The Time of The Cat 41

TREACHERY

The Pug that had moved out into the group of humans had killed eighteen people before he’d been taken down. If the transfer detail consisted of at least five Pugs, it could be a massacre. I didn’t like the odds of having a group of Pugs shooting randomly into the hangar. It could easily end up with most of the captives dead.

We went back to the transporter closet, ignoring the vituperative Secretary, and opened the door. The closet could accommodate about twenty people, and I calculated the transporter could hold about half that.

I summoned it, and the door opened. I suddenly realized that we’d been lucky not to be flanked by Pugs coming in through the door behind us, and I asked the sergeant to have two of his men guard the door with splinter-guns. That left one to keep an eye on the Secretary, but the secret service guard said he’d be pleased to watch her. He walked out with a glint in his eye, and I knew that he would enjoy holding her captive.

Liz and I looked inside the door and saw that this was one of the older transporters with only one button. We’d been so busy shooting Pugs when we had come through the first time that we hadn’t noticed. I pulled out the map and verified that it showed only the one connection to Chichen Itza. The ruins must be a pretty busy place with all of the traffic in captured humans. I asked the sergeant about that, and he said that everyone he’d talked to had been brought in at night, so I figured the Pugs were still worried about detection since they waited until the tourists were gone before transferring prisoners. This might not be the case any longer, though. The capture of a politically prominent individual, such as the Secretary of State, would seem to indicate that they were ready to come out into the open.

“Juan, if we start sending people through to El Caracol, can you direct them to safety?” I asked.

“Si.” He thought about it. “I think I can organize them as if they were groups of tourists. If they can wait, my brother owns a bus concession, and we can set up transportation to Merida. From there –,” he sighed and shrugged. “Well, they are illegals, and Mexico is aiding such people to go to the southern border of the USA. Perhaps we can smuggle them into the USA.”

I laughed aloud at the audacity of the concept while Liz looked at me with a half-smile. Smuggling refugees from an alien attack across the US border as illegal aliens was absurd enough that it tickled me. The sergeant just snickered at the thought.

I asked the sergeant to instruct people to press the activation button when they’d packed the transporter full, and we got started transferring the crowd by sending Juan and his ladies through. They were accompanied by several of the nearest people in the hangar, along with the fifth Marine, who’d just then worked his way through the crowd to where we were standing. He was going to act as a messenger, coming back to let us know if it was OK to keep sending more people.

Juan would wait for the escapees to begin coming through while his fiancee would go and contact his brother for buses. His sister said that she knew of a more remote area where she could lead the crowd so that they would be safe until the buses arrived for them. That seemed to take care of that end of things, but I cautioned Juan to keep his splinter-gun ready because there was always the possibility of running into Pugs transiting the system. He agreed to be ready, and off they went.

Directly the transporter dinged again, and the Marine poked his head out and said, “It’s all clear. Start sending more through.”

We started the group moving, and the only problem we had, besides the Secretary of State cursing at us, was that people tended to bunch up anxiously. They all wanted out as fast as possible, but I couldn’t blame them for that.

I don’t know how we managed, but we got everyone through the system before the hour was up. The people moved rapidly and packed into the transporter as tightly as they could. We found that if they squeezed, the thing would hold fifteen people so that accelerated the transfer and the hanger emptied rapidly. When it was empty, except for the last group of captives, the five Marines, the secret service man and his charge, and Liz and I, we still had fifteen minutes before the Pug transfer team was due.

I mentally allocated that time, giving myself five minutes to interrogate the Secretary. That left about ten minutes to get in position to ambush the Pugs’ human-herding detail.