She touched the wand to the console's face. "Bridge," she ordered, "on a schematic, locate the points within the Empress that a communicator of this—"she broke squelch "—modulation has been used in the past ten minutes. Over."
Six labeled decks appeared in blue outline, shrunk to fit on a single console display. The nine red dots were at expected locations—the bridge, engineering control, and public areas including the main lift and drop shaft foyers on four decks. The commando looked surprisingly sparse against the starliner's enormous volume. They must have lost half their strength in their blind ship-to-ship crossing through sponge space.
Survivably sparse, it might be.
Wade looked over the 15-mm rifle from Calicheman that leaned against a corner of the cabin. "Interesting," he murmured.
He turned to Wanda Holly. "Very good, lieutenant," he said. "Now, as for the method of procedure—may I suggest a course?"
"Go ahead," Wanda said curtly. Every time her mind tried to grapple with what came next, it mired itself in bodies thrashing as she tried to slide them along the deck.
"Right," Wade said. "First, we'll need a scout That's you, Tom. Signals intelligence is all very well, but we don't want to stumble into a team that didn't bother to report in."
He looked at Belgeddes.
The plump man clicked home the reloaded magazine of Wanda's pistol. "You know me, Dickie," he replied without concern. "You lead, I follow. In this case, follow from in front."
"Right," Wade repeated. He slung the submachine gun and raised the bomb thrower by the handle on top of its receiver. "Then with your agreement, Lieutenant, we will proceed as follows. . . ."
"And the more fool me," Belgeddes added with a chuckle.
* * *
"I heard shots," said Trooper II Weik, waggling the muzzle of her submachine gun down the corridor toward the bow.
Corridor 7 widened into a foyer and mini-lounge toward the stern of Deck A, where the shafts opened. The ambiance was from the Moghul Empire, with columns decorated in tilework helixes and florid carpeting on the deck. A band of knobbed brass bannisters ran around the top the walls as though there was an upper-floor balcony, and the holographic murals were of minareted palaces with reflecting pools and lush vegetation.
"That's fine," said Trooper III Buecher, the team leader. He watched the lift and drop shaft openings from over the sights of his submachine gun. "We all heard shots. The people who got nervous and fired them will report to Colonel Steinwagen, who will not be pleased. My team will not be nervous."
The trouble was, they weren't a team. The planners had allowed for fifty percent casualties as the commando crossed from Attack Transport Vice-Admiral Adler to their target vessel, the Empress of Earth. The planners couldn't determine which soldiers would be lost, however; which would disappear as twists of light into a universe of twisting light, with no boundaries and no hope.
Rather than the team he had trained with for this operation, Buecher commanded troopers whose teammates, like his own, were running out of air in an alien spacetime. Teammates closer than lovers, closer than blood kin. Teammates who no longer existed when Buecher's magnetic boots suddenly clanged and bit on the hull of a starliner which had been a warp of infolded shadow until the moment Buecher touched it Buecher understood how Weik could be unhinged by the experience. She was a woman, without the strength of will that stiffened Buecher. The will that prevented Buecher from killing these sniveling rabbits, Weik and Magnin, who reached the starliner while Buecher's proper teammates did not. . . .
"I didn't hear shots," said Magnin. "It's a big ship. Noise is funny. The Colonel will tell us if there's anything we ought to know."
Magnin faced the stern with his doorknocker. The planners had allowed for the possibility that the commando would have to fight its way through a series of firedoors lowered across the corridors. The squash-head bombs of the 15-cm assault weapons had shown in tests on Grantholm that they would wreck the locking mechanisms of the firedoors and spall a sleet of fragments into defenders on the opposite side.
The reasoning was good, but the crew of the Empress of Earth were cowards who used the presence of civilians as an excuse not to oppose the commando. The doorknocker was of limited use in a normal firefight, because the thin-cased missiles had no direct fragmentation effect: only concussion and, perhaps, bits of fittings and furniture flying about as secondary projectiles.
If opponents attacked from the stern end of the corridor, Magnin's weapon could not give as satisfactory a response as a submachine gun would; but the concern that roiled Buecher's mind was a false one, he realized, because the cowards who would not defend themselves weren't going to attack either.