“The aircar,” said Adele.
“Right, the lady’s back with an aircar!” Woetjans said. “I shouldn’t wonder we could fit twelve in her—she’s a big sucker. Over.”
“Yes,” said Daniel. “Woetjans, take nine and yourself. Stop to pick me up at—”
“Daniel, I’ve downloaded the coordinates,” Adele said hastily.
“Roger, me and Hogg,” Daniel resumed. “No guns. Adele, take charge until Mr. Chewning reports back. Six out.”
Woetjans was on her feet bellowing, gathering personnel both with her raw voice and over the ship’s PA system. “Daniel!” said Adele before he broke the connection. “Do you want me and Tovera—or just Tovera?”
“Good God no!” Daniel replied, his voice strained as if he were doing something physically demanding while still holding the call plate in one hand. “Adele, if there’s shooting in this city, you can depend on it that the Governor’s troops will execute everybody they catch. Just don’t let anybody from the Goldenfels aboard the Sissie, and make damned sure the guns’re manned. Over.”
“Over, Daniel,” Adele said. “Out.”
She leaned back in her couch and closed her eyes, feeling suddenly empty. There was a good deal happening, but she herself had nothing to do except wait.
The Klimovna’s voice penetrated the mental barriers Adele had set up when she had no time to deal with trivia. Adele opened her eyes. “Madam,” she said. “Your husband is in trouble over a card game. Captain Leary and some of the crew are on their way to extricate him. Ah, they’ll be taking your aircar.”
Bessing was seated at the gunnery display. Nobody was at the command console or the missile board, but the three senior ratings in the Battle Direction Center could handle anything up through lifting ship, Adele supposed.
“Georgi will play,” the Klimovna said. She made a moue. “So clever, he thinks himself.”
She looked sharply at Adele. “He will be all right?” she said. “Tell me the truth.”
Adele met the older woman’s eyes, her face expressionless. “Yes,” she said at last. “I think the Count will be all right. Daniel—Captain Leary—will send him back in the aircar, I expect.”
But will Daniel be all right with hundreds of Alliance spacers baying for his blood? Adele thought.
Oh. Yes, of course. There was an answer.
Adele’s wands flickered as she entered the maze of local communications systems. There were six simply for the San Juan district, two of them surprisingly sophisticated. There was no common system even for the military. The army, the navy, and the Governor’s Guard were all separate.
The Klimovna was speaking again somewhere close by in the background. Adele found the node she needed and entered it, bypassing the firewall. She took a deep breath and began to speak.
* * *
Barnes, swearing like the spacer he’d been for the past twenty years, deliberately slammed the aircar hard on the street. The overloaded vehicle bounced upward on a combination of momentum and air compressed by the fans in surface effect. The huge cloud of dust looked like a bomb blast, but they cleared the furniture van whose driver had kept right on coming out of the sidestreet when he saw the aircar hurtling down the boulevard a bare seven feet above the rutted surface.
Daniel’d braced himself against the dashboard, but the weight of husky spacers behind him slammed him hard anyway. His ribs didn’t crack, so it was cheap at the price.
Barnes wasn’t a good driver in the conventional sense, but his very ham-fistedness made him exactly what the present situation required. There was no way to do a neat job of flying a six-place aircar with fourteen spacers aboard. Unlike a better driver, Barnes wasn’t disconcerted by the number of skidding collisions they’d had on the way to the Anyo Nuevo.
Barnes was a big man, handy with a club or his fists. That was good too, as was the fact Woetjans brought twelve in the car instead of ten like Daniel ordered. He hadn’t put them out on the street when he and Hogg squeezed aboard, and now that they’d arrived at their destination he was glad for the bosun’s better judgment.
It’d been a near thing, though. Bloody near, he’d thought when he saw the van nosing straight across their path.