The metals unit and its surrounding fence slept in the unchanging pattern of light and shadow. Beyond its front gates and the gatehouse, the concrete surface of the square graded back into the darker shadow of the building, behind a corner of which they stood.
Hal felt a loosening of the muscles of his shoulders and the coolness of the night air being pulled deep into his lungs; and recognized the adaptations of the body to the expectation of possible conflict. A calmness and a detachment seemed, for the first time, to have come over him from the same source. He looked about for Jason, caught the eye of the smaller man, and led the way out into the square. Talking in low voices, apparently immersed in their conversation, the two of them started across the square on a slant that would take them past the front of the static-charged fence with its gate and gatehouse, guarding the unit.
As they moved down alongside the fence past the gatehouse, Hal was just able to make out through one of its windows the peaked cap of the single civilian guard seated within at his desk. Hal slowed his step, Jason slowed with him, and eventually they came to a halt just outside the gates themselves, apparently deep in conversation.
They talked on, their voices so low that their words would not have been understandable unless a listener was standing almost within arm's length of them. They stood, centimeters from the fence with its static charge that would be released at any contact to stun, if not kill, whoever had touched the metal of the fence. Time went on. After a while, the door to the guardhouse opened and the guard stuck his head out.
"You two out there!" he called. "You can't stand there. Move on!"
Hal and Jason ignored him.
"Did you hear me? Move on!"
They continued to ignore him.
Boots thumping loudly on the three steps down from the gatehouse door to the concrete of the square, the guard came out. The door slammed loudly behind him. He came up to the fence, careless about touching his side of it; for any touch from within deactivated the mechanism producing the static charge.
"Did you hear me?" His voice came loudly at them through the wide openings in the wire mesh, from less than an arm's length away. "Both of you - move on before I call Militia HQ to come pick you up for disturbance!"
Still they acted as if he was not there. He stepped right up against the fence, grabbed the wire and shouted at them; and as he did so, they stepped away, back along it on their side.
"What's going on here - " the guard began.
He did not finish. There was a distant, twanging noise, a hum in the air, and a second later a crossbow bolt with a blunt and padded head flickered into the lights to strike the side of the guard's head with the impact of a blackjack. The man slumped against the fence and began to sag down it toward the concrete; and, reaching swiftly through a couple of the wide mesh spaces, Hal caught and held him, upright but unconscious, against the fence.
With the fence registering an upright and still-living body pressed against its inner surface, its static charge was quiescent. Reaching through it, past Hal's straining shoulder-muscles, Jason unclipped the picture-crowned identity badge of the guard from the left pocket of his uniform jacket, and carried it over to the sensor plate in the right-hand gatepost. He pressed the face of the badge against the plate. There was a slight pause and then, recognizing the badge, the gates swung smoothly and quietly open.
Jason dodged through and put his hand against the interior control plate on the back of the same gatepost. He held it there and the gates stayed open. Hal let go of the guard, who slid down to lie still at the foot of the fence.
Jason went swiftly to stand at one side of the closed doors of the building, drawing a handgun from under his shirt as he did so. Hal came around to pick up the guard, take him into the gatehouse and immobilize him there with tape and a gag. The other ten Command members flooded smoothly across the square and through the open gate of the fence - which the last of them closed behind him.
Hal came out of the gatehouse, carrying the sidearm from the leg holster of the once more conscious, but trussed and now-undressed, guard. He handed the clothes to the member of the Command they seemed most likely to fit and the man who had taken them put them on, pulling the cap low over his eyes. Tilting his head down to pull his face back into the deep shadow below the visor of the uniform hat, the spurious guard stood directly before the sensor plate to the right of the doors blocking out its view of anything else and pressed the doorcall button.
There was a second's wait.
"Jarvy?" said a voice from a speaker panel above the plate.
The uniformed member grunted wordlessly, still holding his head down.
"What?" demanded the speaker panel.
The spurious guard grunted again.
"I can't hear you, Jarvy - what is it?"
The member said nothing, still looking down with his face in shadow.
"Just a minute," said the speaker panel. "There's something wrong with the voice pickup out there - "
The two doors swung open in neat mechanical unison. Framed in the white glare of illumination from the interior of the metals unit stood another guard, peering out into the darkness.
"Jarvy, what - " he began; and then he went down, silenced by hands on his mouth and throat even as he fell under the unified rush of several bodies.
"Where's the metals room?" Jason asked Hal, soft-voiced.
"Straight back," answered Hal, an image of the plan of the unit's interior which Rukh had shown him clear in his memory. He pointed along the hand-truck-wide corridor they had just entered. "But the guard-office's to the right. You'd better wait until we clear that."
Jason nodded and fell back. Hal, with two other men and three women of the Command, all armed now with handguns produced from within their clothing, went swiftly and quietly ahead down the corridor and burst in through the first door to their right, which was standing ajar. But inside there was only a single other guard, sitting on a cot at one end of a small room filled with surveillance screens, a power rifle on his knees.
At the sight of them he stared - grasped the rifle as if he would swing it up into firing position, then dropped it as if it had burned his fingers. Going forward before the protection of the handguns those behind him held levelled on the man, Hal picked up the power rifle and found it, not broken open for cleaning as he had expected, but loaded and ready to use.
"What were you going to do with it?" Hal asked the guard.
"Nothing…" The guard stared up at him, hopelessly, with frightened eyes.
"How many other people on duty here, now?" Hal loomed over him.
"Just Ham - just Ham and me, and Jarvy on the gate!" said the guard. He was white-faced and shock was losing out to fear.
"How do you unlock the metals room?"
"We can't," said the guard. "Really - we can't. They don't let us. It's a time lock on the door."
Hal looked down at him through a long moment of silence.
"I'm going to ask you again," he said. "This time, forget what they told you to say. How do you open the metals room door?"