Part 103 (2/2)
”Work, d.a.m.n you, work!” he shouted. The watchers standing about the messy cubicle in the Castle Gateway cloister had blank faces and barricaded minds. Cloud. The thunder-browed redskin, Chief Burke. Kuhal Earthshaker. The incompetent amateur engineer, Chee-Wu Chan, whose screw-up had produced the faulty batch of wire in the first place. ”Work!”
Finger the restart. Set tolerance: 0.005u,. Feed.
Go!
He moaned, ”Now stay there, you peris.h.i.+ng f.u.c.ker.” Cloud caressed his fatigue-poisoned senses. A vision of sweet Rowane seemed to float just beyond the labouring machine, slender scaled arms outstretched, single eye weeping tender tears.
Chee-Wu caught a fresh bobbin as the machine spat it out, and rushed it away to the core-spinning team. Hagen Remillard stuck his head into the cubicle and said to his sister, ”Aiken's deep-sight has spotted an anomaly just outside the castle, standing on the old time-gate site. Impermeable, two hundred and thirty cents high, ma.s.s congruent with Papa's CE rig.”
”We can't hurry this,” Cloud said. ”Go flog the other workers.”
”We're going to stack all the small sigmas that the King brought with him around the inner ward,” Hagen said, ”get everybody under the umbrella up next to the Guderian device and the fix-it benches. We'll activate just as soon as you finish the last spool of wire. With luck, there'll be enough time left to complete the last cable repair.”
Tony gave a manic chuckle. ”Some hope! You have Jonah himself jinxing your escape, kid! Disaster tracks old Tony Wayland like hyenas trailing a wounded buck. You're not going to get away from your father. None of us have a chance! The black Night's closing in and the demon horde is ready to strike-”
The cladder ejected the final spool of wire.
”Grab Tony!” Hagen told Kuhal Earthshaker. ”Everybody out into the courtyard!”
”We'll try a psychocreative s.h.i.+eld,” Aiken told the crowd gathered about the gazebo platform. ”It might give us a lastsecond edge after he cracks the big dome and the improvised sigma-stack. But I can't go the limit defending the time-gate.
The war that's coming up has to be my first priority. You understand that, don't you?”
Hagen and Cloud gave a simultaneous mental a.s.sent. They stood, together with Kuhal Earthshaker and Diane Manion, inside the gazebo of the Guderian device. Every person in the silent a.s.sembly knew that once Marc Remillard's children were beyond his reach, the battle would be over. But if Hagen and Cloud failed to escape ...
Elizabeth said to them: You have fully a.s.similated the extremity defence?
Cloud said: Yes. And we'll use it. Papa won't take us alive.
Hagen said: I wish there was some way we could destroy our bodies!
Aiken said: He'll be able to stop that-if it reaches that point.
I'm sorry. Elizabeth's snuff sequence is your last bastion.
Kuhal and Diane said: And we are in tandem.
Elizabeth said: Fortunate ones. In the Milieu such consolation would be refused for the greater good of the Unity.
Anatoly said: ”And rightly! Poor children. But G.o.d understands lovers and forgives. Those who refuse to love are another matter.”
Elizabeth cried: How can you hear us? How dare you?
”He hears through my mind's ear,” replied the King. And he said to her on the intimate mode: Death is not the children's last defender Elizabeth. You are.
Outside the castle the armoured shape stood ready in starless dark. Its body was set aside, suspended from life-process in refrigerated stasis. Its brain blazed as the needle electrodes charged it with energies too great for unsupported flesh and blood to bear. It was fully empowered in the aggressive psychocreative faculty. Far away in Nionel, the obedient cells of the Organic Mind, 80,000 strong awaited its command.
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