Blaney hesitated, but he knew the XO could get the data from Control as easily—and that if Desoix asked, he already knew the answer even though Gun Three was far out of direct sight of the Palace of Government. "Sir," he said at last. "It's two-five-zero degrees. Over."
Normal rest position for Gun Three was 165° pointing out over Nevis Channel in the direction from which hostile ship-launched missiles were most likely to come. The crew had just re-aimed their weapon to cover the east stairs of the plaza. That was what they obviously thought was the most serious threat of their own well-being.
"Blue to Three," said Charles Desoix. "Out."
He wasn't down there with them, and he wasn't about to overrule their assessment of the situation from up here.
"Eunice is so angry,"Anne McGill murmured.Communicating with the man beside her was as important to her state of mind as the strength of his arm around her shoulders."I'm afraid,mostly—" and the simplicity of the statement belied its truth "—and so's John, I think, though it's hard to tell with him. But Eunice would like to hang them all, starting with the Bishop."
"Not going to be easy to do," Desoix said calmly while he adjusted the imager one-handed and prayed that it wouldn't show what he thought he saw in the shuddering flames.
It did. Men and women in police uniforms were being thrown from the roof of the office building. They didn't fall far: just a meter or two, before they were halted jerking by the ropes around their necks.
Within the Consistory Room,voices burbled.Light brightened momentarily as someone turned up a wall sconce. It dimmed again as abruptly when common sense overcame a desire for gleaming surroundings.
The clear panels surrounding the circular room were shatterproof vitril. They were supposed to stop bricks or a slug from any weapon a man could fire from his shoulder, and the layer of gold foil within the thermoplastic might even deflect a powergun bolt.
But only a fool would insist on testing them while he was on the other side of the panel. That kind of test was a likely result of making the Consistory Room a beacon on a night like this.
Anne straightened slightly when she heard the sounds in the room behind them, but she didn't move away as Desoix had expected her to do. "There!"she said in a sharp whisper, pointing down toward the river. "They're moving . . . They—are they coming for us?"
Desoix used both hands to steady the imager, though he kept the magnification down to ten power. The fuel fires provided quite a lot of light, and the low clouds scattered it broadly for the intensification circuits.
"Those are Hammer's men," the UDB officer said as the scene glowed saffron in the imager's field of view.
The troopers crossing the river on the barges moored there were foreshortened by the angle and flattened into two dimensions by the imaging circuitry,but there were a lot of them. Enough to be the whole unit, the Lord willing—and better the Slammers have the problems than United Defense Batteries.
Desoix's helmet said in Control's calm voice, "Captain Koopman of Hammer's Regiment has been calling the officer of the day on the general frequency. The OOD has not replied. Now Captain Koopman is calling you. Do you wish—"
"Patch him through," Desoix ordered. Anne's startled expression reminded him that she would think he was speaking to her, but there wasn't time to clear that up now.
"—warn the guards not to shoot at us?" came the voice of the Slammers captain he'd met just that morning. "I can't raise the bastards and I don't want any trouble."
"Desoix to Slammers, over?" the UDB officer said.
"RogerDesoix,over,"Koopman responded instantly.The relief in the infantry captain's voice was as obvious as the threat in the previous phrase: if anybody started shooting at him and his men, he was planning to finish the job and worry later about the results.
"Tyl, I'm headed down to the front entrance right now,"Desoix said."It's quiet on this side, so don't let some recruit get nervous at the wrong time."
He'd lowered the imager and was stroking Anne's back fiercely with his free hand, feeling the soft cloth bunch and ripple over skin still softer. Her arm was around his hips, beneath the rim of his armor, caressing him as well. Hard to believe this was the woman who'd always refused to lie down on a bed with him, because if her hairdo was mussed, people might guess what she'd been doing.
Desoix turned and kissed her, vaguely amazed that the tension of the moment increased his sexual arousal instead of dampening it.
"Love," he said, and meant "love," for the first time in a life during which he'd used the word to a hundred woman on a score of planets."I'mgoingdownstairs for a moment. I'll be back soon, but wait inside."
Even as he kissed her warm lips again, he was moving toward the door and carrying the woman with him by the force of his arm as well as by his personality.
Desoix felt a moment's concern as he strode for the elevator across the circular room that he'd left his mistress to be spiked by the wondering eyes of the dozen or more men who stood in nervous clumps amidst the furniture.Anne was going to have to handle that herself, because he couldn't take her with him into what he was maybe getting into.
And if he didn't go, well—he didn't need what he'd heard in Tyl Koopman's voice to know how a company of Hammer's Slammers was going to respond if a bunch of parade-ground soldiers tried to bar their escape from a dangerous situation.
Chapter Thirteen
The way some of the Executive Guard in the rotunda were waving their weapons around would have bothered Desoix less if he'd believed the men involved had ever fired their guns deliberately. A couple of them might honestly not know the difference between the trigger and the safety catch, making the polished-marble room as dangerous as a foxhole at the sharp end of the front.
If Koopman's unit blew off the flood shutters and tossed in grenades, the rotunda was going to be as dangerous as an abattoir.
Captain Rene Sanchez must have been off-duty by now, but there were more guards in the rotunda than the usual detachment and he was among them.
"Rene," Desoix called cheerfully as he stepped off the elevator, noticing that the Bamberg officer had unlatched the flap covering his pistol. "I've come to give you a hand. We're getting some reinforcements, Hammer's men. They're on the way now.
Sanchez turned with a wild expression."Nobody comes in or out,"he said in a voice whose high pitch increased the effect of his eyes being focused somewhere close to infinity. The Guardsman was either drugged to a razor's edge, or his nerves unaided had honed him to the same dangerous state.
"We're going to take care of this, Rene," Desoix said, putting a friendly hand on Sanchez's shoulder.
The local man was quivering and it wasn't just fear. Sanchez was ready to go, go off in any direction. He was in prime shape to lead a night assault with knives and grenades—and he was just about as lethal as a live grenade, too.
You could never tell about the ones who'd never in their lives done anything real. They could react any way at all when the universe forced itself to their attention. About all a professional like Charles Desoix knew to expect was that he wouldn't like the result, whatever it turned out to be.