They fetched up parallel to a mountain stream, mostly buried under ice with snow on it. In some places it was open to the sky, and there it was possible to see that it was running broad and shallow, easily fordable by the truck. They rumbled and juddered across it, crept up its bank for half a mile, then struck out in what seemed to Zula like a random direction, plowing directly into the woods and attacking a steep uphill slope as a way of getting out of this valley. Tree branches were pushed out of the way by the windshield, bending back until they either snapped off or else whipped in through the open driver’s-side window where Jones had to beat them back with his left arm. She wondered why he would not simply roll up the window until she noticed little blue cubes of safety glass that had been sprayed all over the cab, and understood that the glass had been shattered. It seemed obvious enough that this must have happened when they were stealing the truck yesterday. She hoped that they had merely punched out the window so that they could get in and hot-wire it. Then she noted a key chain dangling from its ignition. They must have stolen it from a person who had been driving it. They must have killed that person.
A CB radio was mounted in the dashboard, and after they had got well clear of the camp and reached a decent stopping place—a flat spot in the forest, where they were well sheltered beneath the trees, and the snow wasn’t too deep—Jones turned it on. Then, after a glance back over his shoulder toward Zula, he flicked his knife open, severed its microphone cable, and hurled the mike out through the vacant window frame. It skittered away through the undergrowth like a furtive mammal. He turned the volume up and began to scan through the available channels.
Nothing. They really were out in the middle of nowhere.
It had been set to Channel 4 when turned on. Jones put it back on 4 and left it running. Occasionally it would cough out some noise, but nothing that could be identified as words.
Jones put the truck in gear and attacked another slope. It seemed that they were going up more than down, which didn’t make sense to Zula. But when they crawled over the next ridgeline, open country suddenly stretched out before them, foothills diminishing and descending into lowlands that were no longer covered in snow.
YESTERDAY, MONDAY, HAD been one of those days when Dodge had got to work early with the intention of getting a hell of a lot accomplished, only to arrive at the realization, just after lunch, that nothing was going to happen. Because it was no longer up to him. He had a whole company—a whole structure of vassals—to drag along in his wake, and it just took them a long time to get mobilized.
He’d have thought that
A companywide memo might have gone some ways toward waking people up, but, as his finger was hovering over the Send button, he realized that this would be a terrible mistake. It would be certain to leak beyond the company network and find its way out into the wild, where it would trigger a gold rush. The one thing they had going in their favor was that no one, outside of Corvallis and Richard and a few others, really had any idea how much money was sitting there. Had this knowledge become public, every T’Rain player in the world would have made a beeline, or rather a ley line, for the Torgai, and things would have gone even more completely out of control. The mere Internet rumor that some gold had been seen there had already triggered a fairly well-organized invasion by those three thousand blue-haired K’Shetriae, which was nothing in the big scheme of things and yet still required strenuous work by Richard to beat it back in some way short of dropping a comet on the head of their Liege Lord.
