by David Drake
"Blue to Slammers," Desoix responded. He could feel a smile starting to twitch the corners of his mouth. "Just a second. There's some restructuring going on in here and we're, ah, making room for you in the guest quarters. Let these folks pass."
Desoix made sure that he was with the quartet of wealthy landholders as they forced their way through the door ahead of their servants.
"No, no," one of the men was saying to another. "My townhouse will have to take care of itself. I'm off to my estates to rally support for the President. I'll inform John of what I'm doing just as soon as I get there, but of course I couldn't waste time now with goodbyes."
Desoix thought for a moment that Captain Sanchez would step outside with him because that was the direction in which the Guards officer had last been pointed. Sanchez was lost in the turmoil, though, and Desoix stood alone beside the door as minor rats streamed out past him, following the lead of the noble rats they served.
Fires glowed against the cloud cover from at least a dozen directions in the city, not just the vicinity of the City Offices directly across the river. The smell of burning was more noticeable here than it had been on the porch six meters high.
Desoix looked up. The porch was a narrow roof above him. He couldn't tell from this angle whether Anne McGill had stayed inside as he'd ordered, or if she were out in the night again watching for him, watching for hope.
"You, sir,"a soldier said with enough emphasis to make the question a demand. "You our UDB liaison?"
"Roger," Desoix said. "I'm—"
But the close-coupled soldier in Slammers battledress was already relaying the information on his unit frequency.
There were several dozen of Hammer's men in the courtyard already. More were arriving with every passing moment. He didn't see Captain Koopman or the sergeant major he'd met once or twice before Tyl had arrived to take command.
The troopers jogged across the open street, hunched over. When they reached the courtyard they slowed. The veterans swept the Palace's empty, shuttered walls with their eyes, waiting for the motion that would unmask gunports and turn the paved area into a killing ground unless they shot first.
The new recruits only stared, more confused than frightened but certainly frightened enough.
"They know something we don't?" asked the Slammers noncom with KEKKONAN stenciled on his helmet. He nodded in the direction of the servants, the last of whom were clearing the doorway.
"They know they're scared," Desoix said.
Kekkonan laughed. "That just shows they're breathin'," he said.
He grunted something into his commo helmet—waved left-handed to Desoix because his right hand was on the grip of his slung submachine-gun—and trotted into the rotunda with his troopers filing along after him.
The UDB officer had intended to lead the Slammers inside to avoid problems with the Bamberg guards. He hadn't moved quickly enough, but that wasn't likely to matter. Nobody with good sense was going to get in the way of those jacked-up killers.
Ornamental lighting still brightened the exterior of the Palace, though the steel-shuttered facade looked out of place in a glittering myriad of tiny spotlights. It illuminated well the stooped forms in khaki and gray ceramic armor as they arrived, jogging because their loads were too heavy for them to run faster.
There were six in the last group, four troopers carrying a fifth while Captain Tyl Koopman trotted along behind with a double load of guns and bandoliers.
Casualty, Desoix thought, but Sergeant Major Scratchard was cursing too fluently for anyone to think his wound was serious.
"Listen, you idiots," Scratchard said in a voice of sudden calm as the UDB officer ran up to help. "If you don't let me down now we're under the lights, I got no authority from here on out. Your choice, Cap'n."
"Right, we'll all walk from here," said Koopman easily. He handed one of the guns he carried to Scratchard while looking at Desoix. "Lieutenant," he added, "I'm about as glad to see you as I remember being."
Desoix looked over the other officer's shoulder toward the fires and shouts across the river. For a moment he thought it was his imagination that the sounds were coming closer.
Light flickering through the panels of the mall disabused him of his hopes. A torch-lit column was marching over the river. What the rioters had done to the City Offices suggested that they weren't headed for the cathedral now to pray for peace.
"Let's get inside," said Charles Desoix. "When this is all over, then you can thank me."
He didn't need to state the proviso: assuming either of us is still alive.
Chapter Fourteen
Tyl hadn't ridden in the little elevator off the back of the rotunda before. He and the UDB officer just about filled it, and neither of them was a big man.
Of course, in his armor and equipment Tyl wasn't the slim figure he would have cut in coveralls alone.
"Don't like to leave the guys before we know just what's happening here," he said aloud, though he was speaking as much to his own conscience as to the UDB officer beside him.
Tyl would have hated to be bolted behind steel shutters below, where the sergeant major was arranging temporary billets for the troops. The windowed Consistory Room was the next best thing to being outside—
And headed away from this Lord-stricken place!
"Up here is where we learn what's happening,"Desoix said reasonably, nodding toward the elevator's ceiling. "Or at least as much as anyone in the government knows," he added with a frown which echoed the doubt in his words.
The car stopped with only a faint burring from its magnetic drivers. The doors opened with less sound even than that. Tyl strode into the Consistory Room.
He was Colonel Hammer's representative and the ranking Slammer on this continent. So long as he remembered that, nobody else was likely to forget.
There were fewer people in the big room than there had been in the morning, but their degree of agitation made the numbers seem greater. Marshal Dowell was present with a pair of aides, but those three and the pair of mercenaries were the only men in uniform.
The Chastain brothers smiled with frozen enthusiasm when Tyl nodded to them.They wore dark suits of conservative cut—and of natural off-planet fabrics that gave them roughly the value of an aircar. Everyone else in the room was avoiding the Chastains. Backs turned whenever one of the twins attempted to make eye contact.
Berne, the City Prefect, didn't have even a twin for company. He huddled in the middle of the room like a clothes pole draped with the green velour of his state robe.
"Where are—" Tyl began, but he'd already lost his companion. Lieutenant Desoix was walking briskly toward the large-framed woman who seemed to be an aide to the President's wife. Neither the President nor Eunice Delcorio were here at—
Servants opened the door adjacent to the elevator. John Delcorio entered a step ahead of his wife, but only because of the narrowness of the portal. Eunice was again in a flame-red dress. This one was demure in the front but cut with no back at all and a skirt that stretched to allow her legs to scissor back and forth as she moved.
Tyl hadn't found a sexual arrangement satisfactory to him on the freighter that brought him to Bamberia, and there'd been no time to take care of personal business since he touched down.He felt a rush of lust.It was a little disconcerting under the circumstances—
But on the other hand, it was nice to be reminded that there was more to life than the sorts of things that'd been going on in the past few hours.
"You there!" President Delcorio said unexpectedly. He glared at Tyl, his black eyes glowing like coal in a coking furnace. "Do you have to wear that?"
Tyl glanced down at where Delcorio pointed with two stubby, sturdy fingers together.
"This?" said the Slammers officer. His submachine-gun hung from his right shoulder in a patrol sling that held it muzzle forward and grip down at his waist. He could seize it by reflex and spray whatever was in front of him without having to aim or think.
"Ye
s sir," he explained. He spoke without concern, because it didn't occur to him that anyone might think he was offering insolence instead of information. "Example for the troops, you know. I told 'em nobody moved without a gun and bandolier—sleeping, eating, whatever."
Tyl blinked and looked back at the President. "Besides," he added. "I might need it, the way things are."
Delcorio flushed. Tyl realized that he and the President were on intersecting planes. Though the two of them existed in the same universe, almost none of their frames of reference were identical.
That was too bad. But it wasn't a reason for Tyl Koopman to change; not now, when it was pretty curst obvious that the instincts he'd developed in Hammer's Slammers were the ones most applicable here.
Eunice Delcorio laughed, a clear, clean sound that cut like a knife. "At least there's somebody who understands the situation," she said,echoing Tyl's thought and earning the Slammers officer another furious glance by her husband.
"I think we can all agree that the situation won't be improved by silly panic," Delcorio said mildly as his eyes swept the room. "Dowell, what do you have to report?"
There had been movement all around the room with the arrival of the Delcorios but it was mostly limited to heads turning. Major Borodin, who'd been present after all—standing so quietly by a wall that Tyl's quick survey had missed him—was marching determinedly toward his executive officer. Desoix himself was alone. His lady friend had left him at once to join her mistress, the President's wife.
But at the moment, everyone's attention was on Marshal Dowell, because that was where the President was looking.
"Yes, well," the army chief said. "I've given orders that a brigade be returned from Two as quickly as possible. You must realize that it's necessary for the troops to land as a unit so that their effect won't be dissipated."
"What about now?" cried the City Prefect. He stepped forward in an access of grief and rage,fluttering his gorgeous robes like a peacock preparing to fly."You said you'd support my police, but your precious soldiers did nothing when those scum attacked the City Offices!"
One of Dowell's aides was speaking rapidly into a communicator with a shield that made the discussion inaudible to the rest of the gathering. The marshal glanced at him, then said, "We're still not sure what the situation over there is, and at any rate—"
"They took the place," Tyl said bluntly.
In the Slammers you didn't stand on ceremony when your superiors had bad data or none at all in matters that could mean the life of a lot of people. "Freed their friends, set fire to the building—hung at least some of the folks they caught. Via, you can see it from here, from the window."
He gestured with an elbow, because to point with his full arm would have moved his hand further from the grip of his weapon than instinct wanted to keep it at present.
Perhaps because everyone followed the gesture toward the panels overlooking the courtyard, the chanted . . . freedom . . . echoing from that direction became suddenly audible in the Consistory Room.
Across the room, the concealed elevator suctioned and snapped heads around. The officer Desoix had nodded to downstairs, the CO of the Executive Guard, stepped out with a mixture of arrogance and fear. He moved like a rabbit loaded with amphetamines. "Gentlemen?" he called in a clear voice. "Rioters are in the courtyard with guns and torches!"
Tyl was waiting for a recommendation—Do I have your permission to open fire? was how a Slammers officer would have proceeded—but this fellow had nothing in mind save the theatrical announcement.
What Tyl didn't expect—nobody expected—was for Eunice Delcorio to sweep like a torch flame to the door and step out onto the porch.
The blast of noise when the clear doors opened was a shocking reminder of how well they blocked sound. There was an animal undertone, but the organized chant of "Freedom!" boomed over and through the snarl until the mob recognized the black-haired, glass-smooth woman facing them from the high porch.
Tyl moved fast. He was at Eunice's side before the shouts of surprise had given way to the hush of a thousand people drawing breath simultaneously.He thought there might be shots.At the first bang or spurt of light he was going to hurl Eunice back into the Consistory Room, trusting his luck and his clamshell armor.
Not because she was a woman; but because if the President's wife got blown away, there was as little chance of compromise as there seemed to be of winning until the brigade from Two arrived.
And maybe a little because she was a woman. "What will you have, citizens?" Eunice called. The porch was designed for speeches. Even without amplification, the modeling walls threw her powerful contralto out over the crowd. "Will you abandon God's Crusade for a whim?"
The uplifted faces were a blur to Tyl in the scatter of light sources that the mob carried. The crosses embroidered in white cloth on the left shoulders of their garments were clear enough to be recognized, though, and that was true whether the base color was red or black. There was motion behind him, but Tyl had eyes only for the mob.
Weapons glinted there. He couldn't tell if any of them were being aimed. The night-vision sensors in his face shield would have helped; but if he locked the shield down he'd be a mirror-faced threat to the crowd, and that might be all it took to draw the first shots . . . .
Desoix'd stepped onto the porch. He stood on the other side of Eunice Delcorio, and he was cursing with the fluency of a mercenary who's sleep-learned a lot of languages over the years.
The other woman was on the porch too. From the way the UDB officer was acting, she'd preceded rather than followed him.
The crowd's silence had dissolved in a dozen varied answers to Eunice's question, all underlain by blurred attempts to continue the chant of "Freedom!"
Something popped from the center of the mob. Tyl's left arm reached across Eunice's waist and was a heartbeat short of hurling the woman back through the doors no matter who stood behind her.A white flare burst fifty meters above the courtyard, harmless and high enough that it could be seen by even the tail of the mob stretching across the river.
The mob quieted after an anticipatory growl that shook the panels of the doors.
There was a motion at the flagstaff, near where the flare had been launched. Before Tyl could be sure what was happening, a handheld floodlight glared over the porch from the same location.
He stepped in front of the President's wife, bumping her out of the way with his hip, while his left hand locked the face shield down against the blinding radiance. The muzzle of his submachine-gun quested like an adder's tongue while his finger took up slack on the trigger.
"Wait!" boomed a voice from the mob in amplified startlement. The floodlight dimmed from a threat to comfortable illumination.
"I'll take over now, Eunice," said John Delcorio as his firm hand touched Tyl's upper arm, just beneath the shoulder flare of the clamshell armor.
The Slammers officer stepped aside, knowing it was out of his hands for better or for worse, now.
President Delcorio's voice thundered to the crowd from roof speakers, "My people, why do you come here to disturb God's purpose?"
Through his shield's optics, Tyl could see that there were half a dozen priests in dark vestments grouped beside the flagpole. They had a guard of orderlies from the House of Grace, but both the man with the light and the one raising a bull-horn had been ordained. Tyl thought, though the distance made uncertain, that the priest half-hidden behind the pole was Father Laughlin.
None of the priests carried weapons. All the twenty or so orderlies of their bodyguard held guns.
"We want the murderer Berne!" called the bull-horn . The words were indistinct from the out-of-synchronous echoes which they waked from the Palace walls. "Berne sells justice and sells lives!"
"Berne!" shouted the mob, and their echoes thundered BERNE berne berne.
As the echoes died away, Tyl heard Desoix saying in a voice much louder than he intended, "Anne, for the Lord's sake! Get back inside!"
"Will you go back to your homes in peace if I replace the City Prefect?"Delcorio said, pitching his words to make his offered capitulation sound like a demand. His features were regally arrogant as Tyl watched him sidelong behind the mirror of his face shield.
The priest with the bull-horn leaned sideways to confer with the bigger man behind the flagpole, certainly Father Laughlin. While the mob waited for their leaders' response,the President used the pause toadd,"One man's venality can't be permitted to jeopardize God's work!"
"Give us Berne!" demanded the courtyard.
"I'll replace—" Delcorio attempted.
GIVE give give roared the mob. GIVE give give . . . .
Eunice leaned over to say something to her husband. He held up a hand to silence the crowd. The savage voices boomed louder, a thousand of them in the courtyard and myriads more filling the streets beyond.
A woman waved a doll in green robes above her head. She held it tethered by its neck.
Delcorio and his wife stepped back into the Consistory Room. Their hands were clasped so that it was impossible to tell who was leading the other. The President reached to slide the door shut for silence, but Lieutenant Desoix was close behind with an arm locked around the other woman's waist. His shoulder blocked Delcorio's intent.
Tyl Koopman wasn't going to be the only target on the balcony while the mob waited for a response it might not care for. He kept his featureless face to the front—with the gun muzzle beneath it for emphasis—as he retreated after the rest.
Chapter Fifteen
"Firing me won't—" Berne began even before Tyl slid the door shut on the thunder of the mob.
"I'm not sure we can defend—" Marshal Dowell was saying with a frown and enough emphasis that he managed to be heard.
"Be silent!" Eunice Delcorio ordered in a glass-sharp voice.
The wall thundered with the low notes of the shouting in the courtyard.
Everyone in the Consistory Room had gathered in a semicircle. They were facing the porch and those who had been standing on it.
There were only a dozen or so of Delcorio's advisors present. Twice that number had awaited when Tyl followed Eunice out to confront the mob, but they were gone now.