A commando scuttled through the gap, swung to the right, and then caught sight of the pair of missing windows. Gingerly, booted feet crunching in scattered glass, he crept up to the opening and peered out, rifle at the ready. The durbar following him paused halfway into the room, staring suspiciously at the monofil anchors embedded in the floor. In the smoky air, his goggled eyes did not catch sight of the two wires stretched to the window frame, where a strip of magnetically charged 'lipping' material kept the monofil from shearing through the wood and concrete.
Both tabs zipped up to the window, bounced over the lipping strip, started to coil automatically – sliced cleanly through the neck and left arm of the commando on point – snapped into their anchors and demagnetized.
The durbar poked at one of the anchors with the muzzle of his rifle, then looked up – a question on his lips – in time to see the point commando topple over, blood spurting from a severed neck and gushing onto the floor from the arm. Eyes wide in shock, the durbar made a sound like a steam boiler venting overpressure; his rifle twitched towards the window and his claw clenched tight. One round boomed from the HK-45B, vanishing through the opening, and then the rifle jammed, the chamber fouled with substandard propellant.
The rest of the squad, having whirled at the gunshot, stared in horror at the body sprawled by the window. None of them had seen or heard anything. The durbar continued to try to fire the rifle, which made a click-click-click sound in the sudden quiet.
Malakar lunged after the human, her claws snapping on empty air, and shouted heedlessly with fear, seeing Anderssen stagger across the marble floor of the vault, in plain sight of the soldiers, every detail plain in the fierce, omnipresent glare of the floodlights.
"Hoooo!" A wail of fear burst from the gardener's old throat and she wrenched the heavy, clumsy pistol up, claw-tip scrabbling on the trigger.
Technicians whirled around at the unexpected noise. The Jehanan durbar stepped out, snatching for his automatic. His deep-set eyes widened, seeing an ancient monk waving a weapon at him. Then he caught sight of a smaller figure dashing for the artifact.
"Guards!" he shouted, enraged, and swung the iron-sights of his gun towards Gretchen. "Kill them both!"
His finger tightened – there was the sharp crack! of a gunshot – for an instant the durbar thought he'd been hit himself, claw convulsing on the automatic's trigger. There was the booming, echoing report of a second shot.
The secondary Honda generator shuddered, spewing hydrogen from a punctured cell. A mechanical pressure safety tripped and the current flowing to the kalpataru abruptly cut off.
Parus
District of the Ever-Turning Wheel
Itzpalicue stared at her comm with a sensation of icy dismay welling in her stomach.
"Lachlan?" She could barely whisper.
Gingerly, she turned the hand-comm over, then rotated the thumb control. Nothing happened. The usual whispering thread of voices from her earbug had fallen silent. She raised her eyes to the elderly technician and found him staring at her with equal horror.
"Mine is dead too," Nacace said in a frightened voice. "My earbug is dead. Everything just…stopped working."
"What about your other equipment?" The old NГЎhuatl woman tapped experimentally at the sounders clinging to her throat. They made a dull drumming sound. "Are any of your comps working?"
Nacace shook his head after a moment. He was sweating profusely – the environmental control in his suit had failed.
Our control network is dead, Itzpalicue repeated to herself, trying to grasp the enormity of the disaster which had overtaken her entire plan. Without comp on-line, there's no way to communicate with anyone. The Army will be blinded, unable even to fire most of their weapons. O merciful mother of Tepeyac, guide our spears true to the heart of the enemy, for we have nothing else with which to fight…
Her earbug suddenly squawked to life. Itzpalicue jerked as if she'd been shot.
"Lachlan! Are you there?"
Static and a confused babble of voices answered her.
The v-pane on her hand-comp flickered as the comm software reset – the Mirror-built system cycled through seventy or eighty thousand channels and popped back into synch with operations. Lachlan reappeared, but now he was standing and shouting orders at a chaotic room. His technicians were yelling in panic and the old woman could see dozens of monitoring screens showing nothing but static. Restart, Lachlan shouted again, we've lost the primary network. Shunt to secondary, then restart the primary. Go to battlefield beta cycling and rekey all encrypt sequences!
Itzpalicue waited, weak with relief. Sotto voce, she said: "Nacace, primary comm has suffered severe damage. We'll move to the secondary operations center immediately."
Then she made a sharp hooting sound, summoning the pair of Arachosians she'd chosen for bodyguard detail. By the time they arrived, Lachlan was staring out at her, still frightened.
"What happened?"
I don't know what that was! The Йirishman was sweating, jaw clenched. Everything just turned off. Everything had power – but nothing was working. Then the whole system just restarted itself.
"Do we have primary comm back?"
Lachlan managed a feeble grin and shook his head. Another new wave of jamming has hit the modern comm networks groundside – ours, the Flower Priests', and the Army's – this is modern, Imperial-style battletech too. Absolutely nothing we imported. Analysis says the xochiyaotinime didn't bring it in either. We're running the emission signatures now…
"Our network is back up?" Itzpalicue was walking quickly through the factory sheds, heading for an armored truck parked in a nearby garage. The elderly technician was jogging ahead, checking each doorway with a drawn automatic. The two Arachosians flanked her, kalang knives drawn and the grips of their pistols turned forward for swift access. "Do we have full coverage back? Spyeyes still in the air?"
No. Lachlan's voice was filled with despair. Whatever knocked out our comps killed their hover controls. One of our men on the roof is picking up the pieces of several right now.
"I see." Itzpalicue tried not to clench her jaw. "Shift as much traffic to ground-line or line-of-sight laser as possible. Do we have replacements to launch?"
Some, the Йirishman said, looking haggard. We're running a broadband restart command to try and wake up any of them that survived dropping out of the sky. They're pretty tough, so we'll get a few back. I'll have any reserve hives launched as soon as we have comm back.
"Other alternatives?"
Commercial comm is completely dead, the Йirishman said sadly. Every single relay node probably shorted out with this level of feedback. The xochiyaotinime are chasing their tails – they suffered three primary node failures and have lost nearly a quarter of their coverage. He grinned ghoulishly. The Mirror network had lost its eyes, but the backbone was still up. The Army is bouncing back – I think they'll have a full recovery in about six minutes – but the colonel is going to blister some hides for this… Their net is supposed to be hardened against exactly this kind of jamming.
The old woman slowed to a halt, waiting until the technician had climbed into the cabin of the truck, fired up the engine and put the transmission into gear. One of the Arachosians loped over to unbar the garage doors. "Will there be more outages?"