Chains of pale, ragged looters were shifting equipment down through the gaps in the floor. Others guarded the hundreds of frightened hostages and the outside doors. The raiders were armed with a variety of weapons, including the powerguns which were supposedly only in the hands of the military. A stocky, red-haired woman raised her pistol and fired. One of the scanning cameras exploded into gobbets of burning plastic. The looter turned and blew apart a second camera. The scene in the projection sphere lost much of its precision, but the computer directing the simulacrum still managed to import an illusion of three-dimensionality.
The woman turned to face the remaining scanner. What looked like a bead necklace trembled on her bare bosom. As she leveled her powergun she grinned and extended the middle finger of her left hand. The whole screen spurted cyan, then went transparent.
“At the end of it there were five dead,” Lemba said to his colleagues. “The one you saw, and a patrol car that exploded in the air. Red Teams were dispatched automatically, of course, and they weren’t equipped to deal with powerguns.”
“It isn’t just the dead, though,” objected Arcadio.
“That’s right,” agreed Kuhn, whose hair today matched the giraffe-patterned brown-on-blond polygons of her suit. She slapped the data print-out in front of her. “Of the 212 persons inside when the raid began, 27 are missing. Some—most—can be presumed to have been abducted for reasons one can guess. But there were several others, men and women who nobody’d have grabbed for a brothel or ransom. They were just ordinary people who opted to go Underground when they found the way clear. And that’s the frightening thing.”
“Not in comparison to the reason for this particular raid,” Lemba replied equably. “Perhaps you thought this incident”—he waved at the vanished projection—”merely underscores the fact that Underground is organized and controlled by persons who are utterly ruthless?”
Arcadio and Kuhn stared at the fat man. Their expressions were compounded of disgust and irritation. “If you’ve requested an Interdict merely to play games—” Arcadio began.
“What’s really frightening,” Lemba went on, tapping his own data sheet with a callused index finger, “is that this raid provided all the necessary control components for a fusion powerplant. Coupled with other recent raids and . . . various other sources of information, Central has determined that Underground has a fusion unit in operation now. Beneath the City, where it will kill ten or twenty million people when it fails. And it’s up to the three of us to decide how to shut that plant down before the disaster.”
The hard faces of the subordinate Commissioners went blank. After a moment, Lemba continued, “Since I had a little advance notice of this—”
“Something this critical should have been routed to all of us, immediately!” Kuhn interrupted.
“—I was able to get a possible answer from Central Records. The data bank states that while a full-scale assault would almost certainly fail, an individual infiltrator might be able to eliminate the plant . . . and its personnel. It’s probable that we will get only one opportunity, so we need to choose the most effective person for the task. The man the data bank recommends is a Crime Service employee in Southern Region. His name is—”
* * *
“Field Agent Jed Lacey?” queried a young man in a crisp yellow uniform. The legend printed on his cap band read, “take pride in our city.”
Lacey looked up abruptly. His mastoid implant was useless out of Greater Greensboro Subregion. He felt naked without it, his link to all the knowledge in the State. For that matter, Lacey missed the needle stunner which normally rode high on his hip. “Right, I’m Lacey,” he said when he had identified the speaker from among the throng filling the airport terminal. “You my driver?”
“Well, I’m your guide, citizen,” the City employee said with a false smile. “My name is Theron Barbee. We’ll be taking public transit to the Commission offices. We don’t approve of the waste of air cars here, you see.”
“Right, I see,” Lacey said sourly. He nodded toward the sky. Air cars streamed among the buildings like foam on a rocky strand.