Doc Sidhe (36 page)

Fergus fired at Alastair's heart. More redness erupted from the downed man's stomach.

Alastair slumped to the side and his eyes closed.

"Not bad," the tall man told Fergus. He took the gun out of Fergus' hand. "Let's go."

Fergus stood there and shook. Idiot. He'd gotten the order wrong.

Clouds gathered before dawn and stayed to block the sun. Doc opened the hangar landing door to look up at them through his good eye.

Traces of green Gift-energy shot through them like lightning. He closed the landing door.

Alastair, beside him, asked, "Was I correct?"

"With your depressing regularity, yes. It's a summoning. I don't know what harm it can do, though. The building is shielded from lightning strikes."

Alastair brought out his pocket watch and consulted it. "I hope they don't wait too long. My stomach's a bit twitchy."

"It's simply sore. Wearing the vest just makes being shot akin to being hit with a sledgehammer. Plus the explosives you had packed on it—what did Harris call them? Squibs."

"Next time, you get to be shot."

By noon, two bells, the sky was almost as black as night. The clouds hung heavy with rain. But not one drop fell on Neckerdam.

Doc's windowless communications center was one floor up from the laboratories. A big room, it was nonetheless cramped with talk-boxes of every variety, shelves of partially disassembled electrical devices, tables, chairs, coils of copper wire. It smelled to Gaby of dust and ozone.

Gaby and Alastair sat side by side at the main table. She stared into her talk-box while he indifferently watched a panel of unlit lightbulbs.

"It would've been nice to have a few more days," he said.

"Why?"

"We'd have to keep the deception up. Announce my death in the notices. I want to know who'd show up for my funeral."

"Oh, you'd just want to pop out of your casket and scare everyone. How's your chest?"

"Not bad. And I think I'm trimmer for hauling that monster of a vest around all those hours."

The talk-box beeped, signal of an incoming call. Gaby frowned; the pitch of the beep said that it had not come through the Monarch Building switchboard, but was a direct call to one of the Foundation's private numbers. She switched over to it.

A woman she vaguely recognized—middle-aged, rather faded-looking, friendly. "Goodlady Donohue?"

"Yes?"

"Grace. It's Essyllt Tathlumwright."

"Oh, yes. From the Beldon Hall of Records." Gaby looked aside at Alastair. She wished he weren't here to take this call, but she was on duty; she shouldn't leave to take it on another talk-box. "What can I do for you?"

"Quite the reverse. I found the information you were looking for. All very public, just not where I expected it."

"Wonderful." Gaby dug out her notebook, ignored Alastair's puzzled glance. "Please, go ahead."

"Desmond MaqqRee, born One Sixteen M.X.R. Father unknown, mother Rowena Redcliff. Wed Dierdriu Legarra One Forty-Five M.X.R. They had a—"

"Father
unknown
?" Gaby tensed. She'd half-expected that answer but had hoped to be wrong.

"Well . . . technically, yes. Practically speaking, no."

"What does that mean?"

"I did a little reading on Rowena Redcliff. She was the mistress of Prince Correus, Queen Maeve's husband and consort. And `MaqqRee' is a dialectal variant of High Cretanis; it means `son of the king.' I think Goodsir MaqqRee's paternity is probably well established . . . in the court of Cretanis, at any rate."

"You mean he's the son of this Correus." She relaxed.

"Yes. As far as anyone can tell, Goodlady Redcliff remained true to the prince until her death. But it's not uncommon to cut down on the numbers of eligible claimants to a throne by not recognizing the issue of affairs.

"Where was I? Oh, yes, education. Took his doctorate in engineering in One Thirty-Eight M.X.R." She looked apologetic. "That's all I have for now. But it gives us a place to start."

Gaby lay her pencil down. "It certainly does. I really appreciate it, uh, Goodlady Tathlumwright."

"Essyllt."

"Gaby. Thanks a lot. I'm kind of in the middle of things right now, but I'll call back soon."

The older woman smiled and faded from the screen.

Gaby turned and winced when she saw Alastair's disapproving expression.

"Checking up on Doc?"

"Well . . . Yes. I've been trying to figure out this whole Doc-Duncan thing. I'd been wondering around if Doc were maybe Duncan's son." She saw Alastair's guarded look and felt a little satisfaction. "You wondered about that, too, didn't you?"

"Once or twice."

"I mean, it would help explain why their paths seemed to keep crossing. Why Doc claims some sort of personal responsibility for Duncan. But if Doc's father was the King of Cretanis—"

"Prince Consort. Yes, that probably rules your theory out. But not necessarily. We'd have to look into Goodlady Redcliff's history."

"Did you know any of what she was telling me?"

"No, Doc's always been close-mouthed about this sort of thing. I knew that he didn't get along with Maeve the Tenth, but not why. This would explain it, if she considered him a pretender to the throne, a threat to her children. His half-brothers and half-sisters, that is." Alastair shut up as a green bulb lit on the console. He glanced at the handwritten tag beneath it. "Garage. King's Road entrance."

Gaby physically dialed her talk-box to the viewer that watched the garage. The screen remained full of static. "That's odd." She dialed it a notch further. A ceiling-corner view of the garage swam into focus.

A new panel truck was parked in the mechanic's bay. Men poured out of it—fairworlders, plus a couple of men large enough to be grimworlders. Most carried grim world assault rifles and bags of gear; the fairworlders all wore gloves. Fergus Bootblack, not armed, was the last man out and immediately moved over to the elevator door.

Gaby dialed up to the hangar, where Doc had said he and Alastair would be for a chime or two. The rotorkite swam into view. "Doc."

He wasn't visible, but she heard his voice: "I'm here, Gaby."

"They've arrived. In the garage. I count fourteen of them. Fergus is with them. They seem to have screwed up the old camera, I mean viewer, but they missed the new one you put in."

"I'm coming down. Alert the others."

She dialed the room up eighty-nine and informed Lieutenant Athelstane.

Then Harris, in the laboratory. She felt a stab of worry as she repeated her message to him, and added, "Don't you
dare
get hurt."

"I promise."

"I mean it. I love you."

"I love you." He forced a smile for her.

She switched off and returned the view to the garage. The men were clustered around the elevator.

Alastair said, "If Fergus is as good as he always thought he was, getting around the blocks on the elevator should pose no—ah." On a different board, another green light, near the top of a long column of them, blinked off; the one beneath it immediately blinked on. The glow descended, mirroring the progress of the elevator. "There it goes."

"Alastair, why do you carry an autogun?" She switched to the view of the elevator interior. It showed nothing but empty car, floors gliding by outside the cage.

"To shoot people."

"I mean, doesn't that get in the way of the Hippocratic Oath? Or whatever you have on the fair world?" She began switching back and forth between garage and elevator views.

"You mean the Oath of Diancecht? Not technically." He shrugged. "I can't intentionally harm my patients. But the sort of men I point the gun at can't even
be
my patients until I shoot them. Not so?"

"Alastair, you're weird."

The elevator glided to a stop in the garage. The men waited as Fergus entered. Gaby watched as Fergus reached up for the elevator viewer. After a moment, that view winked out. She returned to the garage view and saw the men board the elevator car.

Gaby switched the set over to the laboratory view and took another look at Harris. "I want to listen," she told Alastair. "I have to go in."

"Gods' luck to you. I'm going to join Doc in the stairwell." He rose.

She closed her eyes and opened them almost immediately. Gabrielle's face stared solemnly back at her from the mirror.

She opened an eye beyond it and looked down on the hallway outside the laboratories. She saw the elevator rise into view of her camera and stop. The men inside drew open the cage and spilled out. Their faces were now covered in gear that gave them an insectile look.

Gaby hissed and opened another eye. The laboratory swam into view. Harris was there. "Harris, they're here—"

"Right. Masks on, everybody. Thanks, Gaby—"

"Harris, they've got gas masks, too."

"Shit!" He turned to look out of frame. "Welthy, forget the gas bomb. Everybody, get behind the barricades." Gaby saw him pull the bulky tan-colored mask and breathing unit into place.

It wrenched her to do it, but Gaby left him and opened another eye. Lieutenant Athelstane was already looking at her. "They're there," she told him.

She didn't wait for a reply. She knew his job as well as her own; he was to lead his men in a charge up the stairs to hit the laboratory intruders from behind while Doc led the other pincer above.

She reopened the laboratory eye. Or, rather, she tried to; but it wouldn't open. And the eye felt strange—not absent, as a destroyed talk-box would feel, but as though it were resisting her.

The men with Fergus followed him out of the elevator.

"Main laboratory," Fergus said. His voice wasn't muffled by a grimworld gas mask; they hadn't given him one. He nodded toward two of the doors. "At this hour, they'll probably be there. That's where I saw the new grimworlders and the devices Doc was building to shield them." He gestured toward another door, farther down the hall. "Valence laboratory. Doc might be there instead."

Costigan, the taller of the grimworlders, waved his men into place. They flanked the three doors, ready with the miraculous rifles that shot explosives like mortars and bullets like autoguns. Costigan pulled out one of the tracer devices and turned it on. "That's a big signal," he said. "They're in there, all right." He raised his hand, a `stand by' signal for his men.

Fergus glanced at Dominguez, his guard. The dusky grimworlder's eyes narrowed. Dominguez said, "Almost over, little boy. Behave yourself and I don't get to kill you."

Costigan shouted "Go go go!" His men kicked the doors open, threw in the special grenades.

Fergus heard noises like big cans crumpling and saw smoke spreading through the laboratory. Costigan's men charged in, firing.

The resistance abruptly vanished and Gaby opened the eye into the laboratory.

She saw the smoke canisters fly into the lab and detonate. Harris and the others were already behind the reinforced barricades Doc had set up behind several of the tables. Smoke obscured Gaby's vision as men poured into the room, shooting as they came. She saw return fire erupt from behind the barricades.

The scene riveted her. She couldn't afford that. She opened another eye. The stairwell. Doc, Ish, and Noriko were there; incongruously, Ish was the one of the three carrying an autogun. "Doc, they're in the lab."

"We're on our way."

Gaby switched away from him. She flickered as fast as she could among all the viewers of Doc's system, channel-surfing. Smoke, rotorkite, two garage views, Athelstane's men racing up the stairs, elevator interior, ropes swinging by in the cloud-dark skies outside the Monarch Building—

She froze in sudden confusion. Something was very wrong.

Harris fired a long burst into the smoke. His Klapper autogun seized up. Alastair had warned him that the complex weapons were prone to do that. He cursed and yanked the bolt back. A deformed brass casing resisted him, then popped free of the chamber. He pulled the bolt the rest of the way back and released it, racking another cartridge into place, then raised the gun and fired again, blindly. No friends were set up ahead of him—he could only hit enemies.

Gunfire hit the front of his table. He crouched down and waited for the lethal rain to end.

The fear was there again, but it didn't cripple or slow him. It no longer embarrassed him.

He heard a sudden whirring and felt the air pressure change. Welthy had activated the air-blowers from her position.

There was a sudden crackle of electricity. Harris faintly heard something—bootheels, he thought—banging the wood floor. He smiled. One of the intruders had to have charged up to a table in the first row and touched it . . . and been felled by the electrical current coursing through it. The outermost of the traps Doc had arranged for the lab.

Gaby flicked back to the last of the confusing views. Ropes dangling outside one of the ledge cameras. The south—she could tell by the buildings in the distance. The same facing as the laboratory.

She switched to the lab view. It was all smoke and gunfire. She shouted Harris' name but there was no answer.

Stairwell views. Nobody was visible in the east; Athelstane's force must be beyond the viewer, perhaps already to the doors leading into the hallway. But in the west view she saw Ixyail and then Alastair flit by and out of frame. "Alastair!"

She waited a long, breathless moment, then Alastair came back into view. "Gaby, there's no time—"

"Tell Doc there are ropes outside the building. From above. Something's going on out there."

Alastair turned. Doc came back into view. "I hear you," he said. "Tell Athelstane he's on his own. We're going back up to the hangar. We'll go up on the roof to have a look."

She switched back to the east stairwell—or tried to. The eye there stubbornly resisted her. Why?

Back to the elevator interior, then the main garage view. She'd seen Fergus disable both cameras. Now they worked again. Why?

Either they fixed themselves, not likely, or Duncan had arranged for them to come back on. Meaning that he needed them.

He had to be using them. Maybe just the way Gaby was. Exposed to the grim world's uses of communications gear and surveillance equipment, Duncan must have figured out how to do artificially what she did naturally. That probably accounted for the viewers she couldn't peer through; he had to be using them just then.