For the first time panic hit her, real fear. This was the hero-stuff, being number one charging up the stairs into that mess. It was where her rashness and the possession of that Illegal AP had put her.
“Hyyaaaah!” she yelled in raw terror, and rushed the stairs, because running screaming the other way was too humiliating. She fired one more time and got plastic-spatter all over her as the shell blew in the corridor and ceiling tiles hailed down in front of her. For a terrifying moment she was alone going through that doorway, and then she felt others at her back, blinked her burned eyes wider and saw blackbreeched hani lying in the corridor, some moving, some not; saw laser fire scatter in the smoke and aimed another shell that way.
There were screams. She flinched.
They were hani. They were downworlders. They had no experience of APs or what it was like to have a body blown apart or walls caving in with the percussion of shells. The survivors scrambled and fled and left guns lying in their disgrace, while outraged Llun charged after that lot, the two stationer-lads yelling as they went.
“Door,” Rhean said, having arrived beside her, and she pointed to where the Llun were already headed.
“No problem,” Hilfy gasped. She was cold all over. Her hand clenched about the grip of the gun as if it was welded there: she had lost all distinction between herself and the weapon, had lost a great deal of feeling all over her splinter perforated skin. She cast a look back to see how many of their own had made it through, and it was a sea of their own forces in that corridor.
She walked now, over the littered floor, past the dead, where the others had run; and up to the sealed door then charge had secured, near where a shocked handful of Ehrran prisoners huddled under guard. It was the last door, the one that led into Central. “I’ll blow it,” she said. “You got to take it the hard way-” remembering only then that it was a senior captain she was telling how to do things. It was so simple a matter. It was hurtfully simple. Near Rhean Chanur near her father, were hani who surely knew. There was Munur Faha, for one. And the Harun. They had to charge in there hand to hand against guns that might destroy fragile controls and kill fifty, sixty thousand helpless people.
Fools. She could have wept over the things she saw. Poor fools. My people. Do you see now? Do you see what we’ve done to ourselves, what a plagued thing we’ve let in, because we tried to keep everything the old way?
There was information coming in, finally, scattered reports booming out over the PA as Llun portable com began supplanting the reports out of Central: ‘ ‘Ehrran is in violation of Immune law,” one such repeated. ”Llun has appealed to all clans to enforce its lawful order for Ehrran withdrawal from station offices and enjoins Ehrran to signal its intent to comply.”
That announcement was becoming tiresome, dinning down from the overhead. Pyanfar wiped her bleeding face and flicked her ears and looked up at the wreckage of the speaker, which gave the advisories a rattling vibration and garbled the words.
“I’d like to shoot that thing,” Geran muttered. Which was her own irritated thought.
“Gods-be little good we’re doing here,” Pyanfar said. “That’s sure.” Her throat was sore. Her limbs ached. She put effort into getting onto her feet. “Hilfy can take care of herself. Whole station’s in on it. Better to get back to the ship, get Chur off her feet.”
“Not putting her in any station hospital,” Geran muttered. “Safer on the ship.”
Which was what Geran thought of Gaohn’s present chances, with kif incoming. Or Geran echoed Chur’s wishes, if they all went to vacuum and there was no real difference.
“Yeah,” she said, noncommittal, and pushed herself off the wall she had braced on. “Gods. What’d I do to stiffen the arm up?” The AP weighed like sin. The debris in the hall was an obstacle course, stuff that stuck in the feet, up in the sensitive arch of the toes. Broken plastics and bits of metal mingled indiscriminately on the deckplates. The mob that had come through had left bloody footprints, but they had seemed crazy enough not to feel it much. Pyanfar limped and winced her way over the stuff, the crew doing the same.