Taking the ship from the Legion was going to be harder than Sula expected. Guards were placed in Command, in Engine Control, and at the entrance to the hold. Torminel in black uniforms prowled the corridors in pairs. Sula set her crew to finding out when the shifts changed, so that she could prepare her countercoup.
It was Pavel Ikuhara who found out the cause of the Legion’s strike, from Striver’s third lieutenant. “It was Captain Foote,” he said, during one of their meetings, this one in Ming Lin’s cabin. “His squadron attacked two others at Colamote and wiped them out. He’s running toward Harzapid, and the two squadrons we saw at Zarafan are moving to intercept.”
A disgusted note escaped Sula’s throat. “That idiot Jeremy Foote started the war early!” she said. “And those Zarafan squadrons aren’t just chasing him, they’re on our tail. They’re going to overrun us if we’re not careful.”
“Maybe not,” Ikuhara said. “Lord Arrun ordered an alteration of our course, so we’re going to miss the next wormhole transit altogether. We’ll do our whole deceleration in this system before our return to Zarafan.”
“When were we scheduled to transit the wormhole?”
“In nine days or so.”
“Then we have a deadline,” Sula said, and then she shook her head. “But why wait? We have a plan, don’t we?” She took a breath. “Let’s do it tomorrow.”
Sula assigned Vijana to lead Sidney, Rebecca Giove, and Ikuhara to the purser’s office to retrieve some of the party’s firearms. She and Ming Lin would approach those guarding the hold and put them out of the way, with Haz, Macnamara, Spence, and three others as backup once the guards were disposed of. She considered having them all advance on the guards at once, but then decided a mob of Terrans charging out of the elevator, or the stairs, would be more likely to convince the guards to call for help than a pair of nonthreatening Terran females.
Lady Koridun would be in the restaurant in the company of her suitor, who—now that his command of the ship had become routine—had resumed his relentless pursuit of the Koridun fortune. If an alarm was transmitted to Lord Arrun, Koridun would know, and she would try to alert Sula to the problem.
“Are we sure the purser’s office doesn’t have security cameras?” Vijana asked.
“We’ve not been inside,” Sula said, and then, “Oh, hell.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I just remembered there’s a security desk in Command.” Before the Legion had taken the ship, Sula had asked Lady Koridun to petition Striver’s captain for a tour of Command, and he’d been happy to grant the request of a prominent clan head. Sula and Giove had gone along and had kept the captain and officers occupied answering questions while Koridun had taken a series of photographs.
Sula got her comm unit and paged through the photos until she found one of the security desk, an unoccupied console brilliant with video feeds from elsewhere in the ship. “We didn’t pay much attention because the console was unoccupied,” she said, “and the officers seemed to be ignoring it. But you can bet there’s a Legion recruit sitting at that console now.”
“We’ll have to take Command first,” said Vijana. “We can’t hope to do anything else with those cameras looking at us.”
“Right,” said Sula. “We postpone our plan by one day.”
Damn.
In the end she decided to lead the Command storming party herself, and to make the attack toward the end of the midday break and shift change, when Striver was burning at one gee, but ten or fifteen minutes before gravities were scheduled to increase. Anyone not on duty would be getting to their couches for the next period of hard deceleration.
Command was key to the rest, and she had to make sure it was done right. She took eight of her eighteen recruits, including Macnamara and Sidney, the best shots; Ikuhara, who could control the ship once it was taken; and Ming Lin, who had experience in the war as a bomb delivery system. She took only eight because the whole party had only eight firearms.
Command rested between Striver’s crew and passenger sections, more or less in the middle of the habited sections of the ship. On the level above were the passenger entry port, a common room, and the purser’s office. Below were three levels of crew quarters. Leaving the elevator, visitors were presented with a bulkhead, and recessed into it a locked door, a camera, and a speaker. An airtight hatch would drop across the recess to seal the bulkhead in a decompression emergency, but normally the hatch was open.
She didn’t know what to expect when the elevator doors opened, because she hadn’t dared scout Command level since the Legion had taken the ship. The Legion was composed of professional paranoids, and someone sticking her head out to view whether the airtight hatch had been sealed, or whether the door was guarded, might have been considered worthy of an investigation.
So Sula had to prepare for everything. A bomb big enough to blow open the airtight hatch, a bomb necessarily large enough to damage a lot more than the hatch. Enough guns to take care of whatever guards might be standing around. And enough of a civilian appearance to seem innocent, at least to someone who wasn’t a member of the Legion.
The day of Sula’s strike, she waited until the crew and the Legion had changed shifts, then assembled her storming party in the passenger quarters. All were dressed inconspicuously except for Lady Alana Haz, who had decided to wear viridian Fleet undress. She loomed above everyone in her tall heels, which she seemed to view as part of her uniform.
Sula’s eight stepped into the elevator, and a tsunami of adrenaline jolted Sula the second the elevator doors closed. It took a fierce act of will to simply stand there, and not leap or bounce or shriek. She shuddered as a sudden chill swept her body. She could feel gooseflesh prickling her skin, and her teeth wanted to chatter. She reached for the pistol in her pocket and gripped it in a fist of iron.
The doors opened, and Sula found herself looking at a Torminel guard at a range of perhaps three paces. The Torminel was viewing her with polite attention.
“Excuse me,” Sula said, and took a single step to the left, unmasking Sidney with a drawn weapon. Sidney shot the guard multiple times with a pistol equipped with a homemade sound suppressor that he’d brought with him in a sample case. The noise was surprisingly loud, and in the elevator deafening, but the sound was so distorted it was not immediately recognizable as a gunshot.
The Torminel collapsed. “Ming,” Sula said, and Ming Lin ran out of the elevator toward the door.
The airtight hatch, thankfully, was open. No hidden guard opened fire from ambush. Ming Lin slapped a container of Spence’s pain relief gel on the Command door, secured it with tape, and readied the preinstalled detonator. The rest of the party took positions on either side of the recessed door, hands over their ears, and Ming Lin triggered the detonator mechanism, stepped out of the recess, and flattened herself against the wall.
“Three,” she said, “two—”
The explosion came before she could say “one,” homemade detonators not being known for their reliability. There was a second crash as the door, blown off its hinges, smashed into something in Command. Sula drew her gun and ran for the door through the acid reek of explosive. The adrenaline that burned through her veins rejoiced that she was finally in motion.
The Command crew were staring either at the door, which had flown across the room and crushed a video display, or at the empty doorframe. The design of the room was elegant, a white diamond-checked floor with pale green walls and elegantly styled instrument consoles. Sula saw Striver’s Daimong first officer in his white uniform jacket, a Legion recruit sitting at the security station, a Legion officer rising from a chair, and other crew members sitting at their stations. Nobody was reaching for a weapon, and Sula realized they didn’t realize they were being attacked—they thought the explosion was the result of some kind of horrific malfunction . . .
Sula pointed her pistol at the Legion officer and began to fire. She wasn’t the only one: within two seconds half a dozen pistols began to bark. Crew members froze at their stations or dived for cover.
The two black-clad Torminel sagged dead in their chairs, astonishment fading from their large nocturnal eyes. Sula’s ears rang in the sudden silence. The air stank of propellant and explosive and blood. Adrenaline urged Sula to keep pulling the trigger, but she pointed the pistol at the ceiling and forced herself to calmly survey the room.
“Everyone stand away from your consoles, please,” she said. “I am Caroline the Lady Sula and Striver is now under Fleet command.”
She realized that she wasn’t exactly recognizable in her disguise, and so she drew off the dark wig and threw it on the deck, revealing her pale blond hair cut short. The crew rose to their feet, hands raised. They seemed more interested in her gun than in her hair, and Sula decided she may as well leave the contact lenses in her eyes.
“Whoever’s handling signals, just step to the wall.” She didn’t want anyone sending out a distress call or a message to Lord Arrun. “All hand comms on the floor, and push them toward me. If you have a sleeve display, I want you to take off your jacket.”
She turned toward Ikuhara and saw that Ming Lin and Alana Haz were very sensibly collecting the equipment belts from the dead Torminel, which included their pistols, restraints, stun batons, and comm units. Vijana was dragging the door guard into the room. Sidney loaded his pipe, lit it, and inhaled. Apparently he’d decided that no one had the authority to tell him not to.
“I’m leaving you in charge here,” Sula told Ikuhara. “Close the airtight hatch once we’re gone, and don’t open it unless you hear from one of us.”
“Yes, Lady Captain.” Ikuhara looked over the silent room, the staring, stunned crew. “Shall I put us back on course for the wormhole?”
“May as well,” Sula said. A hashish scent filled the air, and Sula repressed the urge to sneeze. She called the other members of her group to meet in the stairwell one deck above them, on the level of the common room. She left Maitland and another petty officer in Command with Ikuhara, then led the rest to the elevator. Everyone tucked their weapons away. Sidney sucked on his pipe.
Two stairwells, Red and Green, with stairs of bare metal strongly braced against accelerations, connected all the levels of the ship, though not all doors would open to everyone. Sula’s collaborators met in the stairwell in a creeping fog of hashish smoke. The three new pistols were passed out. Sula told Vijana to wait six or eight minutes before going for the purser’s store, then led her re-formed group of eight down four levels.
She was glad to be in fresher air and took several deliberate breaths to calm the storm in her nerves. She was going to walk out of the stairwell door with Ming Lin, turn right down a curved corridor, and surprise the pair of Torminel guarding the cargo hold. She and Lin would then shoot them—or, if there were unexpected complications, the other five would join the engagement.
But when she pushed the door open, not two but four black-clad Torminel stood directly in front of her. The two guards on the previous shift had apparently stayed to chat with their comrades.
Sula could think of nothing to do but shoot. She got her weapon clear and fired into the nearest target, but on her right, Lady Alana’s weapon snagged on her pocket, and by the time she got it clear a Torminel knocked it from her hand and went for her throat.
Nerve-paralyzing Torminel squalls rent the air. The recruit Sula had shot didn’t fall but seized her gun hand and yanked her forward, practically off her feet. She tried to turn her pistol toward her target and took a wild shot, and then the Torminel clouted her on the side of her head, and she stumbled. Gunshots hammered the air. Something wrenched at her hand and she lost her pistol. Then she was hit on the head again and fell to the beige carpet with a Torminel landing hard on top of her.
She looked up at the snarling face within inches of her own. The Torminel’s black-and-cream fur stood on end and his head resembled a horrifying puffball with two enormous dark eyes and a snarling scarlet mouth. Panic flared in Sula. She punched at the face as she tried to writhe out from under the recruit’s weight. The Torminel clawed at her face, and then his fangs dived for her throat. She managed to get a forearm between them and tried to lever his head away from her, but his jaws opened and he clamped down on her forearm. Pain galvanized her and she squirmed and kicked and punched with her free hand. Nothing seemed to work. His weight on her made it hard to breathe. The Torminel’s hot breath reeked of carrion.
And then the recruit’s body went limp, and the jaws relaxed on Sula’s arm. Sula blinked up at Alana Haz, who stood astride the Torminel, and who then seized him by his collar and rolled him off Sula.
Sula saw, as Haz pulled the recruit away, that Alana had killed the Torminel by driving one of her high heels into his brain. Wasn’t expecting that, Sula thought.
I’m guessing neither was the Torminel.
She gasped for breath, looked around, and saw that the four Torminel were dead, while Macnamara and Shawna Spence were busy looting them of their weapons. Ming Lin was streaming blood from a broken nose. Engineer Markios sat against the back of the elevator, looking dazed but otherwise unhurt. None of the Terrans seemed beyond repair.
“Come out, please,” said Lady Alana. “We need to get you to safety.” Sula turned her head to see a Lai-own engineer looking out his cabin door.
Of course there would be crew on this level, Sula realized. Those working other shifts might be in their rooms sleeping, or going about their own business.
“Come out, please,” said Alana. “Everyone, please. We’re going to put you in the hold until this is over.”
Sula sat up and felt her head swim. Something warm ran down the side of her face where the Torminel had clawed her. Sula waited for the storm in her head to grow quiet, then rose to her feet and reached in a pocket for a handkerchief. Torn muscles in her forearm ached where the fangs had ripped them.
She found and retrieved her pistol, checked the magazine, put the magazine back in. These actions were simple and automatic, and she felt bits of the world fall into place as she performed the simple, undemanding movements.
“Come out, please,” called Lady Alana once more.
Sula stretched her jaw muscles, managed to form words. “Move the bodies back into the stairwell,” she said. It might reduce the terror of the civilians.
Her hand comm chimed, and Sula answered when she saw it was Ikuhara. “The security desk here has been getting calls about a gunfight,” he said. “We’ve told them to stay quiet and remain in their cabins.”
“If they’re all on this deck, tell them it’s over, and they should come out. The Fleet is going to evacuate them to a safe place.”
“Yes, my lady.”
The Torminel were dragged away, leaving bloody smears on the pale deck. Lady Alana, limping along with one bare foot, took charge of the off-duty crew.
“We’re going to put you in the hold till this is over,” she said to a new group. “You’ll be safe there.”
Maybe it was the Fleet uniform that gave Alana Haz the authority to bring the off-duty crew shuffling toward the hold. Maybe it was the confident baritone voice. Whatever it was, it worked, and Sula was grateful.
The corridors in the passenger section were wood-paneled, or mirrored, or had paintings or photos. Here on the decks inhabited only by crew, the walls were plain beige composite, now somewhat marred by bullet holes and blood spatter.
Farther along the curving corridor was the actual entrance to the hold, a large cargo elevator capable of carrying supplies from the hold to inhabited sections of the ship. Sula called the seven unarmed members of her group, who were standing in reserve, and told them to come down the stairs to their level.
In the meantime, Alana Haz and Shawna Spence shuttled the off-duty crew down to the hold, and by the time the elevator returned, Sula had been joined by her remaining seven Terrans. Along the way they’d passed the four dead Torminel piled in the stairwell, the blood smears on the deck, the bullet wounds in the walls. When they arrived, they found Sula dabbing blood from her face and Ming Lin with her broken nose, and by that point they were grim. Though they’d all served in the Fleet during the war, none of them had trained for the kind of personal close-quarters combat that had just erupted, and they looked as if they were mentally girding themselves for a new kind of war.
Once they’d arrived, Sula called every elevator to her floor, then locked them in place by using their emergency cutoff switches, further disabling them by jamming open their doors with furniture taken from the crew cabins. If the Legion sent reinforcements to this deck, they’d have to go by stairs.
Sula took the new arrivals to the holds. These were fourteen decks deep, most levels completely filled with containers, but the cases and trunks belonging to the passengers were in a separate area, walled off behind a locked grille. One of the crew knew the combination to the gate, and Sula led her party to pull her furniture out of crates and then the hidden weapons out of the furniture.
A fair amount of ingenuity had gone into hiding Sula’s arsenal, but that meant all the guns had been broken down into their constituent parts, so as not to look so much like guns. Which meant they required reassembly. Sula took it upon herself to put together the Sidney Mark One, a small homemade submachine gun that Sidney had designed during the last war. It was a crude weapon and far from perfect, but Sula had retained hers throughout the campaign for Zanshaa City. Sula’s was the first such weapon ever made, and she’d hung it on the wall of her office on Confident, then later in her apartment.
Despite the Sidney’s drawbacks, Sula reminded herself that it was a far more deadly and impressive weapon than anything the Legion of Diligence was carrying.
She’d just finished threading the tube stock onto her gun when her hand comm chimed. She answered and heard Vijana speaking over a series of gunshot booms.
“We’ve run into trouble,” he said.
“Where are you?”
“In the purser’s office. But we can’t get out, there are Legion all over the place.”
More booms. Sula recognized the sound of a shotgun, a sensible weapon in the close confines of the ship.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Sidney asked the purser for access to his stores, but the purser wouldn’t allow it once he realized Sidney wanted to check his firearms. So I stuck a pistol in his back and told him to open his stores, and he panicked and began to yell for help. I had to knock him out, but half a dozen people heard him and—” There was the sound of a crash, and more booms.
“Anyway,” he concluded. “We’re trapped in here. But we have good cover and better weapons than they do, so they’re not coming in.”
“Where are the Torminel?” She tried to build a picture of the purser’s office and the common area in her mind.
“We’ve killed a couple,” Vijana said. “Some of the live ones are in the common area, behind the furniture. Some in the gift shop across the way. Some in the stairway on my right, and others in the corridor on the left somewhere—I can’t be sure without getting my head blown off.”
Sula closed her eyes, built a picture, and thought she understood what was happening. “We’ll be there as soon as we can get organized. But right now I need to call Ikuhara.”
When she got Ikuhara, she told him to get the security station to see what was going on in the common room and purser’s stores. Ikuhara ordered Maitland at the security station to locate the proper video feeds, but he also had another issue.
“The ship’s captain is outside Command,” he told her. “He’s demanding to be let in.”
“Does the camera work? Does it show he’s alone?”
“He seems to be.”
“Then let him in. He can do less damage as a hostage than free and wandering around giving the Legion advice.”
“I’ll do that, but now Maitland’s got the video up from the common room.” Sula heard Ikuhara’s sudden intake of breath. “It’s a mess there! What went wrong?”
“Can you tell me where the Legion is?”
“There are about a dozen on Stairwell Red, looking through the door into the common room. Another eight or ten have passed through Stairwell Green and into a corridor that leads to the common room from there. It looks like both are keeping Vijana’s group pinned down in the purser’s area. There are ten or so in the common area, but there may be more because the cameras don’t cover all of it.”
“Right,” Sula said. “Fairly soon now I’m going to ask you to cut the engines, so we’ll go weightless. Then I’m going to ask you to start the engines again under high acceleration. Understand?”
“How high?”
“Let’s say three gravities for ten seconds, then two until I tell you to stop.”
“Very good, Lady Captain.” He hesitated a few seconds, then spoke. “Should I ring the warning for zero gee, and then for acceleration? We could have a lot of injuries among the passengers if we do this without warning.”
“No,” Sula said. “We can’t let the Legion know what we’re doing.”
“Yes, my lady.”
The passengers will have to take their chances, Sula thought. She glanced up to see Lady Alana Haz looking at her.
“My wife,” she said. “My children. They have no experience of zero gee, and they won’t have warning of high acceleration.” She pressed her lips together in apprehension.
“They’re in their cabin, aren’t they?”
“Yes, of course.”
“They won’t have far to fall,” Sula said.
“Can I send them a warning?”
Sula wondered whether the Legion had any way to intercept her communication and decided that with Ikuhara established in Command, they didn’t.
“Be quick,” she said.
She looked over her group of twelve. Macnamara and Alana Haz were armed with semiautomatic carbines, and Spence with another Sidney Mark One. The others at least had pistols.
In addition, Spence and Ming Lin were carrying explosives and grenades. Sula’s group was still outnumbered over two to one, but Sula was beginning to feel a trickle of optimism.
Storming an enemy-held position, like Zanshaa High City or Striver’s common room, was turning out to be Sula’s specialty.
Sula led her group back to the crew levels, then up Stairwell Green to the passenger entrance deck. She peered through the port in the stairwell door and saw the black-clad backs of at least ten Torminel, all crouched on the corridor’s thick umber-colored carpet with weapons in their hands, the lead officer peering around the corner into the common room and the entrance to the purser’s quarters. No one was shooting. The battle seemed to have died down.
“Macnamara,” Sula said, “contact Vijana on your comm. Tell him that in a minute or so we’re going to need them to start firing. And tell them shortly after that I’m cutting the engines, and they need to be in a place where they won’t drift up into the line of fire. And after that, heavy gravities.”
“Yes, my lady.”
While Macnamara was making his call, Sula called Ikuhara and told him to prepare for zero gravity.
“I had to call Engine Control and tell them to strap in,” Ikuhara said. “They asked what was up, and I told them there was no time.”
“Good,” Sula said. “Stand by.” She turned to her group. “Macnamara, Haz, I want you in the doorway with your weapons. I need everyone to anchor themselves against zero gravity. And when the engines ignite again, we’ll be at three gravities, so make sure you don’t float too high, or over anything too sharp.”
The stairs were bare metal, with open air between each stairstep, and there were strong guardrails braced against high accelerations, so there would be little problem finding something to hang on to or brace against during a period of zero gravity. The problem would come later, under high acceleration, when the alloy edges of the stairsteps would cut into flesh and bone.
It would only be for a few seconds, Sula thought. People would survive.
A bigger problem would be anchoring Macnamara and Alana Haz in the doorway. Sula put them prone on the landing just behind the door, with Spence and Markios braced against the guardrail to either side, each with one hand clasped firmly around their belts.
“Choose your targets,” Sula said. “No wild shooting, we don’t have that much ammunition.” And then, to Macnamara, “Tell Ikuhara to stand by.” And then, into her hand comm, “Vijana, you can start the shooting.”
There followed the great boom of a shotgun, heard clearly through the door, followed by rifle shots, followed by a massive answer of pistol shots, presumably from the Legion. Sula looked through the port on the door to see the Torminel tensing in the corridor, as their leader leaned around the corner to aim in the direction of the purser’s station.
Moving as lightly as possible, Sula pulled open the corridor door—Haz wedged it open with an elbow—and then Sula linked arms with Spence and called to Ikuhara to cut the engines.
Even though she knew it was coming, weightlessness still seemed a surprise. Sula’s inner ear swam as she began to drift away from the landing. The metal stair creaked and snapped as weight came off it. And the Torminel began to drift away from the floor as they frantically scrambled for handholds. There weren’t many for them to grab, though, only a few door handles leading to storerooms or offices.
“Fire,” Sula said, and Macnamara and Haz began what was, in effect, an execution.
The Fleet trained their personnel in zero gravity.
Apparently the Legion of Diligence did not.
The Legion recruits’ movements grew more frantic as they realized they were being fired on, and that they were helpless to save themselves. They clutched at each other, shrieked, squalled, raved. A few fired wild shots, but recoil sent them into a slow, helpless tumble. Furred bodies bounced off the walls, the deck, the ceiling. Blood trailed through the air, forming perfect spheres.
Sula waited until Macnamara and Haz ran out of bullets and reloaded. She could see movement among the floating Torminel, but she couldn’t tell if they were moving on their own or drifting with the breeze. She waited for Macnamara to take a few careful shots, then called for resumed gravity.
The metal landing came up very fast and hit Sula with three times her own body weight. Stars flashed behind her eyes. Metal stairs and railings groaned. Her mouth tasted of copper. She blinked the growing darkness from her vision and turned her head—she couldn’t quite lift it—to look toward the Torminel, who had come crashing down on the deck in a rain of their own blood.
She gasped air for the time the heavy gees lasted. Then her weight returned to normal, and she rose to a kneeling position. Only one of the Torminel tried to rise, and Macnamara took deliberate aim and shot him.
Macnamara, star of the Fleet combat course. To think, before joining the Fleet, he had been a shepherd.
The scent of blood eddied toward her, and Sula felt her stomach clench. She’d lived through violence, but nothing this close-up and intimate, not on this scale. Not shooting helpless people hanging in midair and landing in a lake of spattering scarlet. She felt nightmares swarming nearby, circling her, trying to break into her mind, and she turned away from the sight in the corridor. She clenched her fist on the metal guardrail and gave her orders.
Sula assigned Haz, Ming Lin, and two others to advance down the corridor. “Don’t engage the Legion unless they attack you,” she told them, “or if they try to rush the purser’s office. Wait for me to come at them from the other side, and bear in mind that we’re going to lose gravity again in a few minutes.”
Haz and her party advanced down the corridor, examining the Torminel carefully to make sure they were as dead as they looked. Each pistol was collected and stuffed into pockets and belts.
There were two shots as Legion survivors were executed. Sula didn’t look.
She heard no shooting from the common room. Zero gees followed by everyone crashing to the deck in three gravities had stunned all parties into silence.
Sula felt warm liquid trickling down her cheek. Smashing into the landing had opened the cuts on her face.
She led her group up two decks on Green, then along a curving corridor to Stairwell Red. She peered cautiously around the door, then looked down two decks and saw members of the Legion on the landing and the stairs leading to the common room. From what little she could see they were in some disorder, not having quite recovered from her trick with acceleration.
Time to do it again. Red seemed to pulse on the extremities of her vision, but Sula managed to brace herself on the landing, her leg hooked through the guardrail. Spence settled herself in next to her, and Macnamara hooked an arm through the same rail, his rifle at the ready. Everyone else secured themselves to something solid, or to each other.
Spence prepared a bomb and handed Sula a grenade.
The next few seconds throbbed in time with Sula’s heartbeat. She raised her hand comm and told Ikuhara to cut the engines again.
She heard shouts and growls from the Torminel as they began to float. She turned to Spence and nodded.
Spence triggered the timer on her bomb and tossed it, in slow motion, toward the Torminel. She and Sula leaned back over the landing as soon as the bomb was released.
Three, Sula counted to herself, two, one. A well-designed detonator, for once.
The bomb blast was far beyond what Sula had expected. She flapped like a flag in the wind as hot waves of concussion bounded and rebounded in the confined space of the stairwell, but she kept her knee locked on the guardrail and managed not to get thrown into a wall.
Metal shrapnel flew past, clinked on the metal stair. The stair shuddered and groaned. Torminel shrieked and squalled.
Sula pulled herself toward the guardrail again, looked down. Several of the Torminel had been blown off the landing and were swimming through the air, trying to reach a handhold. Others were trying to rescue them. They were all shouting and screaming at once, but they had all been deafened and no one heard.
Sula set her grenade for three seconds and launched it, again in slow motion, toward the target, then pushed herself away from the stairwell.
The sound was much less impressive than Spence’s bomb, but its fury was demonstrated by the rattle of shrapnel flying up and down the stairwell. The screams echoing up the stairs took on a panicked timbre.
“Three gees,” Sula told Ikuhara, and a few seconds later gravity threw her on her back and knocked the breath out of her. The gridded metal surface of the landing imprinted itself on her flesh. She stared at the landing above her and took one breath after another and listened to the shrieks of Torminel falling nearly twenty decks to the bottom of the stairs. The metal stairsteps crackled and clanged in high gee. She wondered if Spence’s bomb had torn something free.
Then the weight came off Sula’s chest, and she dragged herself to her feet. She swayed, or perhaps the staircase did, as she readied her Sidney Mark One. “Macnamara,” she gasped. “Give us cover. The rest of you, follow me.”
Her party couldn’t follow at once, because they took some time to recover from being flattened by gravity. Eventually they were all on their feet, weapons in their hands, and following Sula down the stairs while Macnamara leaned out over the rail, his rifle pointing down, and shot at any target that displayed itself.
Sula swiped at the blood running down her face, then went down two flights to the next deck, then another length of stairs, and turned the corner carefully, deep in a crouch. The Legion recruits were fully visible on the landing below, huddled away from the guardrail and Macnamara’s fire. Some were wounded, and all were half stunned. Sula went down on one knee, brought the Sidney up to her shoulder, aimed, and pulled the trigger.
The chatter of automatic fire must have been terrifying to the Torminel armed only with pistols. She heard screams and cries, saw Torminel fall and the bright sparks of rounds hitting the guardrail or whining off the composite wall. Shots came back, but none found her.
She fell back to reload, and Spence stepped up with her own Sidney. As the second gun opened up, Sula heard a collective moan of fear and terror from the Torminel survivors. Then more screams. Then the sound of panicked flailing.
Spence emptied her magazine, and Sula took her place only to see a pair of terrified Legion recruits break free of the others and stagger through the door into the common room. Since the belligerence of Torminel was legendary, she found herself surprised by this display of terror. She signaled to those above her.
“Move up! I’ll cover!”
The others rattled down the swaying stairs, their weapons pointed toward the black mass of Legion recruits on the landing below. No shots came in reply.
The only firing came from Sula’s party, finishing off any Torminel still alive.
Macnamara came down the stairs and helped Sula to her feet. Sula didn’t go all the way to the landing—she didn’t want to get near the blood-soaked pile of limp, warm bodies—and so she detailed two people to hold the door and everyone else to shift the bodies out of the way. While Torminel were being dragged and rolled down the stairs, Sula called first Alana Haz, then Vijana, to let them know to join in when shooting started.
Sula took a breath, walked across the blood-smeared landing, and prepared herself for what she hoped was the last slaughter of the day.
The one-sided fight started with Ming Lin throwing a bomb into the middle of the common room, followed by a grenade lofted in underhand by Spence, so that it would go off near the ceiling and rain shrapnel down on the people below. Then Macnamara and Sula stood on opposite sides of the door and began firing.
What remained of the Legion sheltered behind the furniture and benches in the common room. With Vijana and Giove firing at them from the front, and Haz and Sula on either flank, they had no way of protecting themselves from the fire, and they were slaughtered. A few fled into the gift shop at the far end of the common room, but another of Lin’s bombs was tossed in the door and blew the windows out from the inside. A fire started in the clothing racks, and that triggered a rain of pale green fire suppressant. A cautious advance sloshed toward the gift shop and discovered that no one inside was left alive, including the hapless Lai-own female who had been working in the shop when the fight had started.
Sula told Ikuhara to shut off the fire suppressant, which he managed after a few minutes fumbling through menus. Sula cautiously entered the common room and saw Haz and Vijana advancing toward her. Haz’s wig had come askew, but it looked jaunty tilted on the side of her head, and she wore it like a panache. “Where’s Safista?” Sula said. “Has anyone seen his body?”
Haz attempted a laugh. “Maybe he’s too busy courting Lady Koridun to have noticed what we were up to.”
“Maybe he—” Sula’s nerves jolted as Vijana fired two shots. Sula spun and saw that he had just executed two wounded Torminel with his pistol.
Vijana saw her look and raised his eyebrows. “What?” he said. “They’re just animals.”
“Battle’s over,” said Sula.
“Tell that to Sidney. They shot him.”
Sula snarled. “You might have mentioned that earlier,” she said. She hurried past the purser’s desk, half shattered by bullets, and into the series of offices and storerooms beyond. Sidney seemed asleep, propped up behind a desk with one of his fine custom shotguns in his lap. His curled mustachios stood out against a face drained of color, and someone’s mustard-colored jacket was pressed to his side. The jacket was turning red.
Sula dropped to one knee and took Sidney’s hand. His eyes opened, and he tried to smile.
“You don’t look so good, either,” he said in a whispering voice, and then he coughed for a while. Fine red drops spattered from his mouth and dropped down his chin.
Sula carefully took a hold of the jacket to draw it away and examine the wound. “May I?” she said.
“Don’t,” Sidney said. “There’s air coming in and out.”
She got out her hand comm and called Ikuhara. “Page the ship’s doctor to the purser’s station,” she said. “We have a casualty.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“The doctor’s Torminel,” Vijana said from behind her. “She may not—”
“She will,” said Sula. She turned to face him. “How did this happen?”
Vijana shrugged. “He’s never been in zero gee before. He made a wrong move and drifted out into plain sight. Rebecca was pulling him to safety when one of the Legion got off a shot.”
“I want a smoke,” said Sidney.
Sula looked at him. “I don’t think so.”
He winked at her. “Worth a try,” he said.
Vijana checked his pistol. “There are still a couple guards in Engine Control,” he said. “And Safista’s still on the loose.”
“No. You stay here.”
She dropped next to Sidney again, took his hand, and told him she’d be right back. Then she left the purser’s offices and went into the common room. Dead Legion bodies and broken furniture lay under gelatinous fire retardant. The air was a chemical stew, explosives and retardant and death, and it turned Sula’s stomach.
Sula sent Alana Haz with six others to Engine Control. “Don’t shoot them if they don’t resist,” she said.
“We don’t have enough personnel to guard them,” Vijana said.
“Go,” Sula said to Haz. She turned to Vijana. “I’m not in the mood for more massacres today,” she said.
“You’ll get used to them. It’s us or them.”
Sula glared at him. “You’re distracting me,” she said. “If there’s going to be more killing, it’s going to be on my order, not yours.”
Vijana considered this for a half second, and then braced. “Yes, my lady,” he said.
“We may have to send parties for Safista.” And then she remembered what Haz had said and thought that he really might be with Lady Koridun. She spoke a query into her hand comm, and the comm turned it into text and sent it to Koridun.
The reply came. safista with me in restaurant. Sula collected Spence and Macnamara and Giove, and they went to Staircase Green and up to the restaurant level, where they cautiously entered the restaurant to find Lady Koridun sitting on a table with a pistol propped in one hand and a cocktail in the other. Lord Arrun Safista lay dead on the floor, his limbs splayed. Sula halted in the doorway.
Lady Koridun’s fangs flashed. “You should see your faces!” she said. Delight danced in her large blue eyes.
Sula lowered her Mark One and absorbed the scene. “What happened?” she managed.
“He was going to follow the rest of his company down to the common room as soon as he could raise his guards in Command. I didn’t want him trying to take Command back, and since he’d sent everyone else away I threw him headfirst into a bulkhead and then strangled him with my belt.” She raised her cocktail. Methanol simmered dangerously behind greenish glass. “I’m finally rid of him! I’m celebrating!”
Sula’s head whirled. Koridun’s face took on an expression of concern. “Are you hurt?” she said.
“I got scratched and bit. Nothing serious.”
“We eat raw meat, you know,” Koridun said. “You should get a shot so you don’t get infected.”
“I’ll do that.” Sula made another attempt to find sense in this situation. “You’re lucky it was us who came here,” she said. “If someone else saw an armed Torminel, they might shoot.”
Lady Koridun put the pistol down on the table. “There,” she said. “Now I’m harmless.”
Sula hardly thought so. Koridun picked up a hand comm. “This is Safista’s,” she said. “I’ve been sending out false messages, saying that the fighting is a mistake and that everyone should hold their fire.”
Sula took a moment to absorb this. “Good work,” she said. “Have any messages come in from people we’ve missed?”
“Not in the last ten minutes or so.”
Sula took the hand comm and looked at it. “Maybe you should go to your suite,” she said. “I’ll join you later once things are settled.”
Koridun waved her cocktail glass. “I’ll make another drink first,” she said.
Sula sent out a message to any of Safista’s recruits who had managed to survive the massacre to report to the hatch outside Command, then told Ikuhara to let her know if anyone showed up. She and her group returned to the purser’s offices. The Torminel doctor had arrived and was looking at Sidney.
“He’ll need surgery,” she said. “I’ll need two people to take him to sick bay on a stretcher and help me prep. I’ll have to look up the procedure, because I don’t know it that well.”
“Whatever you need,” Sula said. After she detailed two of her group to go with the doctor to bring the stretcher, she knelt next to Sidney. The blood-soaked jacket had been taken away, and his shirt cut off: a pale blue temporary bandage sealed the wound. From the ashen look of his face there seemed not an ounce of blood left in him. She took his hand. His eyes opened narrowly and regarded her.
“You should have let me smoke,” he said, and died.
Working with an air of quiet competence, and operating under Macnamara’s wary eye, the Torminel doctor repaired the cut on Sula’s forehead. She bandaged the fang wounds and gave the shot against infection. The doctor then performed a septoplasty on Ming Lin’s broken nose, and for the next few hours treated sprains and broken bones that the wild shifts in gee had inflicted on crew and passengers. The crew that had been evacuated—“for their safety”—to the hold had been thrown around badly in the large hold spaces, and few had come through without injury. They would have been safer in their own cabins.
The two Legion recruits in Engine Control had surrendered without trouble and had been locked in a small second-class cabin and placed under guard. No more Legion members were found on the ship.
Sula wanted nothing more to do with dead bodies or blood and absented herself from the cleanup. Crew carried the Legion bodies to the hold and put them in a shipping container for disposal later. Sidney and the Lai-own vendor from the gift shop were put in body bags—the ship actually carried a few—and were stored in the freezer. Fire retardant was mopped up from the common room and from the ruin of the gift shop.
The Terran assistant purser was put in charge of his department. Firearms were distributed among the Terrans or locked away. Because paranoia was never far from Sula’s mind, Spence and Macnamara were put in charge of feeding the Terrans, so that Striver’s crew wouldn’t poison them.
The food wasn’t necessarily better, but it became less predictable, and that was an improvement.
While the crew were deployed carrying away bodies and swabbing away the blood, Sula planned the next stages of the journey. The journey to the next wormhole gate was supposed to take seven days, but Sula decided to do it in four. Accordingly, as soon as Striver was cleaned and secured, she ordered everyone aboard into their beds or into acceleration couches, cut the engines, pitched the ship over, and began accelerating for the wormhole at three gravities.
Three gravities, she decided, wasn’t too punishing if you were prepared. But it also meant you had to fight for every breath, and you had to be careful when you moved. You couldn’t commit sabotage or plan rebellion when under high acceleration, and when gees were cut so that you could use the toilet or take a meal, you were too tired to do anything else. If the crew or Striver’s captain had any intention of retaking the ship, Sula was going to make certain they wouldn’t have the energy.
When Striver passed through the wormhole into the Toley system, she disabled the ship’s transponder. With its antimatter torch blazing against the interstellar night, Striver couldn’t go completely dark, but at least it could stop advertising the fact that it wasn’t where it had been ordered to be.
Toley was a system of gas giants and asteroids, barren of habitable worlds; but it was also a crossroads, with one wormhole leading eventually to Harzapid, another to Colamote, and another to Zarafan. Foote’s squadron was in a race with the two squadrons from Zarafan to arrive at Toley first, and Striver had to keep ahead of them or get caught up in a battle it had no way of winning.
Because of the three strands of traffic meeting at Toley, the system was filled with spacecraft, and no one paid Striver any attention. Sula was amused to see that the yacht carrier Corona was sailing on at least ten days ahead of Striver. Martinez was still parading through system after system, with his transponder pinging away, announcing his presence to anyone who cared to look for him.
Well, Sula thought, if trouble comes, maybe it will find Martinez before it finds me.