With the Lightnings (20 page)

Even before the sound of the gas bombs reached Daniel, he saw cargo hatches open in the side of the just-landed Alliance transport. A vehicle flew from the starship with an echoing roar. An aircar, Daniel thought, but as the car swung in silhouette against the lights of a Kostroman starship he saw that it was really an armored personnel carrier.

Though lifted and propelled by ducted fans like those of an ordinary aircar, the APC could carry twenty troops behind ceramic armor thick enough to stop small-arms projectiles. The small turret above the bow held a plasma weapon.

The APC turned toward the
Aglaia
, flying just above the water. Its downdraft blew a trough into the foam. A second APC followed the first. The transport continued to disgorge similar armored vehicles from several hatches, but the later ones headed for Kostroma City itself at low level. To unaided eyesight on the seawall their approach would look like great Vees of starlit spray.

Daniel went back down the street by which he'd approached the waterfront. He walked at a steady pace rather than calling attention to himself by running, and he stayed as close to the building fronts as projecting porches allowed.

It wouldn't have been difficult to smuggle gas bombs aboard the
Aglaia
along with the whores and the hawkers. All the hatches were open and half the crew was on liberty or drunk at any given time. After all, Kostroma was the next thing to an ally.

Not all Kostromans were allies, though. More to the point, Kostroman clans that were out of power might be willing to deal with Satan himself to change their status. Guarantor Porra was at least the next thing to a devil, but that might not be as obvious in Kostroma City as it was to an officer of the RCN.

Kostroma City would learn how free the stars of the Alliance really were. Of that Daniel was certain.

He turned left at the first corner. His own apartment was only a few blocks away, but going there would mean flipping a coin for his life. This coup had been planned with obvious attention to detail. There was an even chance that those in charge had included in their calculations Cinnabar personnel billeted in the city.

Daniel doubted that any faction on Kostroma could have carried off this operation by itself. The APCs full of Alliance commandoes were a less important factor than the Alliance intelligence officers who must have done the planning.

A pair of jitneys drove past at top speed, bouncing and squealing on irregularities in the pavement. Daniel swept off his cap and goggles, thrusting them into opposite side pockets of his jacket. He hated to lose the vision aids in the goggle lenses, but they marked him as unusual to anyone he met.

Daniel continued walking at his measured pace. He hoped he could locate Candace's townhouse; he'd only been there twice before and both times was being driven by someone else.

He needed clothing and a place to hide. If Candace could provide him with a weapon and an aircar also, that would be even better. If.

Gunfire crackled in the distant night. Small arms only, a spiteful sound that dissipated quickly among the streets and ornate facades. Candace was a very slim reed for a foreign fugitive to lean on, but he was the best Daniel Leary could think of right now.

"Five ninety-four!" Adele said decisively as she handed the monograph on garden gnomes to Prester. She might have grouped the volume either with gardens, 127, or statuary, 201, but she was at the end of a long day and feeling good at the amount she'd gotten done. "The first new category in the past hour, and a good time to stop and go home."

"Thank you, mistress!" Prester said in a tone of weary relief. She scurried off with the book. Her hands—the hands of all three of them; this hadn't been Adele's work alone—were black with the grime and mold that were inevitable results of a job like this.

Adele heard fireworks and shouting nearby. She sniffed and said, "I'd hoped that people would have worked off their Founder's Day high spirits by now, but this isn't the first time I overestimated human nature."

Prester was pasting a numbered scrap of paper to the end of a shelf. She looked over her shoulder. Adele gave her a quirky smile. Prester was adequately smart and had a dogged willingness that made up for her total inability to understand why anyone would want to store information. Her present labors deserved more reward than they were likely to get unless somebody helped.

"Vanness?" Adele said. The fellow brightened to be addressed directly. "There's obviously some partying going on. The streets may not be safe, so I want you to escort Prester to her lodgings."

She reached into her belt purse. "Here," she added. "I'll give you something in case you find a taxi."

Adele wasn't sure precisely what Hogg had said to the Chancellor, but that worthy had released the Electoral Librarian's first-quarter honorarium. Presumably this had involved a commission to the Chancellor, but by now Adele had enough contact with Daniel's servant to know that there were other possibilities. Hogg might have warned that a gang of Cinnabar sailors would smash up the Chancellor's residence if the honorarium weren't paid.

And while Bosun's Mate Woetjans and her crew couldn't have been more friendly and respectful to Adele herself, the threat might not have been empty. The casual violence with which the sailors cleared gawking locals from their path when they were working suggested they were ready to take the shortest way to accomplishing a task.

Adele noted dispassionately that when Prester smiled, her face was genuinely pretty. "But Ms. Mundy," Vanness protested. "You're at risk—"

Booted feet stamped through the door behind Adele. She turned in surprise. Armed guards wearing black and yellow berets spilled into the library. There were six or eight of them.

Markos's pale aide was one of the group. Instead of a beret she wore Zojira colors on ribbons around her upper arms. Her short cape was clasped at her throat, but the wings were slung back over her shoulders. She held a communicator in one hand and a center-grip submachine gun in the other.

"Zojiras!" Vanness shouted. He stepped forward, thrusting out his hands. God knew what he intended—to put his body between Adele and the gunmen, she supposed.

A Zojira fired, hitting Vanness in the chest and shoulder, though even at point-blank range half the burst blew splintered craters in shelving. Confetti exploded from a rank of genealogies. Kostroman weaponry was bulkier than its Cinnabar equivalent, and perhaps it wasn't as reliable, but there was nothing trivial about its effect.

Vanness spun backward, hit the floor, and bounced face up again. The submachine gun's bullets were too light to have any significant inertia. The victim's own spasming muscles flung him as though he'd been struck by lightning. Each projectile released its kinetic energy like a miniature bomb on the first solid object it struck.

Vanness's left side was a mass of blood and chips of exposed bone, but Adele doubted any of his vital organs were punctured. He had a very good chance to survive if they could bandage him before he bled out through the gaping surface wounds.

Vanness didn't cry out when he was hit. Prester screamed on a rising note, pressing her hands against her temples as if to hold her brain in.

"Put that gun up!" Adele said. She knelt beside Vanness, wondering what to use for a bandage. His own trousers were filthy from the hundreds of books he'd handled today.

The air was fanged with the smell of ozone and burned metal. The submachine gun's barrel generated a magnetic flux so dense that it ionized each pellet's light-metal driving skirt during the run up the bore.

The Zojira shooter pushed Adele away and put the muzzle of his gun against Vanness's forehead. Adele grabbed the barrel and jerked it aside. The sheathing of temperature-stable plastic burned her fingers. Somebody clubbed her from behind with a gun butt.

Adele fell sideways. The Zojira fired. Vanness's head erupted in a volcano of blood and solid matter. Each of the submachine gun's discharges was as sharp as stone snapping.

Vanness's back arched and his arms flung wide. His palms were black.

Adele lay face up. Her left side was numb, though the fiery tingling in her toes and fingertips meant she would have normal feeling back soon—if she lived.

The gunman who'd killed Vanness swung his submachine gun toward Adele. Its bore was a tiny tunnel glowing from the long bursts. Another Zojira, probably the one who'd slugged her from behind, was aiming at her head from the other side. Maybe they'd let recoil raise the gun muzzles when they fired so that they killed each other as well as her. . . .

Markos's aide shouted an order as crisp as the gunshots. She spoke in a Kostroman dialect, not Universal. That angry word was the first time Adele had heard emotion in the aide's voice.

The shooter straightened and snarled back at her. The aide socketed her submachine gun in the Zojira's navel. In Universal as precise as the directions in a gazetteer she said, "Step back and only speak when I tell you to speak. I won't warn you again."

Adele saw that she wasn't alone in thinking the aide was as deadly as a spider. The gunman turned and fired his submachine gun into a window to let out his frustrations.

The projectiles' high velocity meant that they punched neat circles the size of fifty-florin coins in the glass instead of breaking it. The plasma puffing from the muzzle flickered in reflection from the undamaged panes.

"Search and see who else is here," the aide said calmly to the Zojiras she led. She raised the communicator and spoke into it.

"Nobody else is here," Adele said in a husky voice. "Just the three of us."

There were six thugs, all of them male. They prowled the short rank of stacks, holding their guns out at arm's length as though to fend off any figure leaping from among the books. Two of them opened cartons and peered at the contents.

Adele got to her feet. Her right temple throbbed, but the momentary dizziness had passed. She stretched her left arm to the side and twisted it, making sure that it moved normally again.

Prester knelt on the floor with her forehead pressed against a bookcase. She was sobbing and her hands still squeezed her temples. Blood from the ruin of Vanness's head had dribbled to her bare toes, but she didn't seem to be aware of that.

The aide lowered the communicator and smiled faintly at Adele. "I'm to escort you to the Grand Salon, mistress," she said. Two of the gunmen looked at her. She nodded to them and added, "You two come with me. You others, take the woman there to the cage in the gardens. Report to whoever's in charge for reassignment."

"She's just an assistant," Adele said softly. "She isn't even a Hajas. Just the niece of a cousin of the Chancellor."

The aide shrugged. "Not my department," she said. "Maybe nothing will happen to her."

Two of the gunmen lifted Prester by the elbows. She hung as a dead weight, her feet drawing smears of blood on the tile floor.

"Shall we go, mistress?" the aide said. She waggled the submachine gun. That wasn't a threat; the weapon simply happened to be in her hand. Adele doubted that the woman ever threatened in the usual blustering sense of the word.

Without speaking, Adele Mundy walked into the hall and turned toward the staircase. If she delayed she'd find herself stepping in the trail of tacky blood Prester left on the floor.

The arched windows of Candace's four-story townhouse were shuttered, and there were no lights on in the front rooms to glimmer through the cracks. Candace lived with a retinue of twenty servants, so even if he himself had left the city there was certain to be somebody still in the house.

Daniel stepped into the shallow door alcove and knocked with the pads of his fingertips. The slapping sound of flesh on steel was enough to be heard inside without rousing the whole street. The panel was armored to resist battering rams.

Each of the tiles covering the facade was divided diagonally, half blue and half white; figured friezes separated the floors. The pattern seemed to strobe in direct sunlight because the rods and cones of the human eye didn't register at quite the same point on the retina. Now Daniel's only reaction was to wish the background was a neutral gray that his uniform would blend with. He felt as exposed as an infant in a hog pen.

There wasn't much traffic in Kostroma City tonight. You couldn't really call the situation quiet, though, because every few minutes there were gunshots somewhere in the darkness. Occasionally a firefight spread its lingering roar, and twice Daniel heard plasma cannon in use. The beams of ions had a hissing snarl that distance quickly muffled, but stone or concrete in their path fractured loudly.

Metal burned. A door like this one would expand in a bellowing white inferno, rising to the fourth story and scouring tiles from the wall in shattered fragments.

An eyehole opened at the side of the alcove. There was no illumination within, but Daniel caught the movement as a lighter shadow appearing among darker ones.

"It's Lieutenant Daniel Leary," he hissed. "Quick, let me in before somebody comes by."

The eyehole closed. Daniel waited a moment for bolts to draw back. He heard nothing. He patted the panel again with his fingertips.

Ducted fans thrummed through the sky. The vehicle was too low over the housetops for Daniel to see it, but he could tell from its powerful note that the motors supported not an ordinary aircar but the twenty-odd tons of an APC. Window sashes rattled.

The Alliance vehicle passed on, still invisible. There was no sound within the house.

Daniel hammered on the door panel with his balled fist, making the steel ring. "Candace!" he shouted. "Let me in! Now! It's Daniel Leary!"

There was argument inside. Daniel couldn't hear the words, but the rhythm of angry voices penetrated the metal. Daniel slammed his fist once more into the door. Making this much noise might get him killed, but by God! he wouldn't go alone.

It was a tall door and had three separate bolts. They clashed back: top, bottom and finally the heavy crossbar in the center. The door swung outward for safety: an attacker would have to break down the heavy leaf, not simply bash the bolts out of their sockets. Daniel stepped back as the panel opened enough for him to slip through, barely, into the anteroom.