control.'
She smiled a thin smile. 'No need to use
euphemisms, Simon. The call is shielded.' 3
'No, I'm serious. I have a pest problem.
Dangerous pests. Take care of them for me. No
questions. Understood?' _ 'Understood.'
'Good. You'll need . . . oh, three to four operatives. Wear heat-resistant skinthins, and
equip them with flamethrowers, or lasers, something on that order. Come out to my place. You'll see the problem. Bugs, lots and lots of them. In my rock garden and the old swimming pool you'll find castles. Destroy them, kill everything inside them. Then knock on the door, and I'll show you what else needs to be done. Can you get out here quickly?'
Her face remained impassive. 'We'll leave within the hour.'
Lissandra was true to her word. She arrived in a lean, black skimmer with three operatives. Kress watched them from the safety of a second-story window. They were all faceless in dark plastic skinthins. Two of them wore portable flamethrowers; a third carried laser cannon and explosives. Lissandra carried nothing; Kress recognized her by the way she gave orders.
Their skimmer passed low overhead first, checking out the situation. The sandkings went mad. Scarlet and ebon mobiles ran everywhere, frenetic. Kress could see the castle in the rock garden from his vantage point. It stood tall as a man.- Its ramparts were crawling with black defenders, and a steady stream of mobiles flowed down into its depths.
Lissandra's skimmer came down next to Kress's, and the operatives vaulted out and unlimbered their weapons. They looked inhuman, deadly.
The black army drew up between them and the castle. The reds-Kress suddenly realized
that he could not see the reds. He blinked. Where had they gone?
Lissandra pointed and shouted, and her two flamethrowers spread out and opened up on the black sandkings. Their weapons coughed dully and began to roar, long tongues of blue-and scarlet fire licking out before them. Sandkings crisped and shriveled and died. The operatives began to play the fire back and forth in an efficient, interlocking pattern. They advanced with careful, measured steps. The black army burned and disintegrated, the mobiles fleeing in a thousand different directions, some back toward the castle, others toward the enemy. None reached the operatives with the flamethrowers. Lissandra's people were very professional.
Then one of them stumbled.
Or seemed to stumble. Kress looked again and saw that the ground had given way beneath the man. Tunnels, he thought with a tremor of fear; tunnels, pits, traps. The flamer was sunk in sand up to his waist, and suddenly the ground around him seemed to erupt, and he was covered with scarlet sandkings. He dropped the flamethrower and began to claw wildly at his own body. His screams were horrible to hear.
His companion hesitated, then swung and fired. A blast of flame swallowed human and sandkings both. The screaming stopped abruptly. Satisfied, the second flamer turned back to the castle, took another step forward, and recoiled as his foot broke through the
ground and vanished up to the ankle. He tried to pull it back and retreat, and the sand all around him gave way. He lost his balance and stumbled, flailing, and the sandkings were everywhere, a boiling mass of them, covering him as he writhed and rolled. His flamethrower was useless and forgotten.
Kress pounded wildly on the window, shouting for attention. 'The castle! Get the castle!'
Lissandra, standing back by her skimmer, heard and gestured. Her third operative sighted with the laser cannon and fired. The beam throbbed across the grounds and sliced off the top of the castle. He brought the cannon down sharply, hacking at the sand and stone parapets. Towers fell. Kress's face disintegrated. The laser bit into the ground, searching round and about. The castle crumbled. Now it was only a heap of sand. But the black mobiles continued to move. The maw was buried too deeply. The beams hadn't touched it.
Lissandra gave another order. Her operative discarded the laser, primed an explosive, and darted forward. He leaped over the smoking corpse of the first flamer, landed on solid ground within Kress's rock garden, and heaved. The explosive ball landed square atop the ruins of the black castle. White-hot light seared Kress's eyes, and there was a tremendous gout of sand and rock and mobiles. For a moment dust obscured everything. It was raining sandkings and pieces of sandkings.
Kress saw that the black mobiles were dead and unmoving.
'The pool!' he shouted down through the window. 'Get the castle in the pool!'
Lissandra understood quickly; the ground was littered with motionless blacks, but the reds were pulling back hurriedly and re-forming. Her operative stood uncertain, then reached down and pulled out another explosive ball. He took one step forward, but Lissandra called him, and he sprinted back in her direction.
It was all so simple then. He reached the skimmer, and Lissandra took him aloft. Kress rushed to another window in another room to watch. They came swooping in just over the pool, and the operative pitched his bombs down at the red castle from the safety of the skimmer. After the fourth run, the castle was unrecognizable, and the sandkings stopped moving.
Lissandra was thorough. She had him bomb each castle several additional times. Then he used the laser cannon, crisscrossing methodically until it was certain that nothing living could remain intact beneath those small patches of ground.
Finally they came knocking at his door. Kress was grinning maniacally when he let them in. 'Lovely,' he said, 'lovely.'
Lissandra pulled off the mask of her skinthins. 'This will cost you, Simon. Two operatives gone, not to mention the danger to my own life.'
'Of course,' Kress blurted. 'You'll be well paid, Lissandra. Whatever you ask, just so you finish the job.'
'What remains to be done?'
'You have to clean out my wine cellar,' Kress said. 'There's another castle down there. And you have to do it without explosives. I don't want my house coming down around me.'
Lissandra motioned to her operative. 'Go outside and get Rajk's flamethrower. It should be intact.'
He returned armed, ready, silent. Kress led them to the wine cellar.
The heavy door was still nailed shut, as he had left it. But it bulged outward slightly, as if warped by some tremendous pressure. That made Kress uneasy, as did the silence that reigned about them. He stood well away from the door while Lissandra's operative removed his nails and planks. 'Is that safe in here?' he found himself muttering, pointing at the flamethrower. 'I don't want a fire, either, you know.'
