announcement had just been made that the first twenty families could enter to identify and claim the bodies of their kin, and the bereaved were crowding together by the gates.
“It’s him!”Spence said, in sudden surprise. “He’s in his car, with a couple of his pals. Heading your way!”
Laurajean had taken advantage of the crowd clumped around the main gate to leave unmolested through the garage exit. Macnamara pressed the throttle lever and the van’s electric motors surged, bringing the vehicle silently into traffic. Sula slipped into the cargo compartment, crouched on the black composite floor as she first readied her weapon, then placed Macnamara’s gun on the passenger seat where he could reach it.
“There he is!” Macnamara called, and Sula knew her luck was in. She’d beenright to follow this wild impulse. A feral joy filled her heart at the certainty that nothing could go wrong for her today.
Just in case, for caution’s sake, she called Spence to ask if there were any sign of another vehicle following, perhaps with guards.
No. The Naxids had left their killer without protection.
Sula readied her rifle. “You’ve got to catch him before he gets to the expressway,” she told Macnamara. Vehicles on the expressways were required to surrender control to a centralized computer system, which would never let them get close.
“Easy,” Macnamara said, and power surged to the motors. “They’ll be on the left side.” His window powered open and he shifted his stubby machine pistol to his lap.
The van swerved, then swerved again. The motors surged once more, then braked back.
“Now,”Macnamara said. Sula touched controls, and silent motors rolled the big side door open. Hair whipped across her face in a sudden blast of hot wind. The mauve-colored Delvin was right there, almost close enough to touch.
There were three Terrans in the car—two women and Laurajean—all in lawn-green uniform tunics. Laurajean was driving. They were laughing at some joke, and Laurajean was gesturing expansively with one slim hand. Exhilaration still radiated from his face.
He was still rejoicing in his unexpected celebrity, unaware that his starring role on the punishment channel was about to be canceled. He glanced to his right just as Sula put the rifle to her shoulder, and his puzzled squint showed he hadn’t quite worked out what he was seeing when she fired.
The rifle used caseless ammunition that was nearly recoilless, and cycled it very fast. Sula put over a hundred rounds into the car in less than two seconds. Macnamara, firing through the window, emptied his own smaller magazine.
There was the sound of a score of hammers beating metal. Parts of Laurajean’s car seemed to dissolve, the glass spraying outward in crystal fountains that glimmered in the sun, the resinous composite body simply disintegrating. The Delvin swerved, and Macnamara quickly dropped his gun into his lap in order to concentrate on his driving. Sula pressed the control that slid the side door shut.
Peering out the back window, she saw the Delvin slowly cross three lanes of traffic and come to rest on the sidewalk, narrowly missing a startled Daimong pedestrian.
Macnamara made a few turns, then found a legal place to park. By then, Sula had the weapons broken down and in their cases. The two quietly left the van, walked down a baking street, turned a corner and met Spence, who had paralleled their route in the Hunhao.
In a few hours they would call the rental company from a suitably anonymous location and tell them where they could pick up their van. If its transponder hadn’t happened to report within a few minutes of the assassination, there would be nothing to connect it to the killing.
To the team’s strange spirit of impulse and madness was now added another dimension—that of relief. They babbled with frantic good spirits as they left the Apszipar Tower behind. They were as cheerful, Sula realized, as Laurajean had been with his two colleagues. Like children who had gotten away with something naughty.
“Who ordered them shot?” Sula asked.
“Lady Sula!”the others chanted.
“Who fired her weapon?”
“Lady Sula!”
“Whose bullets struck them down?”
“Lady Sula!”they cried, and all three broke into laughter.
This must stop,she told herself. They couldn’t go on this recklessly.
But still, it would be good to put out another edition ofResistance, with the heading “Death of a Traitor.”
Sula bought Team 491 a first-class dinner that evening at Seven Pages, a restaurant with silent, dignified waitrons and a wine list that scrolled along the display hundreds of lines. The meal went on for hours, little plates arriving every ten minutes with some small, ambrosial treat, each displayed with perfection on a plate of near- translucent Vigo hard-paste. Sula could tell that Spence and Macnamara had never been in such a place before.
Not that she had, or at least not often. Not since she was a girl named Gredel, and the real Lady Sula had paid.
“Would you care for a sweet?” the waitron asked. “We have everything on our list except the Chocolate Fancy and the Mocha Gyre.”
“Why not?”
The waitron shook his glossy shaved head. “I regret there is no cocoa of a suitable quality. May I recommend the Peaches Flambe?”
“Hm.” Sula looked at Macnamara and Spence, both deeply relaxed after consuming two bottles of wine, and smiled. “I hate life without Chocolate Fancy in it,” she said. “Perhaps we could arrange something.”
She spoke with the chef before they left and asked how much she would offer for top quality cocoa.
The chef frowned and tugged at her lower lip. “Business isn’t so good, you know. Not sincethey came.”
“Think how much better business would be if you had good chocolate again.”
Her eyes narrowed. “How good?”
“Kabila’s. We have sixty-five percent cocoa and eighty percent. Imported from Preowin.”
The chef tried unsuccessfully to conceal the flare of greed that burned briefly in her eyes. “How much do you have?” she asked.
“How much do you want?”
They settled on a price, seven times what Sula had paid for the cocoa when it sat in a warehouse complex on the ring.
“I’ll deliver tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll want payment in cash.”
The chef acted as if this arrangement weren’t unusual. Perhaps it wasn’t.
“I wish I knew how you did that,” Spence said as they walked away.
“Did what?”
“Change your accent like that. You have the voice you use back in Riverside, and the Lady Sula voice, and you used a completely different voice with the waitron and the chef.”
Sula cast her mind back to the restaurant. “I don’t remember doing that,” she said. “I was probably just imitating them.” Neither the chef nor the waitron had spoken with the drawling speech of the Peers of the High City, but a comfortably middle-class approximation.
“Wish I could do that,” Spence said again.
“You’ve been out having fun,” One-Step said later that night as Sula returned to her apartment. “You’ve been having fun without One-Step.”
“That’s right,” she said cheerfully. She sprang up the stair and reached for the door, the thin plastic key in her hand.
One-Step stepped into the light that poured down from one of the first-floor apartments, and Sula paused a moment to bask in the dark light of his liquid black eyes.
“One-Step could show you a wonderful evening, better than you had tonight,” he said. “You only have to give One-Step a chance.”
Sula wondered how to explain her position in this matter.I don’t go out with boys who refer to themselves in the third person?
“Maybe when you get a job,” Sula said. “I’d hate to take your last few zeniths.”
