by Steve Perry
Wouldn't make sense for Juete to be elsewhere when it happens."
"I don't suppose negotiation with the kidnappers is an option?"
"No."
The matadors nodded but did not speak. They had all done similar scenarios many times, both in training and in reality. This kind of operation had to be fast and precise. Were it to succeed, there was little room for error. Their reflexes might not be as sharp as once they had been, but the old skills were still there.
They'd see how well things worked soon enough.
"All right," Khadaji said. "Here's the aerial holoproj of the main complex. My information says there might be as many as thirty security people on the premises…"
"The implant is ready," the doctor said."Packaged for transport."
"You have taken all the precautions I ordered?" Wall asked.
"You could drop the package from a flitter at ten thousand meters and it would survive the impact.
Life-support systems all are triple-backed, vacuum-proofed, directional locators rigged for emergency.
You have thirty-six hours and twenty-three minutes before the nanomachineries start automatic replication. Best you have the implant in place before then."
"I am aware of that, doctor. Load the package."
"You'll let us know how it goes?"
"Of course."
If it goes as it should, I'll let you know in person, Wall thought. If not, I'll need you for another try. You aren't expendable just yet, doctor.
They had flown in a ground-hugging circle to within ten klicks of the target, arriving just before sunset in a tangle of wooded swampland to the northwest. Both the flitter and hopper were rigged with confounding gear; they had traveled low enough to avoid normal radar, and had taken a route that they hoped had kept them out of sight of any curious locals.
Veate sat alone in the flitter, monitoring the emergency channel her father had designated. They would stay off the air unless there was something they couldn't deal with, he had told her. No news is good news.
Was her mother out there past the jungle that hid the vehicles? Veate couldn't tell; she didn't have any gut feelings that said yea or nay. Her father seemed to think his ex-lover was hidden there among the elephants, and Veate had begun to think his greatest talent was in being right before he took action.
She would know soon enough, one way or the other.
Despite the cooler, the shiftsuit was not the most comfortable thing Khadaji had ever worn. The viral-matrix computer was hardly bulky, given its single, simple task of matching the background closest to it, but the material itself was fairly heavy and stiff. It didn't make you altogether invisible, but as camouflage went, a shiftsuit came pretty close. In the jungle, in the dark, it would take somebody with almost superhuman vision to spot them. Between the suits and the confounders, nobody was apt to pinpoint them even if they suspected where they were.
It had been a long time since Khadaji had done this kind of work, and the old fluttery feelings came back, stirring his adrenaline and putting razor edges on his senses. If they'd had time, he would have gotten bacteria-aug circulating, to speed up their reflexes. The spookeyes they all wore gathered enough starlight to make the jungle a pale phosphorescent green imitation of day; they had flare-shields in case somebody started throwing photonbombs. Crowed to their belts were several varieties of their own explosives. The five of them were as well equipped as they could be under the circumstances. It would have to do.
It took nearly an hour to reach the edge of the plain. The nearest patch of gently waving grass was more than two meters tall. They moved into the new cover.
"Fuck!" Sleel said in a deep whisper.
Khadaji crouched, hands coming up reflexively, spetsdods angled to cover almost a semicircle, seeking possible targets.
"Sleel?"
"Heysoo Damn, I just stepped in a pile of shit halfway to my fucking knee!"
Geneva laughed. "Careful you don't trip over one of the curlnoses, Sleel."
Khadaji chuckled. He hadn't realized how tense he'd been until Sleel's misstep had broken the mood.
"Let's keep it down," Khadaji said. "The night has ears."
"No, the night has turds," Sleel said.
The transport ship arrived, and Wall's mobile dins unloaded it with preprogrammed care, moving the container to the surgidrome. The package didn't look like much, a rounded aluminum block the size of a microwave oven, the operative part of it smaller than the last joint of a man's middle finger. Priced per gram, it was probably one of the most expensive items in man's galaxy. More than a hundred million stads had gone into the implant, not to mention the efforts of more than two dozen of the best man and mue brains ever collected for a project this size.
The Healy surgical environment was programmed to perform only this one task, and there would be no mistakes. The machineries were as precise as could currently be made, and the brainpatterns and vital statistics of the subject had been part of the programming from the start.
Now. All that was left was to make certain of his arrival.
Wall activated his com.
"Cteel?"
"Right here."
"You are in the air?"
"Almost to Poxoreu."
"Get back to the zoo, now. Put the security forces on alert. You are going to have visitors."
"Damn!"
Veate's computer gave her the ID on the small ship that approached the zoo: Cteel had finally come home. Did her father and the others know that?
Outside, local insects chirped and buzzed, filling the swamp with their noises. Should she call the matadors?
No, better not. Her father must have seen or heard the ship coming in.
Hidden in the deep grass, the five matadors watched the small airship circle in and set down on the zoo's landing pad. They had their spookeyes shoved back; the bright landing lights showed the pad well enough so that they recognized the flitter.
Sleel said, "Well, well.Looks as if our boy got tired of his vacation."
Khadaji said, "Doesn't matter.Dirisha?"
"Geneva and I do the main power caster in thirty-two minutes from… now."
"Bork?"
The big man had his sleeve shoved back, He touched his chronograph. "Check. I got the aux in thirty-one minutes, fifty-five seconds."
"Sleel?"
"The front door'll be open, boss."
"All right.You all know the rest of it. We've got to hit this the first time. The Republic won't have a sat footprinting this spot for another hour and a half. Nobody is going to be calling shots from the air.On either side."
"Piece of cake, boss," Sleel said.
Khadaji took a deep breath. The smell of the night was musty, full of pollen and other organic richness.
It was always like this when your life was on the line. Everything was so much more intense.
"Let's do it. Be careful, all of you."
Wall watched with amusement as Cteel and Tone moved about in mild panic, dispatching their security forces to cover the compound. The troops were mercs, ex-military most of them, veterans of life-and-death battles. They were well armed, well paid, and ready for action. Most of them bore military surplus weaponry, full-auto carbines or sleet launchers, and they had been supplied with enough ammunition to last a long time.Two dozen men and women against how many?Five, six? No more than that, surely. Were thosecoming not the spawn of Khadaji's training, Wall would have bet that his people would control the situation quickly. But he knew better. These matadors were the people who had toppled the Confed, andfive-to-one odds was nothing compared to what they had gone up against before. That didn't scan well for Cteel's forces.
"You see something there,Mali ?"
The second guard squinted into the darkness. The big floods didn't reach this far, and it was like the inside of a cave out past the perimeter.
Both men wore spidersilk body armor, including helmets and clear blast shields. Both men held Parker .177s slung in hip points. A wav
e with one of those carbines on full auto would spew a line of explosive pellets that could easily slice an unarmored man in half.
Both men were looking right at Khadaji, no more than ten meters away.
"Nah, there ain't nothin' there. You're getting jumpy in your old age, Sonk."
Khadaji raised both hands slowly. The blast shields the men wore left a thin strip of bare skin between the chin and base of the neck. And neither man wore gloves.Probably too uncomfortable in the muggy tropical night.
Too bad for them.
Khadaji fired, one shot from each spetsdod. Both men crumpled without a sound.
He moved to his left, staying outside of the light's reach.
"We're way early," Geneva whispered.
"That's why they make timers, brat. Take the two on the right." Her voice was also too soft to be heard more than a meter or two away.
There were three guards posted at the only door to the main powercast generator. They could destroy the entire building if they wanted, by simply tossing one of the thermite bombs each carried, but the idea was to keep things quiet until they had to go noisy.
"I got the one on the left.On three. One… two…three —"
Both women fired their spetsdods.
The trio of guards collapsed.
Thirty seconds later, Dirisha and Geneva reached the door.
"Not even locked," Geneva said, pushing the door open.
"Go set the popper," Dirisha said. "I'll keep watch." They dragged the three unconscious guards into the building. Dirisha closed the side-hinged door, save for a crack.Wouldn't be real bright to stand out there in the light, shiftsuit or no. Be trouble enough if somebody came round and saw that the guards were gone.
Geneva was back in less than a minute. "All set," she said.
"Good. Let's get moving."
"Sleel was right. This is a piece of cake."
"I know. That bothers me. It's too easy. Emile is right, it smells like a set-up. Stay sharp."
"If you promise not to swagger."
"Oh, you're gonna pay for that."
The two women squeezed each other's hands, and slid into the night.
Bork had to shoot two guards on his way to the emergency generator, but there wasn't anybody watching the power source itself. That wasn't too clever. Somebody didn't know squat about tactics here.
He set his popper, triggered the timer, and moved away from the shack. In ten minutes, it was going to get real dark around here.
Sleel was in position, watching the four circulating guards. He figured the quad for as good as the opposition was gonna get here; they were cautious, edgy, and paying attention. He sat with his back to a thick-boled tree to the right of the building, at the edge of the floodlights. Without the 'suit, he would have been visible; there was enough light to cast shadows here, but anybody looking his way shouldn't see anything but tree bark. He had his knees drawn up, his wrists propped on them, so he could see the timer crowed to the left sleeve of the shiftsuit. Moving slowly and with great care, he reached up and pulled his spookeyes down, leaving the power off and the lenses clear as he set them in place. With this much light, powered spookeyes would keep the shields up and he'd be effectively blind, but if things went like they were supposed to, there wasn't gonna be any light pretty soon.
Sleel grinned, but kept it tight. Wouldn't do to have one of those trigger-happy balloos see his teeth shining in the bark of the tree, now would it?
Gods, he loved this.
Khadaji glanced at his timer. There came two faint pops, not a second apart. The floods went from white to bright orange, then faded to a dull red. He powered up his spookeyes, stepped into the clearing, and shot the startled guard who had stupidly turned to stare at the dying lights.
The show was in the air. There would be no turning back now.
He took a deep breath and moved.
Chapter Twenty-Five
"NOW," DIRISHA SAID. With that, she pulled one of the pocket-bombs from her belt and thumbed the six-second timer into life. She heaved the fist-sized chunk of heavy plastic in the general direction of the unguarded garage thirty meters away.
The bomb clattered on the roof, bounced once, and exploded. The deepwhump of it resounded solidly in Dirisha's chest. Made more noise than it did damage, but the roof of the garage wasn't going to be stopping the afternoon rains any time soon.
"Good throw," Geneva said. "I felt that in my bones."
Geneva tossed one of her own bombs. It arced away in the eerie green nightscape, and both matadoras turned from the explosion. Somebody started yelling close by, somebody with quite a command of esoteric curses, too.
"Come on. We need to keep this pot stirred," Dirisha said.
Most of Wall's cameras went down when the back-up power did. He wasn't really surprised, and he had a few safeties that ran on batteries scattered around, though not nearly as many as he would have liked.
The hidden camera in the security office, for instance, had a transmitter and basic sensors that could generate just enough signal to reach one of his ground substations. It would be good for maybe an hour, small as the batteries were, but that should be more than enough time. The available light wasn't much, but Wall had starlight boosters on his pickups. Good thing the filters worked, otherwise the camera would have burned out when Tone switched on an emergency biolamp.
Cteel said, "Dammit, there goes the power!"
"Looks like they got the back-up, too," Tone said.
"Tell me something I don't know, moron."
Tone was standing next to a closed window. He manually cranked the casement open. The transmitter's sensors were good enough to feed Wall the stench of damp, burning grass and the scorched-insulation smell of D-2 plastique that came into the room. He couldn't smell it, but he could catalog-match the molecules the sensor noted.
"The garage is on fire," Tone said. "I hope you parked your flitter somewhere else."
"On the landing pad."
"Yeah, well, that's on fire, too."
"Shit!" Cteel looked nervous. Well he should be. He knew what would happen to him and to Tone if they should be captured.The same thing that would happen if he responded to the Exotic sexually.
"I'm going for the woman," Cteel said.
"What do you want me to—?"
"Meet me behind the biolab. Five minutes."
"That cargo flyplate won't carry us a hundred klicks before it runs down."
"Would you rather be here or a hundred klicks away from herecome daylight?"
Another explosion rocked the night.
Both men ran from the room, temporarily out of Wall's ken.
The four guarding the door never had a chance, though one of them did manage to spew a hundred rounds from her carbine before she lost her grip on it when she hit the ground. It dug a three-meter-long trench in the earth next to where Sleel stood, but it wasn't even close; half a meter away, easy. He ran to the door, tried it and found it locked, and slapped a popper onto the control plate inset into the wall. He twisted away, and the popper went off, blowing the circuit. Sleel slid the door open, using it for cover, but nobody inside started shooting. He darted into the building. There was enough ambient light seeping in through the door and windows to see by using the spookeyes, and Sleel moved in an easy crouch across the entryway. This was the building most likely to be sleeping quarters, according to what they figured.
A guard carrying a sleetpistol came around the corner. "Who's there?" he called, waving the gun.
Sleel shot him in the throat, and the shocktox dart threw the man into a hard spasm against a table, knocking it over.
Sleel would've gone on looking, but he was supposed to wait for back-up.
All right.He'd wait. He'd give 'em thirty seconds.
Even six kilometers way, the sounds and light seemed loud and bright to Veate. It was happening. And she had to sit here and wait.
People might be getting hurt, they might be dying, and she couldn't do anything about it.
Her father, her mother, and Bork, they were all out there, in danger.
But she had to wait—
Fuckwaiting!
Veate punched the flitter's repellors up to full power and lifted.
Khadaji came through the open door, rolled to his left, and ducked behind a free-standing shelf full of hand-held umbrella-field generators.
When he peered around the corner of the shelf, he saw what appeared to be several white dots floating in the air five meters away. It took him a second to recognize them as teeth against a shiftsuit hood background.
"Sleel," he said.
"Yeah, boss. Call it."
"Cover the door. I'll go look."
Khadaji moved down the hallway, spetsdods questing as if they had a life of their own, seeking targets.
He passed a small kitchen, turned into a long hallway, and saw a glow-in-the-dark exit sign mounted over a back door. The normally dim sign was made bright enough by the spook-eyes so that it seemed he was looking at the sun. Not quite bright enough to trigger the shields, however.
He tried the first door. It opened on an empty room.
Same with the second door.
The third door slid open and a blast of gunfire erupted from within the room. Craters appeared in the wall across the hall.
Khadaji was not so stupid as to have been standing in the doorway. Off to the side, he dropped prone and wiggled around the jamb.
The man inside had his carbine aimed at where a standing man's chest would be.The shiftsuit tried, but even it couldn't match a background instantaneously, and the man saw the motion. His aim was too high, his reflexes too slow.
Khadaji fanned four shots at the man. The last one missed, but it didn't matter. Three were enough.
Getting old, Emile, to miss at that range.
The last door on the right was locked from without by a portable bolt and screamer.
"Juete?" he said.
"Who is it?"
Khadaji felt a flush of joy as he recognized the voice. It was her! She was alive!
"Stand away from the door."
The popper blew the lock and he shoved the still-smoking door back into its frame. It stuck halfway, but that didn't matter.
