Doll was too busy doing her job to answer him. Her throat worked as she snarled an order over the intercom, though with the faceshield down her helmet muted the words to a shadow.
Sirens sounded from several directions. They were coming closer.
The rescue party piled into the back of the truck. Two Slammers and a civilian remained in the parking lot, putting the boot in with methodical savagery. Their victim was out of sight behind the parked cars. One of the thugs must’ve tried to make a fight out of it—that, or he’d hit somebody while flailing about in panic.
“Move it, Bayes!” Tranter called.
Huber pointed his pistol skyward and fired. The thump! and blue flash both reflected from overhanging foliage. For a moment the bolt was as striking as the blast from a tank’s main gun. The three stragglers looked up in palpable shock, then ran to join their fellows.
Huber hung over the truck’s sidewall to make sure Hera was all right. She wasn’t in sight, so she’d probably gotten back into the restaurant. If she hadn’t, well, better the local cops look into it than that the cops spend their energy discussing matters with the rescue party. That was a situation that could go really wrong fast.
The fans roared. Kelso, a civilian clerk from Log Section, was in the driver’s seat. From the way the vehicle’d nosed in, Huber’d guessed a trooper was at the controls.
The aircar slid forward, gathering speed but staying within a centimeter of the gravel. Faces staring from the restaurant’s front windows vanished as the car roared by in cascades of dust and pebbles.
Only when the vehicle had reached 90 kph and the end of the block did Kelso lift it out of ground effect. He banked hard through a stand of towering trees.
Huber could still hear sirens, but they didn’t seem to be approaching nearly as fast as a moment before. Witnesses being what they were, Huber’s single pistol shot had probably been described as a tank battle.
Doll put her hand on Huber’s shoulder. Raising her faceshield she shouted over the windrush, “That was a little too close on the timing, Arne. Sorry about that.”
“It was perfect, Doll,” he shouted back. The aircar was racketing along at the best speed it could manage with the present overload. That was too fast for comfort in an open vehicle, but torn metal showed where the folding top had been ripped off in a hurry to lower the gross weight. “Perfect execution, too. What brought you?”
They were heading in the direction of the Liaison Office, staying just over the treetops. Kelso had his running lights off. Red strobes high in the sky marked the emergency vehicles easing gingerly toward the summons.
“That’s a funny thing,” Doll said, her pretty face scrunched into a frown. “Every trooper billeted at Base Benjamin got an alert, saying a trooper needed help—and if there was shooting, the best result would be courts martial for everybody involved. It gave coordinates that turned out to be you. We hauled ass till we got here.”
She shrugged. “Sergeant Tranter invited some civilian drivers from Log Section, too. I guess there was a card game going when the call came.”
“But who gave the alert?” Huber said. “Did the—”
He’d started to ask if the restaurant manager had called it in; that was dumb, so he swallowed the final words. There hadn’t been time for a civilian to get an alarm through the regimental net.
“There was no attribution,” Basime said. She lifted her helmet and ran a hand through her short hair; it was gleaming with sweat. “That means it had to come from Base Alpha; and it had to be a secure sector besides, not the regular Signals Office.”
“The White Mice?” Huber said. That was the only possible source, but . . . “But if it was them, why didn’t they respond themselves?”
“You’re asking me?” Doll said. She grinned, but the released strain had aged her by years. She’d known she was risking her career—and life—to respond to the call.
“I will say, though,” she added quietly, “that whoever put out the alarm seems to be a friend of yours. And that’s better than having him for an enemy.”