She had only her naked eyes. Though she squinted she couldn't be sure—
"The Slammers, curse it!" her lover's voice snapped in her ear. Charles' tongue suppressed the further words, "you idiot," but they were there in his tone. "Is there any sign of them?"
"No, no," she cried desperately. She'd forgotten to turn on her microphone. "Charles, no," she said with her thumb pressing the switch as if to crush it. "Chastain is rising and the crowds—"
Anne didn't see the door beneath the altar open the first time. There was only a flicker of movement in her peripheral vision, ajar and then closed.
Her subconscious was still trying to identify it when a dozen flashes lighted the front of the crowd facing the altar.
For another moment, she thought those were part of the celebration, but people were sprawling away from the flashes. A second later, the popping sound of the grenades going off reached her vantage point.
Men were spilling out of the altar building. The bolts from their weapons hurt Anne's eyes, even shielded by distance and full dawn.
"Charles!" she cried, careless now of who might hear her in the gallery. "It's started! They're—"
The air near the seafront echoed with a crashing hiss like that of a dragon striking. Anne McGill had never heard anything like it before. She didn't know that it was a calliope firing—but she knew that it meant death.
Buildings hid her view of the impact zone at the west stair head of the plaza, but some of the debris flung a hundred meters in the air could still be identified as parts of human bodies.
Chapter Thirty-One
When the grenades burst, Scratchard jerked the metal door open again—a millisecond before a slow fuse detonated the last of their greeting cards. A scrap of glass-fiber shrapnel drew a line across the back of Tyl's left thumb.
He didn't notice it. He was already shooting from the hip at the first person he saw as he swung through the doorway, a baton-waving orderly whose face was almost as white as his robe except where blood spattered both of them.
Tyl's target was a meter and a half away from his gun muzzle. He missed. The red cape and shoulder of a woman beside the orderly exploded in a cyan flash.
The orderly swung his baton in desperation, but he was already dead. Jack Scratchard put a burst into his face before pointing his submachine-gun at the group on the altar above and behind them. Trimer flattened, carrying Thom Chastain with him, but blue-green fire flicked the chests of both gang bosses.
Tyl hadn't appreciated the noise. It beat on him, a pressure squeezing him into his armor and engulfing the usual thump! of his bolts heating the air like miniature lightning. He butted his weapon firmly against his shoulder and fired three times to clear the area to his right.
The targets fell. Their eyes were still startled and blinking, though the 2cm bolts had scooped their chests into fire and a sludge of gore.
Tyl strode onward, making room for the troopers behind him as he'd planned, as he'd ordered in some distant other universe.
An army officer leaped from the altar with a pistol in his hand, either seeking shelter in the crowd or fleeing Scratchard's quick gun in blind panic. The Bamberg soldier doubled up as fate carried him past Tyl's muzzle and reflex squeezed the powergun's trigger.
Short range but a nice crossing shot. Tyl was fine and the noise, the shouting, was better protection than his helmet and clamshell. But there were too many of the bastards, a mass like the sea itself, and Tyl was all alone in a tide that would wash over him and his men no matter what they—
One calliope, then the other, opened fire. Not even crowd noise and the adrenalin coursing through his blood could keep the Slammers officer from noticing that.
He stepped forward, his right shoulder against the altar building to keep him from slipping. Each shot was aimed, and none of them missed.
In a manner of speaking, Tyl Koopman's face wore a smile.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The bollards at the stair head were hidden by the units on guard, thugs wearing the colors of both factions and a detachment of hospital orderlies.
There were at least fifty heavily armed men and women in plain sight of Desoix's calliope—and it was only a matter of moments before one of them would turn from the ceremony and look up the street.
There weren't many options available then.
"Is there any sign of them?"Desoix shoutedto—at his mistress as she nattered on about what Trimer was using as he swore in his stooge as President.
Lachere was twisted around in the driver's saddle, peering back at his lieutenant and chewing the end of a cold cigar, a habit he'd picked up in the months they'd been stationed here. He didn't look worried, but Senter had enough fear in his expression for both clerks as he stared at Desoix's profile from his station at the loading console.
"Charles!" cried the voice he had let through to him again for necessity. "It's—"
Desoix had already heard the muffled exclamation points of the grenades.
"Blue Sixto Blue Three,"he said,manually cutting a way to the unit frequency. "Open fire."
As his mouth voiced the final flat syllable, his right foot rocked forward on the firing pedal. Traversing left to right, Desoix swept the stair head clear of all obstructions with the eight ravening barrels of his calliope.
The big weapon was intended for computer-directed air defense. Under manual control, its sights were only a little more sophisticated than those of shoulder-fired powerguns: a hologrammatic sight picture with a bead in the center to mark the point of impact.
Nothing more was required.
Several of the guards turned when the grenades went off, instinctively looking for escape and instead seeing behind them the calliope's lowered muzzles. One of the orderlies got off a burst with his submachine-gun.
The bullets missed by a hundred meters in the two blocks they were meant to travel. Concrete, steel, and flesh—most particularly flesh—vaporized as the calliope chewed across the stair head in a three-second burst.
Desoix switched to intercom with the hand he didn't need for the moment on the elevation control and said, "Lachere, advance toward the stair head at a—"
Faces appeared around the seawall just north of where the bollards had been before the gun burned them away. The high-intensity 3cm ammunition had shattered concrete at the start of the burst before Desoix traversed away. His right hand rolled forward on the twist-grip, reversing the direction in which the barrel array rotated on its gimbals.
More of the wall disintegrated in cyan light and the white glare of lime burned free of the concrete by enormously concentrated energy. Most of the rioters had time to duck back behind the wall before the second burst raked it.
The wall didn't save them. Multiple impacts tore it apart and then flash-heated the water in their own bodies into steam explosions.
Beneath Desoix, the skirts of the calliope's plenum chamber dragged the pavement. Air had enough mass to recoil when it was heated to a plasma and expelled from the eight tubes as the gun fired. Lachere drove forward, correcting inexpertly against the calliope's pitch and yaw.