outer door. Her tones marched triumphant:
“–I escaped the dishonor intended me by the grace of God and the
decency of this man you see here, Captain Sir Dominic Flandry of his
Majesty’s service. Let me tell what happened from the beginning. Have I
your leave, worthies?”
“Aye!”
Gunshots answered. Screams flew ragged. A blaster bolt flared outside
the chamber.
Flandry’s weapon jumped free. The tiers of the Skupshtina turned into a
yelling scramble. Fifty-odd men pounded through the doorway. Clad like
ordinary Dennitzans, all looked hard and many looked foreign. They bore
firearms.
“Get down, Kossara!” Flandry shouted. Through him ripped: Yes, the enemy
did have an emergency force hidden in a building near the square, and
somebody in this room used a minicom to bring them. The Revolutionary
Committee–they’ll take over, they’ll proclaim her an impostor–
He and Chives were on the dais. She hadn’t flattened herself under the
lectern. She had gone to one knee behind it, sidearm in hand, ready to
snipe. The attackers were deploying around the room. Two dashed by
either side of the clustered, bewildered fishers.
Their blaster beams leaped, convergent on the stand. Its wood exploded
in flame, its horns toppled. Kossara dropped her pistol and fell back.
Chives pounced zigzag. A bolt seared and crashed within centimeters of
him. He ignored it; he was taking aim. The first assassin’s head became
a fireball. The second crumpled, grabbed at the stump of a leg, writhed
and shrieked a short while. Chives reached the next nearest, wrapped his
tail around that man’s neck and squeezed, got an elbow-beaking
single-arm lock on another, hauled him around for a shield and commenced
systematic shooting.
“I say,” he called through the din to Ywodh, “you chaps might pitch in a
bit, don’t you know.”
The steadcaptain bellowed. His slugthrower hissed. A male beside him
harpooned a foeman’s belly. Then heedless of guns, four hundred big
seafarers joined battle.
Flandry knelt by Kossara. From bosom to waist was seared bloody
wreckage. He half raised her. She groped after him with hands and eyes.
“Dominic, darling,” he barely heard, “I wish–” He heard no more.
For an instant he imagined revival, life-support machinery, cloning …
No. He’d never get her to a hospital before the brain was gone beyond
any calling back of the spirit. Never.
He lowered her. I won’t think yet. No time. I’d better get into that
fight. The ychans don’t realize we need a few prisoners.
Dusk fell early in fall. Above the lake smoldered a sunset remnant.
Otherwise blue-black dimness drowned the land. Overhead trembled a few
stars; and had he looked from his office window aloft in the Zamok,
Flandry could have seen city lights, spiderwebs along streets and single
glows from homes. Wind mumbled at the panes.
Finally granted a rest, he sat back from desk and control board, feeling
his chair shape its embrace to his contours. Despite the drugs which
suppressed grief, stimulated metabolism, and thus kept him going,
weariness weighted every cell. He had turned off the fluoros. His
cigarette end shone red. He couldn’t taste the smoke, maybe because the
dark had that effect, maybe because tongue and palate were scorched.
Well, went his clockwork thought, that takes care of the main business.
He had just been in direct conversation with Admiral da Costa. The
Terran commander appeared reasonably well convinced of the good faith of
the provisional government whose master, for all practical purposes,
Flandry had been throughout this afternoon. Tomorrow be would discuss
the Gospodar’s release. And as far as could be gauged, the Dennitzan
people were accepting the fact they had been betrayed. They’d want a
full account, of course, buttressed by evidence; and they wouldn’t
exactly become enthusiastic Imperialists; but the danger of revolution
followed by civil war seemed past.
So maybe tomorrow I can let these chemicals drain out of me, let go my
grip and let in my dead. Tonight the knowledge that there was no more
Kossara reached him only like the wind, an endless voice beyond the
windows. She had been spared that, he believed, had put mourning quite
from her for the last span, being upheld by urgency rather than a need