With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  Adele turned away and coughed heavily. Blood gummed her right eyebrow. She threw an arm across her face, knowing she’d have been too late to save her eye if the thumbnail-sized chip had hit an inch lower.

  Size was a great advantage in handling an impeller’s powerful recoil. Dasi was a huge man and Koop was well above average. Hogg was the lightest by fifty pounds, but his impeller was back on target an instant before those of the two sailors.

  As Adele turned, a guard stuck his head and the barrel of his submachine gun around the corner of the bay in which he’d taken refuge. Adele shot him, then shot him again in the ribs.

  He’d leaped like a pithed frog when her first pellet blew a hole above his right eye. So long as the target was moving, she had to assume it was a danger to her and her detachment. She’d pay for what she did tonight in dreams or in Hell, but no one would ever say that Adele Mundy had skimped a task because of what it would have cost her.

  The dead man thrashed in the pool of his own spreading blood. None of his fellows would follow his example in the next minute or two. Adele remembered the helmet visor. She pulled it down and returned to what Hogg and the sailors were doing.

  Their impellers slapped. The sound of slugs smashing bricks was sharper yet, and echoes turned rapid fire into the rattle of automatic weapons. Adele guessed each man had fired about six rounds when a long section of wall fell into the alcove with a roar louder even than the gunfire.

  The other sailors emptied the magazines of their submachine guns into the spreading dust cloud. Compared to the crash of the impellers, the lighter weapons sounded like the buzzing of insects.

  “Cease fire!” Woetjans screamed. She charged with her empty weapon raised to use as a bludgeon. Adele, for reasons she couldn’t possibly have articulated, was with the half-dozen sailors who followed the petty officer.

  The commando helmet had nose filters Adele hadn’t known about; the air she breathed was close but not chokingly full of peach-colored dust.

  Bricks had collapsed into the drainage sump, burying Markos’s aide there. Her right hand stuck out of the rubble. It held a pistol, not the submachine gun Adele knew the woman usually carried.

  The output pipe was shattered just above the pump casing. The submachine gun lay on the floor beneath it. Markos’s right foot, flailing wildly to find purchase to thrust him higher, stuck out of the hole he’d hammered through the ceramic pipe with submachine gun pellets.

  “There!” Adele said. She aimed but didn’t shoot because too many sailors were moving in the dust cloud.

  Woetjans followed the line of Adele’s pistol. She jumped to the motor housing and grabbed the spy’s ankle. When Woetjans pulled, Markos slid out of the pipe. He was covered with ancient slime and his face bore a look of bestial rage. Woetjans hit him in the middle of the forehead with her gun butt.

  “Bring him as a hostage!” Adele said, backing out of the ruined alcove. She lifted her visor because it made her feel trapped. Bricks continued to dribble from the top of the opening as gravity overcame the grip of old mortar.

  “Mistress, we’ll have to shoot our way out,” Hogg said from beside her. “They may not have heard us upstairs, I’ll hope they didn’t, but they’ll sure hell know something’s going on when we turn up looking like we do.”

  “Oh,” said Adele, considering a point she should have seen for herself. The brick dust had started to settle; a great deal of it had settled on the skin and uniforms of the Cinnabar detachment. Sailors who’d dived for the floor when the shooting started were blotched with muck and algae besides. As soon as they appeared in public, there’d be questions that would inevitably lead to shots.

  Hogg was right. If there was going to be shooting, it was best for the Cinnabars to start it.

  Woetjans tossed Markos to the floor beside Adele; a sailor quickly bound the spy’s hands behind his back, using a belt stripped from a dead guard. Adele hadn’t heard any order pass. The sailor simply understood and executed the task.

  Adele felt her face quiver with the beginning of a hysterical laugh. Why couldn’t Kostroma produce library assistants of that quality? She forced her cheeks into a frozen rictus until the fit passed.

  “If it’s all right to use the helmet commo now I can set things up with Barnes and Lamsoe,” Woetjans said. “Unless you want to …?”

  A surviving guard fired a short burst from the bay where he and his fellows remained. A sailor fired back. Neither hit or could possibly hit anything but brick.

  “Get out!” Captain Le Golif repeated.

  He stood behind the wire, feet slightly spread. His arms were behind his back as though he were reviewing a parade. Pride in Cinnabar made Adele flush, despite the cold awareness that the men who cut her little sister’s throat might have been personally brave as well.

  Adele hadn’t seen an armored personnel carrier until a week before. Among other things she had no idea of what might be the rate and duration of fire of the heavy weapons involved.

  “No, you have a much better appreciation of the factors,” she said.

  The petty officer glanced down at Markos. “And you want him along?” she said without emphasis.

  “Yes,” Adele said. “I do.”

  Markos was useless as a hostage: trying to negotiate their exit from Kostroma would simply alert the Alliance command to their presence. The detachment might escape in a rush; if the Alliance had time to set up, every Cinnabar on the planet would die or be captured.

  Adele had called Markos a hostage because the only other alternatives were to kill him in cold blood, or to let him live. She’d meant it when she said she wouldn’t be party to a cold-blooded execution.

  But she’d pull the trigger herself if it was that or setting free the monster she knew Markos was.

  * * *

  “Message received,” Daniel said, speaking into the integral microphone at his console in the Aglaia’s tactical operations center. Domenico was in charge at the Princess Cecile. He’d used his initiative—against Daniel’s orders for communications silence—to relay the warning from the detachment in the Elector’s Palace. “We’re on the way. Leary out.”

  Chief Baylor looked at Daniel with concern. The missileer had just arrived to report his team was done with the starboard installations, Missile Tubes One and Three, but that there’d been damage to the port-side handling controls when the Aglaia was captured. It’d take an hour to clear, and the Cinnabars hadn’t had an hour even before the wheels came off for the palace detachment.

  Daniel keyed the general communicator. “All personnel to the main hatch and begin loading,” he said calmly. “Bridge out.”

  He’d hoped to make the final transfer from the Aglaia to the Princess Cecile in two stages, but the car could carry the nineteen Cinnabars so long as Gambier stayed low and used surface effect. That was an easy problem. If Daniel’d thought it would have helped the palace detachment, he’d have swum to the Navy Pool pulling the missile crew on a raft.

  Chief Baylor didn’t leave the TOC. Daniel felt a surge of rage—did the man think orders weren’t meant for him?—but suppressed it instantly. Baylor didn’t need to guide his people to the main hatch. Daniel was jumpy because he held himself responsible for allowing the palace detachment to take a vain risk.

  He touched the switch opening the hatch of Hold Two, then keyed the general communicator, audio only. Video required more bandwidth than might be available during combat. Trained naval personnel ought to have their eyes on their tasks anyway.

  “You’re free to go,” Daniel announced to the former Alliance guard detachment. They’d be jumping up in their prison as light entered through the opening hatch. “We’ve left an inflatable liferaft tied to the mooring pontoon for you. I strongly recommend that you use it to get away from the Aglaia as fast as you can. Bridge out.”

  Daniel swung out of his seat and headed for the door. Baylor followed in his wake, frowning again. It was a familiar expression on the little man’s face.

>   “We might’ve left them where they are,” Baylor said over the clash of his boots and Daniel’s on the metal stair treads. “Though I don’t guess a bunch of groundhogs’re going to reprogram the targeting computer in the time they’ll have to try.”

  “I don’t guess they are,” Daniel agreed, feeling his irritation rise again.

  As Baylor said, the Alliance personnel were from the ground forces rather than the navy. If they even knew where the TOC was, the chance they could reset the programmed sequence was less than the possibility of them flapping their arms and flying to the Princess Cecile ahead of the aircar.

  Besides, leaving the prisoners locked in the Aglaia was a sentence of death by fire or suffocation. Daniel didn’t hate anybody that much. He hoped he’d never hate anybody that much.

  He hit the Deck C landing and sprinted down the corridor toward the hatch. The Chief Missileer ran at his side.

  “It sounds like Woetjans is really in the middle of it,” Baylor said. He talked out of nervousness. Also, he was displacing his fear rather than acknowledging that his real concern was the certain doom of the Aglaia and his beloved missiles with it.

  A rating stood in the main hatch with a submachine gun. When the officers reached the concourse he shouted, “Here they come!” over his shoulder to the aircar quivering in dynamic balance on the pontoon.

  “They’re professionals,” Daniel said to Baylor. He was out of the Aglaia’s hatch for the last time, into warm salt air and a sky not far short of dawn. He crossed the catwalk and paused, gesturing Baylor and the rating into the vehicle ahead of him.

  They were professionals, Adele and Hogg as surely as the Aglaia’s crewmen. They would do the best they could under the circumstances.

  And by God! so would Daniel Leary and the contingent directly under him.

  * * *

  “Remember,” said Woetjans to the detachment, “shoot anything you please but don’t shoot the fucking APC, right? And keep moving but help your buddies. We don’t leave nobody behind even if their head’s blown off. Ready?”

  The general murmur of assent sounded to Adele like feeding time in a bear garden. She smiled faintly. Everyone in the immediate area would shortly prefer that a pack of bears had rushed up from the depths of the Elector’s Palace.

  Woetjans keyed her helmet. “Barnes, get moving,” she said.

  Two clicks on Adele’s helmet intercom signaled wordless agreement. The APC was going into action two high levels above the poised detachment.

  “Remember,” Woetjans said. She sounded peevish, like an adult trying to control unruly children. “I fire the first shot.”

  She nodded to Dasi and Koop; the big sailors put their whole strength into sliding the equipment door sideways so that the detachment could exit as a group rather than dribbling one at a time through the pedestrian doorway.

  The door’s rattle drew the attention of the entire detachment on the landing twenty feet above. The Alliance troops stared in amazement at the squad of commandoes starting up the broad stairs toward them.

  Woetjans was on the left end; Adele was beside the bosun’s mate, holding only her pistol, and Hogg was to Adele’s right with her submachine gun in his hands and the impeller slung across his back. Three more sailors completed the first rank; Dasi and Koop fell in behind with the two men supporting Markos by the elbows.

  “Buddha!” cried an Alliance soldier. He pointed toward Markos, pinioned and groggy. “They’ve got—”

  Faces—angry, surprised; none of them frightened, not yet, because they didn’t have time. They were lighted from above by a glaring fixture the Alliance had bolted to the wall. Ten soldiers, perhaps a dozen.

  Woetjans may have squeezed her trigger first, but Adele doubted there’d been a heartbeat between any of the five weapons firing. Only Hogg of the five shooters failed to empty the 300-round magazine of his submachine gun. The guard detachment melted like frost in a torrent.

  Adele ran up the stairs. A mist of dust and blood pulsed in the floodlight. She didn’t know why she was shouting. Her foot slipped and she did know why, but she didn’t look down to make sure.

  Gunfire and screams echoed in her mind. A soldier lay on the landing, pounding the bricks with his remaining hand. Hogg finished him as he passed; probably a waste of ammunition, but because it was Hogg only three or four rounds.

  An Alliance official looked over the carved stone coping of the light well. Adele shot him. His peaked hat flew off and his face jerked back with a red smear where his forehead had been.

  Adele was winded already, gasping to breathe brick dust but wishing that dry smell could mask the stench of bodies sawn inside out by hypervelocity pellets. She thrust her hand against the wall where the stairs switched back. The surface was cratered and sticky.

  Powerful drive fans howled. A bolt of plasma ripped overhead, dimming the banks of light and setting off a bloom of ionized fire that must have been one of the Alliance gun nests in the entryway.

  Barnes and Lamsoe were doing their part, all of them were doing their part. Nothing else mattered now.

  Adele tripped. A sailor caught her. They were at the top of the staircase. The APC turned on its axis in front of them, bunting civilian vehicles into crumpled ruin. The right side panel was raised but the left one was still locked down so that the detachment could leap aboard.

  Adele stopped. She fired, aiming at white blurs that were faces. Plasma lit the sky. This time the plume carried with it the skirt of the gun vehicle at the garden entrance, devouring the flexible fabric in orange flames that were a shadow in the iridescence.

  Any blur, any face, any soul within them if men have souls.

  Woetjans caught Adele around the waist and leaped into the troop compartment. The APC lifted on the full screaming thrust of its fans.

  Adele twisted on the hard deck. Hands gripped her to keep her from sliding out of the vehicle. She slid a fresh magazine into the butt of her glowing pistol, and the victims in her mind shrieked louder than the fans.

  * * *

  Daniel fiddled at the Princess Cecile’s command console, trying to get the adjustable seat positioned properly for him. The controls were reversed from those on similar Cinnabar equipment; he kept getting a hump in the upholstery where he wanted a dip and vice versa.

  The ship’s systems were live: the telltales were green or amber, with the only red warnings those for the open main hatch and the enabled armament switches. The Princess Cecile was fully crewed with some of the most experienced ratings in the RCN. There was only one commissioned officer, but that wasn’t unheard of for a vessel as small as a corvette.

  The single officer shouldn’t have been a junior lieutenant on his first cruise, but that wasn’t a problem that Daniel could find it in his heart to really regret.

  Lt. Daniel Leary, Officer Commanding the RCS Princess Cecile. That was a fact forever now, even if he died in the next ten minutes or the RCN cashiered him after he reached Cinnabar.

  Dying in the next ten minutes was actually quite probable, because the Bremse, an Alliance cruiser/minelayer, was in orbit over Kostroma.

  Daniel’s main display was a Plot-Position Indicator for the region above the planet to an altitude of 100,000 miles: near space by interstellar standards, but if the Princess Cecile could get through it alive she’d have a very good chance of making it the rest of the way home. The Commonwealth of Kostroma’s automatic defense system hadn’t been a joke, not quite, but the Alliance had come prepared to update the defensive constellation to a level of protection comparable to that over Pleasaunce.

  Alliance cruiser/minelayers were built on the hulls of large light cruisers, but their large magazines were configured to accept either missiles or thermonuclear mines like the ones the Bremse was deploying now above Kostroma. The ships were fast because their mines could interdict hostile planets as well as defend friendly ones; and even though the Bremse would be heavily loaded with mines, Daniel was sure she could out-slug a Kostroman corvette by
a considerable margin.

  The options available to the Princess Cecile were guile or incredibly good luck. And disaster, of course. Disaster was far the most probable option.

  “The Mundy section is beginning extraction,” said Domenico from the console to Daniel’s right. That was normally the navigator’s position, but Daniel had put the bosun there for now because he needed someone trustworthy handling communications.

  Navigation and attack were Daniel’s own responsibilities until he handed the Princess Cecile over to somebody better qualified. He switched the main display to an attack screen which echoed data from the Aglaia’s sensors. The PPI shrank to a holographic fifty-millimeter cube, one of a series of similar displays at the upper edge of the projection volume.

  “Understood,” Daniel said. He tried to keep the gleeful excitement out of his voice. He didn’t want the crew to think he was insane…. “Alert the ship.”

  Domenico passed the report over the general communicator in a rasping tone with as little emotion as he’d have put into a drinks order. These were good people, and they were depending on Daniel Leary.

  “Holy shit!” said Dorfman. She’d been gunner’s mate aboard the Aglaia—a communications vessel didn’t rate a warrant gunner—and was seated at the remaining bridge console with responsibility for the corvette’s defenses. “All the missile batteries at the palace just fired!”

  “Yes,” said Daniel as he transmitted preprogrammed commands to the Aglaia. “We’re fortunate to have a communications officer of Ms. Mundy’s skill. She said she’d trip the automatic defenses to create a diversion as they departed the target area.”

  Daniel pressed the red Execute switch with the full weight of his thumb. “And now,” he added with satisfaction, “we’re going to create a diversion of our own.”

  * * *

  Fifty feet below the APC, a line rippled through three blocks of housing in the center of the city. Buildings crumbled. A pall of dust spread up and outward. Where the hypervelocity rockets hit something harder than brick an occasional spark flew into the night, but the flames growing slowly in the projectiles’ wake were for the moment unimpressive.