“Thank you, sergeant,” Daniel said with obsequious politeness. He stepped past the nearest Zojira and entered the vestibule.
None of the local guards had heard the exchange in detail, but they weren’t going to interfere with a man the Alliance troops had passed. If they tried, there was a fair chance that the commandoes would back Daniel out of sheer bloody-mindedness and feelings of superiority.
It would only take one thing going wrong for Daniel to become another tacky smear like the one he walked around on the mosaic just inside the doorway. There’d been a half-hearted attempt to mop up the mess, but bits of lung tissue as well as blood still stuck to the patterned stone.
The desks in the anteroom had been smashed either in the fighting or in an orgy of destruction that had more to do with mobs than it did with war. Somebody’d emptied a submachine gun across the furniture to the left, blowing out bright yellow splinters of wood and fountains of shredded paper.
The head clerk Daniel remembered from his first visit knelt among the wreckage, trying to piece together torn files. None of his fellows were present. Daniel stepped past quickly to hide himself in a group of noncombatants wearing Zojira colors. It was unlikely that the old clerk could have recognized anyone through his tear-brimming eyes.
Daniel turned to the right and walked purposefully down the corridor past open offices. The lights were on in most, but the people who’d ransacked them had generally passed on.
Occasionally he saw armed Zojiras who drank and broke up furniture. They eyed Daniel, but the only direct challenge he received was from a woman sprawled against the wall facing the doorway. She waved a half bottle of brandy and called, “Hey! I could use what you got, handsome!”
He couldn’t imagine circumstances in which he’d be flattered by attention from that particular quarter.
The Zojiras were a major clan, but the coup had required very large forces to cover all the critical locations. The Alliance commandoes provided backbone and heavy weapons, but they didn’t know the city and couldn’t number more than a battalion even if they and their equipment had been packed into the just-landed transport like sardines.
To get the necessary numbers, the planners had recruited anybody willing to point a gun at fellow-citizens. Real discipline was impossible, and at least half the additional personnel must be criminals. The new regime would find the apparatus of government smashed. They’d be lucky if Kostroma City weren’t burned to the ground besides.
The stairs to the basement and subbasement were in an alcove off the corridor, much like the one on the third floor that held the ladder to the roof. At the rear of the palace was a broad flight of steps which was the usual entrance to the dank arches of the basement, but only low-ranking clerks worked there. Daniel thought he’d call less attention on himself by entering the front instead of having people wonder why a naval lieutenant was going down to the basement.
The stairwell door was ajar but unattended. There was a light fixture at the mid-flight landing, but it hadn’t worked any of the times Daniel had used the stairs to see Woetjans.
His half-boots rang in the stairwell, but the sound would be lost in the noisy excitement echoing from the masonry cavern below. He didn’t have the slippers with small tassels on the toes that were the proper footgear with this uniform. Even if someone noticed, the Kostroman navy wasn’t a stickler for detail.
Somebody fired a shoulder-stocked impeller within the basement. The whack! of the heavy slug hitting a pillar was followed instantly by pebbles slapping against the walls and floor in all directions. People laughed hysterically.
Even a single round would blast a divot the size of a man’s head in this brick. If the idiots weren’t careful, they could cut through a pillar. A collapsing ceiling would spoil this party for good and all.
Daniel grinned. The chaotic violence made it less likely that he’d be arrested by the authorities, but there was a pretty good chance some drunk would blow his head off as surely as they’d decapitated the fountain in Palace Square. Well, he’d wanted an adventurous life.