They had even better reason to be than they knew.
Adele shivered. The air, though warm in any normal sense, cooled her by evaporation as it dried the salt water from her skin. She’d been too exhausted to eat when she and Daniel returned from scouting, and she hadn’t eaten later because tension and the flurry of activity had masked her hunger.
Now she was cold and wet and alone in the darkness. She liked to think of herself as a creature of the mind, but her body was reimposing its own reality.
She’d know better the next time. The thought of there being a next time like this made her grin despite herself: Dangerous Adele, the Pistol-Packing Librarian.
She sobered. There probably would be a next time, if she survived this one.
The Kostromans subsided into glum speculation again. They were urban thugs, as unused to these sorts of conditions as Adele herself was, and they didn’t have her self-disciplined willingness to deal with a situation as she found it.
Ganser had pulled into a notch midway along the lagoon side of this islet. He hadn’t built a real camp. Open ration cans winked orange in the firelight; one floated near where Adele crouched on the opposite shore.
The inflatable liferaft was drawn up on the mud near the fire. Adele wondered if it was tied. The thugs probably didn’t think they’d need the boat again, but the Cinnabar sailors certainly did.
She and the Cinnabar sailors. For the first time since the Mundys of Chatsworth were massacred, Adele Mundy belonged to a group.
Something plopped loudly in the lagoon. A thug cried out and turned. The rhythm of night-sounds shifted for a moment after the cry, then resumed at its previous level.
Daniel Leary stepped out of the undergrowth on the other side of the Kostromans’ fire. He carried a wooden baton a meter long.
“Good evening,” Daniel said. “Surrender quietly right now. You’re surrounded.”
The thugs bawled and scrambled away from the fire. One of them aimed a submachine gun at Daniel. Adele was no longer cold. She shot the gunman in the knee. The gunman screamed in rising pain and fell backward.
Ganser swung at Daniel. Daniel jabbed his baton into the thug’s soft belly, then rang the wood off Ganser’s scalp as he doubled over.
A Kostroman squatting at the edge of the light had a submachine gun also. Adele hadn’t noticed it until the thug pulled the trigger. They’d retrieved guns from the lagoon, but unlike the sailors they hadn’t even tried to wash the salt out of the circuitry.
The submachine gun blew up in a vivid green flash: its battery had shorted through the mechanism. Vaporized metal and globs of burning plastic casing splattered in all directions like the contents of an incendiary grenade.
Daniel shouted, but the thugs themselves caught most of the fireball. Woetjans and Barnes burst from the undergrowth to either side of their commander and joined him in clubbing every Kostroman still standing.
Adele didn’t shoot again. She didn’t have a safe target, and the three Cinnabars across the inlet didn’t need her help.
The only rope the Cinnabars had that was long enough to span the strait between the islands was Kostroma-made and only a quarter-inch diameter. Daniel was unwilling to stress it with more than one person at a time crossing hand over hand to the other side. If there’d been more time the sailors could have braided a bark hawser; but there wasn’t time, for that or much of anything else.
Three Cinnabars had crossed to join Daniel. Adele was the first, because of her pistol and her skill with it. Barnes and Dasi were supposed to follow, but Woetjans had come in Dasi’s place.
The fight in the Kostroman camp, such as it was, ended. Daniel swayed, panting as he held his club by both ends. He looked across the notch of water and called, “Don’t try to come around, Adele. We’ll bring you over in the boat as soon as we’ve got this lot tied.”
The four Cinnabars had worked their way up the shore from the island’s tip until they found the Kostroman camp on the other side of this inlet. They hadn’t been able to make a plan until they saw the location. Adele had been the one to suggest she stay here where she had a better line of fire than she’d have if she worked around with the others.