Adele turned away. She could scarcely be wetter than she was already, but the deliberate insult set her face coldly. Scorn a Mundy of Chatsworth, would they?
She turned again, smiling internally at her own reaction. She’d have laughed, but that would have been out of keeping with her pose as a small-time crook and smuggler. Instead she let her face muscles relax into a neutral expression. She’d never cringed, so she was afraid of an unsatisfactory result if she tried to fake it now.
The APC swung broadside to the eleven Cinnabars. Its stern shoved aside undergrowth and nestled there. The cupola rotated so that the plasma cannon stayed trained on the presumed Kostromans. Five submachine guns projected from miniature gunports in the armored side.
Realistically, the weapons weren’t much danger because those threatened were close enough to the vehicle to duck under the cannon and flatten themselves against the APC’s flank between the gunports. The muzzles would have a psychological effect, though, especially on the stupid thugs the commandoes thought they were facing.
The driver shut his fans down. The roar of air through the eight intake ducts stilled, but a high-pitched whine indicated various parts continued to spin in readiness for any need.
The plasma cannon twitched, aiming at Lamsoe’s head. “You two with guns!” the Alliance voice shouted, this time through a conformal speaker somewhere on the vehicle’s hull. “Throw them in the water now! And the six of you who have knives, you too! Now! We can see you!”
Daniel stood a half step in front of his sailors, waggling his raised hands and smirking in apparent terror. At the command he clawed into his pocket and came out with the little knife he’d used to peel nuts.
Lamsoe and Sun spun their submachine guns toward the inlet. Sun’s splattered mud on the bank, but Lamsoe got rid of his with the enthusiasm owed a live grenade. It took longer for sailors to fumble folding knives out of their pockets, but they flew toward the water too.
Though Hogg threw his knife, Adele heard it thunk into a tree bole in the near distance. If the Alliance officer noticed the slight disobedience, he passed over it for now.
A hatch opened in the vehicle’s side, just back of the cupola. The man who got out was barely taller than Adele but strongly built. He held the central grip of a submachine gun, a weapon both more compact and more deadly than the Kostroman equivalents the sailors had just thrown away.
“Now listen up!” the officer said. He spoke in an upper-class Pleasaunce accent.
The officer waved the submachine gun as though it were a conductor’s baton. The hatch behind him was a pale rectangle; the vehicle’s interior lights were faint, but they were brighter than the jungle now that the fire was dead.
“You wogs will go back under restraint,” he continued, “or you’ll stay here till you rot. And you can count yourselves lucky that my colonel has a softer heart than I do, or there’d be another burned patch of jungle and we’d be heading home without the trouble of tying you, do you understand?”
“But master—” Daniel whined. He sounded so much like a crying child that Adele felt her jaw clench.
The officer thrust his gun an inch from Daniel’s face. “Shut up or I’ll do it my way!” he said.
Daniel whimpered and bent away. Adele tossed her ripe soap-bubble fungus through the open hatch. The officer’s eyes flicked sideways at the movement and Daniel caught his gun-wrist in his left hand.
Sailors dived for cover as they’d been warned to do. Screaming chaos broke out within the APC. A submachine gun raked the night.
Adele ignored the shots—they weren’t aimed at her or, most likely, aimed at anything at all. She bent to tip over the bucket she’d used as a seat. Her pistol was beneath, concealed from sensors by the galvanized iron bucket.
She straightened with the gun in her hand. There wasn’t anything she needed to shoot.
The plasma cannon pointed at a crazy angle as the howling gunner tried to free himself from his harness. A commando emptied a submachine gun through a port on the opposite side of the APC; pellets lit the jungle like a stream of fireflies, clipping foliage and sending up puffs of splintered wood. Other troops hammered the sides of their vehicle, but even a crash-bar hatch release required a little more coordination than these retained in their present puling agony.