With the Lightnings (26 page)

"Nobody's supposed to enter the compound tonight," the officer said. She remained standing in the cab of her vehicle. "I want you all in line against the front of the building. Everybody in the building come out right now or by God I'll blow you out!"

"Sir, there's plenty of liquor here to go around," Hogg called in an ingratiating voice. "Maybe the lady and her friends would like a case to, you know, make their duty easier?"

"Who are you?" the officer said on a rising note. She unhooked her holster flap with one hand and gripped her pistol with the other. "Who do you think—"

The rating standing behind her in the truck bed leaned forward. He clouted the officer across the head with the butt of his impeller.

The impact sounded like an axe on a tree trunk. The officer's arms flapped as she flew out of the gun truck and hit face-first on the brick roadway.

The Kostroman who'd struck her pointed the impeller from his waist at Daniel. "You got a problem with that?" he said.

"Hell, why should we save good booze for rich officers who never did anything for us?" Adele Mundy demanded shrilly. "Let's drink it
all
ourselves, I say!"

"Too damned right!" Hogg seconded. He hopped out of the van and stumped over to Daniel. "All of it!"

"All right, all right," Daniel whined in what he hoped sounded like angry resignation. "We'll say it was hijacked. The way things are tonight, nobody's going to know the difference."

Somebody cheered. The Kostroman who'd hit his officer jumped down and started for the warehouse door. The ratings from both the van and the gun truck surged after him. Woetjans and three of her huskier fellows held back slightly to be sure of entering behind the last of the Shore Police.

Daniel put his hands in his waistband and began to whistle very softly.

Adele stood near the door of the warehouse. If she hadn't known better, she'd have been sure that the activities within were carefully rehearsed.

The van's headlamp threw a fan of light into the building. The sailors' figures cut it into wobbling, distorted shadows.

"Now!" called Woetjans. She grabbed the barrels of two impellers and jerked the weapons upward, out of the hands of the policemen carrying them. Dasi hit one on the head with his prybar; Sun grabbed the other from behind by both elbows and ran him headfirst into a brick pillar.

There wasn't a shot or even a shout in the whole operation. Glass shattered as somebody broke a brandy bottle over a Kostroman's head, but there were plenty more where that one came from. The Shore Police were down before they knew there was anything waiting for them except cases of liquor.

"All shipshape, sir," Woetjans called.

"Five of you put their armbands on," Daniel called. Hogg had gone to the warehouse doorway with his pistol ready, but his master was kneeling over the Kostroman officer. "Adele, come here if you will."

It sounded like an order rather than a request to her; perfectly proper under the circumstances. She went to Daniel's side.

He was unfastening the officer's belt and holster. Now that the victim was lying in the beams of the gun truck's lights Adele could see she was a young woman with tight blonde curls and ratlike features. The right side of her scalp oozed red, but she was breathing normally.

Looking up again, Daniel said, "I think this'll fit you. Get into it fast. We'll have to hope that the gate guards don't pay a lot of attention to you as we leave."

"Oh," said Adele. She saw the logic immediately: the guards had called a squad of Shore Police to check on the van they'd passed into the compound. If the van tried to leave unescorted, the guards were going to wonder what had happened to the squad. It was at least possible that they'd come up with the right answer. None of the female Cinnabar sailors was slim enough to pass for the police commander.

Understanding was one thing. The thought of actually pretending to be a Kostroman officer,
acting
, made Adele queasy with stage fright. She'd never liked being in front of groups or having everyone look at her.

Aloud she said, "Yes, all right."

She shrugged out of her tunic. The Kostroman uniform wouldn't have a pocket for her personal data unit. For now she could bundle her own trousers around it and carry the packet under the seat of the police vehicle.

Daniel finished stripping the Kostroman officer, then walked to the warehouse doorway while Adele dressed. "Tie them but not too tight," he ordered the sailors inside. "I want them to be able to get loose after we're gone."

Adele pulled on the officer's trousers. They fit properly, but the uniform was cut tighter than she liked. Frustration at the rub of the cloth built to momentary fury. She reminded herself that she was merely transferring her anger at the whole situation to something trivial—and the situation was more her own fault than that of anyone else around her.

Perhaps that was why she was so
very
angry.

Daniel came back to her. He pulled the pistol from its gilt leather holster and said, "I don't suppose you've ever used one of these, Adele?"

"No," she said. It was an electromotive pistol of local manufacture; she'd never fired or even handled one. The weapon was very bulky, but its projectiles were no bigger or faster than those of the little Cinnabar weapon in Adele's pocket.

For all that, Kostroman weapons were satisfactory if you didn't mind their size. Vanness's death was proof of that.

Daniel grimaced as he stood. "Well, I didn't think you would've," he said. "Look, this is the safety; push it forward with your thumb to shoot. But it's probably better if you don't try that. You're likely to do more harm than good."

Adele opened her mouth in amazement. It took her a moment to realize that Daniel's question had been meant in a general nature—"Have you ever fired a gun?"—and she'd answered words that he'd actually used: "Have you ever used a Kostroman pistol like this one?"

"I'd like to wear it myself," Daniel added, looking toward the warehouse from which the sailors were now carrying the brandy they'd come here for in the first place. "I don't dare, though. The lieutenant of a detachment of armed Shore Police has to be armed herself. Oh, well."

He reholstered the pistol and handed it to Adele. She started to correct the misunderstanding, but the words caught in her throat from embarrassment and a degree of anger. Who was
he
to assume a Mundy of Chatsworth didn't know how to shoot?

Before she could decide what to say, Daniel walked over to the line of Kostromans his sailors had dragged out of the warehouse. They were bloody and bound with their own tunics, but none of them seemed as seriously injured as Adele would have assumed.

Daniel looked down at the captives with his hands on his hips. "You shouldn't find it hard to get free," he said in a pleasant tone. "What you do then is your own business. We're going to leave the warehouse open, so if you want to have a good time and make some money selling what you don't carry away inside you, go right ahead."

The Cinnabar sailors waited in respectful silence, listening to their commander with as much interest as the Kostromans showed. They knew their lives depended on Daniel making the right decisions.

"On the other hand, you may decide to report exactly what happened here," Daniel continued with a smile. "I'm sure your lieutenant will be particularly pleased to give her version of events. It's your choice."

He turned. "Everybody ready?" he said. "Adele? Then let's mount up. Police armbands in the gun truck, the rest of you as before. Hogg leads in the van and our police escort follows."

"Duty stations!" roared Woetjans, who wore a Shore Police brassard herself. She climbed behind the steering yoke of the gun truck.

Adele had barely settled herself on the other seat in the cab before Hogg pulled the laden van past them. Gunning her engine, Woetjans fought the truck through a turn and roared onto the roadway in pursuit.

Adele wondered what a lieutenant was supposed to do. As for what Adele Mundy was supposed to do—her computer was under the seat, ready for use.

And her own pistol was in the side pocket of the borrowed jacket.

Candace's uniform was too tight on Daniel's shoulders and thighs despite being loose at the waist and decidedly baggy in the butt. It might have made Daniel feel as though he was in better shape than he'd given himself credit for; in his present mood, he just felt uncomfortable.

A starship was landing in the Floating Harbor, waking echoes and ghostly reflections from the marshy landscape. Under the circumstances, this was probably an Alliance vessel concerned with the coup: a warship, or another transport loaded with troops and heavy weapons.

Daniel'd almost fallen backward when he climbed into the cab carrying a case of brandy.
That
didn't impress him with what it said about his physical abilities.

Hogg glanced over at the liquor balanced on Daniel's knees. "There was room enough in back, you know, even before the six of them transferred to the cop car."

"This is for our friends at the gate," Daniel said. "I don't want to open the back up when we stop for them."

"Ah," said Hogg. The road ahead wobbled like a topo map where seepage had softened the bedding layer; Hogg slacked the hand throttle slightly. "Seems to me," he went on with his eyes on his driving, "that changing styles after you find one that works isn't generally very smart."

"We could've locked the police patrol in the warehouse," Daniel agreed. "And we could bull our way out the way we got in, more or less."

He smiled to think about that. He'd treated the gate guards as he would have done a gang of recruits too raw to understand discipline of any but the most basic sort. An officer rarely had to use his hands on a properly manned ship, because the experienced personnel hammered insolence out of a cocky recruit during the first "lights out."

"But you know, if the whole complex is looted while the guards are drunk," Daniel continued aloud, "or better still
by
drunken guards, nobody will even know we existed. I prefer that to leaving a trail of bodies and pissed-off survivors behind. You take more flies with honey than vinegar, Hogg."

Hogg snorted. "And what's a fly's pelt worth, young master?" he said. "For the things that
are
worth the trouble of skinning, I find a wire noose generally works best. But I take your meaning, sure."

The three-barred gate, backlit by the pole lamp forty yards down the approach road, was closed again. There was a small light on in the brick guardhouse that formed the east gatepost.

Kostroman ratings moved to either side of the roadway as the vehicles approached. They lifted their impellers but didn't point them.

Hogg downshifted and crawled the last hundred feet to the gate in the van's bottom gear. The cab doors were front-hinged. Daniel unlatched his and let inertia swing it fully open as the van finally halted. He put his foot on the running board, swung the brandy to his shoulder—no problem, thank God—and stepped to the ground.

"Here you go, my friends," Daniel said breezily as he walked toward a Kostroman. He deliberately chose the rating he'd choked unconscious when they arrived. "This case was broken in transit, you know the sort of thing."

He hunched the brandy off his shoulder and swung it to the startled Kostroman. The man tried to take the gift while still holding his impeller. The weight was too much—the case was wood in addition to the glass bottles themselves—so he dropped the weapon to use both hands.

"I wouldn't want you to think a gentleman of L'ven can't be generous," Daniel said avuncularly.

The other ratings converged on their fellow. One of the trio outside started to climb over the gate to get her share, despite the petty officer's angry command.

Daniel put a hand on top of the case as Kostromans jostled for possession. "Let's let me get out of here first, shall we?" he said. He dipped his left index finger toward the gate.

"Right!" bellowed the petty officer. "Open the gate and then we'll see what we see about the other."

"I'll look after the brandy," Daniel said with a paternal smile at the six ratings trying to hold the brandy. "Just set it down here."

The Kostromans looked at one another. The one in the middle knelt and set the case on the brick pavement. Then as one they rushed to the gate, drawing it open with even more verve than they'd shown when they admitted the van in the first place. Daniel wondered idly if the ratings ever obeyed their own officers as well as they did him.

Well, from what he'd seen, there wasn't much reason to obey Kostroman officers. . . .

Hogg revved the engine when he thought there was clearance enough. Daniel waited in seeming leisure until the Kostromans returned, a little winded from their exercise. He nodded to them as he got into the truck.

"Gently, now," he ordered Hogg. "We don't want them to think we've just robbed the bank."

Hogg grimaced, but he pulled through the gateway at a rate that didn't, for a change, seem calculated to tear the transmission out of the van. The gun truck followed.

The ratings had begun trying to pry open the case with their impeller muzzles. Several of them cheered Daniel as he rode away.

The streets of Kostroma City were busier than Adele remembered them being earlier in the evening. Black and yellow bunting or a banner flew from every civilian vehicle she saw, but many of them obviously carried would-be neutrals who were leaving town with the most portable of their valuables.

There were still jitneys full of Zojiras and gangsters who wore Zojira colors for the time being. Some vehicles carried prisoners; others were packed with loot.

"The Alliance's got people up on the rooftops already," Woetjans muttered in obvious disquiet. She drove the gun truck with competence but no flair, gripping the yoke as if to hurl the vehicle into turns by main force. "We should've gone around the city instead of straight back through it."

Adele had seen groups of two and three people watching the street from roofs as they passed, but she'd thought of them as spectators or owners guarding their homes. They were armed, but that was natural enough too. Woetjans's experienced eyes had noted uniforms and equipment that meant something else again.