Warlord (45 page)

"Are you a coward, too?" Anne asked, half-raising the gun. "Use the cannon in the car,
shoot
them,
kill
them."

"Lady Anne," Raj said desperately: how to explain to someone with no experience of actual combat?
Although her instincts can't be faulted, certainly
.
"My lady, that cannon, it won't depress . . . bend down, enough to hit the floor at all. And once we've blocked the main entrances to the Tower, when they come through the floor they'll do it a hundred strong or more we couldn't . . ." He held up a hand. "Wait. Wait. There is a way." He looked over at the arc lights that could flood the larger rooms with the extra light needed for spectacle.

Hope blossomed on Barholm's face as he explained, and an avidness on Anne's. Raj kept his own as impersonal as a machine; his mind also, focusing on the means and not what they would do.

"Come on, Gerrin," he said after Barholm nodded furiously. "We've got work to do and not much time to do it in. M'lewis, hold the fort."

The end of the pry bar struck through the bricks almost without resistance.
They must have scratched out the mortar days ago, then supported it with a circle of planks
,
Raj realized, and drew his pistol.

"Gerrin!" he shouted. "Time, Gerrin, time!"

The bricks fell downward, a circle of darkness lit by the flicker of lamps. He rested his hands on the riveted hull of the armored car and fired, the flash orange in the dim light of the subbasement. A scream from below, and the lights retreated.

"Thirty seconds more, Raj." Gerrin's voice, in the uninflected tone of a man concentrating on a task that requires mind and hands both.

"Whitehall, it's over!" Stanson's voice, and there was a thumping all around the floor, as iron beat on unweakened brick. A crack and clatter, and the bricks over another conduit gave, trembling and then falling back as the mortar went to powder.

"Raj!" Des Poplanich's voice, desperately earnest. "I don't want you hurt; nobody will be hurt, but you
mustn't
be, you
belong
with us, not that murdering usurper Clerett."

"Whitehall, don't worry, we
need
you," Stanson continued. "Everyone's agreed you get the Field Force command on the western border, for as long as you want it." More hammering, and the grinding sound of brick shifting. "Nobody can say you didn't go the second kilometer for your oath, Whitehall, but it's
over
."

Raj thought he heard a reluctant admiration in the other man's voice, impossible to tell whether it was for Raj's courage or the skill he had used to deceive.

"Raj, it's done," Gerrin said.

He fired again, and both men broke for the ladder; the trapdoor tumbled back, and so did a servant who dropped the marble statuette in his hands with a shriek at the sight of Raj's face, streaked with oil and sweat.

"Just what I need, to be brained by a fucking butler," he snarled, as Gerrin rolled out of the entrance. The clatter of bricks below gave way to the stamp of men's feet, the sound of the steel butt-plate of a rifle ringing off the armored car's hull.

Have to get them into position
,
Raj thought. He fired through the trapdoor, and a huge volley answered it; there must be a hundred men or more below, all the troops Stanson and the other conspirators could trust to actually do the deed and not just accept the results. They would be the core of the plot; he could hear Stanson's voice, Des Poplanich's, others with Messerclass accents. Boots kicked aside brass shell casings.

"Messer," somebody said below. "There's something funny here. . . . I think this is a siphon—"

"Ser?" M'lewis asked from across the room. His hand was on the knife-switch of the arc lights, the one that lit the subbasement below. Supernal light from the glowing ceiling shone on his gold teeth, on the feral tension in his eyes.

Gerrin's gaze met his commander's, holding an identical distaste. Raj straightened. It was his decision, his responsibility.

"Now," he said. M'lewis threw the switch. Current surged, through the power leads and into the great barrel Raj and his Companion had tipped on its side, filled with the coal-oil fuel of the armored car, backed with a powder charge from the ammunition of its cannon. The improvised flame fougasse sprayed across the men packed beneath the trapdoor.

Suzette— 
 

observe. 
 

—and the troopers of the 2nd were sitting outside the door of the apartments, hands sullenly on their necks as the panels swung wide and she flung herself toward him—

—and the first volley from the men he led caught the 2nd's men in the back as they sniped at the barricade of furniture inside the apartments, and Foley was grinning as he rose from behind it, Muzzaf by his side and Suzette was pushing between them, her face lighting as she saw—

probability of harm to lady Whitehall too slight for meaningful calculation.
Was there a tinge of mercy in the implacable voice?

Raj opened his eyes again. Barholm Clerett was standing, shaking his fists in the air; the fear was gone from his face, leaving a triumph that was far less pleasant to see. Lady Anne was by his side, reaching out one hand to touch him as if he was a talisman.

"I will rule the world, all of it,
all
of it, the Spirit of Man has decreed it."

Yes, thought Raj sickly. And I'm sworn to conquer it for him. May my soul find mercy.

"My lord," he said, "we'd better go upstairs. This floor will probably collapse."

Even with the trapdoor closed, the screams were quite audible.

"Raj?" Thom muttered. Then, slightly shocked: "Raj!"

The two young men stared at each other for a moment. Raj Whitehall felt his skin ridging in horror;
nothing
had changed here in nearly two years. Nothing at all since that moment when Thom Poplanich had frozen into immobility in the round mirrored room that was the body of the being that called itself Sector Command and Control Unit AZ12-b14-c000 Mk. XIV. Thom still had the unhealed shaving nick on his thin olive cheek, the tear in his floppy tweed trousers made by a ricochet when Raj tried to shoot his way out with his ceremonial revolver. Whereas for Raj . . . a
lifetime.
Thom had remained here; Center had sent Raj Whitehall out to be its agent in the fallen world.

"Raj, you're—"

"Older. Two years older. Everyone's older except you, Thom," Raj said gently, forcing calm into his voice.

He had been forcing calm ever since he made himself go down once more into the catacombs beneath the East Residence. This place was something that did not belong in the prosaic world, in the one thousand one hundred and fifth year of the Fall. Forcing himself not to run at the remembered scent, the absolute neutrality of filtered air, like nothing else in the world . . . The eerie not-floor that somehow supported him without touching his bootsoles, the perfect mirror of the walls that reflected one thing and not another. His hand clutched the grip of his five-shot revolver, not for any good the weapon might do but for the comfort of the honest iron and wood.

This was where his life had changed twenty months ago; the shock in Thom's eyes made him aware of it again, that and the fresh-faced youthfulness of the friend who had been older and wiser and more knowing in the ways of the City. Raj brought up an image of himself as he had been, and as he was: still tall and raw-boned, 190 centimeters, broad-shouldered and long-limbed. The brown, high-cheeked, hook-nosed face was more lined now, and there was something in the eyes . . . .

"What's happened to me?" Thom asked shakily.

"Nothing. Center is—"

thom poplanich has had access to all knowledge in the human universe as of the fall of the Federation,
Center said in a slightly waspish mental voice; there was no tone to it, but there was some inner equivalent of inflection, in addition, he has the services of a Sector Command and Control Unit AZ12-b14-c000 Mk. XIV to guide him through it. surely this is more than nothing. 

"That's right," Thom said, some of the tension easing out of his voice; he licked his lips, and Raj wordlessly handed over his canteen. His friend uncorked it and drank gratefully; it was water cut one-quarter with wine and a slice of lime thrown in. Raj had come properly prepared this time; just a pistol for the rats and native spersauroids, a rope and an old jacket.

"That's right, it's been showing me. . . . Raj, what's happened to Bellevue since we lost FTL travel is like a scale model of what happened to the Federation—"

Thom was never religious before,
Raj thought. In fact, Thom had scoffed at his friend's simple belief in the Holy Federation, and the scriptural tales of the days before the Fall from the Stars, when all men were one with the Spirit and there was neither poverty nor age nor death. Now he talked of ancient things as if they were as real and tangible as the prosaic modern world of gaslights and carriages.