Lutair's magical alarms. For that might also drive him to release the monstrosity he'd created in an instant. The strike would have to be sure and swift, but that also required hours of painstaking probing, with most of the power diverted toward concealment. It would be like playing blindfold chess against a true grandmaster. The frustration of it would call for every ounce of calm, detachment, and self-control Niall could muster.
Shivering a little in the mild night air, the elf began to draw out the first glowing of power from the cauldron he carried.
The truck the orks had at their disposal pulled up at a discreet distance around the corner from the Metropolitan. Serrin went up to their suite, where it took him only a moment to pick up all the credsticks and cash they had left. He also made a transfer in the hotel lobby from his own account. Twenty thousand, he reckoned. We're five thousand over budget and we need some extra for contingencies. Whatever those might turn out to be.
They left their possessions behind. Taking them would have been like saying goodbye to Michael, which none of them would do.
Then the group made their way out of the city with sixteen orks stuffed in the back of the truck. They hit the autobahn for Ingolstadt and watched the glowing sodium illuminate their passage through the night.
One of the samurai raised a half-bottle of bad vodka to his lips, but Mathilde knocked it away before he could take a swig.
"Later. We're being paid more money than you've ever dreamed of and you keep sober, Grunnden."
The ork didn't so much as challenge her. He just watched the colorless liquid ebb away across the floor of the van, shrugged his shoulders, and turned to cleaning the Enfield shotgun with which he'd armed himself.
Though the autobahn surface was reasonably good, the truck swayed from side to side and frequently bumped them up and down during the ride. Serrin was beginning to tire, but he knew that, unlike the others, he couldn't risk a stim patch for the battle to come. It was just too
great a risk for a mage, the overstimulation possibly causing permanent deterioration of his skills.
"You want to play medic when we get there?" he asked Kristen. "We need someone to stay back and look after the medikit and stuff." She nodded silently. She wasn't comfortable crammed into this truck with this great army of males. Apart from Mathilde, the ork samurai had only one female among their number.
"We're going to have a little trouble dividing up the gear," Tom said thoughtfully. "Only got respirators for half of us. That's not good."
"Yeah. Better make sure it's the machine gunners who get them. Michael bought enough ammo for them to blow away most of Schwandorf. We've got to make sure they get the chance to use it all."
"We got lucky with the heavy stuff," Tom said. "Gun-ther and one of the others have handled assault cannon; Gunther knows about missile launchers from his army days, I guess. Ain't no one really trained with explosives, though. You want to play that one by ear?"
Serrin met the troll's grin with a laconic smile. He'd realized too late that they didn't have any physical details of Luther's place. All they knew was that it was a monastery. If it had something as simple as electrical fencing around it, blasting in with explosives might be the only way to enter before setting off the dozen alarms that any other kind of forced entry would trigger. Two things they didn't have much of were sublety and the ability to bypass surveillance. Sure, a high-explosive missile could do the job, but they only had two of them and couldn't afford the waste. Only/I Serrin stopped his train of thought. That was enough to blow up most of the damn building. Frag subtlety.
"We should arrive around three," Mathilde told him. "Plenty of time to scout the place before we go in. I take it you just want everything and everyone blown to drek?"
"That's the general idea," Serrin confirmed. "But don't we have to cross borders? I mean, isn't where we're going the, um, Marienbad Council? Aren't they going to check us out?"
"You kidding? Their security is a joke. They're a bunch of liberal-minded drekheads. If a tank convoy of armed terrorists turned up with nukes, they'd probably say it was an infringement of their civil liberties to refuse them entry. Just leave them to us."
Serrin looked at the huge array of armaments in the truck and realized they didn't even have a flask of coffee. He wondered whether they could risk stopping to pick some up. One of the orks cranked up a battered portable CD player and the dubious delights of lumpen ork rock filled the crowded interior. The samurai began to tap their feet, almost in unison.
Serrin had to work hard to keep from laughing. The gang of them looked like a cross between a ragged militia and a bunch of cheerleaders. But even a bunch of cheerleaders weren't to be sneezed at, with the weaponry they were carrying.
Then it occurred to him that had Michael still been with them, he could surely have disabled the monastery's security systems by decking into their control systems. That changed his mood. He no longer felt like laughing.
Martin sat back and waited for this last night to pass. Luther was wholly absorbed in his work now, the first batches being prepared, enough for the precious self-replicating samples to be flown out in the morning. Then he saw the elven figure outside the gates on the monitors.
He was about to activate the remote machine guns, then decided against it. That might solve a problem but attract the police, an irritation he could do without. He flicked on the audio monitor instead.
"Luther! Luther! They're coming to stop you. To stop your work. Listen to me! It cannot happen! You must be ready for them," the elf at the gate babbled. Martin let him ramble on for a moment, then gave security orders over the intercom. It worried him that the intruder was aware of their progress. Martin intended to empty his mind to find out exactly what he knew.
The planes were halfway across the English Channel by the time the orks had left the van in a forest clearing
outside Schwandorf, but they couldn't know that. They got into ragged formation and waited for their shaman to finish her assensing.
When she was done, she turned to Serrin and Tom with a look like thunder. Serrin had already sensed the power of the place. One touch was enough. He wasn't going to get close enough to get burned or to alert any magical defenses.
"The barrier is very, very strong," she said. "But he cannot hide the badness of the place. Now I believe you."
She turned to Gunther and began giving orders. The armor-jacketed samurai began a careful infiltration of the forest in small groups, each with a short-wave communicator.
"They're going to see us coming," Serrin fretted. "They must have IR and stuff. Not to mention watcher spirits."
"They're your job. I didn't see anything that wasn't obvious. You can deal with them, can't you?" Tom replied.
"I can, with the ones I saw," the mage replied. "What worries me is that there wasn't anything stronger. It must be hidden. That damn barrier could be concealing almost anything. This guy's a mage for sure, and if Julia's scoop was right, he could be as hot as hell. Frag it, I could use a spell lock right now."
"Couldn't we all," the troll said sarcastically.
"At least with the binox we'll be able to see what they've got from a way away," Serrin mused.
"Don't let you see through trees," Tom growled. "I think Gunther got it right. We don't get any closer than absolutely necessary, and just blow out the fence. Or the gates. I want to see one of them high explosives do its stuff."
"Should be fun," Serrin agreed.
"You got any doubts? I mean, about just frying everything in sight?"