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  "Thought I heard something. One of the potential ways they were attacking was with people hidden in containers, right?"

  "Yep. Just like us. Look for any containers that might have a top hatch." Out of four thousand containers

  "It sounded close. One of these four, unless it was a crewman down between containers." Wolfgang stepped to the next container and pointed to the square on top of the next.

  Hays waved for attention. The team ghosted over and nodded as he outlined the square egress. A study of the container pinpointed air intake and exhaust.

  They retreated to confer.

  "We could set off a tear gas grenade by the air intake, but that's a bit obvious, and if it's someone smuggling women and children we could even kill some of them."

  Thorne flashed teeth. "What if we welded it shut? Then they couldn't join the party when their friends show up."

  "Unless they don't have any help coming." Wolfgang hesitated. "There are only twenty-four crewmen. Could they intimidate enough sailors to go wherever they take the ships?"

  "Probably. They could fit a dozen men in there." Hays scowled. "But what we really want is the port that is accommodating these pirates."

  Wolf looked up and nodded to the east. "There's a big squall line coming. Remains of Typhoon Jonau building back up. That would give them the cover from the satellites they need, the high seas would keep any rescuers from boarding, if the pirates were already onboard. The short list of ports that can get one of these giants undercover to unload in secret is limited, surely?"

  "Yes, and they all get checked, regularly. These pirates are very clever, in that they choose the ships a bit under medium sized for modern container ships. There are eighteen ports that could certainly handle it, and fifty-eight that might carry it off. And however tempting, we aren't going to disturb these fellows. The mission goal is to find the port. So we leave these people alone." Hays scowled and waved them on. Nothing else suspicious was found. The storm front got closer, the waves larger.

  They were tucked up and resting when five small boats stopped fishing and converged on the SE Faruk. They had thirty-five men aboard before the team was in position to watch. The crew was easily subdued. "Everyone knew" that unresisting crews survived these sorts of raids, and resistors didn't. The small boats had faded away as soon as they'd transferred the pirates. Wolf could follow their fast retreats. The clouds were thick overhead and within half an hour the seas were picking up. The pirates waited until the heavy rains of the storm obscured every bit of visibility to turn southeast and near dawn they put into an insignificant little inlet on the coast of Borneo. The disguised facilities were very well done. Buildings made of painted canvas over lightweight frameworks were quickly pulled out of the way, and then replaced on top of the containers. A narrow channel had been dredged just enough, and the houses above it raised just enough to clear a modern ship. The lightweight, movable homes were lower, and blocked any chance of the draped ship being seen under the little village.

  The aft wheelhouse of the ship was draped with rock painted curtains, more rusty pointy-roofed buildings on top.

  The team paused in the night, to admire it all. "They must have set this up a century ago, to get past all the satellite surveillance." Lopez looked up at inside of the hollow buildings. "Unload a container at a time onto smaller ships and take them to someplace with a road system, a market. Then take the ship out during a storm and abandon it."

  "Generally with ninety percent of the cargo untouched. They just take specific things that are both valuable and easy to sell. That bulldozer we climbed over is a sure thing, and I'll bet the rearranging done in Taipei made what else they want easier to get to as well." Hays looked around. "Okay. Wolf, Lopez, Thorne. Put the homing beacon up there on a high point, we'll secure the crew and keep them from being used as hostages, then when the UN fellows show, we exfiltrate to . . . ten miles south, what looks like a rocky beach. And we were never here." He showed them the spot on his pocket comp, then they split up.

  Wolf led Lopez and Thorne across the disguised ship and across to the steep slope of the rocky hill. The height of the hill was crucial to the pirates being able to hide the ship.

  The extent of the hill was less than it looked, warehouses with vegetation covered roofs made up nearly half of the heights. Their night vision glasses showed the contents. The thirty foot speed boat, a line of armored tracks with the machine guns in place, the three jaguar sedans . . . "This place is stuffed with goodies. I guess they're having trouble selling some of it." Thorne sighed over a motorcycle. Wolf drooled over most of it.

  Lopez chivvied them onward. "Up guys. Homing signal." He barely breathed it. There was a small light ahead, faint sounds. Snores. They tiptoed past and found stairs.

  "Wolf, stay here and keep an eye on that guy, in case we need to leave the same way we came in."

  "Right."

  They slipped quietly up the stairs.

  Temptation won.

  A bubble for the boat, one for the motorcycle . . . The guard snorted and stirred, settled down. The jags would be too obvious. There was a rolligon that would be awfully fun, and surely they could spare just a single track . . . His comm clicked faintly and he ghosted around the guard and spotted the SAMs . . . never hurt to have a dozen along . . . He slid quietly up the stairs. The hilltop had a few trees with entwined antennae.

  "We cut the connections and set the beacon off on the seaward side. So far we haven't set off a single alarm in the place." Thorne sounded a bit nervy. "When the UN shows up, it's down the hill with us, and hope the rest of the team can join us. The crew's locked up on the ship."

  "Umm, how about we check their routes for them. The bridge has to be pretty close to as tall as the hill."

  "Yeah. You know, it's probably right under those shacks." Lopez pointed.

  "How'd they get the ship in there? That part of the hill must be a complete fake, open like a barn door or something?" Wolf climbed while reaching for his meditative state. He could feel the end of the real rock, the covered doors, the gap between covered with a century of carefully pruned trees and bushes. He slipped into them, and with the night vision glasses, could see the ship.

  Lopez looked over his shoulder and nodded. "Perfect. If we can get a rope across, they can slide down here." He switched his com and subvocalized to Hays. A dark figure stepped out of the bridge and Lopez tossed him a rope. Then they headed back to the beacon and waited for a sign that either the Navy or the UN task force was close.

  In the pre-dawn they spotted the ships. A dozen coming out from behind the offshore islands and heading straight for them.

  Sergeant Hays slipped out of the brush. "Time to go home, children. Daddy's coming. The crew is barricaded and should be able to hold out until the blue helmets get there."

  They all headed down the hill, keeping quiet. Still no sign of alarm.

  "I don't think they have any radar. Probably why we had so much trouble finding them."

  "Plus we were looking for an actual port, not a three hundred meter stretch of tin shacks on a stream." They listened to the UN channels as they slunk off.

  Finally yelps and alarms. Small boats pulling away from the sham village and heading upstream. The smallest of the UN ships headed upstream after them, the rest swarmed the village, a few marines fell through a few fake rocks and found the ship below it all.

  Ten miles south they triggered a second beacon, and boarded the submersible that crawled out of the ocean.

  Chapter Ten

  NewGene Experimental Facilities

  Wisconsin, North American Union

  15 March 2114

  The lock clicked open. Rebeccah grinned in delight. Just a tiny little tickle of mental power was enough to trip it.

  AK nodded thoughtfully, and stepped across the hall to trip her own lock. "Excellent. They'll never lock us in again."

  "Now what I need to figure out is how to keep them from opening the lock themselves." Rebeccah frowned. It
was getting easy to see electricity. Tiny and weak compared to the magnetic bottle, but now that she looked, it was visible. And simple to manipulate.

  "Yeah, and if you can do the same to the hall doors and the exterior doors, we'll own the dorms and the guards can just watch their spy cams if they want something to jack off by. No live performances."

  Rebeccah blushed. "I broke the cameras in my room last week. I haven't gotten into anyone else's, to do theirs yet."

  "Girl . . . get in here and zap mine. Right now."

  Two days later, a detail of techs and guards came to replace the broken equipment. Rebeccah hid in her room, while AK and Mercy took some nice cold revenge. The humiliated guards apparently did not report either their failure to install "safety" equipment nor their sudden overwhelming lust for each other.

  The cameras were never replaced; the remaining ones were destroyed and the locks answered only to the Tellies.

  ***

  Rebeccah shivered a bit in the cold room. The full scale rings, at superconducting temperatures, cooled their own room and this adjoining one as well. No doubt it would feel good in the summer, but spring hadn't quite gotten a grip on Wisconsin, yet. She had two tee shirts layered under the yellow coveralls. Techs ran around adjusting liquid nitrogen and the revolutions of the rings ramped gradually upward. The apparatus made an unpleasant whining in the background as a mixture of management and stockholders trooped through to look at the Tellies wired up to their computers in the center room. To her right, she could see the magnetic containment device, like a glowing loop at the edge of her peripheral vision and now the lights were starting to fountain to the left as the rings got up to speed.

  "I don't see why it's necessary to have those abominations involved with this." One of the stockholders was frowning at them.

  Rebeccah refrained from offering to swap places with him as McNabb chivvied them into the ring room and tried to keep them moving toward the observation balcony.

  A large woman snorted. "No doubt it gives them something to do, makes them feel like they are contributing. I've worked with handicapped youth before, and they're just so eager to help. . ."

  Rebeccah gritted her teeth. I will keep quiet. Just as well they think of us as harmless, weak. She touched a few of the computer controls, then just closed her eyes and reached out mentally for the mag bottle. This iteration of the power generator was larger and smoother. Powerful.

  They'd doubled the computer controls. For this trial they'd brought in what Rebeccah thought of as the best team. Besides AK and Mercy, Harriet from the yellows, and the two purple team girls, Isobel and Zelda. They'd practiced endlessly with the smaller prototype setup. Mixed gender groups had had less luck establishing what they were calling a gate to what they were claiming was a parallel world. The statistics of the hundreds of runs they'd made had shown that any group with one of the six of them could establish a link fifty-two percent of the time. The guys from the Yellow team were also good, averaging thirty-four percent. The Red and Blue teams ran thirty percent, Purple twenty, and the Orange team, by itself, had never opened any. The geneticists were trying to pin down what the Orange team was lacking that the others had.

  Today, after seven failures with the big rings, Mueller had decided to throw all of his best at the problem.

  I think that this time it will work. I wish Wolfgang were here. He'd hold us together and make this fail, and maybe we'd cease to have value. All the rest of us just seem to get ourselves in deeper and deeper. If there really is a world over there, we'll be the bridge, and too valuable to be allowed the freedom to quit.

  Someone grabbed her shoulder. No glow about him. She shrugged. "Don't touch me." He shook her and she let go of the mag bottle.

  Jack Kelso, fast earning the nickname Jack-the-Ass.

  She glared at him.

  "This is important girly! Today . . . "

  "Get your hands off of me!" Her voice squeaked and her guts clenched.

  AK looked up and frowned. "Harry! Hey, Massa. Get over here and get this distraction away from the team!"

  "Kelso, get out of here. You're an observer, and if you cause a problem—a worse problem—you will be thrown out."

  "Are you giving me orders?"

  Rebeccah turned her back on the two most despised men in her life and ran through the deep breathing exercises. If they would just shut up and leave us alone we could do anything.

  Jack Kelso had been a supervisor of one of the dorms, a mentor and tutor for a bunch of NewGene gods who'd been born and raised right here. He'd managed to stay in control of that group, almost a third of the Tellies, and claimed to be managing them while Harry merely trained their mental potential. Mary Coventry was another long term NewGene employee, with no engineered genes at all. She'd moved back to managing the Greens, almost half the total NewGene raised kids, leaving what she'd called the "rebellious and undisciplined" Yellow team for Harry. The Yellows were the biggest team at a hundred and twenty-two. Did they really all have similar genes? Rebeccah was so glad God had ignored her wish to be out from under Harry's supervision.

  Jack managed the Reds, a hundred and ten NewGene kids. Deiter Sloan trained the Oranges, a small group from The Number One Kid Company, and the Purples, a mixed group of all the oddball 'gods' collected from the small companies NewGene had been buying out over time, as well as the Blues, a small group of the youngest of NewGene's kids, just twenty-six of them.

  Silence fell.

  "Are you all right, Rebeccah?"

  "No. I have to restart my meditations." Rebeccah started deep breathing exercises and forced herself to relax again.

  After a long minute she could see the mag bubble again, and then the fountaining lights. Funny, how the snake was always so visible to her. AK and Mercy saw the ring lights as overwhelmingly bright, and could barely see the mag bottle. Especially Mercy, after Rebeccah'd described it as a pregnant snake.

  :: Ready?:: AK's mental voice was as beautiful as the woman herself.

  Mercy's wordless dreamy assent was followed by weaker responses from Harriet and Zelda. Isobel murmured something.

  Rebeccah released the remains of her irritation, took a firm hold of the snake and sent the electrons racing. She was vaguely aware of humming something under her breath, to keep up a rhythmic pulse. The background whine of the rings tuned into a song of its own that turned the world blue, with racing bubbles fizzing frantically in a race to go somewhere out there. AK reached into the center, pushing the whirlpool deeper and deeper into the bubbling electric brew. Rebeccah concentrated on the power, she needed a faster song, something to race the bubbles, to match the high pure tone of the rings. The whirlpool bottomed out on something and AK left it there, retreating in exhaustion. Rebeccah could hear excited voices, footsteps and exclamations. Then the whirlpool was unraveling and throwing energy back at her. She curled protectively around the snake, not squeezing anymore, but rather strengthening it as power flooded in . . . faded. She removed her mental hands and opened her eyes.

  "Play it back!" Jack was talking too loudly, hurting her ears.

  She peeled off the electrical contacts on her head and noticed her hands shaking. Low blood sugar, again. AK had her head down on the desk, looking whipped.

  Rebeccah looked around. No one was paying any attention to them. She pushed back and wobbled over to the ice chest. The first sip of cola was marvelous. Energy in a can. She handed it to AK, who swallowed and passed it to Mercy.

  Next stop, the doorway. Showing on the screen, white fog, black spot, rapidly opening up to a view across winter killed long grasses, half covered with snow, a pine forest, then snow blanketed mountains going up and up and even higher.

  A distant voice sounded shocked. "Those are the Alps! That's somewhere in Switzerland looking south."

  "Don't be silly, they were saying last week that the snow cover was at its smallest extent in a decade and there might be a water supply problem next summer." Dr. Heath looked back at the ranks of compute
rs.

  Rebeccah looked at her computer, but shrugged. "They aren't connected to anything else. Check from somewhere else."

  Several people had their portables along, they were opened and searches started. The mountains were inarguably the Alps. With much more snow cover than currently existed.

  Dr. Mueller rubbed his hands and eyed the Tellies. Only Rebeccah was on her feet. "Tomorrow we will try some of the males. They should be stronger, be able to last longer."

  Males. Must he try so hard to dehumanize us? Rebeccah dragged back to her seat.

  Harry crossed the room to the ice chest and fetched sodas for all of them. He looked worried, pulled out a phone and started ordering an early lunch for them.

  We can power the rings, but how can we power ourselves? Rebeccah envisioned them all with IV drips and shuddered.

  The next morning, Jason and Chauncey in a group with some others, all tall and masculine headed for the Dimensional Interface Building, as upper management had renamed the building. Rebeccah watched them go as she finished her breakfast.

  "We won't know if they succeeded for hours." AK groused. "How am I supposed to concentrate on classes with this going on?"

  "I thought you graduated?"

  "I did. Then I found out that Dr. Heath is on leave from USC but she can mentor some graduate studies. I can't be a doctor, but I damn well can be a zoologist. I've already operated on small animals."

  "What are you planning? Or should I say, plotting?"

  "We can open gates to other worlds. We ought to go through ourselves. Escape once and for all."

  "Umm, so we can starve in the wilderness? Have you thought this through logically?"