by David Drake
At least a dozen thugs in red coalesced from nowhere around the fight. It grew like a crystal in a supersaturated solution of hate.
The police had their stunners out and were radioing for help, but they kept their distance. The toughs wore body armor beneath their cloaks, and Desoix heard the slam of at least one slug-throwing pistol from the ruck.
He willed his body to stay upright and to stride with swift dignity between vehicles and out of the potential line of fire. It would have griped his soul to run from this scum; but more important, anyone who ducked and scurried was a worthy victim, while a recognized mercenary was safe except by accident.
Anyway, that was what Desoix told himself.
But by the Lord! it felt good to get out of the shouted violence and see Gun Three, its six-man crew alert and watching the trouble at the stair head with their personal weapons ready.
The calliope's eight stubby barrels were mounted on the back of a large air-cushion truck. Instead of rotating through a single loading station as did the 2cm tribarrels on the Slammers' combat cars, each of the calliope's tubes was a separate gun. The array gimballed together to fire on individual targets which the defenders couldn't afford to miss.
Any aircraft, missile, or artillery shell that came over the sector of the horizon which Gun Three scanned—when the weapon was live—would be met by a pulse of high-intensity 3cm bolts from the calliope's eight barrels. Nothing light enough to fly through the air could survive that raking.
A skillful enemy could saturate the gun's defensive screen by launching simultaneous attacks from several directions, but even then the interlocking fire of a full, properly sited six-calliope battery should be able to hold out and keep the target it defended safe.
Of course, proper siting was an ideal rather than a reality, since every irregularity of terrain—or a building like the House of Grace—kept guns from supporting one another as they could do on a perfectly flat surface. Bamberg City wasn't likely to be surrounded by hostile artillery batteries, though, and Charles Desoix was proud of the single-layer coverage he had arranged for the whole populated area.
He did hope his gunners had sense enough not to talk about saturating coverage when they were around civilians. Especially civilians who looked like they'd been born to squatter families on Two.
"Good to see you back, sir," said Blaney, the sergeant in command of Gun Three on this watch.
He was a plump man and soft looking, but he'd reacted well in an emergency on Hager's World, taking manual control of his calliope and using it in direct fire on a party of sappers that had made it through the perimeter Federal forces were trying to hold.
"Say," asked a blond private Desoix couldn't call by name until his eye caught stenciling on the fellow's helmet: Karsov. "Is there any chance we're going to move, sir? Farther away from all this? It gets worse every day."
"What's . . ." Desoix began with a frown, but he turned to view the riot again before he finished the question—and then he didn't have to finish it.
The riot that Desoix had put out of his mind by steely control had expanded like mold on bread while he walked the three hundred meters to the shelter of his gun and its crew.There must have been nearly a thousand people involved—many of them lay-folk with the misfortune of being caught in the middle, but at least half were the cloaked shock troops of the two Easter factions.
Knives and metal bars flashed in the air.A shotgun thumped five times rapidly into a chorus of screams.
"Via," Desoix muttered.
A firebomb went off, spraying white trails of burning magnesium through the curtain of petroleum flames. Police aircars were hovering above the crowd on the thrust of their ducted fans while uniformed men hosed the brawlers indiscriminately with their needle stunners.
"This is what we're defending?" Blaney asked with heavy irony.
Desoix squatted, motioning the gun crew down with him. No point in having a stray round hit somebody. The men were wearing their body armor, but Desoix himself wasn't. He didn't need it on shipboard or during negotiations on Merrinet, and it hadn't struck him how badly the situation in Bamberg City could deteriorate in the two weeks he was gone.
"Well,"he said,more or less in answer."They're the people paying us until we hear different. Internal politics, that's not our business.And anyhow, it looks like the police have it pretty well under control."
"For now," muttered Karsov.
The fighting had melted away, as much in reaction to the firebomb as to the efforts of the civil authorities. Thugs were carrying away injured members of their own parties. The police tossed the disabled battlers whom they picked up into aircars, with angry callousness.
"It'd be kinda nice, sir," said Blaney, turning his eyes toward the House of Grace towering above them, "if we could maybe set up on top of there. Get a nice view all around, you know, good for defense; and, ah, we wouldn't need worry about getting hit with the odd brick or the like if the trouble comes this way next time."
The chorus of assent from the whole crew indicated that they'd been discussing the point at length among themselves.
Desoix smiled. He couldn't blame the men, but wishing something strongly didn't make it a practical solution.
"Look,"he said, letting his eyes climb the sculptured flank of the hospital building as he spoke. The narrower sides of the House of Grace, the north and south faces, were of carven stone rather than chrome and transparent panels.
The south face, toward Gun Three and the seafront, was decorated with the miracles of Christ: the sick rising from their beds; the lame tossing away their crutches; loaves and fishes multiplying miraculously to feed the throng stretching back in low relief.
On the opposite side were works of human mercy: the poor being fed and lodged in church kitchens; orphans being raised to adulthood; medical personnel with crosses on their uniforms healing the sick as surely as Christ did on the south face.
But over the works of human mercy, the ascetic visage of Bishop Trimer presided in a coruscance of sun-rays like that which haloed Christ on the opposite face. A determined man, Bishop Trimer. And very sure of himself.
"Look,"Desoix repeated as he reined in his wandering mind."In the first place, it's a bad location because the gun can only depress three degrees and that'd leave us open to missiles skimming the surface."
Karsov opened his mouth as if to argue, but a snarled order from Sergeant Blaney shut him up. Lieutenant Desoix was easy-going under normal circumstances; but he was an officer and the Battery XO . . . and he was also hard as nails when he chose to be, as Blaney knew by longer experience than the private had.
"But more important . . ." Desoix went on with a nod of approval to Blaney. "Never site a gun in a spot where you can't drive away if things really get bad. Do you expect to ride down in the elevators if a mob decides what they really ought to do tomorrow is burn the hospital?"
"Well, they wouldn't . . ." Karsov began.
He looked at the wreckage and smoke near the plaza stairs and thought the better of saying what a mob would or wouldn't do.
"Were you on Shinano, Sergeant?" Desoix asked Blaney.
"Yes sir," the noncom said. "But I wasn't in the city during the riots, if that's what you mean."
"I was a gun captain then," Desoix said with a smile and a biting voice, because it was always nice to remember the ones you survived. "The Battery Commander—this was Gilt, and they sacked him for it—sited us on top of the Admin Building. Ten stories in a central park.
"So we had a really good view of the mob, because parts of it were coming down all five radial streets with torches. And they'd blown up the transformer station providing power to the whole center of town."
He coughed and rubbed his face. "There were aircars flying every which way, carrying businessmen who knew they weren't going to get out at ground level . . . but we didn't have a car, and we couldn't even get the blazes off the roof. It didn't have a staircase, just the elevator—and that quit when the power went
off."
Blaney was nodding with grim agreement; so were two of the other veterans in the gun crew.
"How—how'd you get out, sir?" Karsov asked in a suitably chastened tone.
Desoix grinned again. It wasn't a pleasant expression. "Called to one of those businessmen on a loud-hailer," he said. "Asked him to come pick us up. When he saw where we had the calliope pointed, he decided that was a good idea."
The slim officer paused and looked up at the House of Grace again. "Getting lucky once doesn't mean I'm going to put any of my men in that particular bucket again, though," he said. "Down here—" he smiled brightly, but there was more than pure humor in this expression, too "—at the worst, you've got the gun to keep anybody at a distance."
"Think it's going to be that bad, sir?" one of the crewmen asked.
Desoix shrugged. "I need to report to the Palace," he said. "I guess it's clear enough to do that now."
As he turned to walk away from the gun position, he heard Sergeant Blaney saying, "Not for us and the other mercs, maybe. But yeah, it's going to get that bad here. You wait and see."
Chapter Four
Tyl Koopman strolled through a series of short aisles into which the plaza was marked by freshly erected kiosks. In most cases the shop proprietors were still setting out their goods, but they were willing to call Tyl over to look at their merchandise. He smiled and walked on—the smile becoming fixed in short order.
He'd learned Spanish when the Slammers were stationed on Cartagena three years before, so he could have followed the local language without difficulty. It was interesting that most of the shopkeepers recognized Tyl's uniform and spoke to him in Dutch, fluent at least for a few words of enticement.
It was interesting also that many of those keeping shops in the plaza were of Levantine extraction, like the merchants who had disembarked from the surface-effect freighter. They were noticeable not only for their darker complexions but also because their booths and clothing were so bedecked with crosses that sometimes the color of the underlying fabric was doubtful.
Not, as Lieutenant Desoix had suggested, that their desperate attempts to belong to the majority would matter a hoot in Hell when the Crusade really got moving. Tyl wasn't a cynic. Like most line mercenaries, he wasn't enough of an intellectual to have abstract positions about men and politics.
But he had a good mind and plenty of data about the way things went when politicians hired men to kill for them.
The section Tyl was walking through was given over to tobacco and smoking products—shops for visitors rather than staples for the domestic market which seemed to fill most of the plaza.
Tobacco from Bamberia had a smooth melding of flavors that remained after the raw leaf was processed into the cold inhalers in which most of the galaxy used imported tobacco. Those who couldn't afford imports smoked what they grew in local plots on a thousand worlds . . . but those who could afford the best and wanted the creosote removed before they put the remainder of the taste into their bodies, bought from Bamberia.
Most of the processing was done off-planet, frequently on the user world where additional flavorings were added to the inhalers to meet local tastes. There were a few inhaler factories on the outskirts of Bamberg City, almost the only manufacturing in a metropolis whose wealth was based on transport and government. Their creations were displayed on the tables in the plaza, brightly colored plastic tubes whose shapes counterfeited everything from cigarillos to cigars big enough to pass for riot batons.
But the local populace tended to follow traditional methods of using the herb that made them rich. Products for the local market posed here as exotica for the tourists and spacers who wanted something to show the folks back home where they'd been.
Tourists and spacers and mercenaries. The number of kiosks serving outsiders must have increased radically since President Delcorio started hiring mercenaries for his Crusade.
Tyl passed by displays of smoking tobacco and hand-rolled cigars—some of the boxes worth a week's pay to him, even now that he had his captaincy. There were cigar cutters and pipe cleaners, cigarette holders and pipes carved from microporous meerschaum mined on the coasts of Two.
Almost all the decoration was religious: crosses, crucifixes, and other symbols of luxuriant Christianity. That theme was almost as noticeable to Tyl as the fact that almost everyone in the plaza—and every kiosk—was decorated with either black or red, and never both.
Each staggering aisle was of uniform background. To underscore the situation, cloaked toughs faced off at every angle where the two colors met, glowering threats that did not quite—while Tyl saw them—come to open violence.
Great place to live, Bamberg City. Tyl was glad of his khaki uniform. He wondered how often the silver and black of the United Defense Batteries was mistaken for black by somebody with a red cloak and a brick in his hand.
Grimacing to himself,the Slammers officer strode more swiftly toward his goal, the empty stairs at the north end of the plaza.The scene around him was colorful, all right, and this was probably one of the few chances he'd have to see it.
You served on a lot of worlds in a mercenary regiment, but what you mostly saw there were other soldiers and the wrack of war . . . which was universal, a smoky gray ambiance that you scanned and maybe shot at before you moved on.
Even so, Tyl didn't want to spend any longer than he had to in this plaza. He could feel the edge of conflict which overlay it like the cloaks that covered the weapons and armor of the omnipresent bullies, waiting for an opportunity to strike out. He'd seen plenty of fighting during his years with the Slammers, but he didn't want it hovering around him when he was supposed to be in a peaceful rear area.
The stairs were slimy with water pooling in low spots, but Nevis Island and its spaceport shielded the plaza from most of the seaweed and marine life that the high tides would otherwise have washed up. Tyl picked his way carefully, since he seemed to be the first person to climb them since the tide dropped.
A procession, Scratchard had said, blocking normal traffic. Maybe that would be a little easier to take than the human bomb waiting to go off below in the plaza.
At the top of the stairs were ten pairs of steel-and-concrete doors. Each side-hung panel was five meters across and at least three meters high. The doors—lock-gates—were fully open now. They rotated out toward the plaza on trunnions in slotted rails set into the concrete. As Tyl neared them on his lonely climb, he heard the sound of chanted music echoing from beyond the doors.
Tyl had expected to see gaily bedecked vehicles when he reached the top of the stairs and could look into the covered mall beyond. Instead there were people on foot, and most of them were standing rather than marching from left to right.
The mall was at least a hundred meters wide; its pavement was marked to pass heavy ground traffic from one side of the river to the other. At the moment, a sparse line of priests in full regalia was walking slowly down the center of the expanse, interspersed with lay-folk wearing robes of ceremonially drab coarseness.
Some carried objects on display. Ornate crucifixes were the most common, but there were banners and a reliquary borne by four women which, if pure gold, must have cost as much as a starship.
Every few paces, the marchers paused and chanted something in Latin. When they began to move again, a refrain boomed back from the line of solid-looking men in white robes on either side of the procession route. The guards—they could be nothing else—wore gold crosses on the left shoulders of their garments, but they also bore meter-long staffs.
There was no need for the procession to be blocking the whole width of the mall; but when Tyl stepped through the door, the nearest men in white gave him a look that made it real clear what would happen to anybody who tried to carry out secular business in an area the Church had marked for its own.
Tyl stopped.He stood in a formal posture instead of lounging against a column while he waited. No point in offending the fellows who watched him with hard eyes
even when they bellowed verses in a language he knew only well enough to recognize.
No wonder Scratchard hadn't been able to make it to the plaza as he'd intended. The other two staircases were open and in use, but the procession route certainly extended some distance to either side of the river; and Scratchard, with business of his own to take care of, would have waited till the last minute before setting out to collect an officer returning from furlough.
No problem. But it calmed Tyl to remember that there were other Slammers nearby, in event of a real emergency.
The gorgeous reliquary was the end of the procession proper. When that reached the heavy doors at the west end of the mall, a barked order passed down the lines of guards, repeated by every tenth man.
The men in white turned and began to double-time in the direction the procession was headed, closing up as they moved. They carried their staffs vertically before them, and their voices boomed a chant beginning, "Fortis iuventus, virtus audax bellica . . ." as they strode away.
They marched in better order than any mercenary unit Tyl could remember having seen—not that close-order drill was what folks hired the Slammers for.
And there were a lot of them, for the double lines continued to shift past and contract for several minutes, more and more quick-stepping staff-wielders appearing from farther back along the procession route to the east. They must have timed their withdrawal so that the whole route would be cleared the instant the procession reached its destination, presumably the cathedral.
At least something in this place was organized. It just didn't appear to be what called itself the government.
Chapter Five
Tyl didn't follow the procession when the route cleared, nor did he try to raise Sergeant Major Scratchard on his implant again. He'd told Scratchard where he'd be; and if the noncom couldn't find him, then that was important information for Captain Tyl Koopman to know.
There was a surge of civilians—into the mall and through it down the stairs to the plaza—as soon as the procession was clear. Normal folk, so far as Tyl could tell from the loose-fitting fashions current here. Most of them wore a red ribbon or a black one, but there was no contingent of cloaked thugs.
