by Brian Daley
"What about the others?" Alacrity asked.
"There are always two or three tough characters like Notch—the incorrigibles. They were culled out, given a shot at rehab. If it didn't work they were brain-changed or put to death. And I'm talking about thousands and thousands of people."
Floyt was looking off where the alley-gangsters had gone. "I can't help thinking if it wasn't for Notch, though, those kids would probably be selling themselves, or dying slowly in a sweatmill, or wasting away in the gutters."
"Well, stop feeling sorry for them. And watch your back."
Alacrity went to help Janusz and Victoria. Floyt went through a meticulously monitored and defended isolation zone and back into the chateau proper. He heard strange sounds that alarmed him at first, the swooping of a whisk-platform, inhuman snorting laughter, and giddy hoo-ing.
He stepped into the vast foyer and looked up in amazement. Corva was zooming up, over and around, uttering his Srillan laugh. Floyt gaped up at him as the alien looped over a staircase then dove around beneath it.
When Corva noticed Floyt the antics stopped with comical suddenness. "Oh! Er, hello, Hobart," he said, flustered, letting the whisk-platform descend slowly to the foyer floor. The fur along his snout and between his shaggy ears stood up a little; Floyt wondered if that was the Srillan equivalent of a blush.
"I, ah—I just give way to senseless boisterousness sometimes," Corva explained as the platform touched down. "I don't get to leave the chateau. Sometimes I can't help getting … getting … " He made tight, furious motions with his hands, searching for the Terranglish word.
"Apt-happy," Floyt supplied, still staring at him. "Shack-wacky. Alacrity calls it bulkhead fever."
"Just so. But don't be alarmed; there's no reason for you to fear for my—my mental equipoise, I assure you."
"Oh, I know; don't worry." Floyt actually wanted to get away, feeling uncomfortable in the creature's presence, especially without Alacrity or any of the others around. He found himself starting to edge away, then realized how rude he must look. "You've, ah, you've only been out of the chateau once or twice since you got here?"
"Offworld, to make some arrangements, yes," Corva said eagerly. It came to Floyt with an inner start that the Srillan was eager to talk.
"It's a tricky business, my getting offworld and back without being seen," Corva went on, "but there are certain connections that only I have. The rest of the time—Old Raffles is my world."
"It must be very wearing."
The Srillan huffed the peculiar laughter. "Ning-ning-a ning! Oh, cool and collected is Corva (When can we coax him down from the ceiling!) A-ning!"
"Does your uncle know you're here?"
"I think he suspects I'm engaged in work Director Weir began, but Weir was a very private, very security-conscious man, so I doubt my uncle knows anything specific. Weir; I commemorate Weir in my meditations every day. He contacted me and gave me a chance to make this fight against the Camarilla my atonement."
"Atonement—oh, yes; you're a contrition-knight, isn't that the term?"
"Yes. I did a great misdeed—well, failure, really, the kind the young are prone to. But it led to several deaths and a lot of suffering. I'm not so sure I agree with the Doctrines; I'm not so sure any kind of sacrifice or service atones for what's gone before. But I thought at least there would be relief from obsessive memories, and less chance of erring again, which is a fear of mine.
"But this Camarilla situation has me rethinking, Hobart. Perhaps there is some cosmic credit and debit system. At any rate, we have a chance to set right a wrong that passes understanding. It will be good for your people and good for mine."
"Then will you be free to go on with your life?"
"I will have to think that out when the time comes. It may be that I have other things yet to do. Many stay contrition-knights their whole lives once they've taken up the relic and sworn."
"I'm sure that all Terrans will be very grateful to you, Corva." I'm sure that most Terrans would run screaming from the very sight of you, Corva.
"You're most kind, Hobart."
Floyt discovered he hadn't gotten any closer to breaking away. "Well, I'm sorry I interrupted your—your recreation."
"Think nothing of it. It's lonely sport, not much fun after a while."
"Oh." Floyt studied the whisk-platform. "How do you control those things manually?"
"You simply adjust this, like so, you see? Then it will respond to shifts in your body weight and pressure on the handrail, like so, and this control. Would you care to try?"
Now that he'd begun flying, Floyt wanted to pilot anything that came his way. He wanted to try everything. He longed to fly Astraea Imprimatur upside down under a bridge span. He got a whisk-platform and followed Corva on a brief training flight, then, with more confidence, soloed around the foyer and up into the epergne's curving corridors.
"That's very good!" Corva snuffled, soaring after him like a mother bird.
Floyt doubled around and dove back into the foyer, orbiting the chandelier. "This is wonderful!"
"Would you care to try something a little more ambitious?"
"Such as?"
"I have a course laid out, up and around through the chateau and back here. My best time so far is just over a minute. Shall we try for fifty-nine seconds?"
"Lead on!"
Off they swooped through Old Raffles like a pair of great bats, laughing and darting.
Chapter 21
And, By Opposing,
End Them
"Okay, Ho, run."
"Where?"
"Through the side of the truck, if you think you're up to it." Alacrity gave one of the straps on Floyt's wargear an extra tug to snug it up. "But I would advise you do it in place."
Floyt began to jog in place; Alacrity listened closely for stray sounds. "Come on, put some life into it. It won't be good for our health if we end up in a blackout situation and you start clanking, drawing fire."
Floyt pumped his knees higher. Alacrity heard nothing, but double-checked an adhesive buckle on the Earther's harness anyway. The Webley's lanyard ring had been silenced with tape.
Floyt stopped. "If we find ourselves in a blackout, shouldn't we be using vision enhancers? Won't the Custodians and their guards?"
"I don't know; nobody's sure how well equipped they are." Alacrity began running in place vigorously. "And Janusz doesn't have an extra pair of enhancers for us; half the ones he's got are malfunctioning. Hear anything?" His pathfinders made very little noise on the truck bed.
"Not from your equipment." Alacrity stopped running.
"Anyway, Alacrity, we won't be in the first attack contingent, so it shouldn't matter, isn't that right?"
"We weren't exactly walking point in the causality harp vault either, remember?"
"You had to bring that up." Floyt sighed and picked up his shockgun, making sure that it, too, was muffled against accidental sounds, its sling silenced, the metal of its slides and buckles taped. It was set for lethal, high-energy fire. It was a two-hander, short and easy to maneuver, with a horizontal U of elbow-crook brace for a butt.
Floyt had the Webley for backup, and Alacrity the Captain's Sidearm; they'd divvied up other ominous equipment as well. The explosives and battlefield medical kits were especially sobering. Floyt had had time for only minimal training, and Alacrity wasn't all that much more experienced.
The dashboard commo beeped and they hurried from the back of the hovertruck to the cab. On the visual link Janusz looked calm, almost casual, with the cab of the ground lorry in the background and Notch's elbow showing at the edge of the picture.
"The smarts fireteams are in place and ready," Janusz said. "Everything is on track."
"Same here," Alacrity replied. "We're monitoring you with the automatics. Let us know when you need us. Good luck, Janusz."
Janusz nearly smiled. "Luck? Yes, that would be nice." He broke the Connection. It's just not right for anybody to have that much s
ang-froid, Floyt mused. Alacrity switched over to the remotes still focused on the Repository from the relay tower office.
The Repository was a rambling villa done in the blocky First Breath style known as Bauhaus-NASA. It was a functional, solid sort of place, not really in keeping with the elevated esthetics of the Custodians. The appeal of the place, for them, lay not in the building or grounds, but what was beneath.
As Floyt and Alacrity watched the screen, Janusz's ground lorry moved into view, down the winding driveway. Alacrity felt himself tensing up. "I hope they haven't bitten off more then we can chew.
Floyt nodded. The plan was based on a number of established facts, all having to do with Repository defenses and procedures for destroying Camarilla and other material. What Floyt worried about were the unestablished facts.
"We've got the primary advantage, surprise," Floyt answered. "We'll never have a better chance and, let's face it, it's now or never." Alacrity inclined his head minutely, shifting the shockgun in his lap, eyes fixed on the screen.
Janusz's voice came up over the commo net, this time without visual. "We are approaching the entrance portico. Last check: is everyone prepared?"
Corva and Alacrity acknowledged from their different locations, then Victoria. Heart and Sintilla did the same, and the teams of kids guarding their smarts launchers. Notch's lieutenant, Gippo, chimed in last, from where his van of alley runners waited.
"We carry on, then; it's in the mill." Janusz signed off. His lorry, which had been repainted, trimmed, and decaled to look like a courier vehicle, pulled up by the portico.
"You know, I really don't see how Janusz was planning to pull this off before we came along," Alacrity commented, watching the screen intently. "He would've been going in awfully shorthanded, at least in terms of people he could trust. Here they go; cross your fingers, Ho."
Instead Floyt rubbed the Yuri Gagarin coin, his Wonderment, for luck. Alacrity zoomed the visual pickup in tight as the villa's doors opened and one of the guards stumped out. Confusion made a brief visit to the surly face. Another guard stepped out behind him, and the doors shut tightly after.
They were of a type, like all the guards, just as the Custodians were of a type, clones born and raised to a single purpose, unchanging men from unchanging plasm. The mountainous guards shared thick, stolid, stoic faces, eyes like holes in pink plastic, and a high finish to their skin. They wore charcoal-gray uniforms, shoulder boards that made them seem even wider, and big disruptors in belt holsters. Their long, fine red hair was caught up in convolutions, pinned and wound in braids under glossy, flat-brimmed, electric-blue helmets. Their hands were broad, sausage-fingered.
The guards waited impassively. Notch and Janusz, wearing uniforms of the courier service, swung their doors open all the way. The lorry had pulled up with rear doors to the portico, as if to discharge cargo. Notch and Janusz paused in the cab, as though gathering forms, receipts, or whatever.
Alacrity drew a resolute breath. "Here goes." His hand went to the remote firing controls mounted in the middle of the dashboard. Secondary screens and displays were showing firing data.
The two guards had stepped around the end of the lorry and were waiting for Janusz, the driver, to emerge. He did, but immediately aimed down on them with his shockgun and let the two sumo wrestler types have deadly blasts full in the face. Impossibly, they stayed on their feet, reeling. Notch, who'd slipped around the nose of the lorry, opened fire too.
"Unbelievable!" Floyt breathed. The guards were still on their feet. But under that kind of fire, even creatures like the guards had to go down. They toppled against each other as they fell, like some sort of fleshy landslide. Floyt described it to Alacrity, who was too busy to watch.
He'd activated weapons mounted on the relay tower. They opened up at preselected targets on the villa's grounds. Heavy guns, disguised as antennae and pickups and other equipment until that moment, blazed and belched even as Notch and Janusz scrambled back to the cover of the armored lorry.
A belvedere went up in flames, and the observatory at an upper corner of the Repository as well, both of them camouflaged weapons emplacements. Alacrity remote-aimed at a cabana and decorative features of the villa, as they in turn salvoed at the tower. For people who'd been through no real emergency or battle in the course of their two hundred years in business, the Custodians and their guards had an awfully good response time.
For a few moments it was all crash and wham, villa and tower hammering away at each other. Then, from the lorry, Notch and Janusz touched off their surprise package. It was something Janusz had worked up, combination shaped charge and breaching cannon.
The back doors of the lorry disappeared, disintegrated. A spearhead of pure light shot through and through the villa's front doors, annihilating everything in its way. It lasted only a second or two, leaving a two-meter-high hole in the armored entranceway, its edges dripping and molten, and peripheral fires that smoked and flickered.
"Hurdle number one," Floyt murmured.
Alacrity, with the advantage of surprise, had wiped out quite a few of the villa's armaments. But the counterfire began to tell; the tower, not heavily fortified to begin with, was being blown to fragments. Still, by the time Alacrity's instruments went dim only two of the Repository's gun positions were still firing.
"Victoria, are you reading this? And Heart? We've got them softened up, at least."
"We all saw," Heart said. "Not bad, boyo."
"Janusz's group is on the move," Corva reported, from the airborne Astraea Imprimatur. "I've got them on the lorry's rear pickup; it's still working. They're using shields and they're in the entranceway."
An even dozen of Notch's gang, an assault team armed with riprays, plasma rifles, and other heavy weapons, had been concealed in the compartment behind the cab. Alacrity wasn't patched through to the lorry; he was occupied trying to link to the Stray's own long-range pickups, as the Srillan swung away from his station over the spacefield, creating confusion all around. "What else can you see, Corva? Firefight?"
"Nothing clear, Alacrity, and there's no sound, but there must be, yes. Janusz should be all right for now, though; the front-door guard station was right in the path of the breaching beam. All the assault team has to do is dig in and hold for a while."
"And pray for smoke signals," Floyt muttered.
"Pray hard, for green smoke signals," Alacrity agreed.
"Are all crews ready at the smart ordnance?" Victoria sang out.
"You want us to fire, you say so. No trouble," Gippo responded. Notch's lieutenant sounded like he didn't really care one way or the other.
Alacrity raised his voice over the commo net. "Come on, come on! Doesn't anybody see smoke yet? Keep your eyes on the chimneys!"
Janusz's voice came up just then. "We're well deployed; we control the whole entranceway. No resistance yet, but we're staying at phase-point one. Any smoke yet?"
"We're waiting," Victoria said.
The Repository's underground areas were thoroughly sealed off from its upper structures. Those below, where the primary information cache was, would be debating the question of destroying sensitive material, but only tentatively; the encroachment wasn't critical yet. The destruction of lesser materials might begin, as a precautionary measure, but not obliteration of the Camarilla evidence.
Exactly when the Custodians would make their decisions, no one knew. The raiders wanted to push things to the point where the clones would begin destroying lesser data without forcing them to destroy everything. Janusz and his group had spent several years analyzing the attack. Their big piece of luck had been in obtaining an old Custodian destruct manual. Their main worry was that it would lead them into error; if it had been superceded by something very different, the plan was ruined.
"Corva, Heart—d'you have those last emplacements marked?"
"Ready to go, Alacrity."
"Affirmative, Bright Eyes!"
Alacrity spent a sweaty fifteen seconds glaring in
to screens and readouts. "We're getting counterattack activity," Janusz said. "Our crew-served weapons are well in place, but we will eventually have to either fall back or advance. Is there still no smoke?"
"Don't you think we'd have told you?" Alacrity countered. "Listen, this is no good. We're coming to get you out. You'll have guard reinforcements swarming on you soon."
"Remain where you are!" Janusz snapped. "We're all right for now." There was a loud explosion in the near background. Alacrity looked at Floyt, who looked back.
"We can't just leave him in there, Ho."
"No, I don't suppose we can." Floyt brought his shockgun around; Alacrity fired up the truck.
Just then they heard Corva's voice. "There! Smoke! I mark smoke from one, two—all four chimneys!"
"What color?" Sintilla demanded. "Corva, what color!"
"It's green! It's ours! Into motion, everyone! Green smoke!"
Alacrity was already moving. He yanked the hovertruck through a tight turn and bore down on a hillock nearby. Two of Notch's kids were there, a boy and girl, maybe fifteen or so, poised by a multibarreled launcher, making final adjustments. Floyt hit the release for the truck's side door, which slid open.
The truck threw up dirt and debris as it slid to a halt side-on. "Start the timer and get in!" Floyt hollered. The kids were into the track like squirrels, clinging to their flopping bandoliers and equipment. Alacrity wristed the accelerator, twisting the steering grips. The hovertruck whined off over the hillock in a storm of dust.
"Time for you to come down to lower altitude, where you're less of a target, Corva," Floyt was saying. The Srillan rogered.
Alacrity tore along an accessway road and nearly hit a hoghoss-drawn wagon that was racing for Parish Below. There weren't many disturbances in Parish Above, but when there was one, the lower orders knew it was time to get out of the way.
Floyt hadn't had time to worry about any of the other estates becoming involved. Now he thought to, as Alacrity careened along at neck level, staying off the Repository's detectors. "What about the other mansions? What about the tribes?"