Morrison exhaled in irritation and started heading toward the breach. “She had better hope I don’t find her first.”

CHAPTER 30

Gate Sixteen

Alexa fell across the night sky above the city—parts of it were burning. The dark tower of the BTC was capped with a towering cloud, illuminated from below by flames. The structure was an ominous, obsidian volcano in the middle of downtown.

Richard Cotton’s voice shouted in Alexa’s ear via q-link. “Have you lost your nerve already, my dear? I see you’re fleeing the scene.”

“Give it a rest, Cotton. I have a plan.”

“A plan? Well, you might want to let me in on it because from where I sit it looks like you’re running away.”

“I didn’t breach the wall to invade the complex. I breached it to meet my contact. Now back off and let me handle this.”

“If I’m going to be any help, I need to know the plan.”

“That’s debatable. I will contact you once I finish what I need to finish—so don’t bother me until then.”

Alexa dropped down from the night sky into the sparsely inhabited Detroit suburb of Kettering. Barely a mile and a half from downtown, Kettering had, in recent decades, begun to return to nature. There were large overgrown empty lots of grass, bushes, and trees separating abandoned houses and businesses that stood rotting or partially burned. Here and there families had stayed and appeared to be trying to bring the neighborhood back. However, half the community had been bulldozed flat in an attempt to relieve the blight.

As Alexa descended silently from the night sky, she examined the area below and saw no one. There was just the sound of crickets and distant barking dogs. The grid of streets and sidewalks was still there, along with stop signs. But there was no neighborhood to go with it. She recalled decades ago how much more densely populated this place had been. But even then it was depressed, as traditional manufacturing moved away and jobs became scarce—in her memory, it had never been a prosperous neighborhood.

What few of the locals now remembered (or cared about amid all the civic and economic strife) was that the city of Detroit had started building a subway system back in the early 1920s. Construction on three main tunnels had been completed for a couple miles, one beneath Michigan Avenue, another beneath Woodward, and the third through Kettering—beneath Gratiot Avenue. They radiated like spokes from downtown.

However, with the rise of Ford and the other car companies, the public transit project was abandoned, and Detroit instead became Motor City—the world center of the automobile. The subway tunnels running into downtown were sealed and largely forgotten.

But not by everyone.

The BTC had been using them to move unseen to and from their headquarters facility since the 1970s. The tunnels also linked to service passages that provided still more access points throughout the city. BTC officials had watched city planning commission projects closely to make certain the tunnels were never disturbed, and they had likewise removed most records of their existence from the city archives. The tunnels were deep enough that they were seldom disturbed by construction projects—and when that seemed likely, the BTC intervened through proxies.

Alexa touched down in tall grass and darkness. She examined the area with her night vision visor and saw only thickets and dense trees bordering the vacant lots. There were mattresses and other garbage dumped here and there, and graffiti on distant abandoned houses, but no one in sight.

Satisfied, she moved toward what gate sixteen had become—a flat concrete pad edged by tall grass. It had evolved over the decades as the neighborhood changed. As nearby homes were abandoned, it was decided that the elevator leading into the underground should be made as uninteresting as possible. The elevator had once been surrounded by a fenced garage but now was only edged with tall bushes and trees. Instead of lowering automobiles silently into the underground, it now accommodated flight teams.

As she crept closer, Alexa concealed herself below the leaning remains of a burned-out toolshed. She could see the weed-encrusted concrete of gate sixteen clearly from the darkness. She then waited silently. A glance at her heads-up display showed that she had perhaps fifteen minutes to wait for Grady’s security escort.

As she waited, the minutes passed slowly until she could hear someone talking—a high-pitched, disturbed voice in the distance. Her unnaturally sharp hearing was able to make it out . . .

“. . . took it. What can we do? You asked me what can we do? And I gots no answer. I gots no answer, Mariel. No answer.”

The chatter continued over minutes as an elderly African American man wandered slowly along the dark sidewalk by moonlight—passing by the ghosts of a community that had left him behind.

He waved his arms as he hobbled along. “I couldn’t! I couldn’t. You know I can’t. Why do you keep on me?”

Alexa checked the timer in her heads-up display.

“I paid them! I paid them.” The old man was crossing through the field now.

She looked for something to throw—to scare him away.

But as she looked up, the BTC strike team arrived, silently descending from the sky. One moment there was nothing, and the next there were half a dozen BTC operators in jet-black diamondoid assault armor standing with a transport shell held between them like a coffin. Their armor swallowed all reflected light—they seemed like negative spaces outlined in the lesser darkness.

She could see the homeless old man stunned into silence just meters away. Why hadn’t they scanned the area before descending? Were these operators idiots? Did they not care?

One of them nodded toward the old man, and the others looked his way.

The old man threw up his hand and pointed. “I see you, you devils! I see you there! The machinery of your deceit!”

The operators nudged each other, and then one of them pointed an armored finger at the man. An intense beam of light stabbed out, creating a sound like tearing fabric.

Intense fiery embers started to spread through the old man as if he were newspaper. He shrieked in agony as his body and clothes were consumed—and then blew away in ashes, leaving only a small spot of lush grass burning. It, too, soon faded and died away.

The assault team slapped each other on the back heartily, their armor ringing.

Alexa’s eyes narrowed at them with rage.

The team began to sink into the concrete as if it were quicksand.

Alexa knew the elevator was descending. The gate had been improved back around the turn of the millennium with a hologram that projected the concrete surface even when the elevator was descending. Likewise, she knew that not long after it began to descend, twin security doors would swing up to seal the opening.

As soon as the tops of their helmets disappeared beneath the hologram, Alexa leapt up and activated her gravis, bringing herself into free fall toward the elevator shaft—and then down through the holographic concrete and into blackness.

Her night vision visor kicked in almost immediately, and she could see the harvester team descending rapidly as the twin security doors rose toward her. She barely slipped between the doors as she fell, and then drew back on her downward motion—hovering silently ten feet above their heads and hoping none of them looked up.

Fortunately they seemed tired. She couldn’t hear their voices since they were using a team q-link, but she hoped they were lulled into a feeling of false security now that they were inside.

The elevator descended to a depth of a hundred feet, then stopped. The operators immediately grabbed the transport shell and “fell” forward into the access tunnel and out of sight. That gave Alexa a chance to glide down faster and then to fall sideways after them.