Final Inquiries (44 page)

He's got a point there,
Hannah thought.
Or is he actually looking for practical advice?
Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between Brox being literal-minded and Brox being ironic.

She checked her countdown clock again. Ten seconds to go. She resisted the urge to chant the passing seconds out loud.

The charges around the embassy ship went off right on schedule, with a rapid series of short, sharp explosions that shook the main building. The blasts cut the ship clear of all the connections to the surrounding buildings. Two or three fires started up instantly as the destruct sequencers tripped incendiary charge circuits to destroy all the remaining confidential materials in the outlying buildings. Almost certainly all of the secret documents were gone already, but destroying them twice could do no harm. Two or three fire alarms went pointlessly off.

Hannah and Jamie had been briefed on what would come next. When it had first landed, the embassy ship had been set down in a pit deep enough to bury the propulsion system, so as to bring the main entry hatch down to ground level. Now the ship had to blast free. The buried base of the ship was inside a gigantic protective cylinder, which was in turn surrounded by a ring of empty underground chambers. More shaped charges went off underground, all around the ship, knocking out the supports that held up the cylinder sleeve sections, causing them to collapse outward, freeing the ship. The ground around the ship fell away, dropping the surrounding buildings, and blasting dust and smoke and debris up into the sky. The embassy ship's reactionless thrusters cut in, and the ship began to move, trembling, shuddering, slowly lumbering upward.

Hannah looked up in the sky to see that the Kendari embassy ship was already almost out of sight, boosting gracefully for high orbit. She hoped mightily that they made it.

The human embassy ship broke free of the ground, kicking up a shower of dirt and rocks and debris. It moved upward, painfully slowly, moving at only a meter or two a second. If it had boosted at full power, the field distortions produced by the reactionless thrusters would have scrambled the guts of any living thing in the compound. The ship had to escape slowly in order to keep from frying Jamie, Hannah, and Brox.

Twenty seconds after the launch of the
Kofi Annan,
there was another explosion. The main gate of the compound blasted inward, and a full squad of Vixan defenders was inside almost before the smoke had cleared.

"Just for the record," Hannah yelled, "I think that's a violation of extraterritoriality."

Suddenly, there was a giant whirring, whizzing sound that seemed to be coming from everywhere--and a hard, sharp blast of sound, more felt than heard. The reinforced glass of the windows starred and cracked but it held. The hole in the ground where the
Kofi Annan
had been was suddenly a sheet of flame and smoke and debris thrown upward. The ground shook hard. Bits of the ceiling broke off. The compound was blanketed with dust, and dirt and wreckage thrown up by the blast came rattling down. Something or other smashed into a window elsewhere in the room and managed to punch through with a crash.

Seconds later, the same whirring noise came again, a trifle farther off, and another giant blast, coming from the Kendari compound.

"And that's another violation," Hannah shouted for the benefit of the recording her helmet cam was making. "The Vixa just shelled the prelaunch ground coordinates of the embassy ships."

Giant ramplike things suddenly came over the wall behind the crater where the embassy ship had been. The lower end of the ramps crashed into place, and Kendari started coming over the wall and into the compound.

"Time to get moving," Jamie shouted in Hannah's ear. She nodded and signaled to Brox, pointing toward the joint ops center.

"Draw your weapon," she shouted at Jamie. "We're going to make a run for it. Do
not
fire at any Kendari unless one of them attacks you directly. In that case, fire
only
at your attacker."

"What is this, the etiquette of self-defense?" Jamie shouted back. "I might not be able to be that selective."

"Do your best," Hannah yelled back. "If you want, you can fire over their heads or into the ground or whatever."

"Oh, I'm going to want to," he said. "Very much indeed."

"If it makes you feel any better, the Vixa you can shoot at as much as you like."

"Wrong again," Jamie shouted back. "We don't want them to know we're here, remember? I'm gonna lob smoke grenades between us and them before we leave the building and hope they don't notice us at all."

"Okay. Get ready with the smoke." Jamie immediately started pulling apple-sized grenades out of his pockets and setting them out where he could reach them easily.

Hannah peeked out the window again and checked the situation. The Vixa seemed to have gotten themselves distracted by the arrival of the Kendari. Hannah couldn't blame them. It was a confused situation. The Vixa were holding the Kendari back, at least for the moment, keeping their fighting arms held high, their attack talons unsheathed, the neurotoxin oozing very obviously from the stingers.

Everyone was busy. It looked like a good moment to leave.

"Jamie! Make with the smoke bombs." He immediately starting pulling pins and heaving the cylinders out the window and into the compound. She turned to Brox. "Okay," she said. "Nothing fancy. We run like hell, we give each other whatever mutual cover we can, and we get through the blast doors, then get them shut behind us. Understood?"

"Understood."

"Okay, on the count of three," Hannah said, drawing her own sidearm and checking it. "Ready, Jamie?"

"Are you kidding?"

"Close enough. One. Two. Three!"

They sprang to their feet and starting moving, legs pumping, heads down. Hannah glanced behind them. The embassy ship was still crawling into the air, only a hundred or so meters in the air, clumps of dirt still falling away from it, the reactionless thrusters pulsing violet and purple as they strained to lift the massive vehicle on minimum power. The smoke was a solid, swirling, dirty grey wall that concealed the far side of the compound. It ought to hide them from the Vixa. If it didn't, there wasn't anything they could do about it.

The noise was not only overwhelmingly loud. It was impossibly complex. The roaring hum of the embassy ship's engines, the
crump
and
thud
of secondary explosions, the shouts and cries of the mob, the
crackles
of the fires that were starting to spread, the dull
thuds
of debris dropping out of the sky, and any number of other sounds did not merge into one another--instead they seemed to interact, resonating, amplifying each other, weaving in and out so that one would be heard, then another.

Jamie yelled something toward Hannah, turned, fired at someone or something, then turned back again, all without breaking step--and Hannah couldn't hear any of it at all.

The smoke was starting to spread, and dust was everywhere, making it hard to see, and a little hard to breathe. Brox was moving faster than any of them and got to the ops center first.

Hannah reached the ops center's blast doors after Brox and fought off a coughing fit as she worked the lock controls. Jamie put his back to the wall and fired into the ground and into the air, doing his best to add to the chaos and confusion that were their best and only protection.

The door unlocked, and Hannah hauled it back just far enough for them to scoot through. Jamie followed after, firing off one or two last potshots before he dove in. Brox brought up the rear. Hannah slammed it shut behind and instantly started to work on opening the inner blast door, trying not to think how long they were going to be able to hold out.

Except that was the wrong question. The Vixa had all the hardware and weapons and cutting beams and so on they could ever need. The question wasn't how long it would take the Vixa to break in--it was whether they would decide to do so, and how hard were they willing to try.
So let's hope they don't find out we're in here,
she told herself.

They got through the inner door and rolled it shut, then turned and faced the main ops room. It had been a crime scene, not so long ago.

"All right then," said Brox in a perfectly calm tone, as if running for his life through a pitched battle were his morning commute. "It's time to go to work."

TWENTY-FIVE

UNDERGROUND CELL

"What do we do first?" Jamie asked.

"First we think this through," said Hannah. "We threw this together in a hurry, and we're going to be down in the bunker a while. The bad news for you, Brox, is we didn't know you were coming. We set up the gear in the bunker under the
human
side of the joint ops center--and we didn't think to make any arrangements for Kendari visitors."

"Plus which, the entrance to the bunker needs to be sealed to give us proper blast protection," said Jamie. "Sealing it is about a five-minute job. Opening it is a little faster, but not much. Once it's closed, it's camouflaged pretty well. The idea is that no one is supposed to know we're in the bunker, or even that the bunker is there in the first place. Given the mob we just left outside, I like that idea. We can't go back and forth through that hatch ten times a day without exposing ourselves to a lot of needless risk. Once we're inside, I don't want to open that hatch again until we're ready to leave for good."

"Splendid," Brox said sourly. "So I may look forward, not only to being underground most of the time, but to dealing with hallways that are too narrow, tables that are the wrong height, and all the other conveniences of working in areas designed for human use. Needless to say, steep, narrow stairways, such as the one leading to your bunker, are a favorite with Kendari."

"Not just working on the human side," Hannah said. "
Living
there. I don't think we can count on being able to come up here to the main level at all. The Vixa could decide at any moment to flatten it, or blow it up, and we're not going to get much in the way of warning if they do.
I
don't want to be topside if that happens. And what with the two bunker systems being designed to protect
us
from you and your people from
us
, no one thought to put in any connecting passages between the underground levels."

"So I must go over to the Kendari side, collect food and supplies, and take them into the human bunker," Brox said. "I was in need of exercise anyway."

"I'll help you," Jamie said.

"No," said Brox. "I can manage. You two get started on the reason we're going down there."

"Fine," said Jamie. "
You
take the easy job." He watched as Brox headed off to find food and supplies--and couldn't help remembering being locked in with a Kendari once before. The memories were vivid.

"If it's any comfort to you," said Hannah, "I just happen to know the Kendari have a portable sanitizer in storage on their side. My guess is that Brox wants to do the hauling job alone because he's going to have to haul their portable sanitizer down into the bunker and he doesn't want an audience. He's on the prim and proper side, even for a Kendari."

Jamie breathed a sigh of relief. Kendari sanitizers were extremely powerful and effective--because they had to be. "Being buried alive just started sounding a whole lot less unpleasant," he said. He was about to say something more when a shudder passed through the whole building, strong enough to kick up a cloud of dust.

"What do you say we do the rest of our thinking in the bunker?" Hannah asked.

"Sounds good to me," said Jamie.

"We have the facts," said Brox, some hours later, once they were settled in and sealed up. "We have absolute proof of many things, and compelling evidence of additional items, that show that the Vixa deliberately murdered Emelza."

Hannah nodded and let out a weary sigh. "And you care about that, and
we
care about that--but the Elder Races won't care about the death of one Younger Race cop. How does it affect them?"

It had been a long argument already, and they had only been underground for a few hours. The bunker had seemed cramped, musty, and unpleasant when they started, and it hadn't improved in the interim. "Look," said Jamie. "I think we're losing track of something. Telling the truth is all well and good, but that's not the point. We're trying to build a
case
against the Vixan government, against the Preeminent Director. A case that will convict him in the court of Elder Race public opinion, at the very least."

"You're not suggesting we fabricate evidence," said Brox.

"No," said Jamie.
We'd never get away with it anyway.
"Of course not. We're trying to
prove
a fraud.
Creating
a fraud would be suicide. What I'm saying, and what Hannah is saying, is that murder--or rather proving murder--is not enough. It's part of the whole. We want to prove charges of incitement to war, intent to seize the Pentam System by fraudulent means, interference with a diplomatic mission. Grand-scale stuff."

"But we don't even know if those are
crimes
to the Elder Races," Brox objected. "Your people always talk about the Great Game, as if it were all some sort of sporting competition. If the Elders view it that way, why would they even care?"

"Some of them would," said Hannah. "The Reqwar Pavlat certainly would, and I'd bet the rest of the Pav governments would feel the same way. It's okay to kill someone as long as you do it properly. Honor is a very big deal."

"But on the other hand the Stanlarr Consortia are so hard to kill, and live so long, they barely know what
death
is, let alone murder," said Jamie.

"But they
would
care about planet-theft," said Brox. "Even if it was a plot that was going to take many twelves of years. They feel strongly about honest dealings."

"The Metrans and the Bruxa wouldn't like the planet-theft," Jamie said. "Or the stalling, the playing for time. They know all about being short-lived. They take it as a deadly insult when another race tries to use that against them in negotiations."