Ibrahim's nerves jangled and jittered as he took the elevator from the Lahab-u-Din's shuttle hangar. When the lift doors opened on the carrier's bridge, he had to steel himself for just an instant before stepping out.
It wasn't Ibrahim's first time on a military vessel, not by any means, but he still felt a twinge of almost existential despair at the sight of the ghazi pilots, astrogators, datapushers and grunts, no more than swatches of paleness surrounded by dimness, midnight turned to multi-hued twilight by the mingling of the blue glow of the overhead lights and the red and green flicker of datascreens. The contrast to the broad pastel sweeps of the Booth's datapanels and the relatively plush comfort of the controllers' work spaces was a stark one.
Maybe that was how the ghazis had earned their reputation for fearlessness. The professional soldiers knew that survival in battle meant getting sent back to their ships.
Then he found Lieutenant al-Mutawwali, standing at attention with square shoulders and straight back - unusually straight, even for him. Uncomfortably straight, Ibrahim would have thought. When the man nodded and mumbled something just below the threshold of audibility, Ibrahim understood his posture. He was on-line with Setna Amjed. It took some effort for Ibrahim to suppress a guilty flush of pleasure. It looked as if the drill sergeant had met his match.
Ibrahim moved up to stand just behind the Lieutenant at what he hoped was a properly polite distance. Try as he might, Ibrahim couldn't make out a word of the marine's conversation: the Lieutenant spoke softer than a whisper, undoubtedly straining even the hyper-sensitive pickup of his military-grade comm to maximum. Amjed must have been putting on one of his best performances.
Al-Mutawwali turned off his comm with a tap. The ghazi took a deep breath, held it and released it in something very like a sigh of relief.
"Lieutenant al-Mutawwali. Sir."
To his credit, the ghazi didn't jump out of his skin when Ibrahim spoke his name. A twitch of a shoulder maybe, but as one who had been on the receiving end of Setna Amjed's vitriol only moments ago Ibrahim knew al-Mutawwali's remarkable composure for what it was.
"Warden Smith," the Lieutenant said coolly. Overcompensating. "We're about to retake the Mount, get back into the Park Management System. I understand you've received your orders?"
"Yes, Lieutenant. I'm to observe."
"And make your codes available to me at any time."
"Yes sir. And that."
"We'll get along just fine, then." The Lieutenant turned his still-too-straight back on Ibrahim. "Damned clouds," he murmured. Ibrahim turned his attention to the image of Murkworld on the main viewscreen. Sure enough, the continent was buried under a roiling mass of clouds. Cut off from the surface comm grid, and now unable to observe from above. Ibrahim didn't envy the Lieutenant's position.
A marine approached, a hint of "is-this-doggy-going-to-bite trepidation in his eyes as he saluted the Lieutenant. "Drop sphere's loaded, sir."
"Ah," Al-Mutaswali murmured. "Good." His clipped tone made the news seem anything but good, and Ibrahim wondered why.
A drop sphere. They were going all out on this mission. When the marines had landed on Glory of the Ottomans, the drop sphere had been little more than a simulation brewing at the heart of some military thinktank's AI net - though even then the military newsgroups had been aflame with rumors about its capabilities. Designed for the profoundly unlikely occasion of an invasion of the Ghul homeworld (which had yet to be discovered), the spheres relied solely on grav-generators for ... well, propulsion wasn't quite the right word. Push? No. Movement. The only word Ibrahim could think of that left out any implication that such archaic a force as thrust had anything to do with how a drop sphere got from place to place. The grav-generators gave ghazi pilots full control of movement in all three dimensions and the ability to slip into atmosphere without the friction-generated heat signature that invariably betrayed even the suprisiest of surprise drops
Al-Mutawwali stood rapping the fingers of his right hand on the back of the datapusher's chair, earning himself an irritated glance from Ms. Pascal. Ibrahim wondered if there was more to his agitation than Amjed's lecture. If this really was the drop sphere's first deployment, he'd have observers other than Setna Amjed looking over his shoulder during the operation.
Any smugness Ibrahim felt vaporized when he realized those same observers would be watching him as well.
"We can't delay any longer." The Lieutenant spoke softly, as if to himself. When he gave his orders, however, his voice snapped with all of its accustomed volume.
"Proceed with the drop."
The datapusher in the cubicle across the aisle from Mushkilah shot her a skeptical glance as she again turned to her mirror to fiddle with her hijab. She supposed she was overdoing it - nothing short of a hurricane could have blown it awry that many times in the last hour.
But Amjed had stomped down the aisle twice during that time, once nearly getting a look at her dataport before she could switch it back to her progress report.
She poked invisible strands of hair back under her scarf as she scanned the length of the aisle in the mirror. At the far side of the control platform, Amjed's door stood closed. A mailbot scurried from cubicle to cubicle, and Mac Nguyen was leaning against the divider that separated Karen Taggert's workspace from his own. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Mushkilah had to be careful. The scene now playing out on her dataport was damning indeed. With the help of friends in low places, she'd managed to patch into the Booth's observation grid. At a touch she could switch from node to node, but she hadn't touched the control pad for quite some time now, since she'd found the perfect view of the Lahab-u-Din and the massive mirror ball growing out of its side. Only the top third or so of the drop sphere bulged up from the blacker-than-black shadow of the carrier, the light reflected up at it from the blue-green vastness of Murkworld glinting off the golden curve of the verses that covered its surface. From the Booth node they appeared delicate and minute - she thought she could make out Ayat al-Kursi, the Verse of the Throne, but couldn't be sure, so tiny did the script appear on her dataport. In reality, each letter towered taller than a tall man, and the entire verse of the Holy Qur'an would have stretched over at least half of the warehouse-like Misr datapool in which she worked.
Ayat al-Kursi. Had to be. No military vessel expected to enter atmosphere did so without its protection against the Jinn who might inhabit its upper reaches. No self-respecting ghazi would have stepped foot aboard such a vessel. A marine could expect dangers enough after planetfall.
Light flared suddenly up from the glow nodes around the drop sphere. The launch sequence had begun.
Mushkilah adjusted herself in the mirror one last time. The coast was clear.
On the dataport, the sphere flashed brilliantly in the Lahab-u-Din's strobes, its data and weapons arrays seemingly alight with Saint Elmo's Fire, as it rolled away from the carrier and began its drop down to Murkworld.
On the viewscreen, the elegantly scrolling verses of the Qur'an seemed to fade away as a dull, oily muck oozed out like sweat from unseen pores in the sphere's surface -- another toy of the ghazi engineers. Based on one of the many failed attempts to emulate the substance with which the Bedouin coated their ships, the drop-sphere's liquid skin served as both heat shield and camouflage. Well, camouflage if the drop was being made on the night-side of the planet: the substance had some of the strength of the Bedu material, but none of its kaleidoscopic color. It came in one hue: primer gray. That gray, however, was almost impossible to detect from ground-based observation nodes, at least at night.
On traditional craft, that coating would have burned off in the first minute of contact with the atmosphere. The drop-sphere's more controlled descent would produce only as much heat as the pilot thought safe - weighed against the marines' need to boots on soil before ground-based fire brought them down.
The calligraphy-covered sphere bathed in sunlight had been stunningly beautiful. Under the liquid skin it shed its beauty. Now it looked brutal, ready to kill.
The drop sphere swallowed its weapons and communications arrays into itself and fell toward Murkworld.
One of the Lieutenant's ghazis cried out from the back of the control room. "Takbir!"
"Allahu-akbar!" Ibrahim caught himself bellowing out the response with everyone else, his own stake in the ghazi's mission momentarily forgotten in the excitement. Even Lieutenant al-Mutawwali stood a little more at ease.
"Takbir!"
"Allahu-akbar!"
The sphere fell like a peculiarly symmetrical asteroid, a real dinosaur killer.
"Takbir!"
"Allahu-akbar!" After the third and final takbir, the hush of awe returned to the Lahab-u-Din's bridge.
"Track it," Al-Mutawwali barked into the near silence. The image on the viewscreen seemed to leap toward them. In two bounds the drop sphere pressed up against the screen like some roly-poly child's belly rubbing against an ice cream parlor's window.
The sphere hung unmoving in the viewscreen while Murkworld swelled up behind it. Ibrahim wished the Lieutenant had left the view alone - he would have much preferred to watch the drop sphere grow small and disappear into a remote Murkworld, marines and Sprites alike far away, the crisis resolving itself at a distance.
Instead he watched the planet engulf the drop sphere, swallow it like a very big fish gulping down a very little one. Light flared up from the liquid skin as it struck the planet's atmosphere. It glowed an angry red for a few seconds, then dimmed as the pilot adjusted the speed of his descent. The uppermost layer of cloud swept around the sphere, hiding it. The screen flickered as Pascal switched over to heat tracking, and the sphere reappeared, a blue globe still obscured by night. The liquid skin was absorbing too much heat energy for the sphere to present a proper signature: bad for observers aboard the Lahab-u-Din, who would have a tough time tracking it all the way to the surface, good for the marines, since observers on the ground would have just as much trouble.
Ibrahim counted the seconds, though he had no idea how long it would take for the sphere to drop below the clouds.
It faded to near-invisibility as the cloying moisture of the clouds cooled its surface. Then it vanished.
"Sphere nodes," al-Mutawwali snapped. Ms. Pascal's stylus swept across her datapad, and the screen filled with mist.
Beautiful, Ibrahim thought, even as he felt that familiar tightening somewhere in the middle of his chest. He gasped when the mists withdrew suddenly, and the sparkling surface of Murkworld lay spread out beneath him. Beneath the sphere, he reminded himself. Though he could almost imagine himself falling through the open air toward the lights of the Sprite cities, he was only a spectator here.
Alhamdulillahi, he was only a spectator.
Then he noticed. Something was very, very wrong.
The Lieutenant had noticed it too. "Smith, is that Misr's notion of camouflage?"
"No," Ibrahim murmured, hastily adding a "sir." "It's not supposed to...there should be a holo projection over that."
Beneath the sphere, surrounded by the twinkling glimmer of what passed on Murkworld for a metropolis, where there should have been the fiery glow of lava in the volcano's cone, white, oh-so--artificial light swelled up from the Mount of the Oracle.
Ibrahim remembered how firmly the Jacobin had insisted on stripping away every holo-projection concealing the data and power nodes with which Misr Entertainment maintained control over Glory of the Ottomans. Had he been acting on some universal Sprite impulse? Would any Sprite, undeceived, do the same thing?
He told himself that the glitch that had shut down the BrainChild must have deactivated the lava projection. Whoever now controlled the planet's systems simply hadn't gotten around to restoring it yet.
Had to be. It had to be.
Because otherwise it was possible they were faced with another Sprite rebellion.
The Lieutenant shot him an angry glance when the hiccups first hit, then turned away in disgust as they refused to stop.
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In which the ghazi marines of the Caliphate prepare to save the day.
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<img src="/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=2&cb=39695&n=a39695d" /> Negotiations
Footsteps thudded up the aisle behind Mushkilah. She fumbled at the dataport, telling herself it was just Mac Nguyen on the hunt again, or someone chasing after the mailcart to retrieve a packet they'd forgotten to address. How many times had she jumped out of her skin only to have some pimply-faced data-prod bump against her cubicle and move on?
"Ms. Jamjoom." That voice fell around her like a collapsing wall. Setna Amjed. The man gazed down at her over his narrow nose. Though not a tall man, Amjed made up what he lacked in height with sheer presence. Uncommonly pale skin, liquid eyes, almost feminine features notwithstanding, Amjed projected the mien of a man born to tell others what to do and to deal with them efficiently should they fail to do what they were told.
On her dataport, the Mount of the Oracle still glowed white beneath the drop sphere.
Mushkilah's hands leapt for the control pad again, all the while hearing a stream of incoherent nonsense tumbling from her lips. She knew from experience that the best way to get out of trouble was to brave it through - in this instance, act as if she hadn't just been violating half-a-dozen security regulations. Unfortunately, Amjed was a far more threatening figure than her father had ever been, and an illegal tap into the Booth systems was a bit more serious than getting caught slipping out of the house after midnight.
She silently cursed herself as she saw his eyes follow her movements to the calamity on her dataport.
"Ah," he said softly. One corner of Amjed's mouth twitched in what might, under other circumstances, have been mistaken for a smile. "I see you're already observing events on Murkworld."
"Mr. Amjed, I was just...my Warden is there...I thought I should...." Mushkilah stumbled to a halt, her mind blank. She had absolutely no valid excuse for even knowing about the ghazi drop, let alone observing it. She was unquestionably, profoundly screwed.
Though the shape of Amjed's lips again suggested a smile, his eyes glinted cold contempt as he regarded her. "No need to worry. I was just coming to ask you to join me in my office. To monitor the drop." As he turned away she thought she heard him add the word "legally."
With deliberate calm she switched her dataport view back to her progress report, then stood, smoothed the front of her skirt, and followed Amjed, absolutely determined not to hurry to catch up to him.
She hurried a little. But only a little.
Disaster. Disaster. It was all a disaster.
Ibrahim watched in mounting horror as the drop sphere bypassed the Mount of the Oracle, skimming down low over the tree-covered foothills in search of someplace to land in secret. With the Mount itself possibly closed to them, the ghazis would have to proceed under the assumption they were charging into enemy-occupied territory.
No more chance of a quick resolution. No chance that they might just drop into the BrainChild control room, tap a few of his codes into the main terminal, and restore order, peace and the possibility of a rapid shutdown to Murkworld.
Swallowing deep gulps of air in an attempt to silence his hiccups, Ibrahim told himself that, considering the pattern of his life to date, he should have expected nothing less than disaster from the outset.
No, it's not a disaster yet. This is just a setback. They're ghazis. They'll take care of things.
I won't have to go down there.
We're going to have to send Smith down there."
Mushkilah felt a tightening in her chest, and wondered if Ibrahim suffered the same sensation right before the hiccups hit. From across the continental bulk of marble that was his desk Setna Amjed studiously ignored her reaction, all of his attention on the viewport screen which covered the far wall of his office. The thick tangle of Murkworld forest filled the screen, lit garishly by the drop sphere's strobes.
"But Mr. Amjed, the ghazis ... they haven't even disembarked. I'm sure they'll have no trouble getting to the BrainChild, and once they've got control of the Park, the remaining Guests can be located and shuttled out. I'm sure this is only a slight delay..."
Amjed didn't so much as flick his eyes in her direction. His cool gaze stayed on the lushness on the viewport. His fingers plucking at the winged solar disk on his collar offered the only visible sign of his agitation. "The delay is exactly the problem, Ms. Jamjoom. If the marines had taken the Mount as planned, your Warden would have led one of their datapushers into the system via commlink. There would have been time to make the attempt, at least. If successful, the Park shut-down could have been completed immediately and, as you said, the Guests located and removed. If unsuccessful, we'd have sent Smith down in person with no more than a day lost. By the time word of our success worked its way Down-Fold to Al-Bustan, that day would seem a nothing, less than a nothing.
"Now there's no time. If the delay stretches to two days, three, the Shura Council will undoubtedly decide that we're dragging our feet, that Misr Enterprises isn't committed to carrying out the shutdown as ordered. That the fate of our Guests doesn't concern us. The Council already feels they've given us no more than a slap on the wrist for what happened on the Glory of the Ottomans. They'd be more than happy to be given an excuse to mete out a proper punishment.
"When the ghazis have established their perimeter around the Mount, Warden Smith will be dropped in. I'm afraid we have no choice."
Mushkilah didn't think she'd ever heard Amjed speak so many words all together without at some point issuing a command. What had she done to merit such loquaciousness?
A silence hung long between them. Almost as if Amjed were waiting for her to say something. But what?
And then she knew. Mushkilah felts an emotion she'd long abandoned where Ibrahim was concerned.
Hope.
Ibrahim was her Warden. She was the expert on his training, his readiness, his psychological and physical well-being. It had been so long since Ibrahim had been anything more than a glorified (or not-so-glorified) clerk, she'd nearly forgotten the protocols which had preceded his mission to Glory of the Ottomans.
Amjed needed her OK on Ibrahim's deployment.
Mushkilah hadn't realized she'd been slouching until she felt her back straightening against her chair. Although Amjed's signature contempt still curled his lips, it no longer seemed to conceal unspeakable consequences, the horror of failing Misr Enterprises or any of its affiliates in any manner. His smile now seemed to conceal just a bit of uncertainty.
Whatever this conversation had begun as, it was now a negotiation. And Mushkilah might just have the advantage. The flame-shrouded, nose-diving wreck that was Ibrahim's career hadn't exactly done wonders for her own future. Maybe now she could begin to set things right for both of them.
Amjed cleared his throat, interrupting her train of thought. "Please tell Smith to be ready to drop at any time in the next twenty-four hours." His tone was still that of a man who expected his words to be unhesitatingly transformed into action.
Mushkilah leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table in an attempt to project a confidence she didn't quite feel. "To be honest, Mr. Setna, I'm a bit concerned about Warden Smith's preparedness." There - something glinted behind Amjed's eyes. He hadn't liked that. "If you review his file, you'll see for yourself that he's still on restricted duty. Although I've recommended he be upgraded to standby status, head office has insisted he retain his current rating."
The glint behind Amjed's eyes flickered and flared into a small conflagration. "The 'head office' has obviously reconsidered its position." Amjed leaned forward, matching her position, elbows on the table. "Are you telling me that your Warden isn't prepared to resume active duty?"
Ah. Amjed was back in the game.
Mushkilah shrugged, leaned back, tried to cram as much offhanded into her words as possible. "I've thought he was ready for months now. If the administration were to consider revisiting his file -- "
Sudden movement on the viewport caught her eye. She paused, shot a glance in its direction, then turned full body to face the screen, leaving Amjed sitting waiting for her to finish her sentence. Then he turned to see what had distracted her, and was caught as well.
A straggling line of figures stood along the forest's edge, man-height, robed in black.
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In which Ms. Jamjoom wades into battle for her Warden.
Comments 0 0 0 <img src="/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=167&cb=527af&n=a527afd" /> <img src="/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=1&cb=c7a4a&n=ac7a4ad" /> <img src="/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=2&cb=39695&n=a39695d" /> Standoff
Private First-Class Majid Nisaar had spent nearly seven years of his life on the Ghul frontier, playing cat-and-mouse with the aliens. He'd greeted his transfer to the Lahab-u-Din with a mixture of disgust, despair and relief. Disgust at being dragged back from the front line when the Ghul conflict looked ready to last a good long time and despair at possibly losing the one guaranteed means to advancement in the Corps - service under fire. Relief, albeit a guilty sense of relief, at the possibility he'd live to collect his pension.
When black-robed figures stepped out of the forest to form a ring around the drop sphere, his emotions were just as confused. Relief, again, that this drop might amount to something worth putting into his permanent record. Anticipation at the thought of actually seeing some action. And terror at the sight of those dark figures, stepping out to confront the state-of-the-art weapons platform that was the sphere completely empty-handed.
Of course, they had come to beg the marines not to blast their way to the Mount of the Oracle. They'd come to surrender, to plead for mercy, to offer up whoever had been responsible for disrupting the shut-down of Murkworld. Of course they had.
"Deployment in ten and counting." The Captain's voice cracked like a whip from the loudspeaker just above his head, filling the dusky air of the aptly-named animal pen in which the grunts of the drop force waited to be herded out to do their jobs. The ship's systems had almost completely filtered out his nasal squeak, given the weasel's voice a bit of authority.
Sami Lebdi's shoulder hunched forward against his own just as it always did before a fight. But this wouldn't be a fight, would it? Certainly not much of one.
Majid waited for the drop sphere to roll over into deployment position and drop the cattle chute through which the marines would deploy, mumbling dhikr prayers. Beside him, Sami murmured just under his breath, doing the same. "Subhanallhi wa bihamdi, subhanallahi-il-atheem, Subhanallhi wa bihamdi, subhanallahi-il-atheem, Subhanallhi wa bihamdi, subhanallahi-il-atheem...."
At five seconds, the Captain's voice blared takbir over the loudspeaker. "Allahuakbar!"
Majid bellowed with everything he had as the sphere shifted beneath him. "Allahuakbar!"
"Allahuakbar!" The Captain's voice and their reply were accompanied by the low whirring of servos and the snapping and popping of releasing latches as the cattle chute was unfurled.
A second's hush before the third takbir, then the takbir. The clang of the pen's gate sliding open gave way to the roar of the charging ghazis and the dimness around Majid seemed to hum and crackle with energy.
Fishyfishy "Fisabilillahi, ya ikhwanii!" The Captain's voice filled the pen behind him, seemed to propel him forward, down the chute to the brilliant circle of light at its bottom. "For the sake of Allah, my brothers!"
The narrow cattle chute resounded with the pounding of boots and the howls of the marines. He could see no further than the padded shoulders and bulky helmets of the two ghazis just ahead of him, their dark forms haloed by the light pouring in from the clearing without. Then the light bloomed bright around them as they leapt down onto the grass of Murkworld, and Majed leapt too, Sami at his side.
The other marines had already formed up, standing with their bolt-sprayers held across their chests, the air filled with the whine of charging plasma-darts. Majid double-timed it to his place in the arcing line of ghazis, thumbed his sprayer to life. Sami fell in beside him.
Silence dropped around them, thunderous after the cacophony of the last few minutes. Majid checked the charge reading on his weapon, then raised his eyes to the forest's edge.
The figures still stood still, faces hidden in the cowls of their robes, hands buried up the sleeves of opposite arms, like 'tainment net Kung Fu masters. Although all were more-or-less within the normal height and weight range for humans, some pushed the envelope of that range close to bursting. Some were just a shade too tall, and far too thin for their height, while others were a bit too broad, or a bit too short, or both too broad and too short.
He had a sinking feeling he knew what that meant.
A single pair of boots thudded down the cattle chute. That would be Captain Al-Qureishi, leading from slightly-to-the-rear, as always. Majid was too much the professional to allow himself to think bad thoughts of a senior officer (such thoughts as, for example, "that baqarah wouldn't have survived a week on the frontier", or "I guess if he ever did take his head out of his ass, his ears might freeze").
The Captain emerged from the chute and stopped cold. The harsh glare of the sphere's floodlights, which glinted on every other surface in the clearing, fell into the blackness of his body armor as if the suit had been carved from a singularity. Majed and the other ghazis ringing the clearing made do with light-weight flash-coats, little more than projectile-absorbing jackets coated with a substance which, they were told, had been specially engineered to deflect the beams of energy weapons but which never seemed to succeed in doing so - and which bore a disturbing resemblance to chrome paint.
The Captain's bolt-sprayer hung across his back in exactly the right place for him to choke himself with the strap were he to make a quick grab for it. In the hands that should have held his weapon, he carried a datakey.
Which meant that the sphere's scans must have confirmed what Majed had suspected: they were surrounded by Sprites.
The thought should have calmed him. He probably wouldn't be using the bolt-sprayer, not when the Captain had a datakey. [check – Ibrahim created hack?]
Majed ran his gaze down the line of robed figures, standing so serenely along the clearing's edge, and felt anything but calm.
The Captain took three steps away from the cattle chute and halted just behind the row of ghazis. His lips moved behind the gray-tinted glasteel of his helmet. No doubt issuing orders to his suit. Sure enough, the suit's external speakers hissed to life, buzzing with the distortion of the "voice of god" mode the Captain had insisted be custom-programmed into the suit's processor block. All the volume and echo the suit could produce couldn't make Al-Qureishi's voice sound any less whiny.
The first and last sound the voice-of-god projected into the clearing was the phlegmy rattle of the Captain clearing his throat.
It was answered by the soft rustle of cloth sliding down arms as, all around them, the Sprites lifted hands above heads and called fire down upon the clearing.
Safe, Majed told himself. Armor's crap, but the Park suits they issued will keep that stuff off of us. Praise Allah, they're only Sprites. Alhamdulillahi Rabb-ilalameen.
Bolts of fiery light pounded the clearing, the marines and the drop sphere. Instead of issuing the command to open fire, Captain Al-Qureishi fumbled at the datakey. Majed imagined he saw the idiot's thumb depress the transmit key, but he couldn't have, because around the clearing the Sprites stayed standing and the fire continued to pound down. The bolts struck the men around him, played around their bodies like St. Elmo's Fire as their Park-suits discharged the Sprites' faux-magic.
He could see that it was getting harder and harder for the men to ignore the attack; beside him Sami took a hand from his bolt-sprayer to slap at a flurry of energy as it scooted across his chest.
Something flickered in the sky above him - it had looked like - no, it was gone.
The fact that the Sprites' attack was apparently without effect seemed to calm the Captain, who stopped beating at the datakey with dead-fish hands and began purposefully poking and prodding it with his index finger.
Something flickered above his head. Majed looked up to see the sky crisscrossed with blue-white beams of light. The energy-net of the Murkworld grid. The shields designed to mask it were failing, which meant the Sprites had to be drawing more than the safety-overrides should have allowed.
Something was wrong. But the Park-suits would -
Deathly silence fell on the clearing as the fire ceased raining down. Had Majed not seen the grid above him still glowing angrily against the stars, he might have thought the Sprites had given up their attack.
"What are they doing?" Sami's voice held just an edge of panic, an edge Majed had heard no more than a handful of times in their years together fighting the Ghul.
Fire lanced down from the grid again, concentrated now on the Captain's armored form. The datakey fell from Al-Qureishi's gauntlets and he fumbled at the bolt-sprayer on his back, managing only to get the strap tangled around his neck. In his last moments, he seemed to be performing a fair pantomime of a man trying to save himself from being strangled by a python.
A warm glow swelled up from beneath the armor's shiny surface, like the fire of a volcanic eruption rising up from oceanic depths. Inside the helmet the captain's lips were moving as he struggled to free the strap of his sprayer from where it had tangled on the suit's shoulder plate. A sheen of sweat glistened on Al-Qureishi's forehead and on the planes of his cheekbones, though the flesh itself seemed to be darkening. The helm's tinting distorted the colors, but Majed could tell the man was turning red as he began to broil inside his armor.
Majed might have been the first to begin firing, or the first spray of plasma-lit darts could have come from someone else, from any of fifty someone-elses. It didn't matter - the ghazis fired more or less as one, and here and there Sprites began to fall. The fires of faux-magic still concentrated on the captain as he clawed at his suit releases, his lips screaming a silent "o" behind his helm. Majed targeted one of the willowy forms, sending a bolt near enough to burn a chunk out of the Sprite's cheek. The next bolt struck true, and the cowled hood became a flaming mess of fabric, flesh and bone.
A sound like the angry whistle of a tea-kettle filled the clearing, and then gore and shrapnel erupted from where the captain had stood an instant earlier. Shards of officer-grade battle-armor tore through the marines. A dozen must have dropped around Majed, but for those few seconds at least he was spared.
He howled and fired and Sprites fell as plasma bolts tore through them. Then those still standing raised their arms once more, and the overloaded power grid again inserted itself between the marines and the stars.
Fire roared down on Sami Lebdi, whirled angrily around his Park suit until the suit died, overloaded. Then Sami died as well, screaming.
Fire lashed down at marine after marine, its energies concentrated now on no more than two or three men at a time. Their armor useless, their Park-suits quickly failing under the overwhelming barrage of energy, ghazi after ghazi fell.
Majed fired and howled and fired and howled while around him two squads died. Fire began playing along the surface of the sphere itself. Majed wondered if the Sprites could actually summon enough power from the grid to crack that egg.
Then the fires found him.
Neither Setna Amjed nor Mushkilah could find it in themselves to speak for several long moments after the last of the marines died. The fires played along the surface of the sphere, but failed to penetrate it. Another squad of marines poured out of the cattle chute and died, and then there were no more. Who would be left inside the sphere? The pilot, a few techies. Whoever they were, they had the presence of mind to retract the chute.
But not before several Sprites had made their way inside. A few minutes later, a last desperate call came from a marine pilot, no more than a scattering of incoherent syllables, followed by his death-howl.
Then silence, and a moment later darkness as the sphere's visual nodes were shut down.
Mushkilah and Amjed sat in silence, stunned by the many impossibilities they'd just witnessed. The Sprites had ignored the datakey, overloaded the grid, gotten through the Park suits. Killed. The Sprites had killed.
How many Guests were still down on the surface of Murkworld? What might the Sprites do to them? What had they already done?
To give him his due, Mr. Amjed recovered first. Mushkilah clearly saw the glint return to his eyes, the curl to his lips.
She, however, was the first to speak.
"He'll need security."
"Already arranged."
"Not just marines – specialists. Someone familiar with the Parkworld."
"Already arranged."
"And after he's finished - "
"Assuming he survives...."
"Posting of his choice within the company, or executive retirement package."
"I was thinking more along the lines of a cash reward and promotion to B grade. Guaranteed employment at the same grade after the Parks have been shut down."
"Posting of choice or retirement, or no deal."
The glint in Amjed's eyes went supernova.
"Same for me."
No, now the glint in Amjed's eyes went supernova. Mushkilah tried to ignore the many horrible things this man could do or have done to her, and held his gaze.
The corner of his mouth lifted a millimeter higher, and her blood went cold.
"Agreed," he said softly.
Agreed? She'd won? Then why was he looking so smug?
"We leave for Murkworld in an hour. Should your Warden fail, I want both of us to be on the scene. In person. To congratulate your man if he succeeds. To deal with the consequences should he fail."
Ah. The consequences of failure. Mushkilah tried her best to feel like she'd gotten the upper hand. She had won.
As long as Ibrahim didn't screw things up.