In the Hall of the Martian King (17 page)

“Certainly, certainly, toktru masen. Well, now, this first thing is a spy-scout.” Waynong shook the box, which was a cube
about half a meter on a side. Three small black spheres, about the size of golf balls and completely featureless, rolled out.
“As anyone can see, I’ve got three little balls, one for each team in my plan.

“This can connect direct to your purse, and you can use the purse screen or a pair of goggles that plug into the purse. Either
way, it lets you see in any direction from any surface of the rolling ball. Though I don’t know why anyone would want to look
at the floor. But you can see in all the other directions too, and there will be guards and things in those directions. So
the plan is, we put our balls in first, and see how things are going. Then team one comes in using these.” Clarbo Waynong
shook out a second, larger box, and what looked like half a dozen slippers fell out. “These are ceiling sticking shoes; team
one will be way up on the ceiling with their faces about level with the guards’ faces. Totally disorienting. Toktru it’s my
favorite part of it all.

“Now, we’re not supposed to hurt the guards if we can help it, so the last special weapon here is a nonlethal control weapon.
It’s a net gun—the slug expands into a big, spinning net that grabs and holds everything in its path and won’t let go till
we give it the code. Which we’ll message to the local police as soon as we’ve made our getaway.

“So the plan, once the balls have given us a picture of the room, is that team one will come in on the ceiling as a diversion,
team two will run in on the ground and shoot the guards from behind with the net gun while they’re staring at team one, and
then team three will run in, and grab the—um, what was it?”

“The lifelog?” Pikia asked.

“Just so.”

“How is all this coordinated?” Gweshira asked, looking down at the floor.

“Oh, we just agree on a time, of course,” Waynong said. “Our purses are more than accurate enough to synchronize the three
teams.”

“Er, what if there’s a change in plan or a hitch with one team?”

“There won’t be. We have perfect intelligence.”

“We do?”

“In our little balls.” Clarbo Waynong looked around the room emphatically, seeming to pose for a camera that wasn’t there.
“So given that we have perfect intelligence, we won’t need to change plans, and therefore we can just set our clocks and go.
Much more secure than talking back and forth all the time. Now here are my team assignments. I will lead team three, and Sibroillo
and Jak will be members of it as well. Team one, which gets to walk on the ceiling—that seems like so much fun I almost wanted
to do it myself but they told me
very
sternly, excessively sternly if you ask me, that I had to be the one who grabbed the—um—”

“The lifelog?” Pikia asked. Her expression was so innocent that if Jak had been her great-great-grandfather he’d have grounded
her for a year on suspicion alone.

“Yes, yes, exactly. I’m glad someone remembers it.”

“It’s what I’m here for,” Pikia assured him.

“All right, now where was I? Team assignments! Well, then. Team one, the diversion team, the ceiling walkers, call them what
you will”—he gestured grandly—“team commander will be Dujuv, with Pikia and Shadow dividing command backup responsibility.
And since we also have our guests from Greenworld, and one spare pair of these walking upside-down shoes—toktru they seem
like so much fun but I can’t figure out any way for me to wear them and be the actual person who grabs—”

“The lifelog!” Pikia’s smile was wide but her eyes were sparkling strangely.

“—the lifelog, thank you, Pikia, then the last pair of shoes might as well go to Kawib, mightn’t they? And therefore he will
be the fourth member of team one.

“Now for team two, we have these.” He set two very oversized pistols onto the table in front of him. “As long as all three
guards stick together, one shot should make them all, um, stick together. The net spreads out to a three-meter-by-three-meter
square you see, and flies across the room, and tangles them all up very much like a spiderweb. So team two, you will fire
the first net gun at the guards, and that should be enough to take care of them.”

“And who’s in team two?” Gweshira asked.

“Well, it’s not quite as light a team as the other two, is it, masen? No really light equipment and doesn’t get the glory
of actually grabbing the lifelog. On the other hand it doesn’t take much physical strength or mental ability to pull that
trigger, so I suppose we could give it to anyone. I had selected”—he checked his notes in his purse—“you for the main shooter
and Xlini Copermisr for the backup.”

The corner of Gweshira’s mouth twitched. Jak knew that twitch; he had sparred in the Disciplines with Gweshira many, many
times. Usually it preceded a good wanging. “But if I miss my shot, and Xlini misses hers, then won’t the whole plan come apart?”

“I do not create the sort of plans that ‘come apart.’ And you really ought to have more confidence in yourself. You won’t
miss that shot. But since you’re worried about it—”

“I was about to ask for a few minutes to practice with the weapon. I’ve never used a weapon in combat without having practiced
first.”

“Out of the question. I only ordered two and it’s a single-shot disposable weapon.”

Gweshira’s mouth opened to speak, but before she made a sound, she jumped as if bitten or shocked. She turned her left hand
palm upward to look down at her purse, then clapped her purse to her left ear; she looked as if poison were being poured into
her ear. After a long breath, she muttered “Understood” and let her hand drop to her side, where it hung like a dead snake
over a fence rail.

Meanwhile, the situation had been aggravated; Clarbo Waynong had been thinking. “You know,” he said, “I think the thing to
do is autoprogram those net guns; I can set them up so that they fire as soon as you pop out of the corridor into the room
with the lifelog. I hate to do it but if people are going to be second-guessing the plan all the time … well, we’d better
get on with it.” He looked around and said, “So for team three, the ones who will actually grab the lifelog, we have myself,
of course, plus Sibroillo and Jak Jinnaka will divide backup command responsibility, and of course—”

Princess Shyf looked at him coolly. “And of course Her Utmost Grace, me, will do something she’s valuable at, rather than
hanging about in a hallway, and will cause Prince Cyx, who is supposed to be in charge in the event of emergencies tonight
(while his father gets a badly needed good night’s sleep), to hang out an array of fearsome DO NOT DISTURB signs, real and
virtual, on his door, thereby ensuring that any possible response to the theft of the lifelog will be feeble and delayed,
due to everyone’s being very cautious about disturbing the Prince. Not to mention that given that this is apt to be a very
stressful evening for Cyx, this will help him to maintain a sense of proportion and a feeling that life isn’t actually so
bad after all, which will be of some importance in the subsequent negotiations to soothe Red Amber Magenta Green’s official
diplomatic feelings. As soon as I know at exactly what time the Prince should be most occupied, I shall get to work on looking
and smelling good, which happens to be one of my major talents. (And let me add that if you attempt to designate me as ‘team
four,’ I shall ignore you, possibly forever.) So thank you for my assignment and please do proceed with your meeting so I
can get on with it.”

“Er, just so, yes,” Waynong said.

As he waited in the dark hallway, Jak woefully ticked off the long list of what was wrong with all this, and the short list
of what was right. He was standing elbow to elbow with Uncle Sib, dividing the command backup—an easy division of zero by
two, since there was nothing for a second in command to command, and nothing for either second in command to do. Probably
Clarbo had thought that Jak and Sib were the two people most likely to assume command in a crisis, and therefore he had put
them where they couldn’t.

Glumly Jak watched the little square screen on his palm as it showed a rat’s-eye view of the floor of the private viewing
room in the Royal Splendiferous Museum where Nakasen’s lifelog was being kept. The spy-scouts were built like compound eyes,
covered with microscopic fish-eye lenses. A picture assembler in the purse software assembled the thousands of images so that
the view did not tumble rapidly, but moved with the ball, staying in a given orientation until pointed elsewhere, like a single
tiny camera creeping across the floor.

Just then, the camera from Dujuv and Shadow’s team was sitting quietly in the corner of the room, providing a wide angle view
of the three bored, elderly guards: two men and a woman, decked out in big coats and sashes, practically asleep on their feet.
It occurred to Jak that any of the three teams could simply rush in, knock the old people down, and run with the lifelog,
and get away with it. He would have placed his own odds of succeeding at that, all by himself, at about three to two, and
Dujuv or Shadow, with much greater strength and speed, at about ten to one.

But orders were orders … and he wanted his real posting to a real Hive Intel job, and to be allowed complete deconditioning,
and he didn’t want the consequences of disobeying Mejitarian.

The thought of deconditioning reminded Jak of Shyf, who was with Cyx right now. That caused him to need to do some Disciplines
breathing, just as Sibroillo had taught him to do ever since he could remember. At least the conditioned jealous rage Jak
felt was helping him to stay awake.

Team two’s spy-scout was rolled up against the pedestal on which the lifelog sat, and was slowly creeping around it, scanning
up and down, giving a complete view of the room every couple of minutes.

The third spy-scout, operated by Clarbo Waynong, was wandering around randomly, its selected view straight down. It showed
a dark spot at the center and a distorted gray smear of floor in other directions. Occasionally it would pass in view of spy-scout
one or spy-scout two. Despite his admonitions to everyone else to be very quiet, Waynong was muttering and swearing to himself
as he tried to get control of his spy-scout.

At last a momentary red flash from their purses alerted them. Waynong jumped; he had been so engrossed in trying to get the
little black ball to work properly that he had lost track of the time. Jak saw the spy-scout imaging career wildly on the
main screen of his purse, but he was mostly watching the countdown—seventeen seconds till time to run forward.

On the tiny screen in the palm of his left hand, the image of a boot toe burst into a black blur as the ball hit the guard’s
foot. The view spun in a great vertical arc, periodically revealing three puzzled guards staring down at the ball.

Jak and Sib dashed down the corridor together, Clarbo’s cry of “Wait, it’s too soon—” ringing behind them. They reached the
display room just in time to see team one— Dujuv, Shadow on the Frost, Pikia, and Kawib—coming in at a slow walk on the ceiling.
The guards did not—they were all bent over the small black ball, heads together, trying to figure out what it was.

Jak had just an instant to think how badly this was working before Xlini and Gweshira burst in from the main entry corridor.
Activated automatically on entering the room, both their net guns went off, firing at the most prominent moving objects above
the floor—which were not the three bent-over guards, but the team on the ceiling.

A long time afterward, when he thought about it more calmly, Jak had to admit that whoever had designed those net guns had
done a bang-up job. The two nets, a fine transparent mesh just thick enough not to cut skin, with a “smart surface” that stuck
to anything it touched except the net itself, seemed to pour into the air from the muzzles of the net guns and billow across
the room like two raging translucent jellyfish. In less than a heartbeat they had flown around all four people, contracting
very slowly but with tremendous force, hesitating wherever resistance was too great so that no bones were broken. The nets
merged and crept inward, tightening, finding holds to draw tighter, freeing sections to flow to other looser spots on the
struggling mass, so that in just a few seconds, one 130-kg Rubahy, one furious panth, and two unmodified humans were quite
unhurt but being held tightly in a white spider-bag on the ceiling.

This, of course, had gotten the guards’ attention. They were old and they were slow and sleepy, but they had once been police
or soldiers, to judge by how quickly they drew their slug pistols and covered the bewildered party of would-be thieves.

A
t the holding jail, Kawib was separated from the rest of them; perhaps because he was not a Hive citizen? But then, neither
was Shadow … and of course the situation was so unusual that very possibly they were just making up procedure as they went.
Jak resolved not to worry about it.

There wasn’t much time to worry about anything, actually, because it was less than an hour before they were all brought before
King Witerio. They stood, hands bound behind their backs, facing the King’s official business throne; behind them stood a
row of serious, trained, effective guards, from RAMG’s small-but-not-hopeless army. Beside the prisoners the three elderly
minor nobles, who had been the guards for the lifelog, looked so proud that Jak couldn’t help feeling better—
someone
was having a good day.

Jak’s “command” was in predictably sad shape; he summarized his report to himself as
three banged up, four exhausted, and one still a ninny.
Shadow looked worse than anyone else; the net had taken so many feathers that he looked like a half-plucked chicken. Jak
knew that when the Rubahy had a single feather pulled out it hurt, so he imagined that his friend was probably in real pain,
and the Rubahy’s head hung and his shoulders slumped as they did when he was exhausted. Dujuv was bruised from his struggle
to get out of the net and from the stunning they had given him to make him stop. Pikia would have looked all right if they
hadn’t had to cut off much of the hair on one side of her head to get the net detached; its “release” feature had apparently
been somewhat oversold.