“I think the companies spent their money on set up, and maybe training, but I doubt even a well-off colony like this one could afford the types of fees Crow and his people would charge.”

  “That doesn’t mean one of them didn’t retire, here,” Tens muttered darkly as they proceeded cautiously through another airlock and out onto a digital landscape in the form of an open hillside overlooking a valley. The entry for a mine nestled in the hills on the other side, with a transport base in the valley between.

  “And there’s your research facility,” Cutter said, with no little satisfaction. “See?”

  Pulling code around them to help them blend with the passing data, the four of them left the shelter of the gateway and worked their way down the hill.

  “That might be the research facility,” Tens acknowledged, “But how are we going to get into it?”

  Delight studied the structure and saw he had a point. The coding they could see belonged to the security protocols surrounding the place, but not the facility itself, a fact that wasn’t obvious from a distance.

  “We are so very screwed,” Tens muttered, but Cutter shook her head.

  “There’s always something,” she persisted. “You taught me that.”

  “And when I was being such a bloody know-it-all smart arse,” Tens grumbled quietly, “Did I happen to tell you what that something might be?”

  Watching him, Delight saw Cutter’s words had reminded him of a principle he’d temporarily forgotten.

  Cutter was silent for a minute, turning her head as she examined the structure.

  “Where’s their power coming from?” she asked, shifting a little closer, but still careful to keep her distance.

  They all moved forward for a closer look—until Delight grabbed hold of Tens and Mack and hauled them down.

  “Tens, when Penny contacted you, did she say where she was?”

  Ahead of them, Cutter dropped to her belly and waited. Delight could almost hear her listening, and she was glad. The Cutter she had trained had been very, very good, and the one she’d operated with on Mack’s team had been better. The fact she was waiting, now, meant she sensed the same ‘wrongness’ Delight felt…or, at least, knew well enough to wait when her team wasn’t ready.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I mean, she said they had an hour, hour and a half, tops, once the baby woke up,” Delight hissed. “What makes you think she’s in the facility, now?”

  It was a good point, and Cutter froze, then she quietly rose into a crouch, pulling code around her that blended her from view.

  “Wait…” Mack began, but she was gone.

  Tens laid a hand on Mack’s shoulder. “I’ll go,” he said. “I can see the little rat.”

  Little rat, Delight thought, amused. Well, if the boot fits.

  She shifted the code around them, using a small piece of it to seek out Cutter’s presence and attach itself to her digital form. For a moment, she considered doing the same to Tens, then decided against it. For one thing, he wouldn’t like it…and, for another, she wasn’t sure she could make it stick.

  Instead, she waited, surveying the ground around them, before tapping Mack on the knee, and signaling they should return to the door. He glanced, once, in the direction Cutter and Tens had gone, then nodded, and they began moving back to the door.

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  “If Penny’s been anywhere in this system,” Mack whispered, “Then surely, she’s left you a message. She’d know one of the first things Odyssey would do would be to head into the system, wouldn’t she?”

  Much as she hated to admit it, Delight knew the man had a point. Delight dropped into a crouch and carefully surveyed the digital landscape around them.

  Now, if I were Penny, where would I… she thought, studying the three main elements below: the shuttleport, the mine, and the laboratory, and explaining her reasoning as she went. “She wouldn’t be sure which of those I’d start with, so she’d try to find a point somewhere in between the three, one with a separate access point, and preferably multiple exits.”

  “She’d have left a message,” Delight agreed, looking at Mack. She gestured toward the surround digiscape. “Somewhere around here.”

  He gave her an exasperated look, but Delight wasn’t finished.

  “She’s probably also made her own way into the area,” she added, “So there’s another access point we could use rather than the one we came in on.”

  “And would she have figured out which access point we were most likely to come in by?”

  Delight couldn’t blame him for sounding exasperated. She was feeling pretty exasperated herself—and wishing she’d worked it out sooner. She glanced back at the gate through which they’d entered, and moved cautiously back toward it.

  Penny’s message was both well-hidden and painfully obvious to those who knew the girl as well as Delight did. She reached the gate and slid into its coding like a slider through crystal, taking the missive from its concealment.

  “Here,” she said, showing Mack a copy. “Now, we know where she’ll be.”

  She touched Jeremy’s implant, giving him the coordinates and details

  Movement caught the corners of their eyes, and they turned. Tens and Cutter came racing up the slope, all attempts at concealment and stealth abandoned. Behind them, the hillside boiled with movement, the hill’s surface erupting with counter-intrusion programs, even as the skies began to swarm.

  “Mack,” Cutter called. “We need to go.”

  “Delight,” she acknowledged. “If you’ve got a team on stand-by, we need them.”

  Delight didn’t question her. She mightn’t like the girl, but she knew Cutter was solid when it came to operations…no matter how flaky she seemed in her downtime. Behind her, Tens pivoted, watching the counter-measures sweep closer.

  “You got any reason why you woke up every counter-intrusion measure in the area?” Delight demanded, as she pinged the Odyssey hack team that had been monitoring their progress.

  “Because this place isn’t what it seems,” Cutter snapped back, “And we really need to not be here.”

  “What d’you mean?” Mack’s mental voice was rough with concern and consternation, but he wasn’t arguing.

  Rather, he’d risen to his feet, hooking a hand around Delight’s arm to make sure she stayed with them as they followed Cutter along the hillside.

  “There has to be one around here, somewhere,” she murmured, too preoccupied to object. “The real entry.”

  “Or Penny’s entry,” Delight suggested. “That’d be the fastest way out of here.”

  “And the safest,” Tens added.

  “What’s it look like?” the girl asked, “Because it would be better than the legit entry they’re using to introduce new protocols.”

  “And to redirect the existing ones,” Delight agreed, shaking free of Mack’s arm and moving freely on her own.

  “So, you know where she is?” Mack asked.

  Delight tapped the message, not stopping Tens or Cutter when they reached for it. Better they knew than didn’t.

  “So the mine has sufficient interference to block the scans and the company search protocols?” Cutter asked.

  Tens glanced at Delight, and the agent regarded Cutter with an unfriendly look.

  “It does,” she confirmed. “Why?”

  “Because there’s a lot of activity feeding through from the tracking program I left in the security system, and it’s intensifying toward the mine,” Cutter explained.

  “Then we’d better hurry,” Delight stated, increasing the priority on her request for assistance and sending Jeremy another update, one that told the pilot to alter course to bring them in close to the mines. It’d mean skimming the edge of the canyon, and none of Togaresh’s companies were going to like it, but the shuttle did belong to Odyssey, and they did have legitimate business on-world.

  She wondered if it was going to be enough to keep Penny safe while they reached her…or if it would tip the company off and give them the edge they needed to reach the girl before Odyssey’s Marines. She was still searching for Penny’s hidden escape route when the Odyssey web-extraction team arrived.

  One minute, they were looking at the incoming swarms—both the airborne ones and the ground crawlers, and the next they were surrounded by a team of heavily defense-coded constructs that knew exactly how to breach the codes creating the zone’s perimeter and pull the group through them.

  They were good enough to give Delight a run for her money…and enough to make Tens’s life difficult when he chose to go against them. This time they were on the same team, beating the system’s defense measures to the four who’d infiltrated the system and leaving those same measures without a target seconds later.