by John Barnes
“Therefore whatever silly plan Waynong may have, no matter how foolish—make it work.” The signal cut off.
Jak needed a great idea, right now, and all he had was a fair-to-middling one. He stood up and said, “That was a message from a high level of the home government, and I’m not allowed to say more than that. Security is pretty badly compromised on this operation, so they insist that we go right now, before word can get around any more. Clarbo, I’m sure you had a very complex plan waiting to go—”
“It’s something I put together with some devices that Hive Intel had available—had them all shipped in today, you know, on my personal account since headquarters—”
“And those came through regular delivery?” Dujuv asked. “Not through any secure channel?”
“It seemed important to get the things here quickly, and going through the secure channel takes much longer—”
“So Red Amber Magenta Green postal inspectors have almost certainly seen what’s in the box,” Jak said.
“Oh, of course, they opened it—there’s a note right where they resealed the box.”
Jak glanced down at Dujuv’s left hand and saw his oldest, best tove send two quick signals: first, I’ll back you, and second, I have no hope.
Jak looked down for a moment, looked up, and said, “Well, then, we have an operation that has already leaked so badly that agents of a foreign power know all about it and came to the meeting, and sometime this afternoon local security discovered that one of our party was importing spy gear, burglary tools, maybe weapons.”
“Well, of course, it seemed like you’d need those,” Waynong said, crossly, clearly eager to get on with explaining his plan.
“So at any moment our party can expect a rupture of diplomatic relations, and just possibly our arrest on espionage, sedition, conspiracy—well, quite a list. We could drop everything and run for it—”
“—but I just bought all this equipment!”
“—or we can follow our most recent orders, try for the lifelog right away, and hope Red Amber Magenta Green is still specking things out. I’d rather not just run back home with our tails between our legs. And I’m assuming our Greenworld friends feel the same way?”
“Absolutely,” Shyf said. “We came to the meeting and didn’t tell Witerio or Cyx about it—we’re up to our necks in it too. Let’s get going.”
“All right,” Jak said. “Clarbo, what’s your plan? The short version of course—”
“Oh, of course. Time is of the essence, masen? I always wanted to do something where time was of the essence, and get to say that.” The handsome young man opened the shipping container and began pulling out boxes. “I tried to keep it very simple so I restricted myself to just three pieces of hardware, two because they looked very useful and one because I thought, that’s so interesting, I just have to include that!”
Jak’s palm tingled, and he looked down; his purse was signaling him to hold it to his ear. When he did, Mejitarian’s voice said, “Yes, we are aware of the quality of Mister Waynong’s planning. All the other considerations still apply. Make it work. How is up to you.” A harsh little click, and silence.
“The, um, high level source has just confirmed that they want us to proceed,” Jak told everyone. “Well, let’s see what you have for us, Clarbo. Try to keep it brief because we’ll need to start soon.”
“Certainly, certainly, toktru masen. Well, now, this first thing is a spy-scout.” Waynong shook the box, which was a cube about half a meter on a side. Three small black spheres, about the size of golf balls and completely featureless, rolled out. “As anyone can see, I’ve got three little balls, one for each team in my plan.
“This can connect direct to your purse, and you can use the purse screen or a pair of goggles that plug into the purse. Either way, it lets you see in any direction from any surface of the rolling ball. Though I don’t know why anyone would want to look at the floor. But you can see in all the other directions too, and there will be guards and things in those directions. So the plan is, we put our balls in first, and see how things are going. Then team one comes in using these.” Clarbo Waynong shook out a second, larger box, and what looked like half a dozen slippers fell out. “These are ceiling sticking shoes; team one will be way up on the ceiling with their faces about level with the guards’ faces. Totally disorienting. Toktru it’s my favorite part of it all.
“Now, we’re not supposed to hurt the guards if we can help it, so the last special weapon here is a nonlethal control weapon. It’s a net gun—the slug expands into a big, spinning net that grabs and holds everything in its path and won’t let go till we give it the code. Which we’ll message to the local police as soon as we’ve made our getaway.
“So the plan, once the balls have given us a picture of the room, is that team one will come in on the ceiling as a diversion, team two will run in on the ground and shoot the guards from behind with the net gun while they’re staring at team one, and then team three will run in, and grab the—um, what was it?”
“The lifelog?” Pikia asked.
“Just so.”
“How is all this coordinated?” Gweshira asked, looking down at the floor.
“Oh, we just agree on a time, of course,” Waynong said. “Our purses are more than accurate enough to synchronize the three teams.”
“Er, what if there’s a change in plan or a hitch with one team?”
“There won’t be. We have perfect intelligence.”
“We do?”
“In our little balls.” Clarbo Waynong looked around the room emphatically, seeming to pose for a camera that wasn’t there. “So given that we have perfect intelligence, we won’t need to change plans, and therefore we can just set our clocks and go. Much more secure than talking back and forth all the time. Now here are my team assignments. I will lead team three, and Sibroillo and Jak will be members of it as well. Team one, which gets to walk on the ceiling—that seems like so much fun I almost wanted to do it myself but they told me very sternly, excessively sternly if you ask me, that I had to be the one who grabbed the—um—”
“The lifelog?” Pikia asked. Her expression was so innocent that if Jak had been her great-great-grandfather he’d have grounded her for a year on suspicion alone.
“Yes, yes, exactly. I’m glad someone remembers it.”
“It’s what I’m here for,” Pikia assured him.
“All right, now where was I? Team assignments! Well, then. Team one, the diversion team, the ceiling walkers, call them what you will”—he gestured grandly—“team commander will be Dujuv, with Pikia and Shadow dividing command backup responsibility. And since we also have our guests from Greenworld, and one spare pair of these walking upside-down shoes—toktru they seem like so much fun but I can’t figure out any way for me to wear them and be the actual person who grabs—”
“The lifelog!” Pikia’s smile was wide but her eyes were sparkling strangely.
“—the lifelog, thank you, Pikia, then the last pair of shoes might as well go to Kawib, mightn’t they? And therefore he will be the fourth member of team one.
“Now for team two, we have these.” He set two very oversized pistols onto the table in front of him. “As long as all three guards stick together, one shot should make them all, um, stick together. The net spreads out to a three-meter-by-three-meter square you see, and flies across the room, and tangles them all up very much like a spiderweb. So team two, you will fire the first net gun at the guards, and that should be enough to take care of them.”
“And who’s in team two?” Gweshira asked.
“Well, it’s not quite as light a team as the other two, is it, masen? No really light equipment and doesn’t get the glory of actually grabbing the lifelog. On the other hand it doesn’t take much physical strength or mental ability to pull that trigger, so I suppose we could give it to anyone. I had selected”—he checked his notes in his purse—“you for the main shooter and Xlini Copermisr for the backup.”
The corner of Gweshira’s mouth twitched. Jak knew that twitch; he had sparred in the Disciplines with Gweshira many, many times. Usually it preceded a good wanging. “But if I miss my shot, and Xlini misses hers, then won’t the whole plan come apart?”
“I do not create the sort of plans that ‘come apart.’ And you really ought to have more confidence in yourself. You won’t miss that shot. But since you’re worried about it—”
“I was about to ask for a few minutes to practice with the weapon. I’ve never used a weapon in combat without having practiced first.”
“Out of the question. I only ordered two and it’s a single-shot disposable weapon.”
Gweshira’s mouth opened to speak, but before she made a sound, she jumped as if bitten or shocked. She turned her left hand palm upward to look down at her purse, then clapped her purse to her left ear; she looked as if poison were being poured into her ear. After a long breath, she muttered “Understood” and let her hand drop to her side, where it hung like a dead snake over a fence rail.
Meanwhile, the situation had been aggravated; Clarbo Waynong had been thinking. “You know,” he said, “I think the thing to do is autoprogram those net guns; I can set them up so that they fire as soon as you pop out of the corridor into the room with the lifelog. I hate to do it but if people are going to be second-guessing the plan all the time … well, we’d better get on with it.” He looked around and said, “So for team three, the ones who will actually grab the lifelog, we have myself, of course, plus Sibroillo and Jak Jinnaka will divide backup command responsibility, and of course—”
Princess Shyf looked at him coolly. “And of course Her Utmost Grace, me, will do something she’s valuable at, rather than hanging about in a hallway, and will cause Prince Cyx, who is supposed to be in charge in the event of emergencies tonight (while his father gets a badly needed good night’s sleep), to hang out an array of fearsome DO NOT DISTURB signs, real and virtual, on his door, thereby ensuring that any possible response to the theft of the lifelog will be feeble and delayed, due to everyone’s being very cautious about disturbing the Prince. Not to mention that given that this is apt to be a very stressful evening for Cyx, this will help him to maintain a sense of proportion and a feeling that life isn’t actually so bad after all, which will be of some importance in the subsequent negotiations to soothe Red Amber Magenta Green’s official diplomatic feelings. As soon as I know at exactly what time the Prince should be most occupied, I shall get to work on looking and smelling good, which happens to be one of my major talents. (And let me add that if you attempt to designate me as ‘team four,’ I shall ignore you, possibly forever.) So thank you for my assignment and please do proceed with your meeting so I can get on with it.”
“Er, just so, yes,” Waynong said.
As he waited in the dark hallway, Jak woefully ticked off the long list of what was wrong with all this, and the short list of what was right. He was standing elbow to elbow with Uncle Sib, dividing the command backup—an easy division of zero by two, since there was nothing for a second in command to command, and nothing for either second in command to do. Probably Clarbo had thought that Jak and Sib were the two people most likely to assume command in a crisis, and therefore he had put them where they couldn’t.
Glumly Jak watched the little square screen on his palm as it showed a rat’s-eye view of the floor of the private viewing room in the Royal Splendiferous Museum where Nakasen’s lifelog was being kept. The spy-scouts were built like compound eyes, covered with microscopic fish-eye lenses. A picture assembler in the purse software assembled the thousands of images so that the view did not tumble rapidly, but moved with the ball, staying in a given orientation until pointed elsewhere, like a single tiny camera creeping across the floor.
Just then, the camera from Dujuv and Shadow’s team was sitting quietly in the corner of the room, providing a wide angle view of the three bored, elderly guards: two men and a woman, decked out in big coats and sashes, practically asleep on their feet. It occurred to Jak that any of the three teams could simply rush in, knock the old people down, and run with the lifelog, and get away with it. He would have placed his own odds of succeeding at that, all by himself, at about three to two, and Dujuv or Shadow, with much greater strength and speed, at about ten to one.
But orders were orders … and he wanted his real posting to a real Hive Intel job, and to be allowed complete deconditioning, and he didn’t want the consequences of disobeying Mejitarian.
The thought of deconditioning reminded Jak of Shyf, who was with Cyx right now. That caused him to need to do some Disciplines breathing, just as Sibroillo had taught him to do ever since he could remember. At least the conditioned jealous rage Jak felt was helping him to stay awake.
Team two’s spy-scout was rolled up against the pedestal on which the lifelog sat, and was slowly creeping around it, scanning up and down, giving a complete view of the room every couple of minutes.
The third spy-scout, operated by Clarbo Waynong, was wandering around randomly, its selected view straight down. It showed a dark spot at the center and a distorted gray smear of floor in other directions. Occasionally it would pass in view of spy-scout one or spy-scout two. Despite his admonitions to everyone else to be very quiet, Waynong was muttering and swearing to himself as he tried to get control of his spy-scout.
At last a momentary red flash from their purses alerted them. Waynong jumped; he had been so engrossed in trying to get the little black ball to work properly that he had lost track of the time. Jak saw the spy-scout imaging career wildly on the main screen of his purse, but he was mostly watching the countdown—seventeen seconds till time to run forward.
On the tiny screen in the palm of his left hand, the image of a boot toe burst into a black blur as the ball hit the guard’s foot. The view spun in a great vertical arc, periodically revealing three puzzled guards staring down at the ball.
Jak and Sib dashed down the corridor together, Clarbo’s cry of “Wait, it’s too soon—” ringing behind them. They reached the display room just in time to see team one— Dujuv, Shadow on the Frost, Pikia, and Kawib—coming in at a slow walk on the ceiling. The guards did not—they were all bent over the small black ball, heads together, trying to figure out what it was.
Jak had just an instant to think how badly this was working before Xlini and Gweshira burst in from the main entry corridor. Activated automatically on entering the room, both their net guns went off, firing at the most prominent moving objects above the floor—which were not the three bent-over guards, but the team on the ceiling.
A long time afterward, when he thought about it more calmly, Jak had to admit that whoever had designed those net guns had done a bang-up job. The two nets, a fine transparent mesh just thick enough not to cut skin, with a “smart surface” that stuck to anything it touched except the net itself, seemed to pour into the air from the muzzles of the net guns and billow across the room like two raging translucent jellyfish. In less than a heartbeat they had flown around all four people, contracting very slowly but with tremendous force, hesitating wherever resistance was too great so that no bones were broken. The nets merged and crept inward, tightening, finding holds to draw tighter, freeing sections to flow to other looser spots on the struggling mass, so that in just a few seconds, one 130-kg Rubahy, one furious panth, and two unmodified humans were quite unhurt but being held tightly in a white spider-bag on the ceiling.
This, of course, had gotten the guards’ attention. They were old and they were slow and sleepy, but they had once been police or soldiers, to judge by how quickly they drew their slug pistols and covered the bewildered party of would-be thieves.
CHAPTER 9
A Double-Sided Snipe Hunt
At the holding jail, Kawib was separated from the rest of them; perhaps because he was not a Hive citizen? But then, neither was Shadow … and of course the situation was so unusual that very possibly they were just making up procedure as they went. Jak resolved not to
worry about it.
There wasn’t much time to worry about anything, actually, because it was less than an hour before they were all brought before King Witerio. They stood, hands bound behind their backs, facing the King’s official business throne; behind them stood a row of serious, trained, effective guards, from RAMG’s small-but-not-hopeless army. Beside the prisoners the three elderly minor nobles, who had been the guards for the lifelog, looked so proud that Jak couldn’t help feeling better—someone was having a good day.
Jak’s “command” was in predictably sad shape; he summarized his report to himself as three banged up, four exhausted, and one still a ninny. Shadow looked worse than anyone else; the net had taken so many feathers that he looked like a half-plucked chicken. Jak knew that when the Rubahy had a single feather pulled out it hurt, so he imagined that his friend was probably in real pain, and the Rubahy’s head hung and his shoulders slumped as they did when he was exhausted. Dujuv was bruised from his struggle to get out of the net and from the stunning they had given him to make him stop. Pikia would have looked all right if they hadn’t had to cut off much of the hair on one side of her head to get the net detached; its “release” feature had apparently been somewhat oversold.
Xlini, Gweshira, and Sib merely looked very tired. Jak suspected the same would be true of himself.
Clarbo Waynong was bouncing with energy. As the King nodded to the bailiff, Waynong whooped, “Cyxy!”
Cyx entered and strode to his friend, almost shaking his hand before he saw that it was cuffed behind his back. This gave the Prince time to remember that they were “very nearly at war, old tove, toktru I’m sorry but I don’t speck I should be too friendly, wouldn’t do to have the Prince consorting with traitors—oh, but you’re not a citizen so you can’t be a traitor to us—well, anyway—”
