The Military Dimension-Mark II

by David Drake

  The Citadel's doorways were unmarked against segments of the building's metal sheath, hidden except to sophisticated equipment. The current party had been guided by the damage earlier intruders had done. Without the guidance, well—the man Singer had just killed carried a stone-tipped spear, and there was not a scrap of metal on his body. It was scarcely credible that such a band could have woven the protective screen with adequate precision. Perhaps the external barrier was losing its effectiveness with the years.

  Guards were not meant to worry about that, though it could be that no one else remained. Singer had a momentary vision of a tin can rusting slowly, retaining the appearance of a protective covering long after time had leached away the contents. Then the veteran's stride took him through the portal, which slid open at his approach as it was programmed to do.

  The part of the Citadel entered through normal doorways was a bleak warren of conduit-lined halls to which only necessity could draw Singer. There were a few cabinets holding special-purpose tools and weapons beyond those of the kit a guard received when he went operational. Most of the interior was closed as firmly to the guards as to intruders who managed to penetrate the outer shell of the building by force. Singer sometimes believed that the interior 'rooms' were actually structural elements, supporting or capping the levels of the Citadel that held whatever reality Arborson retained. Once before, however, when he ran past on a mission of slaughter, a blank wall had become momentarily transparent. Singer had glimpsed a ballroom and dazzlingly costumed humans. Under other circumstances, he would have assumed he was hallucinating—as perhaps he was.

  None of the guards had any notion of where the physical reality of the guardroom might be. Perhaps it was not even part of the Citadel's structure.

  The interior of the Citadel was humidity and temperature controlled, though even that could not prevent the primers of small-arms ammunition from degrading to the point that guns were useless. The dispenser spool of beryllium monocrystal that the guard snatched—wire so fine that spider-silk was coarse beside it—still had the dull gleam of flawless, corrosion-free uniformity, however. Singer carried it with him in his right hand as he ran down the pattern of long hallways with the corpse jouncing on his shoulders.

  The fact that the intruders' efforts—and even their voices—were clearly audible on the inner side of the portal meant the guard had less time to prepare than he had hoped. The intruders had opened a visible crack between the door's two leaves and were now attacking the hinges. God knew whether or not folk so primitive could do real damage if they penetrated the shell of the building; but Arborson assumed they might . . . or at any rate, no one yet had told the guards that the progressive collapse of civilization had made their services superfluous.

  Using the knife with which he had made his kill, Singer butterflied the corpse: splitting the breast-bone the long way and then, with the body faced away from him and his knee on the spine, pulling back on the halves of the rib cage until bones cracked and the sides flapped with no tendency of their own to close over the organs trying to slip from the cavity. He strung the body from an arm-thick pipe running along the axis of the hall a few inches beneath the ceiling.

  Singer's hands were slimy with blood and lymph, making the task of threading the wire through back muscles and twice around the spine even harder than the thin wire would have caused it to be. The Citadel had no washing facilities that the guard knew of, and the fact that he was working with a fresh corpse meant that an attempt to cleanse himself would be pointless in any case.

  The beryllium filament had a tab on the end so that it could be tracked and handled without special equipment. The monocrystal itself was strong enough to suspend a locomotive, but the guard was very much afraid that a thread so fine would cut even the dense bone of spinal processes under the weight of the dangling corpse. The dispenser hissed as Singer used it to sever and tack-weld the loops he ran off while it automatically fused the new end of the spool into a tab.

  Ordinary baling wire would have been better for the present job, thought the big man as he gently let the wire take the full burden of the dead man he had been supporting one-handed; but you use what you've got and the beryllium filament was perfectly satisfactory, despite a minuscule grating sound from the lolling corpse and a squeal from the pipe above.

  That was half the job. Singer ran back in the direction by which he had entered. Along the walls quivered patches of torchlight that entered through widening cracks in the door that the intruders were forcing. The guard carried the wire dispenser and the knife which he had not had time to wipe and sheathe again. The light crossbow jounced uncocked from a spring tether on the right side of Singer's belt where it balanced the quiver of bolts on the left. He would need the missile weapon again; but for the moment, the knife would deal with anyone he met as he dashed among the trees on the next stage of his plan to preserve the Citadel—from men who might not be able to harm it, for a man who might for ages have been dead and dust.

  How long had it been, anyway? The oaks within the external barrier were protected from lightning and the attendant possibility of fire, so their growth had been stunted by the dense equality of foliage and root systems. There was no way to estimate time's passage from their size. And as for the mad tangle of vegetation beyond the barrier—as well try to count the whorls of a storm cloud.

  For now, time meant the minutes remaining before the intruders broke into the Citadel.

  Singer tacked a loop of beryllium filament to a fitting in the hallway before he stepped out of the building again. The door closed behind him, tugging at the dispenser. Even the tolerances of the Citadel's undamaged portals were not close enough to sever the monocrystal between their surfaces. With one end anchored immovably, the guard began to wind his lengthy snare among the oaks.

  He drew loops of the filament around major trunks, tightly enough that the thin beryllium cut the outer bark and kept the segments of line between trees from sagging. The wire was so fine that, if he had wanted to, Singer could have sawed through the thickest boles with a steady pressure—severing the dense wood like a block of cheddar in a cheese slicer.

  The trees were not his objective, of course. He strung his line at slants varying from eighteen to sixty inches above the ground: knee-height to neck of a man bolting between the trees.

  The job required extreme care for all the haste. Not even Singer could see the strung filament which hung like the disembodied edge of a razor. If he fell against it, it would slice him to the bone or beyond—and that would keep him from completing his job.

  Singer found the remaining outlier no greater problem than he expected. Fear had turned to restive loneliness in the half hour during which the man had been stationed with no company but a hound that was equally bored.

  The patches of torchlight which the outlier could see from where he stood, backed still against the tree, were more fleeting and diffuse than those the same fires had flung within the cracking Citadel. It was toward those torches that the intruder turned at last and craned his neck, hoping for a glimpse of his fellows—as the dog tugged its lead in renewed interest and Singer, ten feet away in a thicket of bush honeysuckle, shot the man through the base of the brain.

  The hound woofed in interrogation, tossing its big head from the slap of the crossbow to the sprawling collapse of the dead man to whom it was still tethered. Singer cared very little about the noise, now that he had strung a ragged line across what the intruders would think was their escape route, and he would have spared the dog if he could . . . but that was not one of the options that Arborson had permitted.

  The guard's powerful forearm drew back on the bow's cocking lever while the dog, its flaring nostrils filled with the scent of death, yelped and sprang against its tether. Its last jump was toward Singer, straining so hard that it dragged along the corpse that anchored it. When the hound reached the limit of its attempt and crashed back to the ground, the guard put a bolt through its chest the long way.

&
nbsp; Singer had no idea of how many men he had killed, either before the day Arborson hired him or after. He knew that he regretted none of them as much as he did the dog whose nostrils now sprayed bright pulmonary blood across the leaves on which it died.

  Even that lengthy paired slaughter of man and beast went unnoticed by the main party in the moment of its own triumph. Metal shrieked from the direction of the Citadel, now out of the veteran's sight. Singer dared not creep closer and chance his own snare, but he flattened himself belly-down on the leaf mold. At the level of the moccasins and bare legs of the intruders, Singer could see them crowding to grip the levers they had wedged between the jamb and door leaves. The locking mechanism failed with a crash. The men gave a great shout and lurched forward, some of them tumbling onto all fours.

  The leader with the catskin headdress was one of those who stumbled, though only to his knees. He rose now to his full great height, holding a torch forward in his hand. The bellow of fear from his men was louder even than their triumph of moments before.

  Singer took the chance he was offered and snapped a crossbow bolt between the shoulder blades of the leader thirty feet away. The big intruder pitched forward without a sound, while the men he had commanded fled from the mutilated body of the fellow they thought was on guard behind them.

  Even in flight, the survivors remained fairly well bunched. They would have been cold meat for an automatic weapon, but the beryllium razor they met at approximately waist height did quite well enough for Singer's purpose.

  The wire was stationary and the victims ran slower than a sword could have been swung towards its impact. Even so, the edge the men struck was supernally sharp, and it was anchored with all of the ineluctable solidity of the Earth itself. Men screamed, and those who were able snatched out to free themselves from a gossamer tenuousness that lopped off the fingers terror flung against it.

  For choice, Singer would have let the men on the wire wait for an hour or more before he exposed himself, but there was the last intruder yet to deal with—the one stationed at the break in the barrier. The noise of terror and confusion should not draw the watchman from his place even if he heard it; but dangerous as it was to count on an opponent doing the wrong thing, it was even more foolish to assume that someone under great stress would carry out each previous order as given.

  Singer's time was short. He stepped from cover with his knife ready for use and his bow cocked against possibility.

  The blade was enough. None of the men on the wire were by this point any danger to the guard, and only three of them really needed the quick stroke to finish the job. The filament had no barbs, but it cut with crystalline certainty even when a victim tried to withdraw from its invisible embrace. The intruders fumbled and lurched until they bled out. The one man who tore himself free, regardless of the pain, lay sprawled a few feet closer to the Citadel than the others. Those parts of him that had been between his ribs and the cup of his pelvis now lay in a liquid tangle beneath the wire which had skidded across bone as the intruder scooped himself free.

  The guard used the dispenser's cutting jaws to sever the filament when he had disposed of the men on it. For choice, he would have clipped each segment of the lethal snare he had hung . . . but if Singer were to complete what was now his main task, he did not have time for those details. The irony was not lost on the guard as he strode toward the man who had led the intruders.

  The leader had enough life in him to blink when Singer snatched away the catskin headdress. The man had been trying to lift himself or crawl, but his thick fingers had only marked the loam.

  The brooch which held the leader's cape at the throat was an elaborate confection of garnets and bits of window glass in a matrix of bitumen. Singer unhooked it and pulled the bark-cloth garment away before he drew his bloody knife across the man's throat. A vein on the bald scalp spasmed as it emptied, and the eyes lost even the film of life they shared with the glass in the cat's sockets.

  One to go.

  Singer threw the cap across his shoulders and fumbled with the brooch until he had it fastened. The garment stank, but not nearly as much as did the catskin which had been, at least, imperfectly cured before it became a headdress. That mattered as little to Singer as it did to the dead man who once wore it. The guard tossed his helmet to the ground and put the catskin on instead before he set off to meet the remaining intruder.

  This time when he ran through the forest, Singer did so with the deliberate intention of making noise. He flapped through brush too green to crackle and thumped heavily against tree trunks, bellowing wordlessly. His left hand gripped the cape to keep it from opening as he ran, because that would have exposed—among other things—the bloody knife he held blade to the thumb side in the other hand.

  As the veteran burst into sight of the barrier, the wire-wrapped cylinder, and Cohen's body, his attention was focused on the intruder waiting in silence for another kill. Singer could not permit the other to know that, however—not until the intruder called to what he thought was his leader, below him and foreshortened by the angle. Singer leaped, his left hand outstretched—sure that he had taken the intruder completely by surprise.

  The man's bowstring slapped his bracer as he sent an arrow down at Singer's chest. The point shattered on Singer's ceramic breastplate, but the bastard was very good and the shock of his reaction almost caused the guard to miss his grip on an ankle beneath the camouflaging drapery.

  Almost. Singer was very good also.

  They tumbled together, the Citadel guard's mass and momentum throwing his slighter opponent like a flail to the threshing floor. Tendons or the fibula cracked in the leg Singer held, and the bow sprang loose when the intruder hit the ground. The cape that had hidden the man fluttered from the tree to which it had been fastened. Without its shrouding, the scars on the intruder's torso and arms stood out sharply. He was missing an ear and the little finger of the hand with which he fumbled for the stone knife in his sash. Even stunned by the fall, the intruder's instincts were everything Death could have wished.

  Cohen had picked the wrong time to get impatient . . . but without Cohen's body on the ground for warning, Singer wasn't sure that he couldn't have made as final a mistake himself. He punched the intruder in his jaw, using not his bare hand but the dagger pommel. Bone crunched and the wiry body went loose. The chest still rose.

  The framework of the cylinder through which the gang had breached the external barrier was too heavy for even Singer to muscle it fully inside. He gripped a double handful of the wire sheathing instead and pulled on it. The meshes distorted from the precise rhomboids they had been. The currents induced in the barrier's heart ravened through the material: The wooden framework burst into flame and the wires, laboriously drawn and woven, blazed in showers of white sparks in the orange wrapper of the softer fire.

  Singer tossed aside the portion of the shielding he held. By the time he next saw it, the metal would have rusted to a flush on the topsoil. Even the tetrahedral bonds of the beryllium monocrystal could, given time, be oxidized. Some day the filament would crumble at a breeze or a raindrop which, like normal light, perpetrated the external barrier unimpeded. As ragged as this party of intruders had been, the Citadel itself might be dust before others gained access . . . unless the barrier failed first.

  And again, the guardroom might precede the remainder of Arborson's constructs to oblivion.

  Singer picked up the intruder whose breath whistled through a nose broken, it seemed, when he hit the ground. The man was smaller than the corpse Singer had used to panic the others, but he was densely muscular and a fair weight. Size was valuable and Singer, a good big man himself, knew that as well as any did. The man who'd put an arrow into Cohen and missed Singer's own throat by a finger's breadth and a millisecond could afford to give a hundred pounds to just about anybody he met, though. Trained to use the weapons of the Citadel—bows better than his, blades better than his dreams, and all the other paraphernalia that remained when time
overcame chemistry—the one-time intruder would become a worthy guard for Arborson or Arborson's tomb.

  Singer carried the unconscious man back to the transfer booths in the cradle of his big arms, the gentleness a personal whim since he knew that the only requirement was that the subject being recruited remain alive.

  The Citadel's front door still gaped, a body before it and a body dangling within. Its repair was no concern for Singer. The conditioning that Arborson's apparatus imparted to the guards locked them within certain strait parameters. Perhaps someone from a place that was not the guardroom would appear to repair the door and dispose of the intruders, men and dogs, whom Singer could not have left alive even if he had wished to do so. A division of labor: those who took care of the Citadel of Arborson . . . and those, Singer and his fellows, who took care of attempts to break into the Citadel.

  The big guard stepped through the immaterial curtain hiding the transfer booths. He could scarcely remember the first time he had done so, he and the three others who had hired themselves to guard Feodor Arborson less for the wages he promised than the possibility that the eccentric genius could provide survival in a world that teetered on the brink of a millennium and the abyss.