Alycia briefs the team. “Alex is going to stay here to collect data. Emma is going to support them.”
Emma groans audibly and petulantly. Alex smirks.
“The rest of us are going to Mongolia.”
Nono raises her hand. “Um, what’s in Mongolia?”
Alex answers. “We found Chin-style intelligence traces with a four-sigma probability. Some of our traces led to a series of mines. Our guy from Khartoum could have been a miner, based on his build, scars, and so on. Sooo I pulled stats and looked for anomalies. We found one that looked obviously wrong. They’ve had no reports of accidental injury or death for months.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” asks a perplexed Nono.
“There are always deaths in a mine,” Alycia says hollowly. “Always.”
“So…” Nono struggles to understand.
“So maybe nobody over there cares about death any more,” John interjects. “Like the guy in Khartoum.”
Alycia nods. “Like guys who are taking a drug that addicts them to despair.”
The Tavan Bogd Group owns numerous subsidiaries and affiliates that include food service, mining equipment, restaurants, vehicles, even banking. It’s not huge - 10,000 people is a small American company - but does everything they need.
Alycia, John, and Nono hop on a train. It’s 1000 miles to Baoji via the ultra-high-speed rail, and another back to Ürümqi via slower, but newer, rail lines. The trip still takes long enough for Alex to rustle up truck routes from the Support Services Mongolia LLC’s computers, and by the time they arrive in Ürümqi, a truck is lined up that’ll take the Turpan–Ürümqi–Dahuangshan Expressway through the Gobi desert.
“Stay in the back, out of sight, at all times,” Alycia instructs Nono.
“Guess I’m not ready for infiltration stuff,” she mumbles.
“You’re too white to pass as Mongolian, actually,” Alycia says sternly. Both she and the robot John Black have noticeably Asian features, and Nono concedes the point without further argument. But just in case, Alycia brings a couple of chadors along. A legally sanctioned reason to cover the face is never a bad disguise.
Permits have been issued and papers are in order. Alycia remembers the days when she was expected to forge handwriting and understand how physical documents were passkeys to forbidden areas. Now, Alex is the master of access.
Well, not where we’re going. The mine will be low-tech, and my skills will be relevant once again, she tells herself, consolingly.
The Gobi is cold and rocky, but what makes a desert a desert is the dryness rather than the hotness. Alycia and Nono make a point of staying hydrated, while John smugly goes without food or water. Eventually the terrain elevates, and the peaks in the distance become towering mountains that overshadow the little truck.
“I thought it was just gonna be sand and lizards and stuff,” Nono breathes. “This place is so beautiful.”
“There are perks to being on the run,” Alycia admits. “The world, and its people, cannot be fully appreciated when you live in only one place.”
Tavan Tolgoi is a coal mine owned jointly by a government-owned company and the Mongolian Mining Corporation. It’s nothing the size of Oyu Tolgoi, but it’s still a huge undertaking.
The truck arrives, and is waved through the gate. John steers, while Alycia devotes her time to watching and studying.
There are further guard posts, but they wave the truck through dispassionately. Alycia isn’t sure if they’re drugged, bored, or just tired of working in this gods-forsaken desert, but they’re definitely not exhibiting even a token of caution.
The plan is rough, because nobody knows what to expect here. But in broad terms, Alycia wants a blood sample from a miner, and Nono is ready to analyze it for the despair-inducing drug the new Chin empire has been producing. John will hang out doing robot shit, Alycia presumes, and can intervene if things get dangerous.
The truck itself is loaded with pallets of food and other supplies necessary to keep a big operation like this fed. Alycia waves to a foreman, confirms his questions, and unlocks the rear doors. Another worker is on the way with a forklift. Good enough.
Alycia’s Chinese is much better than her Mongolian, but the foreman understands Chinese. Where’s the front office, where we can drop off paperwork? It’s over that way, through the door, on your left. The noise of the mining operation would be deafening up close, but from this distance it’s just an annoyingly loud rumble that sometimes requires one party to repeat a word.
After the foreman leaves, and the first load of cargo is being taken away, Alycia calls to Nono. “New plan. Agent R, get that chador on, tuck your hair in, and come with me. SNOWMAN, hang out and stall those guys if they get suspicious.”
“Roger,” the robot calls.
It takes a few minutes, and Alycia has to wait for another pallet to be removed, but Nono emerges, dressed down as much as possible. Alycia still fiddles with the fit of the garment for a moment, then beckons.
“I want to try an experiment,” she explains. “Everyone - everyone - here seems unmotivated. You and I are going to walk through the facility. Walk with a purpose, whatever happens, unless I tell you to do something else.”
“Ohhh.” Nono brightens up. “Bathroom spying.”
“What?”
“When I had Agent R need to infiltrate a place and look like she belonged there, I’d have her pretend she needs to go to the bathroom pretty bad. That would give her the intensity needed to pass herself off as someone who shouldn’t be questioned.”
Alycia pauses. “That’s… Not bad, actually. Alright, yes.”
“I won’t have to act for this part,” Nono confesses.
Alycia nods in renewed understanding. “Yes… yes. Very well, let’s go.”
The pair enter the mining offices. Alycia does drop off the manifest, something she should have no need to do at all - the electronic version is already in their computers, right? But the office worker doesn’t seem to care.
Experimentally, Alycia reaches across the counter, but the office drone looks up sharply at her, and she plays it off like she’s stretching after a long drive.
Interesting. So there are limits to the effect. If things all seem to be routine, nobody pays much attention. If something deviates from expectations, they start to wake up.
“Can we use your bathroom?” Alycia asks.
“Down the hall, between rooms 4 and 5.”
“Thank you.”
Next experiment. Will the office folk think about them after they leave? Alycia and Nono spend a full hour in the office complex. They rig the toilets to collect samples, head to the infirmary to see if there’s anybody already suitable for a blood draw, even discuss (but reject) knocking someone out and drawing some blood directly. At the end of the hour, Alycia has acquired enough samples to take back to the chemistry kit, and satisfied herself that nobody seems alerted by their wandering through the complex.
The truck has been unloaded for fifteen minutes by the time they get back. SNOWMAN is doodling designs on the blank pages of the truck’s technical manual. Nobody seems intent on shooing them away from the mine, so Nono starts work on the analysis. Just in case, she’s already checked the food they’ve brought over from China - no trace of the drug there. If these people are indeed the victims of Chin’s tool of despair, it’s being brought in from elsewhere.
Curious, Alycia hops back out of the truck and studies the ground for tracks. The sandy soil is such that tire tracks and footprints won’t last long, but she’s bored and that’s never a good thing. Predictably, she finds only the truck’s tracks coming in, along with the forklift’s distinctive wheels.
How about a helicopter? She sees a few spots nearby that are both level enough to accommodate a chopper and accessible to the forklift, but nothing actually paved and labeled as a helipad. Night landings in this terrain would be difficult, but possible.
She spots SNOWMAN’s hand out the window of the cab, beckoning her back.
“It’s the stuff, it’s the formula Mr. Bazar talked about,” reports Nono.
“The despair drug.” Alycia’s thought processes ramp up immediately. “Application. The lab we found created tablets of the stuff. They may import premolded tablets in bulk, import powder and make tablets locally, or even synthesize the stuff here with a molecular lathe or similar tool.”
“A lathe takes a lot of energy,” SNOWMAN points out. “Halcyon’s energy grid and my graphene batteries could handle the load, but a place like this?”
“It’s possible they’ve got a synthesis pipeline somewhere in the mine,” counters Alycia.
“Good point. Okay. How do we track this down?”
“Find when the miners take the drug. Work backward from there to find the local source. Stake it out if applicable to see when, how, and from where it’s created or delivered.”
“So someone’s gonna have to go be a miner,” SNOWMAN says. “Guess that’s gonna have to be me.”
“Correct. Agent R and I will leave, set up camp somewhere, and keep watch on comings and goings.”
Alcyia looks from face to face. Nono and John both nod.
A leader should say something decisive and inspirational here, she tells herself.
“We’re… we’re close to our objective now.” She swallows, throat unaccountably dry for a moment. “This is what everything we’ve done has led to. You’ve both … uh, you’ve both really done great.”
She is secretly proud to see them both smile in acknowledgement of the compliment.
“That’s why I’m going to drive you both twice as hard from now on.”