"Hey, what'd those trucks do?" demanded one of Ahwas' men. "Give us the slip and go round the back way?"
"Bloody well better have," said another with a nod back toward the north wall of the courtyard. The wrecked cars had been removed, but the gravel was still enlivened by scorch marks and bright debris. The van had been parked outside the complex until the present dawn. It was easy enough to imagine the effect another out-of-control supply truck could have on Dyson's expensive scarlet vehicle.
The gate squealed inward before the cab of a truck. The leaves scraped as the vehicle edged them open, but that did no apparent harm to the battered skirts.
"Thought those gates were supposed to be locked," muttered Ahwas.
He wished the Master would give an order about this.
Danny Pritchard's mouth was filled with a dry vileness, as if someone had stuffed a used tennis ball into it. He was too old for this. He had been a curst fool to give up the body armor which alone had been his chance of living through the next hour. He was a tanker, by the Lord, and he went into the battle wearing only tinsel that would burn like a torch when he was killed!
Blood and Martyrs. Dyson's liverymen were in scattered clumps across the enclosure. They were either still gossiping among themselves or watching a second truck follow the first through the gate. They knew the meeting would last a minimum of two hours. The only business had been transacted months before, and the formalization required only minutes. All the Councilors would speak, however, both to praise Beverly Dyson out of fear and to hear the sound of their own voices in public.
There were forty-five Dyson liverymen in sight, plus one or more additional within the van to Pritchard's left front. The five observers were still loosely grouped where the detection cabinet had been set up. The specialist was wheeling his gear toward Slade House at something more than a normal pace.
There was Coon Blegan; and Danny Pritchard; and the Lord be praised! men in blue coveralls were climbing out of the back of the leading truck as it halted near the gate!
No rest for the wicked. Danny gripped the safety switch at the back of the gun housing. He swung it live in a hundred and eighty-degree arc. The drone quivered in a puff of dust and gravel as its systems came up. Pebbles pinged the skirt of its mate across the doorway. No one noticed because of the commotion at the gate.
Pritchard stepped away from the quivering drone. It was already beginning to drift because its drive fans were out of alignment. A bit of rock spanged from the second drone and rapped Pritchard's instep. He ignored it as he jumped to the second drone's back deck and threw its safety also. Then he dropped to the ground again as the air around the House doorway filled with grit and the sound of fans.
Somebody had noticed after all. Subiyaga flattened himself beside his equipment, twenty meters short of the House and safety. Pritchard did not have to see the specialist's expression to know it for one he had worn himself often enough, when it was about to drop in the pot and you could only hope the splash would miss you.
Both supply trucks were disgorging men, dozens of them. Each man gripped the bulky rocket gun of his trade. Liverymen who had started toward the trucks in curiosity now scrambled away. Submachine guns were being pointed from all around the yard.
When the drones were switched on, Danny Pritchard had no reason to stand in the open. He gripped the yoke handles of the remote unit, knowing that the hologram display it threw up for his eyes would be the same whether he stood in the courtyard or behind the concrete facade of the House.
But what the Hell. The drone to his right moved as he twisted the controls. The orange pipper on the display skidded across a monochrome landscape to its target. Don Slade was home, but a lot of Danny Pritchard was home again also.
Ballenger flung open the side door of the van. "Hey!" he cried. His loud-hailer had a remote link and belt hooks, but he had not taken time to arrange them. "You fishermen," his voice boomed.
"Get those filthy trucks out of here at once! Don't you realize that the Council will be processing through here in—"
The anti-tank gun on Pritchard's drone ripped the van the long way.
The cyan flash was narrow and intense, but its reflection seemed to fill every angle of the yard. The high-intensity 10 cm gun could knock out the heaviest tanks. On Tethys, it had been used for single-shot kills on creatures large enough to be mistaken for islands when glimpsed from the air. Like any powergun, it liberated most of its energy on the initial impact, but the charge was heavy enough that a hole puffed in the back wall of the van even as the cab exploded in the flames of its own vaporized components. The fireball pitched Ballenger onto the shingle. The skin of the Steward's back was unharmed, but his hair and livery were afire.
"Now listen up," roared the loudspeakers on the drone. The vehicle slid away from the spot in which it had been parked for a generation. There were occasional sparks where the left skirt continued to drag the gravel. "All Dyson servants, drop your guns. You will not be hurt. Drop your guns at once."
Several cases of ammunition in the van went off. Seams leaked blue-green light for an instant as the walls bulged. Then the rear of the vehicle sucked itself flat so abruptly that even the fire in the cab was beaten down for a moment. Subiyaga swore and began to scuttle toward the moaning steward.
The gun drone pivoted on its axis. "You will not be hurt," the loudspeakers repeated dissonantly.
The muzzle of the cannon glowed white. Heat waves above the barrel rippled the image of Slade House. The station crewmen were as surprised by the steel monster as were the Dyson retainers they had come to fight. The blue-suited crewmen were moving cautiously to keep the supply trucks between them and the drone.
As the gun rotated past him, Ahwas saw the ex-mercenary standing fifty meters away in the entryway of Slade House. Ahwas did not recognize Pritchard's voice through the drone's cracked amplification, nor was he fully aware of what Pritchard was doing. Still, he knew enough, and cowardice was not one of the guard leader's failings. Ahwas lifted his submachine gun and thumbed off the safety.
Coon Blegan fired twice from the gate leaf against which he braced his pistol. The second round was from training, not present need, because the first had blasted Ahwas' cap and skull. The head shots were deliberate because the submachine gun was already aimed.
Ahwas spun. His weapon raked the House facade. The window of the Trophy Room dissolved into hair-fine slivers that winked and danced in a cloud drifting down on the courtyard.
"Dyson servants, drop your weapons!" the drone snarled as it threw itself sideways at the pace of a fast walk. The dragging skirt bumped against Ahwas' body, then lurched over and through it. "You will not get another warning! Slade men, prepare to gather up the weapons."
Men were throwing down their automatic weapons. One guard stripped off his crimson tunic and flung it away as well. Like sheep, others began to pull off their livery also. Crewmen strode forward with burgeoning enthusiasm, slapping at one another with weathered hands as their nervousness dissipated.
Then the second drone, the one Danny Pritchard did not control, pulled away from the doorway. A frozen bearing screamed as it galled its shaft, but the heavy vehicle continued to gather speed. Subiyaga was trying to carry the injured steward to a place of relative safety beside the House. The drone swivelled around them, dragging its skirts instead through the molten wreckage of the van. As the drone continued, a trail of blazing plastic followed it toward the armored doors of the Hall.
"This man is an imposter!" Councilor Dyson shouted in a voice that only the handful nearest him could hear over the pandemonium in the Hall.
Slade turned. "Bev," he said, "you know me." He gestured with his left hand, palm down and fingers splayed. Again his amplified voice rocked through the high-pitched clamor. "But there doesn't have to be any trouble."
Dyson flung away the useless control board as he jumped from the chair. "Get him!" he screamed as he backed through his retainers. "Get him!"
Baucom hesitated, then lunged as the big tanker glanced down at the remote unit he gripped with both hands. Slade slammed his left elbow into Baucom's chest, hurling the liveryman back with cracked ribs. His fellows grabbed Slade from either side.
Instead of leaping to the podium himself, Edward Slade caught the nearer liveryman by the ankles and jerked. The man squawked as he fell, banging the point of a hip on the edge of the podium.
Marilee chopped at the liveryman's eyes with the top of her baton. "Come on you bastards!" she screamed at the Slade Housemen. She had no leisure to notice that one of the frightened servants actually did clamber onto the podium to face the score of men swarming from the Dyson enclosure.
Slade kneed the third of his immediate attackers in the groin, then shrugged loose from the crumpling man. He looked up from the hologram display. Beverly Dyson was five meters away, flattened against the outside wall. His hands were raised against the wrench which shimmered in his memory. Slade grinned and squeezed the trigger built into the right handle of his remote unit.
The doors of the Hall rang like a god's anvil when the ten-centimeter bolt struck.
The doors were built to be proof against the largest and most vicious monsters that Tethys spawned, but it was only the thickness of the crossbar which kept the anti-tank round from penetrating the Hall as a jet of directed energy. Instead, the great room lighted with a white flash that painted sharp shadows across the wall beyond the podium. Blazing steel and a plasma that had been steel bulged across the squad of Dyson retainers still hesitating near the doors where they were stationed. None of them had time to scream as they shrivelled.
"Don't move!1' shouted Slade and the speakers as the echoes crashed.
Half the crossbar still sagged against the door beneath the glowing cavity in the center where the leaves met. The other half had been ripped from its bracket by the gout of gaseous metal. The powergun bolt had no kinetic energy of its own, but its impact created enormous secondary kinetic effects.
"Don't move!" Slade repeated, wheeling on the Dyson liverymen whose rush the flash and blast had frozen. The armored drone Slade controlled slammed against the doors, breaking the fresh welds which sealed the panels when the bar was shot away. The doors recoiled open. The fighting vehicle waddled into the Hall.
Husks of liverymen near the door powdered as the skirts touched them. They whipped around the drone as bitter smoke.
The aisle was wide enough for the drone's deliberate passage, but the long-ignored running gear required more than an inertial guidance mechanism to keep the brute in a straight line. When Slade looked up from his display, the drone's back end swung enough to splinter panels of the Hauksbee enclosure. Not, perhaps, the least fortunate of accidents.
"All of you, back out of here," Slade ordered. He gestured with the remote unit toward the red-suited retainers who now cowered at the edge of the podium or just beneath it. The drone had no turret. The whole vehicle rotated in the aisle to enforce Slade's will with the muzzle of the gun.
A number of the liverymen were ducking so that they could no longer see Slade. It was a common misconception. Its converse made drones difficult to manipulate. Slade's own line of sight did not control the cannon's fire. The pipper on the remote display did, and its sending unit was part of the gun mount. Slade and Pritchard had decades of experience guiding heavy armor with no view but that from remote pick-ups. Handling the drones was second nature for them, as it would have been to a settler of the first generation.
Edward Slade stood to his uncle's left, Marilee to Don's right. The Houseman who had jumped to the podium was now standing upright and wondering what to do with his hands. Dyson retainers slunk away from him and from the podium. The broad lighting strips in the roof still seemed dim after the fireball which had blasted clear the doors.
"This isn't a place for people anymore," said Don. The drone slid to the end of the aisle. He grounded the vehicle there, almost touching the podium. Its armored skirts sang and sparked as they settled on the concrete. "We'll go outside—Via, we'll go to the, there's room for forty in the Trophy Room and we can talk—"
"Don!" screamed the woman to his right.
Edward was fast, very fast for a youth with neither training nor experience. He jumped toward Dyson. But Don Slade was the pro, the Mad Dog, and he was fast enough to catch his nephew by the arm and fling him out of the killing zone.
Beverly Dyson was still backed against the wall three meters away, but his hands no longer covered his face. He aimed a glass derringer, the only metal in it the atom's thickness which mirrored the interior of the barrel.
Not a military weapon at all, Slade thought fleetingly, but neither is a man a tank. Aloud, forgetting the link that threw his voice out over the speakers, he said, "Go ahead, Bev. I don't think you've got the guts."
Slade's last thought before the derringer fired was how the Hell had he mistaken Dyson for a handsome man. The face glaring over the muzzle could have come from deep wat—
The bolt made a light popping sound in the air and a crash like breaking glass when it struck the middle of Slade's chest. The big man staggered backward. There were screams from several points in the Hall, though why, one more shooting on this day . . .?
Dyson tossed the gun away like a man snapping a spider from his hand. The discharged piece was too hot to hold. It clattered against the wall and back to the podium.
A plate-sized patch had been burned from the center of Slade's tunic. Its edges were still asmolder. The breastplate of the ceramic armor beneath the tunic was blackened. Crinkle marks at the center of the pattern indicated that the plate would have to be replaced. It had been degraded to uselessness in absorbing the single bolt.
Guess I owe Danny for a chicken suit, Slade thought as he raised the President's chair in one hand. His laughter boomed out over the speakers and he added aloud, "And my life . . ." No one in the Hall understood the words, but by that point no one particularly expected to.
The chair was wooden, like the benches, and probably as uncomfortable for all its smooth curves. It weighed fifteen kilos, a clumsy bludgeon but a massive one. Slade poised it overhead. "Thirty years, Bev, hasn't it been?" he said.
Councilor Dyson turned to the wall. He began trying to claw and bite through the concrete.
Marilee touched Slade's shoulder, the left one, the one that held the chair poised. "Don," she said very softly. "No."
"He's faking that," said Slade and the speakers.
There was blood where Dyson's fingers scratched. The sound of his teeth on the age-darkened concrete was more hideous than a scream.
Slade turned. He tried to set the chair down gently, but his muscles failed him and let it crash to the podium. "Dear Lord," he said. "Dear Lord."
Men and women had already begun to move toward the door. They stepped gingerly or with the set expressions of feigned ignorance as they crunched through what had been the guards. Already the shadows of armed men waiting in the courtyard darkened the doorway. Councilors and their vari-colored retainers paused, trapped between death and uncertainty.
"Go on out," Slade called. "You won't be harmed. No one will be harmed. We're men here on Tethys, not animals."
Beside Slade, Beverly Dyson mewled against the wall he was beginning to scar.