Light flickering through the panels of the mall disabused him of his hopes. A torch-lit column was marching over the river. What the rioters had done to the City Offices suggested that they weren't headed for the cathedral now to pray for peace.
"Let's get inside," said Charles Desoix. "When this is all over, then you can thank me."
He didn't need to state the proviso: assuming either of us is still alive.
Chapter Fourteen
Tyl hadn't ridden in the little elevator off the back of the rotunda before. He and the UDB officer just about filled it, and neither of them was a big man.
Of course, in his armor and equipment Tyl wasn't the slim figure he would have cut in coveralls alone.
"Don't like to leave the guys before we know just what's happening here," he said aloud, though he was speaking as much to his own conscience as to the UDB officer beside him.
Tyl would have hated to be bolted behind steel shutters below, where the sergeant major was arranging temporary billets for the troops. The windowed Consistory Room was the next best thing to being outside—
And headed away from this Lord-stricken place!
"Up here is where we learn what's happening,"Desoix said reasonably, nodding toward the elevator's ceiling. "Or at least as much as anyone in the government knows," he added with a frown which echoed the doubt in his words.
The car stopped with only a faint burring from its magnetic drivers. The doors opened with less sound even than that. Tyl strode into the Consistory Room.
He was Colonel Hammer's representative and the ranking Slammer on this continent. So long as he remembered that, nobody else was likely to forget.
There were fewer people in the big room than there had been in the morning, but their degree of agitation made the numbers seem greater. Marshal Dowell was present with a pair of aides, but those three and the pair of mercenaries were the only men in uniform.
The Chastain brothers smiled with frozen enthusiasm when Tyl nodded to them.They wore dark suits of conservative cut—and of natural off-planet fabrics that gave them roughly the value of an aircar. Everyone else in the room was avoiding the Chastains. Backs turned whenever one of the twins attempted to make eye contact.
Berne, the City Prefect, didn't have even a twin for company. He huddled in the middle of the room like a clothes pole draped with the green velour of his state robe.
"Where are—" Tyl began, but he'd already lost his companion. Lieutenant Desoix was walking briskly toward the large-framed woman who seemed to be an aide to the President's wife. Neither the President nor Eunice Delcorio were here at—
Servants opened the door adjacent to the elevator. John Delcorio entered a step ahead of his wife, but only because of the narrowness of the portal. Eunice was again in a flame-red dress. This one was demure in the front but cut with no back at all and a skirt that stretched to allow her legs to scissor back and forth as she moved.
Tyl hadn't found a sexual arrangement satisfactory to him on the freighter that brought him to Bamberia, and there'd been no time to take care of personal business since he touched down.He felt a rush of lust.It was a little disconcerting under the circumstances—
But on the other hand, it was nice to be reminded that there was more to life than the sorts of things that'd been going on in the past few hours.
"You there!" President Delcorio said unexpectedly. He glared at Tyl, his black eyes glowing like coal in a coking furnace. "Do you have to wear that?"
Tyl glanced down at where Delcorio pointed with two stubby, sturdy fingers together.
"This?" said the Slammers officer. His submachine-gun hung from his right shoulder in a patrol sling that held it muzzle forward and grip down at his waist. He could seize it by reflex and spray whatever was in front of him without having to aim or think.
"Yes sir," he explained. He spoke without concern, because it didn't occur to him that anyone might think he was offering insolence instead of information. "Example for the troops, you know. I told 'em nobody moved without a gun and bandolier—sleeping, eating, whatever."
Tyl blinked and looked back at the President. "Besides," he added. "I might need it, the way things are."
Delcorio flushed. Tyl realized that he and the President were on intersecting planes. Though the two of them existed in the same universe, almost none of their frames of reference were identical.
That was too bad. But it wasn't a reason for Tyl Koopman to change; not now, when it was pretty curst obvious that the instincts he'd developed in Hammer's Slammers were the ones most applicable here.
Eunice Delcorio laughed, a clear, clean sound that cut like a knife. "At least there's somebody who understands the situation," she said,echoing Tyl's thought and earning the Slammers officer another furious glance by her husband.
"I think we can all agree that the situation won't be improved by silly panic," Delcorio said mildly as his eyes swept the room. "Dowell, what do you have to report?"
There had been movement all around the room with the arrival of the Delcorios but it was mostly limited to heads turning. Major Borodin, who'd been present after all—standing so quietly by a wall that Tyl's quick survey had missed him—was marching determinedly toward his executive officer. Desoix himself was alone. His lady friend had left him at once to join her mistress, the President's wife.
But at the moment, everyone's attention was on Marshal Dowell, because that was where the President was looking.
"Yes, well," the army chief said. "I've given orders that a brigade be returned from Two as quickly as possible. You must realize that it's necessary for the troops to land as a unit so that their effect won't be dissipated."
"What about now?" cried the City Prefect. He stepped forward in an access of grief and rage,fluttering his gorgeous robes like a peacock preparing to fly."You said you'd support my police, but your precious soldiers did nothing when those scum attacked the City Offices!"
One of Dowell's aides was speaking rapidly into a communicator with a shield that made the discussion inaudible to the rest of the gathering. The marshal glanced at him, then said, "We're still not sure what the situation over there is, and at any rate—"
"They took the place," Tyl said bluntly.
In the Slammers you didn't stand on ceremony when your superiors had bad data or none at all in matters that could mean the life of a lot of people. "Freed their friends, set fire to the building—hung at least some of the folks they caught. Via, you can see it from here, from the window."
He gestured with an elbow, because to point with his full arm would have moved his hand further from the grip of his weapon than instinct wanted to keep it at present.
Perhaps because everyone followed the gesture toward the panels overlooking the courtyard, the chanted . . . freedom . . . echoing from that direction became suddenly audible in the Consistory Room.
Across the room, the concealed elevator suctioned and snapped heads around. The officer Desoix had nodded to downstairs, the CO of the Executive Guard, stepped out with a mixture of arrogance and fear. He moved like a rabbit loaded with amphetamines. "Gentlemen?" he called in a clear voice. "Rioters are in the courtyard with guns and torches!"