Lokant (39 page)

Categorising them as a
threat, the whurthag-machine threw itself at the door. A sturdy
construction of metal it might be, but it shook hard under the
impact of that heavy body.

‘Yes. Hmm. I wouldn’t
get too close to the door.’

His team worked quickly
and efficiently to execute the tasks they’d been given. Iwa moved
up beside Limbane, getting as close to the door and those thrashing
jaws as she dared. Her disciplined mind seized the whurthag-thing’s
peculiar awareness and grappled with it, forcing it into
submission. The approach she took was direct: there was no room for
subtlety, persuasion of any kind. The creature may be aware, but it
lacked the mental flexibility for friendship.

It did possess
considerable bite, however. It fought Iwa’s efforts violently.
Limbane perceived that Krays had instilled in it an instinctive
fear of any mental intrusions save his own.

He heard the low voices
of Egren and Rael behind him, speaking their observations and
findings to the voice recorder.

‘... height
approximately four spans at the shoulder. Body weight estimated at
three hundred to three hundred-twenty standard measures. Creature
is of mixed biological and mechanical construction: jaws, teeth and
claws are of a steel-tracium alloy; hide of an unknown substance
but signs suggest it is to some extent biological in nature...’

Iwa was finished. The
whurthag’s struggles had ceased; it waited, quiescent, for
Limbane’s interference.

‘Take your time,’ Iwa
said placidly. ‘I’ve got it.’

He nodded. Reaching out
to the beast, he was momentarily distracted by the sheer
strangeness of it. Mechanical creations he could handle, and
biological constructs were equally familiar to him. But this kind
of hybrid was virtually unique in his experience. There was only
one other occasion when he had come across something similar, and
Krays had not been involved in that.

He shook the thought
away. For the moment, to work. Browsing through the beast’s
flickering impressions - not accurate to call them thoughts - he
found the source of Krays’s control over the beast. He had
installed himself as the whurthag’s pack leader, to be obeyed
without question.

It was the work of a
mere few minutes to overwrite Krays’s image with his own. Limbane
withdraw with a satisfied smile. He was now this beast-machine’s
unquestioned superior.

‘All right, we’re ready
to approach. Egren, Rael, are you finished with your assessment?
You’ll get chance to create a more detailed profile later.’

‘Yes, Lokantor,’ was
the reply.

‘Excellent. Yora,
Melle. Get the door open, then deactivate the thing, but carefully.
I want it taken back with us, in a study-worthy state. Iwa, keep
back for now.’

Limbane waited, humming
a soft tune, as Yora and Melle worked at the door. Krays may have
pulled a surprise or two this time, but he was still essentially no
match for the Library.

‘Door’s open,
Lokantor.’ Yora was one of his youngest Lokants, but that didn’t
prevent her from being one of his best engineers and inventors.

‘Good work! Now then.
Iwa, you’re with me. Advance, but take some care. If there are
more, it’s down to us to take control of them as quickly as
possible. Egren, Rael. Are you armed?’

Both of them pulled
their guns and held them at the ready.

‘Good. You’re in first.
You see any more of these, you shoot. I don’t know if they can be
killed, but perhaps they can be maimed. The goal is to find Avane
and Orillin as quickly as possible and get out. All clear?’

A chorus of ‘Yes,
Lokantor,’ followed his question and he nodded.

‘All right, go
ahead.’

Egren and Rael swung
the door open and advanced, approaching the whurthag-machine
warily. The thing stood quiet; it hadn’t moved for several minutes.
Nonetheless its gleaming metal teeth and powerful body were
thoroughly intimidating.

Four Lokants filed past
the creature and it didn’t move. Yora and Melle fell to work
disabling the thing as the others fanned out to check the prison
cells that lined up along the corridor.

‘Empty,’ came three
voices in report. Limbane glanced through the tiny window of a
fourth cell and found it empty too.

‘And onward,’ Limbane
ordered.

A scream of pain
slashed the air from behind him. Whirling, he saw the
whurthag-machine had moved; its wicked teeth were sunk in Melle’s
side. The older woman was down, her blood rapidly spreading across
the floor.

‘Back-up intelligence
system,’ she panted. ‘On a timer. Activated when you overrode
previous instructions.’

Limbane cursed. Krays
was a devious bastard. How like him to put a timer on the thing; it
would strike just when Limbane’s team thought they had vanquished
it.

Egren and Rael had come
running back at the sound of Melle’s scream.

‘Stand back, Yora,’
came Rael’s terse voice. He fired. The sound reverberated around
the cold and empty corridor, sending up a terrific echo.

The bullet bounced
harmlessly off the whurthag-thing’s hide.

Egren dropped her gun
and drew a knife. Rushing the creature, she stabbed repeatedly,
targeting those areas that would be soft points on any normal
beast. Her blade glanced off its glassy eyes and clattered
uselessly against its metallic jaws. She achieved better when she
attacked its hide; the knife penetrated, but poorly, sinking in
only an inch or so. She tried to pull it out for a second strike,
and couldn’t. The knife stuck in the strange black material.

‘Hammer,’ Rael said
grimly. He took one from his belt, a tool designed for engineering
rather than combat. But when he swung it at the creature, he
succeeded in raising a howl of pain. That muscle mass was
vulnerable, then.

Egren grabbed her own
hammer and joined Rael, the two of them taking it in turns to
strike while the other danced out of reach of the thing’s attacks.
The beast whirled in confusion, distracted by each new strike. It
may be aware, but it certainly wasn’t intelligent. Each time the
Lokants hit, the beast howled again.

Hurry it up,
Limbane thought in irritation. The amount of noise they were making
was sure to attract some unwanted attention soon.

At last the creature
gave a final whimper of pain and collapsed, its legs twisted beyond
use. It tried to pull itself along the floor, still intent on
rending Rael and Egren for their offences, but its body was too
broken.

Sounds from further
down the corridor attracted Limbane’s attention. Was that a child
crying?

‘Right. Yora, pull
yourself together. I’m going to need you. Egren, get Melle back to
the Library and get her entered for healing. Rael, keep that hammer
handy. Let’s go.’

He set off in search of
the childish cries, trusting to his team’s loyalty to bring them
after him as necessary. Eight doors down he stopped, listening. The
child had been quieted, but it whimpered still in the room
beyond.

‘Yora.’

The woman nodded
stiffly. Her face was pale with shock and her hands covered in
Melle’s blood, but she obeyed him, setting to work on the
complicated door mechanism.

It wasn’t an ordinary
kind of lock, he could see that for himself.

‘It’s a biolock, sir,
new kind. I’m going to have to reprogramme it.’

‘Move it along, Yora,’
he said testily. Gunfire interrupted him as bullets ricocheted off
the walls, coming from the far end of the corridor. He and Rael
dived to the floor, the latter letting out a grunt of pain.

‘Are you hit?’

‘In the leg,’ Rael
replied. ‘Bastards.’ Then his gun was in his hands and he returned
fire. A dying cry reached Limbane’s ears: Rael had found his
target.

One foe down. How many
more would there be?

‘
Yora!
’

‘Almost there, sir,’
the girl panted. Then the lock clicked open. Limbane didn’t wait to
congratulate her. He flung himself into the cell, dragging Rael and
Iwa behind him.

A black-haired woman in
her thirties huddled at the far end of the room, her arms wrapped
protectively around a child of perhaps two years old. Her eyes were
frightened; they widened further when she saw him.

‘You’re like
him,
’ she said. ‘Another one. What do you want with us
now?’

Limbane scowled. He and
Krays looked
nothing
alike. ‘Avane Desandry?’

She nodded.

‘Get up. We’re taking
you out of here.’

The woman actually
tried to back away, despite the obvious lack of anywhere to go.

Limbane’s temper
snapped.

‘Do you want to be
helped or not? I’ve a woman down and another shot; my team’s down
to three and we’ve another prisoner still to find. There isn’t time
for this. You have five seconds to make up your mind.’

Avane hesitated.

‘Three seconds,’ he
said. ‘Two.’ Rael’s leg was bleeding profusely. It would be a
miracle if the man could walk.

‘All right,’ she said,
standing up slowly.

‘
Move,
’ he
bellowed.

She moved.

***

Devary was lying on his
bed, again. He was thinking, daydreaming, anything it was
reasonable to call this state of near insensibility. He’d lain in a
half-dream for an indeterminate time, waiting with steadily
decreasing hopes for some event to break up the monotony of these
none-days.

Nothing had come. He’d
given up trying to mark the passage of time; nothing changed in
here. It was as if time had nothing to do with the place at all.
His attempts to break himself free had failed one and all. This
place was shrouded, muffled in some dampening enchantment and not a
chink could he now find in that enclosing force. Opening a gate was
out of the question: it was like trying to rip a hole in granite.
And the door had some kind of lock that he couldn’t pick, no matter
how hard he tried.

Nobody ever came.
Sometimes he would sleep; while he was unconscious food and water
would appear, by some means he couldn’t detect. For a while he had
mercilessly denied himself sleep, determined to see and speak to
the person who delivered the food. All he had achieved was
starvation as well as sleep deprivation. Nobody ever came.

So, at last, he’d given
up, letting himself fall out of consciousness as his only defence
against the stupefying boredom.

When the gunshot came,
the incredible volume of the sound jolted him out of his stupor so
suddenly that he feared his heart would fail him. The excitable
organ skipped a beat or two, then settled, and he breathed
again.

He pushed himself off
the bed and stood up. For some moments his head swam with dizziness
as his long-inactive body swayed, his vision blurred. He moved
closer to the door and waited.

The sound was not
repeated for some time. He was about to give up, putting the
interruption down as a product of his own bored mind, when several
loud gunshots fired in a burst. Hope surged in his heart: gunfire
proved the presence of intruders, and based on the logic of enemies
of one’s enemies those intruders might prove to be his friends.

He heard cries of pain
and another couple of shots. His door bore only a tiny piece of
glass, almost too high for him to see out of. He pressed his face
to this miniature window but he could see nothing but the usual,
merely a glimpse of the door opposite to him. He wished he could
tell who was winning the conflict; had that dying cry been one of
his kidnappers or their attackers?

When everything fell
silent once again, he began to worry. He certainly could not be
rescued if nobody knew that he was here. He began banging on the
door and calling out, kicking with his feet, creating as much noise
as he could.

Nothing happened. No
further sounds reached him. His heart sank; dullness closed in on
his fogged brain once more. Whoever they were, they weren’t coming
for him.

But then: footsteps. A
voice, actual words spoken.

‘Is this him?’

A face appeared briefly
at the glass.

‘No. Too old. Next
one.’

The face disappeared.
Then another was pressed against his window, somebody
white-haired.

‘There’s someone in
here?’ a different voice said. Then came a hissed intake of breath.
‘I know this person.’

‘We breaking him out,
sir?’ That was the first voice again, young and female.

‘Be quick about it,’
said the man. Devary frowned. If he imagined those words spoken in
gentler tones and decorated with somewhat more in the way of
courtesy, then he knew the speaker.

It sounded very much
like the strange fellow he’d met at the university. He’d last seen
the man in Indren’s private reading room. He had known about the
tracer Devary wore; he’d even indicated that he might be able to
help him.

Hope flared anew.
Devary stepped back, moving out of the path of the door. He waited,
unconsciously holding his breath as the unseen girl worked on the
other side of it. His straining ears caught every slight scraping
sound as she worked. It seemed to take forever.

At length the door
swung inwards. He could almost have cried with relief.

‘Thank you,’ he said,
filling the word with all the sincere gratitude he hadn’t time to
express at length.

The girl smiled at him.
She was a slight figure, wearing her white hair closely braided.
She was dressed in loose overalls. Shockingly, her clothes and
hands were splashed with blood.

Beside her stood the
man who’d spoken. It was indeed Limbane, though his formerly mild
face was taut with tension and irritation. He made an impatient
gesture at Devary, who hastened to obey.

‘Keep up,’ Limbane said
tersely. ‘We’ve three more cells to check.’

Devary fell into step
behind Limbane’s group as they surged down the dim hallway outside
his cell. There was another white-haired woman; she barely glanced
at him and said nothing. A second man, apparently younger than
Limbane, had no attention to spare for the newest addition to their
group. He was limping badly, his leg pouring blood.