I could die here, and no one would know.
Memory of the tank and the windows of choice expanding infinitely above even Leesh, the Lady’s page, flashed before me and cooled my body like rain on a stove. My muscles relaxed and I could breathe again—though carefully, and though the veins of my head were distending with blood trapped by my present posture.
Instead of flapping vainly, my right palm and elbow locked on opposite sides of the curving passage. I breathed as deeply as I could, then let it out as I kicked my legs up where gravity, at least, could help.
My right arm pulled while my left tried to clamp itself within my rib cage. Cloth tore, skin tore, and my torso slipped fully within the flue, lubricated by blood as well as condensate.
If I had been upright, I might have blacked out momentarily with the release of tension. Inverted, I could only gasp and feel my face and scalp burn with the flush that darkened them. The length of a hand farther and my pelvis scraped. My fingers had a grip on the lower edge of the flue, and I pulled like a cork extracting itself from a wine bottle. My being, body and mind, was so focused on its task that I was equally unmoved by losing my trousers—dragged off on the lip of the flue—and the fact that my hand was free.
The concrete burned my left ear when my right arm thrust my torso down with a real handhold for the first time. My shoulders slid free and the rest of my body tumbled out of the tube which had seemed to grip it tightly until that instant.
The light that blazed in my face was meant to blind me, but I was already stunned—more by the effort than the floor which I’d hit an instant before. Someone laid the muzzle of a powergun against my left ear. The dense iridium felt cool and good on my damaged skin.
“Where’s Sergeant Grant?” said Lieutenant Kiley, a meter to the side of the light source.
I squinted away from the beam. There was an open bedroll beneath me, but I think I was too limp when I dropped from the flue to be injured by bare stone. Three of the tank lords were in the room with me. The bulbous commo helmets they wore explained how the lieutenant already knew something had happened to the guard. The others would be on the ground floor, poised.
The guns pointed at me were no surprise.
“He slipped into the palace to see Lady Miriam,” I said, amazed that my voice did not break in a throat so dry. “The Baron killed them both, and he’s summoned the Lightning Division to capture you and your tanks. You have to call for help at once or they’ll be here.”
“Blood and martyrs,” said the man with the gun at my ear, Lord Curran, and he stepped between me and the dazzling light. “Douse that, Sparky. The kid’s all right.”
The tank lord with the light dimmed it to a glow and said, “Which we bloody well ain’t.”
Lieutenant Kiley moved to a window and peeked through a crack in the shutter, down into the courtyard.
“But . . .” I said. I would have gotten up but Curran’s hand kept me below the possible line of fire. I’d tripped the mercenaries’ alarms during my approach, awakened them—enough to save them, surely. “You have your helmets?” I went on. “You can call your colonel?”
“That bastard Grant,” the lieutenant said in the same emotionless, diamond-hard voice he had used in questioning me. “He slaved all the vehicle transceivers to his own helmet so Command Central wouldn’t wake me if they called while he was—out fucking around.”
“Via,” said Lord Curran, holstering his pistol and grimacing at his hands as he flexed them together. “I’ll go. Get a couple more guns up these windows—” he gestured with jerks of his forehead “—for cover.”
“It’s my platoon,” Kiley said, stepping away from the window but keeping his back to the others of us in the room. “Via, Via!”
“Look, sir,” Curran insisted with his voice rising and wobbling like that of a dog fighting a choke collar. “I was his bloody driver, I’ll—”