1457 hours
Ten men and women had gathered beneath the harsh lights and sharp shadows of Heinlein’s northern motor pool. The newcomers might have been confused by Piering’s frantic calls, but all were committed to the task at hand. He recognized Gypsy from his own security team. Then there were Hazel and Lee, both tough women, a Communications tech and a Fabrication specialist. Then an ex-cop named Chambers, a guy from Food Services and an He3 miner.
“I’m sure you’re wondering why we called you here,” the big man said. “You are all either Security, or have police or military experience. All checked the little box on your contracts agreeing to serve in a Security capacity if needed. Well, you’re needed.”
“The dome?” the lanky miner asked. This was Jankins, probably the oldest man in the room. Tall, pale and looked like he was made of catgut wrapped around barbed wire.
“The dome,” Piering agreed. “The Beehive, currently called the gaming dome, is now controlled by an aggressive threat calling themselves ‘Neutral Moresnot,’ professional kidnappers with allegiance to no nation or cause. We’ll call them ‘the pirates’ for simplicity’s sake.”
“Fatalities?” the miner asked, his narrow face pinched.
“One that we know of.”
Chambers scowled. “Who?”
“One of theirs, thank God. We think his name was Victor Sinjin. British expat, mercenary, career criminal. In a few minutes, we hope that the gamers inside the Beehive will be able to blind the pirates, keep them from seeing what is happening outside the dome long enough for us to get there, get in, and take them out. There may be explosives planted in the dome, so our rescue team has to wear pressure suits in case of… accidents. The use of lethal force is authorized.”
He paused, scanning their faces in challenge. If there was anyone who might object to killing, this was the time to speak. No one did. “Any questions?”
“Yes,” asked Hazel, the short, round woman from Communications. “What are we facing in terms of weaponry, honey? And what exactly are our own resources?”
“Damned good question,” Piering replied. “We believe that the opposition is armed with makeshift weapons. These include air guns and possibly crossbows of advanced design.” He paused significantly. “Made here on Luna.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you saying that somebody here helped?”
Concerned faces twisted into ugly masks. In an instant, the rescue party had transformed into a lynch mob. Piering raised his hand for silence. “We aren’t sure what we’re dealing with, and shouldn’t leap to any conclusions. The point is not who might have turned against us. The point is that we have good people in bad hands, and need to do something about that-now.”
He waved his thick hands above one of the workbenches, crowded with a hastily assembled array of weaponry. “Nail guns are lethal, but only at short range. No more than five meters. We’ve reworked a half dozen handheld welding lasers, but they aren’t lethal at more than a dozen meters-but can blind up to a hundred. The most promising possibility?” He raised a bulky pistol-like device. “Used by engineering. Piton device. If it can throw a steel arrowhead into rock at fifty meters, it can kill a man.”
He braced his meaty arms on the bench. “Here’s what I ask. Everyone here has fired a weapon. I’m not asking you to stand down if you haven’t fired a piton. But find the weapon that is closest to something you’ve already used. We have maybe an hour before we get the green light. Practice. And keep practicing. And then we’ll take it from there.”
“What’s the entry plan?” Hazel asked.
“Two teams,” Piering said. “One will enter at ground level, G. I’ll take a team up the side to level C. That’s where Asako Tabata’s body is. I think the pirates might be a little spooked by that, and give us a clear shot.”
Beneath the golden dome of Xavier’s gaming complex, the mood was just as serious.
“Are you ready?” Kendra asked.
“Almost,” Xavier said. He waved his little hands over a projection table, and a display of Heinlein base and its associated domes blossomed. “This image is ten hours old-just before the game began. It’s been shadow-adjusted to be identical with what the pirates would expect to see right now. Unless I’m very mistaken, they should suffice.”
“Good,” Kendra said. She peered down more closely. A hundred-meter perimeter around the dome had been established, but there were holographic gawkers just beyond that limit. Controlling Lunies was like herding cats.
“Kendra,” Xavier began, and then paused. “I assume I have permission to call you by your first name?”
“Knock yourself out.”
“Once we’ve regained control of communications-”
“I wouldn’t call it control. But we can get more than we have now.”
“Fine,” Xavier said. “Once we have more control, there are things we can do.”
“What kind of things?”
“Let’s just say that it isn’t a good idea to attack a mad scientist in his own workshop,” Xavier said.
“I like the sound of that.” Kendra said. “What exactly did you have in mind?”
The flame of Darla’s adrenaline had burnt down to a dim and dismal coal. Her stomach felt sore, her mouth tasted as if she’d drunk a cup of sour milk.
She had led the eight gamers to bubble 100-G. This was a small, partially furnished sphere strewn with communications and electronics gear. She thumped her palms against a foamed plastic plate and popped out a section of wall. In they crawled on all fours.
“Wish they’d make the access panels a little easier to access, dammit,” the former mermaid said. “Come on, hurry up.”
“This is a communications substation?” Scotty asked.
“Yes. And if I can change the protocols we should be able to communicate with the outside a bit. Enough, anyway. The voice and image feeds may be scrambled, but we’ve got some emergency hard lines in place. Just vanilla stuff, but I can get to them.”
Darla walked around the dome, holding her wrist out in front of her as if she were dowsing for water. Reading the wiggles on the monitor imprinted on her cuff. An anxious pause and then she smiled. “We have a signal. Xavier is sending files.”
“What kind of files?” Angelique asked.
“Visual files.” Her smile broadened. “Kendra added a note: ‘Sow confusion among the ungodly.’” Her expression grew sober again. “But I can’t do it from here. Someone has to go out into the interstices and find a hard-line video input.” She made a face. “I hate to say it, but I’m the only somebody who can do that.”
“And?” Wayne said. “If the gaps are full of pirates?”
She patted his cheek. “Oh, sweetie. You’re worried about me. I’ll just have to figure something out.”
Darla tapped at the floor until she found a section that thumped hollowly. She used her multitool’s flat-headed wedge to pry up an edge, and slid down into darkness, up to her shoulders. “Seal this behind me,” she said.
“Darla?” Sharmela asked. “How safe are these bubbles? What I mean to ask is, what would happen if the pirates depressurized the dome?”
Darla sighed. “Tell the truth, I’m not certain. By the time the Beehive was opened to the public in a couple months, everything would have been tested. The materials are up to standard… that’s not the problem. The problem is that we’re in kind of a transitional phase right now. May have been some shortcuts to speed things up for the game. I can tell you this: All of the doors are flanged so that air pressure will keep them sealed in the case of a pressure drop. You should be safe.”
“Not you, though.”
“I’ll be right back. Scotty? Seal this door after me, would you?”
“You’ve got it,” Scotty said.
Darla climbed downward. All around her was darkness and vague, hollow echoes.
She wiggled through tight spaces, breathing hard. She climbed up the side of one bubble, and stopped. Listened. Machine sounds. Fluid in pipes. Humming of wires. And distant human voices, fractured into echoes like water trickling over rocks.
She continued to climb, until she reached a stenciled number: 103-G. She pressed the side of her head hard against the wall, and held her breath. From within, a steady, thrumming sound… but no footsteps, and no human voices.
“Easy. Easy…”
She crawled up the side, lost her grip, and started to slide around the bubble’s curved roof. She looked down. It seemed to Darla that the bubble structure went down forever, dissolving in shadows somewhere below in moonrock. She gripped at the walls with fingernail-shredding strength.
“Shit fire!” Pain shot down her fingers, and as soon as she stopped her slide, she sucked at her fingers, disgusted at the tears drooling from the corners of her eyes.
At a spot where the rim of one bubble’s roof neared the floor of one just above, several cables ran out of the bubble’s side, meeting in a knot before branching off again. She used her multitool to tap into a little juncture box, and attached her PDA. If the pirates had scrambled the com field, then they probably had the capacity to un scramble it to scan for intruders. With just a drop of luck, this might fool them.
Suddenly, muffled sounds from the bubble above her. Pirates?
Terrified but determined, she triggered the data transfer, keeping her breathing shallow until an UPLOAD COMPLETE message flashed.
She wiggled back through the spaces, until she reemerged at 100-G, the gamer bubble. She knocked three times, and the door lifted out.
She sealed the door behind her. “I did it.” She rolled over on her back, gasping open-mouthed.
“Good girl,” Scotty said.
The gasps turned into shivers. Darla rolled onto her side and clutched herself. “Give me a minute, hon? I think I’m gonna throw up.”
Wayne’s fingers brushed her cheek. “I’ll buy you a gold-plated barf bag later. What’s our next step?”
Darla swallowed air, forced herself to calm. “We have to let Heinlein know that it’s done,” she said. “Then it’s up to them.”
The Moresnot pirates had combed their way through the rubble of bubble 62-E without finding either gamers or evidence of their passage. In the last hours Thomas Frost had pinballed through a series of emotions: tension, joy, frustration, fear. Anger at Shotz and the mercenaries he had hired. And finally cautious optimism that they had behaved in a professional fashion, creating alternate plans when the old ones went south. They did not fall apart, and that gave Thomas hope.
“Celeste?” Shotz asked. “What do you have on the monitors?”
Thomas watched the big woman check a handheld monitor, switching rapidly from view to view around the dome. Viewing over her shoulder, the monitor displayed rocks, the curve of domes and spidery collisions of light and shadow. The line of her jaw was too strong, too masculine. He couldn’t imagine being in bed with her, although he had the sense that she and the intimidating Shotz were lovers. Nothing said. Nothing in their body language. Just a sense. And that put a picture into his head that churned his stomach.
“Nothing,” she said. “No changes. But no bad news, either.”
“Small favors. Thomas?”
“Right here,” Frost said, grateful that the image of a quarter ton of writhing beef was stricken from his mind.
“Contact your brother, ask if he has received any word.”
Thomas tapped a code sequence into his sleeve’s com link, and waited.
In Doug Frost’s cell, a rusty voice began to sing “No High Ground.” His wallet and its built-in communicator lay in a basket on the table, along with the other contents of his pockets. A star-shaped light glowed on and off and on again, in rhythm with the song.
“No high ground, no high ground, no high ground anymore…”
He looked up, but could do nothing.
“Kendra,” the security guard barked into his communicator. “Mr. Frost is receiving a message from inside the dome. What should I do?”
“I’ll be right there.”
Doug looked up at her with no expression on his long dark face as Kendra entered, breathing hard from her half-kilometer sprint around the dome’s rim.
“What does your brother want, Douglas?”
He peered up at her, expression unreadable. He gestured toward the wallet. “You would have to let me answer to find out.”
She shook her head. “I’m sure you’d like that. Too risky.” She turned to the guard. “Keep him isolated.”
Thomas Frost punched a slender finger down at his PDA, ending its attempt to reach his brother. “I’m getting nothing,” he said.
“What does that mean?” Shotz asked.
“They may have captured him.”
Celeste nodded. “I agree that we should assume the worst. That just makes it more important to catch the Prince.” She turned to Stavros, their communications man. “I want you to open the emergency channel, see if we have any word. Perhaps we cannot speak, but we can still listen.”
“At once,” Stavros said, and hunkered in a corner of the room.
She turned back to Thomas. “We will capture the Prince. And once we do, we can force Heinlein base to free your brother.”
He hadn’t the slightest illusion that this gargoyle gave a damn about Douglas as a person, but it made good operational sense to pretend to. Bitch.
She turned and glanced at him, almost as if he had said that word aloud. Her face was neutral, but somehow he felt as if she was grinning inside. A death’s head grin. God, this woman frightened him
“Nothing from the external feeds?” Shotz asked.
“Nothing,” she replied. “I guess Douglas remained silent, after all.”
Thomas stiffened. “Of course he did, but I could not expect mercenaries to understand such a thing. We are patriots.”
Shotz smiled thinly. “Of course. She meant no harm.”
Thomas hoisted his air gun. “Let’s get them.”
Thomas opened the bubble door, exiting to the next chamber. After he left, Shotz turned. “Stavros,” he said. “What do you have for me?”
The Heinlein base motor pool was a flurry of activity as Piering’s volunteer brigade checked their weapons, experimented firing pitons and lasers against makeshift targets. Some tinkered with their suits, trying to get a bit more flexibility and mobility out of the polyplastic joints.
“We have the go-ahead,” he said. “Our people have cut into the communications lines, and right now these bastards are blind. Let’s hit them.”
“Yes, sir!” the brigade called. And if they didn’t snap to attention as might a more practiced unit, enthusiasm compensated for group experience.
They piled into the Scorpion transport, and the pressure seals battened down. The Scorpion hissed and then levitated on the track, and slid forward into an airlock, which sealed behind them.
“This is Scorpion two three three,” Piering said. “Awaiting permission for egress.”
“This is control. You are cleared for egress through to maintenance track two-two. Good luck.”
“Amen to that,” Piering said.
The airlock lights cycled between red, yellow and green. The outer door opened, and the Scorpion slid forward. Eight men and two women looked out at the lunar landscape as the Scorpion progressed. It swung around the track and headed toward the dome. Ground level. Level G.
Although he did not need to, Shotz stood near Stavros. He stood straight, hands clasped behind his back, lecturing an unseen audience.
“Attention, Prince Ali,” he said. “This message is being sent over all communications frequencies within the dome. Your father has requested that we convey the following message to you: ‘Death does not sound a trumpet.’”
“What does this mean?” Stavros asked.
“A Congolese saying,” Douglas replied. “And evidently a code phrase of some kind.”
Crouched in their bubble, Angelique suddenly raised her hand. “I’m getting something,” she said.
“Me, too,” Mickey said. “It’s coming over the gaming channels and the emergency com.”
“What is it?” Scotty said.
Angelique frowned. “It sounds like ‘Death does not sound a trumpet.’”
Scotty was baffled, but Prince Ali reacted violently, and at once. “My father!”
“What?”
He cradled his head in his hands. “It means that he has left Kikaya. I am to do whatever I must to survive, and need not resist to save the crown.”
He sobbed. “He did it for me. My father lost the crown… for me.”
Scotty rubbed the Prince’s shoulder. What in the world do you say to something like that?
“What happens to Kikaya now?”
“I don’t know. It depends on who was responsible for the coup. There is a man named Motabu, a general quite popular with the people. My father would have removed him, or jailed him, but for that popularity. He might have the support to do such a thing.”
“And what do you do now?”
“I surrender,” Ali said. “There is no need for the rest of you to place your lives at risk protecting me any longer.”
“You think we were doing it for you?” Wayne said. “Kid, you’ve got a lot to learn. The world doesn’t revolve around your throne. We’re running because we don’t trust those murderous bastards.”
“If they are hunting or fighting you, they will be more tense, more likely to overreact.”
“They can sue me,” Scotty said.
“I’m turning myself in.”
“I don’t work for you.”
“My father abdicated!”
“He didn’t cancel my contract, or was that part of the code words, too?”
Ali tried to puff himself out to be more threatening. “Yes, it was.”
“Hands here?” Scotty asked. “Hands? Anyone believe that?”
“Please, help me,” Ali said. “I want to turn myself in.”
“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 Second 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 we 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.
That night there had been children at the club, and Gruber had held to the family-friendly lyrics, even in the part about Americans retreating in disgrace:
We kicked their butts in Montreal
It really was a sight
To see the G.I. Joes and Janes
Run naked through the night The referenced original incident had been a successful assault of what should have been a secured American base. The Canadians had been too busy laughing to bother rounding up the dozen soldiers who’d been showering when they attacked. Lee had been out-sung, but let Klaus buy her a beer after they were done.
“We’ve got the southeast door disarmed.”
“I told you,” Piering said. “If the door is mined, don’t mess with it.”
“Yes,” Gruber whispered. “I know, I know. But we’ve really got a chance to get behind them, I think. I figured it out. They expect us to avoid the traps, and go through the open door. If we let them-”
“Klaus, this isn’t a game!”
“We’re so close,” Klaus said. “I’ve almost got-”
And then there was a blast of static, so loud that Piering winced, staggered back against the wall in shock. The entire structure hummed with that blast. Then the alarm began to ring.
“Inner wall breach,” the automated voice screamed. “Alert. Inner wall breach. Immediately seek shelter. The outer door of lock Northeast-G has been damaged. The seals will erode in approximately thirty seconds. Alert. Seek shelter immediately — ”
“Good God,” Max Piering whispered, stunned. “We’re screwed.”
“What the hell?” Angelique said. Panic tightened her voice.
Scotty and Darla glanced at each other. “Alarm,” she said. “And I’m betting that’s the real thing.”
“All right,” Wayne said. “But what does it mean?”
“That there’s been a breach,” Scotty said. “And that the sensors are detecting an outer hull damage as well.” He paused. “And that,” he said, “is very bad news.” He slapped his hand against the bubble wall, not at all comforted by the solid thump. “They say these things will hold a full atmosphere against vacuum. We’re about to find out.”