Charles “Trip” Tucker, on the other hand, was currently lurking in the undergrowth behind the medical clinic where he—or rather, Albert Sims—had been volunteering until just days before. Said clinic was now under the control of the M’Tezir Expeditionary Medical Corps, who had turned it into an armed and guarded camp, nominally to protect the vital plague treatments within from theft or offworlder sabotage.
Tucker wondered if that included offworlder theft as well. The only way to find out, he supposed, was to get past the guards and alarms so he could try it for himself. With his training, that was unlikely to be too difficult.
But then he caught a glimpse of movement near the rear entrance. Setting his night-vision visor to magnify, Tucker grimaced when he realized that Antonio Ruiz was attempting the same thing he was. And likely to get both of them caught and expelled, at best, for he seemed oblivious to the guard turning the corner and heading his way.
Tucker moved toward Ruiz as quickly as he could without rustling the undergrowth too noticeably. Finding a suitable rock, he hurled it into the deeper growth. Once the guard moved to investigate the sound, Trip broke cover, grabbed Ruiz from behind, and dragged him back into concealment with a hand over his mouth. The wiry young Cuban struggled and swung, his fists flying with little technique but considerable force, so Tucker hissed in his ear. “Calm down, Antonio! It’s me! Albert!”
Ruiz settled down and tried to turn his head. Tucker let him, and flipped up the night visor so Ruiz could see both his eyes. “Al!”
“Shh!”
“Al,” Ruiz went on in a whisper. “It is you. What are you doing here, man?”
“I was gonna ask you the same question. Why weren’t you evacuated?”
Ruiz gave him a knowing look. “I wouldn’t be much of a mining engineer if I didn’t know my geology. I know a couple of good hidey-holes up in the hills.”
“Okay, next question. Why did you hide? Why are you trying to break into the clinic?”
“Same reason you are, I reckon. Those lavender ladrones are hoarding medicine that could help Saurians in other countries. Using it as a bribe for—”
“Yeah, I know. We had this conversation.”
“Right, and I know you’re as angry about it as I am. So you couldn’t pass up a chance to get your hands on an actual dose of that medicine any more than I could.”
Tucker conceded with a tilt of his head. “Great minds think alike. And so do ours, apparently.”
“Hey, watch it.”
“So how were you planning on getting inside?”
“I have the security code.”
“Which they would’ve reprogrammed the moment they took over the building.”
Ruiz stared for a moment. “Oh. ‘Great minds’ . . .” He rolled his eyes in self-deprecation. “So I take it you have a better idea?”
“I’m pretty good with machines,” Tucker said.
“I await a demonstration with bated breath.”
Tucker looked at him sidelong, holding the engineer back until the returned guard went past. They must have been undermanned, since the disruption to the patrol pattern left a gap of a full thirty-two seconds for the humans to get to the rear entrance and crack the code. No surprise that a force supposedly on hand to guard the medicine seemed to be devoting the lion’s share of its attention to other things—probably solidifying their control over Veranith.
“So how’d you learn to do things like this?” Ruiz whispered as they made their way through the clinic’s corridors to the lab.
“I told you, I’ve trained in engineering.”
“Not just that. The way you manhandled me back there. The way you sneak around without a sound and know how to avoid armed guards. And you have been asking a lot of questions since we met, y’know.”
“I’m just naturally inquisitive. Which sometimes gets me into trouble, so I need to keep a low profile.”
“Right. Like that trouble with the freighter captain’s wife?”
“It was the first mate.” He caught Ruiz’s eye for a moment. “Nice try.”
“Fine. Forget it. Just tell me, Mister Bond, how we find the medicine.”
“First, we find a computer. We can get an inventory listing from there.”
“Now, that I can do.”
Ruiz led him to an office whose lock Tucker overcame almost unthinkingly. Telling Ruiz to keep watch at the door, he accessed the computer and hacked his way into the recently installed M’Tezir database. While tracking down the medicine was on his agenda, he also searched for data that might reveal something about what the M’Tezir were really doing and how—and with whose help—they were pulling it off. Yet the search was futile, as he had expected; such sensitive information was unlikely to be stored in a place like this. He had to settle for the location of the medicine. “I got it,” he told Ruiz. “Let’s go.”