Levy rose from behind his holo, and Zanzibar stepped up between him and Dom.
“Gods,” she said.
Behind the open safe door was a long rectangular room. The visible walls, ceiling and floor were all the same black metal. The walls on either side were lined with dull-gray lockers with uniformly square doors.
Stacked on the floor ahead of them were three or four dozen white shipping containers—each the size of a foot-locker, the same containers GA&A sold rifles in. One of the containers stood near the safe door. It was open.
It was half-full of Imperial Waldgrave ten-thousand mark notes.
“Zanzibar,” Dom said, “help Levy load the sled. Flower can guard our rear.”
“Yes, sir.” Zanzibar’s voice sounded distant as she stepped forward and closed the open container.
Dom felt his pulse pounding through his temple and his neck. It was a measure of how tense he was that biological imperatives were overriding his body’s finely tuned mechanisms. He forced his thoughts into colder, smoother channels. Don’t get excited, he thought, no mistakes.
He stepped into the safe and looked at the lockers. He tried one of the locks, and it winked green at him. These locks hadn’t been wiped by the EMP that had scragged the outer door’s lock. He ran his onboard computer for inventory and began popping doors.
It had taken them nearly fifteen minutes to open the safe.
It took them three to empty it.
During the loading Dom felt a sight tremor through the building. It felt minor, and no one else commented on it. Inside, however, Dom felt an irrational dread. He had no evidence, but he suspected he knew what that tremor was.
He hoped that the preparations he had started at the commune had gone according to schedule.
Again, Levy maneuvered the contragrav sled. It was burdened with a two-meter-high pile of currency from across the entire Confederacy. The boxes were filled with everything from holographic scrip from Khamsin to the exotic-matter coinage from Shiva.
Dom and Zanzibar guarded the rear of the sled, while Flower took point with the plasma weapon. Flower made a good forward observer, since it didn’t seem to rely on light to see.
Their progress back to their hole was slower; the sled was now encumbered with a lot more inertia than when it started, and it moved sluggishly. Dom expected to run across marine resistance any moment. He expected Klaus to land on him every time they turned a corner. However, the lower levels were as empty as the first time they’d passed through.
After Flower’s warning about Klaus’ preparations, it seemed too good to be true.
It was.
Tetsami was standing by the hole when they arrived. At her feet was her portable groundstation wired to a panel in the wall behind her.
Dom knew something was wrong the minute he saw her. She was staring at the holo; what little color she had was gone from her face.
Dom ran up to her. “What happened?”
Tetsami looked up with an expression that mixed anger, horror, and utter helplessness. “It’s gone,” she whispered. “Everyone’s dead.”
Dom looked back. No one else seemed to have heard her. “Flower, Zanzibar—get the money down to the van.”
Flower nodded its serpentine neck, and Zanzibar gave him an abbreviated salute. When Levy started to go with them, Dom said, “No, Levy, stay up here. I might need you.”
Levy looked a little confused, but he stayed.
Dom waited until Flower and Zanzibar disappeared down the hole before he turned back to Tetsami. “What happened?”
Tetsami looked up at Dom and opened her mouth. It took a few seconds before she said, “He wiped it off the map!”
Dom felt a familiar icy chill grip his stomach. What have you done, Klaus? He made sure to keep Levy in his peripheral vision. Dom noted that he backed away slightly.
The bastard targeted the Commune, didn’t he?
“Tell me,” Dom said softly. “The ground team, are they all right?”
“I don’t know. I had contact, but—” She seemed to lose some of the disengagement and emotion began leaking into her voice, mostly anger. “He knew, Dom. He knew about the team going into the ship. It was a trap.”
Dom nodded.
Tetsami shook her head and knelt at the holo. “He cut all contact to the ship, then he piped this in.”
Dom watched the holo broadcast. Watched his brother for the first time in fifteen years. As he watched, the cold gripped him, freezing every nerve in his body. His racing pulse slowed, and he could feel things sharpen and draw into too clear a focus.
When he saw the holo of the polyceram net slicing through the Diderot Commune, it seemed the world had achieved the perfect stillness of absolute zero.
“Tetsami,” Dom said.
“Yes?”
“Go down with Zanzibar, Flower, and the money. Bug out now.”
“But ...”
“Now! Take the van and evac to Godwin. Blow the hole when you leave. Tell Ivor to give us and the ground team fifteen minutes. At eight hundred he bugs out, no matter what!”
Tetsami looked like she wanted to argue, but she simply looked at him with an expression of mute pain.
“We rendezvous at the commune site.”
“But—” Tetsami looked at the holo that had so recently shown the destruction of the commune.
“The warehouse is compromised. Klaus won’t be looking at Diderot. It just got ‘reduced’ from orbit. Now go!”
Tetsami left without further words.
Again Levy started toward the hole, and again Dom stopped him. Dom put his hand on Levy’s arm and said, “No, I need you.”
“But why?”
“Come on,” Dom said, pulling the short old man after him. Dom went deeper into the warehouse levels, toward the elevators that would take them up into the office complex.
“What are we doing?” Levy sounded nervous.
Dom stopped by a stack of packing crates that had been upended in the chaos of the invasion. He ran the crate’s ID through his onboard computer. It was what he was looking for. He pulled a crate roughly from the pile of debris and ripped the top off of it with his left hand, the artificial one.
“What?” Levy said.
“Long-range, high-frequency sniping laser.” Dom pulled an arm-long rifle from the dozen that packed the crate. “Let me have your HVE.”
Levy handed Dom the electromag, and Dom continued leading them toward the elevators.
“What are you doing?” Levy asked, a pleading note crept into his voice.
They made it to the elevator and Dom pushed Levy in. Dom hit the buttons for the second level of the complex and the codes for the air traffic tower on the roof.
“You’re going to kill him, aren’t you?” Levy was sweating.
“That’s the whole point, isn’t it?” Dom looked down at Levy. “Or each other. It doesn’t matter much to you, does it?”
Levy paled.
“Someone’s been feeding Klaus our plans. Someone’s been a TEC plant. But not a good one, Levy. If the plant fed Klaus all he knew, we’d all have been dead long before now. It makes no sense, unless the plant had his own agenda.” The elevator dinged as they rose above the warehouse levels and began passing the sublevels of the office complex.
Levy began shaking his head. “You have to kill him now. This is your only chance. He thinks you’re in the ship—”