“It’s just nice to feel like I’m doing something right, for once,” Hermutz sighed. “Belisle and his kind are no friends to anyone but themselves. But that’s for another time.” He looked at Enya, then back to Ian. “That Marine colonel, Thorella, wants you and Enya for interrogation. Belisle thinks the Mallorys are gone because they’re afraid of reprisals, but Thorella suspects something more. What should we–”
Reza visibly stiffened, his eyes widening slightly.
“What is it?” Enya said, putting a hand on his armored shoulder, feeling him quiver beneath it.
“They have come,” he told her. He could not sense those of the Blood, ever since the Seventh Braid, his link to the spirit of his people, had been severed the instant before the Empress exiled him from the Empire. But he had cast his mind’s eye upward, into the human ships that orbited overhead, and had heard their cries of surprise as the first of the Kreelan battle groups converging on Erlang had arrived in-system. Those cries soon turned to screams of panic and pain as the great Kreelan warships began the devastation above that would soon begin here, on the surface. He focused on Ian. “We have no more time,” he told him. “We must leave at once, or we will be caught in the coming holocaust.”
“I might be able to get a few of you out,” Pippi said, glancing over his shoulder to see if the other guards were becoming suspicious. They were looking through the viewport. Pippi waved. “But there’s no way I can get everyone out. The parliamentary guard force would cut you all down before you got a foot past the cell block doors.”
Reza thought for a moment. No matter what powers he had, he would not be able to kill every guard before the shooting began. Some, or many, of those with him now would be gunned down. “Then take Enya and Ian with you,” he said. “I will see to the rest.”
“But–” Enya began.
“Go now,” Reza said. “I will meet you on the knoll that overlooks the plain. Go.”
Reluctantly, Enya and Ian let themselves be prodded out of the cell. As the door closed behind them, Markham, the man who could have been Hawthorne’s twin, said, “So, Gard, what are we supposed to do? Just sit here until the Kreelans start shelling Mallory City?”
Reza looked at him, a grim smile on his face. “Yes,” he said.
Markham did not think it was funny.
Pippi Hermutz could not get away with escorting the two prisoners by himself, he knew, and there were no other sympathizers here who could help him. So, out of necessity, he chose a man he knew to be a strong supporter of Belisle to help him. It would make killing him a little easier on his conscience.
After the four of them crowded into the elevator that would take them upstairs to the president’s office, Pippi turned to his Territorial Army colleague and subordinate, Hans Miflin, and shot him between the eyes with a low- power pencil beam from his blaster. Just strong enough to penetrate the man’s skull, it turned his forebrain into bloody steam. Twitching like a pithed frog, he collapsed to the floor of the elevator.
Enya jammed the STOP button. Ian and Pippi propped up Miflin’s body beside the door in a sitting position so it would be harder for someone outside the elevator to see him.
“My God, Pippi,” the elder Mallory breathed. “How can we kill one another like this?”
Pippi looked at him as if he were a child. “Too easily, Ian. But at least he was armed. Most of the people he’s killed in his lifetime weren’t. Keep that in mind the next time you feel like shedding a tear for the likes of him.” Checking that none of them had any blood on their clothes, he said, “Take this.” He handed Ian his blaster, and then picked up Miflin’s gun, handing it to Enya. “Keep them hidden unless you need them. Go straight out the back door, through the kitchens on the first level. You can’t miss them. Someone should be waiting for you there with transportation.”
“What about the others?” Enya asked.
“Reza will have to deal with that,” he said impatiently. “I’ve done all I can.”
“What about you, Pippi?” Ian said.
He nodded at the blaster in Ian’s hand. “You have to shoot me, to make it look like an escape. Injure me enough to make it convincing.”
“But aren’t you coming with us?” Enya asked, incredulous. “Pippi, the Kreelans are coming!”
“I have to think of my family,” he said. “I can’t leave the building before my shift is up without drawing notice to myself. And if Belisle or his people ever find out that I’ve helped you, my wife and children…” He shook his head. Sympathizers were treated far more harshly than Mallorys. His entire family would probably be imprisoned, and he would be executed. “You owe me this, Ian.”
Clenching his jaws, Ian raised the pistol, aimed as carefully as his trembling hand allowed, and shot Pippi in the head, through his helmet. Their rescuer collapsed, and Enya quickly knelt and put a hand to his neck.
“He’s still alive,” she whispered as the stench of smoking flesh turned her stomach. She had to get out of here or she would vomit.
Ian carefully placed Pippi’s body on the other side of the door in a position similar to Miflin’s. “Thank you, my friend,” he whispered, a hand on the man’s shoulder. He knew there was no way either he or his family would make it out of the city alive when the Kreelans came. He should have saved him the pain and simply killed him, he thought sadly. Standing again, he turned to Enya. “It’s time.”
Nodding, she pushed the RUN button, and the elevator lurched upward toward the first floor.
It stopped and the doors swished open. Ian had been praying fervently that there would be no one standing there when it did. Thankfully, no one was.
“This way,” Enya said, leading him to the left, behind the twin staircases that were the centerpiece of the foyer. This early in the morning, few of the Parliament’s bureaucrats and other functionaries were about. They saw two guards, but they were half asleep, inattentive.
Turning down a long corridor, Enya saw the silvery doors that led to the main kitchens. In the job she had once held as a runner for one of the more moderate Ranier representatives, she had often come down here to get him food to satisfy his compulsive eating habits, his only vice.
There were three cooks getting ready for the morning meal service in the main dining room, but they did not see the two refugees as they stole past a row of gleaming copper and stainless steel cookware along the far side, away from the steaming urns.
The back door loomed ahead. Enya opened it, only to find a Territorial Army uniform blocking her way.
“Hey!” the man said, raising his rifle.
Enya shot him in the chest.
But that was not the end of their troubles. Ten meters away stood a big Marine transport skimmer and a group of camouflaged, armored figures with their weapons pointed directly at them.
“Don’t,” Ian said as she raised her pistol. “It’s useless,” he said, defeated.
Tears of frustration in her eyes, Enya threw down her weapon and raised her hands. Ian did the same.
Suddenly, a familiar face peered out through the skimmer’s personnel door. “Don’t just stand there,” Eustus shouted. “Get in!”
“Eustus!” Enya cried as the Marines bundled her and Ian into the troop carrier, hiding the Territorial Army soldier’s body in a nearby trash bin and retrieving their weapons from the pavement before someone noticed something amiss, unlikely as that was in the darkness of this early hour.
Inside the vehicle’s armored hull, Enya and Eustus kissed and embraced. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“One of your people came and tipped us off to your little breakout,” he told her. “But let’s save that for later. Where are Reza and the others?”
“They’re still being held,” Ian told him.
“We’ve got to get them out of there quickly. Belisle and Thorella are expecting us for interrogation, and they’ll be getting suspicious.”
“Well,” Eustus said, “we should be able to do something about that. But I’m not sure what we’re going to do afterwards. We don’t really have anywhere to go, and we’ll have Thorella’s entire regiment on our ass.”
Ian and Enya looked at each other. “What about the plain on the far side of the mountain?” she asked.
Eustus looked at her blankly.
“The messenger didn’t tell you?” Ian asked. “That the Kreelans are coming?”
Eustus’s eyes widened. “They only told us that you guys were going to make a break and that you’d need
