Into the Fire

^{CHAPTER TWENTY}

Stella found the empty silence less restful than she’d expected. She dozed off, woke again, dozed off, woke again. She could not help wondering where exactly the others were, what was happening, what would happen. Ky was impetuous; Rafe was decisive; Teague she still couldn’t figure out. The three women fugitives would do anything Ky told them, being military. The others, the civilians and military she didn’t know about, because Ky had said she didn’t need to know… they included Vatta employees, which she felt strongly she did need to know about. Rodney, for instance. Shortly after midnight, still not sleeping well, she got up, pulled on her house boots, and went to the office down the passage. She called up the flight plans for Vatta. Routine cargo flights out of Port Major, delivering goods ordered for the next day, it looked like. But any of those flights might have carried up to eight passengers, some of them ten. And she knew Grace had connections with Traffic Control; passengers might or might not be listed on the manifests.

She closed that search and tried to concentrate on the work she’d put in the transfer box.

A light on the desk security display turned red. She stared at it a moment. When she didn’t press the response button, the system buzzed. She touched the button. ROOF. GABLE OVER C-WING. She stared at the readout. It couldn’t be. Was someone already in the house? Could they possibly get through the hull-strength protection of the main house? And she was alone. She hit the panic button on the desk, fear already rising to choke her. The direct line to Vatta HQ didn’t light up. She picked up the handset anyway, entered the number. Another red readout: no connection. She tried her skullphone. Nothing.

Panic grew; her breath came short. She had her pistol, but how many intruders were there? She fumbled at the drawers, opening the one with spare magazines ready-loaded, one of her father’s habits, and pocketed them before remembering that his pistol used different ammunition from hers—and his pistol had been lost in the explosion. She looked at the wall behind which the secret room lay. She could go there. She could wait it out. Unless they found the codes. Unless they blew up the house. She was up, halfway to her bedroom, before she realized it. Now what?

She linked her implant to the house internal security system—that worked, at least. Now she could see from the sensors that several people were on the roof, already entering one of the dormer windows. Others were below, near every ground-level exit. Suddenly the four near the front door disappeared as she saw the lights of a vehicle approaching along the street. It passed by; the figures reappeared as if by magic.

Chameleon suits. They had full chameleon suits. So did she, but she’d put on only the top. She kicked off her house boots, yanked off her slacks, fumbled in the drawer for the pants and pulled them up, sealed them to the shirt, pulled on her wool slacks again. Took off the sweater, shivering a bit with fear and the chill. It seemed to take hours, but the glowing clock face on the bedside table clicked the seconds off slowly. It hadn’t taken even a full minute yet. Back into socks and boots. A dark close-fitting top, the shoulder holster, the dark padded jacket Rafe had insisted on, with pockets for the extra ammunition. Two and a half minutes. Only one had gone into the window so far; others were doing something up there but she couldn’t tell what. There were ways to cut through ship hulls, if you had time and the right tools.

Where could she go? And how many would she have to deal with? She turned off the bedroom light, as if she were going back to bed, switched her implant to night-vision amplification, and made her way back down the passage toward the staircase. On the left, a door concealed in paneling let her into a storage room stacked with office supplies. She ducked under the shelving at the far end, pulled open the low door, and crawled into the passage behind it, shutting it after her. Straight ahead to the outer wall, then right.

The intruders had already entered the second attic bedroom, the one that had been Jo’s. Light flared in the video pickup: they were using a torch to cut through the shielding that covered the staircase access. So they must have known about it, or hacked into the house system. It would take them minutes… she thought of hurrying downstairs to the security office, trying to punch a signal through somehow, but that kind of work wasn’t in her skill set. If only Rafe or Teague had been there. She cursed Rafe and Ky silently, for leaving her alone with no warning. Not even Rodney, not even a day’s warning to let her get someone else in. It wasn’t fair!

A muffled thud from the far end of the children’s wing. They were through. Shadows flowed down the staircase, opened the guest suite door. She saw them clearly now, heads covered in helmets—she didn’t have one and her head felt naked, exposed, even behind the secret space’s armored walls. She reached back and tugged her suit’s hood out of the collar and over her hair, for all the good that would do. The finer mesh of the face shield fell down, tickling her nose on the way.

She looked through the peephole set in an elaborate piece of artwork on the other side of the wall. Two entered each of the bedrooms closer to the stairs: a fast search. If anyone spoke she couldn’t hear it.

And now that group—six—were in the passage, and more were landing on the roof. Her heart pounded; her breath came short. Too many; she couldn’t possibly win. And yet… she wanted to live. Her body felt as if it were shrinking in on itself. She forced a deep breath then another. They were to the staircase. Two started down. The other four waited, and four more came out of the guest suite.

Stella sighted on the nearest and got off two shots—both targets jerked, but did not fall—before one of the others responded with a spray of bullets that knocked chips off the carving but did no real damage to the wall or her. Of course they had armor… but her enhanced sight showed the weakened hot spots where the first bullets had hit. Her next two hit the same spots; the two after that took out the faceplates on the helmets of the other two. Now the following four were flattened into the bedroom doorways, and more chips came off the carving. From below came a whump and her implant’s icons for the house security went dead. Now she had no video contacts to know where they were.

She backed away, slid through another hidden door into the adjoining room, opened the door into the passage, and saw one of them running toward her. She fired the rest of that magazine and the man went down hard only a meter away. She darted out, grabbed his weapon, tried to get his helmet but it wouldn’t come off and it was taking too long. She jumped back into the room and closed and barred the door. Slammed her second magazine into her pistol. Back to the passage. One of them was within ten centimeters of the peephole, faceplate lifted. She fired directly into his face, then into the faceplate of the one behind him. Then at the two coming back upstairs. They flinched but didn’t fall. Five down, but there were more. And she had used up all her pre-loaded ammunition.

Her fingers shook as she reloaded the first magazine, slammed it home, reloaded the second. Why hadn’t she followed her father’s practice, kept more loaded magazines? Filling them both cut her down to one box. She had that weapon she’d taken from the man in the passage, and it had a huge magazine, but she had never used a gun like that.

Point the open end at the target; your hand will find the trigger. Her father’s voice. Another deep breath; she found the comfortable place to hold it, and the trigger to pull, then set it down beside her. Then she fingered the chameleon suit’s sleeve control to full concealment and saw the carpet instead of her arm—she’d forgotten to do that before—and her hands floating in the air. Gloves. She’d forgotten the gloves that extended the field. And the booties. They’d see hands and feet and intuit where her body must be.

The gloves and booties were in her bedroom. Down the passage, around the corner—too far, she was sure, to make it before one of them saw her and shot her. Could she could make it across the passage into her father’s office and the secret room undetected? But then she would be trapped. It had no other exit.

The hidden passage she was in wound around to the row of bedrooms—if no one detected the void in the walls or the entrances to it. The entrance to her bedroom was through the desk in the corner; the drawer with the gloves and booties across the room, in the closet. And had she left her bedroom door open or closed? Would she come crawling out of the desk’s keyhole to find them standing over her? She picked up the larger weapon and edged that way, trying not to make a sound, trying to fix her mind on practical things. Someone at Vatta headquarters should have noticed that the house was cut off from the security grid. Wouldn’t they send a team to check? How long would that take?

After midnight, the Vatta HQ Security Watch spent most of their time checking buildings: Vatta warehouses, the headquarters building itself, the hangars and offices of Vatta Transport’s space at Port Major’s airport. They could do much of the work remotely, as computers at headquarters pinged the buildings’ security systems and received alarms. Mobile teams then checked out any anomalies. Someone always sat in the control room, watching for any signal that one of the buildings had been broken into, fences cut, or the like.

Georg Bakli and Ferran Hallen had the watch, and Ferran had stepped out for a few minutes when one of the boards beeped. Georg punched the RECORD button and called up the incident description. The Vatta town house had failed to respond to the regular ping sent by Vatta’s computers.

Such failures weren’t common, but they weren’t rare, either. Usually they self-repaired in a few minutes, or a branch had brought down a wire, something like that. But since the house had been broken into only eleven days before, Georg didn’t wait for self-repair but queried the house’s system, to interrogate its own security system. CONNECTION NOT AVAILABLE. That was unusual. The house’s security system not responding on either hardwired or wireless suggested something more serious.

He looked on the log. Supposedly seven—no eight—people were staying at the house. If anything was wrong—invasion, fire, equipment failure—the backup would alert them. They would then call the security center and report it. Ferran came back in the room. “What’s wrong, Georg?”

“Vatta town house—not responding and I can’t get to the house system either way.”

“They’ve had that ISC man there messing with the system—maybe he screwed something up.”

“It was working fine a half hour ago.” Georg pulled up the log on his screen. “Until three minutes twenty seconds ago.” Had it really taken him that long to look up the residents in-house?

“I suppose we could call Sera Stella,” Ferran said. “But if she’s asleep she’ll be annoyed.”

“Better annoyed than snuck up on,” Georg said. He placed a call to the Vatta house secure line. NO CONNECTION. He looked at Ferran; Ferran looked back. “This isn’t good.”

“We have her emergency number, her skullphone,” Ferran said.

“Calling now,” Georg said. “Get a supervisor; we need help.” No connection on the skullphone. No connection on the house phone. It took Ferran another ten minutes to locate their shift supervisor, Philip Grayson. He had Georg on his own skullphone as he searched, and Georg reported no luck contacting the house.

“Call the police,” Ferran said. “Both our watch units are out at the airport, remember?”

The police weren’t that concerned until Ferran’s supervisor reminded the desk sergeant that the house had been broken into before, and Sera Vatta had been attacked, her car damaged, in her own driveway. Another officer came on. “We’ll send someone right out. You aren’t sure there are intruders?”

“No, but we can’t get any communication with the house.”

“All right then. Keep calling them, just in case.” That line cut off.

“I could call Sera Grace,” Ferran said. “My grandmother’s often awake in the middle of the night.”

“Good idea,” Grayson said. “We don’t want to take chances with Sera Stella. Georg, you call. Ferran, find the nearest mobile team and tell them to go to the Vatta house immediately.”

Georg made the connection to Sera Grace’s phone and got a man’s voice instead. “MacRobert here.”

“Vatta Security at headquarters—we’ve dispatched a police unit to the Vatta house; the house system isn’t responding and we can’t get a response from Sera Stella, either. Of course, with so many people in the house it’s probably not necessary, but—”

“She’s there alone,” MacRobert said. “Send more help. There may be an attack because she called the Rector tonight and said she was alone.”

“Yes, sir. Will you inform Sera Grace?”

“Of course. Go!”

“I’ve got Cameron’s unit,” Ferran said.

When the police arrived, the street was empty, a clean sheet of snow pale between the pools of light at each corner, except for discreet lighting near the residences. Officers Molina and Jankin got out and saw no one at the door or near it. A light over the door illuminated the front steps. Smaller lights marked the driveway entrance and the gate’s lock panel. They walked back to the drive, up it to the locked gates. A light over the kitchen door that had been kicked open before, but no sign of fresh damage. No one lurking in the drive when they flashed their lights along it. A light over the garage doors; the doors were closed. No sound came from inside, and their probes could not penetrate the house’s shielding.

“Use the police master?” Molina asked.

“We could, but I don’t see any reason, really. It’s some electronic glitch; there’s no disturbance, no sign of any intrusion.” Jankin looked through the gate; the snow was unmarked.

“There’s that glass door in the back, you remember? Someone might’ve gotten in there, and in this neighborhood nobody’s going to hear anything once they’re inside.”

“Yeah, but—all right.” Jankin used the police master passcode on the driveway gates and they opened silently, smoothly. They walked up the drive. The kitchen door had been repaired; it was closed and locked. They tried the door. No alarm came on, but the door was locked and the lock held. Farther on, the garden gate was also locked. They looked through the bars. Their light flashed on the lawn; the earlier snowfall had stopped, and what might have been footsteps marred the smooth blanket of white. To their left, the glass French doors gleamed in the light, closed. Whole. Drapes drawn across them. The very picture of a peaceful house properly closed for the night.

“She walked in the garden gate to the back door, not the kitchen?” Jankin asked.

“It’s closer, if she parked in the garage.” Molina looked around, swinging his light. “But there are no tracks in the driveway. If she didn’t drive home, she’d have entered at the front, surely. Or the side. Not back here.” He touched the master passcode to the gate lock, and it snapped open. “It won’t take long; we’ll just walk around to the far side. There has to be some reason the house isn’t answering.”

“She’s not here. She went to a friend’s house for the night.” Jankin shrugged but followed.

“Then she would’ve told Vatta headquarters. That’s how the rich do it. Never out of contact.” Their lights flashed over windows on the ground floor, windows on the second, speared higher to the roof with its two dormers jutting out—“What is that?” Dark shapes that disappeared almost before they’d registered, and something lurking above that defeated the eyes’ attempt to define it.

“Call—” began Molina, and then both were slammed into the snow, into a frantic battle with opponents they could not see clearly, blows coming out of nowhere. Their own blows seemed to have no effect. Only their body armor and helmets saved them—that and the sirens approaching the house. Their attackers stopped abruptly, stood, and ran for it, leaving more and fresher tracks in the snow. Molina clambered to his knees, drew his weapon, flicked his night goggles to infrared, and took aim on what he hoped was one of them, rising impossibly from the ground toward the roof. That one jerked, but did not fall; the other one was already at the roof. Molina shot again at the light blurs his goggles gave him for targets. Return fire slammed into his armor and knocked him back. Then all the blurs were inside something, and the something rose into the air, the air throbbing with the sound of a hovercraft. The backwash threw up all the snow in the yard; it was like being in a blizzard until the craft had moved away. Molina sank down, felt around for his partner. Jankin groaned. “My back—”

“They’ve left. Did you hear the sirens?” The sirens had now wailed to a growl.

“Yeah—help me—”

“If your back’s hurt I’m not going to move you. Lie still. I’ll call.”

Stella Vatta heard the silence—not of emptiness but of determined stillness—where she crouched in her closet, easing out the drawer, fishing carefully for the gloves and booties of her armor. Someone had been outside her bedroom door—she had remembered to close it—and was undoubtedly still there, tense. Why? What had happened? The silence seemed to last forever as she pulled on the gloves, moved one leg at a time just enough to pull on the booties, hoping the intruder couldn’t hear the faint rasp of wool on wool that seemed so loud to her when she changed position. The silence went on as she crouched, breathing quietly, and then, in the distance, she heard sirens. They grew louder, louder still.

Rescue? Or someone else’s emergency? She heard a burst of static from outside, then the thud of boots moving fast, away from her door, back toward the middle of the house. Then shots fired outside, from the garden toward the house, toward the roof. Return fire from the roof. More boots in the distance. A voice called “Out now! Make sure they’re dead.” Shots. She eased over to her door. All the sounds distant now. Opened it a crack. Silence, except in the far end of the house. Then a muffled roar from above, directly above, a sound she recognized as a hovercraft lifting vertically. And then only a faint noise as it shifted from vertical to silenced horizontal flight.

Her skullphone pinged. She tongued the connection. Vatta, at last. She gave the countersign, a pattern of touches rather than out loud, just in case, and walked down to the main passage, leaving the larger weapon behind her. She hadn’t had to use it after all.

“Sera! Are you all right? This is Vatta Security, Philip Grayson—” A name she knew. “They’re all gone, we think.”

“I’m alive,” Stella said. “They got in from above—cut through the shielding—” She stared at the body on the floor in front of her. She could smell the blood, the death; she started shaking.

“Sera—” Grayson’s voice sounded farther away. “Sera, can you open a door for us?”

“I don’t know.” Her own voice sounded faraway, too. “I think they… damaged the main… house controls…” She was sitting on the floor now, leaning on the wall. “Can you use a master?” But her head cleared, now she was sitting down. “No—I know you can’t. I’ll have to come downstairs and manually let you in—” What door would be safest to approach? “Where are you now?”

“Our squad leaders, Mike Wilmots and Dusty Farsich, are at the front and side doors; three of our men are also at the garden door. So any door you can reach.”

Between her and the stairs—or the lift—were the bodies of more men, her kills; the smell of gunfire, blood, and death was everywhere. She pushed herself up the wall, pinched her nose shut, and edged past the body, flicking a light switch as she went. The stench was stronger at the head of the stairs: more bodies. More bodies than she remembered killing. She turned on all the switches near the head of the stairs; the colors leapt out at her. Blood on the carpet, smears of it showing clearly through her… her feet. The chameleon suit. She hadn’t turned it off. She went down the stairs, saw the ruin of the security office to her right… and leaned on the newel post, transferring the pistol to her left hand so she could operate the controls and turn the suit off.

Instantly she caught sight of herself in one of the mirrored panels that flanked the front door. The soft aqua sweater was spattered with blood and dirt, ruined. The gray hood over her head, the thinner gauze over her face made her look bald and plain. She pushed them back behind her, let them hang loose over her jacket. Her face was a mess, as bad as the jacket. Tears, dust from the hiding places, all smeared together. Her eyes were wide, her expression shocky.

This would not do. She was the CEO, she had to look like the CEO, at least look calm, in control, just in need of cleaning up. Watching herself, she opened her mouth, faked a yawn, moved her head around. Her shoulders relaxed a little. She put her pistol back in its holster, took more deep breaths, shook out her hands. Chin up, shoulders down. She pulled the comb she always carried from a pocket, did what she could for her hair in a few strokes. Better still. “Look like what you want to be,” her mother always said. Her mother had never fought for her life. The handkerchief her mother had also insisted on got most of the mess off her face; the lipstick in her pocket gave her a touch of color. And deep inside, something stirred she had never felt before. Now that it was over, now that she was alive and unhurt… could that possibly be what Ky and Rafe felt?

“Sera—?”

“I’m at the front door, Ser Grayson. Which squad leader is out there?”

“Mike Wilmots, Sera.”

“Please tell him I will be opening the door after he knocks three–two–four. My sidearm is holstered.”

“At once, Sera.”

The knocks came. She watched herself in the mirror for another count of five, moment by moment willing herself into what she wanted to be, as calm and controlled and gracious as her mother, then opened the door. The door’s manual control worked; the shielding moving aside smoothly. “Ser Wilmots, I am very glad to see you.”

“Sera! May we enter?”

“Yes, do,” she said, recognizing her mother’s tone and phrasing. Everything was all right now. And yes, what she felt was not just the relief she’d felt other times after danger, but pride.

Wilmot’s squad entered behind him; he sent them here and there with hand signals. The living room showed no damage from the invasion; he offered his arm. “Sera, perhaps you would like to rest here until we’ve cleared the house—”

“Yes, thank you.”

He guided her to the sofa and eased her down onto it.

“And you are quite sure you have no injuries that need attention?”

“Right now I would just like to sit here,” she said. “I don’t think I have anything serious.”

“And are all the exit doors on manual?”

“Yes.”

He moved away, glancing into the security office, then back along the living room to a short passage with a closet in it. He came back with an afghan and a pillow. “Here, Sera. After such a—a situation, you will be feeling shaken.”

“Thank you, Ser Wilmots.”

She had the shakes again while he was out of the room, but inside she was blazing with joy. She heard the kitchen door opening, the sounds of more people spreading through the house, tramping around, muttering into their communicators, commenting to one another. One of the women brought hot tea, and introduced herself as “Marina, one of the Hautvidor Vattas. Can I get you anything else?”

Stella smiled. “No thank you. I think I’m just a little tired—I’m usually asleep at this hour.”

“I should think so, Sera. We’re all impressed.”

“Impressed?”

“Well—you—um—killed so many of them. By yourself.”

“Wasn’t all my doing,” Stella said, between sips of the tea, hot and almost too sweet. “They killed their wounded before they left.” She didn’t want to think how many she had killed. Or wounded, for that matter.

When Wilmots came back, she was calm again, and warmer. He, on the other hand, looked worried.

“Sera, you cannot stay here until the house is cleaned and made secure again. Also you must have guards here around the clock.”

“I agree,” Stella said. “But for the rest of the night—I’m very tired—” Her skullphone pinged. She shook her head and made the sign for “skullphone,” then answered. It was MacRobert.

“Grace wants you to come here. Or there’s the apartment at headquarters.”

“How much do you know?”

“Grace was in touch with that night supervisor at headquarters; he’s gotten reports from the mobile teams. Did you know two police were attacked in the garden?”

“No. When?”

“Vatta Security had the police send a unit out when the house didn’t respond to the computer’s ping. Apparently they were doing a walk-around when they were attacked by two or three men in chameleon suits. When the men ran off, the police tried to shoot them; they took fire. Our teams were out at the airport dealing with another problem.”

“The house is a wreck,” Stella said. “They destroyed the security office here; all the video’s dead. Cut a hole in the shielding from Jo’s room.”

Someone started pounding on the front door; Wilmots and two of his team moved toward it. “Who is it?”

“You know perfectly well who this is,” said a peevish voice. “Open this door now!”

“I’ll call you back,” Stella said to MacRobert, and to Wilmots said, “It’s Ser Prescott, from across the street. Let him in.”

Wilmots opened the door. Prescott looked the very image of a dapper fussbudget, from the cut of his hair to his perfectly tailored slacks and jacket and the tie with its jeweled stickpin. “Are you the person in charge here? If not I demand to speak to him or her. This is outrageous! Flashing lights! Sirens! I want you to know I’m filing a complaint with the neighborhood association and the city: I have already called the police and told them to cite those vehicles out front for illegal parking. And as for that aircraft—!”

“Ser Prescott, how very good to see you again. How is your dear wife?” Stella kept her voice pleasant. Ky had mentioned once that Prescott seemed too interested in this house, but her parents had shrugged it off. Maybe she shouldn’t have.

His head turned. “Sera Vatta. What is the meaning of this… this outrage? It is the third time in the past tenday that unseemly noise and confusion has come to this house. If you are going to be the focus of this kind of annoyance and criminal activity you should move to a neighborhood where such things are more common. Nothing like this happened when your father was alive. You young people today—”

“Ser Prescott!” Wilmots stepped between Prescott and Stella. “Sera Vatta was attacked—she nearly died—”

“Nonsense. Some kind of costume party. And that ridiculous mess on your face, Sera Vatta—!”

Stella’s initial urge to laugh was overcome by pure rage that lifted her to her feet. Not only nosy but insulting, after what she’d gone through.

“Take him upstairs,” she said to Wilmots. “Show him.”

“Yes, Sera,” Wilmots said, and took Prescott’s arm.

“Let go of me; you can’t do that!”

“He can,” Stella said. His face showed the beginning of fear. Good. “This is my house; you don’t make the rules here.” She walked toward him; he stared at her feet, and then a little behind her. She glanced down. Her feet had left bloody marks on the carpet. She hadn’t noticed before.

“Your mother will be appalled,” Prescott said. “When she finds out you’ve walked in paint and then on her expensive Eskalin carpet—”

“It’s not paint,” Stella said, and smiled at him. He flinched. “It’s blood. Take him upstairs, Wilmots. See if he thinks it’s a party then.”

“No!” Prescott yanked back, but two more men closed in and pushed him, complaining loudly, up the stairs to the very top.

“That,” Stella heard Wilmots say as he pointed, “is a dead man. A man who tried to kill Sera Vatta. You can see the damage he did to that sculpture.”

Stella, at the foot of the stairs, put her hand on the newel post for support. She heard Prescott protesting, then saw him fold over suddenly and heard him vomit and then groan. When Wilmots looked back and raised his brows, Stella nodded. As the men brought Prescott back down the stairs, he was babbling, “I didn’t know, I didn’t know, it’s horrible I didn’t mean it I never thought it would be like this…”