The scene riveted her. She couldn’t afford that. She opened another eye. The stairwell. Doc, Ish, and Noriko were there; incongruously, Ish was the one of the three carrying an autogun. “Doc, they’re in the lab.”
“We’re on our way.”
Gaby switched away from him. She flickered as fast as she could among all the viewers of Doc’s system, channel-surfing. Smoke, rotorkite, two garage views, Athelstane’s men racing up the stairs, elevator interior, ropes swinging by in the cloud-dark skies outside the Monarch Building—
She froze in sudden confusion. Something was very wrong.
Harris fired a long burst into the smoke. His Klapper autogun seized up. Alastair had warned him that the complex weapons were prone to do that. He cursed and yanked the bolt back. A deformed brass casing resisted him, then popped free of the chamber. He pulled the bolt the rest of the way back and released it, racking another cartridge into place, then raised the gun and fired again, blindly. No friends were set up ahead of him—he could only hit enemies.
Gunfire hit the front of his table. He crouched down and waited for the lethal rain to end.
The fear was there again, but it didn’t cripple or slow him. It no longer embarrassed him.
He heard a sudden whirring and felt the air pressure change. Welthy had activated the air-blowers from her position.
There was a sudden crackle of electricity. Harris faintly heard something—bootheels, he thought—banging the wood floor. He smiled. One of the intruders had to have charged up to a table in the first row and touched it . . . and been felled by the electrical current coursing through it. The outermost of the traps Doc had arranged for the lab.
Gaby flicked back to the last of the confusing views. Ropes dangling outside one of the ledge cameras. The south—she could tell by the buildings in the distance. The same facing as the laboratory.
She switched to the lab view. It was all smoke and gunfire. She shouted Harris’ name but there was no answer.
Stairwell views. Nobody was visible in the east; Athelstane’s force must be beyond the viewer, perhaps already to the doors leading into the hallway. But in the west view she saw Ixyail and then Alastair flit by and out of frame. “Alastair!”
She waited a long, breathless moment, then Alastair came back into view. “Gaby, there’s no time—”
“Tell Doc there are ropes outside the building. From above. Something’s going on out there.”
Alastair turned. Doc came back into view. “I hear you,” he said. “Tell Athelstane he’s on his own. We’re going back up to the hangar. We’ll go up on the roof to have a look.”
She switched back to the east stairwell—or tried to. The eye there stubbornly resisted her. Why?
Back to the elevator interior, then the main garage view. She’d seen Fergus disable both cameras. Now they worked again. Why?
Either they fixed themselves, not likely, or Duncan had arranged for them to come back on. Meaning that he needed them.
He had to be using them. Maybe just the way Gaby was. Exposed to the grim world’s uses of communications gear and surveillance equipment, Duncan must have figured out how to do artificially what she did naturally. That probably accounted for the viewers she couldn’t peer through; he had to be using them just then.
So it was up to her to stop him.
Time to die.
Fergus lashed out with his elbow and took Dominguez in the throat, under the mask.
Dominguez fell back against the wall. Fergus wrenched the magical rifle out of his hands and shot him with it, a short burst to the face, where his grimworld armor would not protect him. The rifle kicked less than an autogun.
Costigan and the others looked at him in slow-motion surprise.
Fergus held the trigger down and traversed the weapon left to right, firing low, at thighs and knees. Costigan shrieked and fell backwards, his legs ruined. On the floor, he kept yelling as he bled. Another man joined him. Four men left.
Barrels swung in Fergus’ direction, so slow, so slow. He traversed the weapon right to left and continued firing. Two more collapsed. Two got behind cover, one behind the stairwell door, one leaping to take cover behind a hallway bench.
The man at the stairway leaned into view and brought his rifle up. Fergus aimed the roaring weapon at him. Bullets took the man in the chest, where the armor protected him, but sheer impact was enough; he fell back anyway.
The magical rifle ran dry. Fergus dropped it. It took forever to fall.
The man behind the bench brought his own weapon up. Fergus spread his arms wide as if to embrace him, as if to welcome the bullets.
Something dark appeared on the gunman’s forehead and his head jerked back. His rifle fired a short burst into the ceiling. He fell forward onto the bench.
Someone behind Fergus was shouting, “Hold your fire, it’s Fergus.” Lieutenant Athelstane, an automatic pistol in hand, moved past Fergus, not glancing at him. He waved men past. They charged forward to flank the lab doors just as Costigan’s men had done. “Fergus, are you hit?”
Fergus only understood that his name had been spoken. That no more bullets were coming.
He looked down at himself. There was no blood. He felt a vague sense of disappointment.
He fainted, following his rifle to the floor.
Joseph batted the table. It took no more effort than swatting a fly. More than a manweight of hardwood and lab equipment flew out of his way, leaving nothing between him and the grimworld mercenary.
The man fired at him with another of those hurtful rifles. Joseph felt the bullets tear into him. Enough damage and he knew that he might die.
But they had done nowhere near enough.
He grabbed the barrel and yanked. The man, trying hard to hold on, came off his feet, then fell to his knees as the weapon was wrenched from his grip.
The air was starting to clear. He liked that. Seeing the enemy was much better than groping around blindly for him. He tossed the gun aside.
Joseph picked the man up around the torso. He squeezed—carefully, carefully. The man’s air emerged in a helpless gasp. When Joseph felt the ribs begin to give, he let go. The man hit the lab floor and lay still.
Beyond, Joseph saw Novimagos guardsmen appear in the doorway. They pointed rifles and autoguns at the intruders. Lieutenant Athelstane shouted, “Surrender or we open fire!”
The three men not already felled by bullets, electrical traps, or Joseph’s bear hugs looked back at the guns aimed their way. They carefully set their assault rifles aside and raised their hands.
Gaby opened the eye into the hangar.
There was nothing going on there. She prepared to switch views again.
But she saw the ceiling shudder and a hole open in it. A trail of fire stretched to the floor, leaving a silvery missile driven into the concrete.
Black paint issued from the missile, spraying out in a sloppy circle.
Gaby smiled. The missile had landed on the brown paper covering one of the conjurer’s circles. Doc had explained their purpose to her and the others: the circles waited to be struck with energies unique to displacement, summoning. Such power would fuel their counter-devisements, which would exert power over whatever appeared within them, damaging the sturdy, twisting the living. Meaning that anything that appeared within them would be racked with pain, helpless and useless.
The paint circle sprayed by the missile overlapped two of Doc’s defensive conjurer’s circles. Gaby watched as the missile’s second tier of sprayers laid down the crude symbols just within the ring.