With the Lightnings (34 page)

Three Cinnabars had crossed to join Daniel. Adele was the first, because of her pistol and her skill with it. Barnes and Dasi were supposed to follow, but Woetjans had come in Dasi's place.

The fight in the Kostroman camp, such as it was, ended. Daniel swayed, panting as he held his club by both ends. He looked across the notch of water and called, "Don't try to come around, Adele. We'll bring you over in the boat as soon as we've got this lot tied."

The four Cinnabars had worked their way up the shore from the island's tip until they found the Kostroman camp on the other side of this inlet. They hadn't been able to make a plan until they saw the location. Adele had been the one to suggest she stay here where she had a better line of fire than she'd have if she worked around with the others.

She'd felt alone as she waited for Daniel to strike. That wasn't a problem; she'd felt alone for most of her life.

A thug keened in a high-pitched voice that cut through the moans and sick-hearted curses of the others. The one she'd shot, perhaps; or the one who'd incinerated herself by pulling the submachine gun's trigger.

Adele had a good view of the camp from here, but it hadn't been good enough. If the submachine gun had worked, Daniel Leary would be dead. She didn't see any way the group could survive if they lost Daniel.

In rational moments she didn't see how they would survive under Daniel's command either, but it was surprisingly easy in the young lieutenant's presence to suspend disbelief.

Adele looked at the water, then tucked the pistol into the purse she wore on her waistbelt. "I'm coming across," she said. She walked into the inlet.

At midpoint the channel was deep enough that Adele had to splash in an awkward parody of swimming. There was no current; the bottom muck, though unpleasant, slid off her skin like thick oil instead of gripping her. A week ago—a
day
ago—she'd never have considered plunging into water foul with jungle decay, but her standards of acceptability had slipped.

Daniel gave her a hand out. "You shouldn't have done that," he said. "We can't afford to take unnecessary risks."

"Nor can we afford to waste time," Adele said tartly. That wasn't the real reason she'd walked across, though. She was punishing herself for missing the second gunner until it would have been too late.

Woetjans and Barnes were tying the prisoners with the same cord by which Adele and the two sailors had crossed the strait. The campfire had been trampled in the fighting, but it perversely burned brighter than it had under the Kostromans' leisured direction.

Adele took her pistol out of the purse. Daniel looked down at the prisoners. Several were conscious but they waited stolidly to be tied again. Blood still pulsed from where the club had laid open three inches of Ganser's scalp.

"I suppose I need to put a pressure bandage on that," Daniel muttered; but he didn't seem ready to do so quite yet.

Daniel was still breathing hard. A spatter of flaming plastic had blistered his right forearm; he hadn't dressed it yet.

He reached again into the first aid kit Woetjans had brought over. The horribly burned shooter lapsed into slobbering silence. Daniel put the injector back in its clamp in the kit.

"I already gave her three ampules," he said softly to Adele. "It's a waste of drugs, but it was that or knock her head in. I didn't want to do that, but if she hadn't shut up . . ."

"What about the one I shot?" Adele asked. She didn't know which Kostroman it had been. She'd seen the gun and fired, picking her target by instinct rather than design.

"On the end," Daniel said, nodding to the edge of the firelight. "I gave him a shot too, so he wouldn't go into shock. He'll be all right. He'll live, anyway."

"That's the lot, sir," Woetjans said as she straightened.

"Right," said Daniel. "Woetjans, you take the lifeboat back and gather up the others. It'll take two trips, I think, to bring them and the gear we'll need."

He smiled at his surroundings with what Adele thought was anticipation. "The rest of us'll get to work here, readying things for our friends from the Alliance."

The emergency radio was a flat box that hummed softly. Every ten seconds the output display beside the speaker spiked, indicating that the unit continued to send a homing signal.

"I hear 'em coming," whispered Woetjans. "Hear it? Like thunder a hundred miles off, that's the lift fans."

Daniel spread his hand for silence. The radio's integral microphone wasn't very sensitive, but they didn't need to take chances.

Eleven Cinnabars sat around the fire, wearing Kostroman civilian clothing with an addition of Zojira black and yellow. Woetjans was trying to use the excess in her trousers' waistband to make up what was lacking in inseam length; to say Ganser's clothes were a bad fit for her would be putting it mildly. Other ratings weren't much better off.

It probably didn't matter. The Alliance commandoes weren't coming to stage a fashion show. The blood that stiffened the shoulders and right sleeve of Daniel's shirt wouldn't surprise anybody either.

Barnes and Dasi were across the strait, tending the original camp on the other island. It was a dangerous job, but that description would cover most of what was going on tonight.

The eight other ratings guarded the prisoners. They were all neck deep in the water of an inlet eighty yards from the Kostroman camp. Overhanging foliage ought to block the remainder of the human heat signature, at least from a quick-reaction force that was trying to locate known groupings rather than searching for people who
weren't
where they were supposed to be.

"Zojira civilians," a voice rasped from the radio. The person speaking was male, but the single-sideband emergency signal and a degree of professional disdain almost concealed even his sex. "Give us a vector from your camp to the bandit position. Over."

The burned Kostroman had died, so Daniel hadn't been required to decide whether to put her in the water with the others. Both her hands had been charred off, and her heat-shriveled intestines writhed where there was no longer a ribcage to cover them.

Her death had been the best option for all concerned. Daniel supposed it was a failing of his as a man as well as an officer that he'd been unwilling to speed the result himself.

Daniel bent over the microphone. The emergency unit's poor sound quality was a blessing under the circumstances: it'd take a better linguist than most commandoes to notice a problem with his accent.

"Master, the pirates're east of us," he said in tones of breathy nervousness. "Maybe a little south, too, a little southeast. They're not half a mile away!"

Daniel could hear the deep bass note of an APC at speed now. The commandoes were coming in fast, despite the risk that the sound of their ducted fans would alert their quarry.

The power it took to lift and propel twenty-odd tons by thrust alone came at the price of a sonic signature, no matter how much you tried to minimize it. Quick and dirty was probably the better choice, as well as the option that would appeal to members of a strike force.

"On my signal," the radio voice said, "fire a flare straight up. I repeat, straight up. And stay off the radio! Out."

Woetjans smiled lazily and stood, holding the flare gun from the
Ahura
's emergency kit. She was obviously glad to have a task to occupy her while the others could only wait.

Adele sat on an upturned metal bucket. Her attention was seemingly a million miles away. Daniel grinned at her. She raised an eyebrow in question, realized Daniel was just being sociable, and returned to her reverie. Her hands slowly rotated the head-sized object she held between spread fingertips.

Lamsoe and Sun held submachine guns; the Kostromans had salvaged guns, so the Cinnabars taking their place had guns too. Lamsoe held his as if it were a bomb. Daniel wouldn't let him disconnect the battery because the APC's sensors might be able to tell the difference, but the safeties of both weapons were on.

The APC's thrum was louder now. A few minutes earlier the pulsing note could have been concealed in the night sounds except to ears that were searching for it.

"Zojira civilians," the radio ordered, "fire one flare now! Over!"

Woetjans walked two steps closer to the bank of the inlet, aimed the gun skyward, and sent up a flare as close to vertical as you could tell without a plumb line. Daniel hoped the process hadn't been too expert, but the commandoes would probably figure the wogs had just gotten lucky.

"Good, I'm already stiff from sitting here," said Hogg. He still looked like he'd been exhumed on maybe the third day. Daniel'd planned to leave his servant with the prisoners, but at the last instant he'd lacked the courage to say that.

Hogg would've ignored the order anyway. The fellow who'd changed your diapers wasn't going to kiss your boots just because you had "Lieutenant" before your name now.

The flare's tracer burst a hundred feet up in a brilliant blue dazzle. There was enough wind from the sea to push the sparks away from the campfire; not that the commandoes would've cared.

The APC came
fast
over the trees, heading east toward the first island. The downdraft drove the flare's falling particles into the lagoon as a hundred scattered steam vents. The hiss of quenching sparks was lost in the roar of the fans.

The big vehicle banked left. The plasma cannon in its cupola raked the original Cinnabar camp with a hell of stripped ions.

Steam and fire blew from the jungle. The vegetation was wet, but even stone burned when bathed in radiance as hot as a sun's corona.

A mushroom of soot and vapor erupted from the target area. Daniel heard the chatter of submachine guns as well, a sign of ruthlessness and bad fire discipline. Personal weapons had nothing useful to add to the plasma cannon's swath of destruction.

"Those bastards," Hogg said as he stropped his knife on his palm. "Kill us all while we slept,
they
would."

He spat, and smiled, and looked much more his old self.

The APC went into a reverse bank and swept back. The cannon fired again, its dense saffron beam ripping apart the pillar of smoke from the first pass. A glowing rock flew out of the impact area, dimming as it tumbled. It landed in the lagoon and exploded from thermal shock.

Daniel was white with cold rage. This was war: if it claimed Barnes and Dasi, well, that was a hazard they understood when they took their oaths. This Alliance commander wasn't alone in his willingness to shoot sleeping enemies without giving them a chance to surrender.

And it wouldn't change anything about what happened next; nothing except that Daniel Leary would take more pleasure in viewing the Alliance casualties he very much expected to see.

Apparently satisfied with what it had achieved on the neighboring island, the APC idled toward what it believed was the Kostroman camp. The muzzle of the plasma cannon pointed toward them as a white-hot oval, cooling slowly.

Daniel stood and raised his hands to shoulder height. A part of his mind was already composing the letters he'd write to the families of Barnes and Dasi, if that were required and if God preserved him to carry out that duty.

Adele watched the armored vehicle come toward her at a slow pace, thunderously loud and bigger than she'd expected even though she'd seen APCs before. She supposed it was because of the circumstances in which she was watching this one that it seemed to loom so large.

The APC was closed up; its driver and gunner used electronic imaging to view their surroundings. Daniel said that vehicles of this sort had sensor suites that could tell if a gnat farted.

The saving grace of the situation was that this jungle had many, many gnats. As in Adele's own proper job, the difficulty was to sort vast quantities of data for the single item you needed. No ordinary weapon was going to pass the electronic frisking, though.

The APC hesitated in the air, then dropped to the surface of the lagoon. Spray erupted in a screen that would have been rainbowed if there'd been any lights to refract within it. The vehicle resumed its leisurely progress, waddling up the inlet toward the camp. It didn't even show the minimal running lights Adele had seen on APCs in Kostroma City during the coup.

The sailors were all standing. They looked nervous, the attitude the commandoes would expect as well as the way Adele supposed they really felt. She didn't want to stand, but at last she got up awkwardly from the bucket so as not to look out of place.

Daniel spoke; sailors moved forward slightly. Adele, though not concealed, was now in the background.

She wasn't afraid. She was too detached to be afraid. She understood precisely what was required of her; if circumstances permitted, she would execute her task. There was very little uncertainty except about the outcome.

The APC's bluff bow slid out of the water, bulldozing a wedge of root-bound mud ahead of it. Spray doused the campfire and drove the sailors back, cursing and covering their eyes.

Adele turned away. She could scarcely be wetter than she was already, but the deliberate insult set her face coldly. Scorn a Mundy of Chatsworth, would they?

She turned again, smiling internally at her own reaction. She'd have laughed, but that would have been out of keeping with her pose as a small-time crook and smuggler. Instead she let her face muscles relax into a neutral expression. She'd never cringed, so she was afraid of an unsatisfactory result if she tried to fake it now.

The APC swung broadside to the eleven Cinnabars. Its stern shoved aside undergrowth and nestled there. The cupola rotated so that the plasma cannon stayed trained on the presumed Kostromans. Five submachine guns projected from miniature gunports in the armored side.

Realistically, the weapons weren't much danger because those threatened were close enough to the vehicle to duck under the cannon and flatten themselves against the APC's flank between the gunports. The muzzles would have a psychological effect, though, especially on the stupid thugs the commandoes thought they were facing.

The driver shut his fans down. The roar of air through the eight intake ducts stilled, but a high-pitched whine indicated various parts continued to spin in readiness for any need.