Jinx on a Terran Inheritance (47 page)

[Fitzhugh 2]-JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

time for only minimal training, and Alacrity wasn't all that much more experienced.

The dashboard commo beeped and they hurried from the back of the hovertruck to the cab. On the visual link Janusz looked calm, almost casual, with the cab of the ground lorry in the background and Notch's elbow showing at the edge of the picture.

"The smarts fireteams are in place and ready," Janusz said. "Everything is on track."

"Same here," Alacrity replied. "We're monitoring you with the automatics. Let us know when you need us. Good luck, Janusz."

Janusz nearly smiled. "Luck? Yes, that would be nice." He broke the Connection.
It's just not right for
anybody to have that much sang-froid,
Floyt mused. Alacrity switched over to the remotes still focused on the Repository from the relay tower office.

The Repository was a rambling villa done in the blocky First Breath style known as Bauhaus-NASA. It was a functional, solid sort of place, not really in keeping with the elevated esthetics of the Custodians.

The appeal of the place, for them, lay not in the building or grounds, but what was beneath.

As Floyt and Alacrity watched the screen, Janusz's ground lorry moved into view, down the winding driveway. Alacrity felt himself tensing up. "I hope they haven't bitten off more then we can chew.

Floyt nodded. The plan was based on a number of established facts, all having to do with Repository defenses and procedures for destroying Camarilla and other material. What Floyt worried about were the unestablished facts.

"We've got the primary advantage, surprise," Floyt answered. "We'll never have a better chance and, let's face it, it's now or never." Alacrity inclined his head minutely, shifting the shockgun in his lap, eyes fixed on the screen.

Janusz's voice came up over the commo net, this time without visual. "We are approaching the entrance portico. Last check: is everyone prepared?"

Corva and Alacrity acknowledged from their different locations, then Victoria. Heart and Sintilla did the same, and the teams of kids guarding their smarts launchers. Notch's lieutenant, Gippo, chimed in last, from where his van of alley runners waited.

"We carry on, then; it's in the mill." Janusz signed off. His lorry, which had been repainted, trimmed, and decaled to look like a courier vehicle, pulled up by the portico.

"You know, I really don't see how Janusz was planning to pull this off before we came along," Alacrity commented, watching the screen intently. "He would've been going in awfully shorthanded, at least in file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (249 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:30

[Fitzhugh 2]-JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

terms of people he could trust. Here they go; cross your fingers, Ho."

Instead Floyt rubbed the Yuri Gagarin coin, his Wonderment, for luck. Alacrity zoomed the visual pickup in tight as the villa's doors opened and one of the guards stumped out. Confusion made a brief visit to the surly face. Another guard stepped out behind him, and the doors shut tightly after.

They were of a type, like all the guards, just as the Custodians were of a type, clones born and raised to a single purpose, unchanging men from unchanging plasm. The mountainous guards shared thick, stolid, stoic faces, eyes like holes in pink plastic, and a high finish to their skin. They wore charcoal-gray uniforms, shoulder boards that made them seem even wider, and big disruptors in belt holsters. Their long, fine red hair was caught up in convolutions, pinned and wound in braids under glossy, flat-brimmed, electric-blue helmets. Their hands were broad, sausage-fingered.

The guards waited impassively. Notch and Janusz, wearing uniforms of the courier service, swung their doors open all the way. The lorry had pulled up with rear doors to the portico, as if to discharge cargo.

Notch and Janusz paused in the cab, as though gathering forms, receipts, or whatever.

Alacrity drew a resolute breath. "Here goes." His hand went to the remote firing controls mounted in the middle of the dashboard. Secondary screens and displays were showing firing data.

The two guards had stepped around the end of the lorry and were waiting for Janusz, the driver, to emerge. He did, but immediately aimed down on them with his shockgun and let the two sumo wrestler types have deadly blasts full in the face. Impossibly, they stayed on their feet, reeling. Notch, who'd slipped around the nose of the lorry, opened fire too.

"Unbelievable!" Floyt breathed. The guards were still on their feet. But under that kind of fire, even creatures like the guards had to go down. They toppled against each other as they fell, like some sort of fleshy landslide. Floyt described it to Alacrity, who was too busy to watch.

He'd activated weapons mounted on the relay tower. They opened up at preselected targets on the villa's grounds. Heavy guns, disguised as antennae and pickups and other equipment until that moment, blazed and belched even as Notch and Janusz scrambled back to the cover of the armored lorry.

A belvedere went up in flames, and the observatory at an upper corner of the Repository as well, both of them camouflaged weapons emplacements. Alacrity remote-aimed at a cabana and decorative features of the villa, as they in turn salvoed at the tower. For people who'd been through no real emergency or battle in the course of their two hundred years in business, the Custodians and their guards had an awfully good response time.

For a few moments it was all crash and wham, villa and tower hammering away at each other. Then, file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (250 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:30

[Fitzhugh 2]-JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

from the lorry, Notch and Janusz touched off their surprise package. It was something Janusz had worked up, combination shaped charge and breaching cannon.

The back doors of the lorry disappeared, disintegrated. A spearhead of pure light shot through and through the villa's front doors, annihilating everything in its way. It lasted only a second or two, leaving a two-meter-high hole in the armored entranceway, its edges dripping and molten, and peripheral fires that smoked and flickered.

"Hurdle number one," Floyt murmured.

Alacrity, with the advantage of surprise, had wiped out quite a few of the villa's armaments. But the counterfire began to tell; the tower, not heavily fortified to begin with, was being blown to fragments.

Still, by the time Alacrity's instruments went dim only two of the Repository's gun positions were still firing.

"Victoria, are you reading this? And Heart? We've got them softened up, at least."

"We all saw," Heart said. "Not bad, boyo."

"Janusz's group is on the move," Corva reported, from the airborne
Astraea Imprimatur.
"I've got them on the lorry's rear pickup; it's still working. They're using shields and they're in the entranceway."

An even dozen of Notch's gang, an assault team armed with riprays, plasma rifles, and other heavy weapons, had been concealed in the compartment behind the cab. Alacrity wasn't patched through to the lorry; he was occupied trying to link to the
Stray's
own long-range pickups, as the Srillan swung away from his station over the spacefield, creating confusion all around. "What else can you see, Corva?

Firefight?"

"Nothing clear, Alacrity, and there's no sound, but there must be, yes. Janusz should be all right for now, though; the front-door guard station was right in the path of the breaching beam. All the assault team has to do is dig in and hold for a while."

"And pray for smoke signals," Floyt muttered.

"Pray hard, for green smoke signals," Alacrity agreed.

"Are all crews ready at the smart ordnance?" Victoria sang out.

"You want us to fire, you say so. No trouble," Gippo responded. Notch's lieutenant sounded like he didn't really care one way or the other.

Alacrity raised his voice over the commo net. "Come on, come on! Doesn't anybody see smoke yet?

Keep your eyes on the chimneys!"

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (251 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:30

[Fitzhugh 2]-JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

Janusz's voice came up just then. "We're well deployed; we control the whole entranceway. No resistance yet, but we're staying at phase-point one. Any smoke yet?"

"We're waiting," Victoria said.

The Repository's underground areas were thoroughly sealed off from its upper structures. Those below, where the primary information cache was, would be debating the question of destroying sensitive material, but only tentatively; the encroachment wasn't critical yet. The destruction of lesser materials might begin, as a precautionary measure, but not obliteration of the Camarilla evidence.

Exactly when the Custodians would make their decisions, no one knew. The raiders wanted to push things to the point where the clones would begin destroying lesser data without forcing them to destroy everything. Janusz and his group had spent several years analyzing the attack. Their big piece of luck had been in obtaining an old Custodian destruct manual. Their main worry was that it would lead them into error; if it had been superceded by something very different, the plan was ruined.

"Corva, Heart—d'you have those last emplacements marked?"

"Ready to go, Alacrity."

"Affirmative, Bright Eyes!"

Alacrity spent a sweaty fifteen seconds glaring into screens and readouts. "We're getting counterattack activity," Janusz said. "Our crew-served weapons are well in place, but we will eventually have to either fall back or advance. Is there still no smoke?"

"Don't you think we'd have told you?" Alacrity countered. "Listen, this is no good. We're coming to get you out. You'll have guard reinforcements swarming on you soon."

"Remain where you are!" Janusz snapped. "We're all right for now." There was a loud explosion in the near background. Alacrity looked at Floyt, who looked back.

"We can't just leave him in there, Ho."

"No, I don't suppose we can." Floyt brought his shockgun around; Alacrity fired up the truck.

Just then they heard Corva's voice. "There! Smoke! I mark smoke from one, two—all four chimneys!"

"What color?" Sintilla demanded. "Corva,
what color
!"

"It's green! It's ours! Into motion, everyone! Green smoke!"

Alacrity was already moving. He yanked the hovertruck through a tight turn and bore down on a hillock nearby. Two of Notch's kids were there, a boy and girl, maybe fifteen or so, poised by a multibarreled launcher, making final adjustments. Floyt hit the release for the truck's side door, which slid open.

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (252 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:30

[Fitzhugh 2]-JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

The truck threw up dirt and debris as it slid to a halt side-on. "Start the timer and get in!" Floyt hollered.

The kids were into the track like squirrels, clinging to their flopping bandoliers and equipment. Alacrity wristed the accelerator, twisting the steering grips. The hovertruck whined off over the hillock in a storm of dust.

"Time for you to come down to lower altitude, where you're less of a target, Corva," Floyt was saying.

The Srillan rogered.

Alacrity tore along an accessway road and nearly hit a hoghoss-drawn wagon that was racing for Parish Below. There weren't many disturbances in Parish Above, but when there was one, the lower orders knew it was time to get out of the way.

Floyt hadn't had time to worry about any of the other estates becoming involved. Now he thought to, as Alacrity careened along at neck level, staying off the Repository's detectors. "What about the other mansions? What about the tribes?"

"Nothing yet, true to form," Victoria reported from the
Stray's
spaceboat, stationed between Parish Above and Parish Below. "Now, if things will only stay that way." As long as the conflict didn't spill into the other estates or the much more distant tribal zones, theoretically, it remained a private affair.

"No sign of problems," Corva confirmed. "Shall I blow out the accessways?"

"No need," Alacrity decided. "Besides, it might start trouble." He slewed through a small grove, and halted next to the other smarts team. They hopped in too. Floyt closed the side door and the truck howled away.

"Our rounds are firing," the girl from the first team said twenty-five seconds after the smoke had first been reported. Alacrity poured on speed, not wanting to be caught anywhere near the launchers.

"Heart, where are you? Hit those last two gun positions, can you? Soften the place up just a little more, not too much. I think I got all the villa's external pickups, so they won't know where it's coming from."

"I read. I'll be in right after the airbursts."

The second launchers' smart ordnance started flying overhead just then. The truck swooped along, as Alacrity and Floyt waited to hear the report.

"Who are those other people on the net?" one of the alley runners in the back wanted to know. "You didn't tell us about them."

"
Shh
!" Alacrity said. "Let me drive, will you? Just a little change of plans, that's all."

"Airbursts, on target," Victoria reported from the
Stray's
spaceboat. "Counterfire coming from the villa, file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (253 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:30

[Fitzhugh 2]-JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

hidden launch tubes. Keep low!"

Alacrity was doing just that as incoming rounds shrieked overhead, bound for the smarts launchers—too late. The special ordnance was already either at target or in the air. To the raiders' great relief, there'd been no midair intercept.

Heart reported, "The sealant blankets are deploying and settling, on target. All chimneys are well layered."

Alacrity heeled the truck around a corner at near ground level and saw it was true. The special rounds had dispersed airburst aerosols that congealed into vast translucent sheets. They settled in layer upon layer over the Repository, centered on four big chimneys from which the green smoke plumed.