Conquistador (86 page)

She still had her pistol; she drew it and moved out cautiously through the parking lot, moving from one car to another. A dead Gate Security Force trooper lay beyond that, where the glass sliding doors she'd passed through so often lay shattered in a sparkle of fragments. Adrienne stooped beside him, closed the staring eyes and took up the G36. It had a C-mag in it, and a glance at the transparent rear face of the magazine showed it was full—a hundred rounds. She slid the sling over her head, in the assault position that put the muzzle forward and left the pistol grip by her right hand. It also made things easier on her injured left.

Adrienne strode forward through the waiting rooms and into the final corridor that led to the personnel check-through station. A man looked up at her as she walked by; he was kneeling by a row of wounded. Then he did a double take and rose, opening his mouth.

She turned and loosed a three-round burst at point-blank range. The medic toppled backward, and the wounded man he fell on moaned weakly. Apart from that everything was vacant until she turned into the Gate chamber itself.

Someone had used an earthmoving machine to sweep a broad lane clear to the rippling silvery surface; a sense of
wrongness
caught at her, this chaos in the place she'd helped keep so orderly. And men were stepping out of the surface, moving in squads—not uniformed, beyond a rough practicality, but all armed. Something stuck its snout through, the muzzle of a vehicle-mounted cannon. Whatever the plot on FirstSide had been, it had worked—probably a lot better than the Commonwealth half.

Everyone in the room was looking at the Gate; there weren't more than a dozen or so men in the whole huge room, which was a sign of how desperately the conspirators' forces were trying to hold their perimeter until this help arrived.

Tsk, tsk, Giovanni—still operating on a shoestring and not leaving a margin for failure!
Of course, the odds of her crashing inside the area the enemy were holding and surviving in shape to walk were pretty astronomical. . . .

Terminals were spotted all around the interior of the Gate chamber. She stepped over to one and punched her thumb down on the pad. The small screen lit, and she felt a wave of relief that almost overrode the pain in her head and hand. They had had to leave the local system up, or the Gate complex's internal power and light wouldn't be functioning.

“Identify,” she said, and looked into the retina scanner. Her voice might be off enough not to match the files, but eye and thumb together were enough.

“Identified: Rolfe, Adrienne.”

“Code—” She rattled off a string of letters and numbers; ones known only to the two elder male Rolfes, until a scant few weeks ago.

“Acknowledged. Query: Authority?”

“Milady. Cardinal. State.”

“Acknowledged. Query: Sequence?”

“Override B-1!” Adrienne said, as the man turned toward her. “Override B- 1! Override B-1, Oasis!”

That had been
her
idea—a personal link into the self-destruct sequence that would blow the charges in the floor—and send a wall of high-velocity concrete back through to the FirstSide end of the Gate, smashing her grandfather's original short-wave set beyond hope of repair.

She turned, finger clenching the trigger, two fingers and a thumb of her left hand on the forestock to keep the assault rifle from riding up. Cartridges fountained out of it, and the whole hundred rounds spat out in less than ten seconds.

“Self-destruct sequence initiated,” the computer said in its flat idiot-savant voice. “Five minutes to detonation.”

Then she threw the weapon aside and ran, down the corridor, dodging as bullets chipped tile out of the floor, hurdling a fallen row of waiting-room chairs, out into the night—

Fire, and then peace.

EPILOGUE

“Cigarette?” Lieutenant Mordechai Pearlmutter said. He was a slender beak-nosed swarthy young man of medium height. “Blindfold?”

“Get it over with!” Dimitri Batyushkov said; the only other sound beyond the gulls and the distant sea was the muttered prayers of the black-bearded, black-robed priest off near the entrance.

The adobe courtyard was plain whitewash, but the wall behind him had a row of pockmarks across it at chest height, all new, and some splashes. The Prime drew himself up as the row of Pearlmutter militiamen filed in with their rifles sloped; he had asked only one thing, that he not be bound to the post.

The officer—Batyushkov wearily thought a curse at the unseen sardonic face of the old man who had picked a damned Yid for this!—drew his .45 as he walked back to where the squad would stand; he would administer the coup with the pistol, one final shot behind the ear, if it was necessary. A noncom walked down the row of young men, most of them pale-faced and grim, one or two nervously excited. He took each rifle and loaded it with one cartridge, his back turned to the soldier so that none could see which held the one blank.

“Ready!” the young Pearlmutter collateral said. The weapons came up to the present.

“Aim!” And they went level, all but one or two steady. It would probably be quick.

The air was sweet; he was not afraid, but it was a hard thing to leave a world so beautiful.
Why was I not content with it?
he asked himself. There was no answer.

Giovanni Colletta sat behind his desk, looking at the surveillance screens. The soldiers outside on this bright cool fall day had many shoulder flashes: the Rolfe lion, the Pearlmutter Seal of Solomon, even the Von Traupiz eagle. None wore his . . . and he suspected it would be a long time before the tommy gun appeared on an armed man's shoulder flash.

The door swung open.
Well, I was wrong,
the Colletta thought mordantly.

“Major Mattei,” he said.

The soldier saluted and then bowed. “Sir,” he said. “I have been ordered to bring you the decision of the Chairman.”

“As if I didn't know it,” the Colletta said; he could feel the eyes boring into his back, from the portrait above.

Mattei silently drew the pistol at his side and laid it on the desk before his overlord. “Chairman Rolfe says that he allows this—and the survival of the Colletta domain—as a favor to his old friend, your father.”

Giovanni felt the hot flush of anger on his cheeks. “He would spare my son anyway! There is nothing to tie him to my actions. Why should I make his political life easier?”

Mattei sighed. “Sir, I am afraid that Chairman Emeritus Rolfe predicted that would be your answer.”

Giovanni snorted, turning half away from the man who had commanded the domain's troops. Mattei took up the pistol, and the Colletta had a brief moment of utter surprise as he saw it leveled.

“Which is why he allowed me
two
rounds,” Mattei murmured, looking at the body sprawled back in the rich leather of the chair. Was that a glint of amusement in the painted eyes in the portrait on the wall above?

“Two rounds, so that I could perform this last service for you, sir. And for your House.”

He raised the pistol to his own temple, then shook his head. Better to be safe, even if it was inelegant; if he had a private horror, it was to be a human vegetable hooked to machines. He sat at the feet of the chair—of the man he had followed for so long. Better that he be found so, to make it plain the Colletta had taken his own life, and his faithful retainer had followed him.

The metal of the automatic tasted bitter and oily in his mouth, but not for long.

“Most pleasures fade with age,” John Rolfe said quietly, obviously savoring the smoke of the cigarillo. “One of the few exceptions is power—not least because it enables one to punish one's enemies and reward one's friends.”

Outside the elegant octagonal office, the rains of winter streaked down on the glass of the windows; a fire crackled merrily in the hearth, and a cat curled asleep on the rug before it. There was a hint of the pleasant odor of burning oak mingled with fine tobacco and the scent of a snifter of brandy nearby.

And all ends well,
Tom Christiansen thought, shifting his weight to spare the right leg.
And just how ironic am I being, there?

John Rolfe waved him to a seat. “I insist,” he said, then grinned, a charmingly wicked expression in the ancient seamed face. “Pains in the leg are something I'm thoroughly familiar with. . . . Mr. Christiansen, do you know what my favorite part of a Shakespearian drama always was?”

“No, sir.”

“The end, where the duke or prince comes out and plays deus ex machina.”

Adrienne chuckled slightly beside Tom on the sofa. “And I'm the raccoon in the background, Grandfather?” she said.

Well, you won't be looking like a raccoon much longer,
Tom thought stoutly. The reconstructive surgery was over, and the bruises that covered most of her face would fade. Her hand stole into his, and he gripped it gently. Her grandfather went on:

“Now . . . Mr. Tully, I assume you and this young woman intend to marry?”

“Yes, sir,” Tully said, taking Sandra Margolin's hand as she sat nervously in her wheelchair; one leg was still in a cast, waiting for the last in a series of ceramic-and-titanium implants to bond with the bone.

“The young heal quickly,” John Rolfe said. “In heart not least. And your marital intentions are very convenient. So much so that I would have had to insist. . . .”

The ancient eagle eyes turned on Salvatore Colletta II: “Young Salvo, we're tying up loose ends right now, and this young lady is—albeit on the wrong side of the blanket—a cousin of yours. I presume you're not going to be tiresome about a DNA test?”

“No, sir,” the Colletta said. “Of course, I will have her enrolled among the collaterals of my House at once.”

Since you're on long-term probation and escaped execution only by virtue of your father's extremely convenient suicide and extremely detailed documentation proving you were entirely in the dark,
Tom thought mordantly.
I am somehow not surprised.

“Just so,” John Rolfe VI nodded. “It will do the Commonwealth good to have that group . . . diversified. And that will make you, Mr. Tully, a member of the Thirty. Hmmm. Of course, you and your bride will also be eligible for an estate of your own in the Colletta domain. I think the Colletta, all things considered, would find the Owens Valley and its attached silver mine a suitable endowment. Especially in view of the long delay in regularizing Ms. Margolin's status.”