Pay Me, Bug!

Chapter 25

WHEREIN It Is Decided It Just Might Work

When Grif walked in to the conference room, Velis and Bennet were waiting for him.

"You've been drinking," Velis said.

"A bit," Grif admitted.

He sat down on the opposite side of the table--their natural positions, he thought with some amusement--and studied them carefully. Bennet was openly curious, and slightly anxious. Velis didn't look curious, she looked as if she were just barely controlling the urge to kill.

"All right," Grif said. "I'll come straight to the point. I found a way in... sort of."

Velis snorted in disgust. "'Sort of' doesn't cut it."

"At least hear the plan before you reject it out of hand," Grif said. "We're going to have to get a little a creative. There's no way we're going to get in and out of that place carrying that damn thing in a sack."

Velis looked annoyed, but continued to listen.

"Ur Voys is too well guarded on most days," Grif continued, "and now that they're dealing with the mystery of their missing anagathics it's going to be locked down tighter than ever."

"So what do you suggest?" Bennet asked.

"Glad you asked." Grif grinned at both of them. "It just so happens that Ur Voys isn't a self-sufficient installation. It has regular shipments of supplies going into it, and it ships out what it produces in its labs. It also ships out any equipment that needs major repairs."

"We already tried that," Bennet said. "We thought we could infiltrate one of the maintenance crews that repairs their equipment. Ur Voys might use other facilities, but they transport everything themselves. They ship out all the equipment they need fixed, drop it off, and then pick up the equipment when it's ready to go. And all equipment is scanned to make sure there aren't people hiding in any of it."

"That won't be an issue," Grif said. "We won't be sending people into Ur Voys."

Velis frowned. "Grif, you're not going to be able to fast-talk your way out of doing this."

"I'm not talking my way out of anything," Grif insisted. "If we're going to have any chance of pulling this off, we can't send people into Ur Voys. People attract attention. Even if we could successfully smuggle someone in to Ur Voys--even if we could get someone in there legitimately--they'd be under observation the entire time, and they'd get noticed."

Velis nodded reluctantly. "That was our problem in previous attempts. There's a specific culture in the facility that requires a fair amount of indoctrination to adopt. We couldn't fake it." She narrowed her eyes. "How did you pull it off?"

Grif waved his hand dismissively. "Not important. Like I said, this time we won't be sending people."

"What then?"

"A thing, Velis. Rather, things. Specifically, robots. Robots are mobile. People don't bother looking at them twice." Grif punched in a command in front of his terminal, and the picture of a high security military complex appeared on each of the terminals in the conference room.

"This is Ur Ados," he said. "It's a facility that, among other things, does most of the repair work for any Ur Voys robots that need maintenance. It was mentioned in one of the files you sent me, Bennet. A brief footnote. It's listed in the public record of Varkav, so it's public knowledge… though it is high security and restricted."

Velis nodded again. "We tried to use that facility as a staging area for an infiltration. As far as we can tell, all agents died before the operation could get underway."