A scream pierced the night, coming from the lakeside chalet in the grounds of the Constellation Suites, where the bride and groom were staying. Apprehensive domestic staff fluttered around the door, while behind them, guests who had been awakened or in the vicinity looked on. Word went around that a doctor had been called and was on the way. The head steward strode forward brandishing a master key, but just then the door opened and Marissa appeared in a pink velvet robe. Normally calm and controlled, she could only indicate the direction behind her with frantic nods of her head, at the same time gnawing her knuckle distraughtly. "It's Mervyn! He's got it! It's here! Oh, my God . . . !"
While one of the night maids guided Marissa back to a chair and tried to calm her down, the head steward went through to the bedroom suite, followed by several of the guests. They found Mervyn Quinn staring, horrified, into the mirror wall behind the gilded bathroom sink and vanity unit. His face was sickly yellow, showing hints of a greenish tint in places.
"Where is he? What's going on?" a voice demanded from the hallway outside.
"The doctor and a nurse are here," someone announced.
"We should call Hamilton," one of the guests said.
"Huh . . . ? Wha . . ." The call note from the comset by the bed dragged Hamilton Gilder up from the depths of a sleep fortified by copious administrations of champagne and century-old brandy.
"I'm sorry to disturb you, Mr. Gilder. This is Dr. Dante, duty physician at Constellation Suites. We have an emergency, I'm afraid. It concerns your son-in-law, Mr. Quinn."
The news brought Gilder abruptly back to wakefulness. "Mervyn? What's happened?"
"He's feeling nauseous and has a facial discoloration. My first guess would be that he might have eaten something that disagreed with him, but Ms. Gilder insists that it's some kind of plague. To be honest, it's her that I'm more worried about."
"Marissa?"
"She's very disturbed."
"I'll be right over."
Gilder cut the connection, swung himself out of bed, and hurried through to the dressing room to pull on some pants. He grabbed a shirt and detoured back via the bathroom to splash water on his face. As he straightened up to reach for a brush to run through his hair, he froze at the sight of the face peering blearily back at him from the mirror.
"Jesus Christ!" he breathed, staring disbelievingly.
Thornton Velte was still up, drinking with a group of cronies in the subdued light of an alcove outside the ballroom. In a visit to the men's room, someone had remarked that he was looking a bit pasty, but Velte dismissed it with a laugh and the comment that none of them was getting any younger. By the time he wandered out to get some air in the new light of Asgard's dawning sun, his condition had advanced several hours. A fellow guest gasped at his appearance and took him back inside to see himself in a mirror. Stunned but still rigidly disbelieving, Velte made his way with a couple of attending colleagues to the medical room, where they found Mervyn and Hamilton suffering from the same affliction. Minutes later, a gibbering Achilles Gilder called in from his own suite, whence his ladyfriend of the evening had just fled in terror. Slessor Lomax joined them within the hour.
Food poisoning was the doctors' first suspicion, but it became less plausible as further checking showed the condition to be confined to just those five cases. One of the doctors recognized the symptoms as the ones affecting the corporation people and their military detail down on Mars, upon which the security head from the Oasis recalled the eccentric Asiatic who had visited Marissa there. Velte needed no further proof that the Martian Cross the Khal had given her to bring up to Asgard was the culprit. "It's impregnated with something or releasing something," he fumed as the facts strung themselves together before his eyes. "Get it over to the labs and find out what's in it. Take it apart down to the last molecule if you have to."
They X-rayed the Cross, electromeasured it, sonogrammed it, broke it in pieces, ground parts of it to powder, and subjected samples to neutron activation tests, fluorescence tests, gas and liquid chromatography, various types of spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance tests, a battery of solution assays, and biometric imaging. And they found . . . nothing. For the moment the experts were baffled.
"But we know it was the Cross, although not operating through any of the mechanisms they're looking for, don't we, Dad?" Marissa said when they got a chance to talk alone. She was having trouble keeping horror from showing on her face as she looked at him. "You have to ask the Khal for guidance. He's the only person who'll know anything." Hamilton had his assistant call the Oasis hotel down at Lowell, but she was informed that the guest of that name had checked out without leaving any contact information.
"I still think you're jumping to unwarranted conclusions," Velte maintained stonily, despite his own condition. "Something broke out on Mars, and a lot of people here have just come up from Mars. There's bound to be a simple connection. What's the latest on the ones they've got at the hospital down there?"
Hamilton had Asgard's medical chief call the unit down at Lowell who were dealing with the syndrome. And the startling news from there was that Justin Banksand only Justin Bankswas magically recovering.
"Now what do you have to say?" Gilder stormed at Velte, finally losing his patience. "Everything he said has come true! No, I can't explain it, you can't explain it, and neither can anyone else here. But there isn't a single fact known to science that couldn't be explained at some time." It was one of those rare times where Thornton Velte found himself too shocked and bemused to say anything.
"What do you want to do?" Gilder's assistant asked.
Gilder thought furiously for several seconds. Marissa watched him anxiously. "Get a fast transfer ship ready for immediate descent to Mars," he ordered. "The only hope now is that other mystic that the Khal talked about. We'll go down there, and we'll talk with him directly."
"Does that mean you'll let them have the site?" Marissa asked.
Hamilton squared his jaw stubbornly. "I didn't say that. Let's see if this guy can get rid of whatever this is first. It's still a big investment to throw away. Then we'll play it by ear. There might be ways of getting to him yetjust like anyone else."
The eight-man squad that Mahom had recruited was taking it easy outside until plans were sufficiently advanced to hold a detailed briefing. Inside Mahom's office, Kieran sat across from the desk, staring at pictures of the building that Leppo and Casey were being held in, along with floor and site plans purloined from a city architect's office. Since it suited him to keep Kieran Thane invisible for a while longer, and he didn't know when circumstances might require the reappearance of the Khal, he had changed into casual clothes but kept the swarthy Asiatic features and grizzled hair. The squad's commander, Major Everit, small, brown skinned, dapperly turned out in a dark jumpsuit with black beret and calf-length boots, went once again through what seemed to be the only option.
"Speed and surprise. A distraction phone call, diversions front and back, and then straight in behind stun and flash grenades, and grab them. It's a high-density location. The geography doesn't give any maneuvering options."
Kieran wasn't overenamored. Hard in and brutal. It lacked the finesse and use of misdirection and deception that appealed to him. But for once he was at a loss to come up with anything better. He shook his head dubiously. "Right in the middle of a residential zone. It's bound to spark instant reactions. Even if you spring them, what are the odds going to be of getting yourselves out?"
"Speed and surprise," Everit said again. "We'll be gone before any enforcement gets near the block."
"And then what?" Kieran asked. "You still have to get out of Lowell. All they have to do is seal the locks."
"There are other ways out of Lowell."
Kieran looked at Mahom. "I wanted these guys more to keep an eye on Hamil and his people at Tharsis. For this we need something more subtlequiet and easy. You know my style."
Mahom shrugged, showing two empty ham-like palms and a pair of bulging eyes. "We looked at it from all the angles, Knight. There aren't other options. There isn't the time."
Kieran stared back at the pictures and charts. He was still contemplating them, when an incoming call came for Mahom. It was from one of the spies he had stationed around the block from where Leppo and Casey were being held. People were coming out and getting into the Metrosine. A screen showed the picture. There were six of them. Both Balmer and Sarda were there. Kieran also recognized Brown, Black, and the other man he had glimpsed with them in the elevator at the Oasis. Mullen, whom Mahom had previously identified, was with them. Brown drove. A quick tally of the numbers logged coming and going indicated that only three were left inside guarding the two prisoners. It gave much better odds than those Everit had been assuming.
"If we're going to do it, this is the time," Everit said. "We won't see this again any time soon." Mahom looked inquiringly at Kieran. Kieran nodded reluctantly. Everit went outside and called his men inside to brief them.
As things transpired, it now seemed they had plenty of time. Tracking the vehicle's locator code, which one of Mahom's contacts had extracted from the leasing company's records, showed the car progressing through the Trapezium and along Gorky to exit to the surface at the Wuhan end. It soon became clear that it was heading for Stony Flats. Kieran puzzled over what might draw Balmer, Sarda, and practically the syndicate's entire coterie at Lowell, out to a place like that.
By the time the Metrosine arrived at a spot identified from the map as a warehouse shed at the back end of the airfield, owned by a company that imported hydrocarbon distillates from the Belt, Everit had run his men through the plan several times, and they were preparing to move out. Kieran used Mahom's desk c-com to buy five minutes of priority time from one of the commercial surface surveillance satellite operators, and when one was next passing over, directed a high-resolution scan of the buildings Mahom had picked out from the map image. Sure enough, the black Metrosine was parked under a glass-roofed annex at the rear of two of them, reached by an alley between. More interestingly, some shapes next to the Metrosine, if he wasn't very much mistaken, were a couple of general personnel carriers painted in desert camouflage, a distinctly warlike profile suggestive of a gunship, and a smaller flyer. Somebody else out there, it seemed, was also putting together a private militia. But theirs had the appearance and firepower of an attack force. Kieran was still pondering on what it could mean when Everit and his team departed in a plain civilian bus. The only thing that made any kind of sense was that whoever had sent the abortive mission to Troy that had almost gotten shot down were getting set to try again. What to do? Recall Everit and get him out to Tharsis before the Stony Flats force made its move? Or gamble on seizing the chance to get Leppo and Casey out while the opposition was minimal?
But then the situation changed again, and the second option went away. Mahom's spy in Embarcadero called again to say that five more people were coming out. The accompanying view showed, sure enough, the remaining three guards marching Leppo and Casey to another vehicle that had been parked nearby, which then left, going the same way as the Metrosine had. Mahom's man fell in to follow at a distance, and it soon began to look as if the second car was heading through for Wuhan, and hence out onto the surface to join the others at Stony Flats.
"Mahom, what's the fastest way to get Everit and his team outside in a flyer?" Kieran asked suddenly as the meaning became clear.
"Their outfit is geared for fast response. They keep an air-APC on permanent standby ready at the Cherbourg skylock." The Sudanese frowned. "Why? What's going through your mind, Knight?"
"Get them onto it right away! The syndicate still wants its money back. They think I'm at Tharsisand probably two other people who are far away off-planet by now. They're sending out another team to grab us. But they also think Leppo set them up last time, and therefore he's in with us and knows the story. They want to grill him before they go in." Kieran turned from the screen while Mahom clicked on Everit's call code. "See what it means, Mahom? We don't have to risk a lot of noise and commotion in the city at all. If we move fast, we can spring them outsideright there on the road to Stony Flats!"