Hundreds of Szgranians, many of them armed, had gone simultaneously psychotic. Most of them still writhed on the ground, their limbs locked into pretzel shapes that might mean broken bones. One warrior chuckled as he stabbed himself repeatedly in the abdomen. His daggers pumped in sequence like the pistons of a reciprocating engine.
The Szgranians facing the Empress hadn't been spared either, because the light had reflected from the starliner's gleaming hull. An arc of servants sprawled where bullets had cut them down, and a warrior was pounding his own feet to pulp with the heavy tube of his plasma discharger.
"You were waiting here?" Ran gasped. He'd scraped the hell out of his right palm and elbow. They felt cool from oozing blood.
Wanda's face was a mirrored ball. She'd polarized her helmet visor to protect her from her own weapon, even though it was calibrated to the slightly higher critical frequency of the Szgranian physiology.
"Don't be a damned fool!" she snapped. "I waited for you at the gate of the palace. You didn't think I'd let you get into something like that without backup, did you?"
Commander Kneale and the two ratings from Ran's own watch grabbed the pair of them and helped them up the gangway. The submachine guns the three men carried clattered against one another and Wanda's nerve gun.
"No," Ran mumbled. "I don't guess you would have."
It was good to have friends.
TELLICHERY
Carnatica Port was a large, bustling and cosmopolitan city. The last point was underscored by the number of cases of beef, relabeled Calicheman mutton, which had been unloaded from the Empress's holds and trucked past Hindu temples whose courtyards abutted the spaceport. So long as lip service was paid to the planet-wide dietary laws, the business class which controlled Carnatica was willing to wink at foreign tastes—and to share them, it was whispered.
The Trident Starlines offices filled the top three floors of a building just outside the spaceport reservation, overlooking both the port and the town. Commander Hiram Kneale stood on the palm-shaded roof garden. He was checking the Empress's manifest with a hand-held reader linked to the main unit beneath him instead of using a fixed terminal.
A modern office building and a starliner both cut their occupants off from their surroundings. In the case of the starship, enclosure was a necessity. When Kneale was dirtside, however, he preferred to work in a more open environment.
In the street below, electric-powered jitneys crawled through streams of pedestrians without the noise and hostility an observer would note in most cultures. Across the chain-link fence and alarm wires which surrounded the reservation, vans replenished stocks of tangibles aboard the Empress of Earth and more jitneys arrived with passengers and their luggage.
The manifest in Kneale's hands quantified the unusual number of passengers embarking from Carnatica Port on this voyage. Kneale looked down on the foreshortened figures even now sauntering up the gangplank. His face was still, but his mind frowned.
He didn't have to wonder whether some of the passengers were potential hijackers. He had to determine which ones were the danger.
The door of the hydraulic elevator—chosen by the Trident design team because it could be locally maintained while lift/drop shafts could not—gasped open. Kneale turned, reflexively dimming the holographic manifest to hide it from observation.
The commander expected to see office workers coming up to the garden for a break—though at midday, he hadn't expected to be interrupted. Alternatively, it might have been a Trident officer, bringing Kneale a message that no one trusted to put on a link from the starliner or the data bank below.
The intruders were two passengers from the Empress of Earth—Wade and Belgeddes, whom Kneale recognized only because it was his job to recognize all First Class passengers. He assumed they were lost, or—
"Ah, there you are, friend," said the tall one, Wade. "I see you're like me—always out in the open air if I can be."
"They told us we'd find you here," said his plump companion Belgeddes, wiping his bald scalp with a handkerchief. "Mind you, I'd just as soon you stayed indoors where the temperature's at a civilized level. If God had meant us to swelter, he wouldn't have given us climate control."
"Ah, do you gentlemen . . . ?" Kneale began curiously.
"Have business with Commander Hiram Kneale, the First Officer, Staff Side?" Wade continued crisply. "Afraid we do, friend. It's about the passengers, you see. The ones we're taking on here, and no few of those who boarded at the past two or three dockings."
"Dickie's been secret service, you see, laddie," Belgeddes added. He chuckled. "Maybe a dozen secret services, one place and another. To a feller like me, people are just people; but Dickie here spots the wrong 'uns as if he reads their minds."