by David Drake
"Lord Berne," Delcorio continued to his tall prefect, "I expect your police to take prompt, firm action wherever trouble erupts." His eyes were piercing.
"Yes sir," Berne said, his willing enthusiasm pinned by his master's fierce gaze. Alone of the civilians in the room, he owed everything he had to his position in the government. The richness of his garments showed just how much he had acquired in that time.
"I've already done that,"he explained. "I've canceled leaves and my men have orders that all brawling is to be met with overwhelming force and the prisoners jailed. I've suspended normal release procedures for the duration of the emergency also."
Berne hesitated as the implications of what he had just announced struck him anew. "Ah,in accordance with your previous directions, sir. And your assurance that additional support would be available from the army as required."
Nobody spoke. The President nodded as he turned slowly to his military commander and said, "Marshal, I expect you to prepare for the transfer of two regular regiments back to the vicinity of the capital."
Dowell did not protest, but his lips pursed.
"Prepare, Marshal," Delcorio repeated harshly. "Or do you intend to inform me that you're no longer fit to perform your duties?"
"Sir," Dowell said. "As you order, of course."
"And you will further coordinate with the City Prefect so that the Executive Guard is ready to support the police if and when I order it?"
Not a command but a question, and a fierce promise of what would happen if the wrong answer were given.
"Yes sir,"Marshal Dowell repeated."As you order."Berne was nodding and rubbing his hands together as if trying to return life to them after a severe chill.
"Then, gentlemen . . ." Delcorio said, with warmth and a smile as engaging as his visage moments before had threatened. "I believe we can dismiss this gathering. Father Laughlin, convey my regrets to the Bishop that he couldn't be present, but that I trust implicitly his judgment as to how best to return civil life to its normal calm."
The priest bowed again and turned toward the door. He was not the same man in demeanor as the one who had entered the meeting, emphasizing his importance by blatantly displaying his bodyguards.
"Praise the Lord,"Tyl muttered,more to himself than to Major Borodin."I've been a lotta places I liked better 'n this one—and some of them, people were shooting at me."
Nodding to take his leave of the UDB officer, Tyl started for the door that was already being opened from the outside.
"Lieutenant Desoix of United Defense Batteries," the greeter announced.
"You there," Eunice Delcorio called in a throaty contralto—much less shrill than her previous words had led Tyl to imagine her ordinary voice would be. "Captain Koopman. Wait a moment."
Father Laughlin was already out of the room. Borodin was bearing down on his subordinate with obvious wrath that Desoix prepared to meet with a wry smile.
Everybody else looked at Tyl Koopman.
She'd gotten his name and rank right, he thought as his skin flashed hot and his mind stumbled over itself wondering what to say, what she wanted, and why in blazes Colonel Hammer had put him in this bucket. He was a line officer and this was a job for the bloody staff.
"Yes, ma'am," he said aloud, turning toward his questioner. His eyes weren't focusing right because of the unfamiliar strain, so he was seeing the President's wife as a fiery blur beneath an imperious expression.
"How many men are there under your command, Captain?"Eunice continued. There was no hostility in her voice, only appraisal. It was the situation that was freezing Tyl's heart having to answer questions on this level, rather than the way in which the questions were being asked.
"Ma'am, ah?" he said. What had Scratchard told him as they walked along the levee? "Ma'am, there's about a hundred men here. That's twenty or so in the base establishment, and the rest the transit unit that, you know, I'll be taking to Two in a few days."
"No," the woman said, coolly but in a voice that didn't even consider the possibility of opposition. "We certainly aren't sending any troops away, now."
"Yes, that's right," Delcorio agreed.
A tic brushed the left side of the President's face. The calm with which he had concluded the meeting was based on everything going precisely as he had choreographed it in his mind. Eunice was adding something to the equation, and even something as minor as that was dangerous to his state of mind if he hadn't foreseen it.
"Ah . . ." said Tyl. "I'll need to check with Cen—"
"Well, do it, then!"Delcorio blazed."Do I need to be bothered with details that a corporal ought to be able to deal with?"
"Yes sir!" said the Slammers officer.
He threw the President a salute because it felt right.
And because that was a good opening to spinning on his heel and striding rapidly toward the door, on his way out of this room.
Chapter Eight
Headquarters and billets for the enlisted men of Battery D were in a basement room of the Palace of Government, converted to the purpose from a disused workers' cafeteria. Desoix sighed to see it again, knowing that here his superior would let out the anger he had bottled up while the two of them stalked through hallways roamed by folk from outside the unit.
Control, the artificial intelligence/communications center, sat beside a wall that had been pierced for conduits to antennas on the roof. It was about a cubic meter of electronics packed into thirty-two resin-black modules, some of them redundant.
Control directed the battery in combat because no human reactions were fast enough to deal with hypersonic missiles—though the calliopes, pulsing with light-swift violence, could rip even those from the sky if their tubes were slewed in the right direction.
The disused fixtures were piled at one end of the room. Control's waste heat made the room a little warmer, a little drier; but the place still reminded Desoix of basements in too many bombed-out cities.
Major Borodin pulled shut the flap of the curtain which separated his office from the bunks on which the off-duty shift was relaxing or trying to sleep. In theory, the curtain's microprocessors formed adaptive ripples in the fabric and canceled sounds. In practice—
Well, it didn't work that badly. And if you're running an eighty-man unit in what now had to be considered combat conditions, you'd better figure your troops were going to learn what was going on no matter how you tried to conceal it.
"You should have called in at once!"the battery commander said,half furious, half disappointed, like a parent whose daughter has come home three hours later than expected.
"I needed you at that meeting," he added, the anger replaced by desperate memory. "I . . . you know, Charles, I never know what to say to them up there. We're supposed to be defending the air space here, not mixed up in riots."
"I got a good look at that this morning, Sergei," Desoix said quietly. He seated himself carefully on the collapsible desk and, by his example, urged Borodin into the only chair in the curtained-off corner. "I think we need to reposition Gun Three. It's too close to where—things are going on. Some of our people are going to get hurt."
Borodin shook his craggy head abruptly."We can't do that,"he said."Coverage."
"Now that Five's back on-planet—" Desoix began.
"You were with that woman, weren't you?" Borodin said, anger hardening his face as if it were concrete setting."That's really why you didn't come to me when I needed you. I saw her slip in just before you did."
Yes, Daddy, Desoix thought. But Borodin was a good man to work for—good enough to humor.
"Sergei,"he said calmly,"now that we've got a full battery again,I can readjust coverage areas. We can handle the seafront from the suburbs east and west, I'm pretty—"
"Charles, you're going to get into really terrible trouble," Borodin continued, his voice now sepulchral. "Get us all into trouble."
He looked up at his subordinate and added,"Now, I was younger too, I understand . . . But believe me, boy, t
here's plenty of it going around on a businesslike basis. And that's a curst sight safer."
Desoix found himself getting angry—and that made him even angrier, at himself, because it meant that Anne mattered to him.
Who you screwed wasn't nearly as dangerous as caring about her.
"Look,"he said,hiding the edge in his voice but unable to eliminate the tremble. "I just shook a calliope loose on Merrinet, and it cost the unit less than three grand plus my transportation. I solve pro—"
"You paid a fine?"
"Via, no! I didn't pay a fine," Desoix snapped.
Shifting into a frustrated and disappointed tone of his own—a good tactic in this conversation, but exactly the way Desoix was really feeling at the moment also—he continued, "Look, Sergei, I bribed the Customs inspectors to switch manifests. The gun was still being held in the transit warehouse, there wasn't a police locker big enough for a calliope crated for shipment. If I'd pleaded it through the courts, the gun would be on Merrinet when we were old and gray. I—"
He paused, struck by a sudden rush of empathy for the older man.
Borodin was a fine combat officer and smart enough to find someone like Charles Desoix to handle the subtleties of administration that the major himself could never manage. But though he functioned ably as battery commander, he was as lost in the job's intricacies as a man in a snowstorm. Having an executive officer to guide him made things safe—until they weren't safe, and he wouldn't know about the precipice until he plunged over it.
Desoix was just as lost in the way he felt about Lady Anne McGill; and, unlike Borodin, he didn't even have a guide.
He gripped Borodin's hand."Sergei,"he said,"I won't ask you to trust me.But I'll ask you to trust me not to do anything that'll hurt the battery. All right?"
Their eyes met. Borodin's face worked in a moue that was as close to assent as he was constitutionally able to give to the proposition.
"Then let's get back to business,"Charles Desoix said with a bright smile."We need to get a crew to Gun Five for setup, and then we'll have to juggle duty rosters for permanent manning—unless we can get Operations to send us half a dozen men from Two to bring us closer to strength."
Borodin was nodding happily as his subordinate outlined ordinary problems with ordinary solutions.
Desoix just wished that he could submerge his own concerns about what he was doing.
Chapter Nine
"Locked on," said the mechanical voice of Command Central in Tyl's ears. "Hold f—"
There was a wash of static as the adaptive optics of the satellite failed to respond quickly enough to a disturbance in the upper atmosphere.
"—or soft input," continued the voice from Colonel Hammer's headquarters, the words delayed in orbit while the antenna corrected itself.
The air on top of the City Office building was still stirred by the fans of aircars moving to and from the parking area behind. Their numbers had dropped off sharply since the last remnants of the riot were dispersed. In the twilight, it was easier to smell the saltiness from the nearby sea—or else the breezes three stories up carried scents trapped in the alleys lower down.
The bright static across Tyl's screen coalesced into a face, recognizable as a woman wearing a commo helmet like Tyl's own. Noise popped in his earphones for almost a second while her lips moved on the screen—the transmissions were at slightly different frequencies. Then her voice said, "Captain Koopman, how secure are these communications on your end?"
"Ma'am?" Tyl said, too recently back from furlough not to treat the communicator as a woman instead of an enlisted man. "I'm using a portable laser from the top of the police station. It's—I think it's pretty safe, but if the signal's a problem, I can use—"
"Hold one, Captain," the communicator said with a grin of sorts. Her visage blanked momentarily in static again.
A forest of antennas shared the roof of the building with the Slammers officer: local,regional,and satellite communications gear.Instead of borrowing a console within to call Central, Tyl squatted on gritty concrete.
His ten-kilo unit included a small screen, a twenty centimeter rectenna that did its best to align itself with Hammer's satellites above, and a laser transmitting unit which probably sent Central as fuzzy a signal as Tyl's equipment managed to receive.
But you can't borrow commo without expecting the folks who loaned it to be listening in; and if Tyl did have to stay in Bamberg City with the transit detachment, he didn't want the locals to know that he'd been begging Central to withdraw him.
The screen darkened into a man's face."Captain Koopman?" said the voice in his helmet. "I appreciate your sense of timing. I'm glad to have an experienced officer overseeing the situation there at the moment."
"Sir!" Tyl said, throwing a salute that was probably out of the restricted field of the pickup lens.
"Give me your appraisal of the situation, Captain," said the voice of Colonel Alois Hammer. His flat-surface image wobbled according to the vagaries of the upper atmosphere.
"At the moment . . ." Tyl said.He looked away from the screen in an unconscious gesture to gain some time for his thoughts.
The House of Grace towered above him. At the top of the high wall was the visage of Bishop Trimer enthroned. The prelate's eyes were as hard as the stone in which they were carved.
"At the moment, sir,it's quiet,"Tyl said to the screen."The police cracked down hard, arrested about fifty people. Since then—"
"Leaders?" interrupted the helmet in its crackling reproduction of the colonel's voice. Hammer's eyes were like light-struck diamonds, never dull—never quite the same.
"Brawlers,street toughs,"Tyl said contemptuously. "A lot of 'em, is all.But it's been quiet, and . . ."
He paused because he wasn't sure how far he ought to stick his neck out with no data, not really—but his commanding officer waited expectantly on the other end of the satellite link.
"Sir," Tyl said, determined to do the job he'd been set, even though this stuff scared him in a different way from a firefight. There he knew what he was supposed to do. "Sir, I haven't been here long enough to know what's normal, but the way it feels out there now . . ."
He looked past the corner of the hospital building and down into the plaza. Many of the booths were still set up and a few were lighted—but not nearly enough to account for the numbers of people gathering there in the twilight. It was like watching gas pool in low spots, mixing and waiting for the spark that would explode it.
"The only places I been that felt like this city does now are night positions just before somebody hits us."
"Rate the players, Captain," said Hammer's voice as his face on the screen flickered and dimmed with the lights of an aircar whining past, closer to the roof than it should have been for safety.
The vehicle was headed toward the plaza. Its red and white emergency flashers were on, but the car's idling pace suggested that they were only a warning.
As if he knew anything about this sort of thing, Tyl thought bitterly. But the colonel was right, he could give the same sort of assessment that any mercenary officer learned to do of the local troops he was assigned to support. It didn't really matter that these weren't wearing uniforms.
Some of them weren't wearing uniforms.
"Delcorio's hard but he's brittle,"Tyl said aloud."He'd do all right with enough staff to take the big shocks, but what he's got . . ."
He paused, collecting his thoughts further. Hammer did not interrupt, but the fluctuation of his image on the little screen reminded Tyl that time was passing.
"All right," the Slammers captain continued. "The police, they seem to be holding up pretty well. Berne, the City Prefect, don't have any friends and I don't guess much support. On that end, it's gone about as far as it can and keep the lid on."
Hammer was nodding, but Tyl ignored that too. He had his data marshalled, now, and he needed to spit things out while they were clear to him. "The army, Dowell at least, he's afraid to move and he's not afrai
d not to move. He won't push anything himself, but Delcorio won't get much help from there.
"And the rest of 'em, the staffs—" Tyl couldn't think of the word the group had been called here "—they're nothing, old men and young kids, nobody that matters . . . ah, except the wife, you know, sir? Ah, Lady Eunice. Only she wants to push harder than I think they can push here with what they got and what they got against 'em."
"The mob?" prompted the colonel. Static added a hiss to words without sibilants.
Tyl looked toward the plaza. The sky was still blue over the western horizon, behind the cathedral's dome and the Palace of Government. The sunken triangle of the plaza was as dark as a volcano's maw, lighted only by the sparks of lanterns and apparently open flames.
"Naw,not the mobs," Tyl said,letting his helmet direct his voice while his eyes gathered data instead of blinking toward his superior. "Them, they'd handle each other if it wasn't any more. But—"
He looked up. The sunset slid at an angle across the side of the House of Grace. The eyes of Bishop Trimer's carven face were as red as blood.
"Sir," Tyl blurted, "it's the Church behind it,the Bishop, and he's going to walk off with the whole thing soon unless Delcorio's luckier 'n anybody's got a right to expect. I think—"
No, say it right.
"Sir," he said, "I recommend that all regimental forces be withdrawn from Bamberg City at once, to avoid us being caught up in internal fighting. There are surface-effect freighters at the port right now. With your authorization, I'll charter one immediately and have the unit out of here in three hours."
Two hours, unless he misjudged the willingness and efficiency of the sergeant major; but he'd promise what he was sure of and surprise people later by bettering the offer if he could.
Hammer's lips moved. Tyl thought that the words were delayed by turbulence, but the colonel was only weighing what he was about to say before he put it into audible syllables. After a moment, the voice and fuzzy screen said in unison, "Captain, I'm going to tell you what my problem is."
