Supremacy's Outlaw: A Space Opera Thriller Series (Insurgency Saga Book 3) by T.E. Bakutis (top 100 books of all time checklist .TXT) 📗

At least, no one who hadn’t sent him to prison.

“Anyway, that’s about all there is to it,” Rafe said. “I fucked up. I really fucked up. But I’m better now, thanks to these people and all the good they want to do.” Rafe looked at Jan and smiled. “And now you’re back. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. I really missed you.”

“I missed you too,” Jan whispered truthfully. “Now, we probably should actually sleep. I’ll unwrap the listening devices and put them back. From this point on, assume we are being listened to at all times. Understood? Say nothing you wouldn’t say in front of the Commander.”

“I got it, mate.” Rafe smiled. “It’s gonna be so good to be working with you again.”

“Yes,” Jan said, as he confronted the almost impossible task of getting both himself and Rafe out of an underground base filled with Truthers. “It will most certainly be interesting.”

Bharat frowned at the expanse of dirty nothing visible on the feed from Marquis’s drone, which was currently hovering above a hill almost a kilometer from their current location. It did not look like there was anywhere for Jan to hide out there. It did not look like there was anything out there at all.

He thought about saying something. After one glance at Fatima’s scowl, he decided not to. If he’d learned one thing from the past twenty-four hours with these people, it was that they worked best when he let them yell at each other.

“Oh, lovely,” Fatima said, from where she stood at Bharat’s side. “There’s dirt! And more dirt. And a rock shaped like a dildo. I’m so glad we wasted a day driving to the ass end of nowhere. Such a wonderful use of our time.”

“Such sarcasm is undeserved, m’lady.” Marquis stood on the side of the two-lane road, behind their autotruck. “I am not mistaken about the coordinates on my drone’s screen. My tracker transmits even now. Jan Sabato waits at these coordinates!”

“Two meters under, perhaps,” Fatima said darkly. “Though I never figured Rafe for a killer.”

“I’m almost entirely certain Jan’s not dead,” Kinsley said confidently, as she walked into view from behind the autotruck. “The signal from Marquis’s drone is coming from those coordinates, and what triangulation I could manage suggests it is coming from underground, far deeper than two meters.”

Bharat frowned. “How does that tell you Jan’s not dead?”

Kinsley stared at Bharat like he’d just asked the dumbest question in the world. “Because Rafe lacks both the time and focus to dig a grave that deep.”

Emiko hopped out of the passenger seat of the autotruck and stared at the distant hill. “So Rafe built an underground bunker down there?” She asked like she really wanted to believe it.

“I doubt Rafe could build a pillow fort,” Fatima said, and she kicked the autotruck bumper. “God! I spent the past five years evading surveillance from a moron.”

“I don’t think Rafe built anything,” Kinsley said. “I think, instead, there’s a large commercially built structure hidden beneath that vast expanse of flat dirt on the feed from Marquis’s drone. It may even be a military installation.”

Emiko glanced her way. “You heard those rumors too?”

“It’s not just rumors,” Kinsley said confidently. “Shortly after the armistice, Ceto’s government undertook a number of reconstruction projects. Those included building a network of redundant underground command and control structures. The thinking was that if the Advanced cannot see it, and if they do not know where it is, they cannot drop a rail slug on it.”

“Wait,” Fatima said. “Where did you find all this?”

“In CetInt’s database. In Star’s Landing.”

Fatima stared at Kinsley for a moment. “You got into CetInt’s database?”

Kinsley looked momentarily concerned. “Is that supposed to be hard?”

Bharat’s respect for Kinsley’s hacking skills jumped a notch. CetInt was the intelligence portion of Ceto Security Division, largely separate from the larger organization that it helped support. If Kinsley was capable of hacking into that database, she’d been dramatically underselling her talents.

“What did you find in there?” Fatima asked hungrily.

“Building permits,” Kinsley said. “Work orders. It is impossible to keep a project involving this many people fully secret, but to their credit, CetInt did a passable job.”

“Yet you still found it,” Fatima said.

Kinsley shrugged. “Even with the access I gained, I never discovered the locations of any of the bases. I could only intuit their existence from those documents I could access, in increasingly redacted form. It seems we’ve now found one base.”

Fatima was now grinning like a woman who’d won the lottery. “Can you get me in there later?”

Kinsley beamed in response. “Sure!”

“So here’s my question, then,” Emiko cut in. “If you’re right, and Rafe and Jan are in some secret underground military base, what are they doing in a secret underground military base?” She scowled. “Think that Coffman asshole caught up with them?”

Bharat nodded thoughtfully. Lieutenant Coffman was the soldier who’d led the CSD searching for Jan back at the Greasy Bowsprit, in Duskdale. If Rafe had gotten careless during his escape — and Rafe was nothing if not careless — it was possible Coffman’s forces caught Rafe during his escape, took him and Jan into custody, and renditioned them here for interrogation.

“I’ve seen nothing in the Duskdale arrest reports,” Kinsley said. “And the drone footage I’ve reviewed still shows plenty of active CSD elements searching Duskdale for Jan.”

“Jan’s bounty remains active as well,” Marquis added helpfully. “You are aware, of course, that the Network has a strict policy against falsified data! I doubt even the CSD would risk their access by breaking the rules.”

“CetInt doesn’t report to CSD,” Kinsley reminded everyone.