“Not without casualties, nadi-ji. I insist. Stay back. Let me attempt this.”
His security was not happy to wait. They had other armament ready. They were far enough in, and prepared to finesse it, as Banichi would say, from here on. But Banichi motioned his contingent back against the wall, into what concealment the section door frame offered, while he keyed the door open and locked it into position.
He and Barnhart and the co-pilot walked into a corridor that could be any stretch of small offices, no windows, nothing to indicate who was where, or that this was a high-security area. He counted doors. Ten.
First intersection of corridors. The habitual scuff marks in the corridor took a turn. Bren pulled a brochure out, sole precaution. And around that corner they faced a uniformed guard.
“Banichi,” Bren said under his breath, to his electronics, “one armed man at a desk and a shut door.” He kept walking, himself and Barnhart and the co-pilot, as if the guard himself, not the closed double door beyond, was their objective.
“Who are you ?” the guard asked.
“Looking for Madison,” Bren said, and laid the brochure on the desk. “Have you seen these things?”
The man took a split second to read the title and look at the pictures. And looked up into a gun-muzzle—a weapon in the hands of a very scared paidhi-aiji who really, truly hoped his security would hurry so he and his two non-combatant allies wouldn’t have to defend themselves. “Don’t touch anything. Don’t make a move.”
The man considered carefully what to do with his hands. He was indeed wearing a gun.
“Read the paper,” Barnhart suggested. “It explains what’s important.”
The guard looked down, opened it as if it had been a bomb. And looked up, alarmed at what he read—twice alarmed, as Banichi and Jago turned up silently.
The guard looked from Bren to them and very carefully didn’t move a muscle.
“We’re from Alpha,” Bren said calmly, “and these are our neighbors, no relation to the people who blew a hole in your station. This station is in imminent danger, we’re here to get the prisoner and evacuate the station as quickly and quietly as we can. Stay very still. We’re going to remove the gun. You don’t want to use it, anyway.”
“Damn you!”
“Mind your tone. They don’t speak much of our language. Be polite and smile at them.”
“The hell?” The man moved to prevent Jago lifting the gun from his holster. Mistake. Jago took the arm instead, yanked him up straight out of his chair, and Banichi took the gun in a wink.
“Be still, sir,” Banichi said in Mosphei’, and the guard said not another word.
Bren moved on and inserted the keycard at the next door: the door, the hallway in the other direction showing an office-like door at the end.
The door didn’t open. The builder’s code didn’t work. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
“Code’s not working,” he said. “It must be a jury rig. Not on the system.”
“Finesse will not suffice here,” Banichi said in Ragi, and took a fistful of the guard’s jacket. “Open the door.”
The guard commendably refused.
Just as someone, an administrative sort, opened a side office door and blithely walked out into the situation.
Blinked, open-mouthed.
And ducked back. Other doors stayed shut. Jago walked down the short corridor, dragging the unhappy clerk with her, shoving small clear wedges into the small gap between door and mounting—assuring someone from the outside was going to have to release the occupant; but the alarm by now would go to Central.
“Gas,” Banichi said, gun in hand, and Bren tugged the mask out from under his collar as the others did the same.
Banichi ripped the panel off the double door, clipped a line and attached a small switch, which quietly opened the door on a wide open area that suddenly, in Bren’s recollection, matched their charts—he was thinking that and thinking he had better get himself to the fore, when Banichi tossed a grenade that went rolling down the hall.
A guard ran to grab it, and it blew out a cloud of gas and went on spewing, while the guard, a shadow among other shadows in the gas, doubled over. Jago and Banichi charged in. Bren ran. Man’chi, whatever impelled a sane human—he went in, gun in hand, desperate—skidded to a stop as Jago pitched another grenade, this one percussive, with a great deal of smoke, a shock that deafened human ears. Two human senses were impaired.
Sirens started. Red lights dyed the gas. They’d gone in as civilized individuals. They’d become invading, masked monsters. Guards, whose defenses hadn’t included gas masks, were down and choking in front of a clear-walled enclosure that itself was filling with gas, and the yellow-clad figure caught inside that cube of slowly obscuring air, white-lit in the general haze of red, could have been a very stout, brownish-gray human in a baggy yellow coverall.
The occupant of that glass cage applied stocky dark-gray palms to the glass wall, pressed close, trying to discern the nature of the invaders. It had a broad, large-eyed face, heavy-jowled, heavy-browed. All of that, Bren saw at first blink, before Jago blew the clear plastic door in, and the yellow-clad alien turned away to face intrusion.
Then the alien turned full circle, as if seeking some other route of escape—or expecting to die by the hands of some oddly composed lynch mob.
Banichi invaded the cell, seized the alien’s massive arms and hauled the alien toward the shattered wall. Banichi had brought a spare mask. He whipped it out of his jacket and pressed it over the alien’s mouth, and at that point the alien stopped fighting, held the mask in place with his own hands and, perhaps conceiving of safety, cooperated in the rescue, accompanying Banichi, trying to keep up with a wider stride.
Jago stood with rifle ready to provide covering fire, and as they brought the alien past, Jago folded their expedition inward and began a fast retreat. Bren tried to observe that plan, grabbed Barnhart by the arm as they reached their rear guard, accounting for the co-pilot: he meant to get to the fore again, but Jago took the lead and Banichi dragged the rescuee along with them.
Cenedi’s man stayed rear guard. Bren didn’t look back, except to be sure that all their company was retreating with them, a rush back toward clear air, back past rows of—thank God—closed office doors, where people were likely phoning for help, but nothing but another builder’s key could close a door a builder’s key had locked, so Gin swore, and so far things were working.
Someone, maybe the guard, rushed at them at the corner: mistake. Jago flattened the man with an elbow and light-footed it ahead, pausing for corners and doorways. They reached clear air at the corner by the desk, and pulled the masks down in favor of unobstructed breathing and vision. The prisoner, seeing others give up the breathing masks, removed his own—then looked wildly about at a thunderous rush behind them.
Men came running behind them; and all of a sudden Jago heaved another grenade down the corridor, and running attackers skidded to a stop and tried to get back.
It blew in a cloud of gas. And Cenedi’s man blasted the overhead light panels, a neat, one-after-the-other chain that darkened the corridor and drove their pursuers in retreat.
They ran, then, Banichi dragging the stocky alien, as fast as he could; and Bren had his gun in hand, keeping an eye to pursuit behind them, not wanting to shoot any hapless guard. The doors had stayed open, and he found the presence of mind to shut one and lock it with his key.
Then he ran to catch up, almost hindmost, around the last turn. He passed Barnhart, passed Banichi, caught up with Jago just as she reached the lift.