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  “Emergency,” Lily gasped out, thrust past him, past the second open lock door, and into the main guardroom.

  Opened up with her rifle as she dove behind a console.

  It was over in seconds. Rainbow evidently shot the man in the lock, because moments later, as Lily sweated and shuddered in the silence, huddling behind the console, she saw Kyosti enter, distinctive by the relaxed precision of his walk.

  “One’s still alive,” he said, and she had to stand up, to survey the five dead guards: three were half-dressed, as if they had just woken up. Most were sprayed with blood and gaping wounds. Kyosti just stood there as the wounded man rolled, reached for the gun dropped by his dead compatriot, and lifted it to aim at his nearest clear target: Hawk.

  Lily shot him in the head, and he slumped forward over the other body. Rainbow came forward and began to search the bodies.

  Lily walked to the door, paused by Kyosti long enough to shove his rifle into him so hard that he had to take three steps back.

  “I hate you,” she muttered. “Rainbow! What are you doing?”

  “Got it.” Rainbow rose. “Ya manual keypad for ya cells. Free ya prisoners.”

  Her voice seemed so nonchalant that Lily was filled with a wrenching rage at the Ridani’s seeming ability to kill so casually. She whirled and stalked out. Had to wait in the empty corridor until Kyosti and Rainbow emerged a few minutes later.

  “We checked the other rooms,” Kyosti said. “They’re clear.”

  From some deep recess of memory that she had forgotten existed, there flashed a vivid picture of Master Heredes sitting cross-legged on the floor of his Academy’s workout room, watching her as she did a particularly complicated kata. “Yes,” he said in this memory, “yes. In this move you strike directly to the temple. Done so, with proper alignment, you kill your opponent with that single blow.” His face remained impassive, as if killing was an abstract ideal that never touched reality, as if the opponent was always an idealized shadow of one’s self, echoing your own movements across space. She wondered, standing there in the light of the three filtered helmet beams, how many people Heredes had killed in the course of his very long life.

  The tube lighting along the walls flickered on, off, on: low wattage power, almost grey, and the hushed, strained whirring of the auxiliary venting system kicked in.

  Lily forced herself to relax her grip on her rifle, finger by finger. “Come on,” she said, more to herself than to her companions.

  They met the other three by the metal door that led on to the meter-square maintenance shaft that paralleled, opened out from, the central elevator shaft. The door was ajar.

  “I didn’t believe it.” Yehoshua said as they came up. “The ’bot really did it.”

  “Who do you think cut the power?” Lily demanded.

  “Maybe Main Block finally tapped through and cut it.”

  “Maybe that’s what the guards will think. We can hope. Did you clear all three corridors? Good.” In the distance they could hear prisoners shouting to each other across the cell tunnel. “Rainbow. Release one prisoner, and then follow us up. Lock this shaft behind you.”

  Rainbow paused to look up at the ceiling. “It be ya sore long way to ya surface dome, min.”

  “I know.” Lily stepped through the door and set one hand on a ladder rung. “That’s why they won’t be expecting us.”

  6 Jacob’s Ladder

  THEY CLIMBED.

  Lily’s hands began to hurt first, from being curled around the metal rungs, then the arch of her foot, from pushing off all the time. Eventually her back began to ache as well, right around the shoulders and between the shoulder blades.

  Rainbow started to lose ground fairly soon. Yehoshua and Alsayid kept up until they passed the door marked level 6 and then their lights, too, began to recede into the vast depths of blackness that surrounded them: the empty, seemingly bottomless central shaft.

  Lily had to stop just above level 5. She laced her elbows around a rung and let her hands hang open, breathing hard. Below, Jenny stopped as well, but Kyosti continued up until he was half-overlapping Lily. Letting go with one hand, he massaged each of her palms in turn.

  “Hoy,” she gasped. “You’d think it was three kilometers between levels instead of one-third.”

  “It’ll get worse,” replied Kyosti cheerfully.

  It did. She reached a point where she could block the pain lancing through her muscles, but the halts became more frequent, and the relief they afforded less. Once she heard a curse, far below, and she trained her light down to see Alsayid dangling and pulling himself back onto the ladder with Yehoshua’s help. Rainbow’s light was lost in the deep black beneath. The air stirred around them.

  “Damn it,” cursed Jenny from below. “Would you turn that light back into the wall? I’m terrified of heights.”

  Kyosti laughed.

  Lily started up again. They had long since passed level 2 when abruptly a red light snapped on some meters above Lily’s head. She flipped off her light immediately, and the others vanished as well.

  “They’ve restored power,” she said softly, downward. “It’s been”—she checked the gleaming numbers on her wrist-com—“over four hours. We’ll wait for the others to catch up.”

  “How much time do we have left?” asked Jenny. Her voice, even at a whisper, caused strange reverberations in the shaft.

  “Enough.”

  “Damn my eyes if I don’t ache like a Senator’s sore—”

  Noise above, an echoing, deep click, and a heavy humming. Pressure—wind—began to increase against their faces and shoulders, stirring the rifles slung over their backs.

  “Hold on,” said Kyosti. “The elevator’s coming down.”

  Lily vised her arms around the vertical poles of the ladder and hugged herself against the metal, hooking her knees around a rung, pressing as flat as she could. Then she shut her eyes.

  As wind roared past, ripping at them, the elevator descended. The hum increased until it shook the ladder itself; the rungs vibrated as if they were trying to throw off these intruders. Just as the noise and wind seemed unbearable, the blank wall of the elevator slid past. Lily hugged against the ladder so tightly that she got seams in her skin, and she felt the wall of the elevator jostle her rifle. She held her breath until, mercifully, it slid past and continued down.

  “Hoy,” she said as she started to climb, “let’s get out of here.” She stopped, catching her breath, and just held on until, after an interminable time, she heard Yehoshua hailing her.

  “Are you all three there?” she asked, in return.

  “Alsayid is about fifty rungs below me, and the Ridani at least one hundred below him, but we’re still climbing.”

  “Just one level to go.” She began the slow rung-to-rung ascent, propelled now more by a strong desire to beat the elevator’s inevitable return trip than by that burst of strength that comes from nearing the goal.

  The last gap between level 1 and the surface seemed the longest, but at last they were met by a pattern of blinking lights: red, green, and blue.

  When she reached Bach, she merely rested her head against the cool sheen of his curve for long moments. She could hear Jenny’s ragged breathing, and a little later, Yehoshua and Alsayid halted below her. Kyosti remained silent and still at her feet.

  At a brief whistle from Lily, Bach recounted his mission in beautiful four-part counterpoint, softly serenading the climbers.

  Affirmative, patroness. None discerned my ascent or trail unto the main computer. And lest they suspect my ploy, I did engage the power overrides so that it might appeareth to their technicians that an overload had occurred. Wast well done?

  “Very well done, Bach,” said Lily, unable to muster up the breath to whistle. “And this ladder goes all the way up to the control center?”

  Affirmative. I have ascertained that the main control center does indeed rest upon the top of this elevator shaft, and this ladder dost as well ascend to a doo
r that should open onto such center. Although such as have built this place have also locked this door.

  “We expected that,” said Kyosti, once Lily had translated. “We’ll have to send Ishmael up to set charges.”

  “Ishmael? Kyosti, do you make up these strange names? Don’t answer. Is Rainbow up with us yet?”

  A slight voice from below. “I’m here.”

  “Last instructions. Alsayid, you and Bach set the explosives. Jenny, you and Rainbow wait by this ladder—when the charge goes you must be first up the ladder to the command center. And Bach must come in right behind you.”

  “Check,” replied Jenny, her voice flat with concentration.

  “Yehoshua, Alsayid; you follow me. Hawk will be going up the ramp alone into the control center. We wait until he’s inside, and then we hit as soon as he attacks.”

  “Hold on.” Yehoshua sounded, for the first time, skeptical and angry. “I don’t intend to commit suicide. That’s a three-meter-wide ramp up to the control dome, with two mounted laser guns at the top placed for cross fire.”

  “Change of plans,” said Lily. “It’ll work.”

  “Forget it.”

  Lily waited a moment, controlling her voice, and then spoke. “Hawk. Tell them.”

  “I have six shock grenades. Four thrown to the four corners when the ladder hatch explodes and two into the laser emplacements—which are manual, I believe—that will give you a good five seconds with most of the personnel in the dome stunned. Of course, you’ll have to watch your back.”

  “But that will leave you stunned and a sitting target.”

  “Maybe.” Kyosti’s voice was colorless.

  Lily began to climb. Bach rose ahead of her. “We haven’t got time for this. Move it.”

  Alsayid passed them at the main dome-level door, and he and Bach went on up. Alsayid returned quickly, however.

  “There’s a lock on this side,” he murmured to Lily. “The ’bot says he can blow it.”

  Above, she heard a faint whine, like a drill. “Hoy. Damned show-off. All right, hand me up the manual key. We’re going out.”

  It took a moment for the small rectangular keypad to pass from hand to hand, but Lily disengaged the lock on her first try. She took a breath, let it out, and swung the door aside.

  It opened out into the corridor. She stepped out, easy, as if she were meant to be there, and found herself in a narrow, empty corridor. Motioned the others out quickly.

  Jenny immediately knelt by the door, and after a hesitation, Rainbow stopped beside her, rubbing her arms with one hand. Lily waited for Kyosti to disappear alone around the bend in the corridor, and then she walked forward with Yehoshua and Alsayid at her heels.

  Around the bend the corridor came to an end: one door opened into a long, narrow maintenance room, a second gave onto a large, brightly lit corridor that arced around the curve of the elevator shaft. Down it, she heard voices, a few raised, and then one, angry, that she recognized.

  “You idiot, we have a complete security breach in level nine—”

  Lily signed Yehoshua and Alsayid forward. As they rounded the corner, they saw Kyosti berating two guards, who were wearing the same standard issue coveralls they were. The two guards, cowed by Kyosti’s apparent authority, quickly turned to escort him toward the broad hall through which equipment was loaded into the elevator and which held, on one side, the long ramp that led to the central dome above.

  Kyosti had pulled down his breathing mask so that, evidently, the guards could see clearly the scorn with which he kept up a constant flow of furious invective about security breaches and incompetent level supervisors. Lily could not quite hear the details. As they came out into the hall she made a small sign with her hand and split off from the other two, filtering into the restless gathering of armed guards.

  “—must have been a malfunction. Damn rebels would have attacked by now.”

  “—keep us off guard—”

  “—I heard prisoners on level seven sabotaged the—”

  She moved along the wall until she stood on a level with the ramp, seeing Kyosti walking up it alone, seemingly oblivious to the muzzles of the big laser guns trained on his approach. Caught Yehoshua’s eye, to her left, and began to press nonchalantly forward toward the beginning of the ramp.

  A second’s high, piercing whine warned her: an instant later a muffled explosion sounded from above, and she broke forward at a run as the rest of the guards were registering the sound. She reached the ramp just as a series of low pops betrayed the concussions of the shock grenades Kyosti had thrown. Behind, footsteps rang on the ramp, but she did not have time to turn to see whose they were, only heard the beginning of heavy shooting.

  The fifteen meters up that ramp seemed, with the two muzzles of the laser guns trained straight on her, like a kilometer. A burst of light shot out at her. She hit the floor rolling, heard a scream of pain behind, came up running as, ahead, she heard Kyosti yelling her name.

  Metal rang beneath her boots, and she was through the double doors. Her first sight was of Kyosti wrestling down the gunner at the laser emplacement. Opposite, a guard drew himself to his knees and aimed a rifle down the ladder shaft. It took Lily two shots to cut him down, and then she saw a head emerge from the shaft: Jenny.

  People stirred at the consoles. A woman reached for a gun. Lily turned, dropping to her knees, and fired over the heads of Yehoshua and Alsayid into a line of guards pounding up the ramp. Held her fire, noticing in an abstract way that Yehoshua was struggling behind his cousin, and that red trailed after him.

  Then one of the laser guns woke and swept fire through the first two lines of guards. They fell back, hesitated. Lily whirled to cover her back, dropping to her belly, but Jenny was methodically picking off everybody left in the command center from behind the body of the guard by the ladder. Behind her, Rainbow fired in bursts down the shaft. And singing—

  “Bach! Shut the damn doors!”

  Laser fire from the ramp. A moan. Lily moved to Alsayid, helped him drag Yehoshua out of the line of fire. Alsayid, bleeding from one leg, staggered up to the laser emplacement, shot the still-stunned man in the chair, pushed the body aside, and seated himself. The fire on the ramp doubled, devastating the guards’ advance. Lily knelt beside Yehoshua. Blood leaked out of him onto the metal floor. He writhed, coughing spasmodically.

  “Jenny!”

  Jenny appeared at her side.

  “Take Kyosti’s position. Send him out here.”

  Jenny moved.

  Lily glanced toward Rainbow. The Ridani woman had paused to switch rifles, taking one from a dead guard, and a burst of fire ricocheted up from below until she stuck the muzzle into the shaft and set off shooting again.

  Without a word, Kyosti knelt beside Lily and began to strip the suit from Yehoshua with a small, red-handled knife.

  “Do you need me?”

  He shook his head.

  The power went out. Black. She froze in the act of standing, surprised, until Kyosti switched on his helmet light and resumed his work.

  She switched on her light and stepped over corpses to reach Bach.

  “Topside guns disabled?”

  Affirmative. Opening hangar doors. Auxiliary ventilation systems engaging—now.

  A low whine signaled their advent.

  “Now we wait for Callioux.” Lily picked her way carefully around the command center, checking each body for signs of life. All were dead. She placed five rifles by Rainbow and returned to Bach.

  Progress? she whistled, pulling the dead comm-officer off his console and seating herself in his place.

  All hangar doors open. All locks on all levels sealed shut.

  Lily switched on the outside channels and toggled until she caught comm.

  “This is Heredes. We have control of thirties main command center. Please acknowledge main strike.”

  As if in reply, an explosion shook the dome. In the silence of its aftermath, Lily could hear the fire of the moun
ted laser guns stutter and cease.

  “Assault up the ramp has stopped,” called Jenny, hidden from view by her emplacement.

  “We did it,” Lily breathed.

  “Strike acknow—”

  A second explosion shuddered through the dome. Jenny fired a single burst from her gun.

  “My cousin—” Alsayid’s voice, strained with worry and physical hurt, came from the opposite emplacement.

  “He’ll live.” The auxiliary lights came up, casting an eerie glow on the litter of bodies, on Kyosti’s pale hair as he drew off the helmet and mask and laid a gentle hand on Yehoshua’s motionless form. “But he’s going to lose his right arm. I’m sorry.”

  Alsayid murmured a phrase, solemn as a prayer. Lily shifted her foot, accidentally nudging the bloody head of the dead comm-officer. She began to shake, gasping hard to fight it, but even so, she was still trembling when Callioux came up the ramp, hair singed by laser fire but otherwise unhurt.

  7 The Mule

  THEY LET CALLIOUX’S SOLDIERS take over at command central, waited first in the hall below the center until level 1 was cleared, and then waited in the extensive level 1 medical complex until the last of the guards surrendered or died. Most surrendered, once they realized how thoroughly they were breached. One squad of six managed to sneak out the way Lily and her people had come in, but Inonu’s ten caught them soon enough.

  Kyosti quickly stripped off his guard’s uniform and threw on a white medical jacket, going to work on casualties with a physician’s disregard for which side they were on. On level 7, the guards had massacred two hundred prisoners before Callioux’s people arrived, but otherwise most of the injuries came from Callioux’s assault on the dome.

  Alsayid sat by his cousin, who had been put on a stasis couch and now, unconscious, was entirely unaware of the discussion going on above him concerning his mangled arm.

  Lily had also taken off her guard’s uniform, unable to stomach the constant reminder of the blood that spattered it; now she fell asleep, head resting on Bach as he sang a quiet, soothing chorale.