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.If Jericho had been right, even if she hopped onto the hoverbike and made a max-speed burn for the Capitol City Abaca, it would take no less than nine hours to reach it.That left just over a day to implement whatever plan Jericho had set up—and she only hoped that she would be able to decipher his plan in time to execute it.So she made her way to the bottom of the crater where the craft rested, and swiped her hand across the area of the hull which she thought was the door.There was a hiss of air as the door opened before lowering itself to the ground to form the boarding ramp.Once inside the craft, Masozi checked to ensure that the duffel bag was still in the closet, and it was.She carefully withdrew the bag from the closet and opened it, revealing the same, heavy device she had seen inside the concealed compartment which was disguised as a bench.She took the bomb out of the duffel and gently laid it down on the floor of the cabin, her heart racing as she did so.She then turned and carefully opened the concealed compartment, and when it was open she placed the bomb inside the honeycombed interior of the hidden box.Masozi then closed the box and emptied the rest of the duffel’s contents onto the floor of the craft.There was a pair of ID’s, one for Jericho and one for Masozi, and she snorted derisively to see that their false identities suggested the two of them were married.“You wish, you old bastard,” she muttered as she took the pieces she would need and stowed them in her overcoat’s inner pockets.There was also a pair of pistols inside, and after a brief hesitation, she took one and secured it to her bodyglove’s hip beneath the overcoat.She could always abandon it as she neared the Capitol City, but Philippa was known as a ‘wild frontier’ to the residents of Virgin; she would rather have the gun and not need it than have the reverse be the case.There was also some clothing inside the duffel bag, and Masozi saw that hers was a two-piece outfit which would go neatly over her bodyglove.So she removed the other articles she had worn since disembarking the Zhuge Liang and placed the new pieces—a vest and a fairly tight, knee-length skirt—over her bodyglove.There were a handful of credit chits inside the vest, and they totaled nearly ten thousand credits in all—half a month’s salary for an Investigator of Masozi’s experience and accomplishments.The final item was a vehicle access key, and she picked it up to examine it.There were two buttons, one of which clearly was meant to activate the bike’s motivators while the other had the picture of a closed lock on it.She had ridden as a passenger on several hoverbikes, and had even operated one a former fling had owned.She had left him in the dust a few weeks into the relationship because he seemed to care more about his bike than he did about anything—or anyone—else, including her.She pressed the second button and heard a low thrum outside, and Masozi exited the craft via the ramp to find a hoverbike—remarkably similar to, but clearly different from the same one Jericho had picked her up on in New Lincoln—had been lowered from a concealed compartment along the craft’s fuselage.Masozi took a deep breath and activated the ramp’s retraction sequence, causing the cabin door of the Tyson to fold back up into the closed position.Masozi then threw her leg over the seat of the bike and pressed the activation button of the key.She was rewarded by a low-pitched thrum which vibrated her thighs and groin just enough that she was aware of it, and she waited for the bike’s warm-up cycle to conclude before carefully maneuvering it away from the Neil deGrasse Tyson.Once she was clear of the spacecraft, she twisted the manual throttle and was rewarded by a measure of acceleration she had not entirely expected as her head was snapped back.Her hands reflexively gripped the handlebars, and she felt certain if she had been less athletic that she would have failed to keep her hold of the vehicle’s handles.She managed to keep hold of the handlebars as the bike roared up and over the edge of the crater before leveling itself out and rocketing across the relatively flat terrain at speeds which would have seen her arrested within seconds if she had reached them inside New Lincoln’s confines.Masozi had memorized the basic topographical layout of Philippa, so she set the most direct course she could for the Capitol City before opening the throttle of the hoverbike up and feeling the impressive power of the vehicle beneath her hurtle toward her destination at roughly four hundred kilometers an hour.The faster she went, the higher the hoverbike climbed; when she reached the vehicle’s maximum speed she had achieved an altitude of nearly a hundred feet above the cratered moon’s surface.She knew that she needed to do everything in her power to stop Governor Keno—and not place any innocent civilians’ lives in danger when she did.After nearly nine hours of near-continuous riding—during which time she only ever saw two other vehicles on the bike’s radar-like display, neither of which came close enough for her to see visually—Masozi pulled up at the edge of a truly massive crater.It was so large that, had she not known it was there, she might not have seen it until she was well within and Philippa’s horizon had been replaced by the crater’s edge in the far-off distance.The sun had still not come up, but Masozi knew that a ‘sunrise’ would not happen for at least another week while Philippa orbited around Pacifica, and even when it did it would be unlike any sunrise she had experienced on Virgin.That knowledge somehow made the lights of Abaca even more striking.While the Sense District where Tera St.Murray had operated her brothel was wreathed in neon light, Abaca was filled with what seemed to be massive searchlights.The industrial-strength beams stabbed upward and wandered the deep, dark sky in seemingly random patterns, and there must have been dozens of the most powerful ones whose beams disappeared into the black void of Virgin’s space.The city itself was a dull, yellow-white glow from her position at the edge of the giant crater, and she took the pistol which had been fastened to her hip.Despite her inclination to keep it for protection, she knew it presented too great of a risk.She tossed it to the ground, grateful she had not needed to use it, and sped off toward the city [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]