"All right, Jake. You see that hatch down there?"
"Yes, ma'am. I surely do."
"Well, this piece of shit's flag bridge is on the other side of it." She smiled up at him and waved a hand with the tick's dance-like fluidity. "Feel free to get carried away."
James Howell crouched behind his useless console in his vac suit. The laser carbine was alien to him, clumsy-feeling in his grip, but he waited almost calmly, his mind empty. There was no room for hope, and no point in fear. He was going to die, and whether it happened in a few minutes or a few hours-or even in a few months, if he was taken alive-didn't matter. He'd betrayed all he was sworn to uphold to play the great game; now he'd lost, and his own stupidity had brought all of his people to the same degrading end.
Echoes of combat quivered through the steel about him, and he glanced across the bridge at Rachel Shu, small and deadly behind a bipod-mounted plasma rifle. Others crouched with them, waiting, eyes locked on the hatch. Any moment now-
The heavily-armored hatch shuddered. A meter-wide circle flared instantly white-hot, and a tongue of plasma licked through it, a searing column that leapt across the bridge. Someone got in its way and died without time even to scream as the heart of a sun embraced him.
Another bolt of fury blew the hatch from its frame in half-molten wreckage, and the first drop commando charged through it.
Howell braced his laser across the console and squeezed the stud. A dozen others were firing, flaying the armored figure with tungsten penetrators and deadly beams of light, and the invader staggered. His battle-rifle flashed white fire as he went down-an unaimed spray of heavy-caliber penetrators that chewed up consoles and people with equal contempt-and then Rachel's plasgun fired, and what hit the deck was a less than human cinder.
Tannis Gateau swallowed a curse as her point man went down. It was her fault. Other teams had already taken heavy fire; hers hadn't, and she'd let herself grow overconfident. Now she slid forward, hugging the bulkhead and trying not to think about Adams and his monster gun behind her. Her racing mind rode the tick, and she reached out through her armor sensors. She couldn't get a clear reading, but with a little help …
A hand signal brought her HQ grenadier up on the other side of the passage, and she unhooked a small device from her armor harness, then nodded.
The grenadier opened up on full auto. It was a mixed belt, mostly smoke and pyrotechnics with only a handful of light HE, for they wanted prisoners, but it did its job. Anyone beyond that hatch was hugging the deck as flash-bangs and anti-laser vapor exploded in his face when she tossed the sensor remote with a smooth, underhand motion. It bounced across the deck, unnoticed under the cover of the grenades, and she smiled the cold, distant smile of a drop commando as she keyed it alive.
Ah! She oriented her remote perspective, tallying threat sources and taking careful note of the plasma rifle, then nodded to the grenadier a second time. He ripped off another burst; then Tannis Gateau flowed into the hatchway with the uncoiling deadliness of a bushmaster, and her battlerifle's powered mounting was an extension of her own nerves. Her target was invisible behind the last of the grenade bursts, but the rifle rose without an instant's waste motion, and she squeezed off a five-shot burst of twenty-millimeter caseless. The rounds left the muzzle at eighteen hundred meters per second; the ten-millimeter sub-caliber projectiles reached their target virtually instantaneously and cut its legs from under it.
Even most drop commandos found it difficult to direct aimed fire from a remote sensor, but Tannis Gateau was an artist. Answering fire ripped back at her despite the blinding effect of me grenades, and she ignored it. She knew it was unaimed; they couldn't see her, but her eyes were in their midst.
Her rifle was a magic wand, spewing agony and death with merciless precision, and for once there was no pity in her. Her ammo belt burned through the feed chute in five- and six-shot bursts, and the answering fire ebbed. A last spattering of penetrators whined off her armor, and she went through the hatch like a panther, already calling for the medics.
"My God."
Ben Belkassem's words hung in the sickbay air, and he wondered if they were a curse or a prayer. He sank back into his chair, as nauseated as Tannis Gateau had been as she came down from the tick.
Sir Arthur Keita said nothing, only stared down at the woman in the hospital bed. Tannis's fire had sliced away her legs like a jagged scalpel, but no one pitied her. She lay there, smiling a bemused, cheerful smile, and Keita wanted to strangle her with his bare hands.
Rachel Shu was the only member of the renegades' field staff to be taken alive. He knew he should be grateful, that no one except James Howell himself could have given them more information, but simply listening to her fouled him somehow. She carried an invisible rot with her, a gangrene of the soul all the more terrible for how ordinary she looked, and she'd explained it all with appalling cheerfulness under the influence of Ben Belkassem's drugs.
Under normal circumstances, no imperial subject could be subjected to truth drugs outside a court of law- which, Keita knew, wouldn't have stopped Ben Belkassem or Hector Suares for a moment. For himself, the brigadier was just as happy that no laws had been broken. Bent, perhaps, but not broken. Shu had been taken in the act of piracy; as such, she had no rights. Keita could have had her shot out of hand, and he wanted to. Oh, how he wanted to! But she was far too valuable for that. His medicos would cosset and pamper her as they would the Emperor himself, for her testimony would put Subrahmanyan Treadwell and Sir Amos Brinkman in front of a firing squad.
He stepped back from the bed as from a plague carrier and folded himself into a chair opposite Ben Belkassem. Tannis Gateau was a white-faced ghost at his side, and silence hung heavy until the inspector broke it. "I can't-" He shook his head. "I heard it all, and I still can't believe it," he said almost Wonderingly. "All these months hunting for the cold-blooded bastards behind it, only to find this at the end of them."
"I know." Keita's lips worked as if he wanted to spit on the deck. "I know," he repeated, "but we've got it all. Or enough, anyway." He turned to Inspector Suares, standing at Ben Belkassem's shoulder. "We won't need Clean Sweep after all, Inspector."
"I can't say I'm sorry," Suares said, "but this is almost worse. I don't think any sector governor's ever been convicted of treason."
"There's always a first time," Keita said grimly. "Even for this, I suppose." He shook himself. "I'll speak to Admiral Leibniz myself; I don't want this going any further than the people in this room until we reach Soissons." He inhaled deeply, then summoned a sad smile.
"This may even help, in a way." The others looked at him in astonishment, and his smile grew a bit wider. "We'd never have gotten this far without Alley, Tannis." He nodded at Ben Belkassem. "Add it to what the Inspector has to say, and we may get that shoot on sight order dropped."
Tannis's face lit with sudden, fragile hope, but Ben Belkassem sucked in air as if he'd been punched in the belly. Keita turned at the sound, and his eyes narrowed as he saw the inspector's face.
"What?" he asked sharply
"Alicia," Ben Belkassem whispered. "My God, Alicia!"
"What about her?"
"She knows. Dear God in heaven, she knows about Treadwell!"
Keita twitched in surprise. "That's ridiculous! How could she?"
"The computers." Ben Belkassem's hands gestured in frustration as they eyed him blankly and he tried to put his racing thoughts into words. "Procyon's computers! When Megarea took out the AI, Alicia tapped into the net along with her!"
"What are you talking about?" Tannis demanded. "That's-I don't think that would be possible for a trained alpha synth pilot, much less Alley! Even if she could, Shu just told us Treadwell wasn't in the computers."