With the Lightnings (28 page)

"It's stolen?" Daniel said, squinting toward the harbor. He saw what he thought was the vessel, a trim craft tied up at a quay just at the edge of the lighted area. A yacht like Hogg described was at least as expensive as a luxury aircar.

"Next thing to it," Hogg agreed. "The owners were on the wrong side when the Hajas took over, so it got confiscated along with their houses and all. Now that the Hajas are out, the survivors are going to come claiming their stuff. Ganser figures if the
Ahura
goes missing, nobody's going to be able to prove it was his lot responsible."

Daniel looked from the yacht to the office. With his goggles down he'd be able to see through the building's windows, but identifying himself to this gang by using Cinnabar gear probably wouldn't be smart. "It still seems too good a bargain," he said.

"Yeah, I think so too," said Hogg with a sour expression. "But I don't see much choice but to keep our eyes open and go ahead."

Daniel clapped his servant on the shoulder. "When we drive to the quay to unload, we'll be on the back side of their automatic," he said. "Without an edge like that, this sort won't start anything."

He waved to the scattered ratings. "Mount up!" he ordered. "We'll transfer our rations to the ship over there, then we'll take a little vacation."

Daniel believed in planning if you had the time and information to do it; but if you didn't, you acted anyway. There was only one thing worse than trying to imagine every possible occurrence when you were for all practical purposes flying blind: remaining frozen because you
couldn't
imagine every possible occurrence.

"And if they do start something, Hogg," Daniel said as he got into the cab beside his servant, "then we'll deal with it."

Adele had made a half-hearted offer to help load the ship. Woetjans had said, "No, mistress, you're an officer," in a tone that made it sound like, "You'd be more trouble than you're worth."

Adele didn't take the implication as an insult since it was objectively true in her opinion. She stood at the top of the seawall, out of the line of traffic, and observed events.

Hogg had backed the van to where steps led down to the quay, but the distance from there to the
Ahura
was too great for the Cinnabar sailors to form a human chain. They carried the rations, one carton per trip.

Woetjans and three other sailors dismounted the automatic impeller from the police vehicle, then carried it and its case of ammunition to the ship also. The weapon had to be rigidly mounted to be of any use; the truck's pintle was welded to the frame and couldn't be removed. Either Woetjans thought she could jury-rig a mounting on the
Ahura
, or she was just making sure the gun wasn't in Ganser's hands while the Cinnabars were still in range.

The Kostromans hadn't volunteered to help load the
Ahura
. Adele doubted that Daniel would have permitted them to become involved anyway. They stood watching and occasionally talked among themselves in low voices. She knew that she was imputing sinister motives to the gang members because of their appearance, but people who went to so much effort to look sinister probably
were
a scurvy lot.

The armed sailors stayed aboard the
Ahura
while their fellows made multiple trips with the cargo. Daniel must have decided that he wanted his available weapons concentrated aboard the vehicle on which the Cinnabars hoped to escape. He'd called Adele to him; she'd shaken her head and remained where she was.

The back of the flatbed truck was twenty feet away from her. The heavy sheet of armor welded behind the cab protected the gun crew from fire from the front, but because of the way the automatic impeller was mounted, it could only sweep an arc of about sixty degrees to the right or left of the direction the truck was pointing. So long as the truck stayed where it was, the gun didn't threaten the
Ahura
.

Adele might not be any use in carrying boxes to the ship, but she was quite confident that the automatic impeller wasn't a danger to the Cinnabars so long as she survived.

Daniel had vanished within the
Ahura
to check the hull. Only then did he reappear to examine the cockpit. Now that Adele thought about it, there was only a superficial similarity between a spaceship and a marine vessel. Daniel might be the only Cinnabar present who knew anything about craft like the
Ahura
, and that because he was raised on the coast rather than from any sort of training.

Five Kostromans came out of the harbormaster's office and walked in Adele's direction. They were talking among themselves with studied innocence, but the strands of "conversation" didn't interweave: none of the thugs was listening to the others.

They were about to attack.

Three of the Kostromans, all men, went to the truck. The other two, a man and a woman, split off and stood on the seawall to Adele's other side, only six feet away. They faced the harbor, but their eyes flicked sideways toward Adele every few seconds. The man was describing the
Ahura
; the woman talked about the leaking roof that made a pool in her room every time it rained.

Adele turned her back on the pair beside her and watched them as reflections in a window of the office. When the Kostromans thought their target was no longer able to see them, both tensed.

Two of the other group hopped onto the back of the truck and sat there with their legs dangling over the side. The third man got into the cab. The engine ground for a moment, then started.

Adele lifted her right hand and ostentatiously scratched the back of her neck. Her left hand dipped into her tunic pocket and brought out the pistol, hidden in her palm.

The gun vehicle pulled twenty feet forward in a curve, then stopped. Its transmission went into reverse with a clang. The men pretending to relax on the back stood up. A sailor on the
Ahura
shouted a warning.

Adele turned toward the thugs beside her. The man started to point his submachine gun. Adele shot him at the top of the chest. The pistol snapped like a mousetrap in her hand, but the sound of the pellet hitting the man's breastbone was as loud as boards slapping. A muscle spasm threw the Kostroman backward over the seawall.

The woman lunged toward Adele instead of trying to use a weapon. Adele shot her in the throat. The pellet's temporary shock cavity gaped as wide as the woman's shoulders, nearly decapitating her. Most of the blood sprayed upward and back, but Adele felt droplets fleck her face. She turned, ignoring the touch of the dead woman's hand as inertia tried to complete the intended movement.

The truck was backing with the steering yoke reversed to bring the automatic impeller to bear on the
Ahura
. Several weapons were firing behind Adele. An impeller projectile hit the truck's armor and blew a glowing trench in the metal without penetrating.

The Kostroman gunners were behind their weapon; only their heads showed. They were thirty yards away from Adele. She aimed at the loader's nose and hit within a finger's breadth of that.

His head spun around as though a horse had kicked him; he went down. The gunner, his hand still on the impeller's charging handle, turned in surprise to look at his partner. Adele shot him in the temple.

Something stung the back of her right calf. She ignored it. She fired at the truck driver. The windshield shattered but she doubted pellets from her little pistol had enough mass to actually penetrate normal glass.

The driver leaped out of the cab, screaming and covering his face with one hand. He held a submachine gun in the other. He was moving and the light was bad. She fired twice more with no better target than his upper torso. He went down, but she could hear him still wheezing and gurgling in the darkness.

Adele walked toward the truck; it had stalled when the driver bailed out. The barrel of her pistol glowed red from the rapid fire. Pocket weapons like hers weren't intended for continuous use. The magnetic flux that accelerated pellets to 9,000 feet per second was dissipated as heat, and the light barrel didn't have enough mass to be a good heat sink. In an hour she'd have blisters on the web of her thumb and the side of her index finger where it touched the receiver.

She drew the Kostroman pistol with her right hand and dropped her own weapon into the empty holster. The leather would scorch but it wasn't likely to burn the way her pocket lining would. If she tossed the little pistol onto the bricks it might not be at hand the next time she needed it.

Nobody was paying any attention to her. All
her
opponents were dead. With the truck between her and the office, Adele looked over her shoulder.

Three bodies sprawled on the pavement. A sailor and a Kostroman thug wrestled for the latter's weapon. A Kostroman stepped out of the harbormaster's office and sprayed both indiscriminately with his submachine gun. An impeller slug fired from the
Ahura
tore the shooter's left arm off and flung his body sideways to thrash in a widening pool of blood.

The gang members had run into the brick office to join their leader when the shooting started. All the living Cinnabars were on the vessel or hidden beneath the lip of the seawall. The
Ahura
was far enough back that those aboard it could see over the seawall to a degree, but only the upper half of the building was visible to them.

Adele tried twice to climb onto the truck, using a back tire as a step. Finally she laid the service pistol on the truck bed to free both hands. She was still awkward but she got up.

The gunner had rolled off the vehicle. The loader still lay there on his back, his hands clawing spasmodically. Her pellet had cratered the left side of his face, but his right eye remained. It was open.

She'd never used an automatic impeller, but this one had a grip and a trigger like a pistol's. Adele depressed the weapon as far as it would and pulled the trigger.

The gun cycled three times before she could let up. The heavy projectiles cracked like thunderbolts, making the truck shudder violently from recoil.

The rounds blew platter-sized openings in roofing tiles as they hit; on exit they smashed even larger holes through the brick wall on the other side. A cloud of glowing gas slowly dissipated in front of the muzzle. It was the vestiges of the projectiles' aluminum driving skirts, ionized by the dense magnetic flux.

Without backing the truck, she couldn't lower the muzzle enough to hit the people sheltering inside the building. There was nothing more she could do.

"All right, Ganser!" Daniel Leary shouted from the
Ahura
's bow. "That's your warning! Come out unarmed with your hands up or Lieutenant Mundy will blow you all into a crater in the street. Now!"

Adele retrieved the Kostroman pistol. If the gangsters tried to fight, she could at least use it.

"How do we know you won't just shoot us?" Ganser called from inside the office. He began to cough; a rosy haze of brick dust swirled from the shattered walls.

"You know we
will
shoot you if you don't give up!" Daniel said. He jumped from the ship.

"Master!" Hogg cried. Daniel ignored the servant and walked up the seawall's slope in plain sight of anyone looking out a window of the office. He was still unarmed.

"Last chance, Ganser," Daniel said cheerfully.

Somebody threw a submachine gun out the door. More guns followed. Sailors looked over the edge of seawall, some of them aiming weapons they must have taken from Kostromans in the initial confusion.

There was a long pause before the first of the thugs scuttled through the doorway, her hands raised and her eyes closed. Others crept behind her.

Adele felt her muscles relax without her conscious volition. She sat down in the truck bed because otherwise she would have fallen.

Daniel watched as Woetjans and Dasi finished tying the Kostromans with wire stripped from the back garden of one of the nearby houses. Daniel was willing to pay if the owner complained about the ruin of his snap beans, but nobody came from the house.

Daniel wasn't in a mood to volunteer anything.

Munsford and Olechuk were dead. Whitebread's belly looked like a rat had chewed her, but the wounds were superficial. The pellet had hit the carton she was carrying. It sprayed her with terne plate and fish stew instead of disemboweling her as direct impact would have done.

"You said you wouldn't kill us!" said Ganser, desperate to keep the question in his mind out of his voice. He was a fat man and already half bald despite being younger than Adele.

"Yes," said Daniel, thinking of Munsford and Olechuk. "I did say that."

Lamsoe was in line for an armorer's warrant. He and Tairouley were cutting down the
Ahura
's flagstaff to mount the automatic impeller.

Hogg and the bulk of the detachment were on a scrounging expedition through the harbor's other vessels. The
Ahura
was in generally good condition, but she'd been laid up without maintenance for long enough that there were a few problems. Daniel's quick check had convinced him that the batteries wouldn't hold enough of a charge to keep the vessel under way long by themselves. The last thing they needed was a ship that was a sitting duck except in bright sunlight.

"Sir," said Woetjans quietly. Air-hardening ointment sheathed her right forearm to replace the skin she'd scraped off in diving over the seawall to safety. "They must have some friends at least in the houses here."

She nodded toward the facades. Stray projectiles had blown holes in the bricks; curtains fluttered behind a shattered windowpane. "If we leave them alive, they'll be free before we're out of the harbor. And the right man with an impeller can nail something as big as the boat from here to the horizon."

"You promised!" Ganser cried. "You promised—"

Dasi bent down and slapped the Kostroman with a hand as hard as a boot. Ganser screamed, spraying blood from lips cut against his teeth.

"Shut up," Daniel said in a quiet voice, "or I'll have your mouth taped."

If the tape covered Ganser's nostrils as well, the thug's face would darken until it was almost black; and then he would die. Like Munsford and Olechuk.