WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(80)

Adele lifted her right hand and ostentatiously scratched the back of her neck. Her left hand dipped into her tunic pocket and brought out the pistol, hidden in her palm.

The gun vehicle pulled twenty feet forward in a curve, then stopped. Its transmission went into reverse with a clang. The men pretending to relax on the back stood up. A sailor on the Ahura shouted a warning.

Adele turned toward the thugs beside her. The man started to point his submachine gun. Adele shot him at the top of the chest. The pistol snapped like a mousetrap in her hand, but the sound of the pellet hitting the man's breastbone was as loud as boards slapping. A muscle spasm threw the Kostroman backward over the seawall.

The woman lunged toward Adele instead of trying to use a weapon. Adele shot her in the throat. The pellet's temporary shock cavity gaped as wide as the woman's shoulders, nearly decapitating her. Most of the blood sprayed upward and back, but Adele felt droplets fleck her face. She turned, ignoring the touch of the dead woman's hand as inertia tried to complete the intended movement.

The truck was backing with the steering yoke reversed to bring the automatic impeller to bear on the Ahura. Several weapons were firing behind Adele. An impeller projectile hit the truck's armor and blew a glowing trench in the metal without penetrating.

The Kostroman gunners were behind their weapon; only their heads showed. They were thirty yards away from Adele. She aimed at the loader's nose and hit within a finger's breadth of that.

His head spun around as though a horse had kicked him; he went down. The gunner, his hand still on the impeller's charging handle, turned in surprise to look at his partner. Adele shot him in the temple.

Something stung the back of her right calf. She ignored it. She fired at the truck driver. The windshield shattered but she doubted pellets from her little pistol had enough mass to actually penetrate normal glass.

The driver leaped out of the cab, screaming and covering his face with one hand. He held a submachine gun in the other. He was moving and the light was bad. She fired twice more with no better target than his upper torso. He went down, but she could hear him still wheezing and gurgling in the darkness.

Adele walked toward the truck; it had stalled when the driver bailed out. The barrel of her pistol glowed red from the rapid fire. Pocket weapons like hers weren't intended for continuous use. The magnetic flux that accelerated pellets to 9,000 feet per second was dissipated as heat, and the light barrel didn't have enough mass to be a good heat sink. In an hour she'd have blisters on the web of her thumb and the side of her index finger where it touched the receiver.

She drew the Kostroman pistol with her right hand and dropped her own weapon into the empty holster. The leather would scorch but it wasn't likely to burn the way her pocket lining would. If she tossed the little pistol onto the bricks it might not be at hand the next time she needed it.

Nobody was paying any attention to her. All her opponents were dead. With the truck between her and the office, Adele looked over her shoulder.

Three bodies sprawled on the pavement. A sailor and a Kostroman thug wrestled for the latter's weapon. A Kostroman stepped out of the harbormaster's office and sprayed both indiscriminately with his submachine gun. An impeller slug fired from the Ahura tore the shooter's left arm off and flung his body sideways to thrash in a widening pool of blood.

The gang members had run into the brick office to join their leader when the shooting started. All the living Cinnabars were on the vessel or hidden beneath the lip of the seawall. The Ahura was far enough back that those aboard it could see over the seawall to a degree, but only the upper half of the building was visible to them.

Adele tried twice to climb onto the truck, using a back tire as a step. Finally she laid the service pistol on the truck bed to free both hands. She was still awkward but she got up.

The gunner had rolled off the vehicle. The loader still lay there on his back, his hands clawing spasmodically. Her pellet had cratered the left side of his face, but his right eye remained. It was open.

She'd never used an automatic impeller, but this one had a grip and a trigger like a pistol's. Adele depressed the weapon as far as it would and pulled the trigger.

The gun cycled three times before she could let up. The heavy projectiles cracked like thunderbolts, making the truck shudder violently from recoil.

The rounds blew platter-sized openings in roofing tiles as they hit; on exit they smashed even larger holes through the brick wall on the other side. A cloud of glowing gas slowly dissipated in front of the muzzle. It was the vestiges of the projectiles' aluminum driving skirts, ionized by the dense magnetic flux.

Without backing the truck, she couldn't lower the muzzle enough to hit the people sheltering inside the building. There was nothing more she could do.