Resolution (83 page)

They descended in darkness, rappelling down the shaft. Their harnesses were attached to the ropes via squeeze-beeners - intricate carabiners fitted with triggers - which slid freely when gripped with medium strength, but locked when released or squeezed hard in panic.

Tom descended in the pitch-black shaft.

Neither he nor the clone-warriors carried smart tech: no corneal smart-gel to see into infra-red; no smartropes to lower them under control. The chameleoflage sheets were minimal tech, now buried beneath twenty centimetres of clay upon the surface.

Something hard struck Tom’s ankle, a rocky protrusion, and he bit back an exclamation -
bifurcatin’ Chaos!
- as he spun away from the shaft wall, dangled helplessly in darkness -
heisenberging harness -
straps digging into his crotch -
who the Fate designed this? -
before taking control once more.

Tom continued the descent, with his ankle sending pain signals: a little distress beacon all of his own.

They reached a balcony inset against the shaft wall. Bright light shone from a tunnel of the Quatemium Stratum, and voices drifted from it. Tom and the clone-warriors hung in place.

Come on. Go talk somewhere else.

Minutes were sliding away and soon the webbed support up on the surface would tear apart under acid attack and the ropes would come snaking down.

Come on ...

Then the voices faded and the nearest clone-warrior slithered over the stone parapet and dropped to a low crouch. After ten seconds he gestured, and the next warrior swung in a pendulum action until he could reach balcony’s side and grab hold. As the second man went over the parapet, the third was beginning his own swing.

Then the next, and the next.

As the eleventh man hooked onto the balcony, Tom got ready. Releasing the squeeze-beener, he trusted to the harness and lock as he ran
away
from the balcony then back, swinging back and forth in increasing arcs until he could hook on with his one hand.

Ankestion Raglok hauled Tom over the parapet. Tom rolled aside just seconds before the next man grabbed hold and clambered onto the balcony. One more to come.

The last man fell.

It was two minutes early, but a severed rope tumbled past, and Ankestion reacted fast, throwing out his hand to grasp the last warrior. For a second Tom thought they were going to make it, but then the remainder of the acid vials must have released up above as the other ropes fell and the warrior plummeted from sight.

Tom leaned over the parapet. Below him, the falling clone-warrior flung his hand out towards a small ledge on the shaft wall -
hook it, come on -
making contact, but torque spun his body, bouncing him off -
no -
and then he was done for.

The clone-warrior fell in silence.

Fate.

A
yell would alert the Enemy, but the man kept his discipline even as he tumbled into darkness, shrank to a spot of grey against black, and was gone.

~ * ~

50

NULAPEIRON AD 3426

In occupied territory,
read the Academy’s Infiltration Manual,
assume the enemy’s appearance.
Like all good military manuals, its precepts were simple enough to work under extreme stress, and were best learned in dangerous conditions, with adrenaline.

Tom and the twelve remaining clone-warriors crouched in hiding places high up in a natural cavern. The cavern was unaltered by humankind, save for a small decorative fountain off to one side, where water tinkled from copper nozzles beneath a stone dragon’s wings.

There were no locals in sight.

Initial rendezvous,
the manual warned,
is fraught with danger.

Finally, two warriors lowered themselves from their positions. It took ten minutes for them to examine the environs and satisfy themselves that no booby traps or alarms lay in wait. Still, the Enemy could have left devices too small to be detected without sophisticated tech: exactly the kind of hardware that infiltrating warriors could not carry.

Come on ...

Then the two warriors slid back a panel in the fountain’s side, and hauled four green sacks of supplies out of the cache. One of Trevalkin’s agents-in-place had readied the cache; so far, everything was in order.

The warriors descended in twos and threes to shuck off their jumpsuits, pull civilian clothing from the protective sacks, and tug the garments on. They used simple theatrical make-up - no smartmasks here - to turn their purple skins to ebony. Contact lenses disguised their eyes. With their soft caps and tunics of brown or grey, they looked like typical freemen-artisans of Strehling Suhltone. Their features were almost identical, but that was no problem: they would not travel as a group.

Tom folded up the discarded jumpsuits, wrapped them in the green sacks, and secreted them inside the fountain. He sealed the panel up; it looked untouched.

The clone-warriors performed a final check on each other’s appearance. Graphite needles protruded from one warrior’s brow; a clone-brother adjusted the glued-on false hair. Then they stared at each other, looking for signs of dismay or overwhelming stress, and nodded: their minds were also in order.

‘All right,’ said Ankestion Raglok. ‘Chain-sequence rdvs, overlapping contacts. First objective is the dead-letter drop in Horstmann Pentangle. Likardion, you’ll make the pick-up. Tom’ - he nodded: no-one would use ranks until the operation was over - ‘and I will cover you. Everyone else ... You’ll be nowhere in sight, until rendezvous gamma. Understood?’

There were nods all round.

Then Ankestion Raglok surprised Tom by giving a farewell and benediction whose wording came straight from LudusVitae, from those who had plotted revolution:

‘Go in freedom, my brothers.’

Tom walked with Ankestion Raglok, while the others faded into side-corridors to make their separate ways through the beleaguered realm.

At first, Tom and Ankestion were in square-edged residential tunnels that bore all the marks of armed resistance: scarred ceilings and broken pillars; tunnels where the air tasted of soot. They passed through dead zones, chests tightening, as the charred remains of ceiling fluorofungus struggled to replenish the atmosphere. In communal squares people were waiting in food queues, or going about their listless business with drawn faces and sunken eyes. No children laughed.

After a while, they reached clean, unbroken boulevards, with the architecture peculiar to this sector: low, almost oppressive blue-grey ceilings covered with angular knotwork, yet stretching wide. Rows of square pillars stretching out on every side. Among them, people walked, looking subdued.

‘This way.’ Ankestion subtly changed direction.

‘What... ?’ Then Tom noticed the sentries taking up position. ‘I’m with you.’

Militiamen were forming a checkpoint, blocking off the aisle along which Ankestion’s clone-brother Likardion had been headed. Tom hoped Likardion was far ahead, out of the troopers’ sight.

They followed a convoluted route to Horstmann Pentangle, before coming out into the busy plaza. Most of the crowd were civilian, but here and there military officers walked with purposeful strides, or sat drinking in front of daistral houses. (It was the prettiest servitrices who brought food and drink to the most senior officers, Tom noted.)

Head down, Tom pretended not to notice the flat-faced woman who scanned the crowd from behind a café membrane window, or the three nondescript men bracketing the main exit tunnel. As pedestrians passed the window, the woman made a subtle gesture.

And then, as the people continued walking, one of them, a man with foppish hair, suddenly jerked upright as he sensed danger, yet disbelieved his own perceptions, for he did not run in those few seconds when he had the chance.

Then there was a short scuffle which would have gone unnoticed in any realm, never mind one whose subjects had little incentive to pay attention to the dark things happening around them. Within seconds, the three agents - or policemen - had dragged their victim through a membrane wall and were gone.

It was so swift that—

Something brushed against Tom’s hand.

Danger.

But the person walking past him was Likardion, and the hard object clutched in Tom’s fist must be whatever Likardion had retrieved from the dead-letter drop. Tom watched for the woman in the window, to see if she had spotted Likardion, but she had already turned away: she had her target for today.