—and Sergeant Bourne. The Molt sword blade was a sandwich of malleable iron welded to either side of a core of high carbon steel, quick-quenched to a rich blue after forging. That razor-sharp steel and the black iron which gave the blade resilience glowed momentarily cyan in reflecting the bolt flicking past them, brighter for that instant than the sun.
Hammer flattened behind the iridium bulkhead, his commo helmet howling with static induced by the bolt which had bubbled the plastic surface.
The trooper who should have disarmed Profile Bourne was one of those whose eyes were drawn by the bolt to the warrior in the combat car. The autochthon's sword sparked on the lip of the fighting compartment and bounced out. The Molt himself twisted. His face had two eyesockets but only one eye, and the wrinkles were bulged from his features when his head absorbed the energy of the single shot.
The driver of Hammer's car had no view of the scene behind him. He drew a pistol and presented it awkwardly through his hatch, trying to aim at Bourne while still holding the car steady with one hand.
"No!"cried the trooper who had tried to disarm Bourne, windmilling his arms as he made sure he was between the sergeant and the guns threatening him.
Lieutenant Hawker and the trooper with whom he struggled now separated cautiously,Hawker releasing the submachine gun and the man from A Company licking the scraped knuckles of his left hand. There was a pop in the lieutenant's helmet, static from a message he did not himself receive, and the sound level dropped abruptly as both combat cars grounded and cut their fans.
The Molt's sword had stuck point first in the soil. It rang there, a nervous keening that complemented the cries of the infant Molt, dumped without ceremony on the driver's seat when Hawker had gotten into the jeep. The big lieutenant walked back toward his vehicle and lifted the Molt with both hands to hide the fact that they were both trembling.
Colonel Alois Hammer reappeared, standing up with deliberation rather than caution. He held something in his left hand which he looked at, then flipped like a coin to fall spinning onto the ground near the sword. It was the sapphire condensing plate from a combat car's navigation display, a thick fifty-millimeter disk whose internal cross-hatching made it a spot of fluid brilliance in the sunlight.
"He was holding that," said the colonel, pointing to the disk with the pistol in his right hand. He fired, igniting grass and fusing a patch of soil without quite hitting his target. "I didn't know they could do that," and the condensing plate shattered like a bomb, the scored lines providing a myriad fracture sites.
Hammer fired twice more into the mass of glittering particles that carpeted the ground.
"Now, kid, it could be a lot worse," muttered Enzo Hawker as he patted the shivering infant's back and wondered if that were true for the little Molt, for any of them. The sounds of distant battle were like hogs rooting among the mast, shellfire and diesels and the mighty soughing of the Slammers' ground-effect vehicles.
"Hey!" called Sergeant Bourne, holding his weapon vertical again and aloft at the length of its sling."Still want this, Colonel?"His voice was high and hectoring, a reaction to having made a shot that he would never have dared attempt had he paused to think about what he was doing. A millimeter, two millimeters to the right, and the bolt would have expended itself on Hammer's face an instant before the sword finished the business.
"Disarm the man," Hammer ordered in a voice as far away as the breeze moving wispy clouds in the high stratosphere.
"Sure,allright," said Profile,and perhaps only Hawker realized that the brittle edge in his voice was terror and not a threat. The sergeant's left hand fumbled with the sling catch while his right hand held clear the submachine gun, though its barrel was by now cool enough to touch.
"Only one thing—" the enlisted man added.
"Profile, don't—" said Hawker, aware that three tribarrels were again aimed at his partner's chest.
"Only you better keep the Loot on his console,"Bourne completed as he flung his weapon to the ground. "Until you hunt up somebody else who knows how to use the bloody gear, at least."
Three pistol bolts struck within a palm's scope, the first shattering the urn of blue john. The other two sparkled among the shivered fragments, reducing some of the fluorspar to its ionized constituents. Other chips now ranged in color from gray to brilliant amethyst, depending on how close they had been to the momentary heat. Larger chunks, the upper third of the urn, cascaded over the gun the Molt had dropped and, dropping it, disappeared.
Ozone and nascent fluorine battled for ascendancy between themselves, but neither could prevail over the stench of death.
Someone had kicked Alexander Radescu in the temple as he flopped backward to the floor. His memory of the past thirty seconds was a kaleidoscope rather than a connected series, but he was not sure that the blow had anything to do with his disorganization. The gun muzzle flickering like a strobe light while the white glow of the iridium remained as a steady portent of further death . . .
Radescu's right hand lay across his gilded cap, so he could don it again without looking down. He stumbled on his first step toward Chief Tribune Antonescu, but he knew what was binding his right foot and knew also that he dared not actually view it.
Lifting his foot very carefully to clear what was no longer Nikki or anything human, the young general murmured, "I'm going to be fine if I don't think about it. I just don't want to think about it, that's all." His tone would have been suitable had he been refusing a glass of sherry or commenting on the hang of a uniform. He couldn't keep from remembering and imagining concrete realities, of course, but by acting very carefully he could keep them from being realities of his experience.
The screams had not stopped when the Molt warrior disappeared. Most of the crowd still did not know what had happened. Would the Lord that Alexander Radescu were as ignorant!
"I was afraid you'd been shot, my boy," said Grigor Antonescu, politic even at such a juncture,"by that—"he nodded toward the spilled crystals of bluejohn, cubic and octahedral, and the gun they lay across like a stone counterpane"—or the other."
Staring over his shoulder, Radescu saw Major Steuben picking his way toward them with a set expression and quick glances all around him, ready now for any target which presented itself. Hammer's bodyguard had been marginally too late for revenge, and not even his reflexes would have been quick enough to save Nikki. None of the rest mattered to Radescu, not the dead or the maimed, those catatonic with fear or the ones still screaming their throats raw.
But that was over, and the past could not be allowed to impede what the future required.
"This can't go on, Uncle Grigor," Radescu said with a twist of his neck, a dismissing gesture.
The Chief Tribune, whose face and robes were now as much red as white, said, "Security, you mean, Alexi? Yes, we should have had real guards, shouldn't we? Perhaps Hammer's men . . . ."
In his uncle's reasonable voice, Radescu heard himself—a mind that should have been in shock, but which had a core too tough to permit that in a crisis.
Members of the Honor Guard were running about, brilliant in their scarlet uniforms and almost as useless in a firefight as the unarmed militia "officers" attending the ball. They were waving chrome and rhodium-plated pistols as they spilled in through the doors at which they'd been posted to bar the uninvited. If they weren't lucky, there'd be more shots, more casualties . . . .
"Not security, not here at least," said General Radescu, gesturing curtly at one of the Honor Guards gagging at a tangle of bodies. "It's the war itself that has to be changed."