by David Drake
"Which reminds me," headded, rising onto the toes of his gilded boots despite the indignity of it—and finding that he could see no farther across the ballroom anyway, "do you know where the mercenary adjutant is, Major Steuben?"
"Why would I know that? He could be anywhere!"
Makeup wouldn't keep Nikki's voice from being shrill as a powersaw when the boy got excited, Alexander Radescu thought; and thought other things, about the way Nikki's medals were now disarranged, rowels and wreathes and dangling chains caught and skewed among themselves. The back of Radescu's neck was prickling, and the hairs along his arms. He hoped it wasn't hormonal, hoped that he had better control of his emotions than that. But dear Lord! He didn't care about Nikki's sexual orientation, but surely he had better sense than to get involved with a killer like Steuben . . . didn't he?
Ignoring the whispers in his mind, Radescu eyed the gorgeous show on the ballroom floor and said, "This is why the war's being fought, you know, Nikki? The—all the men having to wear uniforms, all the women having to be seen with men in uniforms." Except for Uncle Grigor, who distanced himself and his fellow Tribunes from the war by starkly traditional robes. Everyone else—of the aristocracy—gained from the war the chance to cavort in splendid uniforms, while Grigor Antonescu settled for real control of the Oltenian State . . . .
"They don't fight the war—we don't fight the war, even the ones of us with regular commissions," Radescu continued, turning to face Nikki again and beginning to straighten the boy's medals, a task that kept his eyes from Tzigara's face. "But it couldn't be fought without our support."
The whole surface of his skin was feeling cold as if the nerves themselves had been chilled, though sweat from the hot, swirling atmosphere still tingled at his joints and the small of his back. The two blue john urns stood tall and aloof just as they had done for centuries, but between them—
"I think maybe the Molts would have something to say about ending the war," said Nikki Tzigara. "I mean, you have your opinions, Alexi, but we can't make peace—"
"Nikki!" Radescu shouted, for suddenly there was an ancient Molt warrior directly behind the young aide. The Molts hide was the color of an algae-covered stone, soaked for decades in peat water, and his right brow horn was twisted in a way unique in the general's experience. The powergun he held was a full-sized weapon, too heavy for the Molt's stringy muscles to butt it against his shoulder the way one of the Slammers would have done.
The warrior had no need for technique at this range, of course.
Nikki had begun to turn,his mouth still open and saying "—the Molts don't—" when the warrior fired.
The first of his twenty-round magazine.
The human nearest to Ferad flew apart in an explosive cavitation effect, two-thirds of the mass of his thorax having been converted to super-hot steam by the bolt it absorbed from the powergun almost in contact with it. The remainder of the corpse was flung backward by the ball of vaporized matter which coated everything within a five-meter radius, Ferad and the urns included. The flailing yellow sleeves were still attached to the rest of the body, but the scarlet bodice which they had complemented was scooped away to the iridescent white of the membrane covering the inner surface of the victim's spine and ribs.
The taller human in pearl and gold who had been standing behind the first had locked eyes with Ferad. He was an easy target, fallen in a tangle of dancers and only partially covered by the corpse of the companion which had knocked him down . . . but the theme elder's finger paused and twitched only after the muzzle had swung to cover a paunchy man in green and brown and the silvery cape of an immature Molt. Ferad did not need to be fussy about his targets and could not afford the time it would take to pick and choose anyway; but in the case of the human screaming something on the floor, he chose not to kill. Perhaps it was the eyes, or something behind them.
The thickly packed humans were trying to surge away from the gun like the waves of compression and rarefaction in a gas. Only those closest to Ferad knew what was happening—the bolts of energy hammered the air and struck with the sound of bombs underwater, but the sounds were not sharp enough to identify them to untrained ears in the noisy ballroom.
The orchestra on the far side of the hall continued to play some incomprehensible human melody, its members aware of the disturbance but stolidly unwilling to emphasize it by falling silent. Ferad shot into fleeing backs trapped by the press.
Sopasian had suggested a bomb in his calm voice that hid a cancer of emotions beneath—envy and scorn, but mostly envy. It was a reasonable suggestion, since a bomb would have killed more than the powergun could in targets as soft and frequent as these. The surface-absorbed, two-centimeter bolts had no penetration, though the amount of energy they released could separate limbs from bodies—and the medals on the first victim's chest were still raining down all across the hall.
But Sopasian missed the point of this attack. They couldn't kill all the humans, not even if every Molt on the planet had Ferad's skill or Sopasian's. What Ferad brought to the gala was a personal death, not a sudden blast followed by dust and the screams of the injured. This attack went on and on in the safest place in the world, the victims would have said a moment before.
Cyan light spurted from a gunbarrel so hot that the scales on Ferad's left arm were lifting to trap a blanket of insulating air.The polished wood and stones inlaid into the groined ceiling reflected the shots as they echoed with the screams.
Ferad's peripheral vision was better than that of a human, an adaptation crucial to a Molt teleporting into the confusion of a battle or hunt who had to receive a great deal of data about his immediate surroundings in the first instant. The flash of white drew Ferad to the left, the powergun's barrel shimmering its own arc through the air before him.
None of them were armed.The ballroom was like a nursery tunnel, females and infants and all of them helpless as the veriest newborn—but it had to be done.
One of the Tribunes stood in glistening white, facing Ferad though the three shrieking females in between were scrabbling away. The theme elder fired, clearing a path for his next bolt by taking a female at the point where her bare skin met the ruffles at the base of her spine. Her corpse scissored backward, its upper portion scarcely connected to the splaying legs, and the other two females—now in gowns only half pastel—were thrust from either side to close the gap.
The trio had been caught not by the general confusion but by the grip of the Tribune's arms, protective coloration and, in the event, a shield.
Ferad, wishing for the first time in decades that he had the muscles of a young adult, squeezed off another bolt that parted the white-gowned male from his females,only one of them screaming now and the gown covered with the residues from the flash-heated steam. Had Ferad been younger, he could have leaped on the Tribune, thrusting the heavy powergun against his target and finishing in an instant the business it had taken two shots to prepare. But a young, athletic warrior could never have gotten here, and the Tribune was now sprawled on the floor, his back against the wainscoting and only his palms and spread fingers between his face and the white iridium disk of the powergun muzzle.
The Molt's gun did not fire. Ferad had already spent the last round in his magazine.
The theme leader dropped his useless weapon on the floor, where wood and wax crackled away from the barrel. The hours he had spent in locating the urns here in Belvedere, in gripping them with his mind, were gone from memory. The antechamber of the tunnel system which had been the center of his existence for a hundred and forty years was a dazzling beacon though a thousand kilometers separated it from the theme elder.
For the instant only.
The ballroom and the carnage, almost as dreadful to Ferad as to the humans surviving, trembled for a moment, superimposed on the stone and lamps and shouting warriors of the nursery cave.
Two humans made a final impression on him: the male knocked down by the first bolt, now trying to rise; and another in the khaki
of the mercenaries, so much more dangerous than the forces of the settlers themselves. This mercenary must have wedged his way through a counter-current of bodies in screaming panic. His hand was raised, a pistol in it, and there was a blue-green flash from the muzzle that Ferad did not quite see.
In his millisecond of limbo, the theme elder wondered what success his rival, Sopasian, was having.
"There's a Molt—" said Lieutenant Hawker as the tone in his left earpiece gave him a distance and vector, bloody close, but the target designation was figured from the jeep and not where he himself stood a couple paces away.
The trooper sent to collect Hawker's gun snatched the weapon away, nervous to be reaching into the crossed cones of fire of the tribarrels to either flank. "Drop it,he said, cophead!" the headquarters trooper snarled,just as somebody shouted to Hammer from the other combat car, "Sir, we've got'n incoming!"
For operations against the Molts, all the Slammers' line armor—the tanks and combat cars—had been fitted with ionization detectors similar to those on the team's jeep. For reasons of space and the need for training to operate more sophisticated gear, however, the detectors which equipped the big blowers were relatively rudimentary. The troops of A Company, Hammer's personal guard, were picked as much for technical skills as they were for ruthlessness and lethality—qualities which were not in short supply in the line companies either. The man calling, "Thirty-five left, eight meters—Colonel, he's coming right beside your car!" was getting more precision from his hardware than Hawker would have thought possible.
The big lieutenant stepped over the body of the Oltenian officer, setting the limbs a-twitch again when the sole of his boot brushed a thigh. The trooper with Hawker's gun holstered his own pistol so that he could level the automatic weapon as he turned toward Hammer and the combat car.
"Loot!" called Profile Bourne, familiar enough with Hawker to know that the lieutenant's disquiet was not simply because a warrior was about to attack. The White Mice could handle that, the Lord knew, they weren't poofs who needed a picture to figure which end to piss with.
The trooper who had advanced to take Bourne's gun as his companion did Hawker's was now poised between the sergeant and Hammer, impaled on the horns of a dilemma.
Bourne held his weapon muzzle-high, the barrel vertical and threatening to no one who had not seen how quickly he moved. The left hand, however, was thrust out like a traffic warden's—a barrier in defiance of the pistol which the man from A Company still pointed.
The fellow in the combat car had the vector right and the distance, but there was something wrong with what he'd said.
Hawker dropped into his seat in the jeep and laid the infant Molt beside him as Hammer's own combat car slid a few meters upslope, swinging so that the two manned guns still covered the expected target without threatening the dismounted troops besides. The flashing holograms of Hawker's display shifted simultaneously with a subtlety that no tone signal could have conveyed.
"Drop it or you're dead,trooper!"the manin front of Profile shouted,but even as he spoke, his pistol and his eyes were shifting to the danger behind him, the tribarrels that might be aligned with his spine.
"Colonel, it's right under you!" shouted the man on the combat car's detector.
Hammer's great car spurted sideways like fluff blown from a seed pod and the digits on Hawker's display shifted as quickly.
"Colonel!"the lieutenant bellowed,trying to make himself heard over the fans of the big blowers roaring in the machine equivalent of muscles bunched for flight. His unit link was to Henderson's infantry company, and tonguing Central wouldn't have given him the direct line to Hammer that he needed now.
"It's in your car!" Hawker shouted as he leaped out of the jeep, snatching for the submachine gun that had been taken from him.
The Molt was so old that wrinkles showed like dark striping on his face as the warrior appeared in the fighting compartment between Hammer and the other gunner, both of them craning their necks to scan the rocky ground beside the car. If their body hairs felt the sudden shift in electrostatic balance as the autochthon appeared behind them, that warning was buried in the subconscious of veterans faced with a known threat.
"Contact!" the A Company detection specialist shouted into the instruments on which his attention was focused, and his companion at the wing tribarrel triggered a shot into the empty soil by reflex. The Molt warrior's wiry arms held, raised, a blade of glittering blue steel; the junction between Hammer's helmet and body armor was bared as the colonel stretched to find a target before him.
Hawker caught his gun, but the trooper holding it wouldn't have been in the White Mice if he were soft. He held the weapon with one hand and rabbit-punched the lieutenant with the other, an instinctive, pointless act since Hawker was wearing body armor; but the trooper held the gun as the Molt's sword swung downward, unseen by anyone but Hawker—
—and Sergeant Bourne. The Molt sword blade was a sandwich of malleable iron welded to either side of a core of high carbon steel, quick-quenched to a rich blue after forging. That razor-sharp steel and the black iron which gave the blade resilience glowed momentarily cyan in reflecting the bolt flicking past them, brighter for that instant than the sun.
Hammer flattened behind the iridium bulkhead, his commo helmet howling with static induced by the bolt which had bubbled the plastic surface.
The trooper who should have disarmed Profile Bourne was one of those whose eyes were drawn by the bolt to the warrior in the combat car. The autochthon's sword sparked on the lip of the fighting compartment and bounced out. The Molt himself twisted. His face had two eyesockets but only one eye, and the wrinkles were bulged from his features when his head absorbed the energy of the single shot.
The driver of Hammer's car had no view of the scene behind him. He drew a pistol and presented it awkwardly through his hatch, trying to aim at Bourne while still holding the car steady with one hand.
"No!"cried the trooper who had tried to disarm Bourne, windmilling his arms as he made sure he was between the sergeant and the guns threatening him.
Lieutenant Hawker and the trooper with whom he struggled now separated cautiously,Hawker releasing the submachine gun and the man from A Company licking the scraped knuckles of his left hand. There was a pop in the lieutenant's helmet, static from a message he did not himself receive, and the sound level dropped abruptly as both combat cars grounded and cut their fans.
The Molt's sword had stuck point first in the soil. It rang there, a nervous keening that complemented the cries of the infant Molt, dumped without ceremony on the driver's seat when Hawker had gotten into the jeep. The big lieutenant walked back toward his vehicle and lifted the Molt with both hands to hide the fact that they were both trembling.
Colonel Alois Hammer reappeared, standing up with deliberation rather than caution. He held something in his left hand which he looked at, then flipped like a coin to fall spinning onto the ground near the sword. It was the sapphire condensing plate from a combat car's navigation display, a thick fifty-millimeter disk whose internal cross-hatching made it a spot of fluid brilliance in the sunlight.
"He was holding that," said the colonel, pointing to the disk with the pistol in his right hand. He fired, igniting grass and fusing a patch of soil without quite hitting his target. "I didn't know they could do that," and the condensing plate shattered like a bomb, the scored lines providing a myriad fracture sites.
Hammer fired twice more into the mass of glittering particles that carpeted the ground.
"Now, kid, it could be a lot worse," muttered Enzo Hawker as he patted the shivering infant's back and wondered if that were true for the little Molt, for any of them. The sounds of distant battle were like hogs rooting among the mast, shellfire and diesels and the mighty soughing of the Slammers' ground-effect vehicles.
"Hey!" called Sergeant Bourne, holding his weapon vertical again and aloft at the length of its sling."Still want this, Colonel?"His voice was high and hectoring, a reacti
on to having made a shot that he would never have dared attempt had he paused to think about what he was doing. A millimeter, two millimeters to the right, and the bolt would have expended itself on Hammer's face an instant before the sword finished the business.
"Disarm the man," Hammer ordered in a voice as far away as the breeze moving wispy clouds in the high stratosphere.
"Sure,allright," said Profile,and perhaps only Hawker realized that the brittle edge in his voice was terror and not a threat. The sergeant's left hand fumbled with the sling catch while his right hand held clear the submachine gun, though its barrel was by now cool enough to touch.
"Only one thing—" the enlisted man added.
"Profile, don't—" said Hawker, aware that three tribarrels were again aimed at his partner's chest.
"Only you better keep the Loot on his console,"Bourne completed as he flung his weapon to the ground. "Until you hunt up somebody else who knows how to use the bloody gear, at least."
Three pistol bolts struck within a palm's scope, the first shattering the urn of blue john. The other two sparkled among the shivered fragments, reducing some of the fluorspar to its ionized constituents. Other chips now ranged in color from gray to brilliant amethyst, depending on how close they had been to the momentary heat. Larger chunks, the upper third of the urn, cascaded over the gun the Molt had dropped and, dropping it, disappeared.
Ozone and nascent fluorine battled for ascendancy between themselves, but neither could prevail over the stench of death.
Someone had kicked Alexander Radescu in the temple as he flopped backward to the floor. His memory of the past thirty seconds was a kaleidoscope rather than a connected series, but he was not sure that the blow had anything to do with his disorganization. The gun muzzle flickering like a strobe light while the white glow of the iridium remained as a steady portent of further death . . .
Radescu's right hand lay across his gilded cap, so he could don it again without looking down. He stumbled on his first step toward Chief Tribune Antonescu, but he knew what was binding his right foot and knew also that he dared not actually view it.
