by David Drake
Woetjans looked worriedly from Adele to the cab. Ahead, a luxurious aircar stuck out a foot from the line of parked vehicles. The APC’s rear fender would rip the car’s side off in the next moment.
Barnes dropped his right skid to the pavement. It shrieked in a shower of sparks, then lifted again. The contact had braked their drift and straightened the course.
“He’ll do,” Adele said. She hadn’t been going to let Woetjans shout at the driver anyway. Trying to directly control the work of somebody who’s already over his head couldn’t possibly have a good result.
“Pull in here,” Woetjans called to the driver. “Onto the hedge. We’ve got the weight and it won’t scratch our finish.”
The petty officer looked at Adele. “If that’s all right, sir?”
“Yes,” said Adele. She hadn’t thought of herself as being in real command of the undertaking, but that was how the sailors viewed her. She had to keep reminding herself to make decisions with crisp authority.
The hedged squares where Adele had met Markos were battered, but civilian vehicles weren’t massive enough to drive through the remains of the bushes. As Woetjans had noted, the APC was. Perhaps it was a good omen that the detachment was able to park close to where they’d be escaping from the subsurface levels.
But if you believed that, you could just as easily believe that Fate was giving with one hand in order to snatch the gift back with the other. Best trust to courage, discipline, and good marksmanship.
The APC shuddered as Barnes plowed the hedgerow with his side panel, then settled. When the driver cut the fans to idle, his own sigh of relief was audible over the sounds of the restive vehicle.
“Let’s go,” Woetjans said quietly. “Remember, company manners.”
The detachment stepped down from the compartment in two ranks. Adele wiped her palms on her trouser legs. She’d thought she was perfectly calm.
Adele led the way up the ramp with Hogg at her side; Woetjans was one of the pair bringing up the rear. The Cinnabar sailors couldn’t march in step and Adele didn’t know what a military pace was, but Daniel assured her that they’d look out of place if they moved like parade-ground troops while wearing commando uniforms.
Despite the hour, lights were on all over the palace. The only time that was likely to have been true in the past was when the Elector was giving a party.
Adele saw the Kostromans for the first time since she’d entered the palace grounds: a group of low-ranking clerks, looking haggard and frightened as they left the building. She knew from her signals intelligence that the Alliance command was determined to take over every aspect of Kostroman life as soon as possible, but Kostroman bureaucrats were still necessary to the process. Their new masters were working them within an inch of their lives.
Or a step beyond. One of the messages Adele had skimmed was an order for the execution of a clerk who’d upset a glass of wine over a stack of account books while eating supper at his desk. The official charge was “treason against the Alliance of Free Stars.” As the member of the Alliance military government had explained in her covering memo, the real purpose was to encourage other clerks to be more careful.
They entered the rear porch, covered by the overhang of the second and third stories. There was another guardpost, this time manned by troops whose rigid armor and opaque faceshields made them look like statues with only a rough resemblance to humans. Plasma cannon threatened from behind two semicircles of sandbags. Between the gun nests stood another soldier with an electronic reader.
Adele handed over the routing card she’d taken from the helmet of the commando lieutenant, a programmable chip in a rectangular polymer matrix. It had carried the commandoes’ orders in electronic form that could be read on the helmet visors of every member of the unit so that complex operations could be executed without communications errors.
The faceless guard inserted the card in his reader. Adele had reprogrammed it so that it showed only a destination—the Elector’s Palace—and reserved all other information under the highest security level of Blue Chrome operations.
The guard looked at the projected data, then returned the card to Adele and stepped out of the way. “Proceed,” he said.
Or was it, “she said”? The voice was an electronic synthesis, just as were all sensory inputs the guard received. What sort of person could willingly live and function in a prison so strait that it touched their skin at every point?
But then, there were people who probably thought work in a library was a sentence to Hell. The universe had room for all sorts; though God knew, present events proved that many people weren’t willing to leave it at that.
Adele turned left with the sailors sauntering behind her. Strip lights glued to the ceilings brightened the main corridor. People, two or three in a clot, stood talking in hushed voices outside the offices. Inside were Kostromans at tables made from shelving laid over furniture and stacked with paperwork, some of it from moldy boxes that must have come up from storage in the basement.
Each room had an Alliance overseer who looked tired but very much in command. The Alliance must have moved in a civilian administration as large as or larger than the invasion’s military component.
Adele glanced to left and right in cold appraisal at those she passed. Bureaucrats, even Alliance personnel, avoided her gaze as she passed to the back stairs. No civilian wanted to know why a squad of commandoes had been summoned here.
Because of the bright illumination she noticed the corridor’s murals for the first time. They showed scenes of Kostroman life during centuries past. The backgrounds were so varied that they must be of specific different islands. Fishermen cast hand lines from a sailing vessel; a farm family picked citrus fruit; a starship lifted from the water as a crowd cheered.
The artist had been skillful, but grime and the band rubbed by shoulders of those passing in the hall had reduced them to a shadow of what they must have been. Adele thought of her library. Was it perhaps enough out of the way that the palace’s new masters had spared it, or had the books been treated with the same brutal unconcern that had tossed antique furniture from the windows of reception rooms to clear them for office space?
She should be worrying about humans, not books; but the books and their probable fate filled her mind anyway. She smiled at herself with wry humor.
The single soldier on guard at the narrow staircase down straightened when she saw a detachment of commandoes coming toward her. She carried a submachine gun and to Adele looked very young.
“Out of the way,” Adele said with a curt nod. The Alliance soldier jumped sideways, knocking her weapon against the wall, pitting the ancient plaster.
Adele pulled open the door and led her detachment down the stairs in single file. Lighting had been improved even here: battery-powered lamps were stuck to the wall at each landing.
She hadn’t expected the guard; there’d been no reference to a post at the stairhead in the electronic media Adele had examined. It would have been a mistake to try to explain what the detachment was doing, however. The guard must have been placed by someone of relatively low rank, so she was therefore best ignored by commandoes claiming to operate on the instructions of Blue Chrome Command.
Blue Chrome Command was Markos. Adele wondered if that would amuse him. He hadn’t seemed a man with a sense of humor.
Adele smiled faintly. She was finding more humor in life herself since she became a Cinnabar pirate.
The door to the basement level was open. A guard stood there as well. He turned from watching workmen installing power cables to stare as the detachment trooped past down the stairs. Adele gave him a hard glance.
The subbasement was well lit also, but that was a doubtful virtue in a region so decayed. The brick flooring rippled like the face of the sea—a useful simile, because at least half of the surface was under water. The ceiling arches dripped condensate, and an apparent spring stirred one pool clear of the pale algae that scummed the others.
&n
bsp; A pump rumbled disconsolately, and the generator at the far end of the building vibrated at a higher frequency. Workmen had drilled fresh holes through the ceiling to pass power lines to the upper stories. The air danced with brick dust.
Adele approved of the additional wiring in principle. The execution of the work was simple butchery, however. One might as well shear a book down on the upper and lower edges so that it fit your new shelving.
Her detachment had returned to double file; the only sound they made was the splash of boots in the foul water. The bays filled with the detritus of past generations looked like the wrack of a terrible storm. To Adele it was a sad reminder of the ephemeral nature of human civilization; but then, she saw most things that way. Hogg and the sailors probably had a different viewpoint.
The pumps were in four brick alcoves jutting from the lengthwise exterior walls, arranged in an X pattern with the outside entrance between the pair on the north side. The pumps were huge cylinders sunk beneath floor level and venting through ceramic pipes half a meter in diameter. They had more than sufficient capacity to keep the subbasement dry.
Only the southwestern pump still worked, and a grumble from it suggested not all was well with that one either. As Adele passed between the eastern pair of pumps, she glanced through the arch to her right. Workmen had recently removed the end cap of the big electric drive motor. The Alliance planned to put this portion of its house in order also.
The broad outside stairs were a continuation of the light well that provided natural illumination for the basement level. The sliding doors that could offer twenty feet of width for large objects—the pumps and the fusion generator were obvious examples—were closed and barred, but the pedestrian door set in one of the larger panels stood ajar.
The guard post covering this entrance was outside and up a level, at the basement landing. Through the door Adele heard a jig, distorted by reverberation in the stone-lined masonry pit of the light well. The soldiers were playing music that had been popular when Adele was on the staff of the Bryce Academy.
She’d never had a taste for music and she doubted that a connoisseur would have found the jig to have been of any particular merit, but it took her back to a time that was now forever past for her. She regretted its loss, as surely as she regretted the loss of her childhood.
The music shut off in mid-chord. Well, so had that stage of her life.
The fusion generator was in a masonry room on the western end of the subbasement. According to architectural files, the original plan had been to enclose the generator in all directions but one, a curtain wall to the west. That way if the Tokamak failed it would vent its plasma harmlessly into the open air.
Later Electors had added to the initial structure. The ionized plume would now envelop the west wing and everyone in it, but Adele had found no evidence in the records that this was viewed as a problem. Fusion bottles rarely failed; and if this one did, well, the west wing was given over entirely to servants’ quarters and the offices of low-ranking clerks.
Alliance officials had used the three bays in the northwest corner of the subbasement as a high-security prison. The wall of the generator room formed the south side, and a mesh of barbed wire woven on a steel frame closed the open end.
Twenty Kostroman citizens—Walter III and members of his immediate family—shared two bays of the makeshift prison. The Aglaia’s five officers were in the remaining one, brightly illuminated by floodlights in the vaulted ceiling outside the enclosure.
The prisoners had no privacy and no chance of escape, but Adele saw as she approached that the twelve Alliance soldiers on duty were a great deal less than alert. She and her detachment made no attempt to conceal themselves, but they were still within twenty yards of the post when a guard looked up, realized the splashing footsteps weren’t condensate dripping after all, and shouted in surprise.
Guards jumped to their feet and zipped their uniform tunics closed. They’d appropriated furniture from the upper levels. The luxurious chairs, couches, and tables made a dissonant tableau among the utter squalor.
“Who’s the officer in charge?” Adele demanded. She didn’t raise her voice, but the tinge of scorn in her voice was proper either for the lieutenant she pretended to be or the craftsman she truly was.
A lanky soldier, the oldest in the squad by several years, stepped forward. Instead of identifying himself he said, “Sir, this is a restricted area.”
He tried to sound forceful and threatening. His act wasn’t nearly as good as Adele’s.
“Yes,” she said, “it is.” She handed him the routing card. The codes Adele had implanted in the chip would direct the guards to turn over the five Cinnabar officers to the detachment of commandoes.
The chip wouldn’t explain why: that was beyond the guards’ need to know. The guards would have been sure something was wrong if Adele had included unnecessary information.
Some of the prisoners moved forward, drawn by hope of something to punctuate the boredom. The individuals weren’t identifiable until they almost touched the wire mesh. Light glinting from the steel threw a haze over those beyond it.
Walter Hajas was in the middle bay. Captain Le Golif, whom Adele had seen during the Founder’s Day Banquet, stood grim-faced with his four juniors. She didn’t think either man would recognize her.
The sailors had bunched slightly when Adele and Hogg stopped. Woetjans suddenly pushed through her subordinates, put her lips to Adele’s ear, and whispered tautly, “Sir! Two guys come down the side stairs and they’re behind us!”
“You there!” someone called. The subbasement was so huge and multi-bayed that the words, though shouted, didn’t seem loud. “What’s going on here?”
Adele recognized the voice.
“Kill them!” she shouted, reaching for her pocket.
Hogg carried his impeller slung under his right arm with the muzzle forward. His right hand had ridden lightly on the grip from the moment he left the Princess Cecile on this mission. The guard commander’s mouth gaped as Hogg’s slug punched him mid-chest before Adele could complete the second word of her warning.
The soldiers were too startled to react. Hogg killed three of them standing before the rest of the survivors threw themselves toward cover. Brick shattered and a Kostroman prisoner doubled up with a cry: an impeller slug didn’t stop when it hit its intended target.
The sailors had fast reflexes but they weren’t trained killers. Only Dasi fired at the two figures who dived into the nearest pump alcove. He missed, though his impeller blasted a head-sized divot in the brick wall.
Adele didn’t bother to shoot. The guards weren’t worth her concern, and she couldn’t get a clear shot past the members of her detachment before the real targets were under cover.
The voice had been that of Markos. He and his aide had decided to see the prisoners without giving electronic warning.
A volley of submachine gun pellets blew powder from the north wall and stuffing from the furniture. The sailors were trying to copy Hogg now that they understood what was required, but the surviving guards were mostly safe in a side bay.
A guard fired his submachine gun. Pellets slapped and scarred pillars on the other side of the vault, but the shooter couldn’t hit the Cinnabars for the same reason they couldn’t hit him and his fellows: at the present angle a three-foot-thick brick wall was in the way.
Hogg shouldered his impeller with more deliberation than he’d shown previously and fired one round through the seat of a red plush divan. The guard hiding there leaped up with a scream, then collapsed. The divan broke beneath her. The slug had smashed the frame on its way to her chest.
Civilian prisoners were screaming and throwing themselves into the back of their cells. Captain Le Golif pointed toward Adele and shouted, “Run for it! You’ll be killed if you try to get us now!”
He was right in one sense: at least six of the guards were alive and armed. The open front of their bay was only twenty feet from the mesh barrier enclosi
ng the Aglaia’s officers.
The Alliance soldiers were shocked and frightened, but they were still capable of pulling a trigger. With a submachine gun, that’s all it would take to chop to mincemeat anybody trying to break open the prisoner cage.
Adele had the pistol in her left hand. Her right elbow held the burdensome submachine gun to her side to keep it from flopping. For a moment, only her head and eyes moved.
Le Golif was half right. Adele and her sailors couldn’t run, either, except past the pump alcove where Markos and his aide had taken refuge. Ruthless didn’t necessarily mean skillful, but Adele didn’t doubt that the pale sociopath could knock over human targets just as quickly as they appeared before her.
A submachine gun fired in the alcove. The burst wasn’t directed toward the opening. Brick shattered and a few pellets rang on the steel pump housing.
“Sun, Polin, Hafard!” Woetjans roared. Like Adele, the petty officer had seen that there was no way out for the detachment except past Markos. “On the count of three, with me.”
She pointed toward the front arch with her left index finger; the submachine gun was in her right hand, the stock extended to the crook of her elbow. The sailors she’d named were, like her, among the majority carrying submachine guns rather than impellers.
“One—”
A second burst within the alcove. The impacts sounded as though someone had thrown a case of glassware against the wall. A single bit of metal ricocheted through the arch, trailing a corkscrew of smoke.
“Stop!” Adele shouted. “Stop, she’ll kill you all!”
Woetjans turned with an expression combining surprise and frustration. “Sir!” she pleaded. “There’s no—”
Hogg pointed his impeller at the side of the alcove. “Dasi and Koop,” he said. Those three—and Lamsoe, back in the cupola of the APC—carried stocked impellers. “It’s just fucking brick after all. On the count, one, two, thr—”
The impellers fired a ragged volley. The slugs were aimed a few inches above the base course. Each impact blasted out thirty or more pounds of pulverized brick.