Doc Sidhe (37 page)

So it was up to her to stop him.

Time to die.

Fergus lashed out with his elbow and took Dominguez in the throat, under the mask.

Dominguez fell back against the wall. Fergus wrenched the magical rifle out of his hands and shot him with it, a short burst to the face, where his grimworld armor would not protect him. The rifle kicked less than an autogun.

Costigan and the others looked at him in slow-motion surprise.

Fergus held the trigger down and traversed the weapon left to right, firing low, at thighs and knees. Costigan shrieked and fell backwards, his legs ruined. On the floor, he kept yelling as he bled. Another man joined him. Four men left.

Barrels swung in Fergus' direction, so slow, so slow. He traversed the weapon right to left and continued firing. Two more collapsed. Two got behind cover, one behind the stairwell door, one leaping to take cover behind a hallway bench.

The man at the stairway leaned into view and brought his rifle up. Fergus aimed the roaring weapon at him. Bullets took the man in the chest, where the armor protected him, but sheer impact was enough; he fell back anyway.

The magical rifle ran dry. Fergus dropped it. It took forever to fall.

The man behind the bench brought his own weapon up. Fergus spread his arms wide as if to embrace him, as if to welcome the bullets.

Something dark appeared on the gunman's forehead and his head jerked back. His rifle fired a short burst into the ceiling. He fell forward onto the bench.

Someone behind Fergus was shouting, "Hold your fire, it's Fergus." Lieutenant Athelstane, an automatic pistol in hand, moved past Fergus, not glancing at him. He waved men past. They charged forward to flank the lab doors just as Costigan's men had done. "Fergus, are you hit?"

Fergus only understood that his name had been spoken. That no more bullets were coming.

He looked down at himself. There was no blood. He felt a vague sense of disappointment.

He fainted, following his rifle to the floor.

Joseph batted the table. It took no more effort than swatting a fly. More than a manweight of hardwood and lab equipment flew out of his way, leaving nothing between him and the grimworld mercenary.

The man fired at him with another of those hurtful rifles. Joseph felt the bullets tear into him. Enough damage and he knew that he might die.

But they had done nowhere near enough.

He grabbed the barrel and yanked. The man, trying hard to hold on, came off his feet, then fell to his knees as the weapon was wrenched from his grip.

The air was starting to clear. He liked that. Seeing the enemy was much better than groping around blindly for him. He tossed the gun aside.

Joseph picked the man up around the torso. He squeezed—carefully, carefully. The man's air emerged in a helpless gasp. When Joseph felt the ribs begin to give, he let go. The man hit the lab floor and lay still.

Beyond, Joseph saw Novimagos guardsmen appear in the doorway. They pointed rifles and autoguns at the intruders. Lieutenant Athelstane shouted, "Surrender or we open fire!"

The three men not already felled by bullets, electrical traps, or Joseph's bear hugs looked back at the guns aimed their way. They carefully set their assault rifles aside and raised their hands.

Gaby opened the eye into the hangar.

There was nothing going on there. She prepared to switch views again.

But she saw the ceiling shudder and a hole open in it. A trail of fire stretched to the floor, leaving a silvery missile driven into the concrete.

Black paint issued from the missile, spraying out in a sloppy circle.

Gaby smiled. The missile had landed on the brown paper covering one of the conjurer's circles. Doc had explained their purpose to her and the others: the circles waited to be struck with energies unique to displacement, summoning. Such power would fuel their counter-devisements, which would exert power over whatever appeared within them, damaging the sturdy, twisting the living. Meaning that anything that appeared within them would be racked with pain, helpless and useless.

The paint circle sprayed by the missile overlapped two of Doc's defensive conjurer's circles. Gaby watched as the missile's second tier of sprayers laid down the crude symbols just within the ring.

There was a crackle of energy and men appeared—four fair world gunmen and Adonis. They stood in a circle, facing out, just as the attackers disguised as musicians had done.

The men brought their guns up. Then, as one, they doubled over as pain from Doc's defensive devisement hit them. Most of them were throwing up by the time they hit the floor.

Adonis lost height and gained girth as if it were a putty man squashed by a child. Its face registered surprise. Then it stretched up to its accustomed height, shook itself, and looked impassively at the fallen men.

One of them, his face twisted with pain, tried to talk to him, words that were so low Gaby couldn't hear them.

Adonis looked around, scanning the hangar. It focused a moment on the talk-box, looking straight at Gaby, then turned away. It spotted what it wanted on the wall near the rotorkite and headed that way.

A switch on the wall. Adonis threw it, and in the top of the picture frame Gaby saw the hangar roof shudder as the overhead door began to lift.

Uncoiling ropes snaked down in to the hangar, and dark-armored men rappelled down beside the rotorkite.

Gaby grimaced. If men just came physically through the roof hatch, the conjurer's circles would do no good.

She went looking for Doc.

The voice buzzed through the speaker in Duncan's ear. "Sir? This is Greencoat." The man sounded uncertain; he'd been uncomfortable with the new grimworld equipment.

"I'm here."

"The missile team isn't answering because they're all sick. But Adonis did find the switch. We are in and we have the hangar."

"Sick. Some trick of Doc's." Duncan hissed his frustration. "Very well. The laboratory team has stopped answering. We have to assume they've been beaten. Don't send any men down the building exterior; we need to concentrate our forces. Send the entire force in through the hangar and kill everyone."

"Yes, sir."

Duncan leaned back, irritably drumming his fingers on the arms of his chair. The signal still showed a large number of grimworlders alive on one of Doc's floors. Whoever these men were, they had managed to break the first wave of Duncan's attack.

But only the first. He had more in store for them. The thought made him smile.

Gaby first tried the topmost viewer in the west stairwell, only a floor or two below the hangar—and there Doc was, Ixyail beside him, racing up the stairs, in sight only for a moment.

That was only a viewer; Gaby couldn't talk through it, couldn't warn him.

Wait. Maybe she could.

She lashed out at the viewer in anger.

Alastair flinched as the viewer above his head burst and rained sparks down on him. "Gods!"

Above, at the landing, Doc skidded to a stop and looked back. Ixyail and Noriko barely slowed in time to keep from running into him. Doc said, "I wonder what it did to make her mad at it."

But with the four of them stopped, their clattering footsteps no longer obscured the noises from above—cries of orders over the cries of pain and sound of men being sick.

There were men up there, and they were active, not brought low by Doc's conjurer's circles.

Gaby reopened the eye into the laboratory. Athelstane's men were shackling captured gunmen; most of the attackers, though badly hurt, appeared to have survived, saved by their grimworld armor. Harris was in view, talking rapidly with Athelstane. Gaby heaved a sigh of relief. "Athelstane."

The lieutenant and Harris turned to look at her.

"There's a problem in the hangar. Doc's going there. I think you and your men should join him."

She heard one of the guards, a woman, say, "Gods, not more stairs."

Athelstane shot a dirty look at the woman. "Quiet, you. Very well, goodlady, we're on our way." He waved a hand at his guards and trotted out of frame.

Harris moved to follow.

"Harris, don't!"

"Gaby, if there are problems—"

"Listen . . . " He'd survived one encounter already. There had to be some way she could convince him to stay behind now, not to charge into another dangerous situation. The answer came to her in a burst of enlightenment. "I think Duncan's in the talk-boxes. Using them to track our movements. I want you to make like Mister Actor Guy. Stay in front of this one and talk to Doc and everybody else as if they're still in the room with you. It might screw him up."

Harris looked after Athelstane and grimaced. "Dammit. All right. But wait a second. Let's see if we can do to him what he's doing to us." He ran out of frame.

He was back in a moment with a radio headset. "This was on one of the grimworlders. Check it out." He put it on, fiddled with it. "Testing, one, two, three . . . "

Gaby switched away from the laboratory talk-box and listened. Then she heard Harris again, two voices; one was crisp and clear, the other distant and fuzzy. She went looking for the fainter signal.

The first of the soldiers descending the stairs rounded the turn, coming into view on the landing. Alastair and Ixyail opened up with their autoguns. The attack caught the first two men by surprise. They fell; those behind brought up their guns to fire. Alastair and Ish ducked behind the cover of the banister and backed down the stairs.

"This will not work," Doc shouted over the gunfire. "We can't hold here long against those weapons. And if they have any sense, they're covering the other stairways and elevators."

"We could perhaps lure some of them ahead of the others," Noriko shouted back. "Take their weapons and use them against the rest. When the enemy is stronger, you must use his strength against him."

Doc nodded. "That's partly correct." He clapped Alastair on the back. "Fighting retreat," he told the healer.

Alastair nodded without looking back. Doc gestured for Noriko to follow him. Together, they trotted down three stories, past a set of armored doors that normally kept people from lower floors from reaching Doc's floors. Then Doc sat cross-legged in the center of the landing. Above, the gunfire went on and on.

Doc used his bronze penknife to prick his wrist. He drew a conjurer's circle around him in his own blood, took a moment to assure himself that it was unbroken. "I may be gone for a few beats," he told Noriko. "If I can't defend myself—"

"Don't worry," she assured him.

He closed his eyes and sank within himself.

And spoke. To a god. To the worst of them, the war-bringer, the conqueror.

"Hear me," he pleaded. "Weapons beg to be wielded. Grant me knowledge of them. Power over them. I will use them, and entertain you with noise and pain and blood."

It was a loathsome bargain. But he sent it out into the void like an outstretched hand, and when mad laughter began bubbling up within him he knew that it had been accepted.

The mirror remained a reflection, but suddenly Harris' second voice was much clearer: "—two, three. Testing—"

She switched back to the lab for a brief moment. "Got it." Then she returned to the new eye she'd found.

She extended her perceptions. She could feel other eyes not far away, a direction she'd never felt before.

She opened one of them and heard: "— heavy resistance in both stairwells, and they have the elevators locked off. But it should not take more than part of a chime."

Duncan's voice: "Very well."

But she couldn't see anything; this was a sound-only place.

A moment later, she found an eye that provided sight as well as sound. It looked out on a huge room. It was a vast metal framework crowded with what looked like rigid, upright bags attached to metal cross-braces. It all looked like steel, a shocking amount of bare steel for the fair world.

She opened another eye—and did not have enough time to see what lay beyond. She was suddenly swept away in a tidal wave of words and thoughts: dry, emotionless knowledge that tore through her with such force that it left her no strength to think.

She yelled in sudden fright, unable for the moment even to remember her name or purpose, and tried to extend herself around the vastness that carried her along.

Names, hundreds of names, grimworld dates and grimworld money transactions, personal details, embarrassing facts that could twist men to the will of another, crimes of the past, evaluations of the psyche, technical specifications, techniques of industry, construction, history of the fair world, history of the grim world, comparisons and contrasts, projected trends, structure of the stock market, mountains of knowledge on physics and chemistry, biology and geology— She couldn't see anything; the knowledge was without form. Its cold impersonality numbed her. Its immensity crushed her. She gave one final cry and winked out of existence, conquered by the force she had encountered.

The mind-wisp that was Doc floated up to the first of the attackers in the stairwell. The man looked through him, could not see him.

Doc looked at the man, seeing not a human being but a machine made of meat and blood, carrying more machines and devices designed to make him more powerful, more lethal.

With just a glance, he understood all there was to know about the man's long gun, the M16, with its monstrous rate of fire and grenade launcher. More grenades in the man's belt pouch, tear gas and smoke. Ammunition. Body armor. Gas mask hanging unused in its case. Satchel charge in the backpack.

And they all cried to him, begging to be used.

He smiled benignly at them and began granting wishes.

He reached out to the smoke and tear-gas devices, imparting a bit of his strength to them. Then he moved on to the next man up the stairs and granted his blessing again. A third man, more wishes granted—

Behind him, there was a sharp bang as the devices in the first man's belt went off, flooding him and his immediate surroundings with black smoke and stinging fog. Doc laughed and flew on, touching another half-dozen men before he reached the top of the stairs.