All five displayed Zojira colors in some fashion or other. One of the men had a pistol thrust under his black and yellow sash. Bracey carried a slung submachine gun, but the ammo tube that should have been parallel to the barrel was missing.
Adele swept the group with expressionless eyes as she entered; no point in pretending they weren’t present. No point in speaking to the scum either. She found her personal data unit on the console where she’d left it. After sliding it into the pocket where she should have left it to begin with, she squatted to open the main console’s sideplate.
“Hey!” said Bracey in surprise. He got up from the stacked boxes on which he sat, tumbling the one on top onto the floor beside him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, bitch?”
People were dying tonight; Adele shouldn’t let herself worry about a carton of what seemed to be service manuals for machinery that had been rust for a hundred years. Even so . . .
She turned and looked at Bracey with the cold loathing of a human for a slug. “Because of the unsettled conditions at the moment, Bracey,” she said, “I’m not going to order you out of here. But neither will I have you interfering with the way I carry out my duties. Shut up and mind your own business.”
She turned back to the console’s internal architecture. When she’d emplaced the decryption module Markos gave her, she’d deliberately reversed its polarity as a minor act of rebellion. She was quite confident that neither Markos nor any Kostroman technician he brought to check the installation would figure out why it didn’t work.
In the event, Markos hadn’t asked for information from the Aglaia which would have told him twenty members of her crew were billeted in the palace. Now Adele wanted that decryption capacity herself: what would work on Cinnabar naval communications would work equally well on their Alliance equivalents.
“What do you mean, your duties?” Bracey said. He stepped toward Adele. His fellows looked puzzled; the drunken woman began to croon a lullaby. “I’m the Electoral Librarian, now. You’re nothing, bitch! You’re dirt!”
Adele seated herself at the console and used the wands to bring up the operating system. She needed to enable the module now that it was properly in place, and she also wanted to conceal its existence from anyone examining the software.
Movement in the doorway . . . Adele’s eyes flicked to the right. Markos’s aide had entered the library.
“Turn around or by God I’ll use this!” Bracey said. The aide raised an eyebrow in mild interrogation.
Adele looked over her shoulder. Bracey was pointing the submachine gun at her. She couldn’t tell whether he thought she was too stupid to know the gun was unloaded, or whether the fool didn’t know himself.
“Get him out of here or I’ll kill him,” Adele said quietly to the aide. She shifted both control wands into her right hand.
Bracey pulled the trigger, answering Adele’s unspoken question. When nothing happened, he gave a wordless scream and gripped the weapon by the barrel to use as a club.
Adele drew her pistol. Bracey stepped back; the two men with him ducked behind piles of boxes. The more sober woman was cradling her drunken companion’s head, smiling in satisfaction as she ignored whatever else might be going on in the room.
“You won’t use that!” Bracey said. Adele grinned faintly.
“I wonder how many men have had that for their last words,” said the aide, speaking for the first time. She crooked the index finger of her left hand toward Bracey. The submachine gun in her other hand shifted slightly.
“I’ll use this,” she added with her insectile smile. “Out of here now, all of you.”
One of the hiding men raised his head to survey the situation. He and his companion circled their way out of the library, giving both Adele and the aide as wide a berth as possible. Bracey saw them leaving. He started after them, stumbled on a fallen book, and hurled the useless submachine gun away as he scuttled through the doorway.