The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(40)
“I need a mask!” Nadashe yelled at them. “Hey! Do you hear me? I need a mask!”
One of them—the one who was convinced that the fish was not fishy, or what the fuck ever—looked up at her, confused, and then nodded and started looking on the wall for the emergency oxygen masks.
“That’s not the wall!” Nadashe said. “They’re at your feet!”
This took a few more seconds for Not Fishy to process, and then lo and behold, enlightenment came and the wall-mounted case that was now the floor-mounted case with the emergency oxygen masks was found. Not Fishy put one on, gave another to No Actually It Is Fishy, determined guard number three would not be needing one, and then handed one to Nadashe, who put it on with some difficulty, her hands being shackled.
“You stay there,” the guard said, and Nadashe was incredulous, because what else was she going to do, shackled and strapped as she was. “We’re going to radio in.”
There was another hideous bang, and the rear doors of the transport flew away and all the guards, living and dead, were sucked out into the airless surface of Hub. Nadashe grabbed desperately at her mask to keep it from flying off her face; just before the view fogged up she saw Not Fishy and No Actually Fishy had lost theirs and were simultaneously gasping and freezing to death.
Speaking of which, the cold immediately began to bite into Nadashe’s skin. Theoretically the overland road to Hubfall was in the temperate twilight zone of the tidally locked planet, but “temperate” meant different things when there was a 500-degree temperature range. “Temperate” here meant “blisteringly cold.”
There was a light in Nadashe’s face and then two people in space suits were all up on her, cutting through her shackle chains and restraining straps. Nadashe fell from the ceiling into their arms and was immediately sealed into a clear, bulky full body suit that instantly flooded her with warmth and oxygen. Nadashe stood for a second, basking in warm, and then was hustled out of the shattered transport wagon. As she exited, she saw the bodies of the guards, all dead, and the wreck of the transport. This transport was manually driven. Given the shape of the transport, Nadashe assumed the driver was in the same shape as the guards, if not worse.
Nadashe was drag-walked to what looked like a storage container with an airlock. She was pushed into the airlock and sealed in. When the airlock pressurized, the interior door opened and two more people pulled her out, replacing her in the airlock with a body missing a head, and sealing the door to allow it to cycle. That done, they returned their attention to Nadashe, peeled her out of the full body suit and took the oxygen mask off her face.
The entire operation of cutting her down from the wrecked transport to unshucking her in whatever this was had taken less than sixty seconds.
“Lady Nadashe,” someone said to her. She turned and saw it was Lord Teran Assan, kitted out in his own suit. “Lovely to see you.”
“What are you doing here?” Nadashe asked.
“Just managing your rescue,” Assan said. Nadashe opened her mouth to say more, but Assan held up a hand. “Hold that thought,” he said, and headed to the airlock, which by now had recycled. “Your mother sends her regards, by the way.”
“Does she?”
“You’ll be seeing her soon.” Assan gave a little salute at that and then disappeared out the door.
*
Lord Teran Assan was not going to lie: He was absolutely fucking delighted that his prison break scheme was working out as well as it was.
And it was his plan; he was the one who had pitched it to the Countess Nohamapetan. “Look,” he had said, presenting the countess with a visualization on a tablet screen. “This section of the road to Hubfall is only lightly surveilled, and that surveillance is easily compromised. I’ve already had my pet hackers at it. I can make a five-minute window where all the ground surveillance is down.”
“That leaves the drone surveillance that comes with the transport itself,” Tinda Louentintu said. The countess’s chief of staff, as usual, was doing the heavy conversational lifting for the two of them. “They send a constant secure video feed back to the correctional facility.”
“Yes they do,” Assan agreed. “And that feed is both jammable and fakable. You just need the encryption keys for the individual drones, which I happen to have because the supervisor of the drones likes money more than she likes security.”
“And then there is the satellite surveillance,” Louentintu said.
Assan smiled. “That was a harder nut to crack. For that, I needed someone who could give us access to the satellite itself. Which means access to the military. The good news is, between Jasin and Deran Wu, the countess in her wisdom has chosen Jasin for her favored Wu cousin. In return Jasin has agreed to help, as part of his thanks for the countess’s favor.”
“You’re going to hide a snatch-and-grab from a military satellite,” Louentintu said. “Because when it doesn’t show up on the satellite feed, that’s not going to look at all suspicious.”
“It is going to show up on the feed, of course,” Assan said. “We’re not going to hide the transport exploding. But we are going to fake the explosion, and make it look like the transport is running slower than it is, so by the time anyone looks at the satellite feed, we’ll be long gone. And we run the same simulation to the drones and the security cameras. No one will know to look for us because no one will see that we were there. They will only see what we want them to see. And what we want them to see will be a tragic freak explosion of the transport.”