"Orange Six to all Orange personnel," he said on the unit push. "We're going to board the nearest barge and cut it loose so we drift to the dam at the other end of the plaza . . . ."
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Some of the men were still scrambling aboard the barge, the second of the ten in line rather than the nearest, because it seemed less likely to scrape the whole distance along the concrete channel. Tyl didn't hear the order Jack Scratchard muttered into his commo helmet, but troopers standing by three of the four cables opened fire simultaneously.
Arm-thick ropes of woven steel parted in individual flashes. The barge sagged outward, its stern thumping the fenders of the vessel to port. Only the starboard bow line beside Tyl and the sergeant major held their barge against the current sucking them seaward.
The vertical lights on the walls, faintly green, merged as the channel drew outward toward the river's broad mouth and the dam closing it. They reflected from the water surface, now five meters beneath the concrete roof though it was still wet enough to scatter the light back again in turn.
"Hold one, Jack,"Tyl said as he remembered there was another thing he needed to do before they slipped beneath the plaza. He keyed his helmet on the general interunit frequency and said, "Orange Six to all Orange personnel. I am ordering you to carry out an attack on the Bamberg citizens assembled in the plaza. Anyone who refuses to obey my order will be shot."
"Via!" cried one of the nearer soldiers. "I'm not afraid to go, sir!"
"Shut up, you fool!" snarled Ripper Jack. "Don't you understand? He's just covered your ass for afterward!"
Tyl grinned bleakly at the sergeant major. Everybody seemed to have boarded the vessel, clinging to one another and balancing on the curves of hogsheads.
"Cut 'er loose," he said quietly.
Scratchard's powergun blasted the remaining cable with a blue-green glare and a gout of white sparks whose trails lingered in the air as the barge lurched forward.
Their stern brushed along the portside barge until they drifted fully clear. The grind of metal against the polymer fenders was unpleasant. Friction spun them slowly counterclockwise until they swung free.
They continued to rotate for the full distance beneath the widening channel. One trooper vomited over his neighbor's backplate, though that was more likely nerves than the gentle, gently frustrating motion.
Light coming through the louvered flood gates was already brighter than the greenish artificial sources on either wall. It was still diffuse sky-glow rather than the glare of direct sun, but the timing was going to be very close.
The barge grounded broadside with a crash that knocked down anybody who was standing. Perhaps because of their rotation, they'd remained pretty well centered in the channel. Individually and without waiting for orders, the troopers nearest the catwalk jumped to it and began to lower a floating stage like the one on the dam's exterior.
"They must've heard something,"Tyl grumbled.The variety of metallic sounds the barge made echoed like a boiler works among the planes of water and concrete. But as soon as the barge had slipped its lines, Tyl had been unable to hear even a whisper of what he knew was a sky-shattering clamor from the crowded plaza. Probably those above were equally insulated.
And anyway,it didn't matter now.Tyl pressed forward to the pontoon-mounted stage and the stairs of steel grating leading up to the open hatch of the control room. Tyl's rank took him through his jostling men, but it was all he could do not to use his elbows and gun butt to force his way faster.
He had to remember that he was commanding a unit, not throwing his life away for no reason he could explain even to himself. He had to act as if there were military purpose to what he was about to do.
Only two men could stand abreast on the punched-steel stair treads, and that by pressing hard against the rails. The control room was almost as tight, space for ten men being filled by a dozen. Tyl squeezed his way in, pausing in the hatchway. When he turned to address his troops, he found the sergeant major just behind him.
It would have been nice to organize this better; but it would have been nicer yet for somebody else to be doing it. Or no one at all.
"Stop bloody pushing?" Tyl snapped on the unit frequency. Inside the control room, his signal would have been drunk by the meter-thick floor of the plaza. No wonder sound didn't get through.
Motion stopped, except for the gentle resilience of the barge's fenders against the closed floodgates.
"There's one door out into the plaza," Tyl said simply. "We'll deploy through it, spread out as much as possible. If it doesn't work out, try to withdraw toward the east or west stairs, maybe the calliopes can give us some cover. Do your jobs, boys, and we'll come through this all right."
Scratchard laid a hand on the captain's elbow, then keyed his own helmet and said,"Listen up.This is nothin' you don't know.There's a lot of people up there."
He pumped the muzzle of his submachine-gun toward the ceiling. "So long as there's one of 'em standing, none of us 're safe. Got that?"
Heads nodded, hands stroked the iridium barrels of powerguns. Some of the recruits exchanged glances.
"Then let's go," the sergeant major said simply. He hefted himself toward the hatchway.
Tyl blocked him. "I want you below, Jack," he said. "Last man out."
Scratchard grinned and shook his head. "I briefed Kekkonan for that," he said.
Tyl hesitated.
Scratchard's face sobered."Cap'n,"he said."This don't take good knees.What it takes, I got."
"All right, let's go," said Tyl very softly. "But I'm the first through the door."
He pushed his way to the door out onto the plaza, hearing the sergeant major wheezing a step behind.
Chapter Thirty
Anne McGill couldn't see the sun, but the edges of the House of Grace gleamed as they bent light from the orb already over the horizon to the northeast.
The crucifix on the seafront altar was golden and dazzling. The sun had not yet reached it, but Bishop Trimer was too good a showman not to allow for that: the gilt symbol was equipped with a surface-discharge system like that which made expensive clothing shimmer. What was good enough for the Consistory Room was good enough for God—as he was represented here in Bamberg City.
"Anne,what's happening in the plaza?" said the tiny phone in her left ear."Do you see any sign of the, of Koopman? Over."
She was kneeling as if in an attitude of prayer, though she faced the half-open window. There were scores of others in the cathedral this morning, but no one would disturb another penitent. Like her, they were wrapped in their cloaks and their prayers.
And perhaps all of their prayers were as complex and uncertain as those of Anne McGill, lookout for a pair of mercenary companies and mistress of a man whom she had prevented from retreating with her to a place of safety.
"Oh Charles," she whispered. "Oh Charles." Then she touched the control of her throat mike and said in a firm voice, "Chastain is kneeling before Bishop Trimer in front of the crucifix. He's putting a—I don't know, maybe the seal of office around his neck but I thought that was still in the Palace . . . ."
The finger-long directional microphone was clipped to the window transom which held it steady and unobtrusive. UDB stores included optical equipment as powerful and sophisticated as the audio pickup; but in use, an electronic telescope looked like exactly what it was—military hardware, and a dead giveaway of the person using it.