by David Drake
“Look at that!” Westerbeke said as he—last of the mercenaries to leave the mobile crane—jumped down to the wall’s fir ing step. “Look at it!”
The clear exterior sheath of the office spire crumbled away, dropping in bits like snowflakes toward the mist of charged ions at the base of the building. The floors and the central sup port column containing the elevator and utility conduits looked like the remains of a fish after filleting.
The remnant was beginning to waver. Distance silenced the screams of humans who shook from the edges of the structure. Bits of furnishings and partition walls fell with them.
Cars on the six-lane highway slowed and pulled off on the median. Civilians were stopping to watch what they thought was a major accident. Harlow and Coyne eyed the scene. Together they raised their 2-cm weapons and opened fire, raking the soft-skinned vehicles.
Most Telarian cars used ion-transfer membranes to power hub-center electric motors. The fuel cells ruptured in balls of pale hydrogen flame which quickly involved upholstery and plastic body panels.
Survivors ran screaming, some into the path of oncoming vehicles. A tanker of petroleum-based sealant exploded into a huge orange mushroom, raining fire across the entire highway.
Coyne and Harlow crouched on the firing step to reload, then dropped to the mown sward within the estate to join their fellows.
“What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” Herne Lordling grumbled.
Harlow grinned. “Just giving the cops something to worry about besides us,” he said. “And having a little fun.”
A one-lane road ran parallel to the boundary wall, separated by a few meters of grass. At one end it dipped over a hill in a profusion of pink and blue flowers. The moan of a loud klaxon swelled from that direction.
Ten of the mercenaries poised. Lordling gave Paetz and Yazov a two-fingered gesture to watch the wall behind them: guards might approach along the firing step from the neighboring towers.
Westerbeke remained kneeling as he scrolled through the map display on the inner surface of his visor. The team had known neither its destination nor the point at which it would enter the estate, since the latter depended on when the spire’s destruction gave them the signal to come over the wall. Westerbeke carried a pistol and a submachine gun, but his prime value in this company wasn’t his marksmanship.
A three-wheeler carrying two guards and a tribarrel came over the rise at ninety kilometers per hour. Cyan bolts blew the Telarians out of their saddles before they had an inkling of the emergency they’d been summoned to deal with.
The trike lifted and was fully airborne when Raff put a rocket into the center of it. The little vehicle disintegrated in black smoke and bits of metal. Its klaxon cut off with a startled croak.
“Why’d you do that?!” Josie Paetz screamed at Raff. “D’ye want to fucking walk?”
“Paetz, watch your—” Herne Lordling began.
A second trike, running silent twenty meters behind the first, squealed and fishtailed as its driver broke the single rear tire loose in trying to stop. The gunner was desperately swinging his tribarrel toward the wall, but he didn’t have a target when Paetz’ one-handed burst killed him and his partner.
The three-wheeler twisted broadside and flipped at least a dozen times before it came to rest a hundred and fifty meters down the road. The riders, two of the three wheels, and shards of the instrument console lay scattered at angles to the main track.
“Blood and martyrs!” Ingried said in amazement.
“Shall we ride yours, then?” Raff said to Josie Paetz. “But good shooting, very good.”
A half-tracked water tanker, marked Fire and painted red with white stripes, rumbled into sight behind the wrecked three-wheelers. The four-man crew wore fire-retardant suits and helmets with neck flares as protection from falling debris. The driver and one crewman bailed out on the far side of the vehicle.
The truck coasted to a halt. The other man in the cab crawled out the driver’s door, but one of the firefighters on the tailboard actually started paying out a hand-line toward the burning wreckage of a trike. When he saw eleven mercenaries in motley battledress running toward him, jingling with weapons, he froze.
None of the mercenaries fired. They jumped aboard the truck, clinging to the handholds above the tailboard and climbing on top of the four-kiloliter watertank.
Westerbeke got behind the wheel and drove the vehicle off. Paetz fired another one-hand burst at the pair of people he glimpsed at the edge of a grove two hundred meters away. They were grounds-maintenance personnel. He killed them both.
The firefighter standing by the road watched his hand-line jounce behind the disappearing truck like a thin white tail.
The limousine brought itself to a perfectly calibrated stop before a gray stone building, Gothic in styling but only seven meters high to its peak over the rose window. A black van, built on the body of a luxury car and polished to a soft gleam, was parked around to the side.
A number of civilians stood in front of the chapel, looking in the direction of what had been the central spire. They were all well dressed—not menials. One of them, a woman, wore clerical robes and collar. They stared in amazement as Ned, in tattered battledress and carrying a pair of submachine guns—one slung, the other in his hands—got out on the driver’s side.
Ned’s legs were shaky. “Where’s Lendell’s body?” he demanded in a high-pitched shout. “Where’s the coffin?”
Klaxons rose and fell from several places within the Doormann estate. The unsynchronized moans were further distorted by Doppler effect as emergency vehicles sped through the growing chaos.
“Sir?” said the woman in clerical dress. “Sir? Who are you?”
A terrible sound drew Ned’s head around despite his focus on the task at hand. The spire had begun to collapse. Because of the building’s size, the process went on for more than thirty seconds. It seemed to take minutes.
The release of energy in the sub-basement laboratory had finally dissolved the concrete spine from which the upper floors were cantilevered. A cloud of plasma enveloped the lower hundred meters of the building. Now the upper portion of the structure sank slightly and began to tilt like a top at the end of its rotary motion.
Figures jumped or fell from the visible floors. They disappeared in the boiling ions beneath.
The spine plunged downward at an angle. Stress broke the upper levels apart while the lower portion of the huge structure simply crumbled in a disintegrating bath. The building dropped out of sight a moment before it hit the ground.
Seconds after the impact, dust and smoke sprang skyward in a great, flat-topped pillar that hid and smothered the sea of ions. The crash took ten seconds to arrive at the chapel. It went on for at least that long.
A man in the quiet black garb of an undertaker stared at the destruction. His legs folded beneath him. He knelt and began to pray, moving his lips, as tears rolled down his cheeks.
“The coffin!” Ned snarled. No one looked at him. He ran into the chapel. The swinging butt of one weapon knocked a splinter from the dark wood of the door panel.
The chapel was quiet. There were three closed pews in front for members of the Doormann family and six open rows behind for their retainers. Light streamed through stained-glass windows illustrating Old Testament scenes. The building was bowered in trees. The light—equal to north, south, and through the east-facing rose window over the door—was artificial.
A pair of folding trestles waited before the altar, but the coffin wasn’t on them yet. The small door to the side behind the pulpit was open. Ned pushed through it.
He was in what would normally be a changing and storage room for the chapel staff. To the right was a staircase leading up to the choir loft. On the floor, Lendell Doormann grinned from the clear-topped casket the Swift’s crew had built on Wasatch 1029 and rebuilt on Dell. Beside the plastic box was a traditional coffin of dark, lustrously rubbed hardwood.
Ned stepped to the
casket, looking around for a tool. The female cleric walked into the room. “Sir!” she cried. “You must leave at once!” Two of the undertaker’s assistants stood in the doorway behind her, looking doubtful.
The woman grabbed Ned’s arm. He pushed her away. A heavy screwdriver lay on the floor beside the coffin. He bent to pick it up.
“Sir!” the woman shouted. “I’m the Dean of Chapel! What are you doing?”
One of the assistants stepped forward with a set expression on his face. Ned dropped the screwdriver to point his submachine gun.
“Get out, you fuckheads!” he screamed. “Do I have to kill you? Get out!”
The dean got to her feet. “Sir,” she said in a trembling voice, “this is sacrilege. You must leave here—”
She extended her hand. Ned took up the slack with his trigger-finger, then raised the muzzle and put a single bolt into the ceiling.
Shattered plaster exploded across the room. The undertaker’s assistant grabbed the dean from behind. He dragged her back into the nave as the other assistant jumped out of the way. The three of them were gabbling unintelligibly.
Ned tried to sling the weapon he’d just fired. It clanked against the other submachine gun. He swore and dropped the gun beside him on the floor.
The plastic casket was welded smoothly all around the top. Ned set the screwdriver blade against the seam and slammed the butt of the tool with the heel of his right hand. The blade scrunched in, but only a few centimeters of the weld on either side broke.
A klaxon howled to a halt in front of the chapel. Voices shouted to one another. Ned stretched out his foot and kicked the door shut as he levered the lid upward. More of the weld broke, but the transparent sheet Tadziki had used for the lid was too flexible either to lift away or shatter the way Ned wanted it to do.
He stepped back and brought his boot up hard, smashing his heel into the juncture just beyond where he’d managed to crack the bead. The gray sidepanel broke apart, tags of it still clinging to the clear top.
Ned grabbed the slung submachine gun and aimed toward the doorway. The door flew open. Two security guards burst in, one of them rolling in some desperate vision of how to enter a room safely against an armed man.
Their pistols were drawn. The rolling man fired into the wooden coffin as his partner shot a robe hanging on a peg in the far corner.
Ned hit the standing man twice in the upper chest. The guard’s pistol flew out of his hand. His body fell, its legs tangled with those of the man on the floor. Ned fired a long burst into both guards.
Somebody in the nave screamed.
The guards’ uniforms only smoldered, but the hanging robe managed to sustain a low, acrid flame. Smoke and ozone made Ned’s eyes water. He stepped over the casket and laid the gun he’d just fired across its top.
The broken sidepanel permitted a two-hand grip on the lid. Ned pulled upward and back with all his strength, ripping the seam apart and flinging the submachine gun against the wall behind him.
Lendell Doormann lay now on his side, disturbed by the violence with which Ned had opened the casket. Ned rolled the body out. It was as light as a foam mannequin. He pulled up the layer of red baize from the stock of trade goods on Dell.
Lissea lay beneath the baize. Her eyes were closed, and her chest did not move.
Ned fumbled an injector out of his belt wallet. Klaxons outside the building were suddenly much louder: the chapel’s outer door had opened. He reached over the casket for the gun with which he’d fired the shot into the ceiling. The limo’s driver and guard had carried only four spare magazines between them, so he had to watch his ammo expenditure.
Ned aimed the submachine gun at the door with his right hand. Holding the injector against his left palm, he let his fingertips trail along Lissea’s shoulder to the skin at the base of her throat. He squeezed down with his thumb, breaking the seal and triggering the injector.
Three Doormann security personnel rushed the door. They wore back-and-breast armor and helmets with faceshields.
Ned knelt behind the casket and blazed the twenty-nine rounds remaining in his magazine into the trio. The tightly grouped bolts chopped the guards apart in thunder and blue glare despite their armor. The Telarians were firing their submachine guns also, but wildly. The third guard shot the woman in front of him several times in the back before Ned killed him.
Ned groped behind him for the other gun he’d brought from the limo. The air was gray and his lungs burned. He supposed that was because of the flames and powergun residues, but maybe the security people had thrown tear gas at him.
Perhaps they hadn’t used frag grenades because the body of a Doormann was in the room, but it was equally likely that such equipment wasn’t an item of issue for security personnel. They were guards, after all, not combat troops.
Lissea groped at the edge of the casket.
Ned reached beneath Lissea’s shoulders with his left arm and lifted her upright. Like her great-granduncle, she seemed almost weightless to Ned’s adrenaline-fueled muscles.
“Oh Lord!” Ned gasped. “You’re all right! Are you all right?”
Lissea clutched him. “I think you’re supposed to kiss me, aren’t you, prince?” she murmured.
Effects of the drug and its antidote suddenly washed her face saffron. She leaned out of the coffin and vomited the bile which was the sole content of her stomach.
Pews scraped in the nave. The door between the rooms was ajar. Ned took a chance. He got to his feet and stepped to the hinge side of the inward-opening door.
A whistle blew. Ned reached around the door left-handed and fired a short burst into the nave. Then he put his shoulder and full strength against the panel to slam it shut. A dead guard’s foot was in the way. Ned kicked it free, then banged the panel against the jamb.
Bolts from the nave hit the panel, but the wood was heavy and the chapel’s architect had added metal straps for the look of it. The security forces carried 1-cm pistols and submachine guns. If a few of them had been issued projectile weapons or even 2-cm powerguns, they’d have blasted through the door and the man behind it; but they weren’t expected to fight a full-scale war.
They shouldn’t have fucked with Lissea Doormann, then. . . .
“Ned!” Lissea screamed.
Smoke and haze swirled as security personnel outside the building jerked open a door that Ned hadn’t noticed because the burning clerical robe hung beside it. The man lunging in hosed the room with his submachine gun, firing blind because his eyes werenadapted to the smudgy atmosphere.
Ned tried to swing his weapon, but the target was on his left and the submachine gun was still in his left hand. The guard’s line of bolts snapped toward him across the partition wall, chest-high.
Two cyan flashes lit the Telarian’s faceshield, spraying a mist of vaporized plastic into the man’s eyes. His hands flew upward.
Ned shot the guard in the throat and, as the Telarian toppled backward, sprayed the doorway and the further guards clus tered there. They fell or scattered. He knelt and replaced his magazine, though there were still a few rounds in the one he dropped into his pocket.
Lissea climbed out of the casket, holding the pistol she’d scooped from the floor where a dying guard flung it. “Stairs!” she cried. “There’s stairs behind you!”
“Go!” said Ned. He saw movement through the open doorway and shot, aiming crotch-high in case the guard was in body armor. Return fire chewed the door panel and jamb, but none of the security people outside were willing to rush the scene of sudden carnage again.
Lissea ran to the stairs, bending over as if she were in driving rain. She hesitated once, to tug a submachine gun out of the hands of a fallen guard. His fingers twitched mindlessly for the missing weapon.
Ned backed after her. The hisscrack! of bolts wove fiery nets across the changing room. Bits of stone exploded from the walls like shrapnel, stinging and even drawing blood. The door to the nave exploded in a welter of splinters and cyan as a d
ozen Telarians opened fire on it together.
More klaxons sounded outside the chapel. Many more klaxons.
The firetruck slowed. “Hold your fire,” Herne Lordling ordered. “I’m not going to commit till I know what we’re getting into.”
“Who died and made him God?” Josie Paetz muttered, but the three tense veterans on the tailboard with him were nodding grim agreement to Lordling’s words.
There was heavy firing to the front of them, small arms and at least one tribarrel; no high explosive. Rushing into a doubtful situation was a good way to get killed. It wasn’t a good way to accomplish anything useful, either, and staying alive was a higher priority of most of the Swift’s complement than a grand gesture was. They’d lived to become veterans, after all.
The truck plowed through a bed of white-flowering bushes. The bluff cab crushed the shrubs down, and the tracks supporting the rear of the vehicle chewed up foliage and spat it out behind.
The firetruck hadn’t attracted dangerous attention in the midst of so much violence and confusion. Westerbeke was driving a straight vector to the rendezvous point. He didn’t want to take chances with a road net designed for scenic vistas rather than high-speed communication.
As a sensible security precaution, there were no openly available maps of the Doormann estate. The team didn’t have time or the proper equipment to break into the estate’s data base now.
Besides, the data base had probably been housed in the central spire.
In the cab, Lordling called up a chart of recent powergun discharges onto his visor display. The weapons’ bursts of ionized copper atoms threw high spikes into the radio-frequency bands. The energy of each discharge was closely uniform within classes of weapon, permitting easy correlation between signal strength and range. Though the sensors built into a commo helmet were rudimentary in comparison to those of dedicated packs, they gave Lordling a fair schematic of the fighting half a klick ahead of the firetruck.
Shots had been fired from thirty-one points during the past five minutes, though some of the locations might have been alternate firing positions for a single weapon. Most of the points formed a pair of inwardly concave arcs a hundred meters apart. A gun or guns were also being fired frequently from the point squarely at the center of the common radii.