“They haven’t gone through,” Adam said in astonishment. “What the hell are they waiting for? They’ve only got forty minutes left before the wormhole cycle ends.”

“Stig,” Bradley said. “It has to be. He’s stalled them somehow.”

The drones were close enough now to pick out individual humans on the ground. Five people in pressure suits were clustered right in front of the force field. There was a lot of encrypted signal traffic between them and the trucks.

“We’ve got a chance,” Adam said. “Wilson, circle us around. Everyone on the drop combat team, stand by.”

Wilson was sure he could hear cheering from the top deck as he altered the Carbon Goose’s flight path by a couple of degrees. He felt like joining in. Oscar was grinning sinfully beside him. Anna put her arms around his shoulders and delivered a happy kiss.

A camera in the lower cargo deck showed him ten armored figures making their way slowly back toward the rear door as it opened again. Cat’s Claws and the Paris team were all in the same kind of suit, while the four Guardians who’d joined them were in the best marque aggressor suit available on the black market.

“Rather them than me,” Oscar said. “Did you access Gore Burnelli’s little drop into Park Avenue? That assassin was in bad shape when he hit.”

“The navy suits are up to it,” Wilson said. “I remember the specs we drew up. And Adam wouldn’t let his people take part unless he was confident.”

“Here’s hoping.”

Wilson raised their altitude by another hundred fifty meters. The cliff that surrounded the vast island was over a hundred meters high in places. He’d navigated blind before—yeah right, three hundred fifty years ago—and the golden rule was always give yourself enough leeway in enemy territory. The Carbon Goose avionics had an excellent inertial navigation system, but it was hardly designed with this kind of stunt in mind.

He switched off all the internal lights, including the cockpit. “One minute till we reach the shoreline,” he told everyone.

Oscar removed the optical limiter from the windshield, and Wilson switched his retinal inserts to full light amplification. “I think I see the cliff.”

Red warning icons appeared in the plane’s navigation function section.

“It doesn’t like where we are,” Oscar growled. “That makes two of us.”

Wilson’s virtual hands moved to disengage the warnings. He’d eliminated three of them when the Carbon Goose’s radar switched on. “Shit!” Its return image swept across half of his virtual vision, splashing a green and purple portrait of the sea and the approaching cliff face. “Anna, kill the fucking radar. Shoot it if you have to.”

It took her several seconds to shut down the power, then load a series of restrictions into the ground collision safeguard programs that were monitoring the flight.

“Goddamnit,” Wilson spat as they swept in over the crumpled rock. “Adam, they know we’re here; the son of a bitch autopilot switched on the radar. I’m sorry. Do you want to abort?”

“Not an option,” Morton said. “Hold her steady, Wilson, we’re jumping.”

Wilson pressed his hands hard against the console, putting pressure on the i-spots as if that alone would keep the massive plane on course.

“They’ve gone,” Adam said. “Get us the hell out of here.”

Wilson banked the Carbon Goose sharply to starboard, curving them back around to head out to sea again. Behind them, ten armor suits plummeted through the freezing night air at terminal velocity.

***

The baby sneekbot slowly picking its way undetected along the parapet of Market Wall was designed to resemble a cockroach. It worked with five siblings who networked their respective sensor types and relayed the results back to a pack-governor disguised as a rat, which in turn transmitted the data to the operator a safe distance away. They were built by the McSobel clan, who wrapped a plyplastic body around a bioneural array supplied by the Barsoomians. Over eighty of them were scanning First Foot Fall Plaza for the Guardians, providing a reasonably comprehensive image of what the Institute was up to.

As the warm afternoon rolled on they watched the curved rank of parked Range Rover Cruisers in front of the gateway. There were no other vehicles in 3F Plaza. Several squads of Institute troops lounged around in the shade of the awnings set up along the base of the wall, helping themselves to the contents of the abandoned cafés. Just after two o’clock the gateway opened, its pearly force field turning funereal as it exposed the night of Half Way. A couple of people in pressure suits went through.

“Nobody else is moving around there,” Stig said as he reviewed the images. He and Olwen had set up a temporary command post in the Ballard Theater, three kilometers east of 3F Plaza. They’d chosen it because it had a glass-walled rooftop restaurant, which gave them an excellent vantage point out across the city. It also made Stig feel exposed. He switched between the sneekbots and simple eyeball observation, looking out at the blimpbots that were circling the city like fat impatient sharks.

On any normal day, someone would have noticed the twenty-two dark shapes keeping their distance as they went around and around in sedate procession at an unusually low altitude. So far no one had called the aerodrome to ask what was happening. People were too busy either staying at home, intimidated by the police patrols escorted by the Institute’s Range Rover Cruisers, or causing a lot of trouble for those same patrols. Several crowds had gathered on the larger streets, to fling bottles and stones every time they saw a police car.

The Institute didn’t seem to care much, unless anyone started protesting along their clear route out of the city to Highway One; then the troops cracked down hard without any pretense of involving the police. It made it difficult to get the Guardians’ snipers into position. Stig was still trying to infiltrate three teams to fix booby traps to the road. The route that the Institute had cleared used the Tangeat bridge over the Belvoir River. That was his main priority for the booby traps. It was clearly a high-rated concern with whoever was commanding the Institute troops; there were nine Range Rover Cruisers parked on the bridge, their sensors scanning the water below.

“It has to be this cycle,” Olwen said. “They wouldn’t expend this much effort otherwise.”

“Right.” Stig looked out across the rooftops again. Away to the south, another blimpbot was gliding smoothly over Highway One. The faint pink overlay graphic supplied by his virtual vision showed it was one of the six bomb carriers. “I’ve got to change that holding pattern. The Institute’s going to notice them if they keep flying over Highway One like that.”

“Okay,” Olwen said. She knew how pointless it was to argue when his nerves produced that much determination in his voice.

Stig sat at one of the tables and lit a cigarette. He pulled down some smoke, then started opening secure links to the blimpbots. Instead of chasing one big circle around Armstrong City, he split them into two groups, and circled one to the east, and one to the west. North, of course, was the sea. If they all clustered out there, they’d certainly be noticed and queried.

It took nearly two hours and eleven cigarettes before he was satisfied they were all locked into their new holding patterns. The wind was starting to blow in from the North Sea, which gave the blimpbots’ fans extra work to hold them on course. Stig didn’t like the look of the clouds that were scudding in from the horizon; they were getting progressively darker. He knew Armstrong City’s weather well enough by now to recognize when it was going to rain.

An hour later, the first drops of water were hitting the restaurant’s green-tinted glass. They kept the lights off as the sky darkened outside.

“This could complicate things,” he said. “Water adds a lot of weight to the blimpbots. They shouldn’t fly low altitude in the rain.”