Abrams wheeled and strode back, trailing bad words. At the end, he slammed to a halt. His cigar hit the deck and he ground down a heel on it.
The door was properly closed, the windows dark. But he could see footprints in the churned, not yet congealed mud before the entrance, and they weren’t his own.
And no alarm had gone off. Somebody was inside with a truckload of roboticist’s gear.
Abrams’ blaster snaked into his hand. Call the guard on his wristcom? No, whoever could burgle his office could surely detect a transmission and was surely prepared for escape before help could arrive. By suicide if nothing else.
Abrams adjusted his gun to needle beam. Given luck, he might disable rather than kill. Unless he bought it first. The heart slugged in his breast. Night closed thickly inward.
He catfooted to the door and touched the lock switch. Metal burned his fingers with chill. Identified, he swung the door open and leaned around the edge.
Light trickled over his shoulder and through the windows. A thing whirled from his safe. His eyes were adapted and he made out some details. It must have looked like any workman in radiation armor as it passed through the base. But now one arm had sprouted tools; and the helmet was thrown back to reveal a face with electronic eyes, set in a head of alloy.
A Merseian face.
Blue lightning spat from the tool-hand. Abrams had yanked himself back. The energy bolt sparked and sizzled on the door. He spun his own blaster to medium beam, not stopping to give himself reasons, and snapped a shot.
The other weapon went dead, ruined. The armored shape used its normal hand to snatch for a gun taken forth in advance and laid on top of the safe. Abrams charged through the doorway while he reset for needle fire. So intense a ray, at such close range, slashed legs across. In a rattle and clash, the intruder fell.
Abrams activated his transmitter. “Guard! Intelligence office—on the double!”
His blaster threatened while he waved the lights to go on. The being stirred. No blood flowed from those limb stumps; powerpacks, piezoelectric cascades, room-temperature superconductors lay revealed. Abrams realized what he had caught, and whistled. Less than half a Merseian: no tail, no breast or lower body, not much natural skull, one arm and the fragment of another. The rest was machinery. It was the best prosthetic job he’d ever heard of.
Not that he knew of many. Only among races which didn’t know how to make tissues regenerate, or which didn’t have that kind of tissues. Surely the Merseians—But what a lovely all-purpose plug-in they had here!
The green face writhed. Wrath and anguish spewed from the lips. The hand fumbled at the chest. To turn off the heart? Abrams kicked that wrist aside and planted a foot on it. “Easy, friend,” he said.
3
Morning on Merseia—
Brechdan Ironrede, the Hand of the Vach Ynvory, walked forth on a terrace of Castle Dhangodhan. A sentry slapped boots with tail and laid blaster to breastplate. A gardener, pruning the dwarfed koir trees planted among the flagstones, folded his arms and bent in his brown smock. To both, Brechdan touched his forehead. For they were not slaves; their families had been clients of the Ynvorys from ages before the nations merged into one; how could they take pride in it if the clan chief did not accord them their own dignity?
He walked unspeaking, though, between the rows of yellow blooms, until he reached the parapet. There he stopped and looked across his homeland.
Behind him, the castle lifted gray stone turrets. Banners snapped in a cool wind, against an infinitely blue sky. Before him, the walls tumbled down toward gardens, and beyond them the forested slopes of Bedh-Ivrich went on down, and down, and down, to be lost in mists and shadows which still cloaked the valley. Thus he could not see the farms and villages which Dhangodhan dominated: nothing but the peaks on the other side. Those climbed until their green flanks gave way to crags and cliffs of granite, to snowfields and the far blink of glaciers. The sun Korych had now cleared the eastern heights and cast dazzling spears over the world. Brechdan saluted it, as was his hereditary right. High overhead wheeled a fangryf, hunting, and the light burned gold off its feathers.