Teyud extended a case unclipped from her belt. Sally winced slightly but bent forward. The lid snapped open, and tentacles swarmed out and webbed around her face. The optical-beast pulled itself out of the case with a sticky plop and settled firmly; it only weighed a couple of pounds, and it felt like the slightly tacky play-goo kids used. Everything went blank, and there was a slight sting at her temples as the fine tendrils plugged into her veins. Another sting at the corners of her eyes, and a sensation like blurs of static and a very brief headache as even finer filaments integrated into her optic nerves.
Then everything went brighter, like an overcast day. Teyud glowed very slightly; the animal sensed ambient heat as well as magnifying light.
“Functioning,” she said.
If she looked anything like Teyud, she was now giving a fair imitation of a Bug-Eyed Monster from an ancient magazine cover; the optic the Thoughtful Grace wore turned the upper part of her face into a smooth bulging surface like the eyes of an insect … which was more or less what it was. This was Imperial-era military tembst, and Teyud had said there was a very slight possibility it would kill Sally when she tried to use it, despite her providing a blood sample for prior authorization.
Too small a probability for serious consideration, was the way she’d put it.
The intercom whistled, then said: “Coming up on target. Prepare to deploy. I express a desire that random factors eventuate in a favorable pattern.”
Satemcan whimpered slightly as Teyud picked him up, and he clamped on to her harness with both paw-hands. Sally checked her equipment; her sword was across her back, in that cool-looking position that meant you had to be careful to not slice off your ear when you drew. She wore a native dart pistol, after a bit of an argument from Teyud. Her own Colt had a much higher rate of fire—it didn’t depend on a chamber generating methane. On the other hand, shooting someone with a bullet didn’t drop them instantly, and it was much louder.
Cables uncoiled from the roof of the assault transport’s ceiling. Sally clipped one to her harness and gripped it in her gloved hands.
Down below, the dome of the Science Faculty glowed like an opal beneath the moon—Phobos was up here, a third the size of Luna from Earth, and Deimos crawled past it. The airship’s props whirred briefly as it corrected course.
“Deploying … now!”
The transparent doors beneath them opened, and her weight came onto the harness. The cable dropped away, coiling into space, and dangled as they approached the swelling top of the tower. Teyud’s head moved, calculating.
“Now,” she said, and squeezed the release.
Sally followed suit, and they swooped down into the not-darkness. She hoped the falling-elevator sensation in her stomach was all physical. The tower’s roof was flat or nearly—shedding rain wasn’t much of a problem here, and from the markings there had been Paiteng perches there once. She didn’t try to gauge her own speed; Teyud was the specialist, and she just followed as closely as possible. There was a sudden flexing in the cable; the bundle of sucker-equipped boneless limbs at its end had clamped down on the target. She clamped her legs together and extended them as the roof rushed up at her, then hit the release and tucked and rolled the way she would have from a parachute drop; she’d done that on Earth, of course, but never here.
Whump.
“Oooof!” and a muffled yelp from the canid.
Things thumped and gouged at her and the wind jolted out of her lungs. The boots and padding protected her, a bit. She thought the impact would have broken bones on Earth; it would have broken bones here, for most standard-issue Martians. Teyud was up on one knee, the edges of her blackened sword blade glimmering and the dart pistol in the other.
Sally drew likewise, the steel a comforting weight. The pistol was in her left and much lighter, but she didn’t have the Thoughtful Grace’s advantage of being ambidextrous. Satemcan staggered for a moment, shook his head, and slunk over to her heel.
There were a couple of packages of Semtex in her belt, part of her other-job kit as she thought of it. Hopefully …
They came erect and padded over to the door. It opened its eye—slowly, which was the sign of a system reaching the end of its life span. Teyud leaned forward swiftly and pressed her optic mask to the opening. Things made rather ghastly wet, sticky sounds as the commando optic used one of its functions to take over the other biomachine, and the door swung open.
“Poor security maintenance,” Teyud said very softly.
A spiral staircase led down from the landing stage, curling around a shaft that held—or had held, once—a freight lift. Teyud went down with a rapid scuff-scuff-scuff leaning run not quite like the way a Terran moved and only slightly more like the way a standard Martian did. Sally simply hopped down three or four steps each time, quiet enough in padded-sole boots if you were careful. There were occasional glow-globes, but they were nearly dormant; the optics gave them a sort of twilight view, in which footprints glowed slightly from remnant heat.
Every once in a while, they’d pass a door, one that led to rooms in the thickness of the tower wall. Most were unoccupied. Some—
Phufft.
Teyud fired before the door was fully open. The student toppled backward, a surprised look on his face. One hand held a pancake-tortilla thing wrapped around some filling, the other a top-hinged book. Teyud moved in a blur, getting her pistol arm underneath him before he struck the ground, lowering him gently and leaving the book and the more-or-less burrito on his chest.
Sally covered the stairwell while she worked. Shooting someone here wasn’t really like doing it at home, not if you used anesthetic darts; it was more like paintball, in a way, with the only real risk that of bonking your head when you collapsed. She had played a fair amount of what amounted to paintball with Teyud and her friends now and then. It was fun and excellent training, though she never beat the Coercive. Other Martians yes, but not the Thoughtful Grace, though she came close occasionally.
Of course, out on planet Reality and away from the padded obstacle course you couldn’t tell if someone was using lethals until it was too late. The instant unconsciousness was the same, but with the real thing you had instant brain-death too.
“Here,” Teyud whispered, in a flat, noncarrying tone.
Here was a door with more than its share of faintly glowing footprints. Sally tapped Satemcan on his head, and he sniffed long and carefully, then nodded.
“Ssssamesssstrangesssssmelll,” he whispered.
Teyud went through the eye-capture routine again. Then she looked up and nodded to Sally before she pushed gently on the door.
It swung open, and her optic mask stepped down the brighter light. A voice came through:
“… many years of declining fees and contributions by organizations and the Despot. This is suboptimal in the medium to long term! Contact with the Wet World—”
Which was colloquial Demotic for Earth.
“—presents both unprecedented risks and opportunities for maximizing the utility of the faculty of—”
Under the tiger alertness, some distant part of Sally Yamashita’s mind quietly boggled.
Am I really listening to an evil-mastermind academic veterinarian monologing about cutbacks in his fucking budget? that part of her asked.