“A rebel or a smuggler?”

Stoner shrugged. Deniz chortled.

“A smuggler,” guessed Deniz.

“Why do you care?”

“Curious. The captain told us an American needs a guide.

That’s all we know,” answered the Romanian.

“That’s more than you should.”

Kyiv said something. His tone was angry, and Stoner looked at Deniz for an explanation.

“The smugglers are the men with the money,” said Deniz.

“They throw cash around. My friend thinks it’s disgusting.”

“And you?”

“I just want what they want.”

Deniz gave him a leering smile. Stoner had been planning on giving the men a “tip” after they returned; now he wasn’t so sure he’d bother.

“Tell me about the rebels,” he said. “They don’t scare you?”

“Criminals.” Deniz spit. “Clowns. From the cities.”

He added something Romanian that Stoner didn’t understand.

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“They are dogs,” explained Deniz. “With no brains. They make an attack, then run before we get there. Cowards. There are not many.”

“How many is not many?”

Deniz shrugged. “A thousand. Two, maybe.”

The official government estimates Stoner had seen ranged from five to ten thousand, but the Bucharest CIA station chief guessed the number was far lower, most likely under a thousand if not under five hundred. What the rebels lacked in numbers, the Romanian army seemed to make up for in in-competence, though in fairness it was far harder to deal with a small band of insurgents bent on destruction than a regular army seeking to occupy territory.

“You speak English pretty well,” Stoner told Deniz, changing the subject.

“In Bucharest, all learn it. TV. It is the people here who don’t need it.” He gestured toward Kyiv. “If you live all of your life in the hills, there is not a need.”

“I see.”

“On the computer—Internet—everything good is English.”

“Probably,” said Stoner.”

“Someday, I go to New York.”

“Why New York?”

“My cousin lives there. Very big opportunity. We will do business, back and forth. There are many things I could get in New York and sell here. Stop!”

He put his hand across Stoner’s chest. Stoner tensed, worrying for a moment that he might have sized the men up wrong.

“There is a second Moldovan border post there,” said Deniz, pointing to a fence about a hundred meters away. “A backup. If you don’t want to be seen, we must go this way through the field.”

“Lead the way.”

40

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

Dreamland

22 January 1998

0935

FOLDED, THE MAN/EXTERNAL SYNTHETIC SHELL KINETIC

Integrated Tool—better known as MESSKIT—looked like a nineteenth century furnace bellows with robot arms.

Unfolded, it looked like the remains of a prehistoric, man-sized bat.

“And you think this thing is going to make me fly?” asked Zen, looking at it doubtfully.

“It won’t take you cross-country,” said scientist Annie Klondike, picking it up from the table in the Dreamland weapons lab where she’d laid it out. “But it will get you safely from the plane to the ground. Think of it as a very sophisticated parachute.”

Zen took the MESSKIT from her. It was lighter than he’d thought it would be, barely ten pounds. The arms were made of a carbon-boron compound, similar to the material used in the Dreamland Whiplash armored vests. The wings were made of fiber, but the material felt like nothing he’d ever touched—almost like liquid steel.

Six very small, microturbine engines were arrayed above and below the wing. Though no bigger than a juice glass, together the engines could provide enough thrust to lift a man roughly five hundred feet in the air. In the MESSKIT, their actual intention was to increase the distance an endangered pilot could fly after bailing out, and to augment his ability to steer himself as he descended.

“You sure this thing will hold me?”

“Prototype holds me,” said Danny.

“Yeah, but you’re a tough guy,” joked Zen. “You fall on your head, the ground gets hurt.”

“It’s much stronger than nylon, Zen, and you’ve already trusted your life to that,” said Annie.

A white-haired grandmother whose midwestern drawl sof-

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tened her sometimes sardonic remarks, Annie ran the ground weapons lab at Dreamland. MESSKIT was a “one-off”—a special adaptation of one of the lab’s exoskeleton projects.

Exoskeletons were like robotic attachments to a soldier’s arms and legs, giving him or her the strength to lift or carry very heavy items. The MESSKIT’s progenitor was intended to help paratroopers leaving aircraft at high altitude, allowing them to essentially fly to a target miles away.

Annie and some of the other techies had adapted the design after hearing about the problems Zen had had on his last mission using a standard parachute. If MESSKIT was successful, others would eventually be able to use it to bail out of high-flying aircraft no matter what altitude they were at or what the condition of the airplane. MESSKIT would allow an airman to travel for miles before having to land.

If Zen had had it over India, he might have been able to fly far enough to reach an American ship and safety when his plane was destroyed. And because it was powered, the MESSKIT would also have allowed him to bail out safely from the Megafortress after the ejection seat had already been used.

“Try it on,” urged Danny, who’d served as the lab’s guinea pig and done some of the testing the day before. “You put it on like a coat.”

“What’s with these arms? What am I, an octopus?”

“You put your hands in them. Your fingers slide right in.

See?”

“Yours, maybe.”

“Starship can test it just as well,” said Danny.

“I got it,” snapped Zen. “You don’t need to use reverse psy-chology on me.”

“Now would I do that?”

Zen gave the MESSKIT to Danny to hold and wheeled himself to the side of the table. He maneuvered himself out of the wheelchair and onto a backless bench, then held up his arms.

42

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

“I am rea-dy for the operation, Doc-tor,” he said in a mock Frankenstein monster voice.

Once on, the gear felt like a cross between football pads and a jacket with a thin backpack attached. His hands fit into metallic gloves. Bar grips extended from the side “bones”

of the suit; they looked a bit like silver motorcycle throttles, with buttons on the end.

“Comfortable?” Danny asked.

“Different,” said Zen.

Annie was looking over the device, adjusting how it sat on his back. Zen moved back and forth, twisting his torso.

“Here, press the left-hand button once and pick this up,”

said Danny, bringing over a twenty pound dumbbell.

Zen could curl considerably more than twenty pounds with either hand, but he was amazed at how light the weight felt.

Danny laughed. “Don’t throw it. You should see it on boost.

You can pick up a car.”

He was exaggerating—but only slightly. The MESSKIT

used small motors and an internal pulley system to help leverage the wearer’s strength.

The more Zen fidgeted with the suit, the more he saw its possibilities. Annie and the rest of the development team might think of it as a way to help him get out of a stricken Megafortress. But Zen realized that a similar device with artificial legs instead of wings could help him walk.

Like a robot, maybe, but still …

“So when do we test it?” he asked.

“It looks like a good fit,” said Annie, tugging down the back as if she were a seamstress. “We can set up the gym and go at it tomorrow.”

“Why not today?” he asked. “Why not right now?”

The others exchanged a glance, then Danny started to laugh.

“Told you,” he said.

“Come on,” said Zen. “Let’s get to work.”