There was a second burst.
The prisoners lay on the deck of the wardroom with their wrists and ankles taped. Daniel hadn’t decided what to do with them; they were simply out of the way for the moment.
He’d expected Adele to shoot into the couch or one of the wardroom chairs, but from the terrified cries she must be putting each burst into the deck within an inch or two of a prisoner’s ear. The carpet was glass fiber and nonflammable, but the stench of smoldering human hair indicated where some of the sparks were landing.
“Oh God oh God oh God!” Candace said. He’d squeezed his palms over his ears, but he still couldn’t shut out the screams from the wardroom. “Stop it! Stop it!”
“Cease fire!” Daniel cried. He returned his attention to Candace. Quietly he resumed, “Now, I hope that means you’re ready to help us, Benno. Because if you’re not . . .”
Adele walked back onto the bridge. Behind her a rating clanged shut the wardroom hatch, smothering the prisoners’ voices. The muzzle of her submachine gun glowed; heat waves shimmered in the air above the barrel shroud.
“I’ll talk to them,” Candace said. He wiped tears from his eyes, then lowered his hands and faced Daniel with an unexpected degree of dignity. “I’ll say anything you please. And I don’t care what you do then. You’re all animals!”
Adele draped the sling of her submachine gun over the seatback again. She looked at her right wrist. The skin was smudged with a black residue: metal from the pellets’ driving skirts, vaporized by the flux and redeposited on the shooter’s skin.
Candace turned his seat. He stabbed a button on the left wing of his console and said, “Bridge to power room. This is Lieutenant Candace. Whoever’s in charge of the power room, report now.”
Daniel shifted position slightly so that he could look over the Kostroman’s shoulder at the communicator’s holographic display. That wasn’t much help because though the display came alive, somebody had flung a shirt over the power room’s imaging pickup.
“Sir, what’s going on?” a male voice said. The words were a plea, not a demand.
Daniel nodded toward the console’s pickup and gave it a pleasant smile. The ratings in the power room could see him even if he couldn’t see them, so it was important to project an aura of friendly calm.
“Gershon?” Candace said. “It’s all right. We’ve been captured by the Cinnabar navy but I know the officer in charge. Everything will be all right so long as you open the power room with no trouble. They, they’re . . . It’s really very important that you surrender right away, Gershon.”
He swallowed. “Really very important.”
A last tear dropped from Candace’s chin to the sill of the console. His hands were folded in his lap, but they were still shaking.
“Sir, what’ll happen to us if we raise the containment bulkhead?” Gershon’s voice asked. “Are they, you know . . . ?”
“You’ll be confined aboard the Princess Cecile until just before we’re ready to leave Kostroma, Gershon,” Daniel said mildly. He rested his right forearm on top of the console in order to look even more relaxed than his voice projected. “Then we’ll let you and all those with you go.”
As a smiling afterthought he added, “Or you can join us, if you like. The Republic of Cinnabar Navy can always use brisk fellows who know how to act in a crisis.”
“Christ help us,” Gershon muttered miserably. The shirt slipped away from the pickup. The bald, gray-bearded Kostroman at the power room communicator looked as though he’d just volunteered to jump into vacuum.
“Open the bulkhead, Carney,” he ordered. He pulled his shirt on to cover his scarred torso. A worm gear began to whine, hauling back the massive barrier intended to prevent a fusion bottle ruptured during combat from venting its contents through the entire vessel.
“We may as well give up,” said Gershon. He was speaking toward Daniel, not Candace in the foreground. “We haven’t got any rations or even water in here.”
“You won’t be sorry, I assure you,” Daniel said. Commando-garbed Cinnabar ratings poured into the power room behind Gershon. They were securing the Kostromans without any serious roughness so far as Daniel could tell.