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Lomax kept smiling. "My dear boy, you must be starving. I"ll have some dinner sent up right away."
Wiley had not missed wery political dinner and knew an evasion when he heard one. He didn"t think he"d be able to learn anything more from Lomax and he didn"t pursue the question.
"Yes, thank you." But he kept his eyes open and tried to see everything.
Lomax left the room briefly, then returned with a bottle and a pair of gla.s.ses. "Dinner will be here shortly, but I thought you might like an aperitif." He set the gla.s.ses down on a marble- topped buffet and fumbled with the bottle"s seals. "I couldn"t trust this to the servants," he said. Too precious."
Wiley wondered if the bottle might not have been safer in the hands of a servant. Lomax looked as though he might drop it at any moment.
"I must say," Lomax grunted, at last releasing the cork. "Your father"s regrettable demise caught me a little unprepared. It was not expected, not so soon, at any case." He poured a golden liquid into the gla.s.ses and handed one to Wiley. "We - the Haiken Maru - had to speed up our operations to keep the Pact from failing.
But we are prepared to support you, my lad, and
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we have the men to make you High Secretary within the next two days."
"Pardon me, but I believe that job belongs to the Kona Tatsu," replied Wiley. They are, after all, the High Secretary"s police."
Lomax frowned. "We have reason to believe that the head of the Kona Tatsu - Damien Ver, you know him - intends to try to take the Secre- tariat for himself."
Wiley rolled the stem of the gla.s.s between his fingers and studied the resulting small moments in the liquid. "I see. What do you intend to do about that?" He wasn"t sure he believed Lomax, but didn"t know Ver well enough to deny the charge.
"I have at my command right now over one hundred thousand Cemian mercenaries," re- plied Lomax. "Fully armed and with all necessary materiel. They are ready to stop this incursion from the Navy and place you at once at the head of the Secretariat, They will also defend you from the Kona Tatsu."
"Splendid," murmured Wiley. "I can see you have my best interests at heart."
"Certainly. Certainly. And for the moment, you really ought to relax. Let me provide a little entertainment for you." He made a signal and a concealed door opened.
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Chelsea Quinn farbro
There were five women, all different and all stunning. Each of them was dressed elegantly and each smiled at him as if there were no one else in the room.
"Let me say that the Germans are utterly loyal to Haiken Maru," said Senator Lomax, con- vinced that Wiley could not possibly be concentrating on his words. "We hold their con- tract, and without our endors.e.m.e.nt there is nowhere on Earth they can go or hide."
The fairest of the women reached Wiley and slid her arms around him, placing her soft lips at the comer of his mouth. She was shapely and pli- ant, fitting her body against his as if there were no clothes between them.
Senator Lomax sipped at his drink. There is a small chamber to which you might wish to retire."
The woman holding Wiley nodded and tugged him toward an elaborate gold-chased door. He followed, setting his gla.s.s, untouched, on the hood of the "57 Cadillac.
The AID Nika had given him at the safe house broke away from one of its belt loops. Wiley grabbed for it. The other loop broke and the whole unit fell to the floor.
The AID"S casing crumbled. It was as rotten as ice that"s been sitting for weeks in sub-freezing
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temperatures, subliming directly from solid into gas without pa.s.sing through a liquid state.
A human in coveralls with orange and yellow Haiken Maru collar flashes burst into the recep- tion hall from a side door. One of the women caressing Wiley began to scream. Behind the shouting human was a German whose garments were slick with blood.
The alien collapsed in the doorway, jamming the panel open. In the corridor beyond him were three more Cemians, fallen and hemorrhaging through their skin. Purple-tinged blood pooled on the tiles beneath them. Their eyes and tongues protruded. One of the aliens thrashed mindlessly; the other two bent backward in bone-breaking convulsions.
Only dusty traces remained of the AID"S cas- ing. The plastic had begun to decay into gases toxic to German metabolisms as soon as Wiley brought the unit into the higher atmospheric pressure of the sealed building. Nika - the Kona Tatsu - had used him as a Trojan horse!
Senator Lomax waved a control stylus. Vision screens flashed from behind panels all around the reception hall. Each screen displayed a dif- ferent facet of the reality universal within the immense building: Cemians dying in blood and agony.
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Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Lomax pointed his stylus at Wiley. "You did this!" the Senator shouted. "You did this! Kill him!"
The aide who"d been too horror-struck to report intelligently now scrabbled at the pistol holster hanging from his belt. One of the women tried to grab Wiley. Wiley knocked her aside and bolted for the doorway.
Another human was coming toward him from the other end of the corridor. "Where are you going?" the Haiken Maru employee demanded.
"Who are-"
Bullets from the reception hall ripped the cor- nice molding above Wiley"s head. The second human drew his pistol with an inarticulate shout.
Wiley leaped into the dropshaft in the middle of the corridor, then dodged out at the next level down.
And into a precinct of h.e.l.l.
Weapons and materiel of all sorts lay strewn amid the bodies of violently convulsing Germ- ans, Huge lesions were opening in many of the bodies, and grotesquely swollen organs pro- truded as the aliens contorted in unspeakable agony.
He couldn"t bring himself to pick up any of the guns lying there for the taking, not if it meant getting any closer to the dying Germans. He ran
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as quickly as he could, taking care where he stepped. Twice he slid on welling blood and once a feeble German hand almost closed on his ankle.
Finally through the gloom Wiley spotted another dropshaft, turned and dashed for it, as much to escape the carnage around him as to put more distance between him and any pursuers.
As he reached the dropshaft he consulted the levels: 104 toG. He rode it all the way to Level 1.
There were Germans here as well. Thick mucus ran from their eyes and their dying bodies were slick with blood. The stench was hideous.
On the far side of the expanse of dying and dead aliens there were humans, armed and deter- mined, and shooting at him.
To his right, almost against one wall, there were sleek Cobra tanks. At the head of the pha- lanx, one of them was purring, idling in this chamel vault.
Wiley raced for it with all the speed he pos- sessed, hoping that if any of the bullets struck, they would kill him at once; he did not want to die slowly in all this wretchedness.
There was a German driver in the tank, his chest burst open, his arms slick with blood. He was not quite dead. Wiley hesitated, but the shooting didn"t, so he dragged the alien out of