Tricked

working on her Latin, and Oberon had found someone game enough to play tug-of-war with him on a piece of rope. It was Ben Keonie, and he was now the foreman for the crew.
    › Hey, Atticus, you watching this? ‹ he asked.
    Yes. You’d better let him win, Oberon. If you pull him down, he’ll lose face with his crew .
    › Oh. Good thing you said something, because I was about to yank him off his feet and then hump his leg, proclaiming him to be my bitch. ‹
    Play nice with him and you’ll earn back a sausage. Negative fourteen .
    › Okay! This is fun anyway. He’s making growly noises at me. He’d probably make a good dog. ‹
    I called Granuaile over for a confab and explained that I’d need a ride down to Black Mesa. » Colorado’s forcing me to pull a Monkey Wrench Gang before he’ll agree to move gold here. «
    » What’s a Monkey Wrench Gang? «
    » You’ve never read Edward Abbey? «
    Granuaile shrugged. » Nope. «
    » Well, they call it ecoterrorism now, and I would agree that if you blow stuff up you’re being terrifying. But I’m not going to do that. I’m going to sabotage their machinery in a completely safe manner. It will effectively shut down their operation and they’ll have to replace everything before they start again. «
    » You can do that? «
    » Sure. They can’t stop me. All I have to do is sneak in there and unbind the steel in the engines. Or bind the pistons to the cylinder walls. Turns ’em into big hunks of scrap metal, no way to repair it. «
    » Well, why don’t you do that more often? Wouldn’t that protect the earth? «
    » I could spend my entire life doing it, shifting from place to place, and I still wouldn’t stop them. I can do one big mine, maybe two, a day. So that’s 730 mines a year if I don’t take a day off and never spend two nights in the same place. Do you know how many mines there are in this country alone? Tens of thousands. And for every mine I shut down, another one will start somewhere else. Even the ones I shut down will reopen after a while. And that’s doing nothing about developing and dams and overfishing and oil spills and clear-cutting virgin rain forest for cow pasture so some fat man in Rio can have a steak. There’s no way I can keep up. «
    Granuaile tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear and sighed. » Kind of depressing when you put it like that. «
    » On the bright side, what Coyote’s proposing to do here is a step in the right direction. He’s right, you need a lot of capital to create a new energy infrastructure. The problem with generating so much electricity in a concentrated area is that there’s no efficient way to transfer it to the rest of the country, and the government’s not going to step up and do the right thing anytime soon. «
    » Been meaning to ask you about that, sensei. «
    » Ask what? «
    » How do we know Coyote’s going to use the gold the way he says he is? What if this is just a scheme to get rich and make a fool of you, and all that talk in Tuba City was one big con job? He knows what you are and what buttons to push. Why are you buying his story at face value? «
    I pointed down the hill. » They’re certainly investing in something down there. «
    » Yeah, but it could be a casino for all you know. Or Coyote’s paying them to put down stakes in an impressive pattern for our benefit. «
    » All right, « I conceded, » it bears investigation. Coyote certainly deserves the skepticism. I’ll have Oberon spy on them, because people say all kinds of crazy stuff to dogs. « I switched mental gears to talk to my hound, who was still playing with Ben Keonie. Hey, Snugglepumpkin!
    › Very funny, Atticus. ‹
    Heh! Granuaile and I are going off site for a while. I want you to stick next to Sophie Betsuie this afternoon and report later on everything she talks about. Listen especially for anything regarding the project she’s working on. I want to know what they’re building .
    › Don’t we know that already? I thought it was going to be buildings they would use to build other stuff. Solar-power stuff. ‹
    We’re treating this like nuclear-arms reduction. Trust, but verify .
    › I don’t know, Atticus. She’s going to pet me a lot and tell me I’m precious. Sounds like rough duty for a hound of my delicate constitution. ‹
    Whatever, you big baby. Negative thirteen sausages .
    › Twelve! ‹
    Thirteen, with a possible bonus if your report is satisfactory .
    › Deal! I’m on it! ‹
    Oberon