He paused, struck by a sudden rush of empathy for the older man.
Borodin was a fine combat officer and smart enough to find someone like Charles Desoix to handle the subtleties of administration that the major himself could never manage. But though he functioned ably as battery commander, he was as lost in the job's intricacies as a man in a snowstorm. Having an executive officer to guide him made things safe—until they weren't safe, and he wouldn't know about the precipice until he plunged over it.
Desoix was just as lost in the way he felt about Lady Anne McGill; and, unlike Borodin, he didn't even have a guide.
He gripped Borodin's hand."Sergei,"he said,"I won't ask you to trust me.But I'll ask you to trust me not to do anything that'll hurt the battery. All right?"
Their eyes met. Borodin's face worked in a moue that was as close to assent as he was constitutionally able to give to the proposition.
"Then let's get back to business,"Charles Desoix said with a bright smile."We need to get a crew to Gun Five for setup, and then we'll have to juggle duty rosters for permanent manning—unless we can get Operations to send us half a dozen men from Two to bring us closer to strength."
Borodin was nodding happily as his subordinate outlined ordinary problems with ordinary solutions.
Desoix just wished that he could submerge his own concerns about what he was doing.
Chapter Nine
"Locked on," said the mechanical voice of Command Central in Tyl's ears. "Hold f—"
There was a wash of static as the adaptive optics of the satellite failed to respond quickly enough to a disturbance in the upper atmosphere.
"—or soft input," continued the voice from Colonel Hammer's headquarters, the words delayed in orbit while the antenna corrected itself.
The air on top of the City Office building was still stirred by the fans of aircars moving to and from the parking area behind. Their numbers had dropped off sharply since the last remnants of the riot were dispersed. In the twilight, it was easier to smell the saltiness from the nearby sea—or else the breezes three stories up carried scents trapped in the alleys lower down.
The bright static across Tyl's screen coalesced into a face, recognizable as a woman wearing a commo helmet like Tyl's own. Noise popped in his earphones for almost a second while her lips moved on the screen—the transmissions were at slightly different frequencies. Then her voice said, "Captain Koopman, how secure are these communications on your end?"
"Ma'am?" Tyl said, too recently back from furlough not to treat the communicator as a woman instead of an enlisted man. "I'm using a portable laser from the top of the police station. It's—I think it's pretty safe, but if the signal's a problem, I can use—"
"Hold one, Captain," the communicator said with a grin of sorts. Her visage blanked momentarily in static again.
A forest of antennas shared the roof of the building with the Slammers officer: local,regional,and satellite communications gear.Instead of borrowing a console within to call Central, Tyl squatted on gritty concrete.
His ten-kilo unit included a small screen, a twenty centimeter rectenna that did its best to align itself with Hammer's satellites above, and a laser transmitting unit which probably sent Central as fuzzy a signal as Tyl's equipment managed to receive.
But you can't borrow commo without expecting the folks who loaned it to be listening in; and if Tyl did have to stay in Bamberg City with the transit detachment, he didn't want the locals to know that he'd been begging Central to withdraw him.
The screen darkened into a man's face."Captain Koopman?" said the voice in his helmet. "I appreciate your sense of timing. I'm glad to have an experienced officer overseeing the situation there at the moment."
"Sir!" Tyl said, throwing a salute that was probably out of the restricted field of the pickup lens.
"Give me your appraisal of the situation, Captain," said the voice of Colonel Alois Hammer. His flat-surface image wobbled according to the vagaries of the upper atmosphere.
"At the moment . . ." Tyl said.He looked away from the screen in an unconscious gesture to gain some time for his thoughts.
The House of Grace towered above him. At the top of the high wall was the visage of Bishop Trimer enthroned. The prelate's eyes were as hard as the stone in which they were carved.
"At the moment, sir,it's quiet,"Tyl said to the screen."The police cracked down hard, arrested about fifty people. Since then—"
"Leaders?" interrupted the helmet in its crackling reproduction of the colonel's voice. Hammer's eyes were like light-struck diamonds, never dull—never quite the same.
"Brawlers,street toughs,"Tyl said contemptuously. "A lot of 'em, is all.But it's been quiet, and . . ."
He paused because he wasn't sure how far he ought to stick his neck out with no data, not really—but his commanding officer waited expectantly on the other end of the satellite link.
"Sir," Tyl said, determined to do the job he'd been set, even though this stuff scared him in a different way from a firefight. There he knew what he was supposed to do. "Sir, I haven't been here long enough to know what's normal, but the way it feels out there now . . ."
He looked past the corner of the hospital building and down into the plaza. Many of the booths were still set up and a few were lighted—but not nearly enough to account for the numbers of people gathering there in the twilight. It was like watching gas pool in low spots, mixing and waiting for the spark that would explode it.
"The only places I been that felt like this city does now are night positions just before somebody hits us."
"Rate the players, Captain," said Hammer's voice as his face on the screen flickered and dimmed with the lights of an aircar whining past, closer to the roof than it should have been for safety.
The vehicle was headed toward the plaza. Its red and white emergency flashers were on, but the car's idling pace suggested that they were only a warning.
As if he knew anything about this sort of thing, Tyl thought bitterly. But the colonel was right, he could give the same sort of assessment that any mercenary officer learned to do of the local troops he was assigned to support. It didn't really matter that these weren't wearing uniforms.
Some of them weren't wearing uniforms.
"Delcorio's hard but he's brittle,"Tyl said aloud."He'd do all right with enough staff to take the big shocks, but what he's got . . ."
He paused, collecting his thoughts further. Hammer did not interrupt, but the fluctuation of his image on the little screen reminded Tyl that time was passing.
"All right," the Slammers captain continued. "The police, they seem to be holding up pretty well. Berne, the City Prefect, don't have any friends and I don't guess much support. On that end, it's gone about as far as it can and keep the lid on."
Hammer was nodding, but Tyl ignored that too. He had his data marshalled, now, and he needed to spit things out while they were clear to him. "The army, Dowell at least, he's afraid to move and he's not afraid not to move. He won't push anything himself, but Delcorio won't get much help from there.