Apart from the crossed fangs, however, the face was undeniably human.
* * *
The Princess Cecile’s utility aircar was little more than a frame linking a quartet of fan nacelles to the open-topped cabin where Adele, Tovera, and two spacers sat on benches of metal webbing. Adele shifted. The seats weren’t as uncomfortable as they looked, but they looked very uncomfortable.
Tavastierna landed with only a moderate bang and bounce. That was a creditable performance given the car’s heavy load, but Adele scowled anyway. She knew it wasn’t fair to expect professional competence from a rigger who hadn’t driven an aircar in months, but “fair” didn’t have much to do with the present situation. The operation had very little margin for error.
“Shut off the motors!” she said, shouting to be heard over the whine of the fans spinning at zero angle of attack. Tavastierna looked surprised since their helmet intercoms would easily damp that level of external noise, but he obeyed without question.
“I’ve cut off helmet communications from now until we execute the entry,” Adele said as the blades wound down octave by octave. “They could be overheard. I doubt whether the Captal’s staff is that alert, but I don’t choose to take a chance with the lives of our shipmates.”
And our own, come to think of it, though that isn’t the first priority for me at the moment, she added internally.
Tavastierna had landed behind a ridge whose front side was a little over a thousand yards from the knoll on which the Captal da Lund had built his fortress. Even Adele could have climbed the slope on this side; Dorst and Tavastierna wouldn’t raise a sweat. The weight of the guns the men carried—Dorst a stocked impeller, Tavastierna a submachine gun for the team’s own protection—wasn’t a significant factor either.
“Dorst, are you still comfortable with this?” Adele said. “Tovera can take over now if you have any concerns. Being unwilling to kill another human being is nothing to be ashamed of.”
“No, ma’am,” the midshipman agreed. “But you don’t need to worry. I’ve trained for this.”
When Adele checked the crew list for a sniper, she’d learned to her surprise that Dorst had been on the Academy marksmanship team and had won trophies in long-range competition. He’d assured her that his training involved hostage simulations rather than merely bull’s-eye targets. He’d never done it for real—killed—but Adele well knew the effectiveness of training like what Dorst described.
A six-wheeled delivery van was trundling down the road from Spires; it would reach them in a few minutes. Adele and Tovera would join the spacers in the cargo box during the time the vehicle was out of sight of the Captal’s residence, unless she decided to leave this job to Tovera after all.
Adele’s servant looked at her and smiled. “He’ll be all right, mistress,” Tovera said. “If anything goes wrong, you or me can fix it then.”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” Dorst said stolidly.
“No, I don’t suppose it is,” Adele said. She tried to smile. It doubtless looked forced, but her natural expression at times like these was something that only a sociopath like Tovera could find humor in. “Dorst, Tavastierna—you’d better get into position. Captain Leary is counting on you.”
The spacers nodded and started up the slope at an amazingly fast pace. They moved like a rigger and a healthy young athlete, not a librarian with a tendency to trip over her own feet, of course.
It was odd what you remembered. The most vivid recollection Adele had of the duel she’d fought when she was sixteen wasn’t the face of the boy when her bullet hit: it was instead the pink mist in the air behind him, a mush of blood and fresh brains. The simulators she’d used for hours in her parents’ townhouse hadn’t prepared her for that.
The van’s suspension squealed and rattled as it approached. They—the Republic of Cinnabar, paying with funds which Mistress Sand had put at Adele’s disposal—were renting the vehicle for a sum not much short of what it had cost new. Just in case, though, the vehicle’s Sexburgan owner and its regular driver were aboard the Princess Cecile with all they wanted to drink. Half a dozen spacers were sitting with them to make sure that they didn’t decide to leave and maybe call the Captal.