“They’re all right,” Adrian snapped. “Asleep, merely. You carry the girl. Hurry, an alarm has gone off!”
“But—”
“They will not shoot and endanger Adrienne’s children, they know she would flay them by inches for the rest of eternity. Go!”
A seven-year-old was more of a burden than he’d anticipated; Adrienne’s body was very strong for her size, but that size was a fifth less than his. The utter limpness helped; his heart started to turn again, as the boy’s face drooped into the curve of his neck.
No time, no time. . .
They took the distance at a quick walk. Adrian could feel the electronic nerves of the security system shrilling; he split off part of his mind to push—
Wires melted, arcs sprang between conduits. Redundant systems came online as the lights flickered, but some of those failed too. Cheba gasped but toiled along behind him. Servants fled his shout of, “Get out of my way!”
The guards at the front door hesitated just a moment too long, caught between the impossibility of firing and the knowledge of what would also happen if they let their mistress’ children be abducted.
Crack! Crack!
Both flipped backwards and slumped to the ground; at ten yards he could manage head shots. He dropped the Glock and scooped up the Steyr assault rifle in one hand as they stumble-ran down the long steps.
“Alert! Alert! Intruder is not Doña Adrienne! The Doña’s children have been captured! Alert! Aleeeiaeoughtg—”
The loudspeakers exploded in cascades of flame. Adrian staggered; he was using the Power with reckless abandon. They dropped the children into the Ferrari’s narrow backseat.
“I will hold them!” Cheba snapped, and scrambled in to kneel facing backwards, her arms bracing the small forms.
Adrian vaulted into the driver’s bucket seat of the sports car, his foot stamping on the accelerator. The turbocharged engine screamed like a horse in agony, and the rear wheels spun black smoke into the night. Lights were snapping on all across the estate grounds as the acceleration punched him back into the padding; he could hear Cheba grunt as she threw herself forward to pin the children safely in place against inertia.
He took the curving approach with insane daring, mind like a needle point of diamond as he pushed at the probabilities even as his body switched wrists on the wheel and worked the shift-stick. The last stretch was level . . . right to the firmly closed and locked gates. The covers on the stone gate pillars had flipped up, and the tele-operated robot guns were tracking him. He grinned like a shark and stood on the brake, turning in a skidding pinwheel that came within a hair of flipping the car as it scrubbed off velocity. The air stank of burning rubber and burning fuel oil and the sweat of terror, a scent that made the hairs stand up along his neck in a predator’s bristle. Cheba was screaming now, but he could feel how she still braced herself with everything that was in her.
She is almost as brave as Ellen, some remote part of him thought.
The operators of the guns at last dared to fire one economical burst directly into the long hood of the Ferrari. The engine seized just as the nose came around to point at the gate once more. The two guards had thrown away their rifles, and they were running at him with their heavy kukris raised, the in-curved chopping blades glinting where their silver inlays caught the floodlights. Their minds were like eyes that had looked into the sun, but their training and the warrior souls within kept them moving; their reflex was to run towards danger.
Even as the car slowed Adrian was moving. Forward, letting his clothes fall away as he reverted to his own default form, impalpable as he passed through the windshield. Then another change in midleap, and the sabertooth gave a screaming roar; and for an instant Adrian understood in his bones how his ancestors had ruled the world for a hundred thousand years.
He landed as delicately as a house cat pouncing for a butterfly, and one plate-broad paw slammed hooked claws across a mercenary’s face and throat, the dewclaw ripping half the scalp free. The man gave a bubbling shriek and spun away to die with his face swiped away like a putty mask, leaving only red bone and grinning teeth and staring eyes above a spouting tear in the throat.
“Ayo Ghorkali!” the second man shouted, and struck.
A half ton of carnivore slammed into his chest as the blade came down, and a razor edge of silver sliced into the skin over Adrian’s spine. In the same instant his bear-thick forearms closed around the man, ripping at the body armor that covered his back, shredding it. The six-inch fangs stabbed down as the grip positioned the prey. Crisp popping sensations as the serrated ivory steak knives drove deep.
Blood foamed across his mouth, irresistible, wine of terror and effort. He allowed himself six long swallows, and felt new strength course through him. When he rose it was as a naked man whose face dripped a red that was almost black in the flickering light.
Two lances of fire from outside the estate wall rammed into the robot turrets and they exploded in flame and smoke-trailing fragments. Half a second later the reinforced bumper and grille of the van rammed the gates. Tortured steel snapped, and the great portals buckled enough to let a man through. It wasn’t a man, though; Guha came instead, running towards the wrecked car whose hood was wreathed in fire. Adrian turned; a platoon of Gurkhas was double-timing down the roadway towards him, spread out in a rough skirmish line with their kukris raised. As he saw them they broke into a charge.
His hands went up. “Aki, tzeeen, alalaaal!” he screamed, the Mhabrogast tearing at his throat, turning his mind into a set of lethal razors.
Four of the Gurkhas simply dropped in their tracks; hearts locked in spasm or brains flooding from burst veins. Another two began hacking at each other madly; and two rifles exploded as the propellant in the cartridges spontaneously ignited. The others wavered for an instant, then came on still faster. Adrian staggered with the effort, wheezing suddenly as the stolen strength of the dead soldier’s blood flowed out of him again. For a moment his night-walker’s form flickered, and he was a pillar of mist with yellow eyes, until it steadied again.
A heavy machine gun cut loose behind him, tracers snapping by overhead; Jack Farmer was shooting from the hatch on the vehicle’s roof, screaming:
“Die, you cocksucking traitors, die, motherfuckers, die, die!”
His shooting was much less frenzied than his shout, or the emotions pouring off him. Men died; the .50 caliber made nothing of infantry armor, especially at this range, blasting through and turning bodies into tumbling bags of smashed bone and flesh or ripping off limbs. Ellen was out of the van too, her sniper rifle snapping off rounds as she braced it through a gap in the gate. The .338 Lapua rounds were silver-cored, which didn’t matter, and heavy and moving fast, which did. She worked the bolt methodically, swayed back a little with the recoil, set herself, picked another target through the night-vision scope, breathed out, fired.
Cheba ran past with Leila in her arms. Salvador met her at the gap in the buckled gate, snatched the child and practically hurled her through, and then into the vehicle. Guha was close behind her when one of the Gurkhas at last lost control and began shooting, a long burst that walked tracer towards her.
Adrian groped for the Power, but he was spent. Guha saw the burst coming and dropped, curling her body around Leon’s small form and wrapping herself in a protective shield. Three of the light high-velocity bullets smacked into her back with sounds like fists striking meat. Little spots flecked up on her clothing, and the armor beneath was the light law-enforcement type. She sprawled, blood draining from mouth and nose.
Adrian took three paces and heaved her over his shoulder. Ellen was beside him, rifle discarded; she grabbed for his son and dragged the boy backwards out of the pool of blood, throwing him into a fireman’s carry. Together they struggled through the wreckage of the gate. Adrian tossed Guha’s limp form into the van, and dove after her.
Blackness.
“Had the devil of a time getting you out of that steel coffin b
efore you smothered,” Farmer grumbled, looking down at the plastic cast on his arm. “That’s where I got this from a stray round, and the ricochet hit Cheba in the thigh. We weren’t even sure your etheric form had made it back to the meat body. Then the black helicopter spiraled in and we piled in. . .. God, what a movie it would make.”
Adrian smiled thinly. He still felt as if every inch of him had been beaten with clubs until his skin came off and then he was dipped in acid; that was what you got for overusing the Power. Even a private feeding with Ellen had made him feel only a little better, enough to keep down some of the Brotherhood’s shanghaied Red Cross blood. The institutional beige-and-brown atmosphere of the safe-house hospital wasn’t helping either.
“You need help, honey?” Ellen said. “You could stay in the wheelchair for this, you know.”
Slowly Adrian stood. The rail of the bed rattled a bit as he put out a hand when everything swayed, and then steadied. He opened his mouth to say he could stand on his own, then smiled and let her put an arm around his waist; his went over her shoulders.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome. This way. The doctor says she can’t say much, but she insisted.”
“She saved my son,” Adrian said. “She can insist as she pleases.”
The hospital was set up in orthodox fashion, until you noticed there were no exterior windows; the rooms opened off a central corridor, with two or three beds in each. Most were vacant; the next held a sullen Cheba, and Eric Salvador sitting in a chair beside her bed being politely implacable about keeping her in it. Beyond that was Guha’s.
No convalescence here; it was simple flat-out borderline-fatal injury. Adrian’s nose flared slightly at the smell of pain. The doctors thought the agent would live, but three pulverized ribs and a perforated lung were not something you could shrug off. Jack Farmer was speaking as they walked in:
“And you are going to take some time off. We never did get to go on that holiday in Mauritius you always talked about. . .. Okay, here he is.”
The nurse watching the monitors gave him a warning glance as he nodded.
“Second . . . time . . . save,” Guha said breathily as he bent over her.
The painkilling drugs were making her muzzy, but he could feel the effort of will she put forth into mastering it. The tubes rattled a little as she moved one arm slightly.
“Got to tell you. Harvey . . . said not. Owe you. Harvey . . . has the bomb. I. . . can feel . . . you should know. Black-path if you don’t. Harvey . . . has the bomb.”
“Bomb?” Adrian said softly.
There was an image in her mind. A flash of light. . .
“Used . . . plutonium from the . . . Never mind. Twenty-five kiloton. In Istanbul. To Tbilisi.”
Adrian blinked. “What? You could never conceal something like that—”
“Boase. Figured it out. Got it. Harvey’s taking it to Tbilisi.”
Her eyes fluttered closed. The nurse pointed warningly out the door, and Adrian walked—stumbled—in that direction, holding himself up against the jamb. Images strobed through his mind, a wild tangle of possibilities with a dead center where the Power simply wasn’t.
“Bomb?” Ellen said. “That redneck maniac has a nuclear bomb?”
“He’s going to try to destroy the Council,” Adrian said with soft wonder. “All the most powerful Shadowspawn adepts in one place. That hasn’t happened since before Hiroshima. And with Boase’s shield to keep it from being detected.”
“And it’s going to work!” Farmer said with quiet vehemence. “We’re going to win.”
“There are over a million human beings in Tblisi, you . . . you fanatic !” Ellen began.
Adrian held up his hand. Both of them fell silent, and he stared at the wall. Ellen’s hand stole into his and he squeezed it, drawing strength.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “Either of you. Adrienne is alive. She’s been moving behind the scenes all year, and we didn’t know she was alive. She must know about the bomb. She’s been playing us like a violin!”
“God,” Farmer said, half a grunt, as if he’d been struck.
Ellen made a wordless sound.
“Harvey doesn’t know she’s alive. He has to be told.”
Farmer backed up three steps. “He can’t be.”
“What do you mean?”
“He went into Istanbul and picked it up, and he was going to deliver it under deep cover. I think he was afraid the Brotherhood would change its mind. I don’t know how to contact him—and with that thing of Boase’s we can’t even use the Power to trace him.”
The three looked at one another. A moment later, Adrian spoke:
“What have we done?”
EPILOGUE
The dun plain of Anatolia stretched out before Harvey Ledbetter, dark and immense, rising to snowcapped mountains in the far distance as the big truck rumbled through the shadows. He whistled tunelessly in the blue glow of the control screen and sipped at a cup of tepid, acridstrong coffee; his eyelids felt as if sand had been forced underneath, but keeping going through fatigue was the oldest of his skills. Then he began to sing along with the sound system that filled the bubble of warmth.
The tune was an old favorite, Cory Morrow:This is some kind of crazy
You’re my favorite kind of lonesome. . .
Behind him, the bomb was invisible to the eye of the Power. But he knew it was there.
Singing, he drove eastward through the night.
NOVELS OF THE SHADOWSPAWN
A TAINT IN THE BLOOD
NOVELS OF THE CHANGE
ISLAND IN THE SEA OF TIME
AGAINST THE TIDE OF YEARS
ON THE OCEANS OF ETERNITY
DIES THE FIRE
THE PROTECTOR’S WAR
A MEETING AT CORVALLIS
THE SUNRISE LANDS
THE SCOURGE OF GOD
THE SWORD OF THE LADY
OTHER NOVELS BY S. M. STIRLING
THE PESHAWAR LANCERS CONQUISTADOR
The Council of Shadows Page 33
