“Good luck in your quest,” Hadari started to say … but he was interrupted by Benja bursting through the door,
“The security guards are coming!” he said breathlessly.
“How many?” Hadari asked anxiously.
“At least twenty,” Benja replied. “They have their machine guns and machetes. They might be heading for the Black Hole.”
Then as predicted, Benja ran away.
“Go…” Hadari told Nolan and company urgently. “Out the back door and through the worker’s settlements. Make your way back to the beach from there. But don’t stop for anything—no matter what you see!”
* * *
SUDDENLY, THEY WERE running.
Gunner was up front. Then came Emma Simms, the Senegals still in a protective formation around her. Nolan was bringing up the rear.
In their previous line of work as special operators for Delta Force, Nolan and Gunner had stolen into many unfriendly places, gathered intelligence and then gotten out, sometimes clean and smooth, sometimes with an army of bad guys on their heels. They excelled in both means of escape, but never with an uninvited guest along.
As soon as they went out the back of Hadari’s shack, they tumbled down a hill and found themselves on the edge of a massive slum. This was the Gottabang workers’ shantytown. It was a horrible sight, thousands of decrepit hovels stretching for as far as Nolan’s eye could see. Most were made of tin sheeting and cardboard, or leftover materials from the broken ships. They were crowded together in conditions that seemed impossible to support even the lowest of animal life, never mind humans. Yet, here they were.
The stink was unbelievable, even through the breathing masks. There was no sanitation here, no running water, certainly no electricity. Trash and excrement were everywhere. Even worse, the smoke from the toxic fires burning on the beach nearby hung over the slum like a cloud that refused to blow away. Animals—small dogs, cats, rats, chickens, snakes and some unidentifiable—scattered or slithered away as Alpha ran past.
Then there were the people. Nolan saw them only as eyes, staring out of the shadows, watery, frozen, unaffected as Alpha went splashing on by. With weapons pointing in all directions, night-vision goggles, heavy body armor and oversized Fritz helmets giving them an otherworldly appearance, Nolan would have thought, in the heat of the moment, these people would have shown some emotion: fright, wonder, amusement.
Something …
But they all looked dead inside.
Nolan could hear Emma Simms’s muffled voice screaming out complaints throughout this dash. They were moving too fast. The body armor was hurting her knees. The smell was making her sick. She was going to catch some disease because the people here were looking at her.
Truth was, had she not been with them, Alpha would have been able to move a lot quicker.
Finally Nolan shouted an order and the Senegals on either side of her, reached under her arms and began half carrying her, half dragging her.
This did not stop her from complaining, though. She began yapping faster and more virulently than before.
They were totally unfamiliar with the lay of the land; all Nolan knew was they were heading north, which was the general direction of where the Shin was waiting. He’d looked behind every few seconds to see if anyone was chasing them, but saw no one.
It took Alpha five minutes of flat-out running but Nolan finally spotted the other edge of the slum terminating at the base of a sandy hill. Beyond, he could see the water and the waiting Shin.
If they could just make it over that hill …
* * *
GUNNER WAS THE first to reach the top of the rise.
Even with all the confusion going on around them, Nolan clearly heard his colleague cry out. Not in pain, but in surprise.
The Senegals went over next, two carrying Emma Simms between them. They, too, cried out and came to a halt. Seconds later, Nolan scrambled up the crest—and he stopped cold as well, finally seeing what had frozen the others in their tracks.
It was another slum, much smaller, and separated from the one they’d just run through. Here, the shacks were clustered in a rough circle with a sewage ditch splitting it down the middle. But the shacks themselves looked more like cages. Most were fashioned out of cargo crates only two or three feet high.
It was obvious there was no running water here either, no electricity, no sanitation facilities. And, if anything, the stink was even more overwhelming, the conditions more putrid. It made the shantytown Alpha had just passed through look