“Excuse me?” I said.
“Think about it,” Jane said. “When you have a BrainPal, it learns to read your thoughts. That’s how it works. Using it to read other people’s thoughts is just a software issue. Generals in the Special Forces have access to their soldiers’ thoughts, although Szilard told me most of the time it’s not very useful, since people are thinking about pointless things. This time, it came in handy.”
“So anyone who has a BrainPal can have their thoughts read,” I said.
Jane nodded. “And now you know why I couldn’t come to Phoenix Station with you. I didn’t want to give anything away.”
I motioned toward the door Rybicki had just stepped out of. “You just gave it away to him,” I said.
“No,” Jane said. “He doesn’t know I’ve been enhanced. He’s just wondering who on his staff leaked, and how it got to me.”
“You’re still reading his mind,” I said.
“Haven’t stopped since he landed,” Jane said. “Won’t stop until he’s gone.”
“What’s he thinking now?” I asked.
“He’s still thinking about how I knew that information,” Jane said. “And he’s thinking about us. He’s hoping we succeed. That part wasn’t a lie.”
“Does he think we will?” I asked.
“Of course not,” Jane said.
The beam turrets focused on the incoming missiles and fired, but there were too many missles to focus on; the turrets went up in excessive blast that flung debris across the fields in which they were located, some distance from Croatoan.
“I’m getting a message,” Jane said, to me and Trujillo. “It’s an order to stop fighting and to prepare for a landing.” She paused. “I’m being told that any further resistance will result in a complete carpet-bombing of the colony. I’m being asked to acknowledge the message. Failure to reply within about a minute will be taken as defiance and bombing will proceed.”
“What do you think?” I asked Jane.
“We’re as ready as we’re going to be for this,” Jane said.
“Manfred?” I said.
“We’re ready,” he said. “And I hope to God this works.”
“Kranjic? Beata?” I turned back to where Jann Kranjic and Beata stood, the two of them fully decked out in reporter gear. Beata nodded; Kranjic gave a thumbs-up.
“Tell them that we acknowledge their message and that we are ceasing fire,” I said, to Jane. “Tell them we look forward to their arrival to discuss terms of surrender.”
“Done,” Jane said, a moment later. I turned to Savitri, who was standing next to Beata. “You’re on,” I said.
“Great,” Savitri said, in an entirely unconvincing tone of voice.
“You’ll be fine,” I said.
“I feel like I’m going to throw up,” she said.
“I’m afraid I left the bucket back at the office,” I said.
“I’ll just throw up on your boots,” Savitri said.
“Seriously,” I said. “Are you ready to do this, Savitri?”
She nodded. “I’m ready,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
We all went to our positions.
Some time later a light in the sky resolved itself into two troop transports. The transports hovered over Croatoan for some small amount of time before landing a klick away in an unsown field. The field had originally been sown; we had plowed under the early seedlings. We’d planned on troop transports and we hoped to convince them to land in a particular spot by making it more appealing than other places. It worked. In the back of my head I imagined Jane smiling grimly. Jane would have been cautious about landing in the one agricultural field that didn’t have plants sticking out of it, but that’s one of the reasons we did it. I would have been cautious, too, when I was leading troops. Basic military competence was going to matter here, and this was our first clue as to what sort of fight we had on our hands.