C. Cherryh: Cyteen

"You stop your people. You guarantee me custody of Giraud's replicate. I'm perfectly willing to accept retirement. I have the means to make taking this place extremely expensive; but there's no need. I have the feeling you must blame me for the events in Novgorod—"

Ari laughed again, with less humor, Justin thought. "I really don't know, uncle Denys. I don't entirely care. I've rather well overrun the course you set for me; and it's my time. The changing of the seasons. Perfectly natural. You can have a wing, you can have your comforts– I know that matters to you, uncle Denys. You can work on your books, – I do know about that. They're wonderful. You have so much valuable yet to do. . . ."

"You're very flattering, young sera. I want Seely."

Ari was silent a moment. "Under some restrictions. I can agree to that."

"You don't touch him!"

"I wouldn't hurt Seely, uncle Denys. We can work something out. I promise you. I won't file charges. Your life will be exactly the same. You don't travel anyway; and you'll have Giraud to occupy you and Seely, won't you? You were a damned good parent, you know; and very kind, really you were. You could have done a lot of things to me Geoffrey did to Ari senior; and you took a chance with the program and didn't. I really have quite a warm feeling for you about that, uncle Denys; and for Seely; and for Giraud. Giraud and I got to be really close at the last; and I really don't think he did it, I think it was a worm in Abban's tapes. I think it was something you put there. Maybe not. I may have an over-active imagination. —They're going to take those doors down, uncle Denys; and practically speaking, —you're running out of time."

"Stop them."

"Are you going to come outside, uncle Denys? With Seely?"

"All right. When you get up here. I want a guarantee of safety."

"You have it in my word, uncle Denys."

"Iwant you here to control your people. Then I'll open the doors."

Justin shook his head. Ari looked at him and said: "All right, uncle Denys. I'll be up there." She pointed at the button on Justin's seat. Justin pushed it, breaking contact.

"Ari?"

Ari pushed a button on her chair arm. "We're finished. Break contact."

"Ari," Justin said, "he wants you in range."

Ari watched the screen and said: "That might be, but he's in an awfully bad position." She picked up her own microphone. "We've got contact with Denys. He says hold off, he's just resigned. Confirm; pick it up. —Justin: you stay here."

"Dammit, Ari, —"

" I wouldn't be going up there, except I hope we can do this without a shot. I'm enough for Security to worry about; they don't need another one. If something goes badly wrong, this plane is going back to Novgorod, and you can tell the Bureau the whole damn mess, then do what you like. But I'd prefer you back in Reseune, running another of my sets. I'll even let you pick the surrogates."

He stared at her.

"I have a lot of unfinished business," Ari said, standing by the seat. "If I don't make it out of this—getting me back is a real priority. Gehenna is only one of the problems. And you need me the same as I need you."

She gathered up Marco, and Wes unsealed the door, and sealed it again after her.

It was true, he thought as that door closed. Everything else considered, —it was true.

Then he thought of what she had said: only one of the problems; and: the same as I need you. . . .

"I don't like this," Florian said, crouched close to Catlin, where the bus and the hill made a little cover a curve away from the glass main doors. His hands were cold, exposed to the air: he protected the left one under his arm and watched the data-flow on the hand-held monitor in his right.

"It's a case of What's he got," Catlin said, tucked down tight, chest against arms against knees.

"Seely isn't sera's kind of problem," Florian said.

Catlin looked at him, quick and hard. "Sniper or something bigger up there. You want those doors?"

"Grenade will handle that. They're doing final prep in there now, I'm sure of it, now sera's left the airport. This whole thing is a set."

"Go, then," Catlin said. "You time it. There's got to be a trigger in that hall."

Florian took a breath, flexed a stiffened hand and an injured shoulder. "Photocell, likely. Floor and body-height, with an interrupt, electric detonator, best guess—I'm first in on this one."

The shockwave shook the bus; and Ari was already ducking when Marco grabbed her and pulled them both down, but she fought to get a look as the bus made the turn.

Smoke billowed up from the area of the Administration Wing front doors. She could see the other bus parked on the slope. The black-uniformed group there was in sudden motion, running uphill.

Her driver stopped.

Marco pulled her flat and threw himself over her.

As the air shook and clods peppered the windows.

Florian picked himself up, wiped his eyes and staggered to his feet as someone helped him, he was not sure who, but it was from behind and it was friendly if it got him up again.

He saw Catlin ahead of him in the dim hall, saw her arm a grenade and wait, the thing live in her hand—because somebody like Seely could give it back to you.

She threw it, but a black blur came out that door.

Florian snapped his pistol up and fired; and the grenade blew the whole doorway to rum. Catlin had fired too. She took another shot, point-blank, to be sure.

Florian leaned against the wall and caught his breath. The net was saying that the teams from Green Barracks had gotten into Security—up the lift shafts from the tunnel system: easy job, till they got to the traps and the defenses.

The whole hall was filled with bluish smoke. The fire alarms had gone off long since.

Catlin walked back to him, swinging her rifle to cover the hall beyond, while he kept a watch over her blind-side. "One more," she said.

He nodded.

He was not glad of this one. Denys had been kind to them. He remembered the dining room, remembered Denys laughing.

But it was sera's safety in question, and he had only a second's compunction.

Catlin had less.

The front doors were in ruins, the smoke still pouring out when Ari climbed off the bus; and Florian and Catlin both came out under the portico to meet her.

"Denys is dead," Florian told her first off. "I'm sorry, sera. It was a set-up."

"What about Seely?"

"Dead," Catlin said.

Ari walked up onto the porch and looked into the hall. Bodies lay scattered in the dim emergency lights, under a lowering canopy of smoke. She had known that place since childhood. It did not look real to her.

Denys gone. . . .

She looked back at Florian and Catlin. Catlin's expression was clear-eyed and cool. It was Florian who looked worried. Florian, who had a gash running blood down his temple and another on his cheek, not mentioning what he had had from Novgorod.

She did not ask. Not anywhere near witnesses.

The Reseune corporate jet touched smoothly, braked, and swung into a brisk roll toward the terminal and Decon—always a special treatment of plane and passengers, when a flight came in from overseas.

"It's going to take a while," Justin said, hand on Grant's shoulder; and they might have gone to sit down, then, in the comfort of the VIP and press room. But he watched it roll up to the safeway; watched the windows after it had come to rest. He could make out shadows moving inside, nothing more.

But one of them was Jordan and another was Paul.

Everything's all right, he had said, when RESEUNE ONE had let him speak to the incoming plane, when Grant was on the way down from the hill and Reseune was stirring to heal its wounds. Don't worry. Yanni Schwartz is the new Reseune Administrator. Welcome home.