He stiffened.
"You come back real soon," she said. "And bring that girlfriend of yours. Coffee will be on the house."
"I appreciate that." He gripped the shoulder straps and headed out the door, trying not to think too hard about the kind gesture. When he’d walked out of Hyperion two months ago, he’d had zero trust in anyone or anything. Still didn’t.
But he knew there were still good people in the world. There had to be. And maybe Praline, as annoying as she could be, was one of them.
He glanced over his shoulder one last time at the diner that refused to advertise its name.
Mouse & Munch.
He laughed. It hadn’t been the worst few days.
His boots crunched over the pavement as he headed out of the parking lot, onto the street, and toward the access road to the hydro transmission relay station.
By car, it was eight minutes, but his vehicle was miles away.
He picked up the pace, even though he’d left the diner four minutes ahead of schedule.
As he’d learned in the military, shit happened, and he was prepared for the worst of it.
Or so he hoped.
As he walked, he did what he always did when he had some time to kill, which was a lot lately.
He thought about Hopper. Her sense of humor. Her intelligence. Her kindness. The way she just always knew what to say, even though she had no idea that her words meant so much.
They played combat video games, killing each other for fun, and boy was it a hell of a ride. Best time he’d had with a woman in years, and the irony that he’d never met her, didn’t even know what she looked like, wasn’t lost on him.
Someday, when he took his life back, he hoped to tell her how much she’d helped him through this time in his life.
He continued at a good clip. The trees were dense enough to give cover, and the light came through them in long grey shafts that meant dawn was closing in.
Gideon moved through the landscape the way he'd learned to move through things these last two months. Not too fast he missed what was happening around him, but not so slow he failed to register everything.
He padded through mud on the access road. Silent on wet ground, solid on rock, broken in enough that his feet didn't have opinions about them anymore.
He listened to the timber and to the wind whistling through the top branches. A raven squawked somewhere to his left. The distant low hum of the transmission lines had become music, leading him toward the prize.
An ICHOR, or a field node. A piece of hardware that housed part of the telemetry pipeline. Taking it off-line would blind Finch and whatever operation he was running. Gideon picked nodes that wouldn’t stop the flow, just reroute and slowdown. He wanted Hyperion to have to react. Play defense.
While he systematically destroyed what he’d built.
He stopped at the tree line and crouched.
The relay station sat on a cleared rectangle of land about the size of a hockey rink. It was ringed with chain-link, which was topped with barbed wire. The main building was low and utilitarian.
Two transmission towers rose behind it. The secondary—the one he needed—was set back and to the right, and he knew exactly where the node was mounted on it because he'd been the one to specify the mounting location.
He watched the station for ten minutes. The guard rotation was the same as yesterday—a single vehicle making a slow circuit of the perimeter every twenty-two minutes, the camera on the northwest corner still tracking the same blind arc it had been tracking yesterday, the whole operation running with the predictability of infrastructure that had never expected to be anyone's target.
He waited for the vehicle to complete its circuit and disappear around the far side of the building.
He took off running, keeping his body low until he got to the fence. Not his favorite part of the journey. It took him twelve seconds to climb it and land on the other side.
But he didn’t stop moving. Breathing labored, he kept his eyes focused on the base of the secondary tower. His heart raced. It all reminded him that no matter how many pushups he did while living in the forest, he wasn't military anymore.
He reached the base of the tower and crouched behind the equipment housing and let his lungs fill with the crisp mountain air. It was cold going in, which was odd because it burned pushing out.
