“For the moment my priority is with the people who fired plasma cannon at us, Hogg,” Daniel said, coloring his voice with the hint of superciliousness which never failed to remind Hogg that Daniel was his master in fact. “There may be a chance to discuss matters with the folks who blew dust on us later, but I can’t say it concerns me a great deal.”
“Sorry,” Hogg muttered. “Won’t happen again.”
“Carry on,” said Daniel mildly. Nothing had really happened, of course, but Daniel knew his servant too well—and Hogg knew himself—for either of them to take the matter lightly.
The Hall was the size of a maintenance hangar, built of wood on pilings that raised it three steps above the ground. A sounder of lean gray pigs, Terran stock but feral, trotted along the side of the building in the direction of the garbage dump to the rear. In the lead was a boar who clashed his tusks at the strangers coming through the berm. The pigs ignored the garishly dressed locals swaggering toward the Hall.
Three aircars landed in quick succession. Each driver tried to put his vehicle closer to the Hall’s entrance than the other two. What would’ve been a shoving match in humans meant screaming metal, then a crash like a sack of anvils falling.
“They’re saving us effort, Mister Hogg,” Tovera called in a clear voice. “Perhaps we should be thankful.”
Hogg guffawed loudly. Daniel leaned close to Adele and said into her ear, “I didn’t know your servant had a sense of humor, Adele.”
“I’m not sure she does,” Adele replied with cool amusement.
The Hall’s roof had a high central peak and flaring eaves. Though the air was dry at present and dust blew along the ground, the structure gave every evidence of being built for downpours. Which raised the question of refilling the Princess Cecile’s reaction mass tanks on a dry field, but that could wait for a more suitable time.
Instead of a door, the whole end of the Hall was open. Daniel looked upward and saw, furled beneath the eaves, curtains of bark fiber to shield the interior in event of rain.
On the broad porch fronting the entranceway stood Dalbriggans in flowing, garish dress. Weapons—knives, guns, and the occasional rocket launcher—were the universal accessory items. More locals joined those already present, not overtly hostile but showing no sign of opening a passage for the approaching Cinnabars.
“Barnes, Dasi, Hogg, front of the line now,” Woetjans ordered. Barnes and Dasi were the biggest men on the ship, nearly as tall as the bosun and with the male animal’s greater muscle mass.
Hogg, short and pudgy, was on the end opposite Woetjans for reasons other than size. He reached into his knapsack, came out with three fist-sized bundles, and began juggling them. That was an impressive trick while walking forward with gear strapped over both shoulders.
The Cinnabars started up the building-wide steps toward the jeering mass of pirates. Daniel saw the locals brace themselves shoulder to shoulder to resist the spacers’ impact. Behind them, their fellows leaned forward to add their weight to the line.
Daniel grinned faintly. He wondered when it would be that a pirate noticed that Hogg was juggling—
“Ganesh bugger me!” a Dalbriggan shouted over the catcalls of her fellows. “That’s metallic hydrogen he’s tossing around!”
Hogg neatly reversed the flow of his juggling from clockwise to counterclockwise. Three identical items were nothing for a juggler as accomplished as he was. He’d kept the young Daniel amused for hours with up to seven objects—eggs, stones, or the cook’s knives, it was all the same to Hogg—in the air at one time.
Now it was blasting charges of metallic hydrogen in zero-zero insulation. Metallic hydrogen had greater energy density than any other explosive, and more shattering power—greater propagation speed—than anything but capacitor-discharge units.
The charges had no fragmentation effect, of course: the explosive’s violence would rupture any casing into its constituent atoms. The blast alone would puree everybody on the porch and deafen their neighbors half a mile away.
“Hey, make way, you ratfuckers!” called a front-rank pirate over his shoulder. “These guys juggle bombs!”
“Hold up!” Daniel called, though the veterans around him didn’t need to be warned. They’d already paused on the second step for the message to spread over the noise of the crowd.