WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(122)

An Alliance official looked over the carved stone coping of the light well. Adele shot him. His peaked hat flew off and his face jerked back with a red smear where his forehead had been.

Adele was winded already, gasping to breathe brick dust but wishing that dry smell could mask the stench of bodies sawn inside out by hypervelocity pellets. She thrust her hand against the wall where the stairs switched back. The surface was cratered and sticky.

Powerful drive fans howled. A bolt of plasma ripped overhead, dimming the banks of light and setting off a bloom of ionized fire that must have been one of the Alliance gun nests in the entryway.

Barnes and Lamsoe were doing their part, all of them were doing their part. Nothing else mattered now.

Adele tripped. A sailor caught her. They were at the top of the staircase. The APC turned on its axis in front of them, bunting civilian vehicles into crumpled ruin. The right side panel was raised but the left one was still locked down so that the detachment could leap aboard.

Adele stopped. She fired, aiming at white blurs that were faces. Plasma lit the sky. This time the plume carried with it the skirt of the gun vehicle at the garden entrance, devouring the flexible fabric in orange flames that were a shadow in the iridescence.

Any blur, any face, any soul within them if men have souls.

Woetjans caught Adele around the waist and leaped into the troop compartment. The APC lifted on the full screaming thrust of its fans.

Adele twisted on the hard deck. Hands gripped her to keep her from sliding out of the vehicle. She slid a fresh magazine into the butt of her glowing pistol, and the victims in her mind shrieked louder than the fans.



Daniel fiddled at the Princess Cecile's command console, trying to get the adjustable seat positioned properly for him. The controls were reversed from those on similar Cinnabar equipment; he kept getting a hump in the upholstery where he wanted a dip and vice versa.

The ship's systems were live: the telltales were green or amber, with the only red warnings those for the open main hatch and the enabled armament switches. The Princess Cecile was fully crewed with some of the most experienced ratings in the RCN. There was only one commissioned officer, but that wasn't unheard of for a vessel as small as a corvette.

The single officer shouldn't have been a junior lieutenant on his first cruise, but that wasn't a problem that Daniel could find it in his heart to really regret.

Lt. Daniel Leary, Officer Commanding the RCS Princess Cecile. That was a fact forever now, even if he died in the next ten minutes or the RCN cashiered him after he reached Cinnabar.

Dying in the next ten minutes was actually quite probable, because the Bremse, an Alliance cruiser/minelayer, was in orbit over Kostroma.

Daniel's main display was a Plot-Position Indicator for the region above the planet to an altitude of 100,000 miles: near space by interstellar standards, but if the Princess Cecile could get through it alive she'd have a very good chance of making it the rest of the way home. The Commonwealth of Kostroma's automatic defense system hadn't been a joke, not quite, but the Alliance had come prepared to update the defensive constellation to a level of protection comparable to that over Pleasaunce.

Alliance cruiser/minelayers were built on the hulls of large light cruisers, but their large magazines were configured to accept either missiles or thermonuclear mines like the ones the Bremse was deploying now above Kostroma. The ships were fast because their mines could interdict hostile planets as well as defend friendly ones; and even though the Bremse would be heavily loaded with mines, Daniel was sure she could out-slug a Kostroman corvette by a considerable margin.

The options available to the Princess Cecile were guile or incredibly good luck. And disaster, of course. Disaster was far the most probable option.

"The Mundy section is beginning extraction," said Domenico from the console to Daniel's right. That was normally the navigator's position, but Daniel had put the bosun there for now because he needed someone trustworthy handling communications.

Navigation and attack were Daniel's own responsibilities until he handed the Princess Cecile over to somebody better qualified. He switched the main display to an attack screen which echoed data from the Aglaia's sensors. The PPI shrank to a holographic fifty-millimeter cube, one of a series of similar displays at the upper edge of the projection volume.

"Understood," Daniel said. He tried to keep the gleeful excitement out of his voice. He didn't want the crew to think he was insane. . . . "Alert the ship."

Domenico passed the report over the general communicator in a rasping tone with as little emotion as he'd have put into a drinks order. These were good people, and they were depending on Daniel Leary.

"Holy shit!" said Dorfman. She'd been gunner's mate aboard the Aglaia—a communications vessel didn't rate a warrant gunner—and was seated at the remaining bridge console with responsibility for the corvette's defenses. "All the missile batteries at the palace just fired!"