Charles Desoix thought about the House of Grace as he mounted the eastern stairs from the plaza. The huge hospital building, Bishop Trimer's latest but not necessarily last attempt to impose his presence on Bamberg City, was about all a man could see as he left the plaza in this direction. For that matter, the twenty glittering stories of the House of Grace were the only portions of the city visible from the floor of the plaza, over the seawalls.
It was like looking at a block of blue ice; and it was the only thing about being stationed in Bamberg City that Desoix could really have done without. But the Bishop certainly wasn't enough of a problem that Desoix intended to transfer to one of the batteries out in the boonies on Two, rumbling through valleys you could be sure the rag-heads had mined and staked for snipers.
Thousands of people, shoppers as well as shopkeepers, were still pouring into the plaza; Desoix was almost alone in wanting to go in the opposite direction. He wasn't in a big hurry, so he kept his temper in check. An unscheduled inspection of Gun Three was a good excuse for the battery XO to be there, not just sneaking around . . . .
He had some business back at the Palace of Government, too; but he wasn't so horny from the trip to Merrinet that he was willing to make that his first priority. Quite.
Three prostitutes, each of them carried by a pair of servants to save their sandals and gossamer tights, were on their way to cribs in the plaza below. Desoix made way with a courteous bow; but uniform or not, he was going to make way. The phalanx of red-cloaked guards surrounding the girls would have made sure of that.
One of the girls smiled at Desoix as she rocked past. He smiled back at her, thinking of Anne McGill . . . but Blood and Martyrs! he could last another half hour. He'd get his job done first.
There was an unusual amount of congestion here, but that was because the main stairs were blocked. Another procession, no doubt; Bishop Trimer playing his games while President Delcorio and his wife tried to distract the populace with a crusade on Two.
As for the populace, its members knocked in each other's heads depending on what each was wearing that day.
Just normal politics, was all. Normal for places that hired the United Defense Batteries and other mercenary regiments, at any rate.
At dawn, the shadow of the House of Grace lay across the cathedral on the other side of the plaza, so that the gilded dome no longer gleamed.Desoix wrinkled his nose and thought about dust-choked roads on Two with a sniper every hundred meters of the wooded ridges overlooking them.
To blazes with all of them.
There was even more of a crush at the head of the stairs. Vehicles slid up to the bollards to drop their cargo and passengers—and then found themselves blocked by later-comers, furious at being stopped a distance from where they wanted to be. A squad of city police made desultory efforts to clear the jam, but they leaped aside faster than the bystanders did when the real fighting started.
Two drivers,one with a load of produce and the other carrying hand bags,were snarling. Three black-cloaked toughs jumped the driver with the red headband, knocked him down, and linked arms in a circle about the victim so that they could all three put the boot in.
At least a dozen thugs in red coalesced from nowhere around the fight. It grew like a crystal in a supersaturated solution of hate.
The police had their stunners out and were radioing for help, but they kept their distance. The toughs wore body armor beneath their cloaks, and Desoix heard the slam of at least one slug-throwing pistol from the ruck.
He willed his body to stay upright and to stride with swift dignity between vehicles and out of the potential line of fire. It would have griped his soul to run from this scum; but more important, anyone who ducked and scurried was a worthy victim, while a recognized mercenary was safe except by accident.
Anyway, that was what Desoix told himself.
But by the Lord! it felt good to get out of the shouted violence and see Gun Three, its six-man crew alert and watching the trouble at the stair head with their personal weapons ready.
The calliope's eight stubby barrels were mounted on the back of a large air-cushion truck. Instead of rotating through a single loading station as did the 2cm tribarrels on the Slammers' combat cars, each of the calliope's tubes was a separate gun. The array gimballed together to fire on individual targets which the defenders couldn't afford to miss.
Any aircraft, missile, or artillery shell that came over the sector of the horizon which Gun Three scanned—when the weapon was live—would be met by a pulse of high-intensity 3cm bolts from the calliope's eight barrels. Nothing light enough to fly through the air could survive that raking.
A skillful enemy could saturate the gun's defensive screen by launching simultaneous attacks from several directions, but even then the interlocking fire of a full, properly sited six-calliope battery should be able to hold out and keep the target it defended safe.
Of course, proper siting was an ideal rather than a reality, since every irregularity of terrain—or a building like the House of Grace—kept guns from supporting one another as they could do on a perfectly flat surface. Bamberg City wasn't likely to be surrounded by hostile artillery batteries, though, and Charles Desoix was proud of the single-layer coverage he had arranged for the whole populated area.
He did hope his gunners had sense enough not to talk about saturating coverage when they were around civilians. Especially civilians who looked like they'd been born to squatter families on Two.
"Good to see you back, sir," said Blaney, the sergeant in command of Gun Three on this watch.
He was a plump man and soft looking, but he'd reacted well in an emergency on Hager's World, taking manual control of his calliope and using it in direct fire on a party of sappers that had made it through the perimeter Federal forces were trying to hold.
"Say," asked a blond private Desoix couldn't call by name until his eye caught stenciling on the fellow's helmet: Karsov. "Is there any chance we're going to move, sir? Farther away from all this? It gets worse every day."
"What's . . ." Desoix began with a frown, but he turned to view the riot again before he finished the question—and then he didn't have to finish it.
The riot that Desoix had put out of his mind by steely control had expanded like mold on bread while he walked the three hundred meters to the shelter of his gun and its crew.There must have been nearly a thousand people involved—many of them lay-folk with the misfortune of being caught in the middle, but at least half were the cloaked shock troops of the two Easter factions.
Knives and metal bars flashed in the air.A shotgun thumped five times rapidly into a chorus of screams.
"Via," Desoix muttered.
A firebomb went off, spraying white trails of burning magnesium through the curtain of petroleum flames. Police aircars were hovering above the crowd on the thrust of their ducted fans while uniformed men hosed the brawlers indiscriminately with their needle stunners.
"This is what we're defending?" Blaney asked with heavy irony.
Desoix squatted, motioning the gun crew down with him. No point in having a stray round hit somebody. The men were wearing their body armor, but Desoix himself wasn't. He didn't need it on shipboard or during negotiations on Merrinet, and it hadn't struck him how badly the situation in Bamberg City could deteriorate in the two weeks he was gone.
"Well,"he said,more or less in answer."They're the people paying us until we hear different. Internal politics, that's not our business.And anyhow, it looks like the police have it pretty well under control."
"For now," muttered Karsov.
The fighting had melted away, as much in reaction to the firebomb as to the efforts of the civil authorities. Thugs were carrying away injured members of their own parties. The police tossed the disabled battlers whom they picked up into aircars, with angry callousness.
"It'd be kinda nice, sir," said Blaney, turning his eyes toward the House of Grace towering above them, "if we could maybe set up on top of there. Get a nice view all around, you know, good for defense; and, ah, we wouldn't need worry about getting hit with the odd brick or the like if the trouble comes this way next time."
The chorus of assent from the whole crew indicated that they'd been discussing the point at length among themselves.
Desoix smiled. He couldn't blame the men, but wishing something strongly didn't make it a practical solution.
"Look,"he said, letting his eyes climb the sculptured flank of the hospital building as he spoke. The narrower sides of the House of Grace, the north and south faces, were of carven stone rather than chrome and transparent panels.
The south face, toward Gun Three and the seafront, was decorated with the miracles of Christ: the sick rising from their beds; the lame tossing away their crutches; loaves and fishes multiplying miraculously to feed the throng stretching back in low relief.
On the opposite side were works of human mercy: the poor being fed and lodged in church kitchens; orphans being raised to adulthood; medical personnel with crosses on their uniforms healing the sick as surely as Christ did on the south face.
But over the works of human mercy, the ascetic visage of Bishop Trimer presided in a coruscance of sun-rays like that which haloed Christ on the opposite face. A determined man, Bishop Trimer. And very sure of himself.
"Look,"Desoix repeated as he reined in his wandering mind."In the first place, it's a bad location because the gun can only depress three degrees and that'd leave us open to missiles skimming the surface."
Karsov opened his mouth as if to argue, but a snarled order from Sergeant Blaney shut him up. Lieutenant Desoix was easy-going under normal circumstances; but he was an officer and the Battery XO . . . and he was also hard as nails when he chose to be, as Blaney knew by longer experience than the private had.
"But more important . . ." Desoix went on with a nod of approval to Blaney. "Never site a gun in a spot where you can't drive away if things really get bad. Do you expect to ride down in the elevators if a mob decides what they really ought to do tomorrow is burn the hospital?"
"Well, they wouldn't . . ." Karsov began.
He looked at the wreckage and smoke near the plaza stairs and thought the better of saying what a mob would or wouldn't do.
"Were you on Shinano, Sergeant?" Desoix asked Blaney.
"Yes sir," the noncom said. "But I wasn't in the city during the riots, if that's what you mean."
"I was a gun captain then," Desoix said with a smile and a biting voice, because it was always nice to remember the ones you survived. "The Battery Commander—this was Gilt, and they sacked him for it—sited us on top of the Admin Building. Ten stories in a central park.
"So we had a really good view of the mob, because parts of it were coming down all five radial streets with torches. And they'd blown up the transformer station providing power to the whole center of town."
He coughed and rubbed his face. "There were aircars flying every which way, carrying businessmen who knew they weren't going to get out at ground level . . . but we didn't have a car, and we couldn't even get the blazes off the roof. It didn't have a staircase, just the elevator—and that quit when the power went off."
Blaney was nodding with grim agreement; so were two of the other veterans in the gun crew.
"How—how'd you get out, sir?" Karsov asked in a suitably chastened tone.
Desoix grinned again. It wasn't a pleasant expression. "Called to one of those businessmen on a loud-hailer," he said. "Asked him to come pick us up. When he saw where we had the calliope pointed, he decided that was a good idea."
The slim officer paused and looked up at the House of Grace again. "Getting lucky once doesn't mean I'm going to put any of my men in that particular bucket again, though," he said. "Down here—" he smiled brightly, but there was more than pure humor in this expression, too "—at the worst, you've got the gun to keep anybody at a distance."
"Think it's going to be that bad, sir?" one of the crewmen asked.
Desoix shrugged. "I need to report to the Palace," he said. "I guess it's clear enough to do that now."
As he turned to walk away from the gun position, he heard Sergeant Blaney saying, "Not for us and the other mercs, maybe. But yeah, it's going to get that bad here. You wait and see."