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He reached out for it, and Garrett’s voice came back, clear as day.
“There’s no way they’d know about this entrance. They’re not from here.”
Another voice replied, one Maxwell had heard before but not frequently enough to place it instantly. “But we’re still going to have to come up in that elevator.”
“Our options are either the elevator or the main entrance, and they’ll see us a mile away if we use the main entrance.” Garrett again, but quieter, as though his voice was fading into the distance.
Maxwell tried to follow, and all at once, his awareness doubled, tripled, exploded exponentially, and he was everywhere.
He was on every floor of the endless elevator’s shaft.
He stared out over abandoned offices and rec rooms and storage rooms and tunnel after tunnel after tunnel.
He could see row upon row of sealed boxes of uranium ore on the other side of the door he pressed against.
And he could see himself, leaned up against that door, shaking and growling while Kurt Buck frowned at him and the surrounding pirates exchanged uneasy glances.
He could see from every camera in the entire Thule mining complex that fed through the wires plugged into the back of Maxwell’s skull. And he had access to so much more than that.
“I can do it.” Maxwell’s own voice echoed back to him threefold from his own ears and from the two cameras on either side of the door close enough to pick up the audio feed. “I’ve got it.”
Kurt gave his face a little shake. “That’s what I like to hear, baby.”
Maxwell pulled his awareness out of his own body and let it loose to seek out the presence in this mind that called to him like a beacon.
A few levels below them and barely half a mile away, Garrett led a human man Maxwell didn’t recognize, as well as Patrick and his team of klah’eel soldiers, through a dark tunnel as quickly as possible in the oppressive gloom. It had been Patrick’s voice that Maxwell hadn’t been able to place. But who was the second man?
As soon as he spoke, Maxwell recognized him.
“Can’t you move any faster?”
Garrett scowled over his shoulder at him. “Not in this dark. You want to fall into a mineshaft? Then we’ll never get to him in time.”
Sebastian.
Maxwell’s heart swelled in his chest, and he let out a relieved sob. Garrett and Sebastian were coming for him. His friends were coming for him.
And he could do something about that dark. He groped around, and the security system that had felt like an invading force before helpfully offered up exactly what he was looking for. He pushed his will through the twisting wires of the system, and in a moment, the light above Garrett and Sebastian flickered on.
Garrett skidded to a stop. “The fuck?”
Sebastian narrowly avoided bouncing off his back. “Did you do that?”
“No.”
With a thrill of newfound power, Maxwell flicked on the rest of the lights in front of them, one after the other, until the whole tunnel blazed with light.
“Maxwell.” Garrett took off down the tunnel, flashlight still on but utterly forgotten and ecstatic, disbelieving hope on his handsome face. “He’s in the system.”
Yes! Maxwell could have whooped, and he just barely managed to twist his facial expression into something that looked more like pain and less like joy. Clever, clever, Garrett. He always understood everything before Maxwell could even explain it.
“The door, Maxwell.” Kurt shook Maxwell more violently, and Maxwell came back to himself with a jolt of pain as the plug in the back of his head jarred against the metal door. “Open the door.”
Maxwell opened his eyes and then blinked them rapidly as his mind struggled to reconcile the inputs from the hundreds of cameras feeding into him with the input from his own eyes. Eyes with much sharper video and no pane of glass in front of them like his human body had always had. Finally, he managed to filter out the noise and see. Kurt looked concerned, nervous even, and glancing past him, Maxwell could see why.
Devin’s expression had lost all semblance of patience. The bugs had edged closer, their mandibles still snapping periodically, and some of them had even pulled the rifles off their backs and held them in their hands. The pirates eyed them with both suspicion and open fear, and a number of them had drawn their weapons as well.
Maxwell would have been happy to see them open fire on each other if he wasn’t convinced that the first person to catch a bullet would be him. He found the huge stockpile door in his mind easily enough. With his new intimacy with the system, it would even be trivial for him to open it. But his desire for self-preservation didn’t extend past his loyalty to Southern Tava, and that uranium belonged to them.
