He looked on the log. Supposedly seven—no eight—people were staying at the house. If anything was wrong—invasion, fire, equipment failure—the backup would alert them. They would then call the security center and report it. Ferran came back in the room. “What’s wrong, Georg?”
“Vatta town house—not responding and I can’t get to the house system either way.”
“They’ve had that ISC man there messing with the system—maybe he screwed something up.”
“It was working fine a half hour ago.” Georg pulled up the log on his screen. “Until three minutes twenty seconds ago.” Had it really taken him that long to look up the residents in-house?
“I suppose we could call Sera Stella,” Ferran said. “But if she’s asleep she’ll be annoyed.”
“Better annoyed than snuck up on,” Georg said. He placed a call to the Vatta house secure line. NO CONNECTION. He looked at Ferran; Ferran looked back. “This isn’t good.”
“We have her emergency number, her skullphone,” Ferran said.
“Calling now,” Georg said. “Get a supervisor; we need help.” No connection on the skullphone. No connection on the house phone. It took Ferran another ten minutes to locate their shift supervisor, Philip Grayson. He had Georg on his own skullphone as he searched, and Georg reported no luck contacting the house.
“Call the police,” Ferran said. “Both our watch units are out at the airport, remember?”
The police weren’t that concerned until Ferran’s supervisor reminded the desk sergeant that the house had been broken into before, and Sera Vatta had been attacked, her car damaged, in her own driveway. Another officer came on. “We’ll send someone right out. You aren’t sure there are intruders?”
“No, but we can’t get any communication with the house.”
“All right then. Keep calling them, just in case.” That line cut off.
“I could call Sera Grace,” Ferran said. “My grandmother’s often awake in the middle of the night.”
“Good idea,” Grayson said. “We don’t want to take chances with Sera Stella. Georg, you call. Ferran, find the nearest mobile team and tell them to go to the Vatta house immediately.”
Georg made the connection to Sera Grace’s phone and got a man’s voice instead. “MacRobert here.”
“Vatta Security at headquarters—we’ve dispatched a police unit to the Vatta house; the house system isn’t responding and we can’t get a response from Sera Stella, either. Of course, with so many people in the house it’s probably not necessary, but—”
“She’s there alone,” MacRobert said. “Send more help. There may be an attack because she called the Rector tonight and said she was alone.”
“Yes, sir. Will you inform Sera Grace?”
“Of course. Go!”
“I’ve got Cameron’s unit,” Ferran said.
When the police arrived, the street was empty, a clean sheet of snow pale between the pools of light at each corner, except for discreet lighting near the residences. Officers Molina and Jankin got out and saw no one at the door or near it. A light over the door illuminated the front steps. Smaller lights marked the driveway entrance and the gate’s lock panel. They walked back to the drive, up it to the locked gates. A light over the kitchen door that had been kicked open before, but no sign of fresh damage. No one lurking in the drive when they flashed their lights along it. A light over the garage doors; the doors were closed. No sound came from inside, and their probes could not penetrate the house’s shielding.
“Use the police master?” Molina asked.
“We could, but I don’t see any reason, really. It’s some electronic glitch; there’s no disturbance, no sign of any intrusion.” Jankin looked through the gate; the snow was unmarked.
“There’s that glass door in the back, you remember? Someone might’ve gotten in there, and in this neighborhood nobody’s going to hear anything once they’re inside.”
“Yeah, but—all right.” Jankin used the police master passcode on the driveway gates and they opened silently, smoothly. They walked up the drive. The kitchen door had been repaired; it was closed and locked. They tried the door. No alarm came on, but the door was locked and the lock held. Farther on, the garden gate was also locked. They looked through the bars. Their light flashed on the lawn; the earlier snowfall had stopped, and what might have been footsteps marred the smooth blanket of white. To their left, the glass French doors gleamed in the light, closed. Whole. Drapes drawn across them. The very picture of a peaceful house properly closed for the night.
“She walked in the garden gate to the back door, not the kitchen?” Jankin asked.
“It’s closer, if she parked in the garage.” Molina looked around, swinging his light. “But there are no tracks in the driveway. If she didn’t drive home, she’d have entered at the front, surely. Or the side. Not back here.” He touched the master passcode to the gate lock, and it snapped open. “It won’t take long; we’ll just walk around to the far side. There has to be some reason the house isn’t answering.”
“She’s not here. She went to a friend’s house for the night.” Jankin shrugged but followed.
“Then she would’ve told Vatta headquarters. That’s how the rich do it. Never out of contact.” Their lights flashed over windows on the ground floor, windows on the second, speared higher to the roof with its two dormers jutting out—“What is that?” Dark shapes that disappeared almost before they’d registered, and something lurking above that defeated the eyes’ attempt to define it.
“Call—” began Molina, and then both were slammed into the snow, into a frantic battle with opponents they could not see clearly, blows coming out of nowhere. Their own blows seemed to have no effect. Only their body armor and helmets saved them—that and the sirens approaching the house. Their attackers stopped abruptly, stood, and ran for it, leaving more and fresher tracks in the snow. Molina clambered to his knees, drew his weapon, flicked his night goggles to infrared, and took aim on what he hoped was one of them, rising impossibly from the ground toward the roof. That one jerked, but did not fall; the other one was already at the roof. Molina shot again at the light blurs his goggles gave him for targets. Return fire slammed into his armor and knocked him back. Then all the blurs were inside something, and the something rose into the air, the air throbbing with the sound of a hovercraft. The backwash threw up all the snow in the yard; it was like being in a blizzard until the craft had moved away. Molina sank down, felt around for his partner. Jankin groaned. “My back—”
“They’ve left. Did you hear the sirens?” The sirens had now wailed to a growl.
“Yeah—help me—”
“If your back’s hurt I’m not going to move you. Lie still. I’ll call.”
Stella Vatta heard the silence—not of emptiness but of determined stillness—where she crouched in her closet, easing out the drawer, fishing carefully for the gloves and booties of her armor. Someone had been outside her bedroom door—she had remembered to close it—and was undoubtedly still there, tense. Why? What had happened? The silence seemed to last forever as she pulled on the gloves, moved one leg at a time just enough to pull on the booties, hoping the intruder couldn’t hear the faint rasp of wool on wool that seemed so loud to her when she changed position. The silence went on as she crouched, breathing quietly, and then, in the distance, she heard sirens. They grew louder, louder still.
Rescue? Or someone else’s emergency? She heard a burst of static from outside, then the thud of boots moving fast, away from her door, back toward the middle of the house. Then shots fired outside, from the garden toward the house, toward the roof. Return fire from the roof. More boots in the distance. A voice called “Out now! Make sure they’re dead.” Shots. She eased over to her door. All the sounds distant now. Opened it a crack. Silence, except in the far end of the house. Then a muffled roar from above, directly above, a sound she recognized as a hovercraft lifting vertically. And then only a faint noise as it shifted from vertical to silenced horizontal flight.