by David Drake
The river here was half a kilometer wide between the levees, but with night sights and powerguns, trained men could sweep the far walkway clear if some of the rioters decided it'd be safe to pursue.
The river had fallen more than a meter since Tyl viewed it six hours before. The barges still floated a safe jump beneath the inner walkway of the levee—but not safe for Jack Scratchard with a load of gear.
"Gimme my arms free," the sergeant major ordered.
Tyl nodded and stepped away with the trooper on the other side. Scratchard gripped the railing with both hands and swung himself over. He crouched on the narrow lip, choosing his support, and lowered himself onto the hogsheads with which the barge was loaded. The troopers waiting to help the senior noncom had the sense to get out of the way.
"I'm fine now," Scratchard grunted. "Let's move!"
The barges were moored close, but there was enough necessary slack in the lines that some of them were over a meter apart while their rubber bumpers squealed against those of the vessel on the opposite flank. Tyl hadn't thought the problem through, but Kekkonan or one of the other sergeants had stationed pairs of troopers at every significant gap. They were ready to guide and help lift later-comers over the danger.
"Thank the Lord," Tyl muttered as four strong arms boosted him from the first barge to the next in line. He wasn't sure whether he meant for the help or for the realization that the men he commanded were as good as anybody could pray.
Chapter Twelve
Charles Desoix wore a commo helmet to keep in touch with his unit, but he was looking out over Bamberg City with a handheld image intensifier instead of using the integral optics of the helmet's face shield. The separate unit gave him better illumination, crisper details. He held the imager steady by resting his elbows on the rail of the porch outside the Consistory Room, overlooking the courtyard and beyond—
The railing jiggled as someone else leaned against it, bouncing Desoix's forty-magnification image of a window in the City Office building off his screen.
" Lord cur—" Desoix snarled as he spun. He wasn't the sort to slap the clumsy popinjay whom he assumed had disturbed him, but he was willing to give the contrary impression at the moment.
Anne McGill was at the rail beside him.
"They told me—" Desoix blurted.
"Yes,but I couldn't—"Anne said,both of them trying to cover the angry outburst that would disappear from reality if they pretended it hadn't occurred.
She'd closed the clear doors behind her, but Desoix could see into the Consistory Room. Enough light fell onto the porch to illuminate them for anyone looking in their direction.
He put his arms around Anne anyway,being careful not to gouge her back with a corner of the imaging unit. She didn't protest as he thought she might—but she gasped in surprise as her breasts flattened against her lover.
"Ah," Desoix said. "Yeah, I thought I'd wear my armor while I was out . . . Ah, maybe we ought to go inside."
"No," Anne said, squeezing him tighter. "Just hold me."
Desoix stroked her back with his free hand while the breeze brought screams and the smell of smoke from across the river.
His helmet hissed with the sound of a Situation Report. He'd programmed Control to call for a sitrep every fifteen minutes during the night. That was the only way you could be sure an outlying unit hadn't been wiped out before they could sound an alarm . . . .
That wasn't a way Charles Desoix liked to think."Just a second,love,"he muttered, blanking his mind of what the woman with her arms around him had started to say.
"Two to Control, all clear," a human voice said. "Over."
Gun Two was north of the city on a bluff overlooking the river. It had a magnificent field of fire—and there was very little development in the vicinity, which made it fairly safe in the present circumstances.
"Control to Three," said the emotionless artificial intelligence in the Palace basement. "Report, over."
The hollow sound of gasoline bombs igniting, deadened by the pillow of intervening air, accompanied the gush of fresh orange flames from across the river. One side of the City Offices was covered with crawling fire.
"Three t' Control," came the voice of Sergeant Blaney.
There was a whining noise behind the words,barely audible through the commo link. It nagged at Desoix's consciousness, but he couldn't quite remember . . . .
"It's all right here," the human voice continued, "but there's a lot of traffic in and out of the plaza. There's fires north of us, and there's shots all round."
The sergeant paused. He wasn't speaking to Control but rather in the hope that Borodin or Desoix were listening even without an alert—and that they'd do something about the situation.
"Nothing aimed at us, s' far as we can tell," Blaney concluded. "Over."
The mechanical whining had stopped some seconds before.
Men,lighted by petroleum flares in both directions,were headed from the City Offices to the adjacent levee. Desoix couldn't make out who they were without the imaging unit, but he had a pretty good idea.
His left hand massaged Anne McGill's shoulders, to calm her and calm himself as well. He reached for his helmet's commo key with his right hand, careful not to clash the two pieces of sophisticated hardware together, and said, "Blue to Three. Give me an azimuth on your gun, Blaney. Over."
Major Borodin was Red. With luck, he wasn't monitoring the channel just now.
Blaney hesitated, but he knew the XO could get the data from Control as easily—and that if Desoix asked, he already knew the answer even though Gun Three was far out of direct sight of the Palace of Government. "Sir," he said at last. "It's two-five-zero degrees. Over."
Normal rest position for Gun Three was 165° pointing out over Nevis Channel in the direction from which hostile ship-launched missiles were most likely to come. The crew had just re-aimed their weapon to cover the east stairs of the plaza. That was what they obviously thought was the most serious threat of their own well-being.
"Blue to Three," said Charles Desoix. "Out."
He wasn't down there with them, and he wasn't about to overrule their assessment of the situation from up here.
"Eunice is so angry,"Anne McGill murmured.Communicating with the man beside her was as important to her state of mind as the strength of his arm around her shoulders."I'm afraid,mostly—" and the simplicity of the statement belied its truth "—and so's John, I think, though it's hard to tell with him. But Eunice would like to hang them all, starting with the Bishop."
"Not going to be easy to do," Desoix said calmly while he adjusted the imager one-handed and prayed that it wouldn't show what he thought he saw in the shuddering flames.
It did. Men and women in police uniforms were being thrown from the roof of the office building. They didn't fall far: just a meter or two, before they were halted jerking by the ropes around their necks.
Within the Consistory Room,voices burbled.Light brightened momentarily as someone turned up a wall sconce. It dimmed again as abruptly when common sense overcame a desire for gleaming surroundings.
The clear panels surrounding the circular room were shatterproof vitril. They were supposed to stop bricks or a slug from any weapon a man could fire from his shoulder, and the layer of gold foil within the thermoplastic might even deflect a powergun bolt.
But only a fool would insist on testing them while he was on the other side of the panel. That kind of test was a likely result of making the Consistory Room a beacon on a night like this.
Anne straightened slightly when she heard the sounds in the room behind them, but she didn't move away as Desoix had expected her to do. "There!"she said in a sharp whisper, pointing down toward the river. "They're moving . . . They—are they coming for us?"
Desoix used both hands to steady the imager, though he kept the magnification down to ten power. The fuel fires provided quite a lot of light, and the low clouds scattered it broadly for the intensification circuits.
"Thos
e are Hammer's men," the UDB officer said as the scene glowed saffron in the imager's field of view.
The troopers crossing the river on the barges moored there were foreshortened by the angle and flattened into two dimensions by the imaging circuitry,but there were a lot of them. Enough to be the whole unit, the Lord willing—and better the Slammers have the problems than United Defense Batteries.
Desoix's helmet said in Control's calm voice, "Captain Koopman of Hammer's Regiment has been calling the officer of the day on the general frequency. The OOD has not replied. Now Captain Koopman is calling you. Do you wish—"
"Patch him through," Desoix ordered. Anne's startled expression reminded him that she would think he was speaking to her, but there wasn't time to clear that up now.
"—warn the guards not to shoot at us?" came the voice of the Slammers captain he'd met just that morning. "I can't raise the bastards and I don't want any trouble."
"Desoix to Slammers, over?" the UDB officer said.
"RogerDesoix,over,"Koopman responded instantly.The relief in the infantry captain's voice was as obvious as the threat in the previous phrase: if anybody started shooting at him and his men, he was planning to finish the job and worry later about the results.
"Tyl, I'm headed down to the front entrance right now,"Desoix said."It's quiet on this side, so don't let some recruit get nervous at the wrong time."
He'd lowered the imager and was stroking Anne's back fiercely with his free hand, feeling the soft cloth bunch and ripple over skin still softer. Her arm was around his hips, beneath the rim of his armor, caressing him as well. Hard to believe this was the woman who'd always refused to lie down on a bed with him, because if her hairdo was mussed, people might guess what she'd been doing.
Desoix turned and kissed her, vaguely amazed that the tension of the moment increased his sexual arousal instead of dampening it.
"Love," he said, and meant "love," for the first time in a life during which he'd used the word to a hundred woman on a score of planets."I'mgoingdownstairs for a moment. I'll be back soon, but wait inside."
Even as he kissed her warm lips again, he was moving toward the door and carrying the woman with him by the force of his arm as well as by his personality.
Desoix felt a moment's concern as he strode for the elevator across the circular room that he'd left his mistress to be spiked by the wondering eyes of the dozen or more men who stood in nervous clumps amidst the furniture.Anne was going to have to handle that herself, because he couldn't take her with him into what he was maybe getting into.
And if he didn't go, well—he didn't need what he'd heard in Tyl Koopman's voice to know how a company of Hammer's Slammers was going to respond if a bunch of parade-ground soldiers tried to bar their escape from a dangerous situation.
Chapter Thirteen
The way some of the Executive Guard in the rotunda were waving their weapons around would have bothered Desoix less if he'd believed the men involved had ever fired their guns deliberately. A couple of them might honestly not know the difference between the trigger and the safety catch, making the polished-marble room as dangerous as a foxhole at the sharp end of the front.
If Koopman's unit blew off the flood shutters and tossed in grenades, the rotunda was going to be as dangerous as an abattoir.
Captain Rene Sanchez must have been off-duty by now, but there were more guards in the rotunda than the usual detachment and he was among them.
"Rene," Desoix called cheerfully as he stepped off the elevator, noticing that the Bamberg officer had unlatched the flap covering his pistol. "I've come to give you a hand. We're getting some reinforcements, Hammer's men. They're on the way now.
Sanchez turned with a wild expression."Nobody comes in or out,"he said in a voice whose high pitch increased the effect of his eyes being focused somewhere close to infinity. The Guardsman was either drugged to a razor's edge, or his nerves unaided had honed him to the same dangerous state.
"We're going to take care of this, Rene," Desoix said, putting a friendly hand on Sanchez's shoulder.
The local man was quivering and it wasn't just fear. Sanchez was ready to go, go off in any direction. He was in prime shape to lead a night assault with knives and grenades—and he was just about as lethal as a live grenade, too.
You could never tell about the ones who'd never in their lives done anything real. They could react any way at all when the universe forced itself to their attention. About all a professional like Charles Desoix knew to expect was that he wouldn't like the result, whatever it turned out to be.
The Guard Commandant, Colonel Drescher, was present. Arm in arm with Sanchez, the UDB officer walked toward him. Desoix had nodded to Drescher in the past, but they had never spoken.
"Colonel," he said, using Rene Sanchez and a brisk manner as his entree. "We've got some reinforcements coming in a few moments. I'm here to escort them in."
"Charles, I got a squad in the courtyard now," said Desoix's helmet. "Let's get a door open, all right? Over."
He didn't respond to Koopman's call, because the Guards colonel was saying, "You? UDB? I'm sorry, mister mercenary, the marshal has given orders that the shutters not be opened."
"I just came from Marshal Dowell in the Consistory Room," Desoix said, letting his voice rise as only control had kept it from doing earlier. The best way to play this was to pretend to be on the edge of blind panic. That wasn't so great a pretense as he would have wished.
"He ordered me down here to inform you,"Desoix continued. He thought he'd glimpsed Dowell upstairs.Certainly that was possible, at any rate."By the Lord! man. Do you realize what the marshal will do if you endanger him by keeping out his reinforcements? He'll have you—well, it's obvious."
The Guards colonel blinked. "Jorge Dowell doesn't give me orders!" he snapped, family pride overwhelming whatever trace of military obedience was in Drescher's makeup.
The Executive Guard was enough a law unto itself that Desoix had been sure that Drescher's references to army orders was misdirection—though Dowell might well have given such orders if anybody had bothered to ask him.
But because they hadn't . . . Desoix's present bluff wasn't beyond the realm of Dowell's possible response either.
"Still," Colonel Drescher continued. "Since you're here, we'll make an exception for courtesy's sake."
The waxen calm of his expression lapsed into gray fear for a moment."But be quick, Lieutenant, or I swear I'll shut you out with them and the animals across the river."
Soldiers who'd been listening to the exchange touched the undogging mechanism without orders, but they paused and drew back instead of engaging the gears to slide the shutters away.
"Well get on with it!" cried another voice.
One of the guards pressed the switch before Desoix's hand reached it; the UDB officer glanced at the speaker instead.
There were four men together. They were wearing civilian clothes now in place of the ornate uniforms they'd worn in the Consistory Room this morning and in days past. The considerable entourage behind them stretched beyond the rotunda: servants, very few of them real bodyguards—but most of the males were now armed with rifles and pistols which looked as though they came from government stores.
"Charles, how we holding?" came Tyl Koopman's voice through the commo helmet. "Over."
The words lacked the overtone of threat that had been in his earlier query. The Slammers could see or at least hear that a door was opening.
"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.