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28

"No answer," Serrin lamented. "We probably just hosed the deal. Great." His anger wasn't mitigated by Ma-thilde's sudden change of heart.

"We'll just have to go with what we've got," she told him. "Our samurai know how to take care of themselves."

"Yeah," Serrin moaned. He was just about to make an uncomplimentary comment when he realized a lot of eyes were on him, just daring him to say the wrong thing. He declined.

"What now?" asked Tom. He was still pale, still a little shaky, trying to figure out what had just steamrollered him.

"We meet some friends underground. Below Meld In," Mathilde replied. "Some of 'em have a stakeout there. Waiting to see if any of the Kreutzritters come back snooping. And it's just around the corner. We can call up anyone extra we need. Gunther, check it out."

They waited and a few minutes later the ork was back, saying everything was quiet on the outside, safe.

"That's it, people. Let's go."

The orks got to their feet in some semblance of military precision. They filed out through the back door, with Serrin and Tom shepherded into the middle.

Great, Serrin thought glumly, looking around him. These orks have barely any cyberware between them. That guy, Gunther, he's got a smartgun link by the look of it and maybe dermal plating. The rest of the bunch look like pure cannon fodder to me. Oh, frag it, if only we could have closed Michael's deal. Assuming he ever made it amp; and Kristen. Where is she?

They'd just made it out the back of the bar when the van came very slowly around the corner. It was just another piece of traffic. They didn't pay any attention to it at first.

Mathilde whistled and four figures came melting out of the dusk as the van got closer. They had almost reached the group when the van stopped directly in front of the bar. Gunther readied his pistol. A half-dozen more orks followed his example.

"If this is some kind of trap " Gunther snarled.

"No!" Serrin screamed as Kristen climbed out the passenger side of the van. "Friends! Freunde, dammit! Don't shoot or I'll kill you!"

She heard his voice and ran full pelt toward him, almost knocking him over when she threw herself into his arms, burying herself in him, hardly believing what she'd done.

"I got it," she yelled, almost jumping up and down with delight. "I did it. It's all in the van, but I spent five grand too much!"

Though she looked frightened about Serrin's reaction to that, his face broke into a smile wider than Tom's chest.

"You're wonderful," he cried, and hugged her tightly. "Hey, Mathilde, Gunther, take a look inside the van. Then tell me this isn't for real."

The orks were already moving toward the van, urging the driver to take it around to the back, away from any prying eyes.

"Michael," she said breathlessly. "He's all right. He's stable. They're going to operate in the morning. But amp; " Her voice trailed away.

"But what?" Serrin had to ask her.

"Spinal damage. They wouldn't talk to me about it.", "Oh, no." The elf looked away, pain in his eyes, mouth creased, fists balled. "God, no." He turned to Tom as he held on to her, his eyes suddenly filled with determination.

"Tom, we've got to see this through."

The troll nodded and gripped the Roomsweeper, which had been returned to him. "Of course," he said. Orkish

chatter came from the back yard. Someone was getting very excited indeed. Tom smiled at Serrin just before the cheer went up.

"I think our chummer must have made a good deal," the troll said. "Let's go see what fireworks we get to play with."

Gunther was examining the missile launcher and the assault cannons while the rest of the orks were contemplating the booty in the crates as the van pulled away.

"The deal is you keep everything afterward. But that buys us total commitment," Serrin warned him.

"I'd go up against the gates of hell with this much heat," Gunther growled. He'd just seen the grenade box and the plastic explosives.

"You may have to," Serrin told him.

Mathanas, old friend, this may be our last night together in this world. It may be a long, long time before we meet again. There isn't anything in my soul you do not know. If tomorrow brings the end of me, then we will know each other again. We are old souls, you and I.

Niall roused himself from his reverie. He was long out of Munich, through Ingolstadt and Regensburg, and now had come to the owl-blessed forests outside Schwandorf. The conifers stood like sentinels, the forest not carpeted with the riot of vegetation he so loved in his homeland. With midnight near, Niall had completed the shrouding of himself, all the illusions and barriers and concealments, and he knew Mathanas had been weaving his own powers into patterns, changing the aura around them. The elf wasn't tired, even though he'd been awake for many hours. Energies beyond anything he'd ever dreamed were at his command. It felt like they could keep him awake and alert forever. He also knew the dangers of that seduction.

"We must scry the place now," he said to his ally spirit. "We must find the defenses. The weak link, if there is one. And without being noticed." It was the last part that would be the great strain; he could not risk Lutair sensing his approach. He had to discover everything about the magical defenses of the place without triggering any of

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?"

"No. Not now that I've been here. Not with everything we know, and Michael in intensive. Not after the zombies. Not after what Magellan said. That's enough to make me want to destroy everything in sight."

"Yeah, me too," the troll said, though it was sad that he

should feel such a thing. "What say we shake on it, chummer."

They did, and Serrin regretted it. Tom was given to firm handshakes, which was fine if you were a troll. Otherwise, it felt like his hand was being squeezed by a metal clamp with infinite crushing potential. Then they shouldered their arms and headed into the darkness.

Niall was incredulous. The barrier was impossible to break. Even using everything he had, he couldn't invade Lutair's space. Trying to enter the building in astral form left him so drained that he'd fled, panicking. Once outside again, he felt his own power return to him. He re-entered his body and jerked into life, looking at the manifested spirit protecting his physical form.

"That isn't possible," he said. This was something he simply hadn't even considered.

"It is," the spirit replied. "If he knows your name. If he has something of you. If he has enchanted a barrier specifically against you. Then you cannot penetrate it."

"How could he possibly amp; " His voice trailed off. "The Family. They have given him something. They must be working with him, actively. That must be it."

He sat with his head in his hands, despairing. His masking was so powerful that Lutair could not have detected him, but he was utterly impotent.

"No spirit or elemental I raise can enter either," he said desperately.

"Quite so," Mathanas agreed.

"Then everything is lost. I can hardly walk up with a pistol in my hands and wave it at the gates."

The spirit, distracted from its protective duty, looked around and smiled at him.

"Niall, perhaps someone else has exactly that idea in mind. Let us wait and see what happens."