“You can have the other submachine gun if you want it,” Wanda said to Belgeddes. As she spoke, she switched on Ran’s console. “You—you’re a better shot than I am.”
“Now, Lieutenant,” Wade resumed, “this is going to get very unpleasant, I’m afraid. Perhaps—”
“Not for me, good lady,” Belgeddes said as he compared the two identical pistols with a broad grin. “These suit me very well.”
The grin slipped into something feral. “As you’ve seen, I should have thought.”
“Do let me finish, Tom,” Wade said sharply. “Lieutenant Holly, there isn’t any clean way of proceeding from here. If you care to wait—”
“Mr. Wade,” Wanda said, “I am in charge here. We will proceed as follows. We’ll have to ki—eliminate—the isolated soldiers before we attempt the bridge controls. We’ll—we’ll trust Ran to take care of engineering control.”
“See, Dickie?” Belgeddes said as he reopened the drawer the pistol came from. He rummaged around until he found a box of cartridges among the hard copy. “All under control.”
“How do you propose to locate the hostiles, Lieutenant?” Wade asked formally. “And if I may suggest . . . ? They appear to be deployed in threes, not as individuals.”
“Yes, that’s correct,” Wanda said with a sharp dip of her jaw that passed for a nod. “And we’ll locate them like this.”
She undipped the communicator from the front harness strap of the body she’d dragged into the cabin. It worked on the same principals as Trident’s intra-ship communications rigs, but it was somewhat larger and extended a rigid wand to a structural feature instead of using a transceiver chip and a length of flex.
She touched the wand to the console’s face. “Bridge,” she ordered, “on a schematic, locate the points within the Empress that a communicator of this—”she broke squelch “—modulation has been used in the past ten minutes. Over.”
Six labeled decks appeared in blue outline, shrunk to fit on a single console display. The nine red dots were at expected locations—the bridge, engineering control, and public areas including the main lift and drop shaft foyers on four decks. The commando looked surprisingly sparse against the starliner’s enormous volume. They must have lost half their strength in their blind ship-to-ship crossing through sponge space.
Survivably sparse, it might be.
Wade looked over the 15-mm rifle from Calicheman that leaned against a corner of the cabin. “Interesting,” he murmured.
He turned to Wanda Holly. “Very good, lieutenant,” he said. “Now, as for the method of procedure—may I suggest a course?”
“Go ahead,” Wanda said curtly. Every time her mind tried to grapple with what came next, it mired itself in bodies thrashing as she tried to slide them along the deck.
“Right,” Wade said. “First, we’ll need a scout That’s you, Tom. Signals intelligence is all very well, but we don’t want to stumble into a team that didn’t bother to report in.”
He looked at Belgeddes.
The plump man clicked home the reloaded magazine of Wanda’s pistol. “You know me, Dickie,” he replied without concern. “You lead, I follow. In this case, follow from in front.”
“Right,” Wade repeated. He slung the submachine gun and raised the bomb thrower by the handle on top of its receiver. “Then with your agreement, Lieutenant, we will proceed as follows. . . .”
“And the more fool me,” Belgeddes added with a chuckle.
* * *
“I heard shots,” said Trooper II Weik, waggling the muzzle of her submachine gun down the corridor toward the bow.
Corridor 7 widened into a foyer and mini-lounge toward the stern of Deck A, where the shafts opened. The ambiance was from the Moghul Empire, with columns decorated in tilework helixes and florid carpeting on the deck. A band of knobbed brass bannisters ran around the top the walls as though there was an upper-floor balcony, and the holographic murals were of minareted palaces with reflecting pools and lush vegetation.
“That’s fine,” said Trooper III Buecher, the team leader. He watched the lift and drop shaft openings from over the sights of his submachine gun. “We all heard shots. The people who got nervous and fired them will report to Colonel Steinwagen, who will not be pleased. My team will not be nervous.”