Kaleidocide by Dave Swavely

Author:Dave Swavely
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

28

ARMED TO THE TEETH

“The good news is that we’re all still alive,” Terrey said, when everyone was gathered together that afternoon for the first time since the gravesite episode. “The bad news is that we almost weren’t.”

We were meeting in the cafeteria of the mountain base, which was one of the few parts of it that had a view. It was toward the top of the hill, and one wall of it was transteel, which allowed the people inside to see out, while from outside they were hidden by a large holographic cover, similar to the one that concealed the mouth of the hangar bay, which was several floors below. The protection team had eaten some lunch—mostly the astronaut food in tubes that Terrey had brought along. They were too rattled from the events of the morning to eat normal food, even though Tyra had been faithfully testing all of it. But the sniper had gotten by Terrey and the Trois, so clearly something else could as well. My friend was presently addressing this failure.

“Our opponent had us in check, and almost in checkmate,” he said. “Somehow he was more informed and aware than we were about the Ares’ Sunday morning habits, and managed to plant the sniper just beyond the range of our sweep. He also must have correctly calculated how far out we would conduct the sweep, and he knew that when Michael and Lynn walked that far out to the graves, they would pass just barely into the sniper’s range. I’m very sorry that I botched this, and put you both into danger.” He nodded at Jon and Lynn, who was still too shaken to go back up to the house.

“At least we know what the yellow part of the kaleidocide is,” Stephenson said. Terrey had told us that the sniper was wearing dark yellow and camouflaged in a grapevine of the same color. “And we know that part is over.” Stephenson and Korcz had spent the rest of the morning extending their sweep another five hundred meters on all sides of the house, and were fairly confident that the sniper had been the only one.

“Yeah,” Terrey agreed. “And we actually might know more than that. I thought to myself, How did Sun know about your Sunday mornings? And I had the triplets search the net about it. They found an interview where Michael was asked about remembering his daughter and shared how they visit her grave every week—obviously that was the source. Then it occurred to me: What else could the enemy have gleaned from information on the net? So we searched it from his perspective, trying to find data that could give him ideas, and we found another interview where Michael said that he and Lynn have a glass of red wine from Artesa almost every night.”

That was true. I didn’t remember saying it in an interview, but we did love the exclusive wines from our favorite winery, which was built into a hill between Napa and Sonoma.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.