Twenty minutes later Jagger said, “I got a ping.”
I found his location on my screen and hardened my suit. “Cupcake?”
“We got this,” she said. “Three hours to dawn. Go.”
???
Carrying the AI Interface Portal—the uplink for the Simba—carefully in both hands, I trudged through the trees and found the men in an open area on the far side of a creek. Amos was hip-deep in mud, Jagger chest-deep, pulling himself out of the wetland muck, his suit on full battle power, the anti-recoil mechs doing the work.
To me, Amos said, “I’m standing on something flat, made of metal, with metal protrusions.”
Jagger said, “The dimensions are perfect. It has to be the Simba, but it’s in total lockdown. Amos and I think we can dig out the mud and get close enough to the top of the Simba to find the access hatch. Then we can sandbag around the hatch, clean it out, and open the uplink access.”
“There has to be four feet of mud,” I said quietly. “It’ll take days.”
“Evelyn doesn’t have days,” Mateo said over the comms.
Amos moved through the mud toward me. Tripped. Fell forward, landed face-first in unsealed armor in the mud. He came out of the mud with a bound of recoil and almost flew up into the air. When he landed on his feet, he was standing in only two feet of mud, and his face shield was sealed. Over comms, he said, “I fucking love this suit! Does the hatch stick up from the tank’s main body? ’Cause I just scratched my new armor on something.”
Jagger waded to him and sealed his faceplate. He disappeared beneath the mud, moving here and there, creating a wake in a four-meter square. He stood upright, slinging and dripping mud. “Hatch is right here.”
“I’m your good-luck charm,” Amos said, wading around as if searching for something else to trip over. He looked like a two-meter pinecone in the Dragon Scale armor.
“Time frame for Simba extraction?” I asked.
“Dawn,” Jagger said.
“That puts us driving the Simba out of here in daylight, instead of under the cover of darkness.” I shook my head. “We need to be twenty miles away by dawn.”
“Got another hatch,” Amos said. He was standing right in front of me, this time only buried to his ankles. “Can I keep this suit?”
Jagger dove into the mud again and came up fast. He pushed back his helmet and mud went flying. “No,” he said to Amos, “but you can drive the earthmover.”
“I’ll make this mud my bitch,” the man said.
???
In forty minutes, the rear hatch of the Simba had been sandbagged, pumped free of mud, washed out, repumped, and dried. Jagger was inflating a massive bladder that would divert the creek when they were finished uncovering the Simba. Amos was moving muck, chortling like a happy four-year-old as he ran the earthmover.
I slid into the muck, stepped over and into the ring of sandbags that protected the hatch—which looked a lot like the airlock hatches on the skin of theSunStar. I was hoping that the seals had held and the Simba wasn’t full of mud and water. That would suck.
The night was blacker than the devil’s heart, as Pops used to say, but in my armor’s face shield, I could see clear as day. I ran my fingers all around the hatch, finding it smooth, solid, perfectly machined. I sat on one side of the hatch and shifted the Interface Portal uplink on my lap. Gingerly, I inserted the hard probe on the uplink into the matching slot at the hatch of the Simba. It fit on the first try. “Okay,” I said to Mateo back at the scrapyard. “It’s up to you and Jolene.”
“We got this, sugah,” Jolene said.
I was glad someone had something. Suddenly all I had was the shakes. Bad ones. In the darkness all around me, I could see Marty’s face as he died, and Gretchen’s eyes when she began to come back to life—her horror, her pain. I shoved back my face shield again. I sipped water. I waited. I told myself I didn’t have to pee. Over the comms I heard whirrs and snaps and clicks and a steady hum of electronic chatter.
I stared at the stars overhead. Millions of stars in the dry air of the night sky. From beneath my butt on the hatch, I felt something vibrate.
I jumped away, landing hip-deep in mud, the surface beneath my battle boots slanted. Arms flailing, I caught my balance. Whipped around to the hatch. A deeper blackness cracked in the center of the ring of sandbags. “Mateo?” I whispered. “The hatch? It’s opening.”
“Once it’s fully open, drop in and re-plug the uplink inside. The socket will be to the right of the hatch rings, glowing yellow. Once the hatch is completely open, you have twenty seconds before the hatch closes again and you’ll be stuck until I can get there.”
“What?!” I said. “I’ll be stuck until you rescue me?”
“Twenty seconds is a lot of time. As soon as you complete the process, I’ll take over and operate it from the junkyard.”
There was something odd in his voice, a nervous pacing of words, something not normal. “Mateo—”
