Lt. Leary, Commanding by David Drake

A gray fog hung above the wreckage, and a few wisps of ionized air were dissipating like yesterday’s rainbow. A plasma bolt, then, from a weapon concealed behind the wall of amber sap. The light-speed particles liberated their energy on the first solid object they encountered. They’d destroyed the boat, but they hadn’t been able to penetrate even the thin hull when Daniel lifted it with the throttle.

Daniel sloshed toward the islet, staying to the left of a direct line with the gunport. He should have looked silly, unarmed and dressed in a dripping uniform. Adele doubted that he looked silly to the gunmen, though. As the commendation for his activities on Kostroma had put it, “Faced with a superior enemy, Lt. Leary chose to attack in accordance with the finest traditions of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy.”

Feeling extremely foolish, Adele also started toward the islet, keeping to the right of the opening. If she’d had her pistol she might have done some good. So far as she could tell, this was no better than suicide. Still, she was acting out of cold analysis, not passion: she knew she’d rather be killed than live to remember that she’d let her only real friend die alone.

It occurred to Adele to wonder what had happened to her purse with the personal data unit, dropped when she tried to get Vaughn out of the way. She hadn’t the least notion of what Daniel was doing, but she knew him well enough to support him regardless.

The boat’s hull had reflected some of the bolt’s energy back toward the weapon, eating away a fan of hardened sap and fracturing the smooth amber wall for ten feet in either direction. A man wearing a poncho of light-scattering cloth ran past the enlarged opening, holding a handgun. Why didn’t I insist on keeping my—

A bow wave washed Adele to the side as the barge carrying the servants surged between her and Daniel. She had to splash forward clumsily to keep from being pushed onto her face.

The craft had a small cockpit in the rear. The aide who’d been at the controls floundered in the water thirty feet back while Hogg drove the vessel at a slant toward the islet. Several of the servants had jumped overboard; all but one of the remainder had ducked behind the gunwales.

The exception, Tovera, stood in the bow. Her left arm was locked at an angle before her; across the crooked elbow rested her right hand holding a pistol.

The ship slid onto the islet, pushing over the amber trees and shattering the hardened sap. The louder crash was the vessel’s lower hull breaking on the concrete retaining wall. Three men wearing camouflage capes were running across ground covered with flowers like a carpet of tiny flags. The assassins’ primary weapon, a bipod-mounted plasma cannon, rested on the ground behind them. They couldn’t fire it again till the white-hot barrel had cooled from the previous discharge, and they showed no signs of planning to use the pistols each waved in his hand.

Tovera shot—with a very compact submachine gun, not a pistol, and how had she gotten it through the detection screen at the entrance? Despite the light-scattering garments and the fact that the boat was breaking up beneath her, Tovera’s first burst sent the most distant assassin onto his face with his arms flapping.

Tovera stepped to the islet just before the impact. The posts supporting the vessel’s canopy flexed till they cracked, slamming her in the middle of the back with the whole structure, frame and fabric together. She fell under a pile of debris.

The remaining assassins reached a skiff nestled onto the shore across the islet; on that side, the branches of the amber trees hadn’t been pleached together to form a continuous wall. One of the men settled behind the controls while the other turned, aiming toward the pursuit just as Daniel and Adele squelched onto the islet.

Tovera’s weapon crackled from the tangled wreckage. Its electromotive coils accelerated pellets up the short barrel at several times the speed of sound. The gunman fell backward, dropping his pistol. The driver slumped on his face, half out of the skiff as it rose on the balanced static charges induced in the ground and its own hull. The pilot’s weight dragged the little craft into a slow circle like a horse guided by a lunge line.

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