'What did you find?'
Dripping and cold, he took a glass of spirits Bequin brought him and showed me his scanner pad.
'The roof is lousy with alarms. I didn't dare probe too far, even with my jammers and sensors. There are rooms under the east wing that Inquisitor Voke didn't know about. A network of tunnels seems to link them to the west wing under the courtyard.'
I spent a few more minutes running through the details, and then went into my room to change.
I put on a heat-insulated bodyglove of matt-black plastic weave with a tight-fitting hood and supple gloves. Then I strapped a webbing harness around my torso and filled the integral pouches with a compact scope, a set of multi-keys, a folding knife, two spools of monofilament wire, a
tubular torch, two jamming units and a scanner pad. I secured my vox-unit's earpiece under my hood, buckled an autopistol into the rig strapped across my chest, dropped two spare clips into a thigh pouch, and finally placed my inquisitorial rosette in my hip pocket.
This was an endeavour that risked discovery. The rosette would be my joker, to be played if it became necessary.
I went back into the sitting room and laced on the grip-gloves and grip-boots that Betancore had been using.
'If I'm not back in a hour, you can start to worry,' I told them.
Outside, blackness, rain and the assault of the wind.
The outside wall of the great house was soaked and old, the limewash crumbling in places. I had to test every move I made to make sure the overlapping teeth of the grip-pads on my hands and feet were secure.
I moved along the side of the house, feeling my way, until I was able to crouch on an outcrop of guttering. I'd taped Betancore's data-slate to my left forearm for easy reference. The tiny backlit screen showed a three-dimensional model of the building, and an inertial locator built into the slate moved the map and kept my current location centred.
Over the downpour, I heard feet crunching gravel two storeys below. I clung to the bricks and tapped off the slate so that the screen glow wouldn't give me away.
Two men from the house militia huddled in foul-weather capes passed below me, lit by the windows on the ground floor. They took shelter in a doorway porch and shortly after that I saw the flash of an igniter or match. Presently, the cloying odour of obscura drifted up to me.
They were almost directly below my perch and I didn't dare move until they were gone. I waited. My joints were going numb from the cold and from the hunched position I had been forced to adopt simply to stay on the gutter.
The rain grew still heavier and the wind swished the invisible trees of the steep woods behind the house. I could hear the men chatting. An occasional laugh.
This wouldn't do. I was losing time and the feeling in my legs.
I focused, drew in a calming breath and reached out with the will.
I found their minds, two warm traces in the cold below me. They were soft and blurred, their responses undoubtedly slowed by the opiate effects of the obscura. Difficult minds to plant strong suggestions in, but vulnerable to paranoia.
I drove in with the will, toying gently with their anxieties.
Within seconds, they started from the cover of the porch, hissing animatedly at each other, and headed off at a trot across the yard.
Relieved, I moved down the wall, bracing my weight against a jutting window ledge as I found footholds around a down-pipe bracket.
On the ground, I hugged the shadows of the west wing, and moved down the yard. Betancore's careful reconnaissance had shown up laser
trips around the gatehouse, and others that extended from the edges of the border beds to the basin of a fountain in the yard. Though I could not see them, they were precisely marked on the slate, and I simply stepped over each in turn, all except the last, which ran at waist height and which I ducked under.
My goal was the launch hangars on the far side of the rear yard. The sweeps had shown up an access point to the cellar network there. Betan-core had located others, but they were all in private areas of the house, or in staff sections such as the scullery, the cold store and the meat pantries.
