Extremis (42 page)

* * *

The eight
Destoshaz
garbed in black tunics—five males and three females—ignored the stares of the passengers of the third automated shuttle that passed them by.
Selnarm
tendrils reached out, grazed their consciousnesses faintly, as if to tap them lightly and point out that they did not need to walk: a passenger vehicle was approaching. They did not return the looks, did not acknowledge the gentle prompts.

A block farther on, they began to see the ugly concrete boxes of Old Punt rising over the sweeping pylons and supports of their deorbited citadel-city. Moments later, more
Destoshaz
began to emerge from the alcoves and recesses that gave True Punt, Inner Punt—
Arduan
Punt—its intrinsic character and intricate architectural beauty. The first eight did not acknowledge the new sixteen, who formed up in pairs on each member of the original group.

As they crossed the boundary into what the humans had called the West Shore District, the foremost of the original eight, who walked at the point of this rough wedge of formidable warriors, tossed aside an object that was much like a handkerchief, stained half-red with blood.

It hit the ground and began blowing about in the sea-brewed breeze, an enigmatic white-and-red warning.

Which no one was there to see.

* * *

Mtube Ventrella was surprised when his supervisor leaned over his shoulder and activated the control relays for the interfaces, which, in an emergency, could link or flush the new water-supply system into the old one. “Sir?”

“Now, open the pressure-relief valves into grid blocks G-14 through I-12.”

“Sir? With our water pressure at max-plus-six, that’s going to be like turning on a fire hose throughout the entirety of the old system. Some of those walls may not hold.”

The superintendent almost seemed to smile. “They might not,” he conceded. “Open the valves.”

“Yes, sir.” And, swallowing down his anxiety and misgivings with an audible gulp, Mtube pressed the red virtual button that would unleash the underground equivalent of Noah’s flood upon walls and culverts and sluices that were, in many cases, three centuries old.

* * *

In the same control building as Mtube, but two floors overhead, the short muscular woman raised a finger and held it poised. Then she jabbed it at the control screen for the ROV waiting patiently under the long-sealed tube in Salamisene Bay. “Now.”

Esmerelda released the waldo-safety and maneuvered the manipulator arms of the ROV into an upright position. In the screen, she could see the large black waterproofed bundle clutched between them, held out like an ominous offering. She pushed the activation button: a short flash, a dying data squeal, and her screen went black.

* * *

Twenty-seven seconds after Mircea and Modibo reached the street level and ran for their lives, the roaring, high-pressure plume that was Melantho’s pent-up water supply slammed into the sealing wall which they had thoroughly perforated with their powerjacks. The wall—centuries old, unmaintained, and now deprived of structural integrity—let go with a sound like an explosion, chunks and fragments propelled hundreds of meters down the abandoned sewer lines that led into the Empty Zone. The torrent howled through the opening, blasted its way westward. Rusted access doors buckled and gave; more walls washed away; bricks stripped off and tumbled down into the roiling cataract like hordes of cubist lemmings diving to their watery deaths.

With the full pressure of Melantho’s entire water supply pent up behind it, the lateral geyser continued to blow a wide, west-streaming pathway through the long-abandoned subterranean warrens of what was now the Empty Zone.

* * *

But the full pressure of Melantho’s water supply was a Lilliputian force compared to the titanic blast of seawater that thundered and screamed into the defunct fusion plant’s main coolant intake: the payload carried by Esmerelda’s ROV—ten kilograms of top-shelf plastic explosive—had completely torn off the sealed end of the tube. The inrushing jet of seawater roared south and hit the old plant’s outer restraining wall. The wall lasted just long enough to double the pressure pushing outward against the sides of the tube—which bulged, seamed, and split in dozens of places. What had begun as one massive lateral geyser became a dozen lesser but equally forceful ones. Access doors and emergency run-off hatches were simply blasted out of the way. The foaming cataract expanded in all directions, speeding east, west, and south into almost every conduit that honeycombed the ground beneath that part of Melantho.

As it went, it carried down walls, toppled stanchions, ruptured pipes—and, significantly, caught up and shattered the several dozen Arduan audio sensors with which the invaders had monitored the subterranean passages that joined West Shore to Heliobarbus across the otherwise interdicted Empty Zone. Those two or three sensors that survived the deluge by dint of fortuitous placement or a quirk of fate were deafened and then drowned by the roar of rushing water and crumbling walls.

* * *

Emergency Chief Menachem Guzman felt more than heard the faint rumble beneath the street. His driver slowed; the Baldy vehicles ahead had come to a dead stop: humans and aliens alike were looking around, unsure of both the cause and source of the sound.

Menachem reached to toggle the command circuit that would allow him to speak to the rest of the vehicles in his convoy; he preferred manual controls, having learned not to trust voice activation or other commo frills when in the midst of a genuine emergency.

Just then, the rumbling abruptly grew louder. “What the hell—?” he started.

The old-style manhole cover in the intersection ahead of him was suddenly blasted upward, riding a vicious geyser of green-gray water up beyond the fourth story of the surrounding buildings. The nearest Baldy defense sled panicked and blasted the gushing hole with a quick rip from its remote pintle-mounted autocannon—which then fell silent, almost as if embarrassed to have been seen shooting at a geyser.

But a moment later, more manholes—one at every intersection—came flying off. A muffled—probably underground—explosion reverberated somewhere farther inland, farther south. And then, starting with a deep growl that was audible above all the other noise, a five-story building collapsed into the street just two blocks north of the convoy, the crash and dust rolling on longer than any sound of destruction that Menachem had ever heard.

However, the long, final groan of the collapse didn’t end: rather, a similar sound had seamlessly taken its place, rolling suddenly louder. And then Guzman realized why. He gripped his assistant’s arm. “The water—it’s rising!”

As he said it, water started gushing and moaning up through the long-disused grates of Melantho’s first, and long-decommissioned, sewer system.

* * *

The short, powerful woman with the ponytail leaned over Odile’s shoulder and activated the remote address system. “Your avenue of approach is now fully flooded, Tank. The ROV’s are on their way. By the time the pressure lock recycles for your team, they’ll have scouted your waypoints and demoed through the four separating walls you’ve identified—and any other obstructions that we might find. By the time you’ve water-checked your gear, the backwashes should have steadied out. So when the interface valve opens, you’ll be heading into still water and fully-immersed passages.”

A deep voice answered. “Roger that, Haika.”

On an adjacent screen, which was monitoring the surface of the access pool where the ROVs had started out, twenty-three black-suited divers rose to stand next to the slime-edged reservoir, small tanks and gear bags strapped to their backs. One by one, they stepped out over the ledge and plunged down into the murky water, hands held over facemasks.

* * *

Ankaht sent a (farewell, fondness) to her two most talented primes, Orthezh and Ipshef, and—somehow—managed not to teasingly intimate that she was quite aware of the romance that was blossoming between them. She managed to remain completely professional. “Do you feel comfortable overseeing the other human subjects on your own?”

Orthezh was confident, perhaps a little proud. “Certainly, Elder. With the vocoder, we are beginning to make some genuine progress. Not anything such as you enjoy with Jennifer”—
significant: they all call her “Jennifer” now, not “the Peitchkov subject”
—“but we’ll manage. And we’ll do better every day.”

Ankaht sent them (pride, joy) and began a leisurely walk to her next session with Jennifer, enjoying the view from a bank of windows overlooking the foot of the bay and the Empty Zone. She noted multiple plumes of smoke curling skyward from that part of the city, stopped, and watched the darting,
zifrik
-sized Security sleds weaving in and out of the buildings. Human emergency vehicles were scattered along the streets, lights pulsing stridently. She closed her lesser eyes, half closed her main one: so much violence, so little reason. She felt a sudden urge to mourn—for both her people and Jennifer’s—but then straightened her spine with a whiplike motion.
You are shaxzhu, you are a Councilor, you are an Elder, and your researches may be the only hope we have of stopping this senseless carnage. So do not waste time and energy regretting the violence: rather, devote them both to ending it.

She turned away from the smoke plumes and walked briskly toward Jennifer’s quarters.

* * *

McGee heard the link from the Department of Public Works Control Center open with a sputter of static. “Tank?” asked Haika’s voice.

“Right here.”

“I’m opening the iris valve now. Fair warning, folks: there’s a lot of lighter debris in the water. A couple of buildings went down up near the edge of the Bay.”

“Side flows took out basement support beams?”

“Looks like it. And because of how that junk spread downstream, I suggest rerouting your avenue of approach to alternate Baker Two. Thirty meters longer, but you should then be able to use your sea-scooters with wide-open throttles the whole time.”

“They’re not ‘sea-scooters’—they’re DPVs,” said Harry as he adjusted his thermal imaging/LI monocle. “Diver propulsion vehicles.” Perceptive Harry didn’t seem to realize that he mercilessly corrected and annoyed Haika because he was utterly smitten with her. “Sea-scooters are kids’ toys.”

“Call ’em whatever you like, jackass. Dilating the valve now. Good luck, Tank. Only fourteen hundred meters and then it’s show time.”

The iris valve in front of McGee’s assault group began opening like the shutter of an old-fashioned camera, but in slow motion. A light current—a thermal—pushed in at them: the water out there was colder. It was also both cleaner and greener: sea-water from the bay. There was still a slow sway in the water, the last backwashes equaling out.

Sandro toggled the open channel and turned to face the first rank of his team: Wismer, Li, and Battisti. “Okay, here we go. Keep a good interval; these sea-scooters”—he glanced at Li and had the satisfaction of seeing an annoyed eye-roll—“run faster and hotter than the ones we had when we trained for underwater ops at Camp Gehenna. Watch you don’t snag on doorways or downed beams: you’ve got less clearance than you think. Any questions?”

Twenty-two faces, hunched low behind the handgrips of their bullet-nosed DPVs, looked back at him. There were no comments.

“Okay then, follow me.” Turning, McGee thumbed the sea-scooter’s throttle forward. Its fans spun up, and McGee let himself be tugged out into the cool green waters. He started steering toward the first way point. It was, he estimated, approximately eighty seconds away.

And approximately six minutes more to the West Shore District—and Baldy Central.

* * *

Mretlak had spent too many fruitless minutes hunting between different security camera perspectives.
Why are the Death-Vowed on none of the main thoroughfares? And although I have many observation points, there are so many places they could be going—

And then Mretlak felt his spine become gelatinous with dread. No, there were some places that were far more likely to be their destinations. If, that is, one were willing to think the unthinkable—

Mretlak manipulated the controls hastily; the screens cleared, then showed new pictures—all of them in the immediate environs of the old University complex that the Council had released to Ankaht for her researches. For a moment, Mretlak felt relief: nothing suspicious on any of the screens.

But then three groups of three tall
Destoshaz
in featureless black tunics appeared, approaching the main entrance from a side street. Two seconds later, three more of the black-garbed triads emerged from an alley, approaching the secondary entrance on the side of the building. Two more of the teams rose into view on the steps that ascended toward the broad asphalt skirt that fanned out around the loading bays at the back of the building.

Three separate entry forces. All formed into teams of three. Mretlak heard the old dictum of his earliest training, remembered that tripartite axiom of three-to-one odds which had been taught to all
Destoshaz
since the savage dawn of their caste in the Pre-Enlightenment epoch.

Encircle.

Engage.

Eliminate.

They were entering the building. There was only one thing he could do in time.

He thrust a
selnarm
spike into his secure channel repeater and sent a long, strobing pulse:

“Ankaht. Respond. Urgent. Urgent. URGENT.”

* * *

The site security for the human-research cluster—a team of less militant
Destoshaz
—started in surprise when their unusually tall and uncommunicative caste-mates entered their ground-floor operations center unannounced, the newcomers’
selnarm
so suppressed and narrow that it faded into the background of the communal
narmata
.

Ulshev, the junior manip in charge of Ankaht’s dedicated Enforcer team, rose and extended a respectful tendril of
selnarm
, for he recognized the
Destoshaz
in the lead: Khremhet. Once a bodyguard of Urkhot, Khremhet was a most redoubtable warrior and superb
maatkah
opponent. (Surprise, gratification, welcome.) “Greetings, Khremhet. How may we help you, brother?”