“The back stairs!” the manager gasped. “They way you came in, for God’s sake!”
“That’s blocked now,” Daniel said, speaking calmly. “Is there a way to the roof?”
Behind Daniel sounds from the card room suggested a demolition team was at work. That was more or less the truth. His people had brought clubs, but weight of numbers was going to tell very quickly if it came to hand-to-hand slugging against the Goldenfels’ crew. The Sissies were converting the furnishings into missiles, and they’d very shortly be using the studs for spears if they managed to tear them out of the walls.
“In there!” the manager said, pointing to the toilet half-screened in the corner. “In the ceiling, there’s a ladder pulls down. But it won’t help you!”
Daniel turned to give an order but Hogg and Portus, a technician with blood now matting her blond hair, had gotten to the alcove before the words were out of the manager’s mouth. Daniel stepped to the card room door, still holding the manager. The fellow was probably harmless, but there wasn’t enough margin for survival in this affair to learn that there was another pistol stashed somewhere in the service area.
His Sissies were holding the tops of both staircases, but Lamsoe was sprawled unconscious in the middle of the room and most of the others Daniel could see had injuries. If there was only a trap door to block they’d survive that much longer, but retreating up a ladder would mean sacrificing the rear guard; which Daniel wasn’t willing to do, not yet.
“Got it open!” Hogg shouted. “I’ll check the—”
“Negative!” Daniel said. “Portus, check the roof for a way out. Hogg, come here and—”
“There’s no way off the roof!” the manager said in a piping voice. “You’d have to jump!”
“—rig a snare across this doorway for after we’re clear. Sissies, start withdrawing to the roof. Horn and Kolbek—”
Two techs who weren’t involved in the immediate fighting, waiting for a chance to replace somebody in the groups fighting at each stairhead.
“—carry Lamsoe now! Move it, Sissies!”
Jumping from a third-floor roof would mean broken legs and maybe broken necks—which wasn’t any worse than what the Alliance spacers would do to them if Daniel didn’t get his people clear in some fashion. Aircars, maybe? But where to steal enough of them quickly, and few spacers could drive one anyway.
Of course if the fight went on long enough the local authorities might intervene. At this point that was looking like a less bad option than it’d seemed at the beginning.
Three spacers trundled past. Lamsoe was on his feet, but his face was slack and he was moving only because Horn directed him.
“Woetjans, start sending them back!” Daniel said. “We’re moving out!”
Hogg knelt nearby, wearing gloves and paying out the length of deep-sea fishline he always carried. The line was boron monocrystal, strong enough to hold a whale but so thin it cut like a knife if you weren’t careful handling it. He’d looped it around the lower hinge of the shattered door and was running it back to the legs of a couch on the other side.
There was a burst of particular violence at the main stairs. Barnes and Dasi charged some ways down the steps after the retreating Alliance spacers; when they came back up, Barnes had lost his left sleeve and his mouth was bloody. The blood wasn’t necessarily his own, of course.
“Now!” Daniel said. “We’ll hold at this door. Now by God or you’ll none of you ship under me again, damn your bloody souls!”
“Captain . . . ?” said Count Klimov, looking aristocratically puzzled and holding a baize bag bulging with chips.
Bloody Hell, I’d forgotten him! Daniel grabbed his employer by the lapel and dragged him into the service room to relative safety. “Somebody get the Count up the ladder!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Soonest! Move! Move! Move!”
All but four Sissies broke back immediately, not in panic but out of the ingrained habit of obeying orders instantly. Horn was feeding them up the ladder; there was a brief delay as spacers helped/tossed the Count up to hands waiting on the roof, but the spacers themselves climbed as they would the companionways of a starship. Not even the largest battleships had elevators. A cage would catch and become a fatal trap if the vessel’s fabric worked enough to kink the shaft. That could happen while transiting from one bubble universe to another, let alone as a result of enemy action.