by Larry Niven
“They won’t hurt you,” Angelique said, gently now.
“But they might hurt you. And I couldn’t stand that.” His eyes widened. “I know. If we survive this, I will still be rich. Anyone who helps me turn myself in, I will give a hundred thousand New dollars.”
Sharmela blinked. “Let me understand this. You want to bribe us to help you sacrifice yourself to save us. That is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Prince Ali groaned, and sat, heavily. “You are all insane,” he said.
Wayne ruffled Ali’s tightly curled hair. “Yeah. Ain’t it cool?”
“Any answer?” Shotz asked.
“Nothing, but…” Stavros frowned. “I’m getting a signal from the motor pool,” he said, touching a finger to his ear. “A vehicle has been released from the northern bay.”
Shotz froze, then turned his head almost as if it balanced on a pivot. “Is it heading toward us?”
“I can’t see it, or track it.” Stavros looked up. “I should see something, dammit. Either the monitor is malfunctioning, or…” His voice trailed off, brow furrowing.
Something was wrong. None of the Beehive’s monitors indicated a problem, but Celeste was taking nothing for granted. She snatched the monitor from Stavros’ hand. If he’d seen a Scorpion leave the northern bay, and then turn east or west, she might have relaxed. But instead she saw nothing on the monitor.
“Yes. The other hand is always possible. Alert alpha and bravo teams. And inform me if the situation changes.”
The Scorpion had reached the Beehive’s eastern edge, the dome’s G level. The ten men and women fastened their own pressure suits, then checked each other’s gear soberly. When the twelve-point survey was complete, each gave a “thumb’s-up.”
“We can’t do this blind,” Piering said into his microphone. “We need those deep-scans. Where are the hostiles?”
Kendra’s voice was a welcome sound. “Infrared shows them on E and F. Our people are on G.”
“Couldn’t be better. Is there any way to communicate with them?”
“Not at the moment. But they’ve been told to hunker down.”
“Then I think it’s time.” Piering clicked the com line off, and turned to his nine volunteers. “Let’s move. Group A?”
The guy everyone called Gypsy stood first, five foot two of pure flex-steel, and mean as a snake. The other five stood up after. Jankins, the miner, said “Good luck,” and then joined Gypsy and the others in the airlock. Just before the door closed behind them, Piering said: “Take the Scorpion around to the next door. And… good luck.”
Waiting for the lock to cycle to green felt like the longest minutes of his life. One of his compatriots, an ex-police officer named Chambers who had retired to Luna, spoke first.
“If the atmosphere is good… I mean if the dome still has integrity, do we shuck suits?”
“I don’t think so,” Piering said. “What if they depressurize the dome? It’s their best threat. Remove that, and they might back down.” He didn’t like the unspoken possibility: That in the next minutes, every unsuited human being in that dome might die.
Kendra stood in the control center, examining the holographic model now shimmering on the stage.
“We’ve retasked the mining satellites,” she said. “But I really didn’t expect to have the images so quickly-or with such clarity.”
“That,” Xavier said, “is because you were not expecting me. Then again, how could you?” There was just enough self-mockery in his voice to take the edge off. A miniature gaming dome shimmered in the air before them like a floating crown. “I’ve created a map,” Xavier said with a hint of real pride. “Mining deep-scans, some infrared information, reports from this Kowsnofski woman.”
With a wave of his hand, the dome’s outer skin peeled away. Tiny human figures in red and green were clustered in various bubbles. “Our best guess. We must accept that they’ve probably screwed with the inputs. I would. However, if the information is accurate, then our people are down here ”-he indicated something near ground level-“and our antagonists are here.” He indicated two levels up.
“That’s good,” Kendra said. “And that means that our best bet is to insert our people between… what did Angelique call them? Pirates? Fine. Pirates and gamers. At the very least, we slow them down. And maybe we stop them completely.”
She took a closer look. The dome had seven public entrances and three service entrances. “We’re assuming that they’ve mined some but not all of the entrances. Piering is going for door six.”
Magique’s fingers flurried with sign. Wu Lin watched, and then interpreted. “Why don’t you think all of them were mined?”
“Because we know the pirates probably acquired their explosives here, and we’ve run inventory. About enough missing material to make four or five explosive devices. There is a very good chance that here on level C, where Asako Tabata’s body was left, might still be clear. We can reach it up an access ladder from a service entrance on ground level G. We have no data suggesting that more entrances have been mined since the gamers broke free, and we have to assume that our gamers put a crimp in the pirates’ plans. We’ll split into two teams. One will go in at F, the other at C. And then we’ll see what happens.”
“We have movement in the dome.” Kendra’s voice in Piering’s ear. “Power surges.”
“Which doors?”
“ Maintenance two and three.”
“What about door seven?” Piering asked. He could smell the chicken sandwich he’d had for lunch, his own sour breath bouncing back at him from the faceplate. Nerves.
“Nothing so far. We picked up security camera blips, just after the attack went down. Look-they wouldn’t be able to do everything at once, and when the gamers complicated things, it may have changed their focus.”
“We’ll find out in about sixty seconds,” Piering said. “Let’s get ready to move, people,” he said, trying to shut the doubt out of his head. “We better have three ‘esses’ on our side: speed, silence and surprise.”
“And serendipity,” muttered Hazel Trout, the round woman from Communications.
“And shit-storm,” Chambers said. “We’d better bring the pain.”
The four heroes of group B opened the inner lock. The access ladder was only a meter away, and Piering grabbed a rung and began to climb.
It took about five minutes to crawl from ground level to C, and another minute to locate the correct maintenance doors. Piering punched in a code, and the door slid up. The first thing Piering saw in the lock was Asako Tabata’s pod. It crowded the little room, so that they had to squeeze past, but none of the four rescuers could resist looking in through the polyglas lid. Her face was turned to the right side, pale and slightly bluish. He didn’t know her, had never met her. But she seemed so small and vulnerable, so much like a sleeping child that his heart almost broke.
We’ll get them for you, he thought. Every one of the bastards.
The airlock’s inner door bore a single window, inch-thick composition plastic harder than glass and stronger than steel. And all he could see beyond it was an empty corridor.
“Unhook the door from the grid,” he said, “and open it.”
Chambers opened the inner panel, and slotted a handheld scanner into place. Piering watched as the guy manipulated glowing red and green lines, effectively isolating the door from the maintenance grid. If the pirates were monitoring, this might… might… bamboozle them.
He held his breath as the door slid open. No explosion.
Piering and his three partners stepped out onto a metal walkway. He motioned Hazel and Lee around to the right, while he and Chambers went left. The walkway curled around the inner wall, separating it from a maze of pipes, wiring and support struts. The microphone in his suit helmet picked up his own footfalls, and a mixture of small hollow machine sounds.
“Anything, Lee?”
Lee was a tall brunette from the tool and die workshops, a veteran of the S
econd Canadian War. “Nothing so far. Hazel and I are on point. Can you find our gamers?”
A map of the inner bubble layout played on his faceplate, a framework of intersecting green lines. The gamers’ last known location was marked in red. Around the curve of the dome, and then in through a few rows of bubbles, then down a level. They just might make it. If they could find their targets, it might be possible to evacuate the gamers to the Scorpion, or at the least form a security wall between the innocent and the guilty… and then hang on for dear life until more help arrived.
His nail gun had an effective range of about a dozen meters. Beyond that they would tumble and act as dull projectiles, still capable of stinging but no longer lethal.
“Piering…” Lee whispered. “I see something-”
Red mist clouded Shotz’ vision. He fought to keep it from swallowing logic, wished desperately to maintain perspective. He had known that Prince Ali Kikaya III could be grabbed. Anyone could be kidnapped or killed, given the appropriate resources and commitment. He had trusted that political pressure on Earth could control the security response. It had always been possible that the gamers might try to escape, but his soldiers had bottled them in the dome. Conceivably, even if their targets escaped, but remained within the dome, the political situation in Central Africa would not be negatively affected.
And now, in defiance of her own superiors, the Griffin woman was striking against them. Though it was invisible to their monitors, Douglas Frost had finally done something useful and spotted the Scorpion transport through one of the dome’s few external windows. Shotz had positioned his people to protect the unmined doors. Pure strategy: Give your opponent an apparent entry point, bottle them there and set up a kill zone.
And then: Demonstrate the price of disobedience.
Two of his men were positioned at the dome’s base level, with complementary fields of fire directed at different doors and maintenance ladders in the southern section of the dome. Others were positioned on levels C and E.
When he first glimpsed his adversaries, he cursed silently. Damn! They were wearing pressure suits. Well, of course they were, but frankly he hadn’t factored that in when designing their assault and defensive gear back on Earth.
Celeste might be right: There was no way to deal with these problems if their highest priority was zero casualties. Celeste was often right.
That was one of the reasons he cared for her. He wouldn’t call it love, exactly. Wasn’t entirely certain he could actually feel that emotion. He considered it, and infatuation, and even sexual attraction to be snares. As he had used it to snare that silly little chocolate heiress in Switzerland There! A head popped back up for a moment. Someone was climbing the ladder. Shotz counted three and then pressed the wireless detonator. A sharp explosion and a shower of sparks from the ladder. A scream, and the climber tumbled down out of sight.
Shotz was scanning for their communications frequency, but so far had picked up nothing. Communications along a private, hidden frequency? Possibly.
He shifted position until he could see the shattered ladder and the three men clustered at the bottom, one still apparently stunned.
This was the moment. He raised his hand, motioning for Frost and Fujita to follow his lead. He aimed the air gun carefully, and pulled the trigger.
Piering heard the scream as the first explosion rocked the dome over around to his left, and a second howl of dismay a moment later, elongated as someone plunged a long distance, to a solid impact. Then… his external mike picked up a short, sharp explosion, and another scream.
Damn! Lee and Hazel had been discovered. “Get back,” he screamed. They would try from the second ladder! If he failed, there were still his A team down on level F… if any of them had survived that first explosion. If he could even keep these bastards busy, that might be enough to give his compatriots a chance. The makeshift weapons put everyone on a more equal footing. These men were experts. Perhaps trained killers, but certainly willing to use violence. In comparison his own people, however well intended, were mere amateurs.
Moving farther left around the catwalk, he and Chambers reached a second ladder. Helmet infrared showed no one lurking around the edges, and visual failed to detect anything dangerous. Still, his heart thundered as he began to climb.
Piering got halfway up, then motioned the ex-cop to follow.
He reached the next level and crouched as much as the suit would allow him, cradling his nail gun, scanning the shadows. Nothing. Perhaps he could circle back around and help Lee and her people. “Lee?” he asked into the helmet. “What’s happening over there?”
“Hazel is down,” she said. “An arrow stuck in the suit, didn’t rupture, thank God. But the explosion knocked out her visuals, damaged her faceplate.”
“Stay where you are,” he said. “But make noise. Make them think you’re still an active threat.”
He duck-walked into a shadow, pressed himself against the bulk of a compressor, peering around the corner trying to pierce the shadows.
Then… the second ladder exploded. A wall of light and air, followed a moment later by a high-pitched scream from Chambers. He knew what had happened: Their enemies had outthought them, split their forces rather than simply destroy access to the next level. Now he was stranded on C level, with the wounded Chambers isolated on F. Smart.
“Chambers. Are you all right?”
“Damn! My faceplate cracked, and the sealant is clouding my vision. The explosion screwed up my suit balance somehow. I’m having trouble getting up.”
He was being watched, and somehow the watchers had avoided his scans. With a ping! something struck his air cylinders, and swung him around. Damn! If those cylinders were damaged, he was completely A quick check of his indicators suggested that no such disaster had taken place. The pencil-thin red beam of a laser lanced through the murk.
“Damn it!” Chambers swore. “Bastards!”
“What?”
“Ah, fall like that should have killed me. Tweaked my knee, too.”
“Stay where you are. Snipe if you get the chance. Let’s see-”
Another explosion, short and viciously sharp, and his suit doppler fixed it at a hundred meters distant. That would be his first team. “Gypsy!” he called. “What’s the situation?”
“We have snipers. Boss, we didn’t blind ’em. They knew what we were doing. What do we do?”
“Can you see any of them?”
“May have blinded one. Not sure.”
“All right. That’s something. All right. I think that time is on our side. Take it easy-we’ll have reinforcements, I hope. And meanwhile, our guests are safe.”
Safe, perhaps, but not secure. The eight gamers were clustered in a bubble on G level. The ugly thrum-thrum of dual detonations echoed through the bubble’s floor.
“What’s happening?” Maud asked, clutching Mickey’s hand. She seemed very frail.
“That’s the cavalry,” Mickey said.
“He might be right,” Scotty said. “Assuming that Kendra took action-”
“Who is Kendra?” Sharmela asked.
“Chief of Operations of Heinlein. And… my ex.”
Wayne cocked an eyebrow. “Family that plays together.”
There was another sharp explosive thrum. Angelique sidled up to him. “Scotty. Where did our rescuers enter the dome?”
He shrugged. “Darla?”
“One of the ground-level entrances, I reckon.”
“Could they have brought a vehicle with them? Is there any chance at all that we can exit the way they came in?”
“Maybe. If we had pressure suits we could just walk home. Unless the entrances are covered.”
“What do you mean?”
“These people. The Moresnot pirates. They ain’t even partial stupid. They’ll have entrances covered.”
“Can they cover all of them? They don’t have enough people.”
“Not all. But maybe enough.”
“What can w
e do? Isn’t there some way we can help?” Wayne asked.
“Stay out of their way,” Scotty said, his voice brimming with a confidence he did not feel. “And let the professionals work.”
We’re the professionals, Shotz snarled to himself, ducking back as a bolt from some kind of air gun splattered against the wall next to him. It was off target, and even if it had hit, the wall was barely chipped by the impact. While it was certainly true that the pressure suits acted as elementary armor, his opponents weren’t in a much better position.
There was a potential upside to the situation, which even now could hardly be considered a standoff. The positive possibility was that the gamers, in a misguided attempt to aid their rescuers or even escape, would reveal themselves. If the assaulting team were in contact with their prey (and he had a very real instinct that they were), then they might have entered the dome at their quarry’s level, or above. Below? Perhaps, but Shotz and his people had searched levels A through F thoroughly, and found nothing. He was going to make a bet: their quarry was somewhere on G, planning to make their way down to the pool for an exit. Well, there was no exit there, and so long as he kept these incompetent fools bottled up, or sent them packing, all was well.
“Shotz!” a voice barked in his ear. It was Carlyle, covering the dome’s northeast side. “We have action here. The ladder is down, but they managed to hit Bai Long with a laser, I think. Half-blinded him, dammit!”
“Pull him back. Don’t expose yourself if you don’t have to, and-”
And then, there was another explosion. Deeper this time, shaking the very flooring below him, followed by the frenzied shriek of an alarm. He had heard that alarm before, but this time, he didn’t think it was a bluff.
“Piering?” Klaus Gruber whispered. Gruber was in Food Handling, but in a former life had been a sergeant in the European Union. Piering knew him a little. Once, Gruber and Lee had gotten into a friendly karaoke duel about “49th,” the notorious ballad about the Second Canadian War. The thing about “49th” wasn’t that it was particularly obscene. No worse than “Eskimo Nell,” in all probability. But there were two entirely different sets of lyrics, one from each side of the border. And it was always dicey whether such duels would stay friendly or end with someone getting peeled off the ceiling.