“The basics are settled,” he said. “All here are in agreement. The are spreading the word by messenger to all the talkers. The talkers at the heart of the attack, and the more we have, the better it will go of We don’t dare use the screens to call them; there is a good chance that the junkmen can intercept our messages. It will take five days before we are ready to go ahead.”

“I’ll need all of that time if I’m to be any good,” Jason said. “Now let get some rest.”

26

26

“It’s a strange feeling,” Jason said. “I’ve never really seen the perimeter from this side before. Ugly is about the only word for it.”

He lay on his stomach next to Rhes, looking through a screen of leaves, downhill toward the perimeter. They were both wrapped in heavy furs, in spite of the midday heat, with thick leggings and leather gauntlets to protect their hands. The gravity and the heat were already making Jason dizzy, but he forced himself to ignore this.

Ahead, on the far side of a burnt corridor, stood the perimeter. A high wall, of varying height and texture, seemingly made of all the odds and ends in the world. It was impossible to tell what it had originally been constructed of. Generations of attackers had bruised, broken, and undermined it. Repairs had been quickly made, patches thrust roughly into place and fixed there. Crude masonry crumbled and gave way to a rat’s nest of woven timbers. This overlapped a length of pitted metal, large plates riveted together. Even this metal had been eaten through and bursting sandbags spilled out of a jagged hole. Over the surface of the wall detector wires and charged cables looped and hung. At odd intervals automatic flamethrowers thrust their nozzles over the parapet above and swept the base of the wall clear of any life that might have come close.

“Those flame things can cause us trouble,” Rhes said. “That one covers the area where you want to break in.”

“It’ll be no problem,” Jason assured him. “It may look like it is firing a random pattern, but it’s really not. It varies a simple sweep just enough to fool an animal, but was never meant to keep men out. Look for yourself. It fires at regularly repeated two, four, three and one minute intervals.”

They crawled back to the hollow where Naxa and the others waited for them. There were only thirty men in the party. What they had to do could only be done with a fast, light force. Their strongest weapon was surprise. Once that was gone their other weapons wouldn’t hold out for seconds against the city guns. Everyone looked uncomfortable in the fur and leather wrappings, and some of the men had loosened them to cool off.