The police-militia noncom turned, a look of grateful relief on his face that someone was taking charge.
His mouth opened; then he staggered, a red splotch opening on the front of his jacket, and dropped bonelessly to the ground.
"Cover, cover!" Owensford called.
"I'll clear the building," Lysander said. He dashed forward, diving and rolling as bullets chipped the pavement at his feet, Harv skipping sideways behind him and snapping off covering shots at the windows. The Milice rallied and followed, driving into the dead ground at the base of the building across the street. The prince kicked in a door and dove through, the militia of the Brotherhoods at his heels.
Ace Barton was firing controlled three-round bursts from behind a pillar. "Fifth floor, second from the right," he shouted as he ducked back behind the stone to reload. Return fire pocked the column; he dodged down and to the other side, snapping off another burst.
"Where the hell is the battalion?"
"Coming."
"?Mierda!" Skilly said, dropping down behind the window ledge.
Light pistol-caliber bullets hammered at the stone below; she rose and squeezed off the five rounds left in the clip, phut-phut-phut-phut-phut.
"Somebody down there too good a shot," she said with respect, slapping another magazine into the well in the pistol grip of the carbine and stepping back out of the line of fire. "That enough, everyone out!"
The dark-clad Meijian at the com unit snapped it closed, picked up his personal weapon and darted to the door. "Niles!"
The young Englishman squeezed off another round and turned. "Got one, by god!" he said.
"Good," Skilly replied impatiently. "Doan matter, we gots nice pictures, cameras knocked out just before the first rocket. Papers will tell, but people we interested in doan read, is all. Hoped we'd get the kings… you take rear, my mon. Go, go, go."
The corridor outside was cool white silence, insanely distant from the fire and blood outside. Niles crouched, his weapon covering the long hallway as the others dashed toward the staircase; the corridors were shaped like a capital "I," with elevators in the middle and stairs at either end. He skipped backward crabwise, conscious of the steadiness of his hands and the bright concentration in his mind. Read about this, Grand-Uncle, he thought. Tell me I'm a useless playboy now, father.
They were to the stairs; he could hear the thunder of feet on the metal slats. And the door at the other end of the corridor was opening.
"Hostiles!" Niles shouted, dropping into prone position. Elbows on the ground, and the stock smacked into his shoulder, squeeze off two rounds. Star-shaped holes in the frosted glass, and a scream of pain.
Then the door opened again, just enough to let a muzzle through. Shots blazed, a military automatic rifle, ugly crack sounds above his head, hammering into the plasterwork and leaving stinging dust in the air.
"Come on, mon, we leaving," Skilly said behind him.
Niles shook his head, fired again. "Got to give them something to think about," he said. "Grenade, please?"
She handed one forward to him, a standard plastic concussion-model egg. He waited until the opposite door began to open, then pulled the tab and lobbed it with a cricketer's expert overarm snap; it bounced into the narrow gap between door and wall and exploded, tearing the door from the hinges.
"Another, fragmentation," Niles said. Skilly handed it to him as they scuttled backward into the stairwell; there was something of a surprised look on her face.
Niles let the door close, pulling a roll of electrical tape from a pocket of his new hidehunter leather costume. The door was a simple rectangle of pressed metal, with a frosted glass window and a U-shaped aluminum handle. Moving with careful speed, he taped the grenade inside the metal loop, then ran a strip of the tape from the pin to the top of the stair railing. Finally he drew his knife and used the point to straighten the split ends of the pin, where they bent back on the other side of the grenade's lever; the slightest pressure would strip it out, now.
"Hoo, Skilly like that," she said, with new-found respect, slapping him on the shoulder. He found himself smiling back.
A bellow from below. "Skilly!?Vamonos!"
They turned, taking the stairs a dozen at a time and whooping like children.
"They didn't cut the line, sir," the Legion electronics tech said, looking up from her equipment. The glowstrips blinked back on. "Something with the central power control computer; I'd say." They had flown her in in one of the RSMP tiltrotors, along with the reaction company who were securing the area, and Fifth Battalion medics to help with the wounded.
There were enough that they still had to be triaged. Peter Owensford walked over to where someone was bandaging Prince Lysander's shoulder. A nice romantic wound in the extremities, he thought. A demonstrator looked up as he passed; he recognized her, the pretty girl who had been grinning when the bottle hit the policeman. She was not smiling now, as she sat with her dead companion's head in her lap, and her face was less pretty for the streaks of blood drying on it.
"Murderer!" she shrilled. "You'll pay for this, you'll pay-" Then she slumped, as a passing medic stopped to press a hypospray against the back of her neck.
Lysander had heard the exchange. "Somebody will pay," he promised, looking around the street.
Wreckage still smoldered, and bodies were lying in neat rows under blanket covers. "Somebody definitely will."
"Bad?" Owensford said, nodding at the wound.
"Just a flesh wound," he said. "What really hurts is that I was putting a field-dressing on it when the men with me charged down that corridor. The door was booby-trapped. Five of them died, and whoever it was got away. We'll do better the next time, sir."
"I call you sir, sir," Owensford said. A squad of Legionnaires in synthileather battledress and nemourlon combat armor moved down the street.
"Major, the Field Force is going to be under your command, and right now the best service I can do Sparta is to be part of it. Sir."
"As a beginning," Owensford said. "We'll create a Prince Royal's Own, which you can command in the field long enough that the men learn to trust you. After that, it's staff schools." Peter grinned hollowly when Lysander winced. "Someone has to lead when all this is over."
"Thank you," Melissa said, across the body. "This one's dead."
"You're welcome," Ursula Gordon said, as they moved onto the next.
Pressure bandage, Melissa thought. They ripped the Milice trooper's tunic free and wadded it over the long cut in his thigh, pressing the flesh closed and binding it with twists of cloth. The Spartan found herself breathing through her nose; it was not that the smell was unfamiliar, gralloching deer was pretty much like this, it was just that when she thought of it together with people- "Out of the way, out of the way!" the paramedics shouted.
Melissa and Ursula jumped back; the white-coated team from the latest ambulance moved in, one setting up a plasma drip and slapping an antishock hypo on the man's arm.
"I think-" Melissa started to brush a strand of hair back out of her eyes, then stopped; in the glowlight it looked as if she was wearing gloves to the elbow, of something dark and glistening. She swallowed. "I think that's the last; they can handle it now."
"Water," Ursula croaked.
There was a fountain in the center of the Spartosky's lobby. They pushed through the thinning crowd that still milled, some shocked-silent, some hysterical, some getting first aid for minor injuries while the professionals saved those on the edge of death. The kings were in one corner with a communications tech and a knot of uniforms, mercenary and RSMP, grimly busy. Water bubbled clear and cold from the fretted terracotta basin; Melissa and the woman in uniform rinsed their hands until they were clean enough to scoop up a handful. For a long minute they waited, letting stress-exhaustion slump their shoulders.