She linked her implant to the house internal security system—that worked, at least. Now she could see from the sensors that several people were on the roof, already entering one of the dormer windows. Others were below, near every ground-level exit. Suddenly the four near the front door disappeared as she saw the lights of a vehicle approaching along the street. It passed by; the figures reappeared as if by magic.
Chameleon suits. They had full chameleon suits. So did she, but she’d put on only the top. She kicked off her house boots, yanked off her slacks, fumbled in the drawer for the pants and pulled them up, sealed them to the shirt, pulled on her wool slacks again. Took off the sweater, shivering a bit with fear and the chill. It seemed to take hours, but the glowing clock face on the bedside table clicked the seconds off slowly. It hadn’t taken even a full minute yet. Back into socks and boots. A dark close-fitting top, the shoulder holster, the dark padded jacket Rafe had insisted on, with pockets for the extra ammunition. Two and a half minutes. Only one had gone into the window so far; others were doing something up there but she couldn’t tell what. There were ways to cut through ship hulls, if you had time and the right tools.
Where could she go? And how many would she have to deal with? She turned off the bedroom light, as if she were going back to bed, switched her implant to night-vision amplification, and made her way back down the passage toward the staircase. On the left, a door concealed in paneling let her into a storage room stacked with office supplies. She ducked under the shelving at the far end, pulled open the low door, and crawled into the passage behind it, shutting it after her. Straight ahead to the outer wall, then right.
The intruders had already entered the second attic bedroom, the one that had been Jo’s. Light flared in the video pickup: they were using a torch to cut through the shielding that covered the staircase access. So they must have known about it, or hacked into the house system. It would take them minutes… she thought of hurrying downstairs to the security office, trying to punch a signal through somehow, but that kind of work wasn’t in her skill set. If only Rafe or Teague had been there. She cursed Rafe and Ky silently, for leaving her alone with no warning. Not even Rodney, not even a day’s warning to let her get someone else in. It wasn’t fair!
A muffled thud from the far end of the children’s wing. They were through. Shadows flowed down the staircase, opened the guest suite door. She saw them clearly now, heads covered in helmets—she didn’t have one and her head felt naked, exposed, even behind the secret space’s armored walls. She reached back and tugged her suit’s hood out of the collar and over her hair, for all the good that would do. The finer mesh of the face shield fell down, tickling her nose on the way.
She looked through the peephole set in an elaborate piece of artwork on the other side of the wall. Two entered each of the bedrooms closer to the stairs: a fast search. If anyone spoke she couldn’t hear it.
And now that group—six—were in the passage, and more were landing on the roof. Her heart pounded; her breath came short. Too many; she couldn’t possibly win. And yet… she wanted to live. Her body felt as if it were shrinking in on itself. She forced a deep breath then another. They were to the staircase. Two started down. The other four waited, and four more came out of the guest suite.
Stella sighted on the nearest and got off two shots—both targets jerked, but did not fall—before one of the others responded with a spray of bullets that knocked chips off the carving but did no real damage to the wall or her. Of course they had armor… but her enhanced sight showed the weakened hot spots where the first bullets had hit. Her next two hit the same spots; the two after that took out the faceplates on the helmets of the other two. Now the following four were flattened into the bedroom doorways, and more chips came off the carving. From below came a whump and her implant’s icons for the house security went dead. Now she had no video contacts to know where they were.
She backed away, slid through another hidden door into the adjoining room, opened the door into the passage, and saw one of them running toward her. She fired the rest of that magazine and the man went down hard only a meter away. She darted out, grabbed his weapon, tried to get his helmet but it wouldn’t come off and it was taking too long. She jumped back into the room and closed and barred the door. Slammed her second magazine into her pistol. Back to the passage. One of them was within ten centimeters of the peephole, faceplate lifted. She fired directly into his face, then into the faceplate of the one behind him. Then at the two coming back upstairs. They flinched but didn’t fall. Five down, but there were more. And she had used up all her pre-loaded ammunition.
Her fingers shook as she reloaded the first magazine, slammed it home, reloaded the second. Why hadn’t she followed her father’s practice, kept more loaded magazines? Filling them both cut her down to one box. She had that weapon she’d taken from the man in the passage, and it had a huge magazine, but she had never used a gun like that.
Point the open end at the target; your hand will find the trigger. Her father’s voice. Another deep breath; she found the comfortable place to hold it, and the trigger to pull, then set it down beside her. Then she fingered the chameleon suit’s sleeve control to full concealment and saw the carpet instead of her arm—she’d forgotten to do that before—and her hands floating in the air. Gloves. She’d forgotten the gloves that extended the field. And the booties. They’d see hands and feet and intuit where her body must be.
The gloves and booties were in her bedroom. Down the passage, around the corner—too far, she was sure, to make it before one of them saw her and shot her. Could she could make it across the passage into her father’s office and the secret room undetected? But then she would be trapped. It had no other exit.
The hidden passage she was in wound around to the row of bedrooms—if no one detected the void in the walls or the entrances to it. The entrance to her bedroom was through the desk in the corner; the drawer with the gloves and booties across the room, in the closet. And had she left her bedroom door open or closed? Would she come crawling out of the desk’s keyhole to find them standing over her? She picked up the larger weapon and edged that way, trying not to make a sound, trying to fix her mind on practical things. Someone at Vatta headquarters should have noticed that the house was cut off from the security grid. Wouldn’t they send a team to check? How long would that take?
After midnight, the Vatta HQ Security Watch spent most of their time checking buildings: Vatta warehouses, the headquarters building itself, the hangars and offices of Vatta Transport’s space at Port Major’s airport. They could do much of the work remotely, as computers at headquarters pinged the buildings’ security systems and received alarms. Mobile teams then checked out any anomalies. Someone always sat in the control room, watching for any signal that one of the buildings had been broken into, fences cut, or the like.
Georg Bakli and Ferran Hallen had the watch, and Ferran had stepped out for a few minutes when one of the boards beeped. Georg punched the RECORD button and called up the incident description. The Vatta town house had failed to respond to the regular ping sent by Vatta’s computers.
Such failures weren’t common, but they weren’t rare, either. Usually they self-repaired in a few minutes, or a branch had brought down a wire, something like that. But since the house had been broken into only eleven days before, Georg didn’t wait for self-repair but queried the house’s system, to interrogate its own security system. CONNECTION NOT AVAILABLE. That was unusual. The house’s security system not responding on either hardwired or wireless suggested something more serious.