Adele noted dispassionately that when Prester smiled, her face was genuinely pretty. “But Ms. Mundy,” Vanness protested. “You’re at risk—”
Booted feet stamped through the door behind Adele. She turned in surprise. Armed guards wearing black and yellow berets spilled into the library. There were six or eight of them.
Markos’s pale aide was one of the group. Instead of a beret she wore Zojira colors on ribbons around her upper arms. Her short cape was clasped at her throat, but the wings were slung back over her shoulders. She held a communicator in one hand and a center-grip submachine gun in the other.
“Zojiras!” Vanness shouted. He stepped forward, thrusting out his hands. God knew what he intended—to put his body between Adele and the gunmen, she supposed.
A Zojira fired, hitting Vanness in the chest and shoulder, though even at point-blank range half the burst blew splintered craters in shelving. Confetti exploded from a rank of genealogies. Kostroman weaponry was bulkier than its Cinnabar equivalent, and perhaps it wasn’t as reliable, but there was nothing trivial about its effect.
Vanness spun backward, hit the floor, and bounced face up again. The submachine gun’s bullets were too light to have any significant inertia. The victim’s own spasming muscles flung him as though he’d been struck by lightning. Each projectile released its kinetic energy like a miniature bomb on the first solid object it struck.
Vanness’s left side was a mass of blood and chips of exposed bone, but Adele doubted any of his vital organs were punctured. He had a very good chance to survive if they could bandage him before he bled out through the gaping surface wounds.
Vanness didn’t cry out when he was hit. Prester screamed on a rising note, pressing her hands against her temples as if to hold her brain in.
“Put that gun up!” Adele said. She knelt beside Vanness, wondering what to use for a bandage. His own trousers were filthy from the hundreds of books he’d handled today.
The air was fanged with the smell of ozone and burned metal. The submachine gun’s barrel generated a magnetic flux so dense that it ionized each pellet’s light-metal driving skirt during the run up the bore.
The Zojira shooter pushed Adele away and put the muzzle of his gun against Vanness’s forehead. Adele grabbed the barrel and jerked it aside. The sheathing of temperature-stable plastic burned her fingers. Somebody clubbed her from behind with a gun butt.
Adele fell sideways. The Zojira fired. Vanness’s head erupted in a volcano of blood and solid matter. Each of the submachine gun’s discharges was as sharp as stone snapping.
Vanness’s back arched and his arms flung wide. His palms were black.
Adele lay face up. Her left side was numb, though the fiery tingling in her toes and fingertips meant she would have normal feeling back soon—if she lived.
The gunman who’d killed Vanness swung his submachine gun toward Adele. Its bore was a tiny tunnel glowing from the long bursts. Another Zojira, probably the one who’d slugged her from behind, was aiming at her head from the other side. Maybe they’d let recoil raise the gun muzzles when they fired so that they killed each other as well as her. . . .
Markos’s aide shouted an order as crisp as the gunshots. She spoke in a Kostroman dialect, not Universal. That angry word was the first time Adele had heard emotion in the aide’s voice.
The shooter straightened and snarled back at her. The aide socketed her submachine gun in the Zojira’s navel. In Universal as precise as the directions in a gazetteer she said, “Step back and only speak when I tell you to speak. I won’t warn you again.”
Adele saw that she wasn’t alone in thinking the aide was as deadly as a spider. The gunman turned and fired his submachine gun into a window to let out his frustrations.
The projectiles’ high velocity meant that they punched neat circles the size of fifty-florin coins in the glass instead of breaking it. The plasma puffing from the muzzle flickered in reflection from the undamaged panes.
“Search and see who else is here,” the aide said calmly to the Zojiras she led. She raised the communicator and spoke into it.