"How do you know there's that many?" Cind wondered, from her sprawl two meters away from him.
"Easy," he said. "I just count their legs and divide by two. Hang on. Cind. Targets. Alpha. Thirteen thirty. Five hundred meters. Bravo. Fifteen hundred. Four—correction, three hundred seventy-five. Charlie. Sixteen hundred, four hundred. One more—Delta. Zero nine hundred, six hundred meters. Looks like he might be the big Limburger.
Monitor, please. Sten, clear."
He was using a clock locator, with twelve hundred being the central boulevard that ran from the embassy to the palace, and ranges in meters.
The spotters reported promptly. All targets that he had suggested were beyond the crowd swirl. He had looked for beings who were standing on top of things, speechifying, organizing, rabble-rousing.
Crowd roar was getting louder. Now, Sten thought, if these speech makers are just angry citizenry, concerned about injustice, in a few moments they'll shout their way to the front of the mob.
But they were not moving.
Professional-type rabble-rousers, then. Ones that whoever's throwing this masked ball would rather not sacrifice if bullets start zipping about. Or else they're just cowards, in which case I'm almost sorry for what's about to happen.
"Alex."
"Aye, lad."
"When you take your two, we'll take the windbags."
"Aye, skip. Hae y' a mo' f'r some incidental intelligence?"
"No... yes."
"Ah hae m' wee ticky ticky wi' me. Th' one thae's th' twig f'r thae flashy popper w' hae oot there?"
Sten thought...oh. Alex was talking about the detector that was linked to the bug in that elaborate pistol they had bugged in that back-alley arsenal.
"GA."
"As y' said. Th' whoppin' Camembert hae i'."
Son of a bitch, Sten thought. So. As he had thought, this "mob" was being created, built, and driven. And whoever was running this operation was also involved with a little private terrorism. And, he was morally willing to believe, even if it wasn't justified enough for an intelligence summary, willing to send a suicide bomber in to kill over four hundred Imperial Guardsmen.
"You're detached, Alex. Don't lose that ticker."
"Ah thought y'd say thae, boss. An' Ah' wish't y' t' be impress't, an' owe me one, frae bein't so self-sacrificing. Ah'm off th' net, an'll be mon'trin' frae com central. Alex, clear."
"Cind?" Sten had his hand over the com mouthpiece.
"I heard.'' She spoke into her open mike to her sniper section.
"This is Sniper Six Actual. Delta is a negative target. I say again, Delta is a negative. Over."
That target—that being—that Sten had spotted far beyond the mob's reach and surmised to be the horde-officer-in-charge was carrying the bugged pistol. As much as he wanted to hit Delta now, the target must be taken later.
"Here they come!"
"Unknown unit! ID yourself!"
"Sorry. Main Central."
Sten swung his binocs. Indeed, here came a thrust of people toward the main gate.
A stumble, really. Sten gave an order.
Irritant gas hissed from projectors atop the embassy walls. A very thin spray, and the gas was cut ten-to-one. It was dyed yellow and would stain anyone it touched. This was in case Sten or anyone else needed to ID any rioters at a later date, since the dye would take at least seven baths to scrub off.
The gas was intended to be no more than an annoyance, but was also intended to be a suggestion that worse things could happen.
The first wave fell back, blinking. Then the now-tawny troublemakers surged forward. This time they were brandishing knives, improvised spears, and firebombs.
Sten touched buttons on the det panel in front of him, and his and Alex's bombs went off. They were not bombs so much as high-pressure spray cans. They had been disguised as trash bins, streetlight bases, and anything else that would have been part of a believable street scene. Each bomb contained at least twenty liters of lubricant.
It became quite hard to walk on the slick streets just around the Imperial embassy.
Then the Tomcat Teams hit, darting out from the embassy's quickly opened and shut sally ports.
They were two-man units, one man with a willygun and orders not to use it unless the team was trapped, the other with a great pack full of what had been looted from that warehouse. Ball bearings. Many, many ball bearings, grabbed by the handful and scattered underhand.
Ball bearing mousetrap.
Tomcat.
It got much harder to be a raving rebel and not be in a seated or prone position.
The mob hesitated. The front rank was suddenly unsure of what was going on, and the rear ranks wanted to find out what was going on and get in on the looting that could be no more than seconds away.
The embassy sally ports opened again, and the two riot-control vehicles, along with the four others Sten had modified, lifted out and opened fire.
Water.
Under medium pressure. Not even at a firehose blast.
The first several ranks of the crowd decided they wanted to go home. It was cold out.
Sten would oblige them, as his second wave of gravlighters boomed out of the embassy. Screams, and people dove out of the way as the dozer blades closed on them before they realized that the gravlighters were deliberately attacking at three meters above the ground.
The lighters weren't intended as weapons—they drove on at speed, toward the barricades down the side streets. They shattered against them once, spun back, and hit again, piled debris and civilian gravsleds spinning out of the way. Now the streets were clear.
The lighters turned and sped back into the embassy grounds. No casualties. Sten sighed in relief—this had been the most dangerous part of his plan, the most likely to produce Imperial casualties.
The mob was swaying, indeterminate.
That gravlighter attack was Sten's bit of humanitarianism, planned to give "his" mob a back door when the next part of the plan was implemented. He, too, wanted them to go home.
"Now!"
And now people died.
Bhor fingers touched firing switches, and missiles spat out of launch tubes. They were fire-and-forget, but even a guided or unaimed missile could not have missed. Both impacted at point of aim: one on the top floor of that slum, the other in the penthouse of the office building.
Beings who had had no intention of involving themselves in real physical violence, let alone in real jeopardy, had bare seconds to blink, as two fiery lines homed, and the missiles blew.
Blastwaves curled out... and other fingers touched triggers.
Alpha... Bravo... Charlie...
The street speakers were dead, too, even before they had time to look up to see the plume of death smoke from their superiors' lairs.
The mob was frozen.
And the gates of the embassy swung open.
The yammers, shouts, and screams stopped.
There was utter silence.
And then there came the even crunch of boots on rubble.
Sten, flanked by twenty Gurkhas, strode out the embassy gate.
All of them held kukris, the half-meter-long curved-blade knives, held at a forty-five degree angle to their chests, at the ready.
They came forward ten paces. And stopped, without orders.
Ten Bhor, willyguns leveled, came out, veed back for flank security. They, too, crashed to a halt.
There was a murmur from the crowd. These were the killers. The little brown men who took no prisoners, men who, the wild stories had said, killed and ate their own children if they were not murderous enough. All of the slanders the most skilled propagandists on Jochi had spread on the Nepalese warriors, slanders that the Gurkhas had paid no mind, now back-blasted. These men were even more terrible than the tales said. These were not men, even, but killers, who went in with the long knife, and came out leaving nothing but blood and silence behind them.