And Cinta had but one card left to play. One she had hoped not to play at all. The pyrotechnics people could assure her all they liked that nothing could go wrong. After everything else that had gone wrong today, she was in no particular mood to believe anyone.
But she didn’t have many choices left. All that was left to her was the question of timing. When would her last diversion most disrupt the opposition?
Cinta watched the chaos on the plaza, saw the robots and the Infernal humans starting to recover, and decided.
The time was now.
She pushed down the button she had been hoping not to push.
THE SKY LIT up like a thunderbolt as the barrel of cleaning fluid blazed up into the sky, a fireball that bloomed up and out from the roof of Government Tower, enveloping the robots who ringed the delivery airtruck in order to keep humans back. Bits of shrapnel from the blast filled the air, bouncing and ricocheting in all directions.
The shock wave bloomed out from the top of the tower, sending the CIP emergency team aircars tumbling out of control, a giant invisible hand that slapped at the cars, scattering them in all directions as their pilots fought to regain control.
Down on the plaza, all the robots instantly forgot all about their pursuit of the falsely injured. There were humans in immediate danger of being struck by flying debris.
Each robot dove for the closest human and wrapped itself around that person. But with the robots turning themselves into shields, and the humans being shielded whether they liked it or not, there was no one available to pursue the fleeing members of the kidnap squad. The door of the snatch car opened, and the team from the crash bus scrambled aboard.
The pilot checked her boards, then looked back toward Justen. This was the moment. If she were going to kill him to cover their escape, and prevent him from pursuing, this was the moment to do it.
Justen’s eyes widened, and he swallowed, hard. He found himself wishing he knew why Lentrall was so important. It would have been nice to know what he was dying for.
It was obvious the pilot could read it all in his eyes. Justen braced himself for the end-but the end did not come. The snatch car pilot shook her head no, back and forth, just once, very clearly and firmly. I’m not going to kill you, she was telling him, as plainly as if she were speaking.
Her blaster cannon swung away from its aim on his head and swiveled down to point at the base of Justen’s aircar. It fired twice, blowing off one landing jack and cutting the core power coupling. His car toppled over on its side as the snatch car lifted into the air and rushed for the edge of town at high speed. No craft was able to pursue them.
Gervad was hustling Justen out of the ruined aircar almost before it had finished falling, the robot’s First Law potentials pushed to new heights by the calamities he had been forced to witness. Justen did not argue. He had no desire to remain long in a vehicle with a destabilized power system.
Justen stumbled out onto the plaza. He looked behind his aircar, and saw a young-looking man, his fashionable business attire much the worse for wear, crawling out from behind the stone bench, his robot helping him get to his feet. Lentrall. Davlo Lentrall. The man at the center of this storm. The man they had come for. Whoever “they” were. The only thing Justen knew for sure about them was that they had sure as hell left a mess behind.
Justen turned and watched the snatch car as it flew toward the edge of vision and beyond. They had gotten away. But they didn’t have what they had come for.
That was some comfort, anyway.
If not much.
8
TONYA WELTON RESISTED the temptation to pick up the nearest object and throw it against the wall. She stomped back and forth across the living room of her house, watching the news reports on the chaos at Government Tower and growing angrier by the minute. She told herself it was a lucky thing Gubber wasn’t here to see her in such a state. The poor man would probably flee in fear of his life, and Tonya wouldn’t blame him. A woman capable of ordering a debacle like the Government Tower raid was capable of anything.
It was clear from the news reports that they had missed Lentrall, for all the damage they had done. The game had cost them dearly, and yet they had gained nothing by it.
The cost. That was what worried Tonya. How high would it be? When-not if, when-the CIP traced the assault back to the Settlers, there was going to be hell to pay. It might be enough to get them all thrown off the planet, which would be more than irony enough, all things considered. Tonya did not believe there would still be a living planet here after the likes of Lentrall got through with things. Tonya Welton was an expert in terraforming procedure. As part of her training, she had been required to do field studies on planets where the terraforming attempt had gone wrong-horribly wrong. She had trod the soil of a planet where someone had thought to save time and effort by dropping a comet. People who were just as sure of what they were doing as Davlo Lentrall seemed to be. She had no desire to walk through another frozen landscape littered with freeze-dried corpses.
But even with the failure of the Government Tower attempt, the situation was not yet lost. Other operations had gone more smoothly. She thought of that, and forced herself to calm down. If nothing else, the commotion at Government Tower had provided a diversion. It had kept Lentrall away from his home, and his office-and his computer files. Kept him away long enough for other Settler teams to go to work. Tonya glanced at the time display. They ought to be nearly done by now. The planning team had expected the physical target, Lentrall’s actual office, to be the easy part. All the operations team had to do was steal or destroy every piece of paper and every datapad and record cube that might have anything to do with the comet. The planners had expected the computer system to be trickier. Still, it would be doable. Other people might well have found it impossible to manipulate the university’s computer system, but it was, after all, the Settlers who had installed it.
And it was the Settlers who could wipe Davlo Lentrall’ s files clean, when they wanted to do so. And once those files were cleared, they would have lost the comet coordinates. They’d never be able to find the comet again in time.
At least she hoped so.
“I MUST ADMIT that I am growing concerned,” said Prospero, his voice a bit on edge. “This terrorist attack on Government Tower might well have some indirect causal link to us, Caliban.” The two robots, New Law and No Law, stood facing each other in an office just off an underground passageway on the outskirts of Hades. “I fear there may be consequences.”
In days gone by, they had used the semi-abandoned tunnels as hiding places, places to go when they were in fear of their lives. Now, at least for the moment, they were unhunted. They had a legal right to be in the city, with passes signed and sealed by all the pertinent authorities. They could at least in theory go anywhere in the city. In practice, there were places where the residents would not worry too much about the legal niceties. There were still robot-bashing gangs out there who had no use for New Law robots.
But for the most part, Caliban and Prospero were safe in Hades. Indeed, they had spent the morning on a number of routine errands, calling at a number of places around town to order this equipment and make that payment. In plain point of fact, Caliban had been surprised by the number of minor things Prospero had been compelled to deal with in person, and the amount of time he had taken in doing so.
But now, at long last, they were by themselves, underground. It was possible to let down their guard, just a trifle. It was a need for privacy, more than a need for survival, that brought them to this place. But still, there was no harm in precautions. The lighting, for example. The chamber was pitch-black as seen by human eyes, in visible light, but the two robots were using infrared vision, and could see each other easily.