Sal stepped outside, staring across the starport. A cloud of scintillant vapor hung in the air to the right of the Commandatura. Fragments of blazing metal traced arcs of smoke out of the center of the glow. The aircar's thunderous destruction would have been deafening had her ears not already been stunned by the cannon's discharge.
Sal felt a low-pitched rumbling through the soles of her shoes. She looked at the turret to see if it was traversing again. The gun, its muzzle white from the plasma it had channeled downrange, was still. Pastel iridescence quivered on the tube and the turret dome.
Sal turned and looked higher, into the western horizon. Six globs of light, starships gleaming from atmospheric friction and the plasma roaring from their thrusters as they braked, thundered toward Savoy.
'Make the remaining guns safe!' Sal called into the director's room. 'We don't want any accidents now that our relief's arrived!'
SAVOY, ARLES
January 1, Year 27
1131 hours, Venus time
'By God, sir, look at them run!' said Lieutenant Lemkin, standing on the roof coping in his hard suit to watch the refugees through an electronic magnifier. The soldier's perch looked dangerous to Stephen, but that wasn't anything for Stephen Gregg to get worked up about. 'Say, can't one of your ships lift a company west of the city to cut them off? By
'To what end, Mister Lemkin?' Piet said. 'To force them to stand and fight? And I'll thank you not to take so lightly the name of God Who gave us this victory.'
Suppressed pain wrung Piet's voice dry. Weicker, the
'You should have come sooner, Lemkin,' Stephen said. 'There was plenty of fighting for everybody half an hour ago.'
He was sick with anger at himself. Giddings was dead. So were Blaise and Portillo, from Dole's contingent, and there were half a dozen serious wounds.
Plus the little stuff. Piet had made it all the way through the fighting uninjured, then been burned by flaming debris from the aircar. Cheap at the price.
It all was, Stephen supposed.
Lemkin hopped down from the coping and faced Stephen in a stiff brace. 'Sir!' he said. 'My company relieved the Commandatura as ordered, within three minutes of the time the hatches of the
'I'm not commenting on anything, soldier,' Stephen said. 'I'm too tired.'
Piet lowered his visor to watch the corkscrew descent of a 300-tonne armed freighter. 'Four square kilometers of field and we'll have a collision yet,' he muttered. 'It was a lot simpler when we had one seventy-tonne ship to worry about.'
After the first wave, the ships of the squadron were coming down one at a time. They were supposed to land on the east side of the field where there was more space, but through sheer incompetence several had dropped close enough to the Commandatura that their exhaust wash warmed the command group on the roof.
'I think that's the last of the fragments, sir,' the surgeon's assistant said.
He stepped back from Stephen and wiped nervous sweat from his brow. Had the fellow been afraid he was going to poke a nerve and have his head blown off for his mistake?
Stephen stood and shrugged off his back-and-breast armor now that his arm was free. He raised the hem of his sweat-soaked tunic and examined the fist-sized bruise where a bullet had slammed the lower edge of his breastplate into the flesh over his hipbone.
'Let me see that,' Weicker said sharply. He knelt before Stephen.
Piet frowned as he watched. He looked uncommonly odd with one pant leg cut off at the knee and the calf below smeared with ointment after it had been debrided.
Weicker drew Stephen's waistband down, then up again. 'No penetration,' he said, straightening.
Stephen tapped the lip of his breastplate. Lead was a bright splash on the black-finished ceramic.
The surgeon shook his head. 'If that bullet had hit lower by as little as half its diameter,' he said, 'pieces of it would certainly have torn your femoral artery. You're very lucky to be alive, sir!'
Stephen looked at Weicker. 'Do you really think so?' he asked in a voice he hadn't meant to use.
Weicker frowned in surprise.
Piet laid a hand on Stephen's shoulder. 'I'm lucky you're alive,' he said. 'Let's go downstairs for a moment. There's something in the foyer that you may not have noticed.'
Stephen stared at Savoy City. 'Sure,' he said.
The squadron's troops were moving cautiously into the city under their own officers. In theory, ground operations were conducted under Stephen's control, but the officers had been fully briefed. Besides, they were more experienced at ordinary military operations than Stephen. This wasn't a one-ship, smash-and-grab raid of the sort that had made Piet Ricimer a byword on Venus and a nightmare to President Pleyal.
Stephen Gregg's real job had been to clear the Commandatura. Stephen Gregg's job was to kill, not to command.
Two soldiers came up through the trap door. They'd discarded the arm pieces and lower-body portions of their armor. 'Colonel Gregg?' the first of them said.
'Report to Lieutenant Lemkin,' Piet said, pointing to that officer.
The soldier recognized the smaller figure shadowed by Stephen's bulk. 'Oh!' he said. 'Yes, sir, Factor Ricimer!'
'Your leg all right?' Stephen asked as he led the way down the stairs.
Dole had put the Molts captured alive in the gun turrets-the five uninjured ones-to cleaning up the building. The corpses were gone from the hallway, but the hundreds of bullets fired during repeated Fed assaults had knocked the office partitions to splinters.
'Stiff, nothing serious,' Piet said. 'I was running for the barge's cockpit when the car blew up. I wasn't expecting that.'
The bodies on the second floor had been removed also, along with the grass pads that had cushioned the floor. Blood had soaked through the matting and into the porous concrete.
Four Venerian soldiers were posted at windows from which they could watch the boulevard and the buildings across from the Commandatura. They noticed the squadron's commanders and turned. 'Sir?' one asked.
'Carry on with your duties, gentlemen,' Piet said.
The soles of Stephen's boots were tacky for the next several steps down to the ground floor.
'It surprised me too, Piet,' Stephen said. Conversationally, as if it meant no more to him than the color of the sunrise, he went on, 'You know, if I hadn't wrecked the fire director in the basement here, we'd have been able to use our own roof guns to bring down that car. I figure that decision of mine cost us most of our casualties.'
The steel door to the guard quarters was now shut, but the foyer's marble floor slopped with water on which floated ash and bits of charred wood. Dole and several sailors watched Molts coil hoses. Savoy's fire company was housed in the building adjacent to the Commandatura. The human officers had fled, but the alien crew had managed to put out the blaze in the guard quarters before it spread to the rest of the building. Stephen hadn't thought that would be possible.
Piet gestured around the sides and front of the entrance hallway in which they stood. Sixty percent of the surface was floor to ceiling windows. Most of the small individual panes had been shot or blown out.
'We couldn't have held the ground floor from so many armed Feds,' Piet said. 'It was difficult enough with them continuing to charge the roof stairs. And we couldn't
He's right, but I should have thought of using the guns. 'It's done now,' Stephen said aloud.
The Commandatura's front entrance was a pair of double archways. Piet stopped in front of them. The alcove set between the doors held an idealized holographic portrait of President Pleyal clad in gold robes of state: stern, black-haired, standing arms akimbo. Behind Pleyal was a starscape. The motto below the display read
