Ran was moving again. They reached the hatchway. Wanda and the civilian both urged him down the ladder ahead of them. He was too drained to argue.
"I knew your father, lad," Wade's radio-thinned voice continued. "He served under me on Hobilo. A good man, Chick Colville. Stopped at nothing to accomplish a mission."
Ran was trembling so hard in his suit that he was barely able to thrust his gauntlet against the switch controlling the outer airlock door.
"His only problem was," the unseen civilian continued, "he brooded too much about things afterwards."
The lock was swinging shut like a clamshell. The Empress's hull plating would block radio signals completely . . . .
"No point in that, young fellow," Wade's cool voice continued as the massive door closed. "You do what you do and go on from there. Mustn't brood on things, eh?"
Light flooded the airlock when the inner door opened. Ran lunged convulsively from the lock's narrow confines. He heard voices shouting congratulations as other people helped him out of the spacesuit.
The only thing Ran saw was the memory in his mind's eye, a Grantholm soldier sailing past Ran Colville and into blazing eternity.
TBLISI
"Good morning, Ms. van de Meer," Ran said, sliding in front of the expensively-dressed woman who seemed determined to use luggage of Hobilo lizardhide as a battering ram through the crowd before her. "What an extremely attractive coat."
The mood of passengers in the Embarkation Hall ranged from funereal to that of a carnival crowd. What was particularly notable was the number of them. Instead of the usual departure staggered by individual fuss and delay, virtually every passenger aboard the Empress of Earth was ready to leave as soon as the gangways fell.
Some of them, like van de Meer, seemed ready to jump and damn the gangways.
"Oh!" the woman said. "I—"
She grounded her twin bags on the deck and lifted out the lapel of the garment, gleaming felt from the fur of a giant Calicheman water rat. The steward drawing the rest of van de Meer's luggage was far back in the mass. "Do you really think so, Mr. Colville? It was just something I got for knocking about."
Van de Meer wasn't young, which didn't matter; and she had the heft of a rhino, which wasn't an absolute bar to Ran finding her . . . interesting. Unfortunately, she had the personality of a rhino also. The only possible interest Ran could have in her was a professional one—at the moment, to keep the self-centered hog from injuring somebody or starting a riot.
"It goes well with your hair, besides," Ran said. He had no idea of whether or not that was true or even what the statement really meant, but it was the sort of thing women liked to hear. "Why don't you just sit right here, though, ma'am? The hatch will open in less than a minute."
The mix of people in the tall room was that of tapioca pudding, nodules of frightened silence embedded throughout a matrix of artificially bright chatter. The stewards had been carefully briefed to stand in front of passengers instead of following them in normal fashion; but that wasn't always possible. All the Staff Side personnel were on hand in the Embarkation Hall, prepared to be as direct as the circumstances required.
Ran turned sideways to survey the hall, looking for hot spots. He saw Wanda, but he couldn't catch her eye. She was planted like a bollard in front of a couple from Calicheman, dressed in fringed layers of suede leather. The ensemble looked rough, but Ran had seen similar outfits in starport boutiques for three thousand credits and up.
The couple was rough, however, and they appeared willing to knock Wanda down and stamp her flat if that would speed their exit from the starliner. The Trident officer wasn't giving a millimeter. Her face was bleakly forbidding in a fashion that Ran hadn't seen until recently.
Until the Grantholm commando had died, some of them beyond the muzzle of Wanda Holly's gun.
The Empress bore very little sign of the fighting. A corner of the Social Hall was a gray bulkhead instead of the facade of the Temple of the Divine Julius, because the blast of a Grantholm doorknocker had damaged the hologram projector for that segment. Stewards whisked away the damaged furniture and rearranged the rest as if nothing had happened, though. The bullet holes scattered here and there across the vessel were mostly hidden by the shimmering holograms themselves.
The same was true of the stains, though stewards scrubbed each of the battle sites thoroughly. Patterns of coherent light wouldn't hide the smell of rotting blood.
"Here we go!" called a rating from the Second Watch, in a perhaps unintentionally loud voice. The main hatch split horizontally, the halves rising and lowering simultaneously onto the mobile shelter extension from Bogomil Terminal.