by David Drake
Hogg entered also. He swung the door fully back as Chatterjee followed.
“Here!” protested the major. His gaudy uniform made Daniel think of doormen at expensive Xenos hotels, though a doorman’s garb wouldn’t have been so worn and dingy. “They can’t come in here! I have to shut the door to keep the stink out! And whatever possessed you to land here?”
“Well, I can scarcely leave them out in the heat, can I?” said Daniel cheerfully. He eased forward with Chatterjee at his side. Their presence moved the major back, allowing the spacers room to enter and spread along the front of the hall. “And as for where we landed, you’d have to ask Captain Salmon. I will say, though, that we were informed in orbit that you were under attack, so the decision seemed reasonable to me.”
The entrance hall was sixty feet long, forty wide to the square pillars framing it, and thirty feet high to the top of a barrel-vaulted ceiling which was decorated with mythological scenes.
Daniel supposed they were mythological; at any rate, the figures wore flowing robes and some of them had feathered wings. From the outside the HQ Building seemed a fortress or the ritual center of a brutal religion; within, however, the Cluster Governor lived in a palace.
“We’re not being attacked!” the major cried. With him were three civilian clerks—two were women—and a young male warrant officer who looked as sharp as Hogg’s knife. The warrant officer carried a personal data unit hooked to his belt; it was projecting a display before him, but he was also keeping an eye on the present discussion. “What blithering idiot said that we were?”
“With respect, Major . . .” Daniel said, drawing out the other man’s rank. Commissioners, like warrant officers, came in various grades, but the major would know that it was normal for the commissioner to be senior to the line officer whom he accompanied. “It was your blithering idiot, not mine. Now, where is Governor Platt?”
“He can’t see you,” the major muttered. He still hadn’t bothered to identify himself. “Anyway, there’s no reason to see him. You’ll need billets and—did you bring your own rations?”
He looked up hopefully, his eyes sliding from Daniel to Chatterjee. The warrant officer’s face had gotten very still, but the three clerks were chattering to one another beside a pillar. There was nobody else in the hallway, though the door to the left marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY had the look of a guardroom. It was ajar.
“We have—” Chatterjee said and paused to hack up phlegm. He continued, “We have nine days’ rations left, but we’re on your strength from the moment we touched down. You’ll have to reimburse the Government of Maintenon for anything I issue to my troops until we’re released from Conyers’ control.”
Perfect, absolutely perfect . . . Daniel thought. All his spacers were in the building. While Chatterjee and the major wrangled over administrative costs, Daniel sidled over to Sayer and murmured, “I want to make sure our pongo friends can get inside fast when they decide to join us. Can you open the main doors here?”
“Does a rat shit in the sewer, Six?” replied the engineer’s mate with a big grin. He was obviously a city boy.
“Governor Platt is in his suite on the top level,” Adele said in a tone of cold detachment. “There don’t appear to be any combat troops billeted in the building itself, but there’re gun crews on the second level and there’s supposed to be a platoon dispersed to guard the entrances. Over.”
Sun had already detached a squad under Jo Ashburn, his striker, to drift toward the guardroom. Ashburn pulled a Bagarian grenade from her cargo pocket, though she didn’t appear to have armed it yet.
“Right,” said Daniel. “Open the doors, spacer.”
He walked back toward the major. Sayer thrust a short prybar into a crack Daniel hadn’t noticed in the surface of a doorpost. He gave it a quick twist to pop the latch and swing out a panel, displaying the set of control buttons beneath.
The warrant officer said, “I’ll get right on that, sir,” in a cheery voice and turned, striding quickly in the direction of a doorway entering the hall from the right.
“Hey!” cried the major. He bustled toward Sayer with his features set in an expression of outrage. “What are you doing? What are you doing?”
The main doors began to crawl apart. Their pained squeals were louder than those of the transport’s hatch; they may not have been opened in years or decades.
Chatterjee’s ear-clip speaker chirped at him. He looked at Daniel and said, “Jon, that’s Major Zaring, is on the way, Commissioner.”
“Hold it, soldier!” Hogg said. “You’re not faster than this is!”
The warrant officer froze in mid-step and threw his hands in the air. Only then did he turn toward the impeller pointed at the middle of his back. In other hands, a long-arm held at the waist wouldn’t be a real danger; this fellow had correctly estimated the likelihood that Hogg would hit his target even if he closed his eyes before shooting.
The Alliance major grabbed Sayer by the arm. A rigger lifted off the major’s bicorn and clocked him over the head with a length of pipe; he went down like a shower of sand.
One of the civilians squealed and put her clenched fists to her mouth. The warrant officer turned his head and snarled, “Shut your face, you stupid cow! Do you want to get us all killed?”
Daniel looked through the doorway to make sure that the Bagarian soldiers really were coming as announced. The detached squad placed themselves against the wall to either side of the guardroom door.
“Colonel Chatterjee,” Daniel said, “secure the lower floors with your troops while—”
Ashburn cocked her right arm back with the grenade poised to throw. A member of her squad jerked the guardroom door fully open and dived out of the way. The remaining six spacers pointed impellers and sub-machine guns into the doorway.
“Freeze!” Ashburn shouted. “Freeze or you’re for it, pongoes!”
Half a dozen soldiers, two in their undershirts, were playing poker. The man with the deck let it get away from him; cards fluttered through the air like mayflies in a mating dance. There were guns leaning against the back wall, but nobody was foolish enough to try to grab one.
“Very good,” Daniel said. “As I was saying, Colonel, I’m taking my detachment to the Governor on the top floor where I hope to end this business without bloodshed.”
He cleared his throat and added, “We’ve kept it relatively peaceful thus far. I’d like that to continue.”
Chatterjee nodded curtly, watching Ashburn’ squad bind the guards with cargo tape. “I’ve been a real estate lawyer for the past fifteen years, Admiral,” he said. “I hope to go back to that profession. If I never hear a shot fired in anger, it’ll be too soon.”
Daniel clapped him on the shoulder. “Sissies to me!” he called. “Up three floors to the Governor’s suite, spacers. The pongoes can take care of things on the ground, right?”
There was a broad staircase of polished gneiss at the far end of the hall. Halfway up it split into a Y and reversed direction onto both sides of a mezzanine; it didn’t appear to go higher. Hogg had located a spiral staircase in the alcove to the left of the entrance door, however. He stood at the foot of it.
“Follow me!” Daniel said, waving his sub-machine gun as he strode toward his servant. “Sun, bring up the rear!”
“Trade me!” said Hogg, tossing his stocked impeller to Daniel, who handed over the sub-machine gun without pointless argument. The man in the lead in these close quarters should have the automatic weapon. Hogg was the proper person to lead because decades of poaching had honed his senses to react to the slightest sound or movement. Daniel was good, but he knew he wasn’t in the same league as his servant.
Besides, Hogg was going to lead in a situation like this, even if that meant clubbing his master down and tying him to keep him out of the way. Relationships generally, not just political ones, were the art of the possible. Daniel’d had his whole life to learn what was—and wasn’t—possible in dealing with his old ser
vant.
Their soft-soled boots whisked on the cast concrete stairs. Hogg and Daniel both kept their faces turned up instead of looking down at their feet. The muzzles of their weapons pointed to the left, the direction of the doors off the clockwise spiral staircase, but that to the mezzanine was closed.
The detachment following banged and rattled like a busy day in a bucket shop. The spacers were all sure-footed: quite apart from the riggers, the wear-polished steel treads of the companionways that the Power Room crews negotiated many times a day were slicker and trickier than this.
On the other hand, though all his Sissies’d had firearms training, they weren’t ideal people to have running behind you with guns in their hands. The spiral was some protection; and anyway, if Daniel’d made personal safety a priority, he wouldn’t be in the RCN.
The door to the second level was closed also, but as Hogg reached it a siren outside began to wind up and hooters—one of them in the stair tower—blatted. Almost at once an automatic impeller on the first-level plaza began to fire. The clang of heavy slugs ricocheting from steel indicated the gunner was shooting at the transport.
“Sector Two, that’s northwest, has given the alarm,” said Adele as dispassionately as if she were ordering lunch. “I’ve rung down the barriers between sectors, but troops can get out through the courtyard doors if they care to, over.”
Hogg paused and glanced at Daniel. Daniel looked back in turn and found—not surprisingly—that the spacer directly behind him was Sayer.
“You!” Daniel said. One petty officer was as good as another in a crisis, and the engineer’s mate had proved he was a quick thinker. “Take half the detachment and clear this side of the plaza. Tell Sun to take the other half and clear the west side. Hogg and I’ll take care of the Governor.”
“Come on, Sissies!” Sayer shouted down the staircase. “We got wogs to teach what’s what!”
“I’ve relayed your order to Sun,” Adele said, as primly as a senior professor. “The captain on duty in Sector Three has informed Governor Platt that the building is under attack. Over.”
“We’re on our way, Signals,” Daniel said. He followed Hogg up the stairs as the spacers clumped through the door onto the second floor.
His spacers’d be hitting the gun crews from an unexpected direction. He’d have liked to be leading them. He’d have liked to be bringing the Ladouceur down—and to be sitting at the cruiser’s gunnery console, demonstrating what a 6-inch plasma bolt did to reinforced concrete.
He’d have liked to be doing a lot of things, but he was an RCN officer so the job nobody else could do became his priority. Admiral Daniel Leary was in command of the Bagarian assault force, so he would treat with the Alliance commander.
The door at the stair head was open; the heavy automatic weapon had stopped firing, but bursts from sub-machine guns and individual whangs from stocked impellers came up from the plaza. There were shouts, screams, and frequently the ringing growl of projectiles ricocheting off gun mountings.
Daniel followed Hogg into the corner of a garden twenty feet on a side. Sparkling gravel walks wound between rough stone planters set with colorful flowers from several planets including Earth. Boxwood hedges enclosed three sides. The polarizing screen overhead let light through but from above appeared to extend the roof of the penthouse whose end wall—with a door flanked by bay windows—formed the garden’s fourth side.
Hogg headed for the door between a planter of flowers streaming like red flags and one of blue, purple and violet cups. Even in haste he planted his feet with such delicacy that his fur-lined poaching boots barely disturbed the gravel path.
He twisted the latch with his left hand, pointing the sub-machine gun in his right like a pistol; the outward-opening door didn’t move. He backed, tensing his right leg to kick.
“Get back,” Daniel snapped, raising the impeller to his shoulder. The door panel was wood-grained metal. The wide troughs in which the clear panels of the casements were set implied that the windows were armored also.
Hogg stepped aside, reflexively careful not to cross in front of the gun muzzle. Daniel fired, blasting the latch into shards. The door itself jounced barely ajar.
Checking to see that Daniel still had the impeller leveled, Hogg stuck his sub-machine gun’s muzzle into the hole where the latch had been and levered the door open. He couldn’t use his bare hand, because the opening was white-hot and as sharp as a jumble of razor blades.
Beyond was a sitting room with a malachite table on which a vase of roses had been recently overset; water still dripped to the carpeted floor. The chairs had ornate frames of gilt wood and upholstery which matched the tabletop, picked out with stylized gold stars. It costs a great deal of money to buy things so tastelessly ugly, Daniel thought.
“I’m in!” Hogg said. He slanted through the doorway in a crouch that kept him below the line of Daniel’s impeller.
“I’m in!” Daniel said. He followed at the opposite angle.
To the right was a well-appointed office. It could be closed off from the drawing room, but the slatted door made from mirror-finished synthetic was collapsed against the wall. There was no one in either room.
Straight ahead was an archway made shimmeringly opaque by holographic distortion; Daniel guessed that there’d be a band of active noise cancellation at the same point to provide complete privacy for those inside. The trouble was, the only way to tell what was on the other side of the curtain of light was to go through it into whatever was waiting—
Hogg lifted the muzzle of his sub-machine gun and raked the transom. Bits of cast synthetic flew in all directions. Sparks popped as the burst slashed away several projectors; strips amounting to half the screen vanished, showing a huge bed. Its rumpled duvet was in the same hideous gold-on-malachite pattern as the chairs in the drawing room.
The bed was empty. On the far wall between built-in bookcases—false ones, Daniel suspected—was another armored door, this one slowly swinging to. Beyond, the powerful fans of an aircar whined, then bogged as the driver tried to bring them up to speed too quickly.
“No you don’t!” said Hogg. He leaped into the bedroom, ignoring the risk that a shooter waited in ambush.
Daniel turned and ran back through the garden. The hedge was dense and the sculptured boxwood branches raked him like so many fingernails, but he’d hunted in brush before. He forced his way between trunks, holding the impeller vertical before him.
If necessary he’d have run on the lip of the planter in which the boxwoods were set, but there was a good five feet between the hedge and the second level’s roof coping. Daniel sprinted around the penthouse to reach the back, just as an open aircar roared out of the garage housed in the rear half of the suite.
Hogg fired a burst, pocking the quarter panel. Where the sub-machine gun’s light projectiles hit, they stressed the black thermoplastic skin to gray-white.
The driver hauled his vehicle into a tight spiral as he gained altitude. The car banked, fifty yards out from the garage and ten or a dozen feet above the level of Daniel’s head.
He fired twice. The impeller’s heavy recoil woke nostalgic memories of his childhood. He’d actually become a better wing shot than Hogg, who took the reasonable attitude that birds shot off a branch tasted the same as those he’d shot out of the air. The aircar was just a bigger bird, and the buttplate’s punch against his shoulder was much the same as that of a shotgun using full charges.
Daniel saw a tiny spark in the car’s rear fan housing. For a moment the vehicle continued to spiral upward, its fans howling.
Hogg stepped out of the garage, pointing his sub-machine gun. “Don’t shoot!” Daniel shouted. He kept his cheek weld on the stock but he’d lifted his finger from the trigger.
“Shoot, you pup!” Hogg shouted. “You bloody missed it, you did!”
The car howled. There was a Blang! and the rear fan blasted shreds of itself out of the housing.
Daniel heard shrill cries from the
cabin. He lowered his impeller.
“Sorry, master,” Hogg muttered in embarrassment. “Shoulda knowed you wouldn’t miss a clout shot like that.”
“I put holes in a couple blades instead of shooting out the motor,” Daniel explained quietly. “I want them to have a chance to set down. Remember, I’m trying to capture the Governor alive.”
The driver—a woman in uniform, Daniel saw as the car came around—fought her controls as the unbalanced rear fan shook itself increasingly to ruin. With the nose continuing to rise despite anything the driver could do, the aircar slanted toward the pad from which it’d lifted.
Daniel and Hogg flattened themselves against the wall in case the vehicle landed beside rather than inside the garage, but the driver managed to hold it straight as it slid down. The nose cleared the transom by no more than a hair. There was a crash, screaming metal, and a second crash which shook the wall that Daniel was leaning against.
The fan motors shut off. They’re not all dead. Somebody was sobbing. Holding his impeller at port arms, Daniel walked around the end of the building and looked into the garage.
The car’s bow was wedged against the back wall; the frame had bent enough to crack. The driver climbed out of the front seat. Her mouth was open and, though she was moving, there was nothing behind her eyes.
All three men in the rear compartment were bloodied, but they didn’t appear to be seriously injured. The two chubby youths were nude except for rings and other piercings; one’s penis stud had tufts of feather at both ends.
The male in his sixties was even fatter than his catamites. He’d thrown on a shimmering robe before running to the car, but it didn’t cover as much as Daniel wished it did. His blubbering made tracks down the blood oozing from his nose.
“Governor Platt,” Daniel said, “I’m Admiral Daniel Leary. I’m here to demand your capitulation to the Independent Republic of Bagaria.”
Hogg began to laugh. He was laughing so hard that he had to kneel on the plaza to keep from falling over.