Revolution's Shore Read Online Free PDF Page B

her, and I mean to get her out, if she’s still alive. Are you planning an attack?”
    â€œClassified, comrade. You should know better than that.”
    â€œThen let me take three of my people, and I’ll go in and get her.”
    Yehoshua laughed. “You’re a cool one. Which three? Or let me guess—the mercenary and the psychotic. Who’s the third?”
    â€œMy ’bot. But you haven’t met him yet, or you’d have more confidence.”
    â€œLily!” Finch spoke as the screen flicked to black, erasing Paisley’s file. “You can’t go in. It would be suicide.”
    â€œHow many guards, and how many prisoners?” Lily asked Yehoshua.
    He laid a dark hand on the records console, brushing his fingers along the smooth, pale surface as he calculated. His eyes narrowed. “Come on,” he said abruptly. “I’m going to take you to see Callioux.”
    â€œHere’s what we’re dealing with.” Comrade Officer Callioux bent over a table whose lights and illuminated lines marked out in three dimensions a map of the complex on Harsh: mines and runnels and living blocks. “We have Main Block virtually at center, with the numbered section blocks radiating out as spokes, but also linked at underground levels one, two, and three by access tube.”
    â€œDo these tubes include ore trains?” Lily asked, examining the grid with the eye of one experienced in mining operations.
    â€œYes.” Callioux looked up and beckoned to a slim woman covered with the profusion of tattoos that marked a Ridani out from other humans; she was dressed in a poorly fitting white uniform. “Comrade Rainbow was a guard here, and she can explain the workings better than I can.”
    â€œDo you know ya mining, min Heredes?” Rainbow asked in a diffident voice.
    Lily smiled slightly at the Ridani honorific. Beside her, Finch made a gesture of derision, but Lily ignored him. “Yes. I do.” She pointed to a spoke illuminated by a dull red glow. “This is the section that failed?”
    Rainbow had moved forward to stand beside Lily. She nodded. “Ya twenties dig. It be abandoned now. It were ya terrible, such destruction.”
    â€œYou were here?” Lily eyed her, a woman of middle years whose slightness belied the gleam of strength in her eyes. “I didn’t know Central commissioned Ridani soldiers.”
    â€œOnly for ya work with ya Ridani prisoners. I were stationed in ya twenties surface dome, to search ya new Ridani prisoners as come in. Here. I watched as they pulled out all ya guards and ya govinment troops, and left ya prisoners to die. That be ya time I became ya Jehanist.”
    In the brief silence following this quiet remark, Lily studied the green-lit outline of the 30s dig, reaching far into the depths of the planet. Red blinking lights showed the areas where the retreating guards had blown the access tubes to cut themselves off from Jehane’s attack.
    â€œThen the only access to the thirties is by the surface dome,” Lily said at last.
    Callioux made a negative gesture. “With this atmosphere, we can’t equip our people for a ground assault, and an air assault would be decimated by the dome’s stationary cannons. And we can’t blast through the tubes without alerting everyone, and probably destabilizing the zone and the artificial atmosphere.”
    â€œNo,” Lily agreed. “But you clearly have any number of shafts in the twenties dig”—she used a pointer of white light to identify several shafts from the deep levels in the 20s tunnels that reached into and almost overlapped with equivalent shafts from the deep 30s—“that a small group could use to pierce through into shafts in the thirties. Take them from behind.”
    There was another brief silence.
    â€œBut the twenties dig is unstable,” Callioux protested at last.
    Lily shook her head.