She hit the wall a little harder this time, rekindling the ache in her left knee. For a moment she hung by her fingertips, gritting her teeth tightly as she waited for the pain to subside.
"You all right?" Akim asked softly from half a meter in front of her.
"Yeah." Pulling herself up, she rolled onto her stomach facing Akim and took the end of the cable/rope from him. "Knee got hurt in the crash and hasn't totally recovered yet. How about you?"
"Fine. Any trouble?"
"Not really," Jin replied, trying not to pant. Even before that last leap over from the housing complex, the jog from Daulo's interrogation cell with the boy in fire-carry across her shoulder had worn her out far more than it should have.
A bad sign; it implied she was getting too tired to give her servos as much of the load as they were capable of. "You were right about him being on the lowest level," she said as she began pulling Daulo up. "Obolo Nardin thoughtfully left a pair of guards outside his door to mark the spot for me."
"Did you kill them?"
Jin's cheek twitched. "I had to. One of them recognized me before I could get close enough."
Akim grunted. "They're all parties to treason. Don't forget that."
Jin swallowed. "Right. Anyway, I found Daulo Sammon strapped to a chair with a set of tubes in his arms and smoke curling around him from a censer under his chin."
"Was he alone?"
"No, but I was able to stun the interrogator without killing him. Okay, here he comes. I'll take his weight; you protect his head."
Between them, they got Daulo up on the wall, draping his limp body over it like a hunting trophy across an aircar rack. "Any idea what they might have used on him?" she asked, trying to keep the anxiety out of her voice as Akim peered closely at Daulo's slack face. The boy was so quiet...
Akim shook his head slowly. "There are too many possibilities." He took Daulo's wrist. "His heartbeat's slow, but it's steady enough. He should be able to simply sleep the drugs off."
"I hope you're right." Notching her light-amps to higher power, Jin gave the
Troft side of the compound a quick scan. "Did you see any activity over there while I was gone?"
"No. Nor on the other side, either."
Jin nodded. "Hard to believe our escape still hasn't been noticed, but I suppose we should be grateful for small favors."
Akim snorted gently. "Perhaps Obolo Nardin expected his son to disobey the order about leaving you untouched."
"You're a cheery one," Jin growled, shivering. "Well, there's no point in postponing this. Watch his head again, will you, while I flip him over the side?"
A minute later Daulo was down, half lying and half slouching at the base of the wall. "Your turn," Jin told Akim. "Don't step on him."
"I won't. How will you get down?"
She felt her stomach tighten. "I'll have to jump," she said, trying not to think about what had happened the last time she'd tried that stunt. "Don't worry, I can manage it."
Akim's eyes were steady on her. "That last jump from the housing roof-you didn't make it by very much."
"I'm just getting a little tired. Look, we're wasting time."
He gazed at her another moment, then pursed his lips and nodded. Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, he wrapped it around the cable and held on there with both hands. Rolling off the wall top, he slid down to the ground in a military-style controlled fall. Waving once to her, he knelt and began to untie
Daulo from the cable.
This is it. Dropping her end of the cable to fall beside Akim, Jin lowered herself over the edge to hang by her fingertips. Knees slightly bent, she set her teeth and let go. The ground jumped up to meet her-
And she clamped down hard on her tongue as a hot spike jabbed up through her left knee.
"Jasmine Moreau!" Akim hissed, dropping to the ground beside her.
"I'm all right," she managed, blinking back tears of pain as she lay on her back clutching her knee. "Just give me a minute."
It was closer to three minutes, in fact, before she was finally able to get to her feet again. "Okay," she breathed. If she consciously turned over to her servos the job of keeping her upright... "I'm fine now."
"I'll carry Daulo Sammon," Akim said in a voice that allowed for no argument.
"Okay by me," Jin said, wincing as she eased back down to a sitting position.
"I'll let you carry the cable, too, if you don't mind. But first we have to figure out how we're going to get into that ship."
Akim looked over at it. "Security systems?"
"Undoubtedly." Jin adjusted her enhancers to a combination telescopic/light-amp and made a slow sweep of the unloading tower nestled up to the ship's stern.
"Looks like the twin horns of a sonic motion-detector over the doorway there," she told Akim. "As well as a-let me see-yes; there's also an infrared laser sweep covering the loading ramp and a fifteen-meter wedge of ground in front of it."
"What about that one?" Akim asked, pointing at the maintenance building. "The one the craft's nose is buried in."
"Probably something similar." Jin glanced back along the wall behind them. "More motion detectors and monitor cameras over the gateway to the other half of
Mangus. A reasonably layered intruder defense."
"Can you defeat it?"
"If you mean can I destroy it, sure. But not without setting off a dozen alarms in the process."
"Well, then, what can you do?"
Jin gnawed at her lip. "It looks like our only chance will be to approach the ship from the side. If I can get on top of it, there'll probably be a way to get through the coupling between the unloading tower and the ship proper."
Akim considered that. "That almost sounds too easy. Except for a demon warrior, of course."
"No, their security wasn't planned with demon warriors in mind," Jin said dryly.
"On the other hand, they haven't been totally stupid, either. You can't see it, but for about thirty meters out from the side of the ship there's a crisscross infrared laser pattern running a few centimeters off the ground."
"Can you see it well enough?"
"Seeing it isn't what I'm worried about. The problem is that the pattern of crisscrosses changes every few seconds."
Surprisingly, Akim chuckled. "What's so funny?" Jin growled.
"Your Trofts," he said, the chuckle becoming a snort of derision. "It's nice to know they're neither omniscient nor even very clever. That laser system is a
Qasaman one."
"What?" Jin frowned.
"Yes indeed. Perhaps Obolo Nardin deliberately gave it to them to keep a little extra control over the bargain."
"Meaning there's a weakness in the system?" Jin asked, heart starting to beat a little faster.
"There is indeed." He pointed toward the ship. "The pattern changes randomly, as you noted; but there are between three and six one-meter-square places in every system of this sort where the lasers never touch."
"Really?" Jin looked back at the ship. "Doesn't that sort of negate the whole purpose?"
"There's a reason behind it," Akim said, a bit tartly. "It gives those using the system places to mount monitor cameras or remote weapons. The gaps are normally set far enough back from the edge to be useless to the average invader... but of course, you're hardly an average invader."
"Point." Bracing herself, Jin eased to her feet. A flicker of pain lanced through her knee as she did so; she tried hard to ignore it. "Okay. Wait here until you see me wave to you from the top of the tower ramp over there. Don't move until then, understand?-I don't want you wandering into range of the detectors by mistake before I figure out how to shut them down."