Chapter 16: To the Tower

I went to the tunnels first.

Soren was awake. She was always awake at this hour, it seemed, the way people with enough on their conscience don't sleep deeply. I came through the junction and into her workspace and told her in twenty words what I'd found and what Osei had said about the timeline.

She was already getting up before I'd finished the second sentence.

"The documentation," I said. "All of it. Ready to carry."

"Ten minutes," she said.

"Five," I said.

The grey-bearded man — I finally learned his name was Crane — organized the tunnel community's movement. They had contingencies, as Soren had said. Six people going east through the secondary tunnel, toward a surface exit in the Fifth Sector that they'd kept clear for exactly this kind of situation. The remaining three, including Crane and a young woman whose name I didn't get, would come with us to the tower. More hands meant more speed on the setup.

Osei arrived at the 38th Street entrance twenty minutes after I'd left her building. She was carrying a bag over her shoulder and a flat case under her arm. She came down the rungs without hesitation and didn't look around at the underground space with the expression that people who had never been underground usually wore. She just looked at me and said: "The meeting with the outer sector contacts. Harkin is moving the militia proposal vote to the day after tomorrow."

"Two days," I said.

"Less than two days. The session starts in the morning."

Soren came through from the tunnel. Osei saw her and stopped.

The two women looked at each other in the lantern light. They hadn't seen each other in thirty years, and the intervening time was visible in both of them — the damage and the accommodation and the long work of continuing after something catastrophic. Osei had reached for Soren across the distance of those thirty years, through a signal on a dead frequency. Soren had answered without knowing who was listening. They'd been circling each other from opposite directions for thirty years and the gap had finally closed in a tunnel under Haven Falls in the rain.

Neither of them spoke. Then Soren said: "Mariam."

"Yael." Osei's voice was steady but something in it wasn't. "You still have the documentation."

"And you still have the access records," Soren said. She looked at the flat case under Osei's arm. "All of it?"

"Everything I could carry without triggering questions." She transferred the flat case to Soren, who took it with both hands. "The supply chain manifests, the contact logs, the message records going back three years. And one more thing." She reached into the bag at her shoulder and took out something I hadn't expected: a small device, pre-Quiet electronics in a hardened case. "Harkin's shortwave unit. The one I've been using."

I looked at it. A shielded transmitter-receiver, compact military spec, in better condition than anything I'd built from salvage. The kind of thing that would have run on a dedicated power supply before The Quiet, but which had been modified — I could see the modification wires at the back panel — to run from a battery bank.

"You took his transmitter," I said.

"I took a transmitter," she said. "He has two. He'll notice in the morning." A pause. "We won't need morning."

Crane looked at the device with the expression of a practical man assessing useful equipment. "What's the power output?"

"Forty watts at the set point," Osei said. "I've run it at sixty watts for short periods. The power stage is rated for eighty."

Sixty watts into the tower's antenna feed. That was enough. That was more than enough.

We moved out.

The north hill wasn't far in distance — maybe two kilometers from the tunnel entrance. In the rain, at night, moving a group of seven people with equipment across three sector boundaries, it was a different kind of distance. Crane went ahead. The young woman whose name I still hadn't learned turned out to be, when she opened her mouth, the most efficient person in the group at reading the terrain and identifying cover. She moved between buildings with a confidence that suggested she'd been doing this for years.

We were at the tower base by 1 AM.

The tower was a pre-Quiet lattice structure, sixty meters tall, on a concrete foundation that had settled but not cracked — solid ground under the north hill. The antenna elements at the top were intact. Even in the dark I could see the profile of it against the slightly less dark sky, the red warning beacons long since dead. The building at its base was brick, one story, locked with a bar and hasp that I cut through with bolt cutters from the canvas bag. Inside: the generator room, stripped of its pre-Quiet electronics but retaining the structural elements, including the antenna feed terminal on the west wall.

The feed terminal was a SO-239 connector, standard pre-Quiet specification. The line running up to the antenna was hardened coax cable in a protective conduit along the tower's southeast face. I checked the cable with a continuity tester I'd built from salvage — a simple ohmmeter in a tin case. The line was intact. No breaks, no shorts.

I connected Osei's transmitter to the feed terminal through the matching network I'd assembled — a simple L-network to match the transmitter's output impedance to the antenna system — and spent fifteen minutes tuning it while Crane and the young woman held lanterns and Soren and Osei sorted documentation.

The tune was approximate. I didn't have a proper SWR meter, only a simple indicator I'd built from a directional coupler and a diode detector, and the indicator told me the reflected power was within acceptable limits but not optimal. I adjusted the matching network twice more. Better. Good enough.