"Can't be!" he muttered and stepped closer. "Jesus Christ- Raupasha! What the hell are you doing here?"
She looked up at him, pushing up the brim of the campaign hat.
"I am starting payment on a debt, Lord Kenn 'et," she said, meeting his eyes without wavering. "And you cannot send me back to the palace, because that would be more dangerous than staying here!"
Hollard opened his mouth. A voice rang out: "Heads up! Here they come!"
"Did you have to bring the dog!" he heard himself say, and a part of him marveled at the banal absurdity.
Raupasha smiled. "I had to. He kept barking; someone would have heard."
"Well, stay out of the bloody way, then," Hollard snarled, turning back to his work, surprised at the furious heat of his own anger.
Figures were moving down the road, shadows in the darkness. He raised his eyes and brought up his binoculars. Ayup. Figures flitting from rooftop to rooftop as well; it was as if there were two sets of streets, one on the ground and one at roof level.
I wonder how they control burglary here, he thought, and went on in a calm, carrying voice:
"Second and Third Platoons will fire and reload. Volley fire on the word of command only. Sergeant Smith, you will fire three three-second bursts at the command for volley fire. Understood?"
"Sir, yessir!"
A knot gripped the pit of his stomach as he saw the crowd milling, thickening as more and more pushed up, the sound of their voices growing. He could hear men shouting, probably haranguing the others and whipping them up to attack.
"Christ, I hate this," he muttered, then laughed harshly. O'Rourke made an interrogative sound, and Hollard went on, "I was just thinking how much I hate shooting people who can't shoot back-but when we finally get at Walker, I'm going to hate it even more, because his goons will be able to shoot back."
A long, baying snarl, and the mob was running at him, filling the street. There was a slight quiver along the line of bayonets ahead of him-picking targets. O'Rourke looked at him, and Hollard nodded.
The company commander filled his lungs. "Fire! "
BAAAMMM! The rifles fired a lacing of red needles into the gloom.
Run away, Hollard pled silently. Please, run away. Don't make us do this.
The Gatling opened up, the operator turning the crank three times; braaaaaaapppp, like a giant tearing canvas between his hands, and a stream of brass cartridges poured out of the bottom of the weapon. Braaaaaaapppp. Braaaaaaapppp.
Jesus, I'm glad it's dark.
Then there was a long whhhtt from one of the buildings ahead, and an arrow went by him, more sensed than seen in the flickering light of the torches. A Marine stumbled back from the firing line, fumbling at the shaft stuck in his hip, moaning. More arrows flitted past, a few hitting the timber of door frames and quivering like angry bees.
"Corpsman! Corpsman!"
Stretcher bearers trotted forward. As they did, the squads stationed on the rooftops opened up. A distinctive muffled badaff marked the rifle grenades, and then vicious red cracking sounds as they burst on the rooftops. Something caught fire from one, and then muzzle flashes stabbed out at the figures outlined against the flames, slow, deliberate, aimed fire.
Not all of them were dead; something arched down from a rooftop, trailing red sparks, and burst in a puddle of flames on the roadway. The fire was slow and red-sullen, not the quick rush of kerosene- sesame oil. It still burned, and a Marine's uniform started to burn, until comrades rolled him and beat out the flames. Another call for corpsmen went up, and Kenneth Hollard ground his teeth in rage.
"Smith! Rake that side of the street!" Hollard snapped. "O'Rourke, keep an eye on the mob."
The crowd had stopped as the torrent of lead plowed into it; scores were down, dead or screaming or moaning and twitching. The rest wavered and eddied. The Gatling crew ran their weapon back out of the infantry formation and wheeled it around to the left, the noncom in charge spinning the elevation wheel. Then the harsh tearing sound of the machine gun began again, long bursts this time as she worked the crank. The stream of bullets worked down the length of the rooftops on that side of the street, tearing through the soft adobe bricks and sending spatters of it back down into the roadway. More than a few bodies followed, tumbling down to thump into the packed clay.
And at last they were running, back the way they had come- except for the piled dead and wounded.
"Captain O'Rourke, we'll move forward now," he said. "Let's get them pinned back in the quarantine area."
Where they'll all die unless they come out and accept inoculation, he thought, then pushed the knowledge away.
"I think we should have parties moving forward on the roofs to either side, sir," O'Rourke said.
"See to it, Paddy. Have a couple of working parties bring out some ladders, too."
Babylonians kept those for accessing their roofs, taking them down at night when they weren't sleeping on their roofs to escape the heat.
"Yes, sir. Good idea."
The Marines moved forward in a line of bayonets, the Gatling crew dragging the bodies aside so their weapon could pass.
Hollard picked his way through the bodies. I should get some of Kash's people here to pick up the wounded rioters… How long to get the situation here under control? Couple of weeks, if Kashtiliash does the right things. Then-
A rifle fired not ten feet behind him. He spun, to see a Babylonian falling back onto the pile of dead where he'd lain concealed. Two more were up and charging, bronze knives in their hands, faces contorted and screaming. And they were close. Hollard clawed at his holster, the Python coming free with glacial slowness. An attacker's head exploded, close enough to spatter across his arm and torso. He shot the third at point-blank range, the muzzle blast of three quick shots burning the wool of the man's tunic, his body jerking under the impacts.
Raupasha was standing, lowering the Werder from her shoulder. Even in the darkness, he could see the smoke rising from the muzzle. Her dog crouched at her feet, growling.
"Ah… it seems you've paid off your debt, Princess," he said slowly, waving away the concerned faces that turned toward him.
"No," Raupasha said, her face pale and eyes wide. "I've just begun."
"Well, now that we're here, we have a slight problem-how do we keep the locals from spearing us or running away before we can talk?" Doreen Arnstein said. "Sort of hard to get them into the Anti-Walker League if they stick sharp pointies into us first."
The Anatolian plateau lay two thousand feet below them, dawn's long shadows stretching across it, stretches of green cropland and dun pasture amid a rocky, rolling landscape with high forested mountains to the north. It was bleak enough, but less so than the arid barrens Ian remembered from visits to Turkey in the twentieth; the raw bones of the earth less exposed by millennia of plows and axes and hungry goats.
Ian shrugged against his heavy sheepskin jacket. "I'm thinking, I'm thinking," he said.
The city of Hattusas, capital of the Hittite Empire, lay below. It was smaller than Babylon-he estimated its total area at around four hundred acres-and it lacked the gargantuan ziggurats that marked the cities of the Land Between the Rivers. Yet it had a brooding majesty of its own, surrounded by cyclopean walls of huge irregular blocks in the shape of a rough figure eight. On a rocky height at the eastern edge of the city was a great complex of palaces, some with ornamental gardens on the flat roofs and trees planted about them. Elsewhere were twisted streets of buildings; castlelike fortresses and temples, scores of them. The smoke of sacrifice rose up from them, and crowds were packed densely into the sacred precincts.
He suspected that they were packed everywhere in the city that had any associations of sacredness, with the Emancipator cruising overhead. They'd opened some of the slanting windows, and he could hear the turmoil as well as see it. The gates were open, and people on foot were streaming out of the city, followed by laden wagons and preceded by a few chariots whose owners lashed their teams to reckless speed.