by David Drake
Scratchard laid a hand on the captain's elbow, then keyed his own helmet and said,"Listen up.This is nothin' you don't know.There's a lot of people up there."
He pumped the muzzle of his submachine-gun toward the ceiling. "So long as there's one of 'em standing, none of us 're safe. Got that?"
Heads nodded, hands stroked the iridium barrels of powerguns. Some of the recruits exchanged glances.
"Then let's go," the sergeant major said simply. He hefted himself toward the hatchway.
Tyl blocked him. "I want you below, Jack," he said. "Last man out."
Scratchard grinned and shook his head. "I briefed Kekkonan for that," he said.
Tyl hesitated.
Scratchard's face sobered."Cap'n,"he said."This don't take good knees.What it takes, I got."
"All right, let's go," said Tyl very softly. "But I'm the first through the door."
He pushed his way to the door out onto the plaza, hearing the sergeant major wheezing a step behind.
Chapter Thirty
Anne McGill couldn't see the sun, but the edges of the House of Grace gleamed as they bent light from the orb already over the horizon to the northeast.
The crucifix on the seafront altar was golden and dazzling. The sun had not yet reached it, but Bishop Trimer was too good a showman not to allow for that: the gilt symbol was equipped with a surface-discharge system like that which made expensive clothing shimmer. What was good enough for the Consistory Room was good enough for God—as he was represented here in Bamberg City.
"Anne,what's happening in the plaza?" said the tiny phone in her left ear."Do you see any sign of the, of Koopman? Over."
She was kneeling as if in an attitude of prayer, though she faced the half-open window. There were scores of others in the cathedral this morning, but no one would disturb another penitent. Like her, they were wrapped in their cloaks and their prayers.
And perhaps all of their prayers were as complex and uncertain as those of Anne McGill, lookout for a pair of mercenary companies and mistress of a man whom she had prevented from retreating with her to a place of safety.
"Oh Charles," she whispered. "Oh Charles." Then she touched the control of her throat mike and said in a firm voice, "Chastain is kneeling before Bishop Trimer in front of the crucifix. He's putting a—I don't know, maybe the seal of office around his neck but I thought that was still in the Palace . . . ."
The finger-long directional microphone was clipped to the window transom which held it steady and unobtrusive. UDB stores included optical equipment as powerful and sophisticated as the audio pickup; but in use, an electronic telescope looked like exactly what it was—military hardware, and a dead giveaway of the person using it.
She had only her naked eyes. Though she squinted she couldn't be sure—
"The Slammers, curse it!" her lover's voice snapped in her ear. Charles' tongue suppressed the further words, "you idiot," but they were there in his tone. "Is there any sign of them?"
"No, no," she cried desperately. She'd forgotten to turn on her microphone. "Charles, no," she said with her thumb pressing the switch as if to crush it. "Chastain is rising and the crowds—"
Anne didn't see the door beneath the altar open the first time. There was only a flicker of movement in her peripheral vision, ajar and then closed.
Her subconscious was still trying to identify it when a dozen flashes lighted the front of the crowd facing the altar.
For another moment, she thought those were part of the celebration, but people were sprawling away from the flashes. A second later, the popping sound of the grenades going off reached her vantage point.
Men were spilling out of the altar building. The bolts from their weapons hurt Anne's eyes, even shielded by distance and full dawn.
"Charles!" she cried, careless now of who might hear her in the gallery. "It's started! They're—"
The air near the seafront echoed with a crashing hiss like that of a dragon striking. Anne McGill had never heard anything like it before. She didn't know that it was a calliope firing—but she knew that it meant death.
Buildings hid her view of the impact zone at the west stair head of the plaza, but some of the debris flung a hundred meters in the air could still be identified as parts of human bodies.
Chapter Thirty-One
When the grenades burst, Scratchard jerked the metal door open again—a millisecond before a slow fuse detonated the last of their greeting cards. A scrap of glass-fiber shrapnel drew a line across the back of Tyl's left thumb.
He didn't notice it. He was already shooting from the hip at the first person he saw as he swung through the doorway, a baton-waving orderly whose face was almost as white as his robe except where blood spattered both of them.
Tyl's target was a meter and a half away from his gun muzzle. He missed. The red cape and shoulder of a woman beside the orderly exploded in a cyan flash.
The orderly swung his baton in desperation, but he was already dead. Jack Scratchard put a burst into his face before pointing his submachine-gun at the group on the altar above and behind them. Trimer flattened, carrying Thom Chastain with him, but blue-green fire flicked the chests of both gang bosses.
Tyl hadn't appreciated the noise. It beat on him, a pressure squeezing him into his armor and engulfing the usual thump! of his bolts heating the air like miniature lightning. He butted his weapon firmly against his shoulder and fired three times to clear the area to his right.
The targets fell. Their eyes were still startled and blinking, though the 2cm bolts had scooped their chests into fire and a sludge of gore.
Tyl strode onward, making room for the troopers behind him as he'd planned, as he'd ordered in some distant other universe.
An army officer leaped from the altar with a pistol in his hand, either seeking shelter in the crowd or fleeing Scratchard's quick gun in blind panic. The Bamberg soldier doubled up as fate carried him past Tyl's muzzle and reflex squeezed the powergun's trigger.
Short range but a nice crossing shot. Tyl was fine and the noise, the shouting, was better protection than his helmet and clamshell. But there were too many of the bastards, a mass like the sea itself, and Tyl was all alone in a tide that would wash over him and his men no matter what they—
One calliope, then the other, opened fire. Not even crowd noise and the adrenalin coursing through his blood could keep the Slammers officer from noticing that.
He stepped forward, his right shoulder against the altar building to keep him from slipping. Each shot was aimed, and none of them missed.
In a manner of speaking, Tyl Koopman's face wore a smile.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The bollards at the stair head were hidden by the units on guard, thugs wearing the colors of both factions and a detachment of hospital orderlies.
There were at least fifty heavily armed men and women in plain sight of Desoix's calliope—and it was only a matter of moments before one of them would turn from the ceremony and look up the street.
There weren't many options available then.
"Is there any sign of them?"Desoix shoutedto—at his mistress as she nattered on about what Trimer was using as he swore in his stooge as President.
Lachere was twisted around in the driver's saddle, peering back at his lieutenant and chewing the end of a cold cigar, a habit he'd picked up in the months they'd been stationed here. He didn't look worried, but Senter had enough fear in his expression for both clerks as he stared at Desoix's profile from his station at the loading console.
"Charles!" cried the voice he had let through to him again for necessity. "It's—"
Desoix had already heard the muffled exclamation points of the grenades.
"Blue Sixto Blue Three,"he said,manually cutting a way to the unit frequency. "Open fire."
As his mouth voiced the final flat syllable, his right foot rocked forward on the firing pedal. Traversing left to right, Desoix swept the stair head clear of all obstructions with the eight ravening barre
ls of his calliope.
The big weapon was intended for computer-directed air defense. Under manual control, its sights were only a little more sophisticated than those of shoulder-fired powerguns: a hologrammatic sight picture with a bead in the center to mark the point of impact.
Nothing more was required.
Several of the guards turned when the grenades went off, instinctively looking for escape and instead seeing behind them the calliope's lowered muzzles. One of the orderlies got off a burst with his submachine-gun.
The bullets missed by a hundred meters in the two blocks they were meant to travel. Concrete, steel, and flesh—most particularly flesh—vaporized as the calliope chewed across the stair head in a three-second burst.
Desoix switched to intercom with the hand he didn't need for the moment on the elevation control and said, "Lachere, advance toward the stair head at a—"
Faces appeared around the seawall just north of where the bollards had been before the gun burned them away. The high-intensity 3cm ammunition had shattered concrete at the start of the burst before Desoix traversed away. His right hand rolled forward on the twist-grip, reversing the direction in which the barrel array rotated on its gimbals.
More of the wall disintegrated in cyan light and the white glare of lime burned free of the concrete by enormously concentrated energy. Most of the rioters had time to duck back behind the wall before the second burst raked it.
The wall didn't save them. Multiple impacts tore it apart and then flash-heated the water in their own bodies into steam explosions.
Beneath Desoix, the skirts of the calliope's plenum chamber dragged the pavement. Air had enough mass to recoil when it was heated to a plasma and expelled from the eight tubes as the gun fired. Lachere drove forward, correcting inexpertly against the calliope's pitch and yaw.
Gunfire was a blue-green shield against the roar from the plaza, but in the moments between bursts the mob's voice asserted itself over the numbness of ringing breech blocks and slamming air.The stair head was now within a hundred meters as the gun drove onward. There was a haze over the target area—steam and dust, burnt lime and burning bodies.
Desoix's face shield protected him from the sun-hot flash of his guns. Events, thundering forward as implacably as an avalanche, shielded him from awareness that would have been as devastating to him as being blinded.
With no target but the roiling haze, Desoix triggered another burst when they were ten meters from the stair head. Fragments blown clear by the impacts proved that there had been people sheltering beneath eye level but accessible to the upper pair of gun tubes.
"Sir?" a voice demanded, Lachere slowing and ready to ground the vehicle before they lurched over the scars where the bollards had been and their bow tilted down the steps.
"Go!" Desoix shouted, knowing that the plenum chamber would spill its air in the angle of the stair treads and that their unaided fans would never be able to lift the calliope away once they had committed.
Koopman and his company of Slammers weren't going anywhere either, unless they all succeeded in the most certain and irrevocable way possible.
The stench of ozone and ruin boiled out from beneath the drive fans an instant before the calliope rocked forward. Gravity aided its motion for an instant before the friction of steel against stone grounded the skirts. The plaza was a sea of faces with a roar like the surf.
Bullets rang off the hull and splashed the glowing iridium of one port-side barrel. The doors of the mall at the head of the main stairs were open toward the plaza. Men there were firing assault rifles at the calliope. Some of them were either good or very lucky.
Desoix rotated his gun carriage.
"Sir!" Senter cried with his helmet against the lieutenants. "Those aren't the mob! They're the Guard!"
"Feed your guns, soldier!" said Charles Desoix. The open flood gates filled his sight hologram.
He rocked the firing pedal down and began to traverse his target in a blaze of light.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Tyl's index finger tightened. The gunstock pummeled his shoulder. The center of his face shield went momentarily black as it mirrored away the flash that would otherwise have blinded him.
A finger of plastic flipped up into his sight picture, indicating that he'd just fired the last charge in his weapon. He reached for another magazine.
A hospital orderly stopped trying to claw through the mass of other panicked humans and turned to face Tyl. He was less than ten meters away and held a pistol.
Tyl raised the tube of 2cm ammunition to the loading gate in the forestock and burned the nail and third knuckle of all the fingers on his left hand. He'd already put several magazines through the powergun, so its barrel was white hot.
He dropped the magazine. The orderly shot him in the center of the chest.
There was no sound anymore in the plaza. Tyl could see everything down to the last hair on the moustache of the orderly collapsing around a bolt from somebody else's powergun. His armor spread the bullet's impact, but it felt as if they'd driven a tank over his chest. Maybe if he didn't move . . . .
The calliope which was canted down the west staircase opened fire again.
Only three of the eight barrels were live at the moment. Individual bolts made a thump as ionized air ripped from the barrel; they crossed the plaza a few meters over Tyl's head as a microsecond hiss! and a flash of light so saturated that it seemed palpable.
Everything the bolts hit was disintegrated with a crash sharper than a bomb going off, solids converted to gas and plasma as suddenly as the light-swift bursts of energy had snapped through the air. The plaza's concrete flooring gouted in explosions of dazzling white—
But the crowd was packed too thickly for that to happen often. The calliope's angle allowed its crew to rake the mob from above. Each 3cm bolt hit like the hoof of a horse galloping over soft ground, hurling spray and bits of the footing in every direction before lifting to hammer the surface again.
Bodies crumpled in windrows. Screaming rioters climbed the fallen on their way toward the main stairs, already packed with their fellows. The guns continued to fire.
"If I can hear, I can move," Tyl said, mouthing the words because that was his first movement since the bullet hit him.
He knelt to pick up the magazine he had dropped. The pain that flooded him, hot needles being jabbed into his whole chest, made him drop the empty gun instead.
He couldn't breathe. He didn't fall down because his muscles were locked in a web of flesh surrounding a center of pulsing red agony.
The spasm passed.
Tyl's troopers were spread in a ragged semicircle, centering on the building from which they'd deployed. He was near the east stairs; the treads were covered with bodies.
Rebels had been shot in the back as they tried to run from the soldiers and the blue-green scintillance of hand weapons. If they reached the top of the stairs, Gun Three on the seafront hurled them back as a puree and a scattering of fragments.
The west stairs were relatively empty, because the mob had time to clear it in the face of the calliope staggering toward them. They died on the plaza floor, because they'd run toward the debouching infantry; but the steps gleamed white in the sunlight and provided a pure contrast to the bodies and garments crumpled everywhere else in muddy profusion.
Tyl left the 2cm weapon where he'd dropped it; he raised his submachine-gun. It felt light by contrast with the thick iridium barrel of the shoulder weapon, but he still had trouble aiming.
It was hot,and Tyl was as thirsty as he ever remembered being.Ozone had lifted all the mucus away from the membranes of his nose and throat. The mordant gas was concentrated by shooting in the enclosed wedge of the plaza. The skin of Tyl's face and hands prickled as if sunburned.
He aimed at a face and missed high, the barrel wobbling, sending the round into the back of somebody a hundred meters away on the main stairs.
He lowered the muzzle and fired again, fired again, fire
d again.
Single shots, aimed at anyone who looked toward him instead of trying to get away. Second choice for targets were the white robes of orderlies, most of whom had been armed—though few enough had the discipline to stand in chaos against the mercenaries' armor and overwhelming firepower.
Third choice was whoever filled the sight picture next.None of the mercenaries were safe so long as one of the others was standing.
The calliope opened up again. Desoix had unjammed and reloaded six of the barrels. A thick line staggered through the mob like the track of a tornado across a corn field.
Tyl fired; fired again; fired again . . . .
Chapter Thirty-Four
It was very quiet.
Desoix watched the men from Gun Three's doubled crew as they picked their way across the plaza at his orders. Sergeant Blaney was leading the quartet himself. They were carrying their submachine-guns ready and moving with a gingerly awkwardness, trying to avoid stepping in the carnage.
Nobody could get down the east stairs without smearing his boots to the ankles with blood.
"They could hurry up with the water," Lachere muttered.
"They didn't see it happen," Desoix said. He lay across the firing console, his chin on his hands and his elbows on the control grips he no longer needed to twist.
He closed his eyes for a moment instead of rubbing them.
Desoix's hands and face,like those of his men,were black with iridium burned from the calliope's bores by the continuous firing. The vapor had condensed in the air and settled as dust over everything within ten meters of the muzzles. Rubbing his eyes before he washed would drive the finely divided metal under the lids, into the orbits.
