A short dogleg in this direction, and then another turn, brought him to a final cross corridor busy with men in black uniforms hurrying back and forth between doorways. These glanced at him puzzledly as he walked among them; but no one stopped him until he came at last to an open doorway on his left, looked in, and saw a large room with a long, fully-occupied conference table and blackout curtains over tall windows in a far wall. Two Militiamen privates with cone rifles stood guard, one on each side of the entrance; and when he turned to enter, they stepped to bar his way, the rifles snapping up to cover him.
"Who're you - " began one of them.
Hal struck out right and left at both men. The butt of a power rifle crashed into the forehead of one, the barrel end across the throat of the other, and they dropped. Hal stepped inside, closing the door behind him.
Those at the conference table within were already on their feet. Still moving swiftly, he saw clearly what his first glance through the doorway had made him suspect, that the uniforms of all of them there showed officer's rank.
Two reached for holstered pistols at their belts; and the rifles in his hands coughed. They fell; and the other officers stood staring. A hand turned the doorknob from the corridor, outside.
"Stay out!" shouted the officer at the far end of the table.
"Where's Amyth Barbage?" Hal asked - for the man he had come to find was nowhere in the room. He continued to move as he spoke around the walls of the room, so that he could cover with his weapons not only those at the table but the closed door through which he had just come.
No one answered. Still moving, and approaching the table, Hal swung the muzzle of the rifle in his left fist to center on the senior officer present, a squarely-built major in his fifties, at the end of the table farthest from the door, under the curtains of one of the windows.
"He's not here - " said the Major.
"Where?" demanded Hal.
The Major's face had been pale. Now the color came back.
"No one here knows," he said, harshly. "If anyone could tell you, even, it'd be me - and I can't."
"But he's in the Center," said Hal; for Athalia's people had reported Barbage returning to the Center some hours past, and that he had not gone out again.
"Satan take you!" said the Major. "Do you think I'd tell you if I knew?"
But to Hal's hypersensitive hearing in this moment, there was a note of triumph in the officer's voice that convinced him not only that the other was lying and knew where Barbage was, but that something had been achieved by the other since Hal had entered the room.
The words of the second to last observer on the cable line came back to Hal, telling him that the monitoring equipment in the kitchen courtyard had called with the suspicion that an earlier party had been sent from the front of the building to deal with the team sent out to rescue Rukh. The Major's hands were in open sight on the tabletop, but he was standing with the middle of his body pressed against the table-edge before him. Hal moved swiftly forward and knocked the man backward. Cut at an angle of forty-five degrees into the table's edge and covered until now by the bottom edge of the Major's uniform jacket was a communications panel as long as Hal's hand, but hardly wider than a ruler.
The door to the room smashed open and armed Militiamen erupted inward.
"Take him now!" The Major's order came out more scream than shout. Around the table, the officers who had not yet drawn their sidearms were reaching for them.
Malachi Nasuno, or anyone who had ever had Dorsai training, could have pointed out their error. Their very numbers were the cause out of which their failure could be certainly predicted. Moving thinkingly and surely around the table, using the bodies of those who would kill or capture him as shields, Hal disabled or threw into the fire of the weapons aimed at him all those with whom he came in contact. Finally, as the room began to be empty of people still on their feet, panic took those of the Militia who were still unharmed; and there was a sudden, general rush for the still-open door.
Hal found himself standing alone, the passage beyond the open doorway empty.
But, caught still in the coldness that held him, he was aware that the victory was a transient one; and that the way out the still-open door was no safe escape route for him. Turning, he pointed his power pistol at one curtained window and blew out both curtain and window. The thick but ragged edge of the window material showed through the tatters of the curtain. It had been heavy sandwich glass, which would have frustrated even the energy of a power pistol at any greater distance than the point blank range at which he had used the one he held.
He knew from the plan in his memory that the window from which he was escaping was near one end of the building's front, closest to that same side which, further back, held the courtyard and the kitchen entrance. He dropped onto concrete sidewalk, behind the line of Militia cars parked along the front curb of the street. Having landed, he stayed flat on his belly at the foot of the front wall of the Center; and had this sensible decision rewarded by hearing the whistle and pock of impacts on the wall above him, of cones fired by the resistance people in buildings across the street.
Undoubtedly, among those rounded up to maintain a steady fire on the Center's front, there were responsible individuals who would realize that someone not in Militia uniform, exiting out a smashed window of the building, was hardly likely to be an enemy. But they would be too few and too scattered to get that understanding passed quickly to all the excited amateurs with weapons surrounding them.
The cone rifle firing continued - but, as he had foreseen, the line of vehicles parked parallel to the curb shielded him from the direct view of the resistance people, and from any shots that came close. While his position up against the base of the wall, under the narrow outcropping of the decorative stone window ledge over which he had just come, protected him from observation and fire from above the building. Almost immediately, he began to wriggle along the base of the wall toward the corner of the building, only a few scant meters from him.
He reached it and turned the corner. Rising to his feet he ran down the empty, lamplit street toward the lights of the kitchen courtyard.
There was a silence about the courtyard as he got closer that made him slow his steps and begin to move more quietly, himself. There had not been time for the rest of the team to get loaded into the trucks and away, yet. He went swiftly but softly until he came to the beginning of the courtyard wall. Ignoring the gate, he found finger-cracks enough where the building wall joined that of the courtyard, climbed to the top of the wall and dropped down inside.
The trucks were still there, close enough to him so that they blocked his view of most of the rest of the courtyard. He drew the power pistol and went with it in his hand around the back of the nearest truck… and breathed out with relief.
The team was just now loading, ready to depart. But something - it may have been their first sight of Rukh as she now was - seemed to have impressed them to a degree he himself had not been able to, earlier. They were moving as silently as they could, and communicating by hand signals wherever possible.
Rukh was just now being brought to the back of the nearer truck. He holstered his gun and stepped forward into the midst of them. Ignoring the astonishment of the others, to whom he must have seemed to have appeared out of empty air, he walked to the side of the stretcher on which they carried her.