Adele didn’t care about her own life to speak of, but she found the notion of being snuffed out at random was oddly disquieting. Logically it shouldn’t matter whether she was killed by a sniper’s deliberation or instead by a few ounces of impact-heated osmium plunging from the sky. She obviously wasn’t as much a creature of logic as she preferred to believe.
The jeep rounded a knoll on which stood several houses, one of them afire. The swale beyond was a plaza of sorts with a triumphal arch and a number of plinths from which the statues had been recently shot away. Five armed vehicles parked on the pavement, with a group of heavily armed Dalbriggans hunched behind them.
One of the Dalbriggans saw the jeep out of the corner of his eye. He shouted and leveled a stocked impeller.
Tovera lifted slightly to aim: the light pellets of her submachine gun wouldn’t penetrate the windscreen of the open car. Before she could fire, Daniel rose to his feet and raised his hands high.
“Quite all right!” Daniel shouted, keeping his balance even though the driver reacted to the threat by landing in what was virtually a controlled crash. “Captain Leary here to speak with the Astrogator!”
Kelburney stepped forward, holding a drawn pistol. The man with the impeller looked hesitant and didn’t lower his weapon. Kelburney backhanded him with the pistol butt from behind, knocking him face-down to the ground.
“Leary!” he shouted, advancing to give Daniel a bear hug. “Bloody good work with the guardship! There aren’t six captains in my squadron who’d have been able to equal that!”
In the assembly, Kelburney had been a monarch; in the council meeting later he was the canny man of business. Here on this field of smoke and blood, Adele saw a much more primal figure that she suspected was the stuff from which the Astrogator had molded his other personas.
Automatic impellers opened fire from somewhere out of sight. Projectiles bounced skyward like a neon fountain. And where are they going to come down? Adele wondered, but with detached curiosity. The near miss had inoculated her against fear of death from that sort of randomness.
A white flash lit the sky to the west. There was a sharp explosion and the firing stopped.
“I gather Captain Aretine has gone to ground in the circular fortress just over the hill?” Daniel said, pointing in the direction of the shooting. The air stank of ozone and smoke from burning fuels, plastics, and flesh.
“We’ll get’er out, never fear!” said a hulking gunman. The folk around Kelburney now were bodyguards, not the officers of his inner circle. Those folk would be directing their own contingents of fighters, here in town and back at the spaceport.
“No doubt you will,” Daniel said in a cool tone and a glance that meant, “Don’t interrupt when your betters are speaking, dog!” He cleared his throat and continued to Kelburney, “I think I might speed the process a good deal, Astrogator. That is, if you don’t care what happens to the defenders with the exception of Captain Aretine herself?”
Several automatic impellers opened fire simultaneously. Orange flame mushroomed over the houses, lifting a gunshield from one of the makeshift fighting vehicles. The firing stopped.
“Care?” Kelburney said, his brow furrowing. “God rot my bones, boy, I don’t care what happens to her either! You can burn her . . .”
His expression changed into a cat’s smile. “Ah, I see,” he said. “You mean, do I mind letting them live afterwards?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Daniel said. “I realize that they’re pirates, but regardless, I wouldn’t care to talk them out of their position and have them massacred as a result.”
Ah! Adele understood now. She sat on a cracked marble paver and began setting up the link. She’d use the transmitter in the Astrogator’s command vehicle rather than going through the Princess Cecile’s communications suite. The personal data unit was close to the limit of its unboosted range for reaching the ship from here in the middle of Homeland.
Kelburney laughed. “I could say you were a soft bastard,” he said, “but the truth is I don’t see reason to kill a lot of good people if I don’t have to. Go ahead. I’ve got a loudspeaker on the car. Or are you going to chance your uniform to keep them from blowing your head off?”