“Ivan!” This was one Voice that seemed unapologetically glad to find him; Gregor’s embrace was sincere. “They told me you were drawn up from the tomb alive, but I had to see for myself. Lady Tej. I’m so glad.” He bowed over her hand; she managed a reasonably graceful obeisance.
His eye fell on Simon, watching this with his mouth gone wry. “And Simon. What the hell?” The Why was I blindsided? look was very clear in the emperor’s eye, which Ivan could only be grateful was not turned on him. Yet.
Simon gave him a beleaguered head tilt. “You know that long lunch appointment I made with you for tomorrow?”
“Yes…?”
“I should have made it for yesterday.”
Gregor accepted this with an extremely provisional nod. “We’ll discuss that. Later.”
Gregor’s gaze swept over the disrupted landscape. “General Allegre…” Allegre steeled himself. “Good work.” The general let out a pent breath as Gregor went on, “I’d like to have a personal word with your commander of engineers, if you please.”
Allegre went over to the command post and fetched the man, who’d been directing the platoon of engineers spread all over the site through the portable comconsoles there. Ivan recognized him; Colonel Otto, one of the top men in the Vorbarr Sultana local command. Like Galeni, he had a doctorate tucked away under his military rank. He, too, was in uniform-sensible black fatigues under his greatcoat, with proper engineering mud splashed about, thick on his engineer’s boots. He accepted his emperor’s personal congratulations on his night’s work with a pleased but slightly distracted expression.
Released from the Imperial Attention, Otto took Ivan aside. “Vorpatril. What can you tell me about this so-called Mycoborer shit we’re dealing with? That woman, Star, wasn’t too helpful.”
“It eats big holes right through dirt. Branching semi-randomly. I think it turns the inorganics into its tunnel walls, but I’m not sure. You need to catch up with Lady ghem Estif, before noon by preference, and don’t let her snow you-requisition a high-powered biologist from the Imperial Science Institute when you go. She has more samples-be sure to confiscate them and get them into the hands of the I.S.I. As a construction application, it could be worth millions.”
“As a tool? Or as a weapon?”
Ivan sighed. “As a tool-it needs development. As a weapon-it seems good to go. But you really need the I.S.I. boffins on it.”
Otto’s mouth twisted up in joyless understanding.
Allegre, his hand to his earbug, trod over to them. “Otto. There’s a Captain Roux at the security perimeter, one of your boys. Do you need him now?”
The new security perimeter, added due to Gregor’s, Ivan hoped temporary, complicating presence. Gregor was over having some possibly-stern words with Simon and Lady Alys; Tej was listening intently, and putting in a brave gloss now and then.
“Yes, I do! Let him through,” said Otto.
If mud made the engineer, Roux had to be some sort of boy genius, Ivan thought, as the captain cruised up and quickly dismounted from a float bike. Otto looked merely artistically flecked, by comparison. The salutes exchanged between Roux and his superior were almost as perfunctory as those of ImpSec analysts, as they got down quickly to business. Gregor, noting this arrival, strolled near enough to eavesdrop, but not enough to force an interruption.
“We finally traced that damned storm sewer, Colonel,” Roux reported, slightly out of breath. “It empties into the river about a kilometer below the Star Bridge. It was blocked way the hell up; but it became unblocked in a hurry about an hour ago. We lost our remote probe-swept out in the mudflow. Thank God we hadn’t sent any men in yet. We were estimating efflux at one to three cubic meters a second.”
Allegre, coming over in time to hear the tail end of this, said, “One to three cubic meters a minute are going to drain the water backup fairly quickly, yes?”
Roux glanced up, took in the eye-pins and the general’s rank tabs, and managed a normal salute, courteously returned. “Not per minute, sir. Per second. And not rainwater. Mud. It’s like-it’s like a mud cannon. The stream was still shooting straight out about ten meters before it arced into the river, when I left.”
Gregor, edging closer at this fascinating word-picture, stopped and looked at something across the street, his head tilting slightly.
Allegre’s brow wrinkled. “So where is it all coming from?”
“That’s a good question, and we’ll address ourselves to it as soon as we’ve dealt with your last five urgent requests, General,” said Colonel Otto, looking harassed. “Now, if you’ll just let my people get on with their jobs…”
“Guy,” called Gregor, still staring. “Has ImpSec HQ always been sort of…tilted up on one side? Or is that an optical illusion?”
Allegre looked around; his gaze grew arrested.
Gregor went on, uncertainly, “I’d not seen it before from this angle of view. Maybe it’s just more of Dono Vorrutyer’s subtle disproportions devised from his cracked theories on the psychology of architecture.”
Ivan wheeled around as well. So did everyone else. Simon, Alys clutching his arm, and Tej came over to Ivan’s side.
Ivan blinked. He squinted. Gregor wasn’t wrong; the left side of ImpSec building did look slightly higher than the right. Or…the right side lower than the left…?
In the courtyard, visible through the open iron gates, a lone cobblestone erupted out of its matrix and bounced, clacking. In a moment, a few more followed, looking and sounding like popcorn just starting to pop. Big, granite chunks of popcorn. A soldier crossing the courtyard yelped and dodged this unexpected, knee-capping bombardment.
A loud crack; a visible fissure propagated up the unclimbable front steps, zigzagging. With a horrible, grinding shriek, the bronze doors topping the high front steps twisted slightly apart.
“What the hell…?” said Allegre, starting forward.
Otto grabbed his arm and held him back. “Wait, sir…!”
“Oh, it’s straightening up,” said Tej. “Or…not…”
“No…” said Otto, his engineer’s eye sweeping the crenellated roofline. “The other side is sinking. Too.”
From both side doors, an efflux of men in green uniforms began, at a rate, Ivan guessed, of about a cubic meter a second.
“They’re leaving their posts?” said Allegre, caught somewhere between approval and anguish.
Simon, his teeth pressed into his lower lip, released the stress to say, “At a guess, those would be the fellows who grew up in earthquake country, Guy.” And after another minute, under his breath, as the evacuation continued more sporadically, “The ones still inside, you’ll want to commend. The ones outside, those are the ones I’d promote…”
Allegre moved away, speaking harshly into his pickup, pausing to listen to his earbug. Colonel Otto, after one more wild-eyed stare, ran for his bank of comconsoles.
Simon’s lips parted and his eyes grew big as the building continued, very slowly, to sink. It went as a unit, nothing collapsing; old Dono-the-Architect had been deranged, not incompetent. But inexorably, in the course of the next ten minutes, in a silence only broken by under-voiced swearing nearby and a few cries from beyond the spike-topped walls, its first story was entirely swallowed by the earth. The bronze doors hit ground level and kept going. The frieze of pressed gargoyles above them sank from view as if being dragged down to their old hell. The descent finally slowed at a point where occupants on the third floor could have stepped out of their windows to the ground, if there had been any windows. A few men rappelled off the roof, instead.
“Well,” said Gregor, in a choked voice. “There’s…a surprise.”
A startling cackle broke from Simon’s lips. He clapped a hand over his mouth, and managed in a more measured voice, “My God, I hope no one has been injured.” Except then he cackled again, louder. Lady Alys gripped his arm in worry.
Gregor’s fretful armsmen finally managed to drag him away from this riveting show and back to his groundcar. Surrounded by its black-and-silver-clad outriders, it rose on its fans and slowly pulled away. Ivan thought he saw a familiar face pressed to the canopy, looking backward in still-stunned fascination, as it rounded the corner on the route back to the Residence.