewhere on the Genesseret side.”