Venera didn’t hide her disappointment. “Tell me where the rest of the prisoners are or I’ll blow your head off,” she told the guard. She had him on his knees with his face pressed against the wall, her pistol at the back of his head. “Bear in mind,” she added, “that we’ll find them ourselves if we have to, it’ll just take longer. What do you say?”
He proceeded to give a detailed account of the layout of the tower, including where the night watch was stationed and when their rounds were. So far Venera hadn’t seen any sign of watchmen; for a nation gearing up for war, Sacrus seemed extremely lax. She said so and her prisoner laughed, a tad hysterically.
“Nobody’s ever gotten in or out of here,” he mumbled against the plaster. “Who would break in? And from where?” He tried unsuccessfully to shake his head. “You people are insane.”
“A common enough trait in Spyre,” she sniffed. “Your mistake, then.”
“You don’t understand,” he croaked. “But you will.”
She had already noted that he wore armor that was light and utilitarian, and his holstered weapons had been similarly simple. This functionalism, which contrasted dramatically with the outlandish costumes of most of her people, made her more uneasy about Sacrus’s abilities than anything he’d said.
They spent some time trying to get more out of him and his companion. Neither they nor the prisoners they spoke to knew what Sacrus’s plan was—only that a general mobilization was underway. The prisoners themselves were from all over the principalities; some had recently gone missing within Spyre itself.
“They’re enough evidence to haul Sacrus before the high court on crimes against the polity,” crowed Bryce. “If we can just get some of these people out of here.”
Venera shook her head. “They may be enough to get the rest of Spyre up in arms. But until we can come up with a decent plan for getting them out alive, they’re safer where they are. Let them loose now and they’ll give us away, and probably try to run the gauntlet of machine guns and barbed wire on their way to the outer walls. At least let’s find them some weapons and a direction to run in.”
Bryce and Thinblood exchanged glances. Then Bryce quirked his irritating smile. “I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s strike a compromise…”
There were plenty of cells in the block, but Garth was in none of them. While Venera searched for him, Thinblood took the bulk of the team to look for the night watch. Nearly fifteen minutes had passed before he reappeared.
Thinblood was jubilant. “Both floors are secure,” he said. “We left the watchmen in a closet we found. And my welder has sealed off the main doors and a side entrance. He’s a model of efficiency, that one.”
Bryce put a hand on Venera’s arm. “Your man doesn’t seem to be here. We have to look to our other objectives.”
She shrugged him off, gritting her teeth so as not to snap some withering retort. “All right, then,” she said. “There’s more to this tower upstairs. Let’s find out what Sacrus is up to.”
The next floor was different. Here the velvet-covered walls and darkness gave way to marble and bright, annoyingly uneven electric light. Venera heard the sound of voices and chatter of a mechanical typewriter coming from an open door about thirty feet to the left. Crouching under the lee of the steps with the others, she scowled and said, “The time for subtlety may be past.”
“Wait.” Thinblood pointed the other way. Venera craned her neck and saw the heavy vault-style door even as Thinblood said, “Sacrus is reputed to keep their most secret weapons in this place. Do you think…?”
“I think I saw some of those weapons being made downstairs,” she said, thinking of the fish-tank room. “But you’re right. It’s just too tempting.” The door was surrounded by big signs saying VALID PERSONNEL ONLY, and two men with rifles slouched in front of it. “How do we get past them?”
One of Corinne’s men cleared his throat quietly. He drew something from his backpack and after a moment his companions did likewise. They strung the small compound bows with quick economical movements. Seeing this, Venera and the other leaders climbed back down and out of the way.
“Count of three,” said the man at the top. “You take the one on the right, we’ll do the one on the left. One, two—”
All four of Corinne’s soldiers jumped out of the stairwell and rolled into crouches. Their shoulder muscles creased in unison as they drew back, and Venera heard an intake of breath and “What the—” from off to the right, and then they let loose.
There was a grunt, a thud, then another. The archers whirled around, looking for another target.
The sound of typing continued.
“Take out that office,” Venera instructed the archers as she stepped into the hallway. “We’ll go for the vault.”
The heavy door had a thick glass window in it. Venera shaded her eyes with her hands and stared through for a few seconds. She whistled. “I think we’ve found the mother lode.”
The chamber beyond was large—it must take up most of this level. There were no windows, and its distant walls were draped in black like the corridors downstairs. Its brick floor was crisscrossed by red carpets; in the squares they defined, pedestals large and small stood under cones of light. Each pedestal supported some device—brass canisters here, a fluted rifle-like weapon there. Large jars full of thick brown fluid gleamed near things like bushes made of knives. There was nothing in there that looked innocuous, nothing Venera would have willingly wanted to touch. But all were on display as if they were treasures.
She supposed they were that; this might be the vault that held Sacrus’s dearest assets.
The view was obscured suddenly. Venera found herself staring into the cold gray eyes of a soldier, who mouthed something she couldn’t hear through the glass.
Deception wasn’t going to work this time. “We’ve been seen,” she said even as a loud alarm bell suddenly filled the corridor with jangling echoes.
“Can we blow this?” Thinblood was asking one of his men. The soldier shook his head.
“Not without taking time to figure out the vulnerable points… maybe doing some drilling…”
Thinblood looked at Venera, who shrugged. “It’s going to be a firefight from now on,” she said. “Better get downstairs and free those prisoners. Then we can—” Something bright and sudden flashed in her peripheral vision and there was a loud clang!
She stared in dumb surprise at the metal bars that now blocked the way to the stairwell. “Blow them!” she shouted, pulling out her preservationist-built machine-pistol. “This is no time for subtlety!”
At that moment there was an eruption of noise from the far end of the corridor. Venera dove to the floor as impacting bullets sprayed marble dust and plaster at her. The others either flattened as well or staggered back against the wall. Blood spattered over the threaded stonework.
Now a smoke grenade was tumbling toward her, each end-over-end bounce sending a gout of black into the air. It stopped just outside the bars then disappeared in a growing pyramid of darkness. Past that Venera heard shouted orders, gunshots.
“You will lie facedown on the floor and put your hands behind your necks! Anyone we do not find in that position will be shot! You have five seconds and then we will shoot everything that sticks up more than a foot off the floor.”
All she could hear after that was machine-gun fire.
The commandant held the mimeographed picture of Venera next to her head and compared the two. “You look older in real life,” he said in apparent disappointment. She glared at him but said nothing.
“Really,” he continued in apparent amazement, “what did you think you were going to achieve? Invading Sacrus? We’ve forgotten more tricks of incursion and sabotage than you people ever knew.”