For a moment, the exterior of the City Offices was lighted by wall sconces as usual. A second or two after Tyl stepped from the door into the bulk of his troops, crouching as they awaited orders, the sconces, the interior lights, and all the streetlights visible on the east side of the river switched off.
There was an explosion louder than the occasional popping of slug throwers in the distance. A transformer installation had been blown up or shorted into self-destruction.
That made the flames, already painting the low clouds pink, more visible.
A recruit turned on his hand light.The veteran beside him snarled,"Fuckhead! Use infrared on your helmet shield!"
The trooper on the recruit's other side—more direct—slapped the light away and crushed it beneath her boot.
"Sergeants to me," Tyl ordered on the unit push. He flashed momentarily the miniature lightwand that he carried clipped to a breast pocket—for reading and for situations like this, when his troops needed to know where he was.
Even at the risk of drawing fire when he showed them.
He hadn't called for noncoms, because the men here were mostly veterans with a minimum of the five-years service that qualified them for furlough. Seven sergeants crawled forward, about what Tyl had expected and enough for his purposes.
"Twelve-man squads," he ordered, using his commo helmet instead of speaking directly to the cluster of sergeants. That way all his troops would know what was happening.
As much as Tyl did himself, at any rate.
"Gather 'em fast, no screwing around. We're going to move as soon as everybody's clear." He looked at the sergeants, their face shields down, just as his was—a collection of emotionless balls, and all of them probably as worried as he was: worried about what they knew was coming, and more nervous yet about all the things that might happen in darkness, when nobody at all knew which end was up.
"And no shooting, troopers. Unless we got to."
If they had to shoot their way out, they were well and truly screwed. Just as Colonel Hammer had said—there weren't enough of them to matter a fart in a whirlwind if it came down to that.
A pair of emergency vehicles—fire trucks swaying with the weight of the water on board them—roared south along the river toward the City Offices. A huge block of masonry hurtled from the roof of an apartment building just up the street. Tyl saw its arc silhouetted against the pink sky for a moment.
The stone hit the street with a crash and half-bounced, and half-rolled, into the path of the lead truck. The fire vehicle slewed to the side, but its wheels weren't adequate to stabilize the kiloliters of water in its ready-use tank. The truck went over and skidded, rotating on its side in sparks and the scream of tortured metal—even before its consort rammed it from behind.
Someone began to fire a slug thrower from the roof. The trucks were not burning yet, but a stray breeze brought the raw, familiar odor of petroleum fuel to the hunching Slammers.
There wasn't anything in Hell worse than street fighting in somebody else's city—
And Tyl, like most of the veterans with him, had done it often enough to be sure of that.
A clot of soldiers stumbled out the doorway. Scratchard was the last, unrecognizable for a moment because of the huge load of equipment he carried.
Looked as if he'd staggered out with everything the rest of the company had left in the arms locker, Tyl thought. A veteran like Jack Scratchard should've known to—
Reinforced windows blew out of the second floor with a cyan flash, a bang, and a deep orange whoom! that was simultaneously a sound and a vision. The sergeant major hadn't tried to empty the arms locker after all.
"Put this on, sir," Scratchard muttered to the captain as the fire trucks up the street ignited in the spray of burning fragments hurled from the demolition of the Slammers' excess stores.The actinics of the powergun ammunition detonating in its storage containers made exposed skin prickle, but the exploding gasoline pushed at the crouching men with a warm, stinking hand.
Roof floodlights, driven by the emergency generator in the basement, flared momentarily around the City Offices. Shadows pooled beneath the waiting troops. They cursed and ducked lower—or twisted to aim at the lights revealing them.
Volleys of shots from the mob shattered the lenses before any of the Slammers made up their minds to shoot. The twin pincers, from the plaza and from the House of Grace, were already beginning to envelope the office building.
The route north and away was awash in blazing fuel. The police aircar that roared off that way, whipping the flames with its vectored thrust, pitched bow-up and stalled as an automatic weapon raked it from the same roof as the falling masonry had come.
Scratchard had brought a suit of clamshell body armor for Tyl to wear—and a submachine-gun to carry along with a bandolier holding five hundred rounds of ammo in loaded magazines.
"We're crossing the river," Tyl said in a voice that barely danced on the spikes of his present consciousness. "By squad."
He hadn't gotten around to numbering the squads.There was a clacking sound as the sergeant major latched Tyl's armor for him.
Tyl pointed at one of the sergeants—he didn't know any bloody names!—with his lightwand. "You first. And you. Next—"
In the pause, uncertain in the backlit darkness where the other noncoms were, Scratchard broke in on the command frequency saying, "Haskins, third. Hu, Pescaro, Bogue, and Hagemann. Move, you dickheads!"
Off the radio, his head close to Tyl's as the captain clipped his sling reflexively to the epaulet tab of his armor and shrugged the heavy bandolier over the opposite shoulder, the sergeant major added, "You lead 'em, sir—I'll hustle their butts from here."
Even as Tyl opened his mouth to frame a reply, Scratchard barked at one of the men who'd appeared just ahead of him, "Kekkonan—you give 'im a hand with names if he needs it, right?"
Sergeant Kekkonan, short and built like one of the tanks he'd commanded, clapped Tyl on the shoulder hard enough that it was just as well the captain had already started in the direction of the thrust—toward the river and the squad running toward the levee wall as swiftly as their load of weapons and munitions permitted.
A column of men came around the northern corner of the building. Their white tunics rippled orange in the glare of the burning vehicles. The leaders carried staffs as they had when they guarded the procession route, but in the next rank back winked the iridium barrels of powerguns and the antennas of sophisticated communications gear.
They were no more than three steps from the nearest of the nervous Slammers. When the leading orderlies shouted and threw themselves out of the way, there were almost as many guns pointed at the troops as pointed by them.
"Hold!" Tyl Koopman ordered through his commo helmet as his skin chilled and his face went stiff. Almost they'd made it, but now—
He was running toward the mob of orderlies—Via! They weren't a mob!—with his hands raised, palms forward.
"This isn't our fight!" he cried, hoping he was close enough to the orderlies to be understood by them as well as by the troops on his unit push. "Squads,keep moving—over the levee!"
The column of orderlies had stopped and flattened like the troops they were facing, but there were three men erect at the new head of the line. One carried a shoulder-pack radio; one a bull-horn; and the man in the middle was a priest with a crucifix large enough to be the standard that the whole column followed.
Tyl looked at the priest,wondering if he could grab the butt of his slung weapon fast enough to take some of them with him if the words the priest murmured to the man with the bull-horn brought a blast of shots from the guns aimed at the Slammers captain.
The burning trucks roared. Sealed parts ruptured with plosive sounds and an occasional sharp crack.
"Go on,get out of here,"the bull-horn snarled,its crude amplification making the words even harsher than they were when they came from the orderly's throat.
Tyl spun and brandished his lightwand. "Third Squad," he ordered. "Move!"
A dozen of his troopers picked themselves up from the ground and shambled across the street behind him—toward the guns leveled on the mob from the levee's top. The first two squads were deployed there with the advantages of height and a modicum of cover if any of the locals needed a lesson about what it meant to take on Hammer's Slammers.
Tyl's timing hadn't been quite as bad as he'd thought. Hard to tell just what might have happened if the column from the House of Grace had arrived before Tyl's company had a base of fire across the street.
Two more squads were moving together. The leaders of the mob's other arm, bawling their way up the river road, had already reached the south corner of the City Offices. The cries of "Freedom, Freedom!" were suddenly punctuated with screams as a dozen or so of the leaders collapsed under a burst of electrostatic needles fired by one of the policemen inside.
Tyl heard the shots that answered the stunner, slug throwers as well as powerguns, but the real measure of the response was the barely audible clink of bottles shattering.
Then the gasoline bombs ignited and silhouetted the building from the south.
Tyl stood on the pedestrian way atop the levee, wondering when somebody would get around to taking a shot at him just because he was standing.
"Three and four," he ordered as the heavily laden troops scrambled up the steps to join him. "Across the river, climb over the barges. Kekkonan, you lead 'em, set up a perimeter on the other side.
"And wait!" he added, though Kekkonan didn't look like the sort you had to tell that to.
The rest of the company was moving in a steady stream, lighted between the two fires of the trucks and the south front of the building they had abandoned.
"Take 'em across, take 'em across!" Tyl shouted as the Slammers plodded past. The noncoms would take the words as an order, and the rest of the troops would get the idea.
The first two squads squirmed as they waited, their guns now aimed toward both pincers of the mob. Fifty meters of the west frontage of the City Offices were clear of the rioters who would otherwise have lapped around it. It wasn't a formal standoff; just the tense waiting of male dogs growling as they sidled toward each other, not quite certain what the next seconds would bring.
The last man was Sergeant Major Scratchard, falling a further step behind his troops with every step he took.
"We're releasing the prisoners!" boomed the array of loudspeakers on the building roof. Simultaneous words from a dozen locations echoed themselves by the amount of time that sound from the mechanical diaphragms lagged behind the electronic pulses feeding them.
"Second Squad,withdraw,"Tylordered.He felt as if his load of gear had halved in weight when the eyes of the rioters, orange flecks lighted by the fires of their violence, turned away from him and his men to stare at the City Offices.
Tyl jumped back down the steps and put his left arm—the submachine-gun was under his right armpit—around the sergeant major's chest. Scratchard weighed over a hundred kilos, only a little of it in the gut that had expanded with his desk job. Tyl's blood jumped with so much adrenalin that he noticed only Scratchard's inertia—not his weight.
"Lemme go!" Scratchard rasped in a voice tight with the ache in his knees.
"Shut the hell up!" Tyl snarled back. The laser communicator was crushed between them,biting both men's thighs. If he'd had a hand free,he'd have thrown the cursed thing against the concrete levee.
The mob's chanted "Freedom!" gave way suddenly to a long bellow, loud and growing like a peal of thunder. Tyl's back was to the City Offices, and the rolling triumph had started on the far side anyway, where the jail entrance opened onto the parking area. He knew what was happening, though.
And he knew, even before the shouts turned to"Kill them! Kill them!"that this mob wasn't going to be satisfied with freeing their fellows.
Likely the police trapped inside the building had known that too; but they didn't have any better choices either.
"You, give us a hand!" Tyl ordered as he and Scratchard stumbled toward the railing across the walkway. He pointed to the nearest trooper with the gun that filled his right hand. She jumped to her feet and took the sergeant major's other arm while Tyl boomed over the radio,"First Squad,withdraw.Kekkonan,make sure you've got us covered."
The river here was half a kilometer wide between the levees, but with night sights and powerguns, trained men could sweep the far walkway clear if some of the rioters decided it'd be safe to pursue.
The river had fallen more than a meter since Tyl viewed it six hours before. The barges still floated a safe jump beneath the inner walkway of the levee—but not safe for Jack Scratchard with a load of gear.
"Gimme my arms free," the sergeant major ordered.
Tyl nodded and stepped away with the trooper on the other side. Scratchard gripped the railing with both hands and swung himself over. He crouched on the narrow lip, choosing his support, and lowered himself onto the hogsheads with which the barge was loaded. The troopers waiting to help the senior noncom had the sense to get out of the way.
"I'm fine now," Scratchard grunted. "Let's move!"
The barges were moored close, but there was enough necessary slack in the lines that some of them were over a meter apart while their rubber bumpers squealed against those of the vessel on the opposite flank. Tyl hadn't thought the problem through, but Kekkonan or one of the other sergeants had stationed pairs of troopers at every significant gap. They were ready to guide and help lift later-comers over the danger.
"Thank the Lord," Tyl muttered as four strong arms boosted him from the first barge to the next in line. He wasn't sure whether he meant for the help or for the realization that the men he commanded were as good as anybody could pray.