Pia hid her surprise. She’d been aiming at his stomach, and he was only four feet away. The other two orderlies were backing towards the far wall, their hands held out palm-up, making incoherent sounds.
“There are three more bullets in this gun,” she said crisply, backing up two paces and standing aside. “Go!” They hesitated, unwilling to approach any closer. “Go now, or I will shoot.”
The two men sidled past her and ran blundering down the corridor, eyes fixed on the four muzzles of the little gun. Pia waited until they were out of sight before letting the hand that held the derringer drop. Acrid-tasting bile forced itself up her throat as she looked down at the man she’d killed.
“It was so quick,” she whispered, and forced herself to swallow.
Just then Lola struck her, clinging and whimpering. Pia shook her sharply. “Get dressed! We have to get out of here!”
Back to the palace district; the embassy was there, or at least there wouldn’t be total anarchy.
Pia remembered John pleading with her not to go to the hospital today. I should have listened.
* * *
“Sweet Jesus on a crutch,” Harry Smith muttered.
A thousand yards down the hill a crowd was tipping a car over. It was an aristocrat’s vehicle—few others could afford them, in the Empire, and this was a huge six-wheeler—strapped all over with luggage. The owners were still inside; a woman tried to crawl out one of the rear windows and was met with sticks, fists, pieces of cobblestone. She screamed and slumped, and hands dragged her limp and bleeding body back inside. A gun spoke; the noise covered the report, but John could see the puff of smoke.
“Stupid,” he whispered.
Half a dozen rifles answered the shot; there were scores of Imperial army deserters in the crowd, many with their weapons. John could see sparks flying as bullets hit the metalwork of the car. Some ricochetted into the densely packed ranks of the rioters. One must have punctured the fuel tanks, because a deep soft whump and billow of orange flame drove the mob back, some of them on fire. Both the figures that tried to crawl out of the burning automobile were on fire, and probably would have died even without the hail of rocks that beat them back.
“All right, Harry,” he went on. “What’s your plan?”
“Well, sir, there’s a side route,” the driver said thoughtfully. “But its a bit narrow.”
“You’re the expert,” John said.
For once, he was glad that diplomatic corps conservatism stuck the embassy with steamers; they had less pickup than the latest petrol-engine jobs, but they were quiet. Smith spun the wheel away from the main avenue, down a side-street, and into a maze of alleyways. Some of them were old enough to date back to the founding of Ciano, to the centuries right after the Collapse, when men first started building again in stone. The wheels drummed on cobbles and splashed through refuse and waste, throwing him lurching into the four Marines packed into the rear of the touring car. Normally the district would have been crowded, but most of the people were missing.
Probably out rioting. Not that it would do them any good when the Chosen showed up, but he supposed it was more tolerable than sitting and waiting. The ones who were left were mostly children, or old. They slammed shutters and ducked aside at the sight of an automobile filled with uniforms and armed men.
“Uh-oh.”
The hill was steeper here, and it gave them an excellent view south over the river to the industrial section—the prevailing winds in the central Empire were always from the north, which meant that residential properties were on the north bank of the Pada. They could see the Land airships coming in over the flatter southern shore at two thousand feet, only a thousand feet above their own position.
Probably aligning on landmarks, Raj thought at the back of his mind.
probability near unity, Center confirmed.
John felt a spurt of anger. God damn it, that’s my wife down there, he thought coldly.
I could never keep mine out of it, either, Raj thought. And she was a lot less of a romantic than yours.