Under the cover of the cheerful babble, he examined the injured arm. More than once, the skin and muscles under his fingers tensed in reaction to what must have been considerable pain, but the grey-haired man didn’t make a sound. So he wasn’t surprised, when he’d finished, to see the Professor shake his head.
“Not now, Commander. Perhaps when this is over.”
Jessan took the blanket that Tarnekep held out to him, and began fashioning a sling. “How did you do this to yourself, if the answer isn’t too embarrassing to repeat?”
“I dived into a gutter a bit too hard,” said the Professor. “I’m afraid that city fighting is a game for the young.”
“Everybody to their own amusements,” said Jessan. “Now, this is going to hurt a bit . . . there. Mind telling me what the fuss is all about, while we’re at it?”
But it was Tarnekep, not the Professor, who answered. “A friend gave us your name.”
“Nice of him.”
“The small army out there wasn’t our idea,” said Tarnekep. “The original plan was to spend a quiet night in the clinic playing double tammani, and sneak out in the morning with your usual shuttle traffic.”
“There’s a supply run coming in at dawn,” said Jessan. “We can leave town with the empty boxes.”
“ ‘We’?”
“We,” Jessan said firmly. “I don’t fancy staying behind and explaining to all these people just where the two of you went. As far as they’re concerned, high orbit strikes me as an ideal negotiating distance.”
He gave a final twitch and pat to the improvised sling, and stood back. “Now, if you gentlesirs will excuse me, I think I’d better rejoin Peyte in the rear corridor.”
Beka’s legs trembled with exhaustion and the adrenaline surge of the firefight. She propped herself against the support of the comm-room wall, and watched as the blond lieutenant commander made his exit.
He stooped over the wounded man again on the way out, and said something light and cheerful-sounding in reply to a thready question, but the set of his shoulders as he headed out into the corridor gave his voice the lie. She bit her lip hard.
Damn you, Owen. Do you realize just how much your getaway is costing?
The Professor still sat in the comm chair where he’d collapsed at the end of the last bit of fighting. His back was as stubborn-straight as ever—but his eyes were shut and his face looked grey and haggard in the half-light of the emergency glows. You can put that one on the tab, too, Owen, she thought bitterly. ‘City-fighting is a game for the young’—and knocking somebody out of the way of a blaster bolt is a game for romantic idiots, not for old men with brittle bones.
She cursed, and slammed her fist against the wall. Then she put the scraped knuckles into her mouth to suck away the fresh blood on them.
At the sound of flesh hitting plast-block, the Professor opened his eyes and brought his blaster to the ready. “Trouble, Captain?”
She took her hand down again, flexing fingers that ached from gripping a blaster. “That was just me, Professor. They’re still quiet out front.”
“So I thought. And from the sound of things, our medical acquaintance has taken care of the back way for a while. A resourceful young man . . . a friend?”
She gave a weary chuckle. “He doesn’t even know me. And I didn’t know about the clinic until this afternoon.”
The Professor looked thoughtful. “I take it you heard from your father.”
“A letter at the mail drop. Some interesting stuff, and the word about this place—in case I needed a bolthole sometime, he said.” She shook her head. “He certainly called that one right.”
Jessan returned to the intersection, where Peyte made a shadowy, vigilant shape in the blue-green twilight. The Khesatan settled down in his old position against the wall and asked, “All quiet back here?”
“Like a tomb, sir,” said Peyte. “How’s Namron?”
“Holding on.” Jessan looked down the hallway toward the pile of rubble. “With that way blocked, they’ll try the other door next.”
“Not the cargo bay?”
“No. The outside door down there is blast-armored against launch. It’d take a laser cannon to get through there.”
Peyte was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You know, Doc, we might be better off down in the bay.”
Jessan thought about it. “There’d only be the one door to worry about . . . give me the blaster, and go back up front. Tell Tarnekep I want to talk with him.”
“Right, Doc.”
Peyte headed up the corridor. Jessan leaned back against the wall, blaster in hand, to wait on developments. After a few minutes he heard footsteps coming from up front—not Peyte’s familiar tread, but a quick, light stride that had to belong to the longer-legged, more slightly built Tarnekep.
The footsteps halted a few feet away. Jessan looked back and saw the tall Mandeynan standing for a second in dim silhouette against the light of the glows, before he moved closer to the wall and became only a vertical shadow.
“Peyte said you wanted to talk with me.” The voice wasn’t promising.
“That’s right. I think we ought to go down below into the cargo bay.”
“That’s what Peyte said.”
“You have some trouble with that?” Jessan kept his own voice as neutral as possible. Already during his tour of duty in Flatlands he’d had to talk a blaster away from a blind-drunk and homicidal spacer, and he was beginning to think of that night as a garden party compared to this one.
“The Professor doesn’t like the idea of leaving the front office unguarded.”
Jessan caught the phrasing. “And you?”
“I can live with it. How close is the cargo bay to the shuttle pad?”
“Just the other side of the blast doors.”
Silence for a moment, then, “Your man Namron. Can he take being shifted that far?”
“If it comes down to a choice between moving him or letting him collect another blaster bolt—” began Jessan. He stopped. “Damn,” he said quietly, as the remaining undamaged door into the upper building tore free of its hinges and slammed onto the floor of the hall.
Massed blaster fire lit up the passage. Jessan dropped to a prone position and started squeezing off shots from the shelter of the corner. If we didn’t have to discuss everything in committee we’d be down in the cargo bay right now.
“Firing blind’s not going to do any good against so many,” said Tarnekep from behind him. “Cover me!”
The lean figure sprang past him into the intersection and ran for the far wall.
Jessan squirmed far enough forward to see the broken door and began firing as fast as he could press the stud. At the same time, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Mandeynan send three quick bolts down title hall in the course of his dash across the gap. Only one of the shots ended with the harsh sound of a miss against plast-block.
He’s good, conceded Jessan, still firing. But what in the name of all that’s sane and normal is he doing now?
Tarnekep had paused for only a few seconds on the far side. Now the Mandeynan stepped away from the sheltering wall into the center of the junction, turned half right, and brought his blaster up at arm’s length like an old-style duelist. Then he began to fire aimed shots into the broken doorway at a slow, deliberate rate.
He is insane, thought Jessan, as the blaster fire from down the hall limned the Mandeynan’s unmoving, upright figure in a lurid halo of light. Nobody in their right mind takes chances like that.
Jessan’s own fire was continuous by now. He had the stud pressed down hard in its socket, and was depending on the blaster’s feedback regulator to keep the weapon from going on overload. Beams of energy played around the far end of the hall like hallucinatory party streamers. Jessan couldn’t tell if he was hitting anything or not, but he hoped that the constant fire might keep the other side from taking time to aim.
Still Tarnekep stood in the center of the hallway, aiming bolt after steady bolt. With each shot, the fire from outside slackened, until there was silence.
Tarnekep lowered his blaster. Jessan waited a moment.
When no renewed firing lit up the air, he stood up and faced the shadowy gunfighter.
“Right now, Portree, I could make out a good case for locking you up in a padded room.” The brief, intense firefight had left his professional manner in shreds and he knew it, but he was past caring. “If you get yourself killed, where does that leave the rest of us?”
“I didn’t get killed,” said Tarnekep, then turned and stalked back toward the comm room without another word.
Jessan shook his head slowly, and slid aside the readout cover plate to check the charge on his blaster. The little glowing numbers showed the weapon’s energy level a lot closer to flat than he liked. “The Academy target-shooting team was never like this,” he muttered, and resumed his watch down the hall.
Beka got as far as the comm-room door before her legs buckled under her. A grab for the doorjamb stopped her from crumpling to the tiles in the middle of the corridor.
She made it to the wall, sliding quietly down that instead, and sat there, head between her knees, until the black fog cleared out of her skull. She’d almost fainted once already, back where the hallways crossed, when fatigue had slammed into her like a high-G lift-off as soon as the firing stopped. Pride alone had kept her back straight and her voice steady long enough to get past the lieutenant commander without collapsing; she was surprised that she’d made it this much farther.
Be honest. You’re surprised that you’re still alive.
She pushed herself back onto her feet, hanging on to the doorjamb again for support, and took a couple of deep breaths. Tired . . . she’d never been so tired . . . threading the Web for twelve hours straight, and then all this. She knew that if she collapsed a second time she wouldn’t be able to get up again until she’d slept herself out.
Keep moving, my girl. Onward and upward.
Shoving away from the wall, she straightened her shoulders and strode into the comm room with a fair imitation of Tarnekep’s usual arrogance. The Professor was still sitting in the control chair, but the clammy grey look that had frightened her into yelling for the medic was gone. Petty Officer Namron didn’t look any better, but he didn’t look much worse either. She supposed that would have to do.
The desk still lay across the outer door, and the young comptech—Peyte, that was his name—kept watch at the improvised barricade. He looked round as she came in; so did the Professor, who would normally have risen to his feet like the stickler for proper behavior that he was.
“Time to pull back,” she said. “I’ve looked, and there’s a chance we can get down into the cargo bay.”
The Professor nodded toward Namron. “What about him?”
“We’re taking him with us.” She looked at Peyte. “You take his right side, I’ll take the left. We’ll have to leave the bedding here.”
“Right,” said the clerk/comptech, standing up. Beka switched her blaster to her left hand and followed Peyte over to the corner where Namron lay in the shelter of the heavy hyperspace comm setup. He was pale, but conscious.
“This isn’t going to be pleasant,” she told him. “But it beats staying behind to get shot at.”
Namron blinked, and shook his head from side to side on the pillow. “Just leave me one of the blasters and I’ll do fine,” he said faintly. “You don’t have to—”
“Don’t argue,” she said. “You can’t spend Hostile Fire Pay if you don’t stay alive to collect it. Ready, Peyte?”
“Ready.”
Together they picked up Namron, Peyte supporting him on one side and Beka on the other. “Let’s go,” she said, and they started off down the hall like some awkward, six-legged beast, with the Professor hanging behind to cover the rear.
Jessan heard the thump and shuffle of footsteps approaching from up front—Peyte and Tarnekep, supporting Namron between them. “Any trouble back here?” asked Tarnekep, when the little procession had drawn even with the junction.
“Not a peep.”
“Well,” said the Mandeynan, “either they’re waiting for us down below, or they’re not. Is your cargo lift tied in to the main power lines?”
Jessan nodded. “We’ll have to use the auxiliary stairs.”
“Lifts, stairs, doors all over . . . if I didn’t know better, I’d say you people wanted to make this place easy to get into.”
“Well, as a matter of fact—” Jessan caught the irony just a second too late and stopped, shaking his head in disgust. The Mandeynan gave a brief snort of laughter. Peyte snickered.
“Gentlesirs.” The Professor sounded patient but tired. “Commander—are these back stairs normally kept locked?”
“Of course. There’s a lot in here worth stealing.”
“Then you’ll have to lead the way. Tarnekep and I aren’t keyed to your locks.”
“Come on, then,” said Jessan. “Easy with Namron, now.”
Blaster at the ready, Jessan stepped around the corner. He more than half expected to get his hair parted by an energy beam as soon as he appeared in the hall, but nothing happened.
The stairs were halfway down the hall. Beyond them, at the far end, the outside door yawned blackly into the night. Jessan covered the distance in a dozen quick strides, the others hurrying behind him with no attempt at quiet. Once at the stairway door, he switched his blaster to his left hand long enough to palm the ID plate. The lock clicked open, and Jessan gave silent thanks to the designer who’d thought to make the auxiliary door panels self-powered.
Self-power didn’t run to working a slide mechanism, though. Like most auxiliaries, this door was mounted on hinges instead. He shoved the door hard, and had his blaster pointed down the unlit stairwell before the swinging panel slammed against the inside wall.
Nothing happened. “Just like a holovid hero,” he muttered, feeling a bit silly.
“Shut up, damn you,” said Tarnekep’s voice in his ear. “And get on in there.”
Pinched a nerve, did I? thought Jessan, stepping through the door and standing aside to let the two men carrying Namron come past, with the Professor on their heels. I wonder how.
He shut the door behind the older man, and locked it. “Peyte,” he said into the solid darkness, “do you still have that hand torch?”
“Just a moment, Doc.”
There were scuffling sounds, a grunt of pain from Namron and a muffled “Sorry!” from Peyte, and the torch came on. Its actinic glow made the faces of the little crowd standing together on the upstairs landing look drained and colorless—not, Jessan suspected, that even north light on a good day could have made much difference at the moment.
But Peyte was grinning like an idiot, and Jessan found himself grinning back. “What the hell,” he said out loud. “If I wanted a quiet life I’d have studied flower arranging and ornamental tree-sculpture. Let’s go on down.”
The cargo bay, when they finally reached it, proved to be as empty of life as the stairwell. The light from Peyte’s hand torch played over stacks of crates and boxes to the massive blast doors at the far end.
“Nobody home,” said Jessan. The words echoed in the high-ceilinged chamber.
The Professor looked somber. “They’ll realize soon enough that we’ve abandoned the upper floors.”
Jessan locked the lower stairway door. “We have a while yet. Peyte, you and Tarnekep get Namron settled by the back door. That’ll be our way out when the shuttle comes in, and I’m damned if I want to see him dragged any farther than I have to.”
“What about blankets, Doc?” the clerk/comptech asked. “This floor’s going to be colder than a Magelord’s heart.”
“Wait a minute and I’ll find you something,” said Jessan, craning his neck to scan the roomful of shipping containers. Where . . . ah, there.
He headed over to the crate he’d spotted and started working the lid off. “Here we are,” he said over his shoulder. “Good-quality reclaimed synthetic, thermal weave, preserves body heat down to some incredible temperature below zero, allows for the free evaporation of sweat, does everything but function like a healing pod—which is what those misbegotten paper-pushers in Supply swore on their mother’s graves these blankets were going to be.”
He came back to the group with a stack of blankets in Space Force basic beige, and with Peyte’s assistance soon had Namron bedded down as snugly as circumstances allowed. The Professor watched the proceedings with an expression of polite interest, but Tarnekep prowled back and forth among the stacks of boxes like a thin, patch-eyed ghost. Jessan recognized from experience the compulsive activity of someone who must either keep moving or collapse.
“Commander.” The Professor spoke quietly, his eyes on the tall, restless figure in the bloodstained shirt. “I am concerned about the stairwell.”
Stairwell, my foot, thought Jessan. Aloud, he said, “They’ll have to cut through the doors top and bottom to get to us—we’ll have warning. And with luck they won’t come around the back. Too much chance of getting burned if the dawn shuttle comes in early.”
“With luck,” said the Professor, still watching Tarnekep prowl among the boxes. “Without it . . . ”
He shrugged his uninjured shoulder. “One does what one can. Your improvisation in the upper hallway comes to mind—do you have supplies for something similar down here?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Jessan. “Except for what’s in the treatment rooms, the chemicals are all in the flammables locker. Safety regs.”
“Very proper,” said the Professor, but his expression was grim.
Jessan hesitated for a moment. What he was contemplating now would probably get Supply so angry with him that he’d never see the healing pods at all. The hell with that, he told himself. Right now you’re not likely to see morning if you don’t do something about it.
“Look in those boxes nearest the blast doors—that’s the emergency supplies for an aircar we don’t even have yet. If there’s anything in there that looks useful, haul it out. Take Peyte with you to do the heavy stuff; that arm has got to be giving you hell.”
The Professor moved off without protest in the direction of the blast doors, summoning Peyte to follow with a nod. Jessan sat down on the cold concrete next to Namron to check the pressure bandage; as he worked, he could hear the sound of boxes being ripped open, mingled with a stream of chatter from the irrepressible Peyte.
“Monofilament—scalpel blades—yo! Look what I found here!”
“What’s that?” The voice asking the question was Tarnekep’s; it sounded like the gunfighter’s prowlings about the cargo bay had brought him back to the doors again.
“Survival Kit, Aircar, One Each.”
“So?”
“So there’s an emergency transmitter in here someplace.”
“Dig it out,” said Tarnekep. “Maybe we can raise somebody after all. Commander!”
Jessan gave Namron a final quick once-over and rose to his feet. “What’s the problem?”
“Help me shove some boxes around. We need to clear out fields of fire around the stairs and lift entrance.”
The slightly built Mandeynan was stronger than he looked; he and Jessan moved boxes until they’d emptied out nearly the first third of the bay and had thrown up some quick-and-dirty barricades, one set facing the stair and lift doors across the open space, and the second about halfway back to the far wall.
Jessan heaved a shipping carton marked “Boxes 120 Lint-Free Wipes, Disposable—100 Count” onto a crate stenciled “Table, Folding, Metal—Property Republic Space Force Medical Corps,” and asked, a trifle breathlessly, “What’s the plan behind all this, anyway?”
“We need covered lines of retreat,” said Tarnekep, panting.
The Professor looked around from holding the hand torch for Peyte. The clerk/comptech was elbows-deep in an open crate.
“If we can’t hold them up front,” the older man explained, “we’ll need to fall back to the secondary position. If we can’t hold them there, we fall back to the door. Then it’s each for himself out the back, or fight to the last man in here.”
“Damnation and hellfire!” Peyte came up from the packing crate empty-handed except for a plastic-laminated printed sheet.
“What’s wrong?” asked Jessan.
“The transmitters’ power sources are shipped separately. But we do have complete instructions for installing them.”
Tarnekep muttered something that Jessan didn’t quite catch, and then asked, “Commander—any chance that the power sources are here?”
“We’re dealing with the Supply Department,” he said. “There’s a chance of finding almost anything. But with all the comps down, I wouldn’t make bets on locating those power sources tonight. Anything else useful in the box?”
“So far—” began the Professor.
A yelp from Peyte interrupted him. “Hey! Here’s something, Doc—take a look.”
Jessan came over and read the label on the carton. “Emergency rations, including stimulant tabs. ‘Use of this medication by persons in a duty status strictly forbidden except under emergency conditions.’ ” He looked from one grey, dust-and-sweat streaked face to the next. “Fine. By the power vested in me by the Grand Council of the Republic, I hereby declare this an emergency. Share out the food and fluids, and everybody take one of those pills.”
The solid rations tasted even worse than space rations usually did, and the liquids tasted like the body fluids they were supposed to replace, but they did their job. Jessan found himself feeling, if not optimistic, at least somewhat more steady. Once the stimulant tabs kick in, we’ll really be on top of the world . . . probably just in time for the party.
Tarnekep finished his share of the rations; Jessan was relieved to see some color reappearing in the narrow features. The Mandeynan swallowed off the stimutab with the last of the liquid and looked over at Peyte and the Professor. “Anything else in there?”
“Flare launcher and flares,” said Peyte. “I’m taking those.”
Tarnekep held up a hand for silence. “Noises in the stairwell.””
“Places, everyone,” said the Professor. “I’ll cover the lift door. Commander, you take the flank—shoot down the length of the front wall toward the stairwell door. Peyte, stay here with Tarnekep. When they break through, put a multistar cluster behind them. I want them backlit and us in shadow.”
Jessan moved off to his left for the position the Professor had indicated, behind a pile of boxes at the stairwell end of the bay. The grey-haired man had vanished somewhere off to the right, and Jessan caught a glimpse of the top of Tarnekep’s head over the boxes in the center before he heard the Mandeynan snap, “Put out your light!”
The hinges of the stairway door glowed a bright orange-red for a moment against the darkness, and then the door fell forward into the cargo bay.
“Here they come!” the Mandeynan’s voice shouted over the crash of the falling door. “Fire, damn you!”
Jessan heard a dull whump! as Peyte fired the flare launcher. A glowing red streak shot in a flat arc across the cleared-out space and into the open door. Brilliant white light poured out of the doorway from the burning flare, and reflected on clouds of thick white smoke. The attackers—black shapes against the light—ran forward through the smoke and glare.
Jessan fired into the packed figures before they could spread out. More streaks of blaster fire zinged in from behind the barricades where the Professor and Tarnekep lay hidden.
The attackers were no slouches either—they fired as they came. So many of them, thought Jessan. Who the hell can throw this many into a private war?
Then the blaster bolts were coming in his direction as well, and he didn’t dare look any longer. He could only take quick snap shots in what he knew was the direction of the opening—a group of three, duck, a burst of five, duck, while the attackers kept on coming.