“Suit,” Hansen said to save his AI the trouble of guessing whether it should take the next words as a direction to it. “All elements in line of sight.”
Then, “Listen up, you dickheads!”
Every warrior in sight of Hansen stiffened at the radioed command.
“This is your warchief,” Hansen continued. “Follow me to the headquarters and we’ll take their surrender.”
He paused. “And any bastard I see with loot after the next thirty seconds, he spends an hour in the latrine pit when I get things sorted out!”
Hansen looked down at the old woman in his arms. She was actually clinging to him.
“Now, madame,” he said as quietly as he could and still be heard over the sounds of battle, “let’s go to the Palace of Trade. And the quicker we get there, the safer everybody’s going to be.”
Hansen’s armored worm squirmed toward the center of Frekka, directed by the old woman’s pointing arm. He started with about twenty warriors and a handful of slaves and freemen, but their numbers increased at every intersection. There were a number of abandoned battlesuits which unarmored members of Hansen’s entourage appropriated.
The civilian populace had mostly hidden. Occasionally someone scampered like a rat back into an alley at the warriors’ clashing approach. There was no resistance, though several times a Frekka hireling stumbled into Hansen’s group and was cut down as he tried to run.
Hansen’s passenger spat in the direction of each smoking corpse. “Cowards!” she snarled. “If they’d been men, they’d’ve met you in the field!”
“Lord Hansen,” Golsingh said on the command push. “I’m in a gate tower as you suggested—” `ordered’ would’ve been a more accurate description of Hansen’s tone when they laid their plans before the battle, but Hansen’s temper was always short when it was about to hit the fan “—and I can see warriors boarding ships in the harbor.”
“Right,” said Hansen. The maze of close-built houses and curving streets had left him without a clue as to his location. Was the Palace of Trade near the harbor? Was—
“Right,” he repeated. “Broadcast over a general frequency that no warrior will be harmed if he takes off his suit. And—d’ye have a couple other people with you in the tower?”
“Roger, Lord Hansen.”
“Right. If any of the ships put out from the dock, have one of your guys fire a bolt at it.”
“We can’t possibly harm armored warriors at this distance, Lord Hansen,” the king protested. “Even my suit doesn’t have that much power.”
“Not you!” Hansen snapped. “I don’t want you a sitting duck for some slow-learner.”
He took a breath. His mouth was dry, while his throat and nasal passages had been scoured by ozone from the omnipresent arc weapons.
“Milord,” he said more calmly. It looked like there was a square at the end of the current street. “You can’t hurt the armor, but the ships’ll burn like tinder . . . and one thing a battlesuit won’t do is swim. Trust me.”
It was a square. Across it was a stone building of four high stories whose corners were raised further by twenty-meter spires. The leaves of the arched central doorway were ajar. Darting through the gap stood the gold-armored Syndic who’d faced Hansen—briefly—outside the walls.
He disappeared inside. The bronze-clad door leaves closed.
“Come on!” Hansen bellowed as he broke into a run. “Don’t kill anybody inside until I do!”
Hansen’s arc licked the doors from across the courtyard. The bronze blazed green at the first touch. The wood underneath was a better insulator. It flamed up instantly, but the panels might have held until Hansen struck them with his suit’s full mass—had not at least twenty more of his men ripped their arcs into the same point as they charged.
The doorleaves blew open in splinters. Hansen, the old woman still in his arms—too terrified to scream, forgotten in the greater need—was the first of the men through their flaming tatters.
Oil lamps hung in brackets from the high ceiling, but their glow was insignificant compared with the hard blue-white arclights quivering from the gauntlets of the battlesuits.
The man Hansen had chased into the hall was climbing out of his armor. He was a fat old fellow, blinking in wide-eyed terror at the killers who’d burst through the doorway behind him.