Deseau cackled like a demon. “Handier inside a car, eh, El-Tee?” he said.
Huber climbed the rest of the way out of the fighting compartment, then hopped from the plenum chamber to the ground. He started grinning also. You might as well see the humor in the screwed-up way things worked. It didn’t change things; but then, nothing did change them.
He started toward the command car, his boots squelching and tossing mud up his pants leg with each stride. He didn’t look over his shoulder to see the troopers of Task Force Sangrela watching him, but the Gendarmes watched and the driver of the big air-cushion truck stared down from the cab with a puzzled expression.
Grenades continued to crash on the north side of the camp. They’d started several fires; the sluggish flames gave off curls of black smoke.
Enough prisoners had passed through the chute that the cage meant for twenty cattle was what Huber would’ve called full. The Gendarmes seemed happy to pack more in. Well, if the former Volunteers had nothing worse in their future than an uncomfortable airship ride, they were luckier than they deserved to be.
“That one,” the loudspeaker ordered crisply. A low-intensity laser stabbed from the mount of the command car’s tribarrel. Its yellow dot quivered like a suppurating boil on the cheek of the bald-headed man nearing the end of the chute.
The fellow looked up in startled horror. One of the waiting troopers grabbed him left-handed by the shoulder, holding the sub-machine gun back like a pistol in his right where the prisoner couldn’t reach it.
The trooper walked the fellow out of the chute. Instead of leaving him for the Gendarmes, he handed him over to another of the White Mice who led him in turn to the back of the air-cushion truck.
The prisoners had been moving with something like the docility of the cattle normally loaded into the shipping containers. Now they paused; the woman two places behind the fellow who’d been taken away tried to go back.
“Move it!” the other trooper at the chute snarled, waggling his weapon.
The woman resumed her way down the chute—and out the other end to the Gendarmes, ignored by the voice from the command car. A man who’d been waiting in the crowd turned and started to force his way back through his fellows.
“Halt!” called the trooper nearest to him along the fenceline as he leveled his sub-machine gun. The prisoner tried to run, pushing at others who were trying desperately to get out of the line of fire. The sub-machine gun stuttered a short burst into the man’s legs, one bolt into the left calf and two more at the back of the right knee.
The prisoner fell, screaming with surprise. It was too soon yet for the pain to have reached him; though that’d come, it’d surely come. Only a tag of skin and one tendon connected his right thigh and lower leg.
“Two of you carry him through,” ordered the loudspeaker.
“Make sure to turn his face toward me.”
The wounded man continued to scream. He tried to stand but slipped onto his right side.
From the command car, Joachim Steuben giggled. Amplified, the sound was even more gut-wrenching than it’d seemed when Huber heard it from across the major’s desk.
The prisoners nearest the fallen man stood frozen till the trooper waggled the glowing muzzle of his sub-machine gun. Then they grabbed his arms convulsively and stumbled through the chute as he screamed even louder. One brushed the razor ribbon, leaving much of his sleeve on the wire and blood dripping from his torn arm. The wounded man’s legs didn’t bleed; the powergun bolts had cauterized the wounds.
“A moment of your time, Lieutenant Huber,” said Captain Orichos. He jumped. She’d walked over to him while his attention was on the byplay in the camp.
“Ma’am?” he said. Without thinking about it, he stiffened to parade rest. “That is, Captain?”
“Mauricia, I hope,” Orichos said. After the battle she’d resumed wearing her beret instead of a Slammers commo helmet. She took it off now and shook her short hair loose before replacing the cap. “I suppose you know your unit will be routed back with a stopover in Midway?”
“No ma’am,” Huber said with a faint grin. “There were rumors, but we’re line soldiers. Nobody tells us anything.”
“Well, I’m telling you,” Orichos said with a mixture of crispness and challenge. “I’ll be flying back by car shortly; there are some things to clear up in the capital now that the threat’s been dealt with.”
She cleared her throat and looked away. “What I’m saying, Arne, is that I hope when you arrive in Midway, you’ll get in touch with me. I’ll have some free time by then, and I’d really like to repay you for all you’ve done for the Point and for me.”
Orichos smiled. It softened and transformed her face to a remarkable degree.
“I think I can guarantee you a good time,” she said. She touched the back of Huber’s wrist, then turned and went back to her fellows.
Huber rubbed his wrist with the fingers of his other hand as he walked on, thinking about Orichos and about the shooting he’d just watched.
It’d taken skill to hit the running man and not nail a couple of the bystanders. Though it could as easily have been dumb luck: he didn’t suppose either the trooper or Major Steuben would’ve cared if some of the other prisoners had lost limbs.
Huber reached the hatch in the rear of the command car. It opened before he rapped it with the barrel of his powergun. The two men inside had their backs to him as they watched a high-resolution image of prisoners moving steadily through the chute to the shipping containers.
Joachim Steuben was as dapper as if he’d spent the past three days in Base Alpha instead of making a thousand kilometer run over difficult terrain. His companion was blond and in his thirties; Grayle’s chief civil aide, Huber recalled, the one who’d disappeared between the Assembly meeting and the time Captain Orichos found incriminating papers in the files that had been under the aide’s control.
“That one!” the aide said. What was his name? Patronus; that was it. “He’s Gerd Danilew. He was in charge of off-planet weapons purchases!”
“That one,” Steuben said, his amplified voice damped to silence when the hatch closed behind Huber. The pipper of the cab-mounted tribarrel framed the face of the sallow, moustached prisoner walking nervously between the barriers of razor ribbon.
The man looked up. Instead of trying to run, he fell in a faint as limp as if the tribarrel had decapitated him—as the slightest additional pressure of Steuben’s finger on the trigger control would’ve made it do.
“Well, carry him, then,” Steuben ordered into the pickup for the external speakers. He looked over his shoulder at Huber and raised an eyebrow in delighted amusement, then turned back and added, “Now!”
The procession resumed. Patronus kept his face rigidly forward as if he thought that by refusing to acknowledge Huber, he could deny what was going on.
Steuben rotated his full-function chair to smile at Huber. “So, Lieutenant,” he said. “I thought I’d use this opportunity to see if you’re still happy with a line command.”
Instead of the slot in the White Mice that he offered me three weeks ago, Huber thought. He shrugged and said, “Yeah, I’m happy. We did a good job here.”
He guessed he’d made that sound like a challenge, which wasn’t the smartest sort of attitude to show when you were talking to a weasel like Joachim Steuben. Huber didn’t care much at the moment.
“Indeed you did,” Steuben said, nothing in his tone but mild approval. “Both the task force and you personally …which is why my offer is still open.”
He cocked an eyebrow.
“I said I was happy!” Huber said. Via, he was going to have to watch himself. It’d be a hell of a note to come through a mission like this one and then be shot because he mouthed off to a stone killer like Joachim Steuben.