You feel like some mischief, Silver-eyes?
I always feel like mischief. I'm like the littlest witch.
That was true enough. The vatch had grown but it was still barely a hand-sized creature. Obviously the thing's mental age was still preteen, even if it could think. The Leewit certainly could, whenever she chose to, and Goth's ability to think was sometimes downright scary.
Mischief's fun! What do you want me to do to them? I'm still little, though. I can't do big stuff yet.
Pausert went over to the store cupboard in the props section. He found some of the luminous virulent yellow-green paint they'd used for the posters a few days earlier. Here. He pointed. Can you put a big splash of this on all of the "not-things"? Maybe on the back of their heads or something.
Sure! Big fun! The little vatch vanished. Pausert went off in hasty search of the others. He still had a few minutes before he was due onstage again, and that would be the last show for the night.
The captain was willing to bet that whatever the Nanites had planned was supposed to happen after the punters had gone . . . one couldn't exactly say "home," but back to their miserable bunks. Both Vezzarn and Hulik had assured him that the sultan did not take kindly to the ISS sticking its nose into his territory, so Pausert had thought them safe enough here. But the Nanite-infected agents apparently ignored the conventional bounds.
He found the Leewit first. Or rather she found him. She'd just come backstage. "We got troubles, Captain," she said quietly. "Vezzarn sent me to tell you. The Petey B's engine room is in a shambles. Old Vezzarn found one of the engineers unconscious, the drive control boxes trashed, and whole lot of other stuff busted."
Someone intended to make sure the Petey B didn't do a hasty retreat, obviously. Pausert winced. "There are also a bunch of them waiting for us at the Venture, and some in the audience. And they're digging at the perimeter struts for some reason. I've got the little vatch tagging them with some of that lime-green luminous paint."
The Leewit grinned. That was the kind of trick she adored.
"See if you can get the others together here," the captain said. "I'm due onstage in a minute. Where's Vezzarn?"
"Reporting the incident to Himbo. He's coming down here next." The littlest witch shivered. The captain gave her brief squeeze. "The show's got to go on. But stay here, backstage."
The curtain call was enthusiastic. But Pausert noticed that the "not things" had already left.
A few minutes later, as the factory workers streamed hastily into the night to get a few hours sleep before returning to work, Pausert came backstage and unobtrusively joined the rest of Venture's crew and the Sedmons.
"I think we need to head for the Thunderbird," said one of the Sedmons. "She's well enough armored and armed to hold off a fairly serious assault."
"We could flee in her too, if need be," said the other Sedmon. "It'd be crowded, but we could manage."
Himbo Petey arrived on the scene then, looking grim. "I need to talk to you about—"
Something exploded.
The lattice pole the captain was leaning against shivered. One of the main lattice legs caved in with the terrible sound of shredding synthasilk; the stage canted sideways, spilling screaming people and terrified animals.
In a flash, Pausert understood why the Nanites had been digging. The entire exercise was designed to cause maximum chaos and send the Venture's crew scurrying for shelter in their ship. The Sedmons were right.
"Come on. To the Thunderbird!" he yelled.
He had to yell. With the destruction of one of her main struts, the old Petey B's structure was under terrific stress. Things were breaking loose, and falling everywhere. Some of the power-cables snapped, plunging the tented area into darkness except for showers of sparks and cascading and exploding lights. And the din produced by the people and animals was even worse than that produced by the inanimate objects.
In a tight-knit bunch, they left the chaos of the dressing rooms and headed out.
The first thing that Pausert saw was that the vatch had exceeded its mandate. The bunch of people shooting at them should not have been able to fire anything at all, since their heads had been doused in luminous lime-green paint. The vatchlet must have raided the Petey B's main store, not just the little props-room cupboard.
But the Nanites, it seemed, didn't need human eyes to see well enough to shoot. A blaster bolt seared above them, hitting another strut, bringing down a large banner.
"They're between us and the Thunderbird," said Hulik, drawing her own elegant little blaster from an outfit that Pausert would have thought couldn't hide a toothpick. She started returning the fire.
Another paint-head tried a flanking shot. His paint-soaked blaster exploded, just as the Leewit gave a shattering whistle. Whether it was the paint or the whistle that caused that was a matter for later academic discussion.
Goth narrowed her eyes and looked intently at a surviving speaker-bank above another group of painted heads. It began, slowly, to totter, as an already off-balance pile will when an extra wedge is teleported under its base. Moments later, tumbling tons of electronic speakers were hurtling down on the painted heads.
Another group found they'd made a mistake with their target. Timblay folded neatly, avoiding the blaster fire with a contortionist's skill, and started shooting back with a Blythe rifle.
"Keep going towards the Thunderbird," said Sedmon. "The other Sedmons are controlling her computer system remotely. They activated blaster tracking. Whatever you do, Hulik, don't fire again."
Blaster tracking meant that the Thunderbird's weapons systems responded with automatic ship-fire to any active weapon in the vicinity. Pausert could only hope that the Petey B's own defenses didn't get manned. He had a feeling there wouldn't be much left of the old showboat if the Thunderbird really cut loose.
A trio of painted heads appeared from behind a tumble of flats. Pul bit one of them as the captain cold-cocked another. A flying paint-pot materialized in the face of the third attacker and did for him.
In the background, the Thunderbird's guns vaporized steel and a Nanite-carrier. The Nanites didn't seem to have realized yet that firing immediately made them a target. It suddenly occurred to Pausert that while the Nanites were clearly able to think, the diffuse form of their intelligence made them relatively slow witted.
They had no sense of macrocosmic scale, clearly enough! The Nanites themselves were micrometers in size, and didn't seem to be able to gauge proportions properly in their human hosts. Mannicholo and Master Himbo came charging through, mounted on pair of fanderbags—and several of the Nanite-carriers raced up to stop them. With the pancake-flat results you'd expect.
The tide had turned. Still, the Nanites kept shooting—and being vaporized almost instantly by the Thunderbird's deadly guns every time they did. They seemed incapable of learning the lesson.
* * *
Within minutes, it was no longer a case of retreating to the Thunderbird. It was a case of mopping up.
But as the sun came up over Yin Bauh district 323, one thing was plain.
When the next shift came off-duty, there would be no show.