"Well, that should be over very shortly, shouldn't it?" Eunice said. Nothing in her voice hinted at the way her body had momentarily lost control. "Marshal Dowell has gone to Two himself to expedite movement of the troops."
The technical phrase came from her full lips with a glitter that made it part of a social event. Which, in a manner of speaking, it was.
"Blood and Martyrs," Tyl said. He wasn't sure whether or not he'd spoken the curse aloud, and at this point he didn't much care.
He straightened."Ma'am,"he said,nodding stiffly to the President's wife."Ah, ma'am," with a briefer nod to Anne.
He strode back into the building without waiting for formal leave. Over his shoulder, he called, "I need to go check on the dispositions of my troops."
Especially the troops out there with Desoix, in a city that the local army had just abandoned to the rebels.
Chapter Nineteen
There were at least a dozen voices in the street outside, bellowing the bloodiest hymn Charles Desoix had ever heard. They were moving on, strolling if not marching, but the five Slammers kept their guns trained on the door in case somebody tried to join them inside the warehouse.
What bothered Desoix particularly was the clear soprano voice singing the descant, "Sew their manhood to our flags . . . ."
"All right," he said, returning his attention to the business of reconnecting the fusion powerplant which had been shut down for shipping. "Switch on."
Nothing happened.
Desoix, half inside the gun carriage's rear access port, straightened to find out what was happening. Lachere, the clerk he'd brought along because he needed another pair of hands, leaned hopefully from the open driver's compartment forward. "It's on, sir," he said.
"Main and Start-up are on?"Desoix demanded.And either because they hadn't been or because a contact had been a little sticky, he heard the purr of the fusion bottle beginning to bring up its internal temperature and pressure.
Success. In less than an hour—
"The representative of Hammer's Regiment has an urgent message," said Control's emotionless voice. "Shall I patch him through?"
"Affirmative," Desoix said, blanking his mind so that it wouldn't flash him a montage of disaster as it always did when things were tight and the unexpected occurred.
Wouldn't show him Anne McGill in the arms of a dozen rioters, not dead yet and not to die for a long time . . . .
"We got a problem," Koopman said, as if his flat voice and the fact of his call hadn't already proved that. "Dowell just did a bunk to Two. I don't see the situation holding twenty-four hours. Over."
Maybe not twenty-four minutes.
"Is the Executive Guard . . ." Desoix began. While he paused to choose his phrasing, Koopman interrupted with, "They're still here, but they're all in their quarters with the corridor blocked. I figure they're taking a vote. It's that sorta outfit. And I don't figure the vote's going any way I'd want it to. Over."
"All right," Desoix said, glancing toward the pressure gauge that he couldn't read in this light anyway. "All right, we'll have the gun drivable in thirty, that's three-oh, minutes. We'll—"
"Negative. Negative."
"Listen," the UDB officer said with his tone sharpening. "We're this far and we're not—"
Kekkonan, the sergeant in charge of the detachment of Slammers, tapped Desoix's elbow for attention and shook his head. "He said negative," Kekkonan said. "Sir."
The sergeant was getting the full conversation through his mastoid implant. Desoix didn't have to experiment to know it would be as much use to argue with a block of mahogany as with the dark, flat face of the noncom.
"Go ahead, Tyl," Desoix said with an inward sigh. "Over."
"You're not going to drive a calliope through the streets tonight, Charles," Koopman said. "Come dawn, maybe you can withdraw the one you got down there, maybe you just spike it and pull your guys out. This is save-what-you-got time, friend. And my boys aren't going to be part a' some fool stunt that sparks the whole thing off."
Kekkonan nodded. Not that he had to.
"Roger, we're on the way," Desoix said. He didn't have much emotion left to give the words, because his thoughts were tied up elsewhere.
Via, she was married. It was her bloody husband's business to take care of her, wasn't it?
Chapter Twenty
"Go," said Desoix without emphasis.
Kekkonan and another of the Stammers flared from the door in opposite directions. Their cloaks—civilian and of neutral colors, green and gray—fluffed widely over their elbows, hiding the submachine-guns in their hands.
"Clear," muttered Kekkonan. Desoix stepped out in the middle of the small unit. He felt as much a burden to his guards as the extra magazines that draped them beneath the loose garments.
It remained to be seen if either he or the ammunition would be of any service as they marched back to the Palace.
"Don't remember that," Lachere said, looking to the west.
"Keep moving," Kekkonan grunted. There was enough tension in his voice to add a threat of violence to the order.
One of the warehouses farther down the corniche—half a kilometer—had been set on fire. The flames reflected pink from the clouds and as a bloody froth from sea foam in the direction of Nevis Island. The boulevard was clogged by rioters watching the fire and jeering as they flung bodies into it.
Desoix remembered the descant, but he clasped Lachere's arm and said, "We weren't headed in that direction anyway, were we?"
"Too bloody right," murmured one of the Slammers, the shudder in his tone showing that he didn't feel any better about this than the UDB men did.
"Sergeant," Desoix said, edging close to Kekkonan and wishing that the two of them shared a command channel. "I think the faster we get off the seafront, the better we'll be."
He nodded toward the space between the warehouse they'd left and the next building—not so much an alley as a hedge against surveyors' errors.
"Great killing ground," Kekkonan snorted.
Flares rose from the plaza and burst in metallic showers above the city. Shots followed, tracers and the cyan flicker of powergun bolts aimed at the drifting sparks. There was more shooting, some of it from building roofs. Rounds curved in flat arcs back into the streets and houses.
A panel in the clear reflection of the House of Grace shattered into a rectangular scar.
"Right you are," said Kekkonan as he stepped into the narrow passage.
They had to move in single file. Desoix saw to it that he was the second man in the squad. Nobody objected.
He'd expected Tyl to give him infantrymen. Instead, all five of these troopers came from vehicle crews,tanks and combat cars.The weapon of choice under this night's conditions was a submachine-gun , not the heavier, 2cm semiautomatic shoulder weapon of Hammer's infantry. Koopman or his burly sergeant major had been thinking when they picked this team.