gaian consortium 05 - the titan trap (31 page)

Then the guard said, “All right, looks like you’re good to go, Mr. Chung, Ms. Whitcomb. Have a good one.”

Derek nodded at the woman, who stepped out of the way and gave some sort of signal, as the crackling energy fence across the road abruptly lifted, granting them access to the region beyond the checkpoint. After releasing the brake, the vehicle moved forward smoothly, slowly, as if Derek didn’t want to attract attention by appearing too eager to get out of there. Then the ’car began to pick up speed, but gradually, and within a few minutes, the checkpoint had dwindled to a few specks on the landscape behind them.

Maybe she hadn’t exactly been holding her breath, but Cassidy found herself breathing a little more easily once they were completely out of eyeshot. “Any more of those we need to worry about?”

“Not on this road. From here it’s more or less a straight shot.”

She nodded, then glanced outside. Here, the vegetation didn’t look much different from the small treed area where they’d slept, although it did seem a little thinner, a little weedier, not quite as lush. And she was certainly no expert on the many moods of Gaia’s sun and sky, but something about the quality of light seemed to have shifted, grown slightly yellow and dim.

“Are we in the Zone now?” she asked.

“Yes. At least, this was one of the worst-hit areas. But of course the entire continent…and more…suffered.”

Suddenly the air tasted acrid in her mouth, harsh against her throat. “Do we need any kind of breathing equipment?”

He glanced over at her then, reaching out to lay a reassuring hand on her knee. “We’re fine. Every vehicle in China is equipped with heavy-duty atmospheric scrubbing filters. Even without that, we’d be fine unprotected for a while. If you’re going to be out in it for more than an hour or so, then yes, it’s recommended that you wear a light filtration mask. But we’re okay.”

His tone sounded calm, casual, and she told herself to relax a bit. After all, he’d lived and worked here for some time, and hadn’t suffered any ill effects.

Well, except for getting framed for murder and being sent to Titan to rot.

Even so, she found it hard to let go of the tension, which seemed to be ratcheting up along her neck and shoulders with every mile that passed. If Derek suffered the same nerves, he showed no sign of it, expression cool, serene almost, as he guided them down the deserted highway.

For him, this was the culmination of a quest. For her…she wasn’t sure what it was for her. She only knew she had to let him do this, had to allow him to place an end cap on the cover-up that had so irrevocably changed his life. It took more strength than she had imagined to allow him to go on driving, to keep herself from putting her hand on her wrist and saying,
Stop. Just turn around so we still have a chance to get out of here and be safe.

Denying him this, though, would be grossly unfair. She’d said she’d see this thing through with him, and she would. If only it didn’t hurt so much, the thought of losing him, of losing what they might have together, if the universe would only give them the chance. Before Derek, she’d never thought of a future with an “us” in it. She hadn’t planned on falling in love.

And that was the craziest thing of all. Could you love someone you’d only known for a few days? If anyone had asked her that question even a week ago, she’d have said that of course you couldn’t. You could be attracted. Infatuated, even. But in love, to the point where you were willing to risk your own life to help the person you cared about achieve the thing they wanted the most?

No way.

Well, that’s what she would’ve said then. Now she knew differently. Oh, the second he’d taken off his helmet, back when he’d been hijacking the
Avalon,
she’d been struck by Derek’s good looks, even though at the time she’d thought he must be a mass murderer or serial rapist or something equally horrible. It wasn’t the first time she’d been attracted to someone at first sight, although she’d never felt that certain pull quite so forcefully before Derek. And after she’d gotten to know him, had understood everything he’d gone through, why he needed so desperately to prove the Consortium’s culpability in both Theo Karras’ death and the truth of what was going on at that processing plant…somewhere along the way, admiration had turned to affection, then love. She couldn’t imagine having to live without him.

He turned toward her, dark eyes warming as his gaze met hers. But then he frowned slightly. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” she said, although she knew her voice sounded too tight, too strained. “Just thinking.”

“About?”

“You.”

Seeming a little taken aback by that, he replied, “Is that a good or a bad thing?”

“Good…mostly.” She swallowed, forcing a smile. “Something about you reminds me of a piece I read once.”

“What’s that?”

She shifted in her seat. “Oh, you’ll probably think it’s silly.”

“I doubt I’ll think it’s silly.”

No, he wouldn’t. He took her seriously, asked for her opinion, treated her like an equal, even though his background and education had given him far more standing in Gaian society than her own spotty upbringing as the daughter of a freighter captain. Not quite looking at him, she said, “I never really went to school. My father taught me some math, the astrogation I needed to pilot a starship, but when I was younger, I used computers to learn how to read, to write. So I read a lot. I was always poking around in the free libraries, because the newer stuff you had to pay for was pretty much out of our budget.”

“
Don Quixote
,” Derek said.

She blinked at him. “What?”

“You made a reference to
Don Quixote
a while back…now I understand why.”

“Right. So anyway, there was this poem I read once. I don’t even remember the whole thing, but there was this line that stuck out for me. ‘I could not love thee, dear, had I not loved honor more.’ Anyway, it reminds me of you. Why you’re doing all this.” Belatedly, she realized the line she’d quoted had the word “love” in it, and so far Derek had never said that word to her. Acted as if he cared, sure. But loved her?

For one long, agonizing moment, he said nothing. Then, voice so quiet she could barely hear him over the hum of the engine, “It’s not entirely accurate. I’m fairly sure I love you more.”

Heart swelling, not knowing what to say, she reached out to him, and he lifted his right hand from the steering wheel so he could clasp her fingers in his.

“So maybe it’s unfair,” he said, still in those soft, intense tones. “Maybe I should stop now and turn around. It’s not too late.”

Part of her wanted to say yes, to tell him that was the right thing to do, that it was more important for the two of them to be together than for the truth to be revealed. However, far more of her knew that it wasn’t, that they couldn’t live with themselves if they didn’t do whatever they could to reveal the truth of what was going on in Hunan Province.

“No,” she told him, clinging to his hand and wishing they weren’t separated by the console so she could be closer to him. “I know you have to do this. I
want
you to do this. And I want to help you.”

He lifted her hand to his mouth, kissed the backs of her fingers so gently that she could feel tears begin to prick at her eyes. That was no good, though. She knew she had to keep it together, for both their sakes.

“Thank you,” he said, and that was all, but she thought she understood.

Then he released her hand, placing his back on the steering wheel, and she knotted her fingers in her lap. After a long pause she asked, “How much farther?”

“An hour or two.”

She nodded. What else could she do? She loved him, and he loved her…and in a few more hours, she’d find out if that love had any kind of future at all.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Derek gripped the steering wheel so tightly he could see his knuckles stand out, white against the golden-brown of his skin. It was the only thing he could think of to do to prevent himself from turning the ’car around, taking them back to safety. He’d known what he felt for her — or at least, thought he did — but he hadn’t been sure of exactly how much she cared in return. Now that he knew she loved him, how he could he continue with this mad dash toward…what? Vindication? Absolution?

But somehow he kept driving, because Cassidy had said she believed in him, would do this thing with him. She seemed to understand that if he left this unfinished, it would hang over him for the rest of his life. On the other hand, if anything happened to her….

He would never forgive himself. Even a lifetime of solitary confinement on Titan wouldn’t be enough to atone for that unpardonable sin.

You’ll just have to make sure nothing
does
happen to her
. Easier said than done, of course, but telling himself that seemed to make it a little better. After all, they’d survived against all odds this far. That luck just needed to hold a little bit longer, and then he’d be able to give the Consortium the black eye it so richly deserved, and he and Cassidy could move on to explore the rest of their lives together.

On the side of the road was a rough signpost, now scarred by the weather, telling him the GARP facility was now ten kilometers away. No mention of the processing plant, of course. GARP was the public face of the Consortium’s rehabilitation of the Asian continent. The processing plant — and any others like it — was a dirty secret it hoped no one would find out about.

But he knew that road, knew if he passed the turnoff for the facility that had been his home for almost a year, then drove a few more kilometers, he’d come to the processing plant. Would it be choked with traffic the way it had been that fateful day two and a half years ago? Maybe. It was hard to say, as he didn’t know how often the convoys went there with their grim loads of human remains. But he had a feeling it had to be a daily occurrence. Otherwise, it would take centuries to process those corpses, rather than merely decades.

Part of the reason he’d rented this particular vehicle, however, was that it had beefed-up ground-effects equipment, and could navigate terrain far tougher than a man-made road. They’d go past the GARP facility, then turn off into the rough so they could come up at the processing plant from underneath, avoiding altogether the road the convoys used.

Up ahead he could see the right-hand turn that would lead him into the GARP compound. They drove past, not speeding, since he didn’t want to draw any attention to the ’car, or at least no more than any vehicle going by might attract, since there was so little traffic here otherwise.

Cassidy’s gaze flickered toward the facility as they passed the turnoff, but she didn’t say anything, apparently sensing that he wasn’t in the mood to talk about his time there. She only stared out the window, jaw tense, then resolutely shifted in her seat so she could keep an eye on where they were heading.

Derek knew that the trucks heading to the processing plant took a different road, the one that cut east-west approximately two kilometers from here. Since loitering around outside in bad air was something to be avoided, those convoys weren’t the sort of thing a casual observer would ever notice. Whoever was watching the monitoring equipment in the facilities building would note the traffic, but that was easy enough to explain away. All Consortium brass had to do was say those vehicles were hauling contaminated soil and plant matter. It wasn’t as if they’d allow anyone from the GARP facility to get close enough to discover otherwise.

“Check your harness,” he told Cassidy. “It’s going to get bumpy from here on out.”

She nodded grimly, fingers touching the buckle of the seatbelt stretched across her lap, then moving up to tug on the piece of the harness that descended from the roof of the vehicle and crossed over her chest. “Everything feels okay to me.”

“Good. Here we go.”

Derek cut off the main road, feeling the jolt as the ’car left the tarmac and began traveling across the hummocky ground. A second later, the compensators kicked in and the ride leveled out somewhat, but it was still nothing like driving across duracrete.

Risking a quick glance at Cassidy, he saw that she still had her right hand clasped around the webbing, just a few inches above her shoulder. “You okay over there?”

“I’m fine. This is — different.”

One could say that. He’d done some off-road driving back home in Tucson, and again here in China, so he knew what to expect. But for someone like Cassidy, who might have had the opportunity to go topside in a lunar rover but most likely had never traveled in anything smaller than a shuttle? It had to be a jarring experience.

“We’ll come up from underneath,” he said reiterating the plan, as much for his own benefit as hers. “The convoys come in from the east, so we’ll angle in from the southwest. They move quickly, as they want to get their loads under cover as soon as possible, so that means they’ll be distracted.”

“But the place must be under surveillance, mustn’t it?”

“Of course it is.” He paused, recalling what he’d seen of the plant, the details he’d gone over and over again in his mind, searching for any kind of weakness. “But part of the reason approaching from the southwest will work is that there’s a large pipeline coming out of the plant on that side, one that empties into a complex of storage tanks. We can use the tanks as cover, and move underneath the pipeline to get close enough to the plant that we can get inside.”

Her expression told him she wasn’t overly thrilled with this plan, but she only nodded. “Guards?”

“I didn’t see any. Doesn’t mean they don’t have them, but I have a feeling they’re relying on video surveillance and the remoteness of the plant to protect them.” He shook his head, recalling all the strictures he’d been told about not going outside for too long, all the warnings that the GARP personnel needed to stay close to their facility. Those admonishments had sounded like common sense at the time, as no one wanted to risk lung scarring just to wander around a not very scenic part of the globe. He’d known that there were very real consequences to breathing that air for too long…it was only that the Consortium had used those consequences as its own personal electric fence.