[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Ninety seconds to come up with something beyond what he had already
improvised. He had no idea, so he walked straight and tall, headed directly
through the checkpoint, and saluted the guard standing there.
The guard looked at him coldly; seeing only corporal's stripes on his arm, Jak
said, "Well, aren't you going to ask me the password?"
The guard pulled his stun baton. "I don't expect an escaped prisoner to know
it," he said, closing in.
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/B...20-%20The%20Duke%20of%20Uranium%
Page 115
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
20v0.9.html (137 of 154) [10/15/2004 12:44:05 PM]
John Barnes - The Duke of Uranium
Jak struck with the best disarm of his life, and followed up with an elbow to
the head. The man went down and Jak went through; about ten seconds of freedom
left, now, and still no plan.
The gate had turned out to open into a courtyard, and in the center of the
courtyard there was a high-
walled building; far above, Jak could see branches of trees from what had to
be a rooftop garden on the building. That had to be where Sesh was being held,
he realized. He looked wildly around; there were more than enough handholds on
that wall, because it was all in faux-medieval broken stonework, but he'd be
at least an hour getting up its twenty meters. He picked a direction at random
and dashed left, trying to suppress the image of being found running aimlessly
around the building.
On the back side, there was a small platform elevator, hanging from cables,
just two meters off the ground, and two masons were slowly, contentedly
tuck-pointing the wall.
Jak sprang onto the platform, toppling the bucket of mortar and knocking one
mason to the ground. The other, clutching the cable to stay on the elevator,
hastily saluted, and Jak, remembering that he was still in a sergeant's dress
uniform, returned the salute, sketchily and badly. "Emergency!" he shouted.
"The princess is in danger! I am commandeering this elevator as an emergency
transport for the Duchy of
Uranium. Take it to the top, now! Full speed uh, up!"
The mason saluted again and yanked at the controls; the open platform shot
upward, Jak clinging to the cable to stay on. He made the mistake of looking
down just once, and realized that twenty meters was several times the fall
needed to catch a bad case of dead. After that he kept his eye on the wall and
the approaching top parapet.
With a thump, the elevator stopped. The top edge was still two meters above
their heads. "This is all the further it goes, sir," the mason said.
"I knew that," Jak said. He firmly told himself not to look down; the gap
between the platform and the wall was only about a fifth of a meter or so, at
closest approach, as the platform swayed gently. He reached out, got a grip
with one hand, got a grip with the other, and jammed a boot into a crevice in
the stonework.
At his first step upward, the boot came off his foot, and he was glad he
hadn't worn socks, because he had a better grip with his toes anyway. He
kicked the other boot off and concentrated on going up carefully;
he'd done many rock-climbing vivs and at least this tower didn't feature
ledges with snakes or eagles who swooped in to peck out your eyes. Also, it
was really only about two and a half meters that he had to cover, even if the
two and a half meters had a very unpleasant long drop under them.
Grip, reach, grip, reach& he wondered why this tower wasn't smooth. Probably
one of those decorator touches the hereditary nobility liked to pretend that
their titles went all the way back to the European, African, and Asian feudal
periods, so they were forever building fake ruins& grip, next grip, check
that, foot, other foot, stay in close& grip that was the top of the parapet,
he realized, and a couple more
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/B...20-%20The%20Duke%20of%20Uranium%
20v0.9.html (138 of 154) [10/15/2004 12:44:05 PM]
John Barnes - The Duke of Uranium moves got both his arms over it, and then
his hands were over onto the other side of the wall. Groaning at doing it in
the full gravity, he flipped over and dropped neatly into a fishpond, water
flying everywhere.
He stood, shaking the water from his eyes, and found himself looking into the
Page 116
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
surprised eyes of Sesh, who was just clutching her torn, and now soggy, tunic
over her breasts. A small, unpleasant, and strangely familiar man was gasping
for air, having caught most of the pond with his face. Surmising the basic
situation, and very uninter-ested in any mitigating details, Jak snapped the
ball of his foot into the little man's face, knocking him backward over a
bench, and said, "I don't speck any hope of getting you out "
"Nonsense," Sesh said. "All the guards just ran down the stairs or piled into
the elevators." She ran; he followed. Within seconds she'd yanked the
emergency deliver car to ground floor/lockdown button for both elevators.
"It's boring up here," she said, "apart from the occasional visit from His
Rudeness, and I
had a lot of time to study everything just in case. Now there's just the few
guards on the spiral stairs they'll be turning around any second."
She turned and dashed again, losing her tunic as she went and not bothering to
retrieve it. Jak, awkward in his too-long soggy pants and bare feet, was a few
steps behind as she reached the door. "How many?" he gasped, staring at the
narrow staircase. He could already hear cries and pounding feet far below.
"I don't know, twenty, maybe," she said.
"Don't know how I can fight them all if they have weapons but if they come at
me one at a time "
"Oh, weehu, don't be stupid, old tove," she said, slamming the door shut and
dropping a large bar across its hasps. "They never specked that they might [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

zanotowane.pl

doc.pisz.pl

pdf.pisz.pl

razem.keep.pl