Extremis (41 page)

McGee nodded. “I’ve only been on a few suppression missions at the edge of Tangri space, sir, but yes—ten seconds in close ground combat is pretty much eternity. But many of our other bird’s-eye pictures strongly suggest that the Baldies do not keep their most capable and seasoned ground troops in these positions, or in this part of their city at all.”

“Where are they?”

“Their true Security units are billeted near their airfield and motor pool, sir. Again, best guess only.”

“But eminently sensible,” muttered Heide. Cap looked like he was ready to fall out of his chair at the cooperative tone the Hider had adopted. “They’ll want to position their best troops to protect their primary ground-engagement assets—their airpower. They’ll also want those same troops proximal to airlift mobility in order to be able to project force quickly beyond their city.”

“Yes, sir,” McGee agreed, “that was my thinking.”

“So, what are your intentions for dealing with a counterattack from their Security troops? They’re sure to have a ready-response team on standby.”

“I’ve had some volunteers who’ve observed the Baldies’ scramble and flight times, Captain. I don’t think their airmobile assets are going to catch us.”

“They do seem to have an uncanny knack for communication and coordination, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir. During my—unauthorized operations—I got a chance to see that firsthand. They are very, very fast. But they spend longer than we do coming up with plans, almost as if they don’t have a very diverse playbook and have to invent a lot of their tactical responses on the fly. Which is why our best tactical approach is to keep them off balance. We move quickly once we’re inside the target building and shoot anything that’s not human. We don’t have any time for finesse, because they seem to be able to signal to each other with a speed and precision that is far beyond anything we’ve ever dreamed of. So if we can put their lights out before they can deduce our strategies and fix our position, that’s what we’d better do.”

“But once you’re in the building, you are blind, Sergeant. You have no idea of their security defense points, or on-site guards.”

“True—but fortunately, the pediatrician the Baldies brought in to look at my son wasn’t a complete newb. He volunteered time with Reserve units on maneuver. He knows his way around a defensive installation just enough to be able to tell us that they didn’t seem to have anything other than their magical equivalent of keycard readers. But those were not defensive. They were traffic monitors and intrusion-detection systems. And we won’t be trying to maintain a stealthy approach by the time we’ve run into those scanners.”

“So your biggest worry is chance-met hostiles as you advance along the corridors.”

“Yes, sir. I’d say that sums it up pretty well.”

Heide leaned back. “Well, you have an interesting plan, Sergeant. But I still see some problems.”

McGee kept his spirits and shoulders from sagging. “May I ask what those might be, sir?”

“Certainly. Firstly, let’s go back to your initial underground approach. I’m sure they’ve got many, if not all, of these subterranean passages monitored. Audio pick-ups, at the very least. So as you start blowing your way through foundation walls and sewer tubes, they will hear you.”

“Yes, sir, I’ve thought of that.”

“And it will take a lot of time to maneuver through those old subterranean levels—gaps in the floors, cracks and shifts in the foundations, lots of debris to climb over. It could be very rough—and very slow—going.”

“Yes, sir. Thought of that, too.”

“And perhaps the biggest problem is that once you’ve entered, how will you get out? The same way? They have scanners, and they’ll take a look at the data. It may take them a few moments, but the Baldies will quickly deduce how you got inside their perimeter, and their fast-response teams will move to cut you off from your egress/ingress building long before you are done securing the objectives. Have you thought of that, too?”

“Actually, sir, I have. And strangely enough, there’s one additional detail to this operation that provides the answer to all of those problems.”

Heide leaned back. “Indeed? And what is that?”

McGee smiled. “Well, Captain, there’s one thing the Baldies have overlooked.…”

14

Multum in Parvo

Much in little.
—Latin motto/saying

Melantho & Punt, Bellerophon/New Ardu

As Emergency Response Chief Menachem Guzman watched, two more fires sprang up, one only a block away. The Baldy Security sleds escorting his convoy of fire and rescue vehicles stopped and seemed to put sensors on the closest conflagration, which had started right at the border of the Heliobarbus District but was now spreading quickly into the Empty Zone. What the Baldies were inspecting was unclear, since even they knew that all these fires had to be premeditated acts of arson. Maybe they were trying to discern if there was an ambush waiting nearby. An ambush: Menachem leaned his head down on the steering wheel; this day was either going to be very long—or very, very short.

* * *

Mtube Ventrella, who ran the pressures and volume board for the Water Supply Section of the Public Works Department, looked at the red-lined digital gauges nervously. “As per your orders sir, water pressure is at max, plus six percent, in all lines running into the western fringe of the Heliobarbus District.”

“Outflows?”

“They’re sealed, sir. This is not going to hold for long.”

Mtube’s supervisor looked over at the much-scarred man that neither of them had ever seen before this morning. He nodded. The supervisor turned back to Mtube. “Not long, now.”

* * *

Mircea Basarab first thought that a large chunk of the flying plasticrete fragments had struck him on the left shoulder, but then he felt the light blow again. He turned and discovered Modibo Jones preparing to thump him a third time. Modibo stopped, jabbed an urgent finger at his watch. Mircea released the portajack’s power bar: the deafening hammering ceased.

“One minute” warned Modibo.

Mircea nodded and turned back to face his adversary: a sealed section of Bellerophon’s oldest sewer system. Located beneath the western extents of the Heliobarbus District, and three hundred meters back from the Empty Zone, the old sealing wall now looked like a pincushion. The two courses of old-fashioned cinder blocks, capped at either end by a good layer of plasticrete, had been intact when he had arrived just an hour ago. Since then, Mircea and Modibo had drilled dozens of equally-spaced holes through to the open space on the other side. Mircea set the portajack’s bit into the last, half-drilled hole, depressed the power bar, and leaned into the resistance. After fifteen seconds of pushing, he felt that split-second of give which meant he was about to break through. He backed off the power bar—just as the bit plunged easily into the hole it had drilled: its point had cut out into open air on the other side. Mircea checked his watch and discovered the past fifteen seconds had really been thirty. Slinging the portajack over his shoulder as he yanked out the power feed, he hustled over to the steel ladder and fast-handed it upward, right after Modibo. Like a dozen other similar teams throughout the area, they made a quick ascent to the street level just above them.

* * *

One of Salamisene Bay’s ubiquitous Richthofen fish—a triple-winged sea-ray—started and plunged into the black-blue depths, its three rippling planes now pulsing in unison to accelerate its dive.

A moment later, a submersible repair bot churned through the space just vacated by the fish. Its tired old prop housings gimballed fitfully as its remote human operator kept it on course. Eventually, it reached the sheer face of what the locals called the Drop: the two-hundred-meter submarine cliff that also extended upward beyond the crashing waves, providing the high bedrock upon which the Heliobarbus District—and the Empty Zone—were perched. The ROV’s prop-cans swiveled a bit, stabilizing; then the fans slowed, counterspun, and stopped the unit just two meters from the vertical rock face. Along that rock face, a set of gray plastic conduits ran east to west. The ROV swung west, following the dim, cliff-hugging line.

Ten seconds later, the bot’s maneuver lights snapped on, revealing the intake fairing of an immense tube. The bot angled around the rim of the fairing, turned to face directly into the tube; it was plugged by a smooth surface, almost as smooth as the fairing itself.

Esmerelda Chin, senior ROV operator in the Remote Maintenance Section of the Public Works Department, turned to the swarthy, silent, muscular woman who was watching over her shoulder. “The seal on the primary cooling intake is still solid,” Esmerelda said.

The woman nodded. “So we go under. As we discussed.”

Esmerelda tilted the ROV’s nose down and sent it diving under the lower rim of the tube’s fairing. When the bot leveled off again, the fairing was directly overhead—but after a few meters of forward progress, it seemed to vanish upward into blackness.

Esmerelda checked her instruments. “I’ve got to be careful—it’s unfinished rock in here, from when they blasted into the cliff face.”

“Crude method,” commented the woman.

“Old method,” corrected Esmerelda. “The colony’s first settlers built this fusion plant. Back then, the plants were big, cumbersome, crude. That’s why the big water intakes for cooling.”

The woman nodded; her short, tight ponytail bobbed. “And that’s good for us now. Snug us up under the tube.”

“Okay.”

“And now reverse—gently—until the rear of the ROV makes contact with the back side of the fairing. Good. Can you angle up the nose a bit?”

“Sure.” Esmerelda complied. “Okay, now what?”

“Now you kill the lights—and wait.”

“Wait? For what?”

But the short, dark, and very serious woman—who had become Esmerelda’s one-day boss just two hours earlier—only checked her watch.

The operator next to Esmeralda—Section Head Odile Djabwurrung—looked over at the woman. “Time for me to start?”

The woman didn’t look up from her watch, but said, “Go ahead.”

Odile adjusted her earbud, tapped her collar mic. “Everybody with me?”

Green affirmation lights blinked on her board: the other nine ROV operators scattered throughout her section were good to go. “Okay, everyone: watch your intervals. Keep your speed low and be prepared to back fans at a moment’s notice. Here we go.” She looked to the short dark woman, who was now watching the video feed from the ROVs, arrayed like a tic-tac-toe board on Odile’s auxiliary screen. The woman pushed out her slightly scarred chin. “Seal and flood the lock.”

Odile tapped a virtual button on the margin of her own control screen—which showed the door behind the waiting ROVs descending as the water level in the chamber began to rise rapidly. As it did, yellow lights started pulsing at each end of the chamber, the ones in front revealing a sign above the two-meter-wide iris valve centered in the far wall: Caution: Sewage Interface Valve.

* * *

Mretlak entered his office and performed his newest morning ritual: he checked the security-monitor activity log.

The red light at the bottom of the human device was flashing urgently.

Illsblood
, he thought profanely,
how long has that been on?
He had wanted a
selnarm
alerting module added to the surveillance system, but there just hadn’t been the time or experts available that quickly. And now, time had run out. He commanded his computer via
selnarm
: (Download surveillance data. Locate anomaly. Display. Analyze.)

His primary, Arduan computer spent half a second accessing and then played back the footage of the atypical activity the human surveillance system had detected. The scene was Urkhot’s outer chambers, the room that the
holodah’kri
alternatively used as a private shrine, place of meditation, and site for highly confidential meetings. Urkhot was not present, but eight other Arduans were. Mretlak immediately recognized two as being among the dozen or so
hwa’kri
—or acolytes—that Urkhot was mentoring personally. Mretlak also recognized three
Destoshaz
hard-liners who had, at various times, served as aides and bodyguards to Torhok, Urkhot, or both. As Mretlak watched, they all raised bowls to their lips and drank deep; when they lowered the bowls, their lips were a bright red.

Mretlak snapped upright out of his chair: assassins. They had all drunk from a Death-Vow Cup, which meant that they fully intended to symbolically drink the blood of their enemies and also to let their own flow freely and finally in the completion of their intended murders. Illudor’s holy face, they had dredged up this ritual from the distant Pre-Enlightenment, and Mretlak—having no
selnarm
recording—could not be entirely sure that they were using the juice which, from the Enlightenment era onward, had replaced the actual blood used in the original ceremony.

Without any further gestures or interactions, the eight filed out of the shrine, and, on the belt of each, Mretlak saw the small pouches in which many Arduans—but unfailingly, all
Destoshaz
—carried their three-clawed
skeerba
when going to a
maatkah
practice or a match. Or an execution.

Mretlak brushed aside the morning’s pending status reports—arson in the depopulated zone; increased rodent activity noted by the subterranean monitors within the zone; joint emergency response operation commenced with humans; airmobile Security reserves reduced to minimum in order to provide close anti-terrorist security for response operation—a busy day indeed, and only an hour into it. But it all paled in comparison to the ceremony Mretlak had witnessed—

—which, he learned from his computer, had occurred almost seven minutes ago. Seven minutes. They could be anywhere by now. But they would have had to walk to reach any of the automated shuttles that served Punt City.
Which means,
Mretlak thought as he started using both the human dynamic-control tablet and the
selnarm
relays in his own computer,
that I have a lot of camera feeds to check from the past seven minutes.