I have to do it. Therefore I can, right? Right. I’m a Rolfe, God damn it. We can do anything! Pocahontas forever!
She pulled the first-aid kit out from its container and threw it out into the night first. Then she turned and backed until she was underneath Tom, with her buttocks braced against the side of the cockpit to his right and her right hand bent back over her own neck to grab him by the front of his tunic. Her left scrabbled with the release of his restraints.
Click.
Two hundred and twenty pounds of man and another ten of equipment fell on her back and side; she bent and pulled, and the front of her face rapped sharply against the control column. She did scream then, long and shrill. She didn’t let go of her grip, pulling and shifting with her shoulders until the big man’s weight rested across her upper back.
“And… out… you… go!” she wheezed, straightening. “I’ve… lifted… more!”
Not when she was in this shape, though. Her thighs trembled, tensed, straightened an inch more. The small of Tom’s back touched the side of the open canopy door. She straightened an inch more, twisting and pushing at his stomach with her left hand. He toppled forward, his boots and legs going out and dragging the rest of him around, and fell to the ground below with a thud. She might just have broken his neck… but that was better than burning to death.
“Don’t you die on me, you great goddamned Scanahoovian lump, don’t you dare,” she wheezed, and crawled out herself.
Dragging Tom’s weight took so much concentration she almost went past the aid kit. That was far enough from the dying aircraft that he wouldn’t be hurt if it went up, particularly as a chunk of concrete provided a little shelter. She pulled the knife out of her boot and slit his sopping trouser leg. Blood was flowing but not spurting… but flowing fast…
She held the edges of the wound together, sprayed and strapped and sealed, her hands wet and slippery. His pulse was rapid and thready, but it didn’t seem to be getting any worse, and the bleeding was under control… and she didn’t have a clue about any other injuries. A injection of painkiller relaxed him and helped to fight shock.
Another hypodermic, this time for her: she stripped off the cover and jabbed it into the meat of her thigh, pressing the plunger with her thumb. A wave of heat seemed to flow from it, driving back the grayness from the edges of her vision. Unfortunately, as things became clearer, so did the pain—the great throbbing mass of pain that was the front of her face, and a dozen others. One was the little finger of her left hand, sticking out almost at a right angle—Toni Bosco, you are avenged—she thought half-hysterically, and then she grabbed it and straightened it with a single swift wrench.
“Oh, shit,” she gasped, as she bound it to the one next to it with tape from the kit.
Dry-swallowing a couple of painkillers was all she could do for the rest of it; and not too many, or it would fight the stimulant that made it possible for her to move. Now she could look around her….
The nearest wall of the Gate complex was blown out, its sheet metal tattered. She could see that quite well….
Because two Hercules were burning on the coastal highway, not three hundred yards from where she lay. Others were wheeled off the roadway, their ramps down, but two had definitely been destroyed as they landed.
Tully, she thought, after a moment when her brain simply spun in place. Roy Tully, you little gargoyle, you are worthy of Sandy, and I hope you both live through this. And Henry Villers, and Jim Simmons, and Kolo too.
She looked down at Tom; the square rugged face was relaxed in unconsciousness, looking younger than his years for a change. You could see what he’d been as a fresh-faced farm boy just out of high school and waiting for the bus that would take him to boot camp.
“And I order you not to die,” she whispered.
The fighting seemed to be mostly out from the Gate complex, a U of combat noises and muzzle flashes ringing the buildings. That meant that the Collettas and Batyushkovs in the GSF had some sort of control of the Gate itself, or there would be more shooting from inside the building. Their men and the reinforcements were trying to hold a perimeter, staving off the growing weight of the Commission forces loyal to the Rolfes. Which meant…
“They expect help through the Gate,” she muttered, unable to frame the thought without speaking it. “Oh joy, oh bliss, oh rapture. They could still pull this off. I’ll have to set the self-destruct mechanism going.”
Let them get a firm control on the Gate and the area around it, and let the other Families and their Settlers realize that their contacts with FirstSide now depended on the Collettas, and support for the Rolfes might yet evaporate. At the very least, the Collettas and Batyushkovs might escape unpunished, the weight of opinion in the committee forcing amnesty to get the Gate back intact.
She still had her pistol; she drew it and moved out cautiously through the parking lot, moving from one car to another. A dead Gate Security Force trooper lay beyond that, where the glass sliding doors she’d passed through so often lay shattered in a sparkle of fragments. Adrienne stooped beside him, closed the staring eyes and took up the G36. It had a C-mag in it, and a glance at the transparent rear face of the magazine showed it was full—a hundred rounds. She slid the sling over her head, in the assault position that put the muzzle forward and left the pistol grip by her right hand. It also made things easier on her injured left.
Adrienne strode forward through the waiting rooms and into the final corridor that led to the personnel check-through station. A man looked up at her as she walked by; he was kneeling by a row of wounded. Then he did a double take and rose, opening his mouth.
She turned and loosed a three-round burst at point-blank range. The medic toppled backward, and the wounded man he fell on moaned weakly. Apart from that everything was vacant until she turned into the Gate chamber itself.
Someone had used an earthmoving machine to sweep a broad lane clear to the rippling silvery surface; a sense of wrongness caught at her, this chaos in the place she’d helped keep so orderly. And men were stepping out of the surface, moving in squads—not uniformed, beyond a rough practicality, but all armed. Something stuck its snout through, the muzzle of a vehicle-mounted cannon. Whatever the plot on FirstSide had been, it had worked—probably a lot better than the Commonwealth half.
Everyone in the room was looking at the Gate; there weren’t more than a dozen or so men in the whole huge room, which was a sign of how desperately the conspirators’ forces were trying to hold their perimeter until this help arrived.
Tsk, tsk, Giovanni—still operating on a shoestring and not leaving a margin for failure! Of course, the odds of her crashing inside the area the enemy were holding and surviving in shape to walk were pretty astronomical….
Terminals were spotted all around the interior of the Gate chamber. She stepped over to one and punched her thumb down on the pad. The small screen lit, and she felt a wave of relief that almost overrode the pain in her head and hand. They had had to leave the local system up, or the Gate complex’s internal power and light wouldn’t be functioning.
“Identify,” she said, and looked into the retina scanner. Her voice might be off enough not to match the files, but eye and thumb together were enough.
“Identified: Rolfe, Adrienne.”
“Code—” She rattled off a string of letters and numbers; ones known only to the two elder male Rolfes, until a scant few weeks ago.
“Acknowledged. Query: Authority?”