And then there was a sharp crack, and his windowpane filled with stars. He dropped to the floor as another shot threw glass chips into the room.
“Down!” he said. All dropped to the floor except for Lady Kosch, who was in a frenzy, hurling bottle after bottle upon the attackers while cursing them without cease. Martinez gathered his legs under him while unease crept up his spine at the realization he was about to throw himself into the line of fire. He hurled himself forward and tackled Lady Kosch just as a pair of shots cracked through her window. She gave a guttural, furious shriek as he landed on top of her, and for a moment he was all too aware of her bared fangs a hand’s width from his throat.
“One of them has a rifle,” he said. Which should be fucking obvious by now. A roar from the crowd outside confirmed this, as the rioters now realized it wasn’t the police shooting at them, but one of their own number adding to their firepower.
With a heave of her powerful body, Kosch rolled Martinez off her. “I know that,” she said. “But he’s too far away to fire with any accuracy.”
More shots snapped through the windows, perforating the walls and ceiling and bringing down flakes of plaster. Sekalog came into the room on his knees, dragging a case of wine behind him.
“Probably a veteran of the Secret Army,” Martinez said. Or a Naxid cop, he thought.
Kosch snarled. “How many more veterans are out there?”
“Veterans? I’ll have to get Lady Sula to give them all a stern talking-to,” Martinez said. He crawled back to his position and carefully rose to his feet on one side of the window, keeping the wall between himself and the shooter. He took a bottle of wine in his hand, took aim, and hurled it at one of the attackers. His arm was exposed only for an instant, but it was enough to produce a pair of bullets that flew through his window. A third bullet shattered the windowpane entirely.
“He seems to have plenty of ammunition,” Martinez said. “Everyone be careful.”
The defenders returned to their work and stood between the windows with their backs to the wall, throwing bottles onto the besiegers. The stance required for staying out of the line of fire was physically awkward and hampered throwing, and the view of the street was less useful. Martinez knew he was contributing less to the defense than he had been.
Several times the wall punched him in the back as it absorbed bullets from the shooter.
From below, there was a cracking noise, and then a rending shriek. The attackers had peeled away a part of the window frame, and the crowd awarded their success with a baying roar that sent a cold shiver up Martinez’s back. The defenders were losing.
Martinez chucked a bottle in the direction from which the rending sounds originated, and then wiped sweat and blood from his face and reached for another.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “We can’t defend this place once they break in.” He looked at the Terran apprentice chef. “Have you been in the cellar? Is there a way out, into tunnels or into the next building?”
“No,” she said shortly. “No way out of the cellar.” She had taken off her uniform jacket and revealed tattoos on wiry arms and shoulders. Her right elbow was bruised and swollen and she was tossing left-handed, and grunting with every throw.
“The stairs go all the way to the roof, yes?” Martinez said.
“Yes, we can get onto the roof. But there’s no way off it once we get up there.”
It seemed to Martinez that the door to the roof might be more defensible than any of the rooms in the club. He tried to recall whether the buildings on either side overlooked the club and could furnish a sniper’s nest for the shooter, but he was exhausted, gasping for breath, and the blaring alarm was hammering his skull and short-circuiting his thoughts. The answer wouldn’t materialize.
Martinez hurled another bottle down onto the attackers but was rewarded only with another rending shriek as another piece of the window frame was torn loose.
“Can we get over to the next building?” he asked.
“There is an alley behind and to the north,” Ti-car said, bending out of the line of fire as he dragged another crate of wine into the room. “To the south, it might be possible to jump the gap.”
Martinez hurled another bottle. “We’ve got to get Kelly over somehow,” he panted.
Ti-car paused for thought. “Perhaps we could bridge the gap.” He turned to the waitron, Mock, who was handing bottles to the defenders. “Have we planks?”
“Back door,” said Mock. “We have a ramp for carrying supplies to the kitchen.”
“We shall bring it up,” Ti-car said.
“Hurry,” said Martinez.
Sekalog half crawled into the room with two crates of wine. Martinez turned to the Terran chef. “Relieve this woman,” he said, nodding at the apprentice. Then, to the apprentice, he said, “Go up to the roof. Don’t let anyone see you. See if it’s possible to get to the next building.”
The apprentice gave him a grateful look, then bent low and loped out of the room, holding her wounded arm close. The chef picked up a bottle, peered narrowly out the window, and launched his missile. A crash was followed by a torrent of abuse in a wounded, lisping Torminel voice.
Shots rattled out from the street, and bullets snapped through the windows. Does that bastard have an unlimited supply of ammunition? Martinez wondered. He heaved one bottle, gasped for breath, heaved another. Even Lady Kosch was nearing her limits, and no longer bothered to curse the enemy as she hurled bottle after bottle at them.
After some minutes Ti-car returned. “We got onto the roof,” he said. “We’ve placed a ramp to the next building.”
His words were echoed by another shriek of a part of the window frame being torn away. The moment decisive, Martinez thought.
“Keep up the fire,” he told the others. “I’ll get Kelly.” He bent low and scurried out, then once in the corridor took Ti-car by the arm. “We’ll have to break into the next building,” he said. “Can you get me some tools?”
“I’ll see what I can do, my lord.”
He went into the lounge and found it strangely peaceful and unreal. The soft gleam of the polished, paneled walls, the scent of the taswa-leather furniture, the gold racing trophies on their shelves. Kelly lay beneath her blanket and seemed unchanged. Her skin was clammy, but her breathing seemed regular.
Martinez considered for a moment while he caught his breath, then took Kelly’s blanket and knotted two of the diagonal corners together, then hung the result over his neck and one shoulder, part sling and part hammock. He knelt by Kelly’s couch, adjusted the two kitchen knives that were still in his belt, and carefully scooped Kelly into the sling, tugging it so it was wide enough to hold her hips and lanky body. He cradled the fractured head against his shoulder, got his feet under him, and stood. Pain crackled through his ribs, and he winced.
Kelly was lighter than he feared she’d be. Making sure not to crack her head on the doorframe, Martinez maneuvered into the hall. He walked to the back stairs and looked down at Sodak and the sous-chef, who were on the landing below him. Sodak was standing on a chair to give her the chance to fire bottles down from the small window on the landing, though there seemed to be no action at present.
“They’re breaking in downstairs,” Martinez told them. “We’re going up to the roof. Sodak, help Ti-car bring tools to the roof. And you—” He gestured at the Daimong sous-chef.
“Nettruku, my lord.”
“Nettruku, tell the people in the front room it’s time to withdraw.”
“Very good, my lord.”
Martinez turned and went up the stairs. The door at the top was open, and Martinez was out of breath by the time he stepped out onto the roof’s flat, spongy resinous surface. The stairs were part of a boxy structure that also held the mechanism for the club’s elevator, and elsewhere the roof supported machinery for heating and cooling, and a water tower in the shape of a racing yacht standing on its tail. If they didn’t hang over the parapets, he thought,
the mob in the street wouldn’t see them. Even watchers in the taller buildings nearby would have trouble seeing them at night, unless they were Torminel.
Martinez leaned, exhausted, on the doorframe and took long breaths of the cool night air. The clean taste was welcome after breathing the air in the library, heavy with the scent of sweat, spilled wine, and desperation.
The antimatter ring made a serene, perfect arc overhead. Pain shot through his ribs and his knees. He waited until Sodak and Ti-car arrived with boxes of tools.
“Can you lock the roof door once we’re all here?” he asked.
“No, my lord,” Ti-car said. “The door can never be locked from the inside lest it trap the victims of a fire.”
“Have you got something that can wedge it?”
Sodak and Ti-car examined their tools, and Ti-car lifted out a pry bar with a wedge-shaped head. “We might try this. If we drove it in with sufficient force . . .”
Sodak lifted a large mallet. “This will do the job.”
Martinez could only nod. Sekalog then came up the stairs in a rush, panting for breath, his purple skin almost invisible in the darkness. “Lady Kosch and the Terran gentlemen are firing a final volley,” he said. “Everyone else will be up here soon.”
Martinez didn’t want to leave anyone behind, so he counted them all as they came up, remembering that Mock and the apprentice were already on the roof. But the numbers swam in his head, and he found himself repeatedly asking the others if everyone was here. Then there was a huge crash from the front of the building, followed by a roar of approval from the crowd, and Martinez concluded that one of the front windows had finally been torn away.
“Wedge the door,” Martinez told Ti-car, and he led the others to the south side of the building, where Mock and the Terran apprentice had placed a pair of wide planks between the parapet of the club building and that of the next. The planks perched on their edges and barely bridged the gap, and Martinez was worried that one or both would slip and drop one of the party into the narrow gap between the buildings.
Another alarm was sounding from the other building, an alarm with a deeper baying tone, so possibly some windows had been broken there, too. A metallic battering came from behind Martinez, where Sodak and Ti-car were trying to jam the rooftop door.
While Martinez hesitated, Lady Kosch stepped onto one of the planks, and crossed in a half crouch. After the crossing, Mock and the apprentice adjusted the planks in case she’d shifted them slightly. Then Martinez stepped to the parapet, cradled Kelly’s head with one hand, and held her body close with the other.
Martinez was a noted yacht captain, accustomed to extreme gravities or none at all, capable of whirling his boat in dizzying spirals or of grazing the atmosphere of planets. He was a stranger to vertigo. But still he was thankful that it was too dark for him to see the ground waiting below as he stepped onto the planks that bowed beneath his and Kelly’s combined weight. His breath stopped in his throat, and he kept his eyes rigidly to the front as he walked. Two steps, three steps, four . . .
He didn’t actually fall until he was all the way across and misjudged the drop off the parapet on the far side, and then Kosch was there to catch him before he dropped Kelly onto the roof and fell atop her. He breathed thanks to Lady Kosch and stepped out onto the neighboring roof, his head whirling.
The others came over quickly. Sodak and the Terran chef didn’t like the looks of the planks, and instead leaped the gap, the chef landing with skinned knees as he misread his landing. “Pick up the planks,” Martinez said. “We might need them for another crossing.”
The party moved along the roof in the darkness, the nocturnal Torminel in the lead. The neighboring building was much larger and broader than the clubhouse, straddling the block from front to back, with retail space on the ground floor and offices above. The building’s alarm groaned on. There were a pair of doors to the roof, both locked, and skylights gazed down at rooms of empty desks and office equipment. The Terran chef came back from scouting the parapet, his eyes agleam. In the darkness he loomed like a seasoned warrior, a carving knife in one hand and a cleaver in the other.
“Look—it’s what we want,” he said. “A tube to the next building over.”
He led Martinez to a view of an enclosed pedestrian bridge connecting the east side of the building with the property across Gearing Street. “Once we get across that,” he said, “we should be clear of all this mess.” Because there were still people wandering the streets below, some probably trying to get away from the violence, but others clearly looking for trouble.
For the first time in a long while Martinez remembered Alikhan, who was in Martinez’s car, supposedly awaiting him on Gearing Street. He looked down the street, but failed to see the car.
“Right,” Martinez said. “Let’s get into the building.”
Tools were deployed to break through one of the roof doors, but the door proved resistant to the party’s pry bars and hammers. “It might be easier to break through a skylight,” Sodak said. “I can drop down, find the stairs, and let you all in.”
The skylight was more vulnerable than the door, and it took only a few minutes to break its lock and wrench it open. Sodak wormed through the gap, hung at the end of her arms, then dropped onto someone’s desk. Her arms windmilled for a moment, then she regained her balance, hopped off the desk, and prowled out of sight. The rest moved to the door to wait.
A few minutes passed. Pain flooded Martinez’s ribs, knees, skull. He tried to listen for Kelly’s breathing, but couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the alarm.
He was standing next to the door when it opened, and in the light rising from the stairs saw that the Torminel stepping onto the roof wasn’t Sodak. Without conscious thought Martinez snatched one of the carving knives from his belt and drove it under the Torminel’s arm with all his strength. The Torminel shrieked and leaped away, wrenching the knife out of Martinez’s hand, but the jump placed the intruder within the range of the Terran chef, who buried his cleaver in the Torminel’s skull.
The next shriek came from Lady Kosch, who pounced onto the second Torminel running onto the roof, her knife driving repeatedly into her target. The Terran chef followed, his cleaver held high.
Martinez groped blindly for his other knife as combat erupted on the stairs. Screams resounded in the night, along with the crash of crude weapons striking the walls and the squalls of hunting Torminel. Martinez heard thumps as bodies were hurled down stairs or into walls. He found his second knife and drew it, then hesitated. He couldn’t drag Kelly into a close-quarters knife fight.
Nettruku charged in, and then the Terran apprentice. There was a final scream, one that cut off with a horrific liquid sound, and then there was silence. Martinez cradled Kelly’s head to keep it from hitting the edge of the door as he peered down the stairs at a scene of carnage.
Apparently the rioters, frustrated with their slow progress in breaking into the club, had sent a party into the building to gain the roof, cross over to the club, and attack the defenders from above, or open a door for their friends. The party hadn’t got into the building as quickly as they’d hoped, or got lost once they got inside, and came up onto the roof later than they expected.
Bodies lay strewn on the stairs, and blood drained in thick, half-clotted waterfalls down the risers. The rioters’ improvised weapons were scattered over the scene, pipes and knives and broken bottles. Lady Kosch stood at the bottom of the stairs covered in gore and leaned on the wall for support. Nettruku, the Terran chef, and Sodak were also present. Sodak’s large eyes glowed in the light of the stairs.
“Come down,” Sodak said. “It’s safe now.”
Martinez descended gingerly, cradling Kelly’s body. The smell of warm blood caught in his throat. His heel slipped as he neared the bottom, and he sat down on the body of a staring Torminel. He felt warm flesh give way, then heard bones crack under his weight. He made a frantic attempt to rise, but with Kelly in his lap he coul
dn’t manage it, and the chef had to help him to his feet.
“We couldn’t let any of them get away,” Lady Kosch said. “They’d have brought the whole mob down on us.”
Sodak had come up from behind, Martinez realized, and blocked their retreat just as Kosch had launched her attack. The rioters were trapped, and they were so packed together their weapons were hampered.
The rest of the party came down the stairs, and tracking blood they went in search of the bridge over Gearing Street. Lady Kosch, Martinez saw, was swaying as she walked.
“Lady Kosch, are you hurt?” he asked.
“Not badly.”
Kosch looked pale even through her fur. “Someone help her,” Martinez said. Sodak hurried to her side and put one of Kosch’s arms around her shoulder.
They were within sight of the bridge when Lady Kosch gave a sigh and slipped into unconsciousness. Her knife dropped from her hand and clattered on the floor. Sodak hung on and called for help, and Nettruku ran to her other side, and the two helped prop her up and supported her to the bridge.
Martinez’s sleeve display chimed as he stepped onto the bridge, and he ordered it to answer. “We’re on our way,” said Roland. “Do you hear the sirens?”
“No,” Martinez said.
“I’m in the car with the Minister of Police,” Roland said. “I’ve also been talking to the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Security.”
“We need ambulances, not ministers,” Martinez said. “We’ve got two casualties.”
“Ambulances are coming, too.” Roland sounded insufferably smug. “Also crews from Empire Broadcasting, to record your heroic actions for history.”
“We’re not in the Corona Club any longer,” Martinez said. “We’re walking over a bridge into—” He peered out the window. “Into the Five Petal Market.”
“Did you hear that, Minister?” Roland asked.
“I hear sirens now,” Martinez said. He was in the middle of the pedestrian bridge and could look through windows to the street below, where people were beginning to scatter at the sound of approaching police. They’d had a lot of practice at scattering during the war, when Naxid convoys went out in search of hostages.
The Accidental War Page 23
