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It occurred to him that the mighty and coddled aristocrats of
LAW were at last getting some sense of the fog of war.
When he looked around for Haven, thinking she might know an escape route, he
saw her making her way along the balcony
railing, still watching the Aggregate calmly going about its work.
While everybody else was trying to get as far from the
biosynthesizer as possible, she was struggling to get to it.
Burning lunged to grab her but had to vault a man who had hit the carpet
bleeding from the forehead. Dextra caught the movement from the
corner of her eye and shot Burning an expression of dismissal. No
resentment; he was inconsequential to her now.
There being no bolt-holes from the situation, he decided he shouldn't let her
go it alone. The Exts owed her, and if by some miracle a slaughter was
averted, Haven was someone they would need ah" ve and on their side. He
used his height, weight, and strength to reach her side, but even
more he used the artful avoidances and eye for opportunity of the
Flowstate.
"Stay behind me," he told her. "We'll go over the railing at stage
left."
She nodded; the drop was far shorter there. They were doing tolerably well
until someone yelled from the rotunda, "This door's giving way! Help us
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get this exit open!"
A wave of howling berserkers rose to engulf Burning and
Haven solely because they were in the way. He moved in to shield
her, using his hands and feet as the mob was compacted in on him.
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Three
If not for the alarms, maybe she would have bitten him, but not in any manner
he had been looking forward to.
"An evac warning?" Cheetah asked, showing those pointy canines. "Is
that the ploy Exts use when they can't get it up?"
"First you're cam-shy," Cheetah's cohort, the sizable
Polyhymnia chimed in, "and now there's a secret alert. Are you some kind of
tease?"
Cheetah was leaning in at him again, Hps drawn back. "Know what we do to
teases?"
She never got to show him. The reverberation of heavy doors and the peal of
Klaxons shook the caterer's prep room, nearly making Lod jump the rest
of the way out of his clothes. A half fibrillation later Cheetah and
Polyhymnia hit the floor moving and never looked back, Poly
abandoning a wire-sculpture tiara with its phony gemstone cam. Pulling his
dress uniform closed as he followed them, Lod had to admire their
decisiveness, if not their solidarity.
By the time he got his jacket resealed, they had lost him in the general crush
of the hallway. He ducked, squirmed, and slid along the wall. All his
adroitness was not enough to keep him from being caught by flying
elbows, flailing hands, and butting heads.
Springing up onto a big wall sconce gave him a vantage point from which to see
over the heads of the hysterical throng. He saw the closed
containment doors and the people squashed against them, trod under
and dying. He had never been a particularly apt Skills pupil, but now he
willed himself into
Flowstate with autotelic activator phrases energized by a steely
determination to survive.
Periapt's plutocrats threw themselves at impervious panels and
locked-down emergency exits. Some beat furniture against
impact-resistant windows. The way to the amphitheater was open, and
that was where Burning had said he was, and so Lod sprinted for the
egress, dodging the occasional aimless hysteric.
There was an off chance mat he could find an airtight space in which to hide a
refrigerator or something jury-riggabte but he doubted he would encounter
anything like that in the contained area. Burning had mentioned NNF, but
Lod had never been sensitized to the gas. Thus, he could not tell
whether the concentration of precursor aerosol was intensifying.
There was a shriek and crash from somewhere, causing him to think, A weapon,
yes. Let's by all means get one.
He had no time to waste, and there was nothing particularly promising
immediately available until he came upon a man lying unconscious or dead
against a pillar. The man wore gray pinstripe vestments with an engraved,
bedizened jetpen clipped conspicuously in his breast pocket. Lod helped
himself to it. In his small hand it was just about the right size for a
kubaton
a littlestick.
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He moved into the amphitheater on the first balcony level, where the
press of bodies wasn't as suffocating. He had not expected to see
his kin, but he spotted Burning stretched out, with Haven rising from
where she had been kneeling next to him.
She took hold of the railing and gathered herself as if to clamber over it.
She had lost or discarded the gauzewing mantelet. Well engineered as
her hair had been, it now suggested a computerized multiwormhole model. She
had kicked off her toe-stand shoes and had the black licorice dress hiked
up around her thighs. When
Lod grabbed her, she tried to fend him off inexpertly but
fiercely until she recognized him.
"We have to get that machine off-line," she said in a rush,
gesturing to a device on the stage below. "Burning was going to do it, but
there was a run for a nonexistent exit, and it was all he could do to keep us
from getting stomped like grapes. Somebody clouted him, but he's alive."
She explained it while Lod assured himself that the Allgrave did in fact have
a pulse. Then she began tugging at his epaulet
'Major, someone has to shut down that contraption!"
If didn't, she was going to; that much was clear. Peering he down,
Lod saw a score of young people moving about without regard for the bedlam
in the rest of Empyraeum all except a bearded man and one doe-eyed
little nube who struck Lod as
being about to lapse into shock.
"Major!"
He turned back to Haven.
"Here's my offer, Lod," she said. "Disable that synthesizer and
I'll give you whatever you want that lies within my power
anything"
He might have held out for an even more all-embracing concession if
not for the fact that delay could have resulted in the ultimate deal breaker:
RIP Lod.
She offered to lower him down to the stage, but he motioned her back, adding a
polite kowtow. "I wouldn't imperil you that way, madam." In point of fact,
he wasn't sure he could trust her grip or sense of equilibrium. "Please watch
over the Allgrave."
He hooked one leg over the railing and began to edge along the outside of the
balcony, scouting out the scene below. Then, having selected an LZ, he stepped
off into space.
* * * *
* * * *
* * * *
* * * *
The babel in the amphitheater was only an inconvenience to the constituents of
the Aggregate. Othertalk allowed them adequate communication.
Still exiled from their unity, Piper found to her astonishment that ostracism
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