When the Tide Rises: Chapter Sixteen

Fort Douaumont, Conyers

    The trolley roared on the short apron of concrete. When the six-inch steel wheels got onto the unsurfaced soil, the noise wasn't as bad but the box rocked as first one side, then the other, slipped into low spots.

    I'll apologize to Woetjans after it's over, Adele thought. It did require three people to roll the container beyond the area so hot from the Skye Defender's landing that no one could walk across it without the protection of a rigging suit. Besides the person pushing from behind–a hard job, but within the strength of each of this trio of spacers–there had to be people to both left and right to prevent the heavy container from toppling over.

    Had Woetjans known that? Perhaps; the bosun had more experience with moving heavy objects than all members of the Mundy family from time immemorial. In any case, Woetjans'd been right and Adele was wrong.

    The trolley bumped onto concrete again, then stopped. Rene lifted the lid a hand's breadth with one arm; the air that curled in through the gap was hot but not searing. Adele straightened, but Tovera had already flung the lid clear and vaulted out.

    The riggers had halted at the base of the rampart. Woetjans had already taken off her helmet; Barnes and Harned were following her lead.

    Behind, the Skye Defender was a huge presence which shut off sight of the headquarters building. The courtyard throbbed with heat from the landing, but it was no worse than midday in a desert. They'd only be out in it for a short time.

    A three-step base rose to a platform which ran the length of the rampart to the left, but Adele and her companions were beside a bunker built out squarely from the back-slope. There were no openings on the inner face, but stairs protected by a blast shield ran along the side to a steel door on an upper level.

    Tovera, holding a sub-machine gun in her right hand and a satchel of plastic explosive in her left, climbed to the door, taking the steps two at a time. Rene was right behind her.

    "Get away from here, you puppy!" Tovera said as she peeled the backing off a 20-ounce block of plastic explosive. "Or you'll be blown to mush."

    She molded a comfortable handful of the doughy white explosive over the upper hinge. Giggling, she added, "But if you want to stay, I shouldn't get in your way, should I?"

    "Let's try this first, old girl," Rene said. The armored door had a bar latch that pivoted on one end. From the handle's length and sturdiness, it was meant to withdraw two or more heavy bolts when the door was unlocked.

    It was unlocked now. The bolts squealed, though Rene had to shift to put his full weight on the bar before he racked them clear.

    Tovera stepped back on the landing, her face expressionless. She looked at the portion of the explosive still in her hand and threw it onto the concrete.

    "I'll go first," Adele said, trotting up the steps. Working in the stacks of a major library was good training for a starship's companionways–or for this.

    "No, mistress," Tovera said. She gripped the sub-machine gun in both hands.

    "Yes, Tovera," Adele said. "Remember your place!"

    Rene had started the door groaning open, but Woetjans speeded the process by reaching past Adele to grab the edge of the panel. The bosun tugged. She'd slung a sub-machine gun, but she couldn't have used it without removing her gauntlets. Apparently she'd decided her armored hands were to be her weapon of choice for this business.

    Adele took her left hand out of her pocket and slipped through the portal. The interior was pleasantly cool after the ion-baked courtyard, though it'd probably seem dank if she had to spend long in it. Beyond was a corridor whose walls, floor and ceiling were concrete, splotched frequently with rust leaching from the reinforcing rods.

    Adele turned right and strode toward Command Center Barbonnet, the post controlling this facet of the rampart. Her fingers itched to take out her data unit, but she had no need of it. She'd memorized not only the floor plan of this sector but also that of the one to the immediate south; until they'd reached Conyers orbit, Daniel hadn't been certain about where he'd land within Fort Douaumont.

    Adele's entourage strode or stomped along behind her. Tovera and Rene were side by side. Adele risked a quick glance over her shoulder. The pair were glaring at one another, though they jerked their eyes ahead again when they realized she was watching them.

    Woetjans was a step ahead of Barnes and Dasi. They'd taken their gauntlets off so that they could use their weapons, though the guns looked like toys in the hands of big men wearing rigging suits. Despite the weight and sweaty bulk of their gear, they matched Adele's quick pace.

    To the left were short staircases up to a gallery. From it opened embrasures in the outer face, intended for automatic impellers or small plasma cannon. From the records she had available Adele hadn't been able to tell how many weapons were mounted. It wouldn't matter if things went as they should, but–

    A weedy young man stepped into the corridor. He saw the group of strangers and started to duck back up the stairs from which he'd come.

    "Hold it right there, soldier!" Adele called in her most sneeringly upper-class Blythe accent. "Don't you bother to salute here on Conyers?"

    It'd be better if she weren't wearing ill-sorted, oil-soaked utilities, but you use what you have. Tone and audacity would get her some way; she hoped they would get her far enough.

    The man–soldier? Civilian technician?–stopped, then slowly returned to the corridor. He started to salute, then fully absorbed the motley group of strangers and lowered his arm. "Mistress?" he said doubtfully.

    "I'm Colonel Adele Mundy of the Fifth Bureau," Adele said sharply. I say most things sharply, I suppose. "I'm here to investigate corruption in the government of the Bagarian Cluster. I expect answers and I expect them now."

    She paused. The local's mouth dropped at the mention of the 5^th Bureau, Guarantor Porra's personal enforcement organization. His face went pale and he began to pant.

    "Who's the officer in charge of Command Center Barbonnet?" Adele snapped. She'd be perfectly happy if the fellow hyperventilated and fainted, but there was also the risk that he'd run off in a screaming panic. It'd be easy to shoot him down–as Tovera, who'd been a member of the Fifth Bureau, would certainly do–but the sub-machine gun's chatter risked giving the alarm also.

    "What?" the fellow said. "Who?"

    He swallowed. "Sir!" he chirped. "That's Captain Cleggs, but I don't think he'll be there so it'll be Chief Belmont. Sir!"

    "All right, come along with us," Adele said with a nod. "Corporal Barnes, take the fellow in charge but don't hurt him unless he tries to warn the traitors."

    She strode down the corridor. The command post was on the other side of a pair of right-angle turns, intended as blast traps in case the fortifications were penetrated. A glance to the side showed her the local–whatever was his name?–following obediently, behind Woetjans and just ahead of Barnes and Dasi.

 

---

 

    The door to the post hinged inward; it was halfway open. No one was on guard in the corridor, but a soldier in the outer section was seated so that he could watch through the gap.

    He got up when saw Adele approaching. "Yes?" he called. He gripped the barrel of the sub-machine gun leaning against his chair and cradled it in his arms.

    "I'm Colonel Mundy–" Adele said.

    The soldier saw the armed group behind her. He slammed the steel door with his foot as he groped for the charging handle of his sub-machine gun.

    Adele shoved against the door, jouncing it off the jamb but recoiling herself; the soldier outweighed her considerably. Woetjans stepped past and slammed her shoulder into the panel. The door flew open, bouncing the soldier into the partition separating the guard room from command center beyond. Another soldier was reaching for her sub-machine gun. The first man shot Woetjans in the chest.

    Adele fired, hitting the shooter at the hairline. He lurched against the partition, then sprawled sideways. She took the pistol from her smoldering pocket and shot him twice more through the base of the skull as she entered the outer office.

    The second soldier screamed and dropped her sub-machine gun. Tovera killed her anyway, a three-shot burst at the top of the breastbone which destroyed all the major blood vessels connected to the heart.

    "Don't hurt the equipment!" Adele shouted as she pulled open the door of the inner office.

    An overweight woman in rumpled khakis sat at a U-shaped console with her back to the left-hand wall. Three younger male clerks in utilities had been at smaller electronic desks which faced hers. They'd started to get up when the door flew open, but the nearest threw his hands in the air and cried, "I surrender! I surrender!"

    The woman in khaki snarled, "You bastards!" and opened a drawer in the right-hand pillar of her console. Adele shot her through the right eye; the bone behind the sockets was thin. She didn't trust the ceramic pellets of her pocket pistol to penetrate the solid portions of the cranial vault.

    The woman's legs spasmed, throwing her out of her integral chair. She lay on the floor, thrashing and battering her head against the concrete wall. She'd voided her bladder and bowels when she died.

    Adele stepped over the body, setting her pistol on top of the console. She needed both hands to bring up her data unit, and the gun barrel glowing from the quick sequence of shots would melt into the synthetic fabric of her tunic if she dropped it back in her pocket.

    A sub-machine gun slammed the three captured clerks against the back wall and pinned them there for the length of the burst. Fifty rounds pulped their chests, splashing the room with osmium ricochets and powdered concrete.

    "Tovera!" Adele screamed, but of course the shooter wasn't Tovera, a sociopath but also a craftsman of slaughter. Tovera would never have wasted a full magazine like that when precise three-round bursts would do the job as well.

    Barnes stood in the doorway, reaching for a reload from the pouch hanging from his hard suit. The barrel of his sub-machine gun was white-hot. The dusty gray air shimmered with ozone and aluminum ionized from the projectiles' driving bands.

    Tovera grabbed Barnes' weapon by the receiver. When he wouldn't let go, she cracked his knuckles with the butt of her own sub-machine gun and jerked it away.

    "Help Dasi with Woetjans!" Tovera said. "Quick! Do you want her to die?"

    Barnes' mouth dropped open. He turned and slipped back into the outer office, moving as easily as if he weren't wearing the rigging suit.

    "Mistress?" said Tovera. "He was upset. He's a good man."

    Adele nodded as she synched her personal data unit with the console. She needed secure communications with the transport as well as to be able to access both Fort Douaumont's systems, so she couldn't simply use the console.

    She wondered if the bosun was still alive. The hard suit wouldn't stop projectiles, but being shot in the chest wasn't necessarily fatal. As Adele knew.

    Tovera returned to the outer office; Rene sat at the end desk and began shuffling through the display. At the moment, Adele was too busy to check what he was doing.

    The boy looked greenish and his face was set. That might simply be in reaction to the smell. Smells, rather. The dry sharpness of lime laced with ions could only tinge the effluvium of bodies ripped apart while alive.

    Adele found the controls quickly enough. First she changed the password and authentication sequence for all five batteries to a pair of eight-character strings of her own choosing. Next she switched the input option so that the password and authentication had to be entered through her personal data unit in order to be valid. Only when that background was in place did she shift the batteries to director fire so that they couldn't be controlled by the battery officer.

    Adele leaned back and closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. Her wands twitched, using Fort Douaumont's own systems to open communications with the Skye Defender. As she did so, Rene rose from his desk and started for the door.

    "Cazelet?" she said. Her eyes were watering from the dust, and the back of her throat was raw. The sound came out as a croak.

    "I found a Medicomp in the next bay," Rene said in a harsh voice. His eyes were watering; tears streaked his cheeks. "Maybe if we get the Chief to it…. The riggers and me, I mean. You'll be all right with Tovera."

    Adele nodded curtly. "Yes," she said, "I will."

    Had Tovera really feared that she'd punish Barnes for killing someone who perhaps didn't need to be killed? That was a matter between Barnes and those who visited him in the night.

    Adele focused on her display again and connected with the transport.

 

---

 

    "Captain, this is Signals," said Daniel's commo helmet as he stood in the transport's forward entry bay. It was Adele's voice, but she sounded odd. Well, goodness knows what sort of rigmarole she'd had to go through to send the signal. "The artillery positions are neutralized. That's the missiles too, I mean. And there hasn't been an alarm yet, but there may be at any moment. Over."

    "Roger, signals," Daniel said. As he spoke, he pointed his finger across the bay toward Michael Sayer, the engineer's mate at the hatch controls–he was a Sissie, of course–and chopped it down in a short arc while nodding to the hatch. "Break. Ladouceur, this is Squadron Six. Come down now and land in Grand Harbor according to plan. Nothing fancy, Mister Liu, just bring her down. Over."

    The hatch dogs withdrew like a bell chorus. Pumps whined, building pressure in the hydraulic jacks that forced the ramp down. Chatterjee hadn't seen Daniel gesture to Sayer. He looked up, startled; at Daniel's calm nod, he spoke into the mike flexed to his epaulet.

    "Roger, Six," Lieutenant Liu replied from the cruiser. "We're approaching the window. We'll begin our descent in ninety seconds. Ladouceur out."

    Daniel didn't remark, but if it'd been him at the cruiser's command console he'd have started his descent immediately and recalculated the details on the way down. He grinned. That, of course, was why Liu was in orbit now instead of being here where serious work was in progress.

    The Ladouceur's plasma cannon could've come in handy, but using them would require the cruiser to hover close to Fort Douaumont. Lieutenant Liu's shiphandling ranged from good to better than good; certainly he was skilled enough to hold the cruiser in a safe hover under normal circumstances.

    The kicker was the definition of "normal." Being shot at had become normal–or at least not abnormal–for Daniel and his Sissies; that wasn't true for Liu. Daniel couldn't risk learning that an impeller slug clanging from the hull made the fellow throw up his hands and send the cruiser plunging into the ground.

    The air roiling in as the hatch lowered was hot and stank of ozone. Daniel slitted his eyes reflexively. He was opening up the ship earlier than he normally would've done following a landing on dry ground, but he hadn't considered that it might be a problem. He realized he was wrong when he heard shouts of fear and anger from the platoon of Skye infantry waiting in the bay with him and forty armed spacers.

    "Admiral!" Chatterjee said. "What's happened? Are we on fire?"

    "It's all right!" Daniel said. "The ground's hot from the exhaust, but it isn't dangerous. We probably don't have much time before an alarm goes off, so we need to cross to the headquarters building as soon as the ramp's down."

    Which would be another minute or more. The boarding hatch weighed twenty tons, far too great a mass to fling around without regard for inertia.

    "Admiral, I don't know that we can!" Chatterjee said. "We're not trained for this! Please, cannot we wait till it's cooler, a few minutes at least?"

    Daniel thought, his face blank. He should've realized that what spacers took more or less for granted might be impossible to soldiers who weren't familiar with the searing violence of a starship's landing. On the other hand, the reasons for getting into the Alliance HQ as quickly as possible were valid regardless of how unpleasant the process was. Hot, curling ozone wasn't lethal at the concentrations outside, but the automatic impellers which might start firing at any moment would be.

    "Right," he said. "I'll take my spacers in now, and you'll follow as soon as you're able to. But don't waste time, Colonel, please don't waste time."

    Chatterjee bent over his mike and gave a series of orders. Daniel didn't really care what the Colonel was saying, though he realized with a smile that Adele would've been coupled into the Bagarian net as a matter of course.

    His smile faded. I hope you're all right, my friend, he thought.

    The ramp thumped down. "Spacers with me!" Daniel said. The hold's PA system boomed his voice out from speakers in the upper molding. Cory wasn't Adele, but he was doing bloody well. "We're not attacking, we're simply marching to our new billets. Until I say different or they shoot at us!"

    "Aw, Six, we gotta march?" Kris Dehaes called, her voice an alto as cracked as a crow's. "You know we're no good at that!"

    "Pipe down, Dehaes!" ordered Sun, leading the contingent because Woetjans was off with Adele. "If we keep cool and listen to Six, it'll go just fine."

    Well, I don't know about that, thought Daniel, but he stepped off on his left foot. As expected, the spacers clumped down the ramp with him. They looked more like a mob rushing for the jakes between innings than a military unit.

    What he hadn't expected was that Colonel Chatterjee would still be at his side. The Bagarian'd tied a kerchief over the lower half of his face and seemed to have squeezed his eyes shut. Maybe he was squinting, but it didn't look that way.

    Chatterjee touched Daniel's arm, for balance or maybe just to be guided. "I told Major Zaring to bring the men along ASAP," he said, his words making the kerchief puff and flap. "I'm going with you, Admiral!"

    Dust and stray ions eddied in the heat shimmering from the ground. The air felt hotter with each step down the ramp, and by the third stride onto the concrete Daniel was thinking that he should've worn something heavier than the soft-soled spacer's boots he had on.

    He grinned, wondering if the dry heat was going to make his lips crack. And here he'd been mentally chiding the pongoes for not being up to crossing this little bit of hot ground….

    Daniel stepped from the pad onto bare earth. It wasn't so bad, now. They were farther from the thrusters, there'd been a little longer for the whole courtyard to cool, and dirt didn't store heat as well as reinforced concrete. Even so, the bare skin of his face and hands felt crisp.

 

---

 

    The main entrance to the headquarters building had monumental double doors, armored and now closed. They were reached by a ramp instead of a flight of steps; Daniel wondered if dignitaries expected to be driven in. Walking at a measured pace–he didn't want his assault force to look like an assault force–he started up the slope.

    The door valves were decorated in low relief with scenes of happy laborers, farming on the left panel and assembling machinery on an assembly line to the right. Despite the embellishments, the doors were a very real barrier. Sun carried a satchel of explosives, but the upper hinges were ten feet above the door sill.

    Daniel supposed they could form a human pyramid to allow someone to climb high enough to place a wad of explosive there, but that presupposed that the Alliance garrison would sit on its collective hands during the preparations. That didn't seem the most likely scenario.

    A pedestrian door opened inward from the left panel. A head wearing a bicorn hat full of gold braid peered out.

    "You!" the Alliance official called angrily. "Whoever's in charge of this shambles, get over here now."

    "Daniel!" Adele's voice snapped on his commo helmet through a 50-Hertz hum. "Claim to be the political officer accompanying the battalion from Maintenon. The man in the door has cluster-command major's insignia, though I don't know his name."

    The officers of a real Maintenon battalion wouldn't know the fellow's name either, Daniel thought, but of course it wouldn't bother them. It wouldn't bother anybody but Adele, to whom information was life. And thank heavens she's with me!

    "I suppose that's me, then, major," said Daniel, who'd reached the apron before the door alcove. The stone facing was pleasantly cool through his thin soles. "I'm Commissioner Leary, the battalion's political officer. Colonel Chatterjee here will handle the purely military decisions, but he defers to me in, shall we say, intra-Alliance matters."

    He stepped through the doorway. It was designed like the hatch of a starship, and the valve in which it was set was as thick as a starship's hull plating.

    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 pry bar 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 servant.

    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 razorblades.

    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 butt-plate'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."

 

---

 

    The image of Station B still held a quarter of Adele's display. One of the men trying to cut the conduit leaped to his feet, flinging his hammer and chisel in opposite directions. Before his body'd collapsed, his partner lurched into the gun carriage and sprawled in a flag of blood. On the other side of his body, the projectile that'd killed him ricocheted as a bright purple streak from a trunnion.

    "Thank you for taking care of that, Cazelet," Adele said. She didn't mean to sound so formal! "I wouldn't have gotten around to it in time."

    She cleared her throat. "That is, if it's in time now. I didn't get much of a look at the wounds, but it's clear the Chief was, ah, badly wounded."

    Another Alliance soldier dropped. Two more ran for the hatch and died in a tangle across it. The sixth man, rather than trying to outrun impeller projectiles fired from the roof of the HQ Building, huddled behind the plasma cannon. Hogg must be smiling….

    "She's stable, mistress," Rene said with a lopsided smile. "It's been my experience that if you get them to the Medicomp, you'll probably be all right. Except for brain and spinal injuries. Shock kills more than trauma does, and she won't slip off that way now that she's hooked up."

    "Ladouceur Six-two to Squadron Six-four," said a voice Adele didn't identify instantly. "Mundy, this is Borries. Please reply, over."

    The Pellegrinian was using the laser communicator, not the microwave link through the planetary comsat system by which Adele'd netted the cruiser with the detachment on the ground. Because the Ladouceur was landing in a descending spiral, for part of the time she'd have been out of line-of-sight with the fort's laser transceiver heads.

    "Mundy to Borries," she said. "Go ahead, over."

    "Mistress?" said Borries. He sounded tense. "Can you highlight where the holdouts are on a map of the fort for me, over?"

    Adele frowned. "Borries," she said, "there're friendly troops holding the sections to either side of the target. I know that Captain Leary intends displace them himself, over."

    "Mistress, I can do this," Borries said in a tone of frustrated despair. "Six won't let me but I can. Let me do my bloody job, mistress, over!"

    Adele pursed her lips again. She'd already prepared the schematic with Sector Two in red and a pulsing cursor over the gun emplacement still in Alliance hands. "Borries," she said, "I'm transferring the data now, out."

    Her wands flicked.

    In her experience there were very few people who wanted to do their jobs. If the Pellegrinian missileer badly missed his aim, well, there weren't many friendly personnel closer to the target area than Signals Officer Adele Mundy.

    "Captain Ringo," Daniel said, "I'm speaking to you as Commander Daniel Leary, RCN. Please, you have a last chance to surrender on honorable terms. You can see that with only small arms at your disposal, you can't resist for more than an hour or two. Surrender and–"

    A low-frequency rumble from the east was beginning to shake the fort. Dust which Barnes' burst had smashed from the walls quivered in the air.

    "Bugger you, Leary!" Ringo screamed. He must be spraying spittle into the microphone; perhaps he too had watched his men shot down. "Didn't you hear me the first time? Bugger all of you bloody Cinnabar faggots!"

    The sound of the cruiser in its final landing approach built to thunder. Through it Adele heard a shriller sound.

    "Adele," said Cazelet as he slid out of the seat built into his desk. "I think we'd better get down–"

    The CRACK! was earsplitting. The Alliance warrant officer's corpse bounced from the floor at Adele's feet, spun on its axis, and flopped back face down.

    Adele's display went monochrome for an instant, but the console had its own power supply. Dust lifting from the floor interfered with the projections and blurred the images, but there was nothing wrong with the computer itself. The quadrant showing the gun position went blank because the sending unit had vanished.

    "Adele, get down!" Rene screamed. He started toward her but sprawled headlong when the second missile dealt the fort another hammer blow.

    Adele strapped herself in and switched her display to a video pickup on the exterior wall of the HQ Building's penthouse. It provided a 90-degree panorama of the rampart, including Sector Two. The gun emplacement was a smoldering crater where a few strands of wreckage poked out of the smoke. The angle beneath it, the precise middle of the sector, had taken the second hit. Blue sparks snapped and sparkled through the bitter gray whorls, showing that the missile had punched deep enough to cut power lines.

    The third missile hit twenty yards to the right of the second, delivering the worst shock of all to Adele's CP. Concrete shattered and steel–the missile's nose, cast from a nickel-iron asteroid, and the wall's reinforcing rods–burned white from the friction of impact. The fourth missile drove into the rampart on the left of the angle, a perfect pairing with the third.

    The Ladouceur roared overhead as it dropped into Grand Harbor. Its magazines still carried two plasma missiles which hadn't been launched on Churchyard, but Adele supposed Borries hadn't had time to program them during the cruiser's landing approach.

    He hadn't needed them, either. There was no question about that.

    Smoke shot up from scores of gunports and ventilation shafts; occasionally a streamer of red flame licked like a snake's tongue before sinking back into the foul blackness that was settling over the gutted angle. The barriers were already down, cutting the late Captain Ringo's sector off from those which had surrendered to the Bagarians. The deepest bunkers may've survived, but all passages from them to the surface had been filled with rubble.

    "Squadron, this is Squadron Six," said Daniel. "Fellow spacers, don't get cocky quite yet, but I believe we've completed the conquest of Conyers. Ashburn, I won't need your escort after all. And Chief Missileer Borries–"

    He paused, then resumed, "Mister Borries, I have some quibbles about your judgment, but your professional skill is on a par with that of the best people I've ever seen in action–myself very definitely among them. Congratulations, my fellow spacers, I'm proud to serve with you. Hip hip–"

    "Hooray!" shouted Rene Cazelet. And Adele found herself shouting also.