The Cityborn by Edward Willett

Author:Edward Willett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2017-05-17T16:32:14+00:00

NINETEEN

FIRST OFFICER KRANZ watched the assault on the River People from the comfort of his office. He watched the first helicopter crash, then saw the second one suffer the same fate, but he also saw the sniper be obliterated. The remaining four helicopters reached the old resort unopposed. Provosts swarmed down lines, entering the resort through the shattered windows that overlooked the once-scenic waterfall and pool—now cesspool. With a twitch of his finger, he switched from helmet cam to helmet cam. He saw a handful of his soldiers fall to crossbows and booby traps, but not very many, and one by the one, the defenders were eliminated or arrested.

But there was no sign of Alania, no sign of Danyl—no sign of the two people the raid was intended to capture.

He watched a door be forced open, saw children and their mothers cowering wide-eyed in the chamber beyond. The Provosts rounded them up. They’d be questioned, of course, but he doubted any of them knew where Alania and Danyl had gone. The leaders, whoever they were, would not have shared that information with the people most likely to survive the assault.

Kranz’s fingers dug into the arms of his chair as the assault wound down. Damn it. Where the hell could they be?

The final “battle” of the raid took place in a stairwell leading up from the resort to the Rim, where there had once been a garden, now a nest of deadly robot Guardians. What the woman fleeing up those stairs thought she could accomplish at the Rim, Kranz would never know; she blew up herself and much of the staircase, the debris crushing three Provosts at the bottom of the shaft and effectively closing it off.

The River flowed underground from the waterfall’s pool, which had been artificially created with a dam when the resort was built. Could Alania and Danyl have fled along it somehow? It seemed unlikely—old records did not indicate any sort of traversable cavern down there, and the River remained underground for a kilometer before emerging through a spillway. But it would have to be checked out once divers could be brought in, equipped with sonar to penetrate the murk of the water.

Kranz frowned at the resort’s plans, summoned from the City’s database. It showed only two ways out of the Canyon. There was a main elevator shaft and accompanying staircase up to the Rim above the resort’s glass-walled lobby in the Canyon’s east wall, and there was a matching elevator shaft and staircase on the far side of the pool in the west wall. The elevator on the lobby side still worked, but while its mechanism was intact, there was no longer an exit up on the Rim; the once-grand main entrance to the resort had long since been demolished.

The elevator in the west wall had failed years ago, the Provosts had reported. Even its mechanism no longer remained atop the Rim. Now the woman they had pursued up the western stairs had blown herself up and brought the bottom half of them crashing down.

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