He switched back to the satellite push and began folding the screen—not essential to the transmission while the face of Colonel Alois Hammer still glowed on it with tigerish intensity.
"Sir," Tyl said without any emotion to waste on the way he was closing his report, "I'll tell you more when I know more."
Then he collapsed the transceiver antenna. Hammer didn't have anything as important to say as the mob did.
Chapter Ten
The mob was pulsing toward the City Offices like the two heads of a flood surge. Powergun bolts spiked out of the mass, some aimed at policemen but many were fired at random.
That was the natural reaction of people with the opportunity to destroy something—an ability which carries its own imperatives. Tyl wasn't too worried about that, not if he had his men armed and equipped before they and the mob collided.
But when he clumped down the stairs from the trap door in the roof, he threw a glance over his shoulder. The north doors of the House of Grace had opened, disgorging men who marched in ground-shaking unison as they sang a Latin hymn.
That was real bad for President Delcorio, for Colonel Hammer's chances of retaining his contract—
And possibly real bad for Tyl Koopman and the troops in his charge.
The transit detachment was billeted on the second floor, in what was normally the turn-out room. Temporary bunks, three-high, meant the troops on the top layer couldn't sit up without bumping the ceiling. What floor space the bunks didn't fill was covered by the foot-lockers holding the troops' personal gear.
Now most of the lockers had been flung open and stood in the disarray left by soldiers trying to grab one last valuable—a watch; a holoprojector; a letter. They knew they might never see their gear again.
For that matter, they knew that the gear was about as likely to survive the night as they themselves were—but you had to act as if you were going to make it.
Sergeant Major Scratchard stumped among the few troopers still in the bunk room, slapping them with a hand that rang on their ceramic helmets. "Move!" he bellowed with each blow. "It's yer butts!"
If the soldier still hesitated with a fitting or to grab for one more bit of paraphernalia, Scratchard gripped his shoulder and spun him toward the door. As Tyl stuck his head into the room, a female soldier with a picture of her father crashed off the jamb beside him, cursing in a voice that was a weapon itself.
"All clear,sir,"Scratchard said as the last pair of troopers scampered for the door ahead of him, geese waddling ahead of a keeper with aready switch."Kekkonan's running the arms locker, he's a good man."
Tyl used the pause to fold the dish antenna of his laser communicator. The sergeant major glanced at him. He said in a voice as firm and dismissing as the one he'd been using on his subordinates, "Dump that now. We don't have time fer it."
"I'll gather 'em up outside," Tyl said. "You send 'em down to me, Jack."
He clipped the communicator to his equipment belt.Alone of the detachment, he didn't have body armor. Couldn't worry about that now.
The arms locker, converted from an interrogation room, was next door to the bunk room. The hall was crowded with troopers waiting to be issued weapons and those pushing past, down the stairs with armloads of lethal hardware that they would organize in the street where there was more space.
Tyl joined the queue thumping its way downstairs. As he did so, he glanced over his shoulder and called, "We'll have time, Sar'ent Major. And by the Lord! We'll have a secure link to Central when we do."
Chapter Eleven
For a moment, the exterior of the City Offices was lighted by wall sconces as usual. A second or two after Tyl stepped from the door into the bulk of his troops, crouching as they awaited orders, the sconces, the interior lights, and all the streetlights visible on the east side of the river switched off.
There was an explosion louder than the occasional popping of slug throwers in the distance. A transformer installation had been blown up or shorted into self-destruction.
That made the flames, already painting the low clouds pink, more visible.
A recruit turned on his hand light.The veteran beside him snarled,"Fuckhead! Use infrared on your helmet shield!"
The trooper on the recruit's other side—more direct—slapped the light away and crushed it beneath her boot.
"Sergeants to me," Tyl ordered on the unit push. He flashed momentarily the miniature lightwand that he carried clipped to a breast pocket—for reading and for situations like this, when his troops needed to know where he was.
Even at the risk of drawing fire when he showed them.
He hadn't called for noncoms, because the men here were mostly veterans with a minimum of the five-years service that qualified them for furlough. Seven sergeants crawled forward, about what Tyl had expected and enough for his purposes.
"Twelve-man squads," he ordered, using his commo helmet instead of speaking directly to the cluster of sergeants. That way all his troops would know what was happening.
As much as Tyl did himself, at any rate.
"Gather 'em fast, no screwing around. We're going to move as soon as everybody's clear." He looked at the sergeants, their face shields down, just as his was—a collection of emotionless balls, and all of them probably as worried as he was: worried about what they knew was coming, and more nervous yet about all the things that might happen in darkness, when nobody at all knew which end was up.
"And no shooting, troopers. Unless we got to."
If they had to shoot their way out, they were well and truly screwed. Just as Colonel Hammer had said—there weren't enough of them to matter a fart in a whirlwind if it came down to that.
A pair of emergency vehicles—fire trucks swaying with the weight of the water on board them—roared south along the river toward the City Offices. A huge block of masonry hurtled from the roof of an apartment building just up the street. Tyl saw its arc silhouetted against the pink sky for a moment.
The stone hit the street with a crash and half-bounced, and half-rolled, into the path of the lead truck. The fire vehicle slewed to the side, but its wheels weren't adequate to stabilize the kiloliters of water in its ready-use tank. The truck went over and skidded, rotating on its side in sparks and the scream of tortured metal—even before its consort rammed it from behind.
Someone began to fire a slug thrower from the roof. The trucks were not burning yet, but a stray breeze brought the raw, familiar odor of petroleum fuel to the hunching Slammers.
There wasn't anything in Hell worse than street fighting in somebody else's city—
And Tyl, like most of the veterans with him, had done it often enough to be sure of that.
A clot of soldiers stumbled out the doorway. Scratchard was the last, unrecognizable for a moment because of the huge load of equipment he carried.
Looked as if he'd staggered out with everything the rest of the company had left in the arms locker, Tyl thought. A veteran like Jack Scratchard should've known to—
Reinforced windows blew out of the second floor with a cyan flash, a bang, and a deep orange whoom! that was simultaneously a sound and a vision. The sergeant major hadn't tried to empty the arms locker after all.