Starliner(74)

Von Pohlitz turned. He aimed his weapon, an automatic rifle, back at the building from which he had fled.

Ran didn't feel his trigger sear release—his action was too reflexive for that. His muzzle lifted in a triple flare, red flame from the bore and the side vents. The butt punished him, and for the first time tonight he noticed the enormous WHAM! of his shot.

The 15-mm bullet hit the receiver of the Grantholmer's rifle before punching through to the torso where it exploded. Gerd von Pohlitz's chest expanded. Violet flames flashed from his mouth and nostrils. His left arm fell separately from the body, and his head remained attached only by the neck tendons.

Ran turned. Franz was staggering toward the lifeboat with Oanh's still form in his arms. Wanda backed along behind him, firing short bursts into the house every time popping flames counterfeited motion.

"Come on!" Ran shouted, even though he himself was Tail-Ass Charlie. "Let's get out of here!"

He lumbered toward the open hatch, staggering because fatigue poisons laced all his muscles. But they'd done what they'd come for—

And there would be time later to think about exactly what they had done, the five of them.

* * *

The sounds of the Empress's loading occasionally rang through the fabric of the hull, but the process was nearly complete. The three-hour whistle had blown, and the passengers dispersed during the layover were dribbling back from hunting or the fleshpots of Calicheman.

"I thought of calling you all together to ask what the hell went on last night," Commander Hiram Kneale said as he paced his cabin. His voice wasn't loud, but it rasped like the coughs of a hunting lion.

Kneale had withdrawn his console into the deck. The decorative holograms on walls and ceiling were muted into a throbbing pearl gray. He was the only person in the room standing. Ran, Wanda, Mohacks, and Babanguida sat in a precise line on the bench extruded from the cabin wall.

Babanguida's left forearm bore a patch of bright pink SpraySeal over a blister. He'd touched it with the glowing barrel of his submachine gun as he cleared a jam. Despite Wanda's goggles, her eyes had been blacked by the same piece of flying debris that raised the livid bruise on her right cheek. Ran moved stiffly because of the punishment the rifle butt had given his shoulder.

Butter wouldn't melt in Mohacks' mouth. He glanced at his companions as if wondering why he had been summoned with the others.

"But then I decided," Kneale continued, "that I didn't want to know what had happened. That would just make me angrier. I think if that happened, I might do something that I would later regret. Much later."

He stared at his four subordinates as though he wished he was looking through a gunsight.

Wanda cleared her throat. "Has there been a complaint about our behavior, sir?" she asked.

"Will there be a complaint?" Kneale demanded harshly. "Colville. Will there be a complaint?"

Ran licked his lips. "No sir," he said, facing straight ahead rather than swivelling his eyes to meet the commander's.

"You didn't leave any survivors to complain, is that it?" Kneale said.

"Something like that, sir," Ran said. He cleared his throat. "Sir, this was entirely my doing."

"I've listened to your call to the Empress, Colville," Kneale said. "I know what you did, and I can bloody well guess what you all did! Look at you, for Chrissakes!"

Only Mohacks glanced around in response to the shouted command. He was still pretending to be innocent, though he knew the commander too well to think that it was going to do a lot of good.

"Sir," Ran said toward the bulkhead in front of which Kneale paced, "what we did, we did for the . . . honor of Trident Starlines."

"What you did," Kneale snarled, "you did because some stupid bastard thumbed his nose at you, and you decided to boot his ass through his shoulder blades to teach him a lesson."

Unexpectedly, the commander smiled. "Which I suppose is as good a definition of honor as we're going to find," he said. "Since we're all human."

Kneale muttered something to the AI. The surfaces of his cabin flashed back to holograms of the Empress's ports of call. The views weren't precisely restful, but they proved that the commander's mood had changed—or that a level had come off the emotional onion.

"Look," Kneale continued, "you went charging in without any plan, just hoping you'd get away with it And you did. But it was a lousy idea, and it could have embarrassed the company seriously. Don't do it again."

"Sir," Ran said, meeting Kneale's eyes, "they didn't have time to plan anything either. The snatch had to be set up after von Pohlitz disembarked. He could make a call to a buddy in the area, but this wasn't—"