Laughlin threw his hands to his face, covering his mouth and a look of horror.
"Yes, all Church personalty," said Trimer. "Except what is needed for the immediate sustenance of the Lord's servants."
"All assets, real and personal, is what I'd heard," said the President. His voice was flat. The index finger of his right hand was rising as, if to make a gesture, a cutting motion.
"Yes, personal property and all the estates of the Church outside of Bamberg City itself," said Bishop Trimer. He thrust out his chin, looking even more like the bas relief on the shot-scarred hospital.
Delcorio paused, then nodded. "Yes," he said. "That's what I understood. We'll go back to—"
Eunice Delcorio looked at Tyl."You,"she said in a clear voice,ignoring her husband and seemingly ignoring the fact that he had spoken. "Shoot these two."
She pointed toward the Chastains.
Tyl raised his submachine-gun's muzzle skyward and stepped toward the President's wife.
"Sir!" shouted Ripper Jack Scratchard,close enough that his big hand gripped Tyl's shoulder. "Don't!"
Tyl pulled free. He took Eunice's right hand in his left and pressed her palm against the grip of the submachine-gun . He forced her fingers closed. "Here," he said. "You do it."
He hadn't thought he was shouting, but he must have been from the way all of them stared at him, their faces growing pale.
He spun Eunice around to face the ramp of bodies. She was a solid woman and triedto resist,but that was nothing to him now. "It's easy," he said. "See how bloody easy it is?
"Do you see?"
A shot cracked. He had been shouting. The muzzle blast didn't seem loud at all.
Tyl turned. Scratchard fired his captured weapon again. Richie Chastain screamed and stumbled across his twin; Thom was already down with a hole behind his right ear and a line of blood from the corner of his mouth.
Scratchard fired twice more as the boy thrashed on his belly. The second bullet punched through the chest cavity and ricocheted from the ground with a hum of fury.
Tyl threw his gun down. He turned and tried to walk away, but he couldn't see anything. He would have fallen except that Scratchard took one of his arms and Desoix the other, holding him and standing between him and the Delcorios.
"Bishop Trimer," he heard the President saying. "Will you adjourn with us, please,to the Palace."There was no question in the tone. "We have some details to work out, and I think we'll be more comfortable there, though my servant situation is a—"
Tyl turned.
"Wait," he said. Everyone was watching him. There was a red blotch on the back of Eunice's hand where he'd held her, but he was as controlled as the tide, now. "I want doctors for my men."
He lifted his hand toward the House of Grace, glorying in the pain of moving. "You got a whole hospital, there. I want doctors, now, and I want every one of my boys treated like he was Christ himself. Understood?"
"Of course,of course,"said Father Laughlin in the voice Tyl remembered from the Consistory Meeting.
The big priest turned to the man who had been wearing the commo set and snarled, "Well, get on it, Ryan. You heard the man!"
Ryan knelt and began speaking into the handset, glancing sometimes up at the hospital's shattered facade and sometimes back at the Slammers captain. The only color on the priest's face was a splotch of someone else's blood.
Trimer walked to the aircar, arm in arm with President Delcorio.
Borodin and Drescher had already boarded. Neither of them would let their eyes focus on anything around them.When Pedro Delcorio squeezed in between them, the two officers made room without comment.
Father Laughlin would have followed the Bishop, but Eunice Delcorio glanced at his heavy form and gestured dismissingly. Laughlin watched the car lift into a hover; then, sinking his head low, he strode in the direction of the east stairs.
Tyl Koopman stood between his sergeant major and the UDB lieutenant. He was beginning to shiver again.
"What's it mean, d'ye suppose?" he whispered in the direction of the main stairs.
"Mean?"said Charles Desoix dispassionately. "It means that John Delcorio is President—President in more than name—for the first time. It means that he really has the resources to prosecute his Crusade, the war on Two, to a successful conclusion. I doubt that would have been possible without the financial support of the Church."
"But who cares!" Tyl shouted."D'ye mean we've got jobs for the next two years? Who bloody cares? Somebody'd 've hired us, you know that!"
"It means," said Jack Scratchard, "that we're alive and they're dead. That's all it means, sir."
"It's got to mean more than that," Tyl whispered.
But as he looked at the heapsandrowsof bodies, tens of thousands of dead human beings stiffening in the sun, he couldn't put any real belief into the words.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The Slammers were gone.
Ambulances had carried their wounded off,each with a guard of other troopers ready to add a few more bodies to the day's bag if any of Trimer's men seemed less than perfectly dedicated to healing the wounded. Desoix thought he'd heard the sergeant major say something about bivouacking in the House of Grace, but he hadn't been paying much attention.
There was nothing here for him. He ought to leave himself.
Desoix turned. Anne McGill was walking toward him. She had thrown off the cloak that covered her in the cathedral and was wearing only a dress of white chiffon like the one in which she had greeted him the day before.
Her face was set. She was moving very slowly, because she would not look down and her feet kept brushing the things that she refused to see.
Desoix began to tremble. He had unlatched his body armor, but he still had it on. The halves rattled against one another as he watched the woman approach.
There was nothing there. There couldn't be anything left there now.
It didn't matter. That was only one of many things which had died this morning. No doubt he'd feel it was an unimportant one in later years.
Anne put her arms around him, crushing her cheek against his though he was black with iridium dust and dried blood."I'm so sorry," she whispered."Charles, I—we . . . Charles, I love you."
As if love could matter now.
Desoix put his arms around her, squeezing gently so that the edges of his armor would not bite into her soft flesh.
Love mattered, even now.
Afterword To Counting The Cost:
How They Got That Way
I gained my first real insight into tanks when I was about eight years old and the local newspaper ran a picture of one, an M41 Walker Bulldog, on the front page.
The M41 isn't especially big. It's longer than the Studebaker my family had at the time but still a couple feet shorter than the 1960 Plymouth we owned later. At nine feet high and eleven feet wide, the tank was impressive but not really out of automotive scale.