Up the ramp and across the portico they went. The main door grew suspicious and began to draw shut. Mikel had prepared for that. Nothing here was planned for serious defense, not after three centuries of the Great Peace. One of his pistols carried explosive rounds. An assembler in a cellar had secretly crafted them for him. He fired with precision. Impact crashed. Shock passed through to the embedded computer. The door halted half open. The raiders stormed inside.
Polished marble encompassed them. Fish swam below a transparent floor. A rampway swept upward. A few individuals, drawn by the noise, saw what was entering and fled. They were merely attendants, ceremonialists, entertainers, or the like. One stood fast, gray, weather-beaten, obviously a kinsman here on a visit. “Who the filth are you?” he exclaimed.
Vahi and Turkan closed in to seize his arms. “Where is Arkezhan Socorro?” demanded Mikel.
”Hoy-ah?” Now the man saw the small clan insignia on the newcomers’ breasts. “Belovs! All of you! What is this outrage?”
”We require direct speech with Captain Arkezhan. We know he’s it home. If we must ransack, there may well be trouble, ancestral treasures damaged, people hurt or even killed. For everybody’s sake, tell us.”
”He-he may be gone-“
Mikel sneered. “So you believe your noble captain forsakes his folk and their heritage in an hour of danger?”
Angry but shaken and bewildered, the man blurted, “Never! I, I saw him last… in the Winter Room.”
”Likely enough,” Teng said. “Doesn’t he often flit to the high North?”
”Claims it inspires him,” Olver growled. “To what foulness this time?”
The loyalty of his followers, their rage on his behalf and his lather’s, stirred Mikel’s spirit anew. He had wondered earlier how many there were to whom clanship meant anything other than relationships and rituals. Now he wondered how many more would have risen like these had he called on them. All?
Then it must be the same for the Socorros. He’d better exploit the advantage of surprise while he had it. “Come,” he said. The men let their prisoner go and ran up the rampway at his heels. The house had been famous for generations; its layout was public knowledge.
Stillness brooded in long halls and spacious chambers. Mikel wondered fleetingly if the house ever called back to mind the days when life and noise Riled it, when children had kept it busier than everything else put together. Aghast; Children! But surely, if any were present, they had immediately been taken out of harm’s way.
A pair of men had armed themselves with wine bottles, the only weapons to hand. They stood forlornly brave in the last corridor. Two stun shots laid them out. The invaders burst into the room beyond.
The air was cool here, though the true cold lay in a simulacrum of an Arctic region where some polar cap had been preserved- glacier and snowfield, blue-shadowed white, and a black glimmer of sea between ice floes. The scene dwarfed Arkezhan. He stood before a multifunctional terminal, clutching a fur-lined robe to him. The cabinet was needlessly large, gold-inlaid ebony with a rock crystal desk surface. You always were vainglorious, Mikel thought. I/only I could spatter you against those screens like a swatted fly.
Did Arkezhan tremble beneath his garment? His tone certainly quavered shrill: “What are you doing? Are you deranged? Is this some obscene prank? Get out! Go at once!”
”We will when we have completed our business with you,” answered Mikel around the lump of hatred in his gullet.
”What business? Your own ruination? Are you aware-“
”Be still.”
”No. You-peacebreaker-“
Mikel grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him till his teeth rattled. “Be still and listen.” Arkezhan stared at the younger, stronger man and the grimness behind him. “Sit down. Over there.” Mikel hustled him to a chair a few meters off.
The men posted themselves, alert, two of them at the terminal. Vahi began to monitor the house and its activities. Olver called up outside views to cover every direction. Now and then he magnified for a closer scan.
Mikel paced to and fro before the chair. Arkezhan gripped its arms and perforce looked up. His features writhed.