The Reaches (89 page)

The Commandatura had a small barracks on the ground floor, facing the arched street entrance. The guards were probably more for ceremony than function, but the three who'd run upstairs at the sound of gunfire had been alert if not particularly skillful.

Two rifles fired at Stephen midway down the last flight of stairs. The staircase here was real stone, not paint on lath and plaster. One bullet shattered a bannister into pebbles and dust. The other ricocheted from Stephen's breastplate, knocking him back a step and tearing his left biceps with a spray of impact-melted lead.

"Flashgun!" he shouted, but he had the powerful repeater to his shoulder and was firing already when the bullet hit him. The repeater was a lovely weapon with a slide working a glass-smooth European action, but when Stephen emptied the rotary magazine he tossed the weapon behind him to be caught or to fall.

There was no time for tools, only for killing. He took the reloaded flashgun.

A dead guard lay half out the barracks doorway. The door itself was metal and thick enough to bounce Lightbody's buckshot off in a bright smear against the panel. It would probably turn rifle bullets also, but Calwell and Brody were shooting through the high ground-floor windows at civilians in the street, and Stephen's own rounds had all gone through the crack in the door.

Somebody out of sight in the barracks was tugging the corpse out of the way to close the panel. Stephen flopped down his visor and fired the flashgun through the opening into the Charge-of-Quarters' wooden desk.

The desk exploded in a fireball that would have hurled blazing fragments twenty meters in every direction if there'd been enough open space around it. A Fed ran out of the room screaming. Lightbody killed her before Giddings could slap the carbine, cleared and reloaded, into Stephen's palm. No one else came out.

As soon as the port defenses were out of action, six transports would brake from orbit. The squadron's initial wave contained nearly a thousand troops, enough to secure Savoy no matter how many of the citizens were willing to die to protect their city. First, though, the port defenses . . .

The door to the basement was set into the well of the main stairs and labeled authorized personnel only. It was closed and locked. Stephen reached for the cutting bar clipped to a stud on his breastplate. A bullet came
in
through a front window and knocked bits from a ceiling molding.

"I've got it!" said Piet Ricimer, switching on his bar. He leaned into the tool as its tip howled against the lock plate. Piet didn't like to wear armor while piloting a vessel. He'd tossed on his back-and-breast plates before leaving the barge, but he hadn't buckled them properly. The armor flopped open on the right side in a gap through which a bullet or stone-sliver could fly.

The lock was sturdy. Sparks flew as the cutting bar ripped metal, but the bolt didn't part.

A projectile whanged off the staircase a meter above Stephen's head. He turned. Twenty-odd armed Molts were getting out of a bus marked PORT CONTROL in big white letters. Brody, Calwell, and Lightbody were banging away at them. The Molts with guns—most of the aliens carried cutting bars or spiked clubs—were shooting back.

Giddings and Lewis had ducked into the shelter of the stone bannisters instead of firing the weapons they carried for Stephen. It was because he could depend on the pair to carry out his directions
exactly
that he'd detailed them for this dangerous and thankless task.

"Flashgun!" Stephen said. A Molt rose with a rifle from behind the engine compartment of the bus. Stephen punched a carbine bullet through the center of the triangular skull, then traded the light weapon for his flashgun.

"Ready!" Piet said.

"Giddings!" Stephen cried as he shot, closing his eyes against the glare. The vehicle's fuel tank was under the cab, cut out in a step to help the driver enter. The laser bolt struck the black-painted metal at a seam. The tank ruptured in a fountain of blazing fuel. Fire engulfed much of the street. Stephen traded weapons.

Piet pulled the door wide. Stephen went through the opening first by using his bulk and strength to shoulder his friend aside. Somebody'd turned off the lights in the room beneath, but the holographic screens of the three control consoles showed movement—huddling, ghostly figures.

Maybe the flashgun would have been a better choice. 
 

Stephen walked down the steps deliberately, firing as quickly as he could work the lever of his carbine. His muzzle flashes were a continuous red throbbing. A human screamed and a Molt gave a loud, rasping cry of agony.

All eight rounds cycled perfectly through the carbine's action. Stephen saved the final three shots for the consoles themselves. The last shorted into arclight as bright as a flashgun pulse, though nearly as brief.

The overhead lights went on. Piet had found a switch at the top of the stairs. Three Molts and a human female lay dead under the consoles where they'd tried to shelter. Where blood mixed with the pools of ichor leaking from the Molts, it reacted to form a purple colloid.

None of the control room crew was armed. If they'd left the lights on, they might all still be alive.

"Stephen, let's get up to the roof," Piet ordered in a crisp tone. "You've taken care of things here."

He set one of the side latches of his armor and added, "I think it'll be the easiest place to defend until the squadron arrives."

Stephen nodded and turned. He was thumbing cartridges into the carbine's loading tube himself, since Piet was between him and his loaders.

Behind the men a console melted down with a sullen hiss, The corpses sprawled beneath it burned with the mingled odors of pork and shrimp cooking.

A bright blue rocket streaked from the roof of the Commandatura, signaling that the guns had been put out of action. Smoke rose from a ground-floor window. Sal thought she could see an occasional wink of flame in the room beyond.

"
Gallant Sallie
to
Spirit of Ashdod,
" she said into the microphone, watching the fancied flame and wondering what it implied for the men in the Commandatura. The
Ashdod
was in geosynchronous orbit above Savoy, from where it could relay Sal's straight-line laser communications to the rest of the squadron. "The guns have all been captured. You can bring the fleet in."

There
were
flames. "Bring the fleet in fast! Over."

Sal still heard occasional shots from the adjacent gun tower, but Major Cardiff had sent up his green rocket three minutes before. The assault force couldn't trust radio within the port area, nor for communication with the rest of the squadron in orbit where any number of ships might be firing plasma thrusters to hold station.

"Acknowledged,
Gallant Sallie,
" replied the
Ashdod
's communications officer. The light-borne signal was clear, though it wobbled in the lower registers. "I'm relaying your message to the
Freedom.
Out."

Captain Casson was in command of the first landing wave. Sal frowned at the thought, remembering the hostility she'd heard—she'd approved—in Old Port taverns in the years before she dreamed she'd ever meet Piet Ricimer herself.

"To hear that puppy Ricimer talk, nobody ever conned a ship before he came along." A shot of slash down Casson's throat, then a long draught of beer. 

"Well, a lot of that's said of him, not by him, you know." Marcus Blythe, not as quick to move as he'd been a decade before, but still a spacer and a man. "The Betaport crowd, they know they're second best. It makes them boast when they've the least excuse."

"What other people are saying are the lies they heard from Ricimer's lips first!" Casson glaring around the booth; all spacers, but none of them his equal. All nodding agreement. 

Nobody'd ever suggested Willem Casson was likely to hang back in a fight, though. He was a good choice to lead the transports in, as well as a diplomatic one. Casson would have his ships down as soon as orbital dynamics permitted. Half an hour. Even less with luck.

Rickalds had closed the cockpit hatch when the last of the soldiers lumbered out. The soil, heated white by the
Gallant Sallie
's exhaust, radiated unpleasantly into the cabin otherwise. The troops were in full hard suits not as protection against the defenders' small arms (half armor would have been a better compromise for that purpose) but rather so that they could attack immediately across the plasma-seared terrain.

The area had cooled by now. Sal rose from the navigation console and reopened the hatch so that she could look at the Commandatura directly instead of on the
Gallant Sallie
's screen. While Harrigan and the other men examined damage the barge had caused to the hold, Brantling was alone with her in the cabin. He watched Sal but didn't speak.

Humming like a swarm of hornets, a large aircar driven by pairs of ducted fans bow and stern rose into view beyond the Commandatura. The car mounted a squat weapon behind the pilot's hatch. Troops, most of them Molts, looked out from both sides of the central cargo compartment. There must have been forty of them.

The weapon in the car's bow was a multitube laser. It fired three strobing pulses at the Commandatura. Fed troops in the aircar were shooting also.

The laser disintegrated like a bubble popping with a violet flash. The
snickWhack/snickWhack/snickWhack
of the pulses' slapping impacts on the building arrived a measurable second after the laser's destruction.

Sal couldn't see what was happening on the roof of the Commandatura from her angle. Her heart surged at what the event implied, however: Stephen Gregg was alive, and he still had his flashgun.

The aircar banked, circling a stone's throw from the Commandatura at thirty meters altitude. The roof coping would have protected the Venerians against troops shooting from the ground, but it was less use against rifles fired from above.

Rock dust danced from the side of the building. This time Sal saw the spark of Stephen's flashgun, a saffron needle that ripped a puff of metal from the aircar's bow. The vehicle continued its circle unhindered. Guns banged from the cargo compartment. Distance dulled the reports.

The aircar was a military vehicle. The pilot used remote viewing rather than a clear windscreen, and the polished skin was resistant to if not entirely proof against a flashgun's bolt. The fans and the motors driving them were buried deep in the hull, shielded unless the pilot overflew the shooter.

The troops in the cargo compartment could be hit—one of the Feds dropped in the instant the situation formed in Sal's mind. But there were a lot of them, and the vehicle gave them better protection than Stephen and his fellows had. The squadron wouldn't be down before—

"
Brantling, help me
—" Sal shouted as she turned from the hatch and realized the guns weren't there. The
Gallant Sallie
's plasma cannon were still in orbit, so Sal couldn't blast the Fed vehicle from the air with them after all.

Sal jumped from the hatch. The ground was still too hot for slippers, but she was three steps around the vessel before she noticed the heat. It wouldn't have mattered anyway.

"Captain?" Brantling called from the hatch with nervous concern in his voice.

"Mind the console!" she shouted back.

The revolver holster slapped her left thigh as she ran for the gun tower. The tower platform was ten meters off the ground, supported on four squat concrete legs. Spiral steps were cast into each leg. There was a hatch into the platform at the top of the helix. Halfway up Sal realized she was mounting the northwest leg while Major Cardiff had led his troops up the southwest stairs.

I should have brought a cutting bar in case the hatch was locked.
Sal drew her revolver, though the chance of shooting a metal door open was a lot slimmer than the chance of killing herself with a ricochet.

Harrigan shouted from the ground. Sal ignored him. Gunfire from the Commandatura was a constant muffled rattle, and she tried to ignore that as well. She grabbed the latch lever and turned it. There wasn't a lock mechanism.

Sal jerked the door open. The Fed hiding in the compartment beyond screamed, "
Mother of God!
" and swung a crowbar at her. He hit the low ceiling instead.

Sal shot him in the face. The muzzle flash was a saturated red-orange, so vivid in the dimness that she almost didn't notice the thunderous report.

The Fed flopped backward. His forelock was burning. Sal stepped over the body and lifted the trap door to the gun platform beyond.

A Venerian soldier with his faceshield raised saw her, jumped back, and tried to aim his shotgun. Major Cardiff knocked the weapon aside with a shout of fear and anger.

"Where's the fire director?" Sal demanded as she clambered out. There were a dozen corpses on the platform, most of them Molts. Cardiff's men were dragging more bodies from the four metal turrets. The cannon still pointed skyward.

"Mistress Blythe, you shouldn't have come here!" Cardiff said. "You could have been killed!"

"Where's the fire director, you stupid whoreson?" Sal shouted. "There's men dying at the Commandatura now, and there'll be more unless we get our fingers out of our butts and help them!"

Cardiff's head jerked as he looked toward the Commandatura. He'd been too involved with his own operation to consider what was happening across the spaceport. "Yes, I see," he said.

He glanced across his visible troops. "Davis, Podgorny!" he shouted. "Let's get these guns working!"

The northeast turret was the same diameter as the others but was taller by two meters to add space for equipment. Cardiff ran toward it, sluggish in his hard suit. "They've been gunners," the major added as he saw Sal was keeping pace with him.

The fire director was a Janus-faced console in the center of the room beneath the turret. On one side was a narrow Molt-style bench; integral to the other side was a cushioned human chair. The walls and equipment were splashed with ichor, already crusting in the heat, but the bodies had been removed.