Kin stopped at the edge of the yard.
He did not run. He stood in the shadows with the katana in his hand and looked at the service entrance and did not move, because the System had opened a panel in front of his eyes and the panel was not telling him to go.
[Assessment: Direct infiltration while under active alert status. Probability of success: 4%. Probability of survival: 11%.]
That bad.
[That bad.]
Nia is in there.
[Nia is in there, and Nia is faster than you and smaller than you and can reach places you cannot. She can stall for six minutes. You can stall for none. If you go through that door now, three guards will meet you in the corridor and two more will come down the stairs behind them, and the third will be the one who is already shooting at her, and you will not reach her before she is dead, and you will not leave the building before you are.]
Kin looked at the service entrance.
Then what.
[There is another way. The soldiers inside are loyal to the general, not to the warlord. The warlord has just ordered three of them to kill the general. If the other guards knew, they would turn. They do not know. They can be made to know, if the news comes from the right mouth.]
Whose mouth.
[A local. A poor man with no connection to foreign powers, a local accent, no reason to lie. A man the guards would not look twice at. A man who was of the dame tribe as the general, if he spoke in their tongue and specific dialect he would pass as a loyalist , loyal to the general.]
Kin understood.
Give me a face.
***
The System gave him a face.
It came with a name and a story, because the System did not hand out faces without context.
[Subject: Kwame Adjei. Age: 47. Occupation: Palm wine tapper. Village: Ekor, four kilometers north of the compound. Cause of death: Fall. He was climbing a palm to tap the sap, his foot caught in the loop of his rope, and he could not get loose before the branch gave way. He died in the woods three weeks ago. His body was not recovered. No one has reported him missing, because he lived alone.]
Kin stood still while the face settled over his.
It was slower than the other masks. The medical crew's work had been quick. This one came from the System itself, and it built itself in layers, the jaw first, then the cheeks, then the brow, and the skin went tight and then loose and then tight again until it had the right amount of wear on it. The eyes adjusted. The hair adjusted. A small scar appeared above the left eyebrow, and a chipped tooth appeared in the front, and Kin ran his tongue over it and felt the rough edge there.
[Vocal modification: active. You will speak the local tongue with the accent of the northern villages. Do not attempt long sentences. Kwame was a quiet man. Short answers only.]
And my clothes.
[Adjusting.]
The suit changed.
Kin felt it move against his skin. The black field suit had been designed to be invisible to scanners and to resist rifle rounds of low calliber probably anywhere below 20, and none of that mattered now. He watched the sleeves roll down and grow thinner and the fabric go from black to a washed-out grey, and the grey went brown at the cuffs and at the collar, and the collar frayed along the edge. The trousers shortened by an inch. The boots turned into old work shoes with the soles worn through at the heel. The blood on his hands was the only thing the suit did not change, and he wiped it on the trousers and it disappeared into the brown.
[Katana: dematerialize. You cannot walk to a gate with a sword on your back. You will not look like a palm wine tapper. You will look like an assasinat.]
If I need it.
[It will take ten seconds to return. In the last mission you summoned it in less than one. The delay is because I will have to rebuild it from the ground up, and I will be doing that while you are standing in front of men with guns. Do not summon it unless you have no other choice and if you choose to you have to hold on for ten seconds before it fully materializes .]
Kin held the katana out and let it go.
The blade dissolved in his hand, and the weight went away, and he stood in the yard wearing another man's face and another man's clothes with nothing on him at all.
[Go to the gate. Speak to the lead guard. Do not run. Do not raise your voice. Be a man who has walked four kilometers to warn someone about a thing he saw in the woods.]
Kin walked.
***
The gate guards saw him coming from thirty meters out.
Three of them. The lead was older, in his fifties, with the flat eyes of a man who had stood at a gate for a long time and had learned to tell the difference between a threat and a nuisance. The other two were younger, and one of them already had his hand on the strap of his rifle.
Kin stopped ten meters from the gate and did not come closer.
"Stop there."
Kin stopped.
"State your business."
"The general," Kin said. The accent came out the way the System had promised, flat and northern. "He is under attack."
The lead guard laughed.
"Under attack," he said. "The general is behind three walls and very many men. God himself could not infiltrate this compound, and you are telling me a palm wine tapper walked in from the woods to warn us about an attack."
"The general was taken from this compound last night ."
The laughter stopped.
The lead guard looked at him for a long moment.
"Say that again."
"He was taken. Out of his own office. By a man who came in through the front gate with papers and walked out with him over his shoulder. You know this. Everyone in this compound knows this."
The two younger guards exchanged a look.
"I was in the woods," Kin said. "When it happened. I saw them take him through the trees and I saw the men who took him hand him off to others. There are more of them, some within your troops and some are even in here with you. "
He looked at the other men around the lead guard.
"Remember the one who took him was amongst your men!"
The lead guard looked at him.
"You said you were in the woods."
"I was."
"Why were you in the woods at night."
"I was looking for a lost goat."
"And you saw the general being carried through the trees."
"I saw him. Tied, and hooded, and carried by four men. They did not see me. I stayed down. I walked home. And I have been walking back here ever since, because I am a citizen of this country and I do not want the general to die in his own bed."
The lead guard studied him.
"You have no reason to lie," he said slowly, "and no reason to be here. What do you want."
"I want you to send a few of your men up to the general's room. Right now. Just to look. If nothing is happening up there, I will go home and you will never see me again. If something is happening, you will know, and you will have the chance to stop it."
"And if this is a trick."
"Then keep me here." Kin spread his hands and did not move. "I will stand at this gate until your men come back down. I have no weapon. Search me if you want. I will not move."
The lead guard looked at him for another long moment.
Then he nodded at the two younger men.
"Go check it," he said. "Third floor. Both of you. And if you find nothing, come back down and take this man to holding until the general decides what to do with him , for being a bloody nuisance ."
The two men went.
***
Kin stood at the gate.
The lead guard stood three meters away with his rifle across his chest and did not take his eyes off him. The gate was still open. The two younger men were already inside the building, their boots echoing on the stone floor.
Kin lifted his hand to his collar.
He had no wrist mic. The System had not given him one, because the System did not trust the guards not to find it. But he had the earpiece, hidden inside the shell of his ear, and he had the small bone-conduction piece the system had built into the jaw of Kwame Adjei's face before they had sent him out.
He spoke without moving his lips. The sound went through his jaw and into the earpiece and into Nia's ear.
Nia. Fire the shot. Make sure it goes through the door.
A pause.
"Kin, I cannot." Her voice was tight, breathless, still running. "If I fire that thing, every guard in the compound will hear it. The mission—"
Fire it.
"Kin—"
Nia. Fire it.
Another pause. Longer.
Then the shot rang out.
***
The .50 round went off inside the residential building like the end of the world.
The lead guard flinched. His rifle came up six inches and his eyes went wide, and behind him, at the open gate, two more guards who had been standing in the shadow of the guardhouse came out into the light with their weapons raised.
"What the—" The lead guard turned to look at the building.
Then the shouting started. Men on the ground floor, men in the motor pool, men who had been on patrol along the perimeter. Boots on stone. Voices calling up the stairs. Somewhere on the third floor, a scream, and then another shot, and then the sound of a door being kicked open.
The lead guard looked back at Kin.
"You," he said. "Stay there."
Kin stayed there.
The guard put two fingers in his mouth and blew a whistle, and three men who had been posted at the far end of the yard came running. He pointed at the residential building and barked an order, and the three men ran toward the entrance with their rifles up.
"Do not move," he said to Kin again, and then he ran after them.
The gate was empty.
There were two guards left at the far side of the guardhouse, but they were looking at the building, not at Kin, and their weapons were pointed at the door, not at him.
Kin looked at the building.
System.
[Yes.]
Can I go in.
[No. Not yet.]
Nia is in there.
[Nia is in there, and the men who were sent to kill her are being taken down by the men who were sent to check on her. Look at the screen.]
The System opened the window in his vision.
Kin watched.
The two younger guards from the gate came up the stairs at a run, and the man who had been shooting at Nia heard them coming and turned, and the first one put a rifle round through his chest before he could finish the turn. The two rogue guards on the ground floor were met by four men from the motor pool and were on the floor with their hands behind their backs inside a minute. The third rogue, the one on the stairs, was still alive and still bleeding and was being dragged toward the guardhouse by two men who did not look gentle.
And Nia was standing in the corner of the corridor with the general's face on, leaning against the wall, breathing hard, the .50 still in her hand.
She was alive.
[Assessment: The rogue guards have been neutralized. The loyal guards have secured the building. Your warning was believed. The plan is not ruined.]
Kin stood at the gate and did not move.
The lead guard came back five minutes later with a look on his face that Kin could not read.
"You," he said. "Come with me."
Kin went with him.