Hogg’s van slowed. Daniel leaned out of the cab and waved the gun truck forward.
A gang was looting a house, carrying furnishings through the smashed front door to a barge in the canal which ran down the center of this boulevard. Several members acted as traffic wardens, gesturing oncoming vehicles to reverse and cross the humpbacked bridge to the other side of the road.
“Look alive,” Woetjans said over her shoulder. The four sailors in the back were already aiming. The automatic impeller clanked as the gunner charged it to fire.
Adele wondered if she should unclip the submachine gun. She decided not to: if it came to shooting, she was probably better off with a familiar weapon.
Woetjans started to pull the gun truck around the van. The gangsters scattered to either side. Hogg accelerated again, brushing the end of a couch dropped in the haste of those who’d been carrying it. Inlays of ivory and mother-of-pearl splintered away like butterfly wings. The wheels bumped over a fallen cushion; then they were through.
“How many spaceports are there on Kostroma anyway?” Adele asked, deliberately casual to settle her stomach. A body beneath the wheels would have felt just the same.
“One bloody one if you mean starport,” Woetjans said grimly. “There’s some trade from other islands to the asteroids. The mining and manufacturing base on the asteroids, that does some direct out-of-system trade. It’ll be in Alliance hands too, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Leary figured to slip us up there by one of the provisions ships.”
She looked at Adele and added, “I don’t guess they’ll be expecting somebody to steal a ship from the asteroids, don’t you think?”
“That may very well be,” Adele said.
She felt hollow. What the exchange proved to her was that Woetjans, far more experienced than she was—or Daniel Leary was, if it came to that—didn’t see a way out of this system-wide trap. All they were going to accomplish by running in circles this way was to be shot down instead of simply being interned.
They were approaching a plaza dominated by the palace of a clan that had ruled Kostroma in the era before the Hiatus. The building remained an imposing mass of age-darkened brick, but the rooms were now laborers’ apartments. The topmost—third—story had been split by an intermediate floor. The new ceiling ran like a horizontal bar across the banks of high windows.
The plaza’s two large fountains were dry. The local residents had converted them to rubbish dumps. Eight streets joined in a circle around the plaza. The van entered and slowed abruptly; because of the traffic, Adele thought, and then realized that an Alliance APC squatted in the middle of the plaza between the fountains.
Over a hundred armed Zojiras were checking every vehicle that entered the circle. Each local squad had an Alliance officer, and Alliance troops were in force on the rooftops.
The jitney ahead of Hogg’s van stopped and tried to back out of the plaza. The nearest Alliance officer spoke into his helmet’s integral microphone. At least six marksmen opened fire from the rooftops.
Impeller projectiles moved at the speed of meteors. They punched through the vehicle’s flimsy body and everything within, then shattered the pavement on the other side. Shards of brick pavers flew about like grenade fragments, but the projectiles vaporized when they finally hit something hard enough to stop them.
The driver sprawled out of his saddle. There’d been someone inside the back as well; her arm flopped into sight when a projectile severed the door latch. Diesel fuel gurgled in a glistening dark circle beneath the jitney. It didn’t ignite, though an oil fire licked sluggishly from the riddled engine.
“Pull ahead of the van,” Adele ordered crisply. She stood in her seat, bracing herself with a hand on the top of the folding windshield.
“We can’t fight all these—” Woetjans said.
“Do as you’re told!” Adele said. She licked her dry lips and added, “We’re not going to fight anyone. I’ll talk us through.”
Woetjans rang the electric bell of the gun truck to warn Hogg she was moving past. Kostroman gunmen were already approaching the van from either side as the Alliance officer looked on. A Zojira leveled his submachine gun at Woetjans.