The makeshift prison would have been easy enough to break out of: twenty people running together at a section of fence would flatten it. Zojira guards stationed around the perimeter would probably open fire if that happened; the commando watching from the open cupola hatch of her armored personnel carrier certainly would. The Zojiras standing between the plasma cannon’s muzzle and the escapees who were the intended target wouldn’t slow the commando in the least.
Hogg walked past the APC and through a group of Zojira officials carrying clipboards with lists of names. They were talking among themselves and glancing from their lists to the faces on the other side of the wire.
The cage was being used as a general impoundment rather than serving only captives from the palace itself. Trucks and jitneys pulled in from the street and wound around the construction equipment parked in the drive. They were delivering more prisoners: men and women in their nightclothes, children wailing in terror that their elders were too frightened to dispel.
Daniel wondered if it had been like this on Cinnabar during the proscriptions. He’d been kept in Bantry with his mother.
The most exciting thing that had happened to Daniel Leary during the period was seeing a migratory roc that rested on a high outcrop during the night. Hogg had carried Daniel near the cliff base. An hour after dawn the great flyer had spread its forty-meters vans and launched itself into the swelling updraft. The roc’s scaly underbelly was almost close enough for a boy to touch when lift mastered gravity and the huge creature mounted skyward again on the next stage of its ten-thousand-mile flight.
Daniel wondered what Adele Mundy remembered about the proscriptions. She’d have heard about them much later, of course.
Banks of floodlights glared across the garden, throwing hard shadows and dazzling reflections that were more confusing than more muted illumination could have achieved. The mobile fusion powerplant that drove the lighting must have come from the Alliance transport.
The cage blocked one arm of the circle from street to street, so the vehicles carrying prisoners had to leave the same way they arrived. The remaining driveway into the gardens was a snarling traffic jam. Normally the route would have been tight but possible, but the construction equipment along the drive made movement a matter of skill and patience—both of which were in short supply.
Hogg walked to the back of a one-ton van marked GEDROSIAN AND DAUGHTERS. A Kostroman thug with a Zojira beret and his hands in his pockets stood nearby. He sauntered away whistling when he saw Hogg; neither man spoke.
The van’s concertina rear door appeared to be padlocked, but Hogg slid it a few inches to the side by simple pressure. Daniel realized that the hasp was sawn through so that the door could be opened from inside or out.
“Some local friends of mine found this for me,” Hogg muttered. “It won’t be reported missing for the next two days.”
The back of the van was full of Cinnabar ratings. “Sir!” said the figure nearest the narrow gap. “Bosun’s Mate Ellie Woetjans reporting for orders!”
The relief in Woetjans’s voice was as obvious as a cement block. Damned if she didn’t throw a salute despite the cramped quarters. Daniel almost returned it. There were times reflex could get you killed. . . .
“Stand easy, Woetjans,” Daniel said. He felt surprisingly calm. He was too busy to be scared, he supposed. “Now, what equipment do you have?”
“Not a fucking thing but ourselves, sir,” Woetjans said. The ratings behind her were a restive mass of people trying not to breathe so that they could hear their superiors’ low-voiced exchange. “No food, no weapons. Well, hammers and pipes, you know.”
Daniel hoped it looked as though he and his two companions were having a conversation a little away from the angry traffic in the drive. They had to plan, and the worst thing they could do was to look furtive. Everyone suspected everyone else tonight, and Daniel’s disguise wouldn’t stand scrutiny.
“I’d been figuring we could lay up in a warehouse somewhere for a few days till things got sorted out, sir,” Hogg said. “That was when I heard about the business. But I didn’t know the Alliance was in it so deep. Those bastards’re real soldiers, and I don’t guess they’re planning to leave any time soon.”