Kingdom of Cages(154)

At last the muck began to slope gently upward. Fortunately the concealing reeds stayed about head-high. The water was soon thigh-deep, then knee-deep, then ankle-deep, and the reed curtain parted to make room for a jumble of waist-high plants and stiff, rough-skinned grasses.

Chena sank to her belly and began to crawl. Every fifty or so yards she stopped and mopped her face with a sponge soaked in her heavily scented goop. Her pack pressed her down into the rich earth. Her shoulders and arms protested each movement, and there were still a hundred yards to go.

Panting, Chena closed her mind to the overwhelming distance and concentrated on the way in front of her.

Knee, elbow, knee, elbow, breathe, breathe, breathe, don’t worry about the stink, don’t swat at the bugs, you might hit a camera, and that would alert somebody to something. God’s garden these straps pinch, knee, elbow, knee, elbow, knee, elbow …

Finally, almost blind in the thickening darkness, Chena found herself nose to nose with a moss-coated support pillar of the Alpha Complex. She rested her cheek on a grassy hummock for a moment, just catching her breath. It was the same outside as it was inside. She was only safe as long as Aleph wasn’t paying attention to her. If she had actually bumped into the thing, the sensory subsystem might have alerted Aleph’s central consciousness, and it might have decided to look closely at what was nosing around out here, and that would have been the end of everything.

Chena scrambled backward a few feet and then checked her comptroller. She swore. Inside, her client had already been waiting for her for twenty minutes. In another ten, they would leave, and she would have to crawl all the way back across the swamp and return to Off-shoot empty-handed.

Taking one long breath, Chena rolled onto her feet and hurried around the hothouse perimeter, using the last of the daylight to dodge the fountains that sprayed water onto the outside of the dome, keeping it cool and comfortable for the people inside.

The shadowy shape of the entrance lock loomed in front of her. She peeked again at her comptroller. Four minutes left. There would be a camera inside the lock. Any anomalies had to be gotten rid of out here. Quickly, Chena pulled the strings and straps of the camouflage suit and shucked out of it. She had practiced this for weeks. The swarms of bugs scattered, momentarily confused by the abrupt motion.

That won’t last.

She stuffed the suit into her pack, pulled out a small packet of things she might need, stowing them in her waistband’s inner pocket. The pack would have to stay out on the grass, there was no help for it. But if everything went well, she would be gone before daylight. No casual observer would notice an extra shadowy bump in the ground, and there was nothing in there to attract the bugs. It would be all right.

Heart beating at the base of her throat, Chena walked to the entrance of the environmental lock. One long second later, the door slid silently open for her and Chena stepped into the Alpha Complex. The camera that looked at her saw a woman in straight black trousers and a long-sleeved shirt that had a white-on-white diamond pattern. Her long hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She did not like to think about how much the outfit cost, or how long it had taken her to finagle a pair of the soft-soled, machine-made black shoes that were the approved footwear inside the hothouse. The cost would be worth it. It would all be worth it.

A short flight of ceramic stairs led up to the inner lock. Chena had not been able to obtain a complete map of all the sensors in here. If she was going to be stopped, it would be in here. For all she knew, they might even be checking the air for the chemical composition of her sweat. Well, if her plan did go that far wrong, there was always the fresh poison under her fingernail.

But the inner lock opened as easily as the outer had and Chena stepped, blinking, into the foyer. A woman stood beside the inner door dressed in a black-and-white-striped robe. Her fingers scrabbled at each other, as if they were looking for something to hang on to.

She swept up to Chena, the hems of her robe swirling around her ankles. “Follow me, quickly,” she murmured. “You’re a mess.”

I’ve just crawled across a damn swamp. But Chena just smiled. “It’s good to see you too,” she said for the benefit of any of Aleph’s subsystems that might be moved to track this conversation. “I’ll need to freshen up a little before the meeting.”

The woman gave her a sharp look that might have been approval, and turned away. She walked fast, with her hands locked together in front of her. Chena wondered if she was trying to hold them still. It was odd to see a hothouser with a nervous habit.

Then again, this hothouser is breaking several thousand regulations.