WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(119)

He was right in one sense: at least six of the guards were alive and armed. The open front of their bay was only twenty feet from the mesh barrier enclosing the Aglaia's officers.

The Alliance soldiers were shocked and frightened, but they were still capable of pulling a trigger. With a submachine gun, that's all it would take to chop to mincemeat anybody trying to break open the prisoner cage.

Adele had the pistol in her left hand. Her right elbow held the burdensome submachine gun to her side to keep it from flopping. For a moment, only her head and eyes moved.

Le Golif was half right. Adele and her sailors couldn't run, either, except past the pump alcove where Markos and his aide had taken refuge. Ruthless didn't necessarily mean skillful, but Adele didn't doubt that the pale sociopath could knock over human targets just as quickly as they appeared before her.

A submachine gun fired in the alcove. The burst wasn't directed toward the opening. Brick shattered and a few pellets rang on the steel pump housing.

"Sun, Polin, Hafard!" Woetjans roared. Like Adele, the petty officer had seen that there was no way out for the detachment except past Markos. "On the count of three, with me."

She pointed toward the front arch with her left index finger; the submachine gun was in her right hand, the stock extended to the crook of her elbow. The sailors she'd named were, like her, among the majority carrying submachine guns rather than impellers.

"One—"

A second burst within the alcove. The impacts sounded as though someone had thrown a case of glassware against the wall. A single bit of metal ricocheted through the arch, trailing a corkscrew of smoke.

"Stop!" Adele shouted. "Stop, she'll kill you all!"

Woetjans turned with an expression combining surprise and frustration. "Sir!" she pleaded. "There's no—"

Hogg pointed his impeller at the side of the alcove. "Dasi and Koop," he said. Those three—and Lamsoe, back in the cupola of the APC—carried stocked impellers. "It's just fucking brick after all. On the count, one, two, thr—"

The impellers fired a ragged volley. The slugs were aimed a few inches above the base course. Each impact blasted out thirty or more pounds of pulverized brick.

Adele turned away and coughed heavily. Blood gummed her right eyebrow. She threw an arm across her face, knowing she'd have been too late to save her eye if the thumbnail-sized chip had hit an inch lower.

Size was a great advantage in handling an impeller's powerful recoil. Dasi was a huge man and Koop was well above average. Hogg was the lightest by fifty pounds, but his impeller was back on target an instant before those of the two sailors.

As Adele turned, a guard stuck his head and the barrel of his submachine gun around the corner of the bay in which he'd taken refuge. Adele shot him, then shot him again in the ribs.

He'd leaped like a pithed frog when her first pellet blew a hole above his right eye. So long as the target was moving, she had to assume it was a danger to her and her detachment. She'd pay for what she did tonight in dreams or in Hell, but no one would ever say that Adele Mundy had skimped a task because of what it would have cost her.

The dead man thrashed in the pool of his own spreading blood. None of his fellows would follow his example in the next minute or two. Adele remembered the helmet visor. She pulled it down and returned to what Hogg and the sailors were doing.

Their impellers slapped. The sound of slugs smashing bricks was sharper yet, and echoes turned rapid fire into the rattle of automatic weapons. Adele guessed each man had fired about six rounds when a long section of wall fell into the alcove with a roar louder even than the gunfire.

The other sailors emptied the magazines of their submachine guns into the spreading dust cloud. Compared to the crash of the impellers, the lighter weapons sounded like the buzzing of insects.

"Cease fire!" Woetjans screamed. She charged with her empty weapon raised to use as a bludgeon. Adele, for reasons she couldn't possibly have articulated, was with the half-dozen sailors who followed the petty officer.

The commando helmet had nose filters Adele hadn't known about; the air she breathed was close but not chokingly full of peach-colored dust.

Bricks had collapsed into the drainage sump, burying Markos's aide there. Her right hand stuck out of the rubble. It held a pistol, not the submachine gun Adele knew the woman usually carried.

The output pipe was shattered just above the pump casing. The submachine gun lay on the floor beneath it. Markos's right foot, flailing wildly to find purchase to thrust him higher, stuck out of the hole he'd hammered through the ceramic pipe with submachine gun pellets.

"There!" Adele said. She aimed but didn't shoot because too many sailors were moving in the dust cloud.