Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(79)
Yeah, that wasn’t a scary proposition. But it did have the ring of truth to it. And he had managed to deliver several not-fibby bits of information. Trust him? No. Let him help her stop Zeke and the consortium? Maybe. Angela thought she might need all the help she could get.
She’d actually believed him when he said he was seeking atonement for his sins.
“As I understand it,” Vallejo went on blithely, “Farad has to be able to establish and maintain communications with the drone army to rig it. He typically does so through the cloud or via wireless, I would imagine. And we know the consortium or UNAN or whoever is in charge over there can deploy extremely dense ICE nets. If Farad is plugged in to an entire military database, he won’t have the bandwidth to get through their security countermeasures.”
“But Chloe can,” Angela said. She was starting to feel the shift in energy. A whiff of hope. Her command codes to access the continental drone army, Heron’s ability to command it, and Chloe keeping the coms open. This could work.
“Um, but before we get rolling, I need to clarify one thing,” she said. “You both know what we’re talking about doing here, right?”
In the slice of silence that followed, she met first Vallejo’s gaze and then Kellen’s. The ambient temperature in the submarine went bone-cold. An unspoken word hung in the air: treason.
Her com buzzed, and a digital voice crackled its way out. “The term is military coup,” said Yoink. “I am standing by for orders.”
? ? ?
Was crazy how much planning went into prepping a massive governmental takeover. Kellen had just spent an hour on the com with his Pentarc crew, working through their plans, assessing capabilities, and getting caught up on the whole nation-under-attack thing. The crew had managed to get the entire Pentarc refugee population down into the protected underground area. Surface structures were being guarded by the Chiba Space Station and its queen, knocking drone-launched missiles out of the sky. Her aim wasn’t perfect, though. Some strikes were getting through. Couple of times during their chat, some serious strikes had come in.
During one of those, he lost Rook, who had insisted on coming down last, after all the rest of the barn evacuated. Little Azul had freaked, apparently, and would only come out from under the trough when Rook nosed her into it. But she’d no sooner gotten into the stairwell than a hit on the wall at the edge of his pen had opened up a hole there. The dwarf goatie hadn’t been used to open space and no protections, and he had expected the dirt ground to be where it always was. Fan had watched him fall.
She’d gotten herself to safety, though, and the whole rest of his animals. She’d done good.
Kellen was less certain he was doing the right thing. Heron had been easy to recruit to the idea of a coup. Maybe too easy. Mari, of course, was on board because violence was her happy place, and the mamas—Adele and Fanaida—could always be counted on to support anything smacking of anarchy.
Chloe had fully engaged herself in the challenge, and Garrett backed her.
As a matter of fact, the only person who seemed to be harboring second thoughts of any kind was Damon Vallejo. Which, any way you looked at it, was wrong with a capital W.
When they’d gotten control of the boat, or when Chloe had, Vallejo hadn’t gone right to the control room/communications module with Kellen and Angela. He’d chosen to stay behind in that weird oval lounge. Well, fine, so they’d locked him back in. But something about his behavior niggled at Kellen, so when the planning chatter started to seem like it would go on forever, he wandered back to check on Vallejo.
The sight that met him wasn’t exactly what he’d expected. Wasn’t a complete surprise, either.
Vallejo was crouched over a void in the wall paneling, directly below the liquor cabinet. He’d managed to get the stark white molding off, and his hands were deep in the electronics webbing the wall. On his head was a pressure seal, roughly head-sized, rigged with a com with its LED app blazing in front, providing a clearer peek into the tangle of wires and diodes and switches.
The getup made him look even more like a mad scientist than he already had, but it also looked sort of perfect on him, like this was his natural habitat.
As Kellen walked in, he heard voices, tiny and familiar. The same conversation Angela was having over in the com room. Sly little fucker had been listening in.
When he noticed Kellen in the room, Vallejo didn’t jump away from his tinkering. He looked up calmly, still clutching a pair of slip-joint pliers. “Come to interrogate me all alone this time? I do hope you did nothing nefarious with the senator.”
“Nah, that’s later and all private,” Kellen replied. “She’s hooked into the coms, powwowing with her contacts, setting up meetings and petitions and other stuff. You realize she can holoconference with two people at the same time? Gal can multitask like I ain’t never seen.”
“Angela Neko is uniquely suited to ruling the world. All you MIST kids were.”
“Yeah.” Kellen folded himself into a half kneel/half crouch so he could get down on Vallejo’s level. “What the hell are you up to?”
Vallejo tapped the light off and removed his improvised headlamp. His hairdo had valleys in the sides where the pressure-seal hat had jammed it down. “Listening.”
“I gathered that,” Kellen said. “How did you patch into the boat’s communications with a mobile com and some wires?”