‘I have sent coordinates to your palm-com. Scar and his people are down now, and have set up a perimeter. The situation is under control.’
Thorn did not bother to observe that he had heard that one before. He took out his palm-com and flipped it open. It obligingly displayed a map of the town indicating the locations of both himself and his aircar. Droplets of rain were smearing its screen as he closed the device and headed for the narrow street nearest.
Sliding garage doors occurred regularly along the bases of the tall buildings, no doubt leading down to basement parking garages for ground vehicles. Hydrocars probably—another energy saving on Aelvor’s part. As it began to rain more heavily Thorn pulled up the hood of his envirosuit. The streets were cobbled—very retro and possibly a draw for runcible tourists. Following the course he had memorized, Thorn took a left, a right, then came out into an open arcade around a wide pool, at the centre of which a fountain gushed. Peering into the pool he observed glittering rainbow weed between whose strands swam shoals of small blue flatfish. The shopfronts here possessed those same bulbous chainglass bay windows. A man with a wide fedora and a leashed Dobermann strode past. He raised his hat to Thorn and smiled.
As the dog walker disappeared into a side street, Thorn finally reached his aircar: a replica mini AGC parked on the cobbles. Detecting his presence, the car popped open its door, and he strode over to duck inside. The cramped vehicle smelt of fish. When he first obtained it he had wondered if so small a vehicle was a result of Aelvor’s energy savings or just spite. Now, after seeing more of this town, he thought otherwise. The haiman seemed to have a complete disregard for standardization, as demonstrated by his lack of ergonomic town planning. Thorn rather liked the result.
The mini took off with a lurch and was soon cruising a hundred yards above even the highest buildings. Thorn floored the accelerator and it took off on two fusion burners. To his left the combined runcible facility and spaceport looked like some industrial complex close to swamping an ancient town—yet they had been established before the town. Below, once the car passed beyond the final buildings, rose grassy and rocky mountainsides scattered with gnarled trees. Over the peak of this mountain, the terrain dropped away to a river valley. Beyond that lay a forest canopy.
‘He likes oaks, does Aelvor,’ Thorn observed.
‘Evidently,’ came Jack’s reply.
‘Is Scar linked into com?’
‘He is—voice connect.’
That meant Thorn need only first speak the dracoman’s name and the comlink would open to him. ‘Scar, what’s your situation?’
‘Wet,’ came the dracoman’s brief reply.
‘A little more detail would be helpful.’
‘We have surrounded the village and are now allowing no one to enter or leave. One resident has spotted us and shown signs of emotional disturbance.’
‘Okay, just hold your perimeter there.’ He paused. ‘Jack, how does Aelvor know her location?’
‘Through a locator implant she received during her adjustment,’ Jack replied. ‘Now available through your palm-com.’
Thorn peered at the device open on the seat beside him. It showed the map he was currently referring to, with dots on it to indicate his car and Oakwood. He tapped the second dot with his fingertip. A frame enclosed it, expanding to fill the screen with a map of the small village and the precise location of Jane von Hellsdorf within it. Soon he was flying above a gravel road, along which trundled a large auto harvester loaded with oak trunks. The next moment he planed over the village itself: a small conglomeration of timber-built chalets. As he landed on its central green, Thorn scanned around for a moment before picking up the palm-com. He turned the device until the map positionally aligned, then peered through a side window at a chalet located on the village edge.
‘Scar, close in your perimeter now and bring yourself and eight of your boys in. You have the target?’ he asked.
‘I have the target.’
‘We want her alive, Scar—that’s paramount—so just use stunners, and only if necessary.’
He reached behind to take up a short pulse-rifle, then stepped outside the vehicle. The weapon he held fired pulses of ionized gas and possessed a sliding scale, so could deliver anything from a mild shock to a smouldering hole. He chose the knockout setting, at its lowest level, preferring not to use the weapon at all. When he next looked up, he could see dracomen moving in through the drizzle.
‘Scar, I’ll take the front door.’
Scar merely showed his teeth, then he and the other dracomen moved in around the chalet.
As he reached the door, Thorn paused for a moment, about to reset his weapon to blow out the lock. Then he grimaced to himself and tried the handle. Swiftly opening the door he stepped inside and quickly to one side, levelling his rifle at the one figure visible. But Jane von Hellsdorf wasn’t going to put up a fight. She sat in an oak rocking-chair, drooling and rolling her eyes. Thorn wondered if the crappy Sensic aug fitted on the side of her head had left anything inside worth salvaging.
Chaline felt tired after a long shift spent on running runcible alignment checks. Having stripped off her overalls when the alert came through her gridlink, she quickly pulled them back on. She had begun making queries through her link just as Villaeus burst the door open.
‘Come on,’ he gestured.
‘Graham said something about intruders. What—?’
‘No time,’ the Sparkind trooper interrupted. ‘We go now.’
Chaline instinctively glanced around at her belongings, but they were only material things—the most important stuff she stored in her gridlink. And if the likes of Villaeus said, ‘No time,’ he meant it.
As she stepped through the door, he caught her arm and dragged her to one side, behind the cover of two other troopers — Judith and Smith—who were staring down the sights of their pulse-rifles towards the end of the corridor. Chaline noted that they also carried proton weapons slung at their sides, ready to be snatched up. Their initial choice of pulse-rifles was obviously to prevent inflicting too much damage, since the base was merely an inflated dome layered with resin-bonded regolith, and all the interior walls consisted of expanded plasgel which, though enough to block sound and create the illusion of privacy, would hardly stop a determined punch.
‘Back to the chamber.’ Villaeus gave her a shove. ‘U-space signatures all over the base—we’ve got company.’
Chaline hesitantly began moving, glancing nervously behind as the three Sparkind kept up with her. Then she heard pulse-rifle fire, yells echoing and a tearing sound. At that moment Villaeus obviously received directions over com, as he turned suddenly to face down the corridor. Chaline tuned in on the military frequency of Sparkind augs. She could not broadcast that way, but she could listen.
SK5: Confirmed hostile — two civs down in North Section.
SK1: Recoverable?
SK12: In a bucket maybe.
SK11: PRs kill ineffective, but do delay the fuckers, going over to PF.
SK1: Contact, hundred yards, three o’clock on corridor’s twelve.
SK1 was Villaeus himself. Chaline picked up her pace, admiring the way the three others kept themselves focused down the sights of their weapons while moving smoothly backwards. There came a whooshing roar she recognized as a proton weapon firing. A subprogram in her gridlink offered up the news that PR stood for pulse-rifle and PF for proton fire—a more correct definition than the old, and now dying-out, misnomer ‘APW, since these weapons fired field-accelerated protons not ‘antiphotons’.