Tails You Lose Read Free Page B

braids that draped across the shoulders of his Mohawk Oil coveralls. A pigeon feather was tied into the end of each braid. Both feathers suddenly fluttered, as if in an unseen breeze. A moment later, Reynolds jerked awake as his astral body and physical body merged.
    "Any results?" she asked.
    The shaman bobbed his head several times in the pigeonlike nod he always used. "I think I've found him. I did a quick flythrough of every container on that pier and didn't find any astral signatures. There's only one container that could possibly have anything living inside it—and it's warded against astral intrusion. I couldn't get in."
    "Which one is it?" Alma asked.
    "One of the yellow ones." He pointed a slender finger. "It's second from the bottom in the row under the blue crane—five back from the end of the row where the crane's working now. There's a green container above it and a red one below. Can you see it?" Alma increased the wipers' speed and sighted along Reynolds' forefinger. When she found it, she used her binocular vision to note the blue crane's number—C21—and to get a closer look at the container itself. She saw what she expected: "Swift Wind Cargo" stenciled on the side in red Chinese characters. The container had four others stacked above it, and its ends were wedged tight against containers to either side of it in the row.
    "What side is the door on?" she asked.
    Reynolds pointed with a bob of his head. "West side."
    She backed off her cybereyes' magnification and used her eye's camera function to snap a digital image of the terminal, marking the position of the target container with a red crosshair. Given the crane's speed—it took an average of three point five minutes to lift and load each container onto the ship—they had approximately one hour and forty-eight minutes before their target would be lifted onto the Plum Blossom . The Swift Wind container was in the second-best possible position: only one level up from the ground. Clearing the door meant lifting five containers out of the stack—with luck, the Plum Blossom ' s crew wouldn't notice that those five containers were being loaded out of sequence. Once they were out of the way—a process that should take approximately seventeen minutes and thirty seconds—Alma could open the door and haul the stabilization unit out onto the top of the adjoining container in the bottom row. From there, it was a three-meter drop to the ground—a distance that Reynolds could easily handle with a levitation spell.
    The only worry was the magical ward. Whoever had extracted Gray Squirrel didn't want him to be found. The ward made her wonder if any other protective measures had been put in place.
    She activated the microphone that was implanted under her skin and spoke to the team's technical support member. "Rover to Base."
    A female voice whispered softly from the subdermal speaker located behind Alma's left ear. "Base here." The transmissions were encrypted, but even so, her teams were trained never to use personal identifiers on air. Riva Schell was one of PCI's best Matrix-intrusion experts. Alma had hand-picked her for this job.
    "Observer has located our target. It's located under unit Charlie Two One, position two from ground, five units back from area where Charlie Two One is currently engaged. Primary color '
yukon
,' secondary color 'romeo.' Access is on west side and will require five relocations. Please confirm instructions, over."
    There was a moment's pause. Alma waited patiently, knowing that Schell would be accessing the automated crane's monitor cameras and visual-positioning systems.
    "I see it," Schell said.
    Alma instructed Schell to stand by. She did a quick radio check with Reynolds, who was wired with the standard ear speaker and mini-mike favored by delivery drivers, and then cracked the door of the van.
    A gust of cold wind blew in through the partially open door, and in that same moment thunder grumbled overhead. The rain suddenly