What made the scene strange were machine gun nests. The floor tiles had been dug up in spots, to make foxholes, and the debris piled in a half-circle in front of the foxholes. The tripod-mounted weapons of some make Montrose did not recognize were still squatting in their places, ugly snouts peering through the debris of tiles toward the outer doors. Fat power cables ran from the tripod-mounted artillery across the floor to an open elevator shaft, and from there they snaked down out of sight, presumably to some buried dynamo, or perhaps the power system of the subterranean vactrains. Also snaking across the tiled floor of the empty mall were tangles of defensive wire, the kind that could be set to shock, or entangle, or explode. The wire was motionless at the moment, but little grenades like iron grapes dangled from the twisted wire at irregular intervals.
But there were no soldiers. Rania’s men must have been here, and quite recently, and fled precipitously enough to leave their gear behind, whatever they could not carry.
In his heavy armor, Montrose clanked through the empty halls, and came to the broad glass front doors, like the doors of a palace, that loomed above him, four times the height of a man. There was a switch, but clicking it did nothing: the circuit was dead. Peering through the thick glass panes, he saw the dark and empty streets outside. No one was standing too close, and he did not feel like searching for a manual door, so he removed the safety from one of his eight side-bullets, the Six O’clock position, and fired it into the door-hinge.
The hinge mechanism must have had a self-oiling canister, because a most satisfactory gust of fire and oily smoke leaped up with a roar, with torn metal screaming in reply, and the massive doors toppled majestically, smashing into half a dozen raft-sized flakes and a cloud composed of a thousand diamond shards. (That crash surprised him. He assumed the future people would make glass out of something safe and shatter-proof, like plastic. He wasn’t complaining, though.)
He stepped through the cloud of black smoke and tinkling shards, down the broad marble stairs. All the eyes of the soldiers were on him.
The buildings here were long-empty, unlit, the windows covered with coppery sheets, like pennies on the eyes of dead. There was no traffic: the road had been recently torn up, as if by directed energy, to form a crude trench. Slabs of armor plate with gunslits like narrowed Cyclops-eyes peered over the trench edge like headstones, as if shields taller than a man but small enough to be transported via traincar had merely been fitted together, edge to edge, to form impromptu pillboxes and stronghouses. Modern warfare was modular.
In the near distance were men uniformed in high-tension ablative weave, bulletproof and beam-resistant, dialed to armor configurations, and dull with the blocky gray of urban camouflage. Their officers were dressed as Conquistadores. The ordinary logic of war should have had the officers blend among the men, camouflaged as they were, for fear of snipers, but the romance of war, at least in the era dominated by personalities like Del Azarchel, allowed officers to seek greater honor by exposing themselves to greater danger.
The soldiers nearer the door kept mostly out of the line of sight, but he could see the periscope-threads of their helmets poking around corners or peeking shyly over trench edges.
There was one figure who was not cowering, not taking cover, but standing bold as brass, dead in the middle of the empty street, right beneath a dark street-lamp. The burly figure was dressed in duelist armor from a dead century, massive as a gorilla, his helmet a faceless hemisphere. An oversized pistol hung crookedly from his armored fist, its foot-long barrel down to mid-shin.
The fear that stabbed through Montrose came as a surprise. A sensation like rolling through thorns crawled across his skin, leaving a wash of hot perspiration in its wake. He blinked and blinked again, but there was no way to get a hand inside his heavy helmet and wipe the sweat from his eyes. He clicked the air switch with his jaw, opening the vents, and wishing for cool.
A bad sign. Montrose never got an attack of nerves before. Had he lost the one thing that allowed him to fight and win? Perhaps it had slipped away when he fought his final fight, the duel with Mike Nails, way back when. That duel had put him in the hospital.
Montrose reminded himself that he was not fighting for himself this time, not for money, not for his family or his firm. This was for Rania.
That thought steadied him.
The squat figure of his opponent was not alone. From behind the armored shape emerged the thinner form of Narcís D’Aragó, spine straight, walking slowly to take up a position halfway between. He was dressed in his black silk shipsuit, and, now that the general population knew the secret of second youth, his hair was dark, his narrow face unwrinkled. But there was something in his footstep, the tilt of his head, that looked positively ancient and wizened: as a ghost of some dead octogenarian possessing the body of a youth might look.
D’Aragó approached across the empty street, his footsteps the only noise in the night. He had reached exactly halfway to Montrose, the position where Montrose’s second, in theory, was supposed to meet him.
He spoke aloud in his dry and colorless voice. “Learned Montrose, I don’t have much affection for you, and not really that much for him. I am supposed to meet your second—you cannot possibly have one—and talk about how to make the fight fair—which is a stupid concept no matter how you look at it. Why don’t you back out? Save yourself the trouble?”
“Licking him will trouble me no trouble ah-tall, partner.”
D’Aragó looked disgusted. “Why are you doing this?”
Montrose shouted back, “Why are you? I want Blackie to stop bothering my wife.”
D’Aragó shrugged. “I believe a man should find his own death in his own way. Your life belongs to you in fee simple, yours to spend or throw away. If I think it is damned foolishness, that’s just my opinion. Since you don’t have a second, according to the rules of this adventure in idiocy, I guess you’re allowed to call it off.”
“I have a second.”
“Who? Where is he?”
“His name is Ximen Del Azarchel.”
And a voice rang out from the metal armband on D’Aragó’s wrist. It was Exarchel.
D’Aragó looked shocked, and the look did not fade. He kept stealing nervous glances at the man version of Del Azarchel as he spoke with the machine version over his amulet.
Montrose turned up the gain on his helmet’s earphones, and could make out the voice of the machine, cold and majestic, dimly echoing, as it conversed with D’Aragó: “Having received in proper course the challenge offered by the friend of the honorable gentleman, and agreed as to time and place, let us establish the uniformity of weapons. My principle is shy a shot from his fourth secondary barrel…”
Del Azarchel must have also had his earphones turned up, because he raised his pistol to port arms, worked the action. With a clack of noise one of the eight shots, a slender micro-missile some nine inches in length, half inch in caliber, clattered, ringing, to the roadstones. He lowered the pistol again to its ready position.
The cold voice of the machine rang out again from D’Aragó’s wrist. “Let us establish the question of a judge. Sergei Vardanov surrendered himself and his men to your principle’s custody. Let him and two others act as the tribunal…”
Montrose spoke inside his helmet to turn on the phone in his wristband. “Hey, Exarchel!”