The alley was too narrow for even the three-wheeled cyclo which'd brought Hogg and Daniel to the produce market where they'd lounged by the well curb, taking in the sights and waiting. Latticed wooden balconies built out from the upper stories almost met overhead. The passage kinked to the left some thirty feet from where they stood at its junction with the road to the harbor.
"Can't say I like it," Hogg muttered. In his loose garments and broad-brimmed hat he could've passed for a local man, at least after the shadows got a little longer. "Could be six guys waiting right round that corner to teach you not to fool with the local women."
"That's why you're with me, Hogg," Daniel said equably, shrugging in the gray cape he'd donned over his 1st Class uniform when they left the market. His Whites and glittering medals were the lure with which he'd trolled the market. He'd smiled faintly but he hadn't spoken except to murmur apologies when bumped, and he'd avoided eye contact, particularly with women.
After one pass through the market, he and Hogg settled to wait. They hadn't needed to wait very long.
Daniel glanced around. There was traffic on the main road, but nobody paid special attention to the two of them. Whistling a snatch from "Abel Brown the Spacer," he stepped into the alley. "I'll drink your wine and eat your pies, I'll screw you blue and black your eyes. . . ."
"And her husband may be home waiting for her and her not knowing it," Hogg said.
"Quite true, Hogg," Daniel agreed, pausing to listen before stepping under the first of the louvered balconies. He heard muted voices from within the house, but there was nothing of concern to him.
Shopping was women's work on Todos Santos, but there were many men in the produce market: stall-keepers, servants, and the bodyguards accompanying women of high station. There were also a few young men who, like Daniel, avoided contact with both the crowd of shoppers and with one another. Those fellows were all well got up, but none of them had a costume as vivid as RCN Dress Whites. A billet with written instructions had dropped from a puffed sleeve into Daniel's lap before he'd been half an hour in the market.
"You know, master," Hogg continued, "there's professionals here in San Juan too. They're a whole lot cheaper than having your dick sewed back on might be."
Daniel passed an inset doorway on the left. He heard the balcony above him creak as someone's weight shifted, but nobody spoke. He and Hogg were past the bend in the alley now.
"Tell me, Hogg," Daniel said in a low voice as they proceeded. The third doorway, the note said. That would be the one to the right, beneath a second-story balcony. "When you were growing up on Bantry, did your family buy meat at the Servants' Store?"
Hogg snorted. "Not unless Pap was too hung over to walk his snares," he said. "And after I turned six or so, not even then. Who'd want to eat chicken when the tree hoppers were fat on nuts?"
He chuckled and added, "And aye, I understand. Who knows? The maid what passed you the note didn't look half bad herself."
Daniel stopped at the third doorway. It ought to be the right one, but . . . The note didn't say, Knock, or Whistle or whatever, and there wasn't an eyeslit in the heavy panel. Which was odd unless—
He looked up. There was a giggle from the balcony; a trap door in the balcony floor opened inward. Daniel caught a glimpse of lace, then a bundle of sticks dropped down unraveling as it fell. It was a ladder of battens hung on cords.
"Keep an eye on things if you please, Hogg," Daniel said in a low voice. He gave the ladder a practice tug. Then, with a quick glance around, he started up. He'd have swung wildly if Hogg hadn't belayed the bottom of the ladder, but the silk-and-bamboo construction was certainly strong enough.
The trap door wasn't meant for anybody quite so bulky as Daniel Leary wearing his dress uniform under a cloak. He squirmed, angling his torso into the enclosed balcony. Light entered through lattices, softening everything into a world apart from the street outside. Perfume clung to the wood, and more giggles sounded from the dim interior of the house proper.
Daniel and every other member of the Sissie's crew carried an emergency communicator while on liberty. The plate now buzzed. For a moment Daniel fought the urge to ignore it, but they'd only call him in a real emergency.
"Are you coming, Mr. Officer?" breathed a voice from just out of sight inside the house.
Daniel sighed and slid the flat communicator from his sash. "Six here," he said. "Go ahead."
Adele sat at her console, her data unit on her lap. Her wands twitched across information she'd collected through the Princess Cecile's antennas and had processed with a navigational computer which in minutes or less could calculate courses across the universes of the Matrix. She smiled as she worked, as happy as she was capable of being. Certainly she was content, which was all she'd ever asked from life.
"General quarters!" ordered Woetjans, the watch officer. "There's an aircar approaching, a big one! Over!"
Adele switched her display to an optical pickup on the corvette's hull. If she could just find the vehicle identification code, she could search for the owner through the mass of data she'd collected. . . .
Crewmen ran down the corridors to their action stations. "Bessing!" somebody shouted on B Deck, his voice echoing up the companionway. "Get the arms locker open! Where's Bessing?"
Bessing, a rigger who was striking for an armorer's rating under Sun—now on liberty—was already sprinting down the corridor to the locker adjacent to the Battle Center. The electronic key was in his hand.
"Everybody return to duty!" Woetjans said. "It's the Countess and there's nobody with her. Bridge out."
Adele didn't understand why the Klimovna was returning alone, but it was no cause for concern; least of all to Adele Mundy. She went back to her own affairs, downloading the files involving the Cluster Naval Self-Defense Force. Nobody'd asked her for the information, but at some future date Daniel or Mistress Sand—or someone at present unknown—might ask about the Cluster's navy. Because Adele was who she was, she gathered the information now.
Also there was the matter of the Goldenfels. The Alliance freighter was sealed against Adele's devices, so she was methodically searching all the Cluster files involved with the vessel. The bureaucrats' records, official and otherwise, would provide a good start on the data she wanted.
"Good afternoon, Countess," Tovera said in a loud voice.
Adele jumped internally, suddenly aware that someone—that the Klimovna—stood beside the signals console. Adele compressed her display, though it was only a blur of light from any angle but that to her own eyes, and looked up.
The Countess smiled down at her. "You appear to concentrate, Mistress Mundy," she said.
"Yes," said Adele. "It's the only way I know to accomplish anything."
The Countess sat sideways on the couch of the gunnery console, continuing to smile. Adele noticed that she hadn't responded to Tovera's greeting. Granted, Tovera had been warning Adele of the foreigner's presence, but she still deserved a response.
"You work very hard," the Klimovna said, ignoring what Adele had meant for a blunt warning that she was busy. "You've only been off this tiny boat one time since we've landed, have you?"
Adele's eyes narrowed. The short answer would've been, "Yes," though the fact hadn't occurred to Adele until the other woman mentioned it.
Still, Adele's duties to Mistress Sand required at least the passive cooperation of the Princess Cecile's new owners. Aloud she said, "Countess, some of the most beautiful and historic buildings in the human universe are libraries, and I've been privileged to work in the best of them. While I'm working, though, I'm aware of nothing but data and the means by which I access it."
She gestured, then continued, "My console provides me with that in a more readily accessible form than I could find anywhere else on this planet."
Except just possibly at a similar installation on the Goldenfels.
"Countess, you say countess!" the Klimovna said with a moue and a shake of her head. "Please, call me Valentina. I should like that we be friends."
She paused, staring intently at Adele, then continued, "You are not the jealous sort, I think? Are you, Adele?"
"What?" said Adele in puzzlement. Light dawned, bringing a broad—perhaps tactless—smile to her face. "Ah, I understand. Ah, Valentina, at the risk of mistaking where this conversation is headed, let me assure you that I have no physical relationship with Lieutenant Leary—with Daniel. I've never had such a relationship."
"But . . . ?" said the Klimovna. "You seem . . . ?"
"We're friends," said Adele. "Daniel happens to be a tenant of the house I own in Xenos. But to be more frank with you than our slight acquaintance warrants—"
And to cut short a conversation that Adele found extremely distasteful.
"—I've never been interested in a man—or woman—in that fashion. Whereas Daniel, so far as I've seen, has never been interested in a woman as old as I am. That's thirty-two standard years, Valentina."
She paused, holding the other woman's eyes, then added, "I'm only seventeen years younger than you are."
The Klimovna jerked back as though struck. In fact a slap probably wouldn't have shocked her as badly as that bit of precise knowledge did. Well, she'd forced Adele into an unpleasant conversation, so she could take the consequences of it.
"Piffle!" the Klimovna said after a long moment, rubbing her hands hard on the thighs of her pants suit. "Men are fools, some of them. What can some young bubblehead offer them, compared to an experienced woman of the world, eh?"
"I'm sure I don't know," Adele said dryly. Then, because it was an aspect of the matter that had irritated her too—though improperly—during her friendship with Daniel, she added, "Though it appears that the bubbleheadedness is at least part of the attraction. I won't even speculate why."
"Piffle," the Klimovna repeated, staring at the outer bulkhead with a disgusted expression. She rose to her feet, her hands interlaced behind her back. She didn't leave, though, as Adele first thought—and hoped—but simply looked away.
She turned back to Adele abruptly. "I suppose my husband's still out?" she said.
"So far as I know," Adele agreed, "though you should check with the watch officer to be sure. I thought the two of you were together."
"Faugh!" said the Klimovna. "Georgi likes to drink and gamble and who knows what? Why would I want to watch that? I bought an aircar to replace the other one."
She waved her hand. To replace the one you crashed, Adele amended, but silently.
"Daniel's man Hogg arranged it," the Klimovna continued. "A very clever fellow, Hogg. I wonder if he would care to serve me in place of his present master?"
"I doubt it," said Adele dryly.
"I don't think Hogg would cut your throat for asking," said Tovera unexpectedly. It was like having the chair itself speak. "But he might. Hogg's quite an interesting fellow—as servants go."
"I take Tovera's point," Adele said, raising her voice to speak through any chance that the Klimovna was going to say the wrong thing. "It would be unwise to raise the question with Hogg. Old family loyalties, you know. I suppose you have the same thing on Novy Sverdlovsk?"
The Klimovna sniffed. "At home, servants know their place," she said, but she wasn't looking at either Tovera or Adele when she said it. "Anyway, I bought this car from a store of unclaimed goods. Hogg introduced me to the warehouse manager."
Did he indeed? Adele thought, struggling to keep a strait face. Well, it was no business of hers. Knowing Hogg, the Princess Cecile would have left Todos Santos long before any owner returned to claim his property.
Because Adele had reduced her display, a small red asterisk appeared in the air over the data unit. She closed her lips over the polite fluff she'd been creating to offer Klimovna—small talk must be easier for other people—and brought the display up to full size.
Oh. Oh! That must mean—
"Ship, this is Loppy, I'm with the Count only he's upstairs," said a voice. "We got a situation here and we're going to need help bloody damned quick. Over."
Because the call was on an emergency channel, it got a priority routing to the bridge and the Battle Center as well as to Adele's console. The call plates every spacer on liberty carried were meant for recall by the ship. The plates' outgoing transmissions generally carried only a half mile or so.
Adele had directed the ship's technicians to adjust the plates' programming to use the relay system that carried messages for the Governor's Guard, giving them full two-way capability. For ordinary crewmen that didn't matter a great deal—the establishments serving their needs were generally well within a half mile of the harbor. The detachment escorting Count Klimov would've been out of touch without the modification, though, as would Captain Leary himself.
"Loppy, this is Woetjans," said the bosun. As watch officer she was using the command console, but the couch was adjusted to Daniel's height. It made a clumsy match for Woetjans' raw-boned frame. "Go ahead."
"Top, we're in a fancy club, dunno what the name of it is," Rigger Loppinger said. "It's not just a bar and a knock shop, the Count's upstairs in the card room playing with the captain of the Goldenfels. You remember—"
"I remember," the bosun said grimly. "Spit it out, spacer!"
Adele's wands flickered. She'd already queued a recall signal; now she called up the triangulated location of Loppy's call and superimposed it on files from San Juan's chief of police. The establishment was the Anyo Nuevo; and judging from the amount it paid in bribes each week, it was a very upscale place indeed.
"Top, the Count's cleaning out the bastard from Pleasaunce," the rigger said. "He'll own his back teeth in a little bit. They wouldn't let us in the card room, but I could hear it through the doorway. Thing is, there's twenty spacers from the Goldenfels drinking down in the bar here, and I don't think their captain's going to let the Count go home with his money. Can you get us some help? Over."
The Klimovna was speaking, had been speaking for some while. Adele was only vaguely aware of her, the way she heard the hum of the corvette's fusion bottle on D Deck. Tovera had backed the older woman away so that she wouldn't brush Adele with a sweep of her arms.
Woetjans turned awkwardly on the couch. Her face was anguished. "Mistress?" she called across the bridge to Adele. In an emergency riggers like her didn't think about radio communication. "Can you raise the captain, because—"
"Six here," Daniel said, answering the summons Adele had sent as soon as Loppinger mentioned the Goldenfels. "Go ahead."
"Woetjans, I'll take this," Adele said, bringing a look of relief to the bosun's face. "Daniel, Count Klimov is playing cards with Captain Bertram of the Goldenfels in the Anyo Nuevo, whose coordinates I've downloaded to you. The game will shortly result in violence. Bertram has twenty spacers with him and his ship has a total crew of three hundred and fifty-six, according to the amount the port medical inspector just paid into his private account to clear the ship from quarantine. Ah, over."
She was sure how many crew the Goldenfels carried because she'd compared the payment to that made for the hundred and twenty-seven passengers and crew aboard the Princess Cecile. Cheating a government was one thing. Cheating an official personally by shorting his bribe was something else, and much more dangerous.
Daniel whistled, a sound which the recall plate only partially transmitted. "That's no freighter!" he said. "The Goldenfels must be an auxiliary cruiser."
In a different tone but with almost the same breath he continued, "Very well, sound recall."
Adele acted as she heard the words, nodding assent to the bosun.
"Woetjans, how many men are aboard the Sissie now? Over."
"Twenty-four either on watch," Woetjans said, "or back from liberty early. But those're in bad shape some of 'em, over."
"Very good," said Daniel. "Can you lay on transport? Because if we have to run a mile and a half to this bar, we're none of us going to be in good shape. Over."
"The aircar," said Adele.
"Right, the lady's back with an aircar!" Woetjans said. "I shouldn't wonder we could fit twelve in her—she's a big sucker. Over."
"Yes," said Daniel. "Woetjans, take nine and yourself. Stop to pick me up at—"
"Daniel, I've downloaded the coordinates," Adele said hastily.
"Roger, me and Hogg," Daniel resumed. "No guns. Adele, take charge until Mr. Chewning reports back. Six out."
Woetjans was on her feet bellowing, gathering personnel both with her raw voice and over the ship's PA system. "Daniel!" said Adele before he broke the connection. "Do you want me and Tovera—or just Tovera?"
"Good God no!" Daniel replied, his voice strained as if he were doing something physically demanding while still holding the call plate in one hand. "Adele, if there's shooting in this city, you can depend on it that the Governor's troops will execute everybody they catch. Just don't let anybody from the Goldenfels aboard the Sissie, and make damned sure the guns're manned. Over."
"Over, Daniel," Adele said. "Out."
She leaned back in her couch and closed her eyes, feeling suddenly empty. There was a good deal happening, but she herself had nothing to do except wait.
The Klimovna's voice penetrated the mental barriers Adele had set up when she had no time to deal with trivia. Adele opened her eyes. "Madam," she said. "Your husband is in trouble over a card game. Captain Leary and some of the crew are on their way to extricate him. Ah, they'll be taking your aircar."
Bessing was seated at the gunnery display. Nobody was at the command console or the missile board, but the three senior ratings in the Battle Direction Center could handle anything up through lifting ship, Adele supposed.
"Georgi will play," the Klimovna said. She made a moue. "So clever, he thinks himself."
She looked sharply at Adele. "He will be all right?" she said. "Tell me the truth."
Adele met the older woman's eyes, her face expressionless. "Yes," she said at last. "I think the Count will be all right. Daniel—Captain Leary—will send him back in the aircar, I expect."
But will Daniel be all right with hundreds of Alliance spacers baying for his blood? Adele thought.
Oh. Yes, of course. There was an answer.
Adele's wands flickered as she entered the maze of local communications systems. There were six simply for the San Juan district, two of them surprisingly sophisticated. There was no common system even for the military. The army, the navy, and the Governor's Guard were all separate.
The Klimovna was speaking again somewhere close by in the background. Adele found the node she needed and entered it, bypassing the firewall. She took a deep breath and began to speak.
Barnes, swearing like the spacer he'd been for the past twenty years, deliberately slammed the aircar hard on the street. The overloaded vehicle bounced upward on a combination of momentum and air compressed by the fans in surface effect. The huge cloud of dust looked like a bomb blast, but they cleared the furniture van whose driver had kept right on coming out of the sidestreet when he saw the aircar hurtling down the boulevard a bare seven feet above the rutted surface.
Daniel'd braced himself against the dashboard, but the weight of husky spacers behind him slammed him hard anyway. His ribs didn't crack, so it was cheap at the price.
Barnes wasn't a good driver in the conventional sense, but his very ham-fistedness made him exactly what the present situation required. There was no way to do a neat job of flying a six-place aircar with fourteen spacers aboard. Unlike a better driver, Barnes wasn't disconcerted by the number of skidding collisions they'd had on the way to the Anyo Nuevo.
Barnes was a big man, handy with a club or his fists. That was good too, as was the fact Woetjans brought twelve in the car instead of ten like Daniel ordered. He hadn't put them out on the street when he and Hogg squeezed aboard, and now that they'd arrived at their destination he was glad for the bosun's better judgment.
It'd been a near thing, though. Bloody near, he'd thought when he saw the van nosing straight across their path.
"Turn right at the next intersection and stop!" Daniel said, his left hand on Barnes' shoulder to get his attention. He was watching the road through a street map projected as a thirty percent mask on his faceshield. A moving red bead indicated the aircar, a gold one their intended destination.
Barnes tried to corner and tried to stop, each with partial success. The streets joined at more than a right angle, and they had the speed up to keep the overweight car from dropping like an anchor. At the last instant Barnes did the best thing possible, jerking the steering yoke hard right so that they were banked at 45 degrees when they slammed into the front of a food stall, then caromed off before bouncing to a halt.
Locals who'd a moment ago been gaping at the vehicle coming toward them on screaming fans scattered like a covey of birds. Daniel was pretty sure the aircar hadn't hit anybody—all the people he could see were running and cursing at the top of their lungs—but the good Lord knew there'd be damage claims from at least the stall-holder whose soup tureens were sprayed across her back wall. That was a matter for later, and for Count Klimov—if they got him out alive.
"This way!" Daniel shouted, forcing his way up against the weight of several spacers using his body to launch themselves out of the moaning vehicle. "And keep out of sight till I'm through the door!"
Daniel handed Hogg the commo helmet Woetjans had brought for him, donned his gleaming white saucer cap—slightly squished in the controlled crash of their landing—and straightened his rows of medal ribbons. When Daniel was as presentable as possible under the circumstances, he strode into an alley whose sides he could've brushed with both elbows. Twenty feet down he knocked at the metal back door of the Anyo Nuevo.
The door didn't have a peephole, but the diode on a thumb-sized camera clipped to the transom went red. "Name?" squeaked a sexless voice from the camera's speaker.
"Daniel Leary of Bantry," Daniel said, brushing the name tape on his left breast: Leary in gold letters against the white cloth. "The password is 'Lusiads,' whatever that means."
And your name is Ramon Echevaria, he thought. My signals officer has told me absolutely everything on record about this house.
"You're not on the list," the voice said in puzzlement. "Who recommended you?"
"Commander Adrian Purvis," Daniel lied nonchalantly. "My cousin."
"All right, get out of the way," said the voice. "The door opens out."
Daniel moved sideways as he heard the bolts withdraw. The door—goodness, it was two inches thick and solid metal!—whined open on hydraulic rams. Echevaria, a small man with a goatee, sat on a cushioned chair, watching a hologram involving two women and a wombat.
Daniel grabbed him by the throat, not hard until Echevaria tried to reach the holstered pistol hanging from his chair. Hogg thrust a wedge of tool steel—an antenna lock—into the door hinge and waved forward the spacers waiting at the head of the alley.
"I got him, master," said Hogg as he wired Echevaria's wrists together. "Now listen—if you're a good little wog and don't make a peep, I'll cut you free when I come back by. If you start screaming, I'll pull your tongue out instead. Understand?"
Daniel started up the stairs to the private room on the third floor, above the saloon at ground level and the women's apartments on the floor above. He wasn't sure Hogg would bother to free the doorman if he stayed quiet, but he'd bet his hopes for a captaincy that the rest of Hogg's promise was real.
Amber-colored rods inset into the wainscoting lighted the stairs. Figures of a darker golden color danced in their depths. There wasn't a door at the top, only a plush drapery. Daniel pushed it aside and stepped through, leaving Hogg behind in the archway.
Daniel expected to arouse attention when he entered, but the twenty or so people already present were focused on the table at the edge of the lush room. A house man sat on the side, dealing five-card stud to Count Klimov at one end across from a short, trim man with brush-cut hair—Captain Bertram. The Alliance officer wore a suit of lace ruffles over puce that made him look like a clown. Daniel knew that the civilian outfit was the height of fashion on Pleasaunce, so far on the cutting edge that it'd been only just beginning to be copied on Xenos when the Sissie lifted.
Chandeliers of rainbow-colored pinpoints twinkled to light the room. Hangings of monochrome plush covered the walls in thick folds to deaden noise. The roulette table in the center was untenanted; the croupier, a sultry woman in a fishnet top, held her rake as she watched the poker game. Half those present were staff, but like the patrons they were now merely spectators around the poker table.
The top cards were face down. Klimov looked at his and said, "Up twenty."
He deliberately added stacks of gold markers, five and five and five and five, to the considerable amount already on the table before him. He had three queens showing. Bertram had the nine and ten of hearts and the seven of clubs.
Daniel scanned the room quickly, making a keep-back gesture to Hogg with his left hand. Only high rollers and the house staff had access to this sanctum. None of the spacers escorting Klimov and Bertram were present, nor did the other gamblers have servants with them. Two heavies stood at the stairs to the lower floors. Although they were well-groomed, they weren't there to serve drinks.
The Alliance officer glowered and took a fierce drag on his cigar, making the tip glow like a demon's eye. he glanced at the palm of his left hand, seemingly empty, and said, "Yes, all right. I call."
Bertram shoved out chips with an angry, nervous motion. Some of his bet was in gold, some in violet, and the rest in a scatter of lesser colors. Daniel didn't know what the denominations were, but judging from the way everybody watched the poker table he could venture a guess.
The dealer's hands fluttered over the final bet, taking the house percentage. The motion was as swift as sunlight glancing on the ripples of a pond.
"So," said Klimov equably. He turned over his top card, a five of clubs.
"So!" said Bertram. He snapped up the jack of spades and the eight of diamonds, then leaned back and took a long drag on his cigar. "My straight beats your three queens!"
Klimov turned up his hole card, the fourth queen.
The Alliance captain gave a disbelieving gasp. He stared into his left palm again, then jumped to his feet. "That's not a queen, it's the ace of spades!" he shouted. "You think you'll cheat me, you hog-fucking hayseed?"
Bertram reached under the blouse of his tunic and started to come out with a gun. Spectators scrambled back like roaches startled by a light. Daniel went through them like a ball scattering ten-pins.
"Sissies to me!" he shouted, catching Bertram's gunhand and elbow. He bent the wrist backward till the gun came loose and Bertram's call, "Alliance! Alliance!" turned to a scream.
The toughs at the door had either missed Bertram's gun or been paid to miss it. Now they jumped out of the way instead of trying to stop the solid mass of Alliance spacers coming up the stairs. There were more than twenty, that Daniel could see in the brief glance he got as he lifted Bertram over his head and hurled him down the stairwell.
"Get your fucking ass outa the way, master!" Hogg shouted. Daniel threw himself to the side. Woetjans and half a dozen more Sissies went by and with an explosive grunt—
Good God almighty, they had the roulette table on its side! A thousand pounds of baize and dark, lustrous wood if it weren't twice that heavy!
—sent their huge missile into the faces of the Alliance spacers trapped in the stairwell.
Lights hidden in the curtain valences came on, flooding the room brilliantly. The last of the dozen Sissies were coming through the back door, holding clubs and looking for somebody to fight. There weren't any hostiles left at the moment. A doorman who'd stumbled into Dasi while trying to dodge the roulette table might need surgery to remove his balls from his chest cavity, though.
"Hogg, where's my—" Daniel began, but before he got the rest of the question out of his mouth Hogg tossed him the commo helmet he'd stuffed into a cargo pocket. Hogg's trousers and loose tunics could hold—and often had held, to Daniel's certain knowledge from when he was a boy on Bantry—whole coveys of game birds without a soul realizing the fact by glancing at the hick with the slack-jawed grin.
He settled the helmet in place as he turned. Woetjans had the Count with one arm around his waist and the other gripping the opposite shoulder. Neither of Klimov's feet touched the ground in the normal fashion but his right boot tapped down occasionally as Woetjans headed for the back stairs as planned.
Klimov must figure to cash out some time, though it wouldn't be tonight; he'd swept up the chips before the bosun grabbed him. That was fair, he'd won the hand, but there was something screwy about the game. . . .
Which could wait for more leisure than Daniel had right at this moment. "Six-three—that's you, Adele—get the men from the bar clear," he said. "We're coming out the back way with the Count. He'll fly back—"
If the car was still flyable; which it likely was, carrying just Klimov's weight and that of a couple spacers as driver and escort.
"—while the rest of us return overland. Out."
Four Sissies watched the stairs down which they'd thrown the roulette table. Daniel glanced past them. Save for sprawled bodies, none of the Alliance spacers were closer than the first landing. They had their captain, Daniel'd seen to that, so there wasn't any reason to continue the fight except for honor—but that was a good enough reason, maybe the only good reason there was. With luck the roulette table would dampen their ardor enough to give the Sissies enough of a head start, though.
"Stand clear!" Daniel said to the self-appointed rear guard. They stepped sideways and he hurled a chair at the faces peering up from the landing. It struck the wall and shattered, flinging splinters and bits of delicate inlays in all directions.
"When I give the word," he continued in a low voice to his spacers, "we'll cross the room and head down the back stairs after the others. Ready?"
Shouts and the deadened crunch of battle burped up the back stairs. Daniel turned, his face blank.
"Bloody hell, captain!" shouted Lamsoe who'd just reached the curtained doorway on his way down. "They got around us, sir! Bloody hell, there's a whole army of 'em!"
"Sissies defend the doorways!" Daniel bellowed. Some of the spacers had commo helmets on, but most did not. "Woetjans, back to the doorway and we'll hold them here!"
For a while, but there'd better be another way out than the two I know about, Daniel thought, absently picking up another of the chairs. They were too flimsy to make good clubs or missiles, but four chairlegs in the face would give pause to a man willing to charge a brandished axe.
The staff and the room's other patrons squeezed themselves against the walls. An elderly man in striped robes was dabbing the pressure cut on his left cheekbone, and a mannishly handsome woman was counting chips from the palm of her left hand into her reticule with an eye on the croupier shivering beside her clutching her own shoulders. In the bright overhead lighting, the female staff in their net tops looked like fish being landed rather than exotically sexual figures.
The wall hangings were disarrayed. Close to the back entrance, Daniel saw the jamb of a closed door. He stepped to it, tried the knob and found it locked.
"Careful, sir!" Dasi shouted. Daniel jumped back. Dasi and Barnes—mates from long before Daniel had known them—lunged forward with the porphyry shelf they'd wrenched from the wall. They smashed it into the latch.
The whole doorpanel disintegrated. Daniel jerked the remains out of his way and stepped into a service area. The floor manager was talking in violent agitation to someone over a flat-plate communicator. He saw Daniel, screamed, and reached into the half-open drawer under the communicator.
Daniel caught the fellow's arm and twisted it up, taking the pistol out of the drawer with his free hand. He didn't want a gun, but in a situation like this he didn't intend to leave it in the hands of somebody who certainly wasn't a friend.
"How do we get out?" he said, still holding the manager's wrist but no more firmly than necessary to keep the pudgy little man from wriggling away. "Quick, if you please, so that we can take our troubles away from here."
"The back stairs!" the manager gasped. "They way you came in, for God's sake!"
"That's blocked now," Daniel said, speaking calmly. "Is there a way to the roof?"
Behind Daniel sounds from the card room suggested a demolition team was at work. That was more or less the truth. His people had brought clubs, but weight of numbers was going to tell very quickly if it came to hand-to-hand slugging against the Goldenfels' crew. The Sissies were converting the furnishings into missiles, and they'd very shortly be using the studs for spears if they managed to tear them out of the walls.
"In there!" the manager said, pointing to the toilet half-screened in the corner. "In the ceiling, there's a ladder pulls down. But it won't help you!"
Daniel turned to give an order but Hogg and Portus, a technician with blood now matting her blond hair, had gotten to the alcove before the words were out of the manager's mouth. Daniel stepped to the card room door, still holding the manager. The fellow was probably harmless, but there wasn't enough margin for survival in this affair to learn that there was another pistol stashed somewhere in the service area.
His Sissies were holding the tops of both staircases, but Lamsoe was sprawled unconscious in the middle of the room and most of the others Daniel could see had injuries. If there was only a trap door to block they'd survive that much longer, but retreating up a ladder would mean sacrificing the rear guard; which Daniel wasn't willing to do, not yet.
"Got it open!" Hogg shouted. "I'll check the—"
"Negative!" Daniel said. "Portus, check the roof for a way out. Hogg, come here and—"
"There's no way off the roof!" the manager said in a piping voice. "You'd have to jump!"
"—rig a snare across this doorway for after we're clear. Sissies, start withdrawing to the roof. Horn and Kolbek—"
Two techs who weren't involved in the immediate fighting, waiting for a chance to replace somebody in the groups fighting at each stairhead.
"—carry Lamsoe now! Move it, Sissies!"
Jumping from a third-floor roof would mean broken legs and maybe broken necks—which wasn't any worse than what the Alliance spacers would do to them if Daniel didn't get his people clear in some fashion. Aircars, maybe? But where to steal enough of them quickly, and few spacers could drive one anyway.
Of course if the fight went on long enough the local authorities might intervene. At this point that was looking like a less bad option than it'd seemed at the beginning.
Three spacers trundled past. Lamsoe was on his feet, but his face was slack and he was moving only because Horn directed him.
"Woetjans, start sending them back!" Daniel said. "We're moving out!"
Hogg knelt nearby, wearing gloves and paying out the length of deep-sea fishline he always carried. The line was boron monocrystal, strong enough to hold a whale but so thin it cut like a knife if you weren't careful handling it. He'd looped it around the lower hinge of the shattered door and was running it back to the legs of a couch on the other side.
There was a burst of particular violence at the main stairs. Barnes and Dasi charged some ways down the steps after the retreating Alliance spacers; when they came back up, Barnes had lost his left sleeve and his mouth was bloody. The blood wasn't necessarily his own, of course.
"Now!" Daniel said. "We'll hold at this door. Now by God or you'll none of you ship under me again, damn your bloody souls!"
"Captain . . . ?" said Count Klimov, looking aristocratically puzzled and holding a baize bag bulging with chips.
Bloody Hell, I'd forgotten him! Daniel grabbed his employer by the lapel and dragged him into the service room to relative safety. "Somebody get the Count up the ladder!" he shouted over his shoulder. "Soonest! Move! Move! Move!"
All but four Sissies broke back immediately, not in panic but out of the ingrained habit of obeying orders instantly. Horn was feeding them up the ladder; there was a brief delay as spacers helped/tossed the Count up to hands waiting on the roof, but the spacers themselves climbed as they would the companionways of a starship. Not even the largest battleships had elevators. A cage would catch and become a fatal trap if the vessel's fabric worked enough to kink the shaft. That could happen while transiting from one bubble universe to another, let alone as a result of enemy action.
"Come on back, the rest of you!" Daniel ordered. "Hold this doorway!"
He tossed the manager into the corner diagonally away from the toilet alcove. If the fellow had good sense he'd stay there, squeezed into as tight a ball as his waistline would allow. If he didn't, well, that was his lookout.
Barnes and Dasi, Woetjans and Szurovsky, jerked themselves away from the struggle at the two stairheads. Alliance spacers followed, but not instantly. The newcomers pouring up the stairs turned their first attention to the civilians in the card room who'd begun to move when they saw the Sissies leaving.
"I'm ready!" Hogg said. "Master, get up the ladder!"
"I'll wait till—" Daniel said.
"Woetjans, haul his ass out of here!" Hogg said. "Quick!"
The bosun turned and reached for Daniel's arm. He was ahead of her, springing for the ladder. Knowing when to decline battle against overwhelming force was a necessary skill for an RCN officer. The ladder built into the wall was iron, red with rust inhibitor and rust—mostly the latter, but the metal remained sturdy enough for the job.
Woetjans was directly behind him. As Daniel went through the trap door he shouted over his shoulder, "Szurovsky next, Barnes and Dasi follow as soon as he's on the ladder. Move it—"
Hands, at least three sets of them, jerked Daniel onto the roof.
"—Sissies!"
"There's no way down!" Portus said. "There's Alliance spacers all around the building, sir, it's like the tide coming in down there!"
Daniel rolled to his belly and glanced back through the trap door. Woetjans was out and Szurovsky, a lanky man of nearly six feet six, slithered up behind her. Dasi and Barnes ran back from the doorway. As they did Hogg rose to his feet, lifting with him the chairleg on which he'd wrapped the other end of the fishline crisscrossing the doorway as an invisible shimmer.
Three Alliance spacers charged into the doorway, then tripped screaming onto the service room's floor. One had a cut deep into his shin bone. There was blood on the threshold and blood in the air, clinging to the boron fiber and giving it visible presence.
Hogg dropped the chairleg with which he'd tensioned the snare and ran for the ladder just as Barnes cleared it. Nobody else rushed into the service room for a moment. An Alliance spacer threw a statuette into Hogg's back as he mounted the ladder; Hogg climbed the rest of the way with only a grunt and a curse to show he'd been hit.
Sissies jerked Hogg onto the roof; Portus and Lamsoe, bright-eyed again, slammed the door down on its jamb. There wasn't a lock on this side, but the two spacers stood on the panel while four others staggered over with a section of stone cornice they'd torn from the facade.
Daniel stuck the pistol he'd taken from the floor manager back into his sash. He hadn't been going to let Hogg be kicked to death in front of him, even if that meant shooting somebody.
Only now did Daniel step to the edge and look down. He'd hoped they'd be able to jump to the roof of the building on the other side of the narrow alley, but it was two stories taller and the brick wall facing the Anyo Nuevo was blank.
The alley itself was full of green Alliance utility uniforms. Some of the more enterprising of the Goldenfels' crew were climbing the gap, bracing themselves between the walls as they would in a narrow crevasse. They weren't a serious threat, but in all likelihood their fellows would be on top of the adjacent building shortly and using twenty-foot height advantage to hurl bricks—if they didn't use guns.
"Bloody hell, sir, come look at this!" Woetjans shouted as she gazed over the front of the building. Daniel stepped to her side, grimacing at the damage to his dress uniform. Still, it'd gotten him into the card room without alerting the mob of Alliance spacers below.
He followed Woetjans' gesture. Up Straight Street—it wasn't particularly straight, except by comparison with most streets in San Juan—from the direction of the harbor came a line of vehicles. Most were armored after a fashion, and all were armed. They flew streamers and flags of many varieties—house colors, Daniel assumed—but every single one of them wore the red-on-gold—
"Great God, our help!" shouted Portus. "That's the Cinnabar sandal! They're not the cops, they're Cinnabars come to save us!"
A pair of large aircars, laboring to stay airborne, roared around the side of the tall building behind the Anyo Nuevo. They flared to land, their skids sparkling on the roof's covering of asphaltic concrete. One had a cloth-of-gold canopy, the other red silk which had torn to tatters on the flight just ended.
Most of those aboard the two vehicles were heavily-armed locals, but the men in the middle, the seat of honor, were Cinnabar natives dressed in local pomp. Daniel recognized both of them.
He stepped to the gold-covered car and saluted. His right arm caught him in mid-motion—he'd strained his triceps somehow—but he carried through anyway.
"Sir!" he said to Admiral O'Quinn. "Lieutenant Daniel Leary, RCN, reporting!"
He coughed. "Ah," he added. "That is, RCN Reserve, sir. And we're very glad to see you!"
O'Quinn got out of his vehicle with the hesitation of a man more hindered by ill health than old age, but who was old as well. "If you're on half pay, Leary," he said, "then you're more RCN than I am by a long ways."
He peered over the front of the building. "I think the boys are sorting out the Alliance well enough," he went on. "It's our household guards mostly doing the heavy work, but I see some of the old crew are showing they're not too old to swing a wrench."
"Sir," said Daniel, nodding to Commander Purvis as he joined them from the other aircar. The mob flying the Cinnabar flag was weighing into the Goldenfels' crew all right. There were hundreds of the newcomers, and more were arriving from several directions in addition to the initial batch from the harbor. "Ah, I'm very grateful, as I said; but how is it that you came here like this?"
O'Quinn looked at him in surprise. "Came here?" he repeated. "Why, Mistress Mundy sent a warning through the alert network we Cinnabars set up in case, well, things changed in our relationship with the Governor. Our private network."
"I don't see how she got the codes to do that," Commander Purvis said with a sudden frown. "I certainly didn't give them to her. I don't know how she even realized the network existed!"
"We'd have done the same if it was your father, Leary," said Admiral O'Quinn. "Of course I might've hanged him afterwards, but I wouldn't have left him to the Alliance."
Daniel nodded crisply. "Yes sir," he said. "I appreciate the distinction. So would he."
Count Klimov, looking very little the worse for wear, strolled over to them. "So, Captain Leary," he said. "These men are friends of yours?"
Daniel quirked a smile at his employer. "Yes, your excellency," he said, "they're my colleagues and most certainly my friends."
He took a deep breath and went on, "And if you don't mind my appearing to give an order, your excellency, I strongly recommend that the Princess Cecile lift from here as soon as we and the rest of the crew are back aboard!"