In preparation for his initially effective, but ultimately disastrous, move on Zolunder’s, Rawne had studied every schematic of the site that he could get his hands on. He’d had Meryn, Varl and Cant visit the Munitorum archive on the Avenue Regnum Khan, and the Oligarchic Library of Architects on Salpeder Square, to procure and request public records and make cheap grease-paper copies. Cant had shown a peculiar propensity for trace copying schematics with forensic precision. Rawne had even pulled a couple of things off the city’s datasheaf.
He’d mixed and matched. He’d overlaid. He superimposed, working to develop the most recent and current plan of the club premises.
He had planned it, and his little circle had executed it, with the same eye for detail that he planned any known target operation. He’d used precisely the same skill set that made him a decorated major in the Imperial Guard, the same skill set that had got him in and out of particular places like the Hagian Doctrinopolis, and Gereon, and trouble in general. He’d assessed the best way in and the best way out, and how to procure transport and dud uniforms.
He hadn’t done any of it because he was that fussed about getting rich. Rawne had done it because he was getting terminally bored.
The most useful schematics had come from the Balopolis Archive of Reconstruction, which itemised all post-war refurb, rebuild and reclaim. The knot of sub-street buildings, now known as Zolunder’s, had once been a vaguely successful dining hall. It had taken two anti-tank rounds through its eastern wall during the war, and the bulk of it had burned out or been looted.
Rawne knew how the refurb had gone. He knew that Zolunder’s had kept the dining hall’s old freight access and front access, and added a service gate in the east during the rebuild.
Urbano, or one of his low-life business chums, had sealed off and locked out the service gate when they’d taken the place over, and turned it into a club that they could rinse for a couple of years before selling on. They’d wanted to minimise the number of entry points, which made good sense from a security point of view. It was what Rawne would have done if he’d been running the place.
It was, however, a dormant vulnerability. It wasn’t as if Urbano and his ilk had actually bricked the service gate up. It was still there.
Studying the schematics before running his boredom-banishing operation, Rawne had noticed the service gate, and seriously considered it as an option. In the end, he’d gone another route, the ‘Ban Daur is so innocent that doves nest in his hat’ route.
Rawne knew it never paid to underestimate an opponent. He was quite sure that Lev Csoni, a man he’d never met, let alone heard of, was a bastard piece of work, and smart with it. If Rawne knew about the service gate, then Lev Csoni knew about the service gate, supposing he had the common dog sense he was born with.
For safety’s sake, Rawne simply presumed Lev Csoni was approaching the problem of Zolunder’s the way he had done.
That is why he took up his weapon and went to cover the service gate.
Up on the top floor, Varl hushed Cant. He could hear men moving around on the roof, making furtive rat-sounds, scuffles and scrapes. It reminded Varl unpleasantly of the high galleries of Hinzerhaus, where the Blood Pact had climbed up out of the dust of the mountains, onto the ramparts, to prise open the metal casemates. He held his shotgun ready, staring upwards. It was stifling in the dark. He’d have given a great deal for a pair of no-light goggles or a scope like Mad Larkin’s.
Light appeared before him. A pale blue band of light had begun to slant down from the ceiling, as broad and thin as a sheet of paper. It was like a holy vision, a shaft of ghostly, ethereal light spearing down from on high into the infernal gloom of the airless building.
Someone was opening a skylight, and soft, cold snow-light was penetrating the darkness.
Cant had seen it too. He took cover across the walkway from Varl, crouching behind a jardinière that supported a dead fern in a glazed pot.
The ladder of blue light broadened. Varl caught the first, wet-raw whiff of snow on the air, just a hint in the breathless warmth. There was a muffled thump, and the light increased dramatically.
They just lifted the skylight too far, thought Varl, and all the snow-weight on the top of it slumped off onto the roof. The panes of the skylight had been blocked, and now they aren’t.
Varl heard the first man about to drop in. He caught Cant’s attention with a gesture, and signalled to him to hold his fire until they had at least two targets.
Framed in the pale, chill shaft of snow-light, a dark figure began to lower himself through the skylight frame. The intruder was trying to be stealthy, but it was a terribly clumsy effort. Somebody was evidently on the roof above, playing out a line or lowering him in a hand lock. It was the most feth-awful manoeuvre Varl had seen in a long time. He realised that, though they might well be dealing with violent, vicious men, the Ghosts weren’t dealing with competent, professional soldiers. Any decent Guardsman or ex-Guardsman would have known that the quickest and quietest mode of entry through the skylight would have been to simply jump down to a hand-arrest, and then drop the rest of the way. The skylight wasn’t especially high. Jump down, brace, drop: quick and simple. Forget this dangling and grunting with your legs waving around, trying to brace a foot hold.
‘Oh, for feth’s sake,’ said Varl, ‘this is just too painful to watch.’
He raised his shotgun, and blasted the intruder with a single shell. The noise was deafening, and the acrid fyceline fumes stung his nostrils. The intruder was thrown backwards through the air with such force that it snatched down the man playing out his line too. The second man smashed in through the skylight, yanked by the rope, and struck his face against the skylight rim with such a tremendous impact that Varl winced.
Both men landed on the walkway floor under the skylight in a tangled, unmoving heap.
Varl racked the pump of his weapon to chamber a fresh shell.
Then somebody, a third man that neither he nor Cant had yet identified, began to shoot down through the roof with a heavy stubber.
Meryn and Leyr, at the freight access, heard the shooting begin upstairs. They knew that neither Varl nor Cant was packing a stubber heavy enough to make that distinctive chugging snort, but there wasn’t much they could do about it.
The small metal saw had just finished with the lock on the loading dock hatch.
The heavy door swung in, slack on its hinges, and somebody sprayed las-fire through the opening as an aperitif. Meryn and Leyr had already planted themselves behind heavy supporting walls, and the las-shots spanked off masonry.
A second spray came in, to wash down the first, and then the first intruder charged.
Leyr had no angle on the hatchway so he shot the hatch instead. At short range, the huge round from the bolt-action rifle dented the metal hatch, and slammed it with considerable force into the men coming through the entrance. Meryn heard yelps of pain and cursing. One of the intruders kicked the door back open on its hinges, but before he could get off a shot, Meryn had dropped him with two sure body hits from his las.
Somebody outside raked another, much longer spray of las-fire in through the door, forcing Meryn back into hiding. The bolts scorched the air beside his flinching face, grazing close.
Leyr tried to repeat his trick of slamming the hatch with a rifle round, but the body of the man Meryn had dropped was blocking the frame and wedging it ajar.
Another long spray of las-fire hosed in. Leyr made the play dead gesture to Meryn. They were swaddled by a ruddy, close darkness and the flowing fumes of gunfire and brick dust sucking out into the cold night. The hatchway had the soft, natural light of the outside world behind it, a seeping grey radiance that seemed to Meryn and Leyr to be as bright as a full moon’s light. Instinctively, they’d clamped their eyes shut every time the las started to hose, in order to minimise flash-shock, and retain their night vision.