Hogg pointed his impeller at the side of the alcove. “Dasi and Koop,” he said. Those three—and Lamsoe, back in the cupola of the APC—carried stocked impellers. “It’s just fucking brick after all. On the count, one, two, thr—”
The impellers fired a ragged volley. The slugs were aimed a few inches above the base course. Each impact blasted out thirty or more pounds of pulverized brick.
Adele turned away and coughed heavily. Blood gummed her right eyebrow. She threw an arm across her face, knowing she’d have been too late to save her eye if the thumbnail-sized chip had hit an inch lower.
Size was a great advantage in handling an impeller’s powerful recoil. Dasi was a huge man and Koop was well above average. Hogg was the lightest by fifty pounds, but his impeller was back on target an instant before those of the two sailors.
As Adele turned, a guard stuck his head and the barrel of his submachine gun around the corner of the bay in which he’d taken refuge. Adele shot him, then shot him again in the ribs.
He’d leaped like a pithed frog when her first pellet blew a hole above his right eye. So long as the target was moving, she had to assume it was a danger to her and her detachment. She’d pay for what she did tonight in dreams or in Hell, but no one would ever say that Adele Mundy had skimped a task because of what it would have cost her.
The dead man thrashed in the pool of his own spreading blood. None of his fellows would follow his example in the next minute or two. Adele remembered the helmet visor. She pulled it down and returned to what Hogg and the sailors were doing.
Their impellers slapped. The sound of slugs smashing bricks was sharper yet, and echoes turned rapid fire into the rattle of automatic weapons. Adele guessed each man had fired about six rounds when a long section of wall fell into the alcove with a roar louder even than the gunfire.
The other sailors emptied the magazines of their submachine guns into the spreading dust cloud. Compared to the crash of the impellers, the lighter weapons sounded like the buzzing of insects.
“Cease fire!” Woetjans screamed. She charged with her empty weapon raised to use as a bludgeon. Adele, for reasons she couldn’t possibly have articulated, was with the half-dozen sailors who followed the petty officer.
The commando helmet had nose filters Adele hadn’t known about; the air she breathed was close but not chokingly full of peach-colored dust.
Bricks had collapsed into the drainage sump, burying Markos’s aide there. Her right hand stuck out of the rubble. It held a pistol, not the submachine gun Adele knew the woman usually carried.
The output pipe was shattered just above the pump casing. The submachine gun lay on the floor beneath it. Markos’s right foot, flailing wildly to find purchase to thrust him higher, stuck out of the hole he’d hammered through the ceramic pipe with submachine gun pellets.
“There!” Adele said. She aimed but didn’t shoot because too many sailors were moving in the dust cloud.
Woetjans followed the line of Adele’s pistol. She jumped to the motor housing and grabbed the spy’s ankle. When Woetjans pulled, Markos slid out of the pipe. He was covered with ancient slime and his face bore a look of bestial rage. Woetjans hit him in the middle of the forehead with her gun butt.
“Bring him as a hostage!” Adele said, backing out of the ruined alcove. She lifted her visor because it made her feel trapped. Bricks continued to dribble from the top of the opening as gravity overcame the grip of old mortar.
“Mistress, we’ll have to shoot our way out,” Hogg said from beside her. “They may not have heard us upstairs, I’ll hope they didn’t, but they’ll sure hell know something’s going on when we turn up looking like we do.”
“Oh,” said Adele, considering a point she should have seen for herself. The brick dust had started to settle; a great deal of it had settled on the skin and uniforms of the Cinnabar detachment. Sailors who’d dived for the floor when the shooting started were blotched with muck and algae besides. As soon as they appeared in public, there’d be questions that would inevitably lead to shots.