Ivan had his target all picked out, the big bastard who’d stolen his stunner. The man tightened his finger on the trigger and fanned the room; nothing happened, except for Ivan hitting him with all the force of his full weight in launch mode and knocking him back through the doorway. The fellow was strong and nasty and…kind of slow, compared to Ivan’s usual sparring partners. Some knuckles to his windpipe, a few nerve jabs; Goon Two willingly gave up the useless stunner to Ivan’s wresting fingers in order to gather himself for a lunge that would put his outweighed opponent on the bottom of the pile, and was thoroughly, if briefly, surprised when the stun beam hit his head at point-blank range instead.
Ivan pushed himself up, breathing, well, not too hard-it was more the adrenaline than the exertion-to find Tej looking down at him with vast approval. The metal bar gripped in her hand was redundant to need, but might have proven a very well-chosen accessory to a Vor lady’s evening garb. He grinned back in sudden exhilaration. His filter mask had been torn off in the struggle; he didn’t bother to try to reaffix it.
“And you said you were just a desk pilot,” murmured Tej.
“But it’s a Barrayaran desk,” he murmured back, and scrambled to his feet. Together, they looked over Ivan’s victim, lying on his back with his legs bent over the jagged doorway. They each took an ankle and dragged him through into the chamber, and out of the path; Tej did not concern herself unduly with his head thumping over the lintel, Ivan was proud to note.
“That was either really brave or really stupid,” said Tej, her admiration tinged by faint doubt, “jumping him unarmed like that.”
Ivan was tempted to claim the first, but was afraid of being tarred with the second. Sheepishly, he admitted the truth instead: “Neither. I could see he had filched my stunner. It’s one of the new issue, with the personally-coded grips. Only the upper ranks have theirs so far. They’re still arguing over whether to give them to the grunts or not.”
“Oh, good,” said Udine in passing. “You mother told me she didn’t think you could be an idiot.”
Imola and his other partner had been overpowered and disarmed. Imola was still whimpering from his contact with the force-field. It must have been just like running up against a really big shock-stick. Driven by a really angry haut woman. Her teeth bared and tight, Lady ghem Estif turned off her antique biotainer field again; with a last blurt of protest, it powered down.
Pidge, now in possession of one of the other stunners, bent to give the struggling Goon One, whom Emerald and Amiri together were barely holding down, a buzz to the back of his neck; he jerked and lay still. Em and Amiri then combined to haul up the shaking older man that Tej had named Imola and push him to the wall.
“I’d be delighted to test the Mycoborer on him,” said Lady ghem Estif in a precisely measured voice, “but I suspect the results would be too slow. Perhaps I can find something faster downstairs.”
“No need,” said Shiv, padding closer to this old friend-enemy. “We’ll do something lower tech.”
Imola watched Shiv approach him with fearful fascination; he realized his new mistake when the taller Udine whirled, grabbed him by the neck, lifted him off his feet, and pressed him to the wall with all her half-haut strength.
“ Where are my children, you worthless sack of greed? ”
“ Glp! ” he replied, eyes bulging.
Shiv’s voice in his other ear dropped to a tiger’s purr. “Star, Jet, Rish. You have to have passed them, coming in. What did you do with them?”
Ah, a quick round of good-Cordonah-bad-Cordonah, Ivan recognized. Or bad-Cordonah-worse-Cordonah. He suspected the roles were interchangeable between the two at need. He wouldn’t have interfered for worlds.
“How many more men do you have out there?” Shiv continued.
Udine permitted Imola a breath of air. Prudently, he used the exhalation to gasp, “Only saw one! Tall girl!”
She waited a little, and permitted him another.
“Really! M’boys took her down-put her in the van!”
Another long pause.
“Four, waiting on stragglers! Crossfire, no escape!”
Udine, after another pause that Imola no doubt found quite lengthy, let him drop. He crumpled to the floor, frantically rubbing his neck.
“If that’s so,” said Em in doubt, watching all this, “where are Jet and Rish?”
Tej’s hand had found Ivan’s, during this show; it tightened in alarm.
“And how do we get out, if they’re laying for us at the only exit?” asked Amiri a bit plaintively.
“Oh,” said Shiv sadly, “I imagine all we have to do is sit down and wait a bit. Ivan Xav’s stepda will be along. To collect on his bet.” He added after a tight-jawed moment, “ Dammit. We were so close.”
“Who the hell is Ivan Xav?” said Imola, clearly bewildered by these additions to the play-list. “Or his stepda?”
Ivan hunkered down in front of the man. “I am,” he told Imola, with false geniality. “My stepda used to run that big building”-not being quite sure how the lab was turned in relation to ImpSec HQ, or which side the erratic Mycoborer had put them in on, Ivan made his wave vague but generally upward-“full of humorless men whom everybody but you has gone to great pains to not attract. But that’s all right. I’m sure you’ll be getting to know them really well, really soon. And vice versa.”
Ivan thought Imola had processed the ImpSec is coming for you part of this, which really wasn’t much of a stretch at this point, but not the rest. He stared at Ivan in personal bewilderment, then back at Shiv.
“In that case,” he croaked, “maybe we should team up again, huh?”
Shiv just snorted.
“I don’t know, Dada,” said Pidge, tapping the captured stunner thoughtfully in her palm. “Perhaps we should reexamine our op-”
It felt as if a giant’s hands had cupped Ivan and pressed inward at all points at once. He didn’t exactly hear the boom, because his hearing had gone wonky in that instant, but he felt it in his bones. Tej may have yelped; in any case, her mouth moved.
Ivan fell back on his butt. A couple of cases thudded to the floor, knocked off their stacks.
And it was over.
All the Arquas were working their jaws, trying to get their eardrums to pop back. Imola cried, in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from a great distance, “What the hell was that?”
Ivan climbed back up as far as his knees. “Sergeant Abelard’s time bomb,” he managed to get out, over the ringing and hissing and rumbling, most but worryingly not all of which seemed to be coming from inside his own head. “Running thirty-five years late.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Tej drew breath against the appalling concussion that had seemed for a moment to crush her lungs, and pushed herself upright from the stack of cases she’d stumbled against. She braced for an aftershock. But except for the humming in her ears, only silence came from the dark, open doorway into the tunnel.
“ Rish. Jet!” she gasped, and bolted for the aperture. She held up her cold light, making dull gleams race over the uneven black walls, and ran down the slope. Around the first, or last, bend.
Behind her, she could hear Ivan Xav’s strained shout, “Tej, no!” and the thump of heavy, slippered feet. She didn’t look back.
She dodged through the kink. Another straight, descending stretch. The next kink. She was almost back to the storm sewer pipe; the breach and the bomb hadn’t been much beyond that. What if Rish and Jet were trapped under some fall of dirt, tons of dirt, like the poor sergeant? Could they dig them out before they suffocated-if they weren’t crushed already-and were there any tools back in the lab for-she skidded to a halt.
Filling the tunnel before her feet was a flat stretch of roiling, dark water. The downward slant of the tunnel, here, brought the roof to its level; the water lapped at the tunnel top. A sort of water seal-she could not make out any dirt- or rock-fall beyond it. Though the blast must have both broken open and collapsed the pipe, to dam and back its flow up into the Mycoborer maze. She put one foot into the icy water. How deep did it go? Could she swim through to the other side-or was there no other side, the tunnel over there flattened?