The reengineered Apache gunships carried two full pods of missiles beneath stub wings, and multibarreled .50-caliber Chain guns protruded from turrets beneath the tinted foreports. Kane knew the choppers were equipped with infrared-signal-processing circuitry, and like a stupe, he had exposed himself and his body-heat signature to their sensors.
Even while the vanes still spun, black-armored men tumbled out of the craft, all of them wielding Copperheads, deadly Mag-issue subguns. Chopped-down autoblasters, only two feet in length, the gas-operated Copperheads had a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire. They were equipped with optical image-intensifier scopes and laser autotargeters.
From the center Bird bounded a blond man wearing a ridiculous-looking coverall garment. The breeze churned by the rotors set the fringes hanging from his belled sleeves to dancing and looping. Even from a distance, Kane recognized the gracile body structure, prominent facial bones and big slanting eyes of a hybrid.
From another chopper slid a grotesque man-shape, powerfully built around the arms and upper body, but sickeningly diminished below the waist. His bare legs looked like afterthoughts. They flopped flaccidly behind him as he crawled headfirst out of the aircraft.
The Magistrates fanned out in a wedge formation, facing the base of the slope. Kane didn’t wait to see what they did next. Backing swiftly away from the edge, he ducked back beneath the sec door and pulled down on the lever. Then he turned and ran down the corridor, hearing the portal drop down to floor level with a faint crunching thud. He knew the Mags had the code to open it from the outside, but even slowing down their progress a half minute or so could buy precious time.
Lakesh and Brigid must have heard his drumming footfalls, since when he rounded the corner they were waiting for him, faces taut with questioning anxiety.
“Mags on their way up,” he grated. “A hybrid with blond hair is with them.”
Turning toward the doorway, Lakesh said grimly, “Baron Sharpe.”
“Do you know him?” asked Brigid.
“I saw him at the Dulce facility a couple of years ago, during the barons’ annual genetic treatments. He’s mad, like Emperor Caligula was mad. He never goes anywhere without a crippled doom-seer called Crawler.”
“I think he’s with him, too,” Kane said.
Lakesh gestured to the body of the dwarf. “Friend Kane, if you would be so kind as to carry the corpse of our departed troll, we will exit, stage down.”
Kane hesitated, then bent and hauled up the little body. It came free of the tacky pool of semidried blood with a sticky smack. The dwarf weighed very little, probably no more than sixty pounds. Still, it was sixty pounds of dead, unresponsive weight Kane settled over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
The three people retraced their steps, moving as stealthily and swiftly as they could manage to the stairwell.
Ericson hadn’t worn the battle armor in a number of years, and far from feeling nostalgic about being encased in the polycarbonate exoskeleton again, he was distinctly uncomfortable. In fact, he hated it. Sweat seeped beneath the Kevlar-weave undergarment and his skin, making him feel like he was wearing a swamp. His own admonishments to his men about enduring hardships came back not to haunt him, but to laugh in his face.
If that weren’t irritating enough, Baron Sharpe countermanded his every order with exuberant whoops and the maddeningly repetitive chant of “C’mon, boys! Today is a good day to cross over!”
The baron bounded up the rock face like a bipedal mountain goat, and at his heels Crawler dragged himself up and over the chunks of stone. Ericson’s warning that the on-board sensor circuitry had detected a human infratrace made no difference to Baron Sharpe.
He behaved as if he were on a field trip and determined to have a grand time. He saw no significance in the slag puddled where the Sandcat’s tracks terminated, nor in the black goo spread out over the base of the rock slope. Ericson and his three Magistrates had no choice but to follow their lord and his high counselor, no matter where they led.
Crawler stopped his scrabbling ascent long enough to plunge an arm into a crevice between two stones.