The pilot stayed aboard, and Taura counted off four other Dendarii. Two vanished into the shadows of the perimeter, two stayed with the shuttle as rear-guard. He and Thorne had argued about that. Thorne had wanted more perimeter. His own gut-feel was that they would need as many troopers as possible at the clone-creche. The civilian hospital guards were little threat, and it would take time for their better-armed back-up to arrive. By then, the Dendarii would be gone, if they could move the clones along fast enough. He cursed himself, in retrospect, for not ordering two commando squads instead of one, back at Escobar. He could have done so, just as easily, but he’d been caught up in calculations about the Ariel’s passenger capacity, and fancied himself conserving life support for the final escape. So many factors to balance.
His own helmet framed his vision with a colored clutter of codes, numbers, and graphs. He’d studied them all, but they flicked by too fast; by the time he’d taken one in, and interpreted it to himself, it was gone, replaced by another. He took Thorne’s advice, and with a whispered word reduced the light intensity to a bare hallucinatory murmur. The helmet’s audio pick-up was not so bad. No one was doing any unnecessary chatter.
He, Thorne, and the other seven Dendarii followed Taura at a trot—her stride—between two adjacent buildings. There was activity on the Bharaputran security guards’ comm links, he found by keying his helmet to their audio bands. The first What the hell. Did you hear that? Joe, check sector four, stirrings of response. More to follow, he was sure, though he had no intention of waiting around for it.
Around a corner. There. A three-story, pleasant white building with lots of plants and landscaping, big windows, balconies. Not quite a hospital, not quite a dormitory, vague, ambiguous, discreet. the life house it was labelled in Jacksonian double-speak. The death house. My dear old home. It was terribly familiar and terribly strange. Once, it had seemed quite splendid to him. Now it seemed … smaller than he remembered.
Taura raised her plasma arc, adjusted its beam to wide, and removed the locked glass front doors in an orange, white, and blue spray of flying, spattering melt. Dendarii bounded through, splitting right and left, before the glow of the spattered globs of glass died. One took up station patrolling the ground floor. Alarms and fire alarms went off: Dendarii killed the noisy speakers they passed with more plasma fire, on the fly, but units in more distant parts of the building kept up a muted clamor. Automatic sprinklers made steam and a mess in their trail.
He ran to catch up. A uniformed Bharaputran security guard in brown trimmed with pink lurched into the corridor ahead. Three Dendarii stunners simultaneously downed him as his own stunner beam was absorbed harmlessly by the ceiling.
Taura and two female Dendarii took the lift tube toward the third floor; another trooper passed them in hope of gaining the roof. He led Thorne and the remaining troopers out into the second floor foyer and to the left. Two unarmed adults, one a night-gowned woman pulling on a robe, were felled the instant they appeared. There. Through those double doors. They were locked, and someone was beating on them from the inside.
“We’re going to break the door open,” Thorne bellowed through it. “Back away, or you’ll get hurt!” The pounding stopped. Thorne nodded. A trooper adjusted his plasma arc to narrow beam, and sliced through a metal bolt. Thorne kicked the doors wide.
A blond young man fell back a pace, and stared at Thorne with bewilderment. “You’re not the firemen.”
A crowd of other men, tall boys, filled the corridor behind the blond. He did not have to remind himself that these were a bunch of ten-year-olds, but he wasn’t sure about the perceptions of the troopers. Every variation of height and racial mix and build was represented, much more motley than the Greek-god look one might have anticipated from their garden-and-fountain setting. Personal wealth, not personal beauty, had been the ticket for their creation. Still, each was as glowingly healthy as the particularities of his genetics permitted. They all wore uniform sleepwear, bronze-brown tunics and shorts. “Front,” Thorne hissed, and shoved him forward. “Start talking.” “Get me a head-count,” he ripped out of the corner of his mouth as Thorne pulled him past. “Right.”
He’d practiced the speech for this supreme moment in his mind ten thousand times, every possible variation. The only thing he knew for certain that he was not going to start with was, I’m Miles Naismith. His heart was racing. He inhaled a huge gulp of air. “We’re the Dendarii Mercenaries, and we’re here to save you.”
The boy’s expression was repelled, scared, and scornful all mixed. “You look like a mushroom,” he said blankly.
It was so … so off-script. Of his thousand rehearsed second lines, not one followed this. Actually, with the command helmet and all, he probably did look a bit like a big gray— not the heroic image he’d hoped to—
He tore off his helmet, ripped back his hood, and bared his teeth. The boy recoiled.
“Listen up, you clones!” he yelled. “The secret you may have heard whispered is true! Every single one of you is waiting in line to be murdered by House Bharaputra surgeons. They’re gonna stick somebody else’s brain in your head, and throw your brain away. That’s where your friends have been going, one by one, to their deaths. We’re here to take you to Escobar, where you’ll be given sanctuary—” Not all the boys had assembled in the corridor in the first place, and now ones at the rear of the mob began to break away and retreat into individual rooms. A babble started to rise from them, and yells and cries. One dark-haired boy tried to dart past them to the corridor beyond the big double doors, and a trooper grabbed him in a standard arm-lock. He screamed in pain and surprise, and the sound and shock seemed to blow the others back in a wave. The boy struggled without effect in the trooper’s iron grip. The trooper looked exasperated and uncertain, and stared at him as if expecting some direction or order. “Get your friends and follow me!” he yelled desperately to the retreating boys. The blond turned on his heel and sprinted.
“I don’t think they bought us,” said Thorne. The hermaphrodite’s face was pale and tense. “It might actually be easier to stun them all and carry them. We can’t afford to lose time in here, not with that iamned thin perimeter.”
“No—”
His helmet was calling him. He jammed it back on. Comm-link babble burst in his ears, but Sergeant Taura’s deep voice penetrated, selectively enhanced by her channel. “Sir, we need your help up here.”
“What is it?”
Her answer was lost in an override from the woman riding the float-bike. “Sir, there’s three or four people climbing down the outside balconies of the building you’re in. And there’s a group of four Bharaputran security people approaching you from the north.”
He sorted frantically through channels till he found the one outgoing to the air-guard. “Don’t let any get away!”
“How should I stop ’em, sir?” Her voice was edged.
“Stunner,” he decided helplessly. “Wait! Don’t stun any that are hanging off the balcony, wait’ll they reach the ground.”
“I may not have a clear shot.”
“Do your best.” He cut her off and found Taura again. “What do you want, Sergeant?”
“I want you to come talk to this crazy girl. You can convince her if anyone can.”
“Things are—not quite under control down here.”
Thorne rolled its eyes. The captured boy was drumming his bare heels against the Dendarii trooper’s shins. Thorne set its stunner to the lightest setting, and touched it to the back of the squirming boy’s neck. He convulsed and hung more limply. Still conscious, eyes blearing and wild, the boy began to cry.
In a burst of cowardice he said to Throne, “Get them rounded up. Any way you can. I’m going to help Sergeant Taura.”
“You do that,” growled Thorne in a distinctly insubordinate tone. It wheeled, gathering its men. “You and you, take that side—you, take the other. Get those doors down—”
He retreated ignominiously to the sound of sh
attering plastic.
Upstairs, things were quieter. There were fewer girls than boys altogether, a disproportion that had also prevailed in his time. He’d often wondered why. He stepped over the stunned body of a heavy-set female security guard, and followed his vid map, projected by his helmet, to Sergeant Taura.
A dozen or so girls were seated cross-legged on the floor, their hands clasped behind their necks, under the waving threat of one Dendarii’s stunner. Their sleep-tunics and shorts were pink silk, otherwise identical to the boys’. They looked frightened, but at least they sat silent. He stepped into a side room to find Taura and the other trooper confronting a tall Eurasian girl-woman, who sat at a comconsole with her arms aggressively crossed. Where the vid plate should have been was a smoking hole, hot and recent, from plasma fire.
The Eurasian girl’s head turned, her long black hair swinging, from Taura to himself and back. “My lady, what a circus!” Her voice was a whip of contempt.
“She refuses to budge,” said Taura. Her tone was strangely worried.
“Girl,” he nodded curtly. “You are dead meat if you stay here. You are a clone. Your body is destined to be stolen by your progenitor. Your brain will be removed and destroyed. Perhaps very soon.”
“I know that,” she said scornfully, as if he were a babbling idiot.
“What?” His jaw dropped.
“I know it. I am perfectly aligned with my destiny. My lady required it to be so. I serve my lady perfectly.” Her chin rose, and her eyes rested in a moment of dreamy, distant worship, of what he could not guess.
“She got a call out to House Security,” reported Taura tightly, with a nod at the smoking holovid. “Described us, our gear—even reported an estimate of our numbers.”
“You will not keep me from my lady,” the girl affirmed with a short, cool nod. “The guards will get you, and save me. I’m very important.”
What the hell had the Bharaputrans done to turn this girl’s head inside-out? And could he undo it in thirty seconds or less? He didn’t think so. “Sergeant,” he took a deep breath, and said in a high, light voice on the outgoing sigh, “Stun her.”
The Eurasian girl started to duck, but the sergeant’s reflexes worked at lightning speed. The stunner beam took her precisely between the eyes as she leapt. Taura vaulted the comconsole and caught the girl’s head before it could strike the floor.
“Do we have them all?” he asked.
“At least two went down the back stairs before we blocked them,” Taura reported with a frown.
“They’ll be stunned if they try to escape the building,” he reassured her.
“But what if they hide, downstairs? It’ll take time to find ’em.” Her tawny eyes flicked sideways to take in some chrono display from her helmet. “We should all be on our way back to the shuttle by now.”
“Just a second.” Laboriously, he keyed through his channels till he found Thorne again. Off in the distance, carried thinly by the audio, someone was yelling, ” ’n-of-a-bitch! You little—”
“What?” Thorne snapped in a harried voice. “You got those girls rounded up yet?”
“Had to stun one. Taura can carry her. Look, did you get that head-count yet?”
“Yes, took it off a comconsole in a keeper’s room—thirty-eight boys and sixteen girls. We’re missing four boys who apparently went over the balcony. Trooper Philippi accounted for three of them but says she didn’t spot a fourth. How about you?”
“Sergeant Taura says two girls went down the back stairs. Watch for them.” He glanced up, peering out of his vid display, which was swirling like an aurora. “Captain Thorne says there should be sixteen bodies here.”
Taura stuck her head out into the corridor, lips moving, then returned and eyed the stunned Eurasian girl. “We’re still short one. Kesterton, make a pass around this floor, check cupboards and under the beds.”
“Right, Sergeant.” The Dendarii trooper ran to obey.
He followed her, Thorne’s voice urging in his ears, “Move it up there! This is a smash-and-grab, remember? We don’t have time to round up strays!”
“Wait, dammit.”
In the third room the trooper checked, she bent to look under a bed and said, “Ha! Got her, Sergeant!” She swooped, grabbed a couple of kicking ankles, and yanked. Her prize slid into the light, a short girl-woman in the pink crossover tunic and shorts. She emitted little helpless muted noises, distress with no hope of her cries bringing help. She had a cascade of platinum curls, but her most notable feature was a stunning bustline, huge fat globes that the strained pink silk of her tunic failed to contain. She rolled to her knees, buttocks on heels, her upraised hands vaguely pushing and cradling the heavy flesh as if it still shocked and unaccustomed to finding it there.
Ten years old. Shit. She looked twenty. And such monstrous hypertrophy couldn’t be natural. The progenitor-customer must have ordered body-sculpture, prior to taking possession. That made sense, let the clone do the surgical and metabolic suffering. Tiny waist, flare of hip … from her exaggerated, physically mature femininity, he wondered if she might be one of the change-of-sex transfers. Almost certainly. She must have been slated for surgery very soon.
“No, go away,” she was whimpering. “Go away, leave me alone … my mother is coming for me. My mother is coming for me tomorrow. Go away, leave me alone, I’m going to meet my mother. …”
Her cries, and her heaving … chest, would shortly make him crazy, he thought. “Stun that one too,” he croaked. They’d have to carry her, but at least they wouldn’t have to listen to her.
The trooper’s face was flushed, as transfixed and embarrassed as he by the girl’s grotesque build. “Poor doll,” she whispered, and put her out of her misery with a light touch of stunner to her neck. She slumped forward, splayed on the floor.
His helmet was calling him, he wasn’t sure which trooper’s voice. “Sir, we just drove back a crew of House Bharaputra fire-fighters with our stunners. They didn’t have anti-stun suits. But the security people who are coming on now do. They’re sending new teams, carrying heavier weapons. The stunner-tag game is about over.”
He keyed through helmet displays, trying to place the trooper on the map-grid. Before he could, the air-guard’s breathless voice cut in. “A Bharaputran heavy-weapons team is circling around your building to the south, sir. You’ve got to get the hell out of there. It’s about to turn real nasty out here.”
He waved the Dendarii trooper and her doll-woman burden out of the bedroom ahead of him. “Sergeant Taura,” he called. “Did you pick up those outside reports?”
“Yes, sir. Let’s move it.”
Sergeant Taura slung the Eurasian girl over one broad shoulder and the blonde over the other, apparently without noticing their weight, and they herded the mob of frightened girls down the end stairs. Taura made them walk two-by-two, holding hands, keeping them rather better organized than he would have expected. The girls’ hushed voices burbled in shock when they were directed into the boys’ dormitory section. “We’re not allowed down here,” one tried to protest, in tears. “We’ll get in trouble.”
Thorne had six stunned boys laid out face-up on the corridor floor, and another twenty-odd lined up leaning against the wall, legs spread, arms extended, prisoner-control posture, with a couple of nervous troopers yelling at them and keeping them in their places. Some clones looked angry, some were crying, and all looked scared to death.
He looked with dismay at the pile of stunner victims. “How are we going to carry them all?”
“Have some carry the rest,” Taura said. “It leaves your hands free and ties up theirs.” She gently laid down her own burdens at the end of the row.
“Good,” said Thorne, jerking its gaze, with difficulty, from fascinated fixation on the doll-woman. “Worley, Kesterton, let’s—” its voice stopped, as the same static-laden emergency message over-rode channels in both their command helmets.
It was the bike-trooper, screaming, “Sonofabit
ch, the shuttle—watch out guys, on your left—” a hot wash of static, and “—oh holy fuckin’ shit—” Then a silence, filled only with the hum of an empty channel.
He keyed frantically for a readout, any readout at all, from her helmet. The locator still functioned, plotting her on the ground between two buildings in back of the play-court where the shuttle was parked. Her medical readouts were flatline blanks. Dead? Surely not, there should at least still be blood chemistry … the static, empty view being transmitted, upward at an angle into the night fog, at last found him. Phillipi had lost her helmet. What else she’d lost, he couldn’t tell.
Thorne called the shuttle pilot, over and over, alternated with the outer-guards; no replies. It swore. “You try.”
He found empty channels too. The other two perimeter Dendarii re tied up in an exchange of fire with the Bharaputran heavy-weapons squad to the south that the bike-trooper had reported earlier. “We gotta reconnoiter,” snarled Thorne under its breath. “Sergeant Taura, take over here, get these kids ready to march. You—” This is to his address, apparently; why did Thorne no longer call him Admiral, or Miles? “Come with me. Trooper Sumner, cover us.” Thorne departed at a flat-out run; he cursed his short legs as he fell steadily farther behind. Down the lift-tube, out the still-hot front doors, around one dark building, between two others. He caught up with the hermaphrodite, who was flattened against a corner of the building at the edge of the playing-court.
The shuttle was still there, apparently undamaged—surely no hand-weapon could penetrate its combat-hardened shell. The ramp was drawn up, the door closed. A dark shape—downed Dendarii, or enemy?—slumped in the shadow beneath its wing-flanges. Thorne, whispering curses, jabbed codes into a computer control plate bound to its left forearm. The hatch slid aside, and the ramp tongued outward with a whine of servos. Still no human response. “I’m going in,” said Thorne.
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