"I'm on the way," Jolober repeated. He shot onto the street, still on direct thrust because ground effect wouldn't move him as fast as he needed to go.
The entrance of the China Doll was cordoned off, if four port patrolmen could be called a cordon. There were over a hundred soldiers in the street and more every moment that the siren—couldn't somebody cut it? Jolober didn't have time—continued to blare.
That wasn't what Stecher had meant by a "crowd control problem." The difficulty was in the way soldiers in the Division Léégèère's mottled uniforms were shouting—not so much as onlookers as a lynch mob.
Jolober dropped his chair onto its skirts—he needed the greater stability of ground effect. "Lemme through!" he snarled to the mass of uniformed backs which parted in a chorus of yelps when Jolober goosed his throttle. The skirt of his plenum chamber caught the soldiers just above the boot heels and toppled them to either side as the chair powered through.
One trooper spun with a raised fist and a curse in French. Jolober caught the man's wrist and flung him down almost absently. The men at the door relaxed visibly when their commandant appeared at their side.
Behind him, Jolober could hear off-duty patrolmen scrambling into the street from their barracks under the port offices. That would help, but—
"You, Major!" Jolober shouted, pointing at a Division Léégèère officer in the front of the crowd. The man was almost of a size with the commandant; fury had darkened his face several shades beyond swarthiness. "I'm deputizing you to keep order here until I've taken care of the problem inside."
He spun his chair again and drove through the doorway. The major was shouting to his back, "But the bastard's shot my—"
Two Droids were more or less where Jolober had expected them, one crumpled in the doorway and the other stretched full length a meter inside. The Droids were tough as well as strong. The second one had managed to grasp the man who shot him and be pulled a pace or two before another burst into the back of the Droid's skull had ended matters.
Stecher hadn't said the shooter had a submachine gun. That made the situation a little worse than it might have been, but it was so bad already that the increment was negligible.
Droids waited impassively at all the gaming stations, ready to do their jobs as soon as customers returned. They hadn't fled the way human croupiers would have—but neither did their programming say anything about dealing with armed intruders.
The Dolls had disappeared. It was the first time Jolober had been in the main hall when it was empty of their charming, enticing babble.
Stecher and two troopers in Slammers' khaki, and a pair of technicians with a portable medicomp stood on opposite sides of the archway leading into the back of the China Doll. A second patrolman was huddled behind the three room-wide steps leading up from the main hall.
Man down, Jolober thought, his guts ice.
The patrolman heard the chair and glanced back. "Duck!" he screamed as Sergeant Stecher cried, "Watch—"
Jolober throttled up, bouncing to the left as a three-shot burst snapped from the archway. It missed him by little enough that his hair rose in response to the ionized track.
There was a man down, in the corridor leading back from the archway. There was another man firing from a room at the corridor's opposite end, and he'd just proved his willingness to add the port commandant to the night's bag.
Jolober's chair leaped the steps to the broad landing where Stecher crouched, but it was his massive arms that braked his momentum against the wall. His tunic flapped and he noticed for the first time that he hadn't sealed it before he left his quarters. "Report," he said bluntly to his sergeant while running his thumb up the uniform's seam to close it.
"Their officer's in there," Stecher said, bobbing his chin to indicate the two Slammers kneeling beside him. The male trooper was holding the female and trying to comfort her as she blubbered.
To Jolober's surprise, he recognized both of them—the commo tech and the driver of the tank which'd nearly run him down that afternoon.
"He nutted, shot his way in to find a Doll," Stecher said quickly. His eyes flicked from the commandant to the archway, but he didn't shift far enough to look down the corridor. Congealed notches in the arch's plastic sheath indicated that he'd been lucky once already.
"Found her, found the guy she was with, and put a burst into him as he tried to get away." Stecher thumbed toward the body invisible behind the shielding wall. "Guy from the Léégèère, an El-Tee named Condorcet."
"The bitch made him do it!" said the tank driver in a scream strangled by her own laced fingers.
"She's sedated," said the commo tech who held her.
In the perfect tones of Central's artificial intelligence, Jolober's implant said, "Major de Vigny of the Division Léégèère requests to see you. He is offering threats."
Letting de Vigny through would either take the pressure off the team outside or be the crack that made the dam fail. From the way Central put it, the dam wasn't going to hold much longer anyhow.
"Tell the cordon to pass him. But tell him keep his head down or he's that much more t'clean up t'morrow," Jolober replied with his mike keyed, making the best decision he could when none of 'em looked good.
"Tried knock-out gas but he's got filters," said Stecher. "Fast, too." He tapped the scarred jamb. "All the skin absorptives're lethal, and I don't guess we'd get cleared t' use 'em anyhow?"
"Not while I'm in the chain of command," Jolober agreed grimly.
"She was with this pongo from the Léégèère," the driver was saying through her laced fingers. "Tad, he wanted her so much, so fucking much, like she was human or something . . ."
"The, ah, you know. Beth, the one he was planning to see," said the commo tech rapidly as he stroked the back of the driver—Corporal Days—Daisy . . . "He tried to, you know, buy 'er from the Frog, but he wouldn't play. She got 'em, Beth did, to put all their leave allowance on a coin flip. She'd take all the money and go with the winner."
"The bitch," Daisy wailed. "The bitch the bitch the bitch . . ."
The Léégèère didn't promote amateurs to battalion command. The powerful major that Jolober had seen outside rolled through the doorway, sized up the situation, and sprinted to the landing out of the shooter's line of sight.
Line of fire.
"Hoffritz, can you hear me?" Jolober called. "I'm the port commandant, remember?"
A single bolt from the submachine gun spattered plastic from the jamb and filled the air with fresher stenches.
The man sprawling in the corridor moaned.
"I've ordered up an assault team," said Major de Vigny with flat assurance as he stood up beside Jolober. "It was unexpected, but they should be here in a few minutes."
Everyone else in the room was crouching. There wasn't any need so long as you weren't in front of the corridor, but it was the instinctive response to knowing somebody was trying to shoot you.
"Cancel the order," said Jolober, locking eyes with the other officer.
"You aren't in charge when one of my men—" began the major, his face flushing almost black.
"The gate closes when the alarm goes off!" Jolober said in a voice that could have been heard over a tank's fans. "And I've ordered the air defense batteries," he lied, "to fire on anybody trying to crash through now. If you want to lead a mutiny against your employers, Major, now's the time to do it."
The two big men glared at one another without blinking. Then de Vigny said, "Blue Six to Blue Three," keying his epaulet mike with the code words. "Hold Team Alpha until further orders. Repeat, hold Alpha. Out."
"Hold Alpha," repeated the speaker woven into the epaulet's fabric.
"If Condorcet dies," de Vigny added calmly to the port commandant, "I will kill you myself, sir."