The Time of The Cat 32
SPLIT UP IN SAN DIEGO
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Eric
THIRTY-TWO
SPLIT UP IN SAN DIEGO
As Liz and Stormbreaker were coming through the cleared-out office of the warehouse complex, she’d somehow had the time to take a look at a desk. There were some papers there, and one of them had a hand-sketched map of part of the transporter network.
It was actually a cheap road map of the United States with some inked lines on it. It looked like the Pugs were very like us in some ways. One of them didn’t trust his memory and had made some notes that showed how the network had been reconfigured.
When we came out of the transporter from Wichita, we were standing in a narrow room in our new location, wondering where we were. The room looked like a hotel conference room. I’d been in many of these. This one was nice, with large chandeliers hanging from the ornate ceiling. The movable walls had been configured to make this space about fifty by one hundred feet. We looked around suspiciously, but the place was quiet and empty. It was dimly lit in the fashion that the Pugs preferred. There were a couple of doors marked ‘Exit’ on the far wall. There were also two other transporters, one on each side of the transporter we’d come through.
We could faintly hear some kind of meeting going on in one of the other rooms, but this one was currently vacant. It’s a good thing it was because I’m fairly certain that our appearance, loaded with weapons, would have completely disrupted any get-rich-quick conference speaker, no matter how polished his presentation.
We were all relieved when Liz pulled out the marked-up road map. With a little study, we were able to see that the link to Loveland had been rerouted, and Wichita now only led to San Diego. The other two Wichita transporters hadn’t survived my use of the eraser gun, so whether or not they’d been rerouted was a moot point. However, it looked as if one of them would have returned us to Loveland while the other had been linked to somewhere in the general vicinity of Eldora, close to Boulder. Blast it all!
It was bad luck, and we agreed that the eraser gun was a mixed blessing. It got rid of things quickly and irrevocably, but the bad part was that it was too indiscriminate. Unless you were very lucky, you’d end up destroying your target, including everything around it.
Looking at the modified map led us to conclude that we were in a hotel near the Embarcadero in San Diego. We didn’t know which one until Joe came up with a piece of hotel stationery that was left in a wastebasket. It didn’t really matter, though, because we weren’t planning on staying overnight. Nice though the place might be, we wanted to leave immediately.
We realized that the Pugs must now be alerted to our presence since they’d felt the need to reroute the system to stop us. Because we didn’t have any way to shut off the transporters, I was worried that they might send a group after us. As a result, I felt an overwhelming urge to get us out of the hotel as rapidly as possible.
The road map had some notations on it in squiggles, but of course, we couldn’t make anything out of them, so that was no help. We were reduced to carefully studying the diagrams that were drawn on it. The key was obvious once we started paying attention.
The door we’d come through was in the middle of a line of three transporter doors, and looking at the map, we were able to see the line linking it directly back to Wichita. The hand-drawn line from our exit door led to one of three small boxes in Wichita that I presumed was in the warehouse. There were three San Diego boxes marked on the map and they obviously represented the transporters directly in front of us in the conference room.
When we traced the links to the other two San Diego boxes, we found that one linked to Carlsbad, New Mexico, but the other one linked directly to Estes Park. Now we were getting somewhere!
The Pugs still needed that Estes connection since it led to the only transporter link that went off-planet to Titan. From what we’d been able to understand from the maps and booklet, Titan was their only entry point to our solar system. Rather than shutting down transporters that led to Estes, they’d simply used a little misdirection to mess up our plans by changing the links.
Judging from the speed at which they’d re-routed the links, they were able to make on-the-fly changes to the network. This concerned us because, if that were true, they could easily change all of the routes and render our maps useless. We decided we’d better move quickly into our attack before they decided to take that step.
Liz said, “If it were me, I’d wait until I was sure that my enemies were approaching through the network before I changed it. If you go and make changes needlessly, you’re simply going to cause a huge disruption to your own forces, and I don’t think they can notify all of their people quickly. They seem to be largely self-directed and only work in loose coordination.”
We faced the three transporter doors and compared them to the drawing. It looked like the Estes one was on the left while the Carlsbad one was on the far right.
In order to better study the maps, we’d converged on a small table that was located about twenty feet from the wall with the transporter doors and at the far end of the room from the normal entrance door. This meant that the Estes transporter link was the farthest away from where we were standing. That turned out to be a problem.
Just as we’d finished our map studies and had folded the maps in preparation to move out, the center transporter dinged and then opened to reveal a full load of Pugs.
I didn’t think that the Pugs in Wichita had enough time to call for help, but they might have, or it might have been the first Pug we’d seen in Loveland. He had retreated into the house by the barn, and while he was getting the bolt shooter, he might have signaled for backup. Since there were only two ways out of the barn location, Lander and Wichita, the Pug backup team might have divided in half. Either way, the ones facing us had transferred through from Wichita surprisingly fast, considering the necessity of driving to the warehouse location. They came out of the door angry and wanting revenge on whoever had killed their fellows.
It got nasty really fast. We didn’t have any cover or other places to hide, and they were ready to shoot. Thinking rapidly, Colin and Stormbreaker tipped the table over, and we all crouched behind it as a perfect hail of splinters broke against the front.
The space behind the table was too tight, and I suddenly noticed that Chandra’s leg was dangerously near the edge. As I reached for him to pull him closer, he was hit in the calf. He stiffened and gagged. I knew that he was dead right then, even though he was still moving.
I felt bad about it, but there was nothing I could do. He was jerking around from the toxin and gasping his last. I rolled over, put my feet on his chest, and shoved him out into plain view of the Pugs in a last-ditch attempt to distract them.
The Pugs seemed to sometimes lack the judgment that makes humans so dangerous. Rather than continuing to shoot at us, they immediately focused on his spasms and shot him repeatedly. Splinters struck all over his head, face, and shoulders, making him practically dissolve into a puddle of blood and gore.
While they were amusing themselves and feeling good about shooting one of us, I slid over to the other end of the table, crawling over the prone men and Liz, who was trying her hardest to hold onto the enraged and squalling cat.
When I reached the other end, I rolled out into plain view and fired the eraser gun simultaneously. The Pugs vanished with a crackle, as did the surface of the wall behind them. It looked like I’d grazed the middle transporter framework, but the door was still there and could become active at any moment. I thought about wiping it off the wall, but I was afraid that I’d hit some necessary part of the electronics of the other portals. They were that close together.
“Let’s get the Hell out of here,” I shouted, and everyone ran for the Estes link. I lagged behind to grab Jefferson from Liz and that slowed us up enough for the rest of the guys to get ahead.
When I grabbed for the cat, he wriggled and slipped out of my grasp. He ran directly towards the wall adjacent to the Carlsbad transporter, with Liz and I chasing him, while the other men ran towards the Estes door.
I caught up with Jefferson near the Carlsbad door. I was trying to get hold of him, and as I did, another group of Pugs came out of the still operational Wichita link. This must have been the other half of their response team that had found nothing in Lander, or it might have been reinforcements from somewhere in Wichita. Regardless of their origin, the rotten luck was that they had come through in time to cut us off.
Liz and I had absolutely no cover, so we were forced to jump into the Carlsbad transporter. She had slapped the call button when the center transporter became active for the second time. The Carlsbad door opened just in time for us to miss being riddled with splinters. As it was, some of the projectiles broke on the door framework as the door closed.
I held Jefferson and Liz grabbed my arm as the walls wavered, and then when the wavering stopped, the door popped open, and we were facing a dark cavern. I expected the Pugs to be right on our heels, and we moved quickly to the right of the door. When it slid shut, the cavern was pitch black.