Tyl looked at the noncom.
Scratchard shrugged again."Kekkonan shot him.Wasn't a lotta time to discuss things."
"Kekkonan due another stripe?" Tyl asked.
"After this?" Scratchard replied, his voice bright with unexpected emotion. "We're all due bloody something, sir!"
His face blanked. His fingers began to reassemble the gun he'd picked up when he'd fired all the ammunition for both the powerguns he carried.
Tyl looked at their prisoners, the half-dozen men who'd survived when Jack sprayed the group on the altar. Now they clustered near the low building, under the guns of a pair of troopers who'd been told to guard them.
The soldiers were too tired to pay much attention. The prisoners were too frightened to need guarding at all.
Thom Chastain still wore a gold-trimmed scarlet robe. A soldier had ripped away the chain and pendant Tyl remembered vaguely from earlier in the morning. Thom smiled like a porcelain doll, a hideous contrast with the tears which continued to shiver down his cheeks.
The tears were particularly noticeable because one of the gang bosses beside Thom on the altar had been shot in the neck. He'd been very active in his dying, painting everyone nearby with streaks of bright, oxygen-rich blood. The boy's tears washed tracks in the blood.
Bishop Trimer and three lesser priests stood a meter from the Chastains—and as far apart as turned backs and icy expressions could make them.
Father Laughlin was trying to hunch himself down to the height of other men. His white robes dragged the ground when he forgot to draw them up with his hands; their hem was bloody.
The prisoners weren't willing to sit down the way the Slammers did.But nobody was used to a scene like this.
"I never saw so many bodies," said Charles Desoix.
"Yeah, me too," Tyl agreed.
He hadn't seen the UDB officer walk up beside him. His eyes itched. He supposed there was something wrong with his peripheral vision from the ozone or the actinics—despite his face shield.
"Water?" Desoix offered.
"Thanks,"Tyl said, accepting the offer though water still sloshed in the canteen on his own belt. He drank and paused, then sipped again.
Where the calliope had raked the mob, corpses lay in rows like flotsam thrown onto the strand by a storm. Otherwise, the half of the plaza nearer the seafront was strewn rather than carpeted with bodies.You could walk that far and,if you were careful, step only on concrete.
Bloody concrete.
Where the plaza narrowed toward the main stairs, there was no longer room even for the corpses. They were piled one upon another . . . five in a stack . . . a ramp ten meters deep, rising at the same angle as the stairs and composed of human flesh compressed by the weight of more humans—each trying to escape by clambering over his fellows, each dying in turn as the guns continued to fire.
The stench of scattered viscera was a sour miasma as the sun began to warm the plaza.
"How many, d'ye guess?" Tyl asked as he handed back the canteen.
He was sure his voice was normal, but he felt his body begin to shiver uncontrollably. It was the drugs, it had to be the anesthetic.
"Twenty thousand, thirty thousand," Desoix said. He cleared his throat, but his voice broke anyway as he tried to say, "They did, they . . ."
Desoix bent his head. When he lifted it again, he said in a voice as clear as the glitter of tears in his eyes, "I think as many were crushed trying to get away as we killed ourselves. But we killed enough."
Something moved at the head of the main stairs. Tyl aimed the submachine-gun he'd picked up when he stood. Pain filled his torso like the fracture lines in breaking glass, but he didn't shudder anymore. The sight picture was razor sharp.
An aircar with the gold and crystal markings of the Palace slid through the mall and cruised down the main stairs. The vehicle was being driven low and slow, just above the surface, because surprising the troops here meant sudden death.
Even laymen could see that.
Tyl lowered his weapon, wondering what would have happened if he'd taken up the last trigger pressure and spilled John and Eunice Delcorio onto the bodies of so many of their opponents.
The car's driver and the man beside him were palace servants, both in their sixties. They looked out of place, even without the pistols in issue holsters belted over their blue livery.
Major Borodin and Colonel Drescher rode in the middle pair of seats, ahead of the presidential couple.
The battery commander was the first to get out when the car grounded beside the mercenary officers. The electronic piping of Borodin's uniform glittered brighter than sunlight on the metal around him. He blinked at his surroundings, at the prisoners. Then he nodded to Desoix and said, "Lieutenant, you've, ah—carried out your orders in a satisfactory fashion."
Desoix saluted. "Thank you, sir," he said in a voice as dead as the stench of thirty thousand bodies.
Colonel Drescher followed Borodin, moving like a marionette with a broken wire. The flap of his holster was closed, but there was no gun inside. One of the Guard commander's polished boots was missing.He held the sole of the bare foot slightly above the concrete, where it would have been if he were fully dressed.
President Delcorio stepped from the vehicle and handed out his wife as if they were at a public function. Both of them were wearing cloth of gold, dazzling even though the cat's fans had flung up bits of the carnage as it carried them through the plaza.
"Gentlemen," Delcorio said, nodding to Tyl and Desoix. His throat hadn't been wracked by the residues of battle, so his voice sounded subtly wrong in its smooth normalcy.
Pedro Delcorio was walking to join his uncle from the control room beneath the altar. He carried a pistol in his right hand. The bore of the powergun was bright and not scarred by use.
The President and his wife approached the prisoners. Major Borodin fluffed the thighs of his uniform; Drescher stood on one foot, his eyes looking out over the channel.
President Delcorio stared at the Bishop. The other priests hunched away, as if Delcorio's gaze were wind-blown sleet.
Trimer faced him squarely. The Bishop was a short man and slightly built even in the bulk of his episcopal garments, but he was very much alive. Looking at him, Tyl remembered the faint glow that firelight had washed across the eyes of Trimer's face carven on the House of Grace.
"Bishop,"said John Delcorio."I'm so glad my men were able to rescue you from this—"his foot delicately gestured toward the nearest body, a woman undressed by the grenade blast that killed her "—rabble."
Father Laughlin straightened so abruptly that he almost fell when he kicked the pile of communications and data transfer equipment which his two fellows had piled on the ground. No one had bothered to strip the priests of their hardware, but they had done so themselves as quickly as they were able.
Perhaps the priests felt they could distance themselves from what had gone before . . . or what they expected to come later.
"Pres . . ." said Bishop Trimer cautiously. His voice was oil smooth—until it cracked. "President?"
"Yes,very glad,"Delcorio continued."I think it must be that the Christ-denying elements were behind the riot. I'm sure they took you prisoner when they heard you had offered all the assets of the Church to support our crusade."