As he was exposing her now, to save himself and punish her with the same stroke.
The sailors stared at Adele in stricken horror. They’d seen her shoot. But she couldn’t fly an armored personnel carrier, and she couldn’t kill the sailors who’d risked their lives for her and with her in the past. The only family she’d known since the proscriptions; and in a real sense, the only family she’d ever known.
“I’ll handle this,” said Hogg. He raised the flap of Markos’s jacket and unclipped the belt communicator.
“Be careful,” the spy warned. “If you try to retrieve the data without the codes you’ll destroy it instead. But I will tell all to the proper authorities.”
He sneered at Adele in bloodthirsty triumph. His lips and left cheek were swollen from Woetjans’s blow.
Hogg weighed the false communicator in the hand that didn’t hold a submachine gun. “You know,” he said conversationally, “the master wouldn’t believe a word of this. He’s a honest sort himself, my master Daniel, and he thinks the whole world’s like him. But there’s a lot of people back on Cinnabar who would believe it.”
He grinned at Adele. “Right, mistress?” he said.
“Yes,” said Adele.
Hogg shot Markos in the temple. The spy’s head jerked sideways, losing definition as hydrostatic shock violently expanded his brain tissue.
Hogg thrust his right leg straight, shoving the corpse out the open side of the APC. He tossed the communicator after Markos. He fired a burst from his submachine gun as the little object spun off in the vehicle’s wake.
“Missed,” Hogg said. “When my eyes was better I’d have blown it to shit in the air, but I guess we’ll have to trust salt water to do the job.”
He looked around the troop compartment. Everyone was staring at him. “What the fuck’s going on?” Barnes demanded plaintively from the front cab.
“It’s like this,” Hogg said to the sailors. “The master told me to take care of Ms. Mundy, there.”
He nodded to Adele. The submachine gun was still in his right hand, pointed toward empty night sky through the open side of the vehicle.
“Giving her to this guy and his sort—and they’re all the same sort, I don’t give a fuck what color uniform they wear,” Hogg continued. “That wouldn’t be doing my job. Besides, you can’t trust them even if they do happen to tell the truth.”
“Too fucking right,” said Woetjans. To Adele in a respectful voice she went on, “You got a bad burn on your hand there, sir. Better be sure to get it looked at the next time you get a chance.”
Adele looked at the throbbing blisters on the thumb, web, and index finger of her left hand, her gun hand. She held her hand out to Woetjans.
“Yes,” she said. “Perhaps you’d do it now. I believe we have a few minutes before we reach Lieutenant Leary and our new vessel.”
“The APC’s approaching at speed!” Domenico said. The bosun’s console displayed the region centered on the Navy Pool at a scale small enough to include Kostroma City miles to the north.
“Direct the crew to their stations, Mr. Domenico,” Daniel ordered without looking around. “Ms. Mundy takes over the commo desk, and you head up the emergency team until we’re out of the system and in one piece.”
A computer-generated model of the Aglaia was at the center of Daniel’s display; the remainder of the imagery was that gathered by the Aglaia’s sensors and transmitted to the Princess Cecile.
The Aglaia launched missiles across the Floating Harbor.
The first round lifted at a flat angle from a bath of steam and plasma. The harbor surged as though it’d been bombed. Nearby pontoons rocked violently, breaking their tethers and grinding against one another like blunt concrete teeth.
The second missile exited with less immediate disruption because its predecessor had blown a hard vacuum in the sea about the Aglaia’s flank; water pressure hadn’t had time to fill the man-made event. The missile trailed a corkscrewed line of fire as bright as the sun’s corona, matter and antimatter annihilating one another in its wake.
Antiship missiles were intended for use over stellar distances. Even accelerating at twelve gravities, the first round was only travelling at 800 feet per second when it nosed over toward the Alliance destroyer moored a dozen berths away in the Floating Harbor. The ball from a flintlock musket moved faster than that.