"Or being driven! Joshua! Bring me the shotgun!" He turned to his companion. "You wish anything, my dear?"
Magda Schwartz pulled up her flowered print dress along her left leg and withdrew a nasty looking energy rifle from a leg holster. "Not exactly in period, but sometimes one must do what one must do."
Joshua emerged, handing a double-barrelled shotgun of the type approved by the Barnum's World gamekeepers to Macouri and then drawing his own very large pistol. It looked exactly like a large caliber projectile sidearm of the approved sort, but in reality it was a powerful tight-beam ray device that could burn a hole in a hippo at short range. Its only drawback was that its power was quite limited by the need for imitation; although he had more powerpacks in his jacket, he would have only a few seconds of sustained shooting before he'd have to manually eject the dying cartridge and insert a new one.
Georgi Macouri stared in the direction of the steadily increasing sounds and vibration and shouted over the rising noise, "Magda, what would happen if a dozen full-grown elephants hit that outer fence?"
She looked suddenly at a loss and shook her head. "I don't know. It wasn't designed for an entire herd. More worrisome is the inner grid. At that speed, while the lead couple may well be barbecued, it might displace the connector foundations and bring the whole thing down!"
Macouri looked over at Joshua. "Get most everybody out here, now! Leave somebody to look over the guests, but otherwise, emergency! And call in the aerobus!"
The sound and vibration were almost unbearable now, and there was, in addition, the cracking noises and shaking of trees just beyond their direct view, telling them that whatever was coming was almost here. They almost wished that whatever it was, in fact was already here. The suspense was worse than fighting off a threat.
A half-dozen burly gunmen burst from the lodge and began fanning out along the porch, heavy weapons in hand. They were huge brutes, heavily tattooed from head to foot, mostly dressed in work pants and sleeveless undershirts. They looked like nothing so much as a cartoon of someone's vision of an old pirate crew; one or two even had nasty-looking side swords to complement their much more modern laser pistols.
Macouri felt better just seeing them there. Any one of them could blow a couple of rampaging elephants to the next planet.
Magda Schwartz looked very nervous now, waiting for the attack to come at any moment. "Oh, and it was such a pretty morning!" she said, mostly to herself.
Joshua, the clear leader of the staff and guards, frowned suspiciously as he looked out at the trembling bush. "There's something bloody strange here," he said loudly.
"What?" Macouri shouted over the increasing din.
"I said that something's not right here, sir!" the big man shouted. "Nobody controls elephants like that except they be ridden by experts! Particularly not through that bloody swamp! It's a trick of some kind, I swear!"
At that moment, they were all knocked over as a huge blast seemed to strike the lodge from the rear, followed quickly by a series of small, sharp explosions. Instantly, a circular arc of bluish energy was formed by the security grid and seemed to pour to the rear, and there was an incredibly loud clap of thunder and the smell of ozone.
Macouri tried to pick himself off the porch and find where he'd dropped his gun. "All of you! Up and to the back!"
"No!" Schwartz screamed at them as the din of charging elephants continued. "That was the grid shorting out! We've got no security fence!"
That got everybody's attention. "Good god! We're sitting ducks out here, then!" their boss said loudly but as much to himself as to them. Finding his shotgun, he got to his feet. "Everybody spread out! Joshua! You and Spilver to the rear to see what happened! The rest of you stay at your post and be prepared to shoot anything that approaches!" He ran over and helped Schwartz to her feet. "As for us, my dear, I think we'd better retreat inside!"
She looked a bit dazed and shaken, but managed to nod, and with the help of his arm made it back inside the large lodge doors.
At the back, Joshua and the scruffier-looking but equally imposing Spilver made it to the back by opposite routes at almost the same time, weapons drawn and ready. There was nobody obviously there, but something clearly had happened. The whole rear grounds had been scoured almost as if a meteor had struck.
Going to the railing and looking down, the two guards saw a massive black basalt rock that had to weigh a ton or more sticking half in and half out of the earth. It had clearly had no problems with the outer fence and had been flung in by someone or something with enough force that it had come to rest on the anchor of the grid, and had gouged enough ground to take out the whole circular base for the entire width of the great rock. It looked scarred and now had several deep fractures, the result of both the landing and the massive energy that had come in and concentrated on it just after it had broken the plane, but it had done its job.
Joshua looked over at Spilver. "Get inside to the security console and cut the exterior power on this thing! Otherwise it could flare up at any moment and fry any of us!"
"Aye, sir!"
"And make sure the internal controls are still viable!" the big security chief added.
As Spilver ran to do his assignment, Joshua got to work with the old-fashioned kind of duty he felt most comfortable about. Calling the security people together, he positioned them around the entire lodge but on the porch, warning them not to step off until Spilver reported that it was safe to do so, and placing them in such a way that each one could see the man or woman on each side of them all the way around. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble with this, but so far they hadn't taken advantage of it. Well, let 'em come! He felt confident that his people could take anybody else human one on one, and most of them preferred it that way anyway.
Off to the east, someone quite deliberately and somewhat mockingly killed the noises of a herd of charging elephants in such a way that the sounds slowed to a stop, betraying their phony origin.
Joshua fingered his weapon and looked out at the bush. Okay, he silently called to whoever it was, you want to come to me now, come on! Even on elephants!
"Got both ferrets in," Broz reported. "One of them went in the front door with those two characters! They never looked up! Talk about roughing it! The damned lodge is even air conditioned!"
"They've still got power, then?" Maslovic asked.
"Yes, sir. Full power and water on. They've got internal security systems, too, but with all those people there they have to be on minimum."
"Still, best not to disregard them," the team leader said, both to himself and as a reminder to the others. "They're almost certainly keyed to anybody not in their data banks."
"I wouldn't worry about them too much," Broz responded. "They haven't spotted either ferret yet and they had to be easily updatable if the girls are in there, let alone anybody else." She whistled. "Quite a place in there. Not a lot of privacy, but lots of atmosphere. I'll feed it to you."
It was luxurious, all apparent hardwoods and polished floors and walls. The main living area was a single great room entered from the massive front doors, filled with antique but comfortable-looking furniture, faux wicker tables and settees, a formal dining area that could seat at least twelve, a big central fireplace that looked real but was betrayed as a simulator by the lack of an outside chimney and, along the walls, the stuffed heads of all sorts of exotic wild beasts, mounted on ornate plaques. Although large, the great room clearly wasn't as big internally as the lodge itself, and there were openings at strategic intervals for entryways into a series of surrounding rooms. Most had push-away netting over their doors, but one near the rear and behind the dining table was a true hinged double door, and next to it a window opening and ledge. Clearly that was the kitchen.