Three women seemed to be the center of everyone’s attention.
Which left Kris with two questions. Which one of the three was Her Terribleness? And did that really matter? With the target group reduced to those dozen, should she just blast the balcony and let God sort them out?
Across the way, two of the snipers put down their guns and started moving away from their human shields.
Across from them two other gunslingers opened up on the dropouts, shooting them down where they stood.
Above Kris, Marines dropped the shooters before they could celebrate their fratricidal killings.
Now it looked like all the shooters were fleeing or just ducking. Hostages took the chance to drop out of sight. Shooters on the roof of the big house in the next block started shooting up the roof, hitting both hostages and now-reluctant gunslingers.
“Put smoke in the next block,” Kris ordered, and soft popping sounds told her smoke was on its way.
It took half a minute before the street between the big house and the next row of houses was smoke-covered, and the shooting stopped. Kris took that opportunity of distance between her target row and Her Terribleness to try further negotiations.
“We’re trying to cut the power cord between Her Terribleness and the bombs she has installed in the houses you’re in.” Kris let the speaker amplify her matter-of-fact words. “When we occupied this row of houses, we found explosives hidden in bags of fresh ground coffee. I suspect you’ll find the same bags of coffee scattered around your houses.”
Kris knew very well that her sniffer spies had found the coffee sacks. No need to tell the other side just how much she knew of them.
A sack of coffee sailed out an upstairs window. It was followed by several more. Kris glanced at Chief Beni.
“They’ve only found about half of them,” he said.
Kris passed that information across the way. Hostages disappeared from windows as gunners and their shields found themselves in the same desperate search against the same killer. More coffee bags came out of more windows. Many broke open, showing clear proof of blocks of gray explosives among the ground brown beans.
“Now come out with your hands up,” Kris said, “and you’ll live.”
“Aren’t you gonna shoot them?” came from behind Kris. The volunteers had arrived, many of them sporting weapons and ammunition acquired from bodies in the houses that Kris had captured.
“They are my prisoners. I will treat them under the Laws of War,” Kris said forcefully.
“But they’ve murdered and raped and stolen,” a gunslinging volunteer pointed out.
“If you can make a case for that against a specific individual, there is a judge up on my ship who will give you your day in court.”
“Why do we have to use your judge? We have judges hereabouts. At least we used to. Don’t know if we still do,” the gunner said, looking around uncomfortably.
“When the time comes, we can make arrangements,” Kris snapped. “What we don’t do is take the law into our own hands. Now stand back. POWs are coming in.”
And Marines were advancing in short bounds, from houses to fences to trees, to across the street, then from trees to fences to open doors.
“Spy eyes show gunners advancing from the big house to try to retake the next row of houses,” Chief Beni reported.
The sharp snaps of M-6 fire told Kris that Lieutenant Stubben had beat the bad guys to their goal. She watched via the spy eye as thugs dropped.
Some of the hostages died, too. High-powered rounds went right through the unarmored gunslingers.
Kris made the decision to end this.
“Lieutenant Stubben, do you have rocket launchers on your front.”
“Three, Commander.
“Aim for the balcony on the big house. Take it down.”
“Understood, Commander. The balcony is a legitimate target. Grenadiers target it. Fire on my order. Fire.”
Moments later, the spy eyes recorded the front of the house disintegrating in a cloud of flame.
14
Lieutenant Commander Kris Longknife fully expected that cleaning up the mess would be at least as hard as winning the battle. But before the battle was over, a good portion of the mess was kind enough to clean itself up.
While the dust from the balcony explosion was still rising, cars and trucks were already gunning away from the big house, headed north. Kris let them go.
But she did make a quick call to the colonel. “There’s a lot of traffic headed your way.”
“No problem,” he said, cheerfully. “We’re ready for them. The smart ones will surrender when we tell them.”
Quite a few of them were too dumb to live . . . and died on the road out.
Kris made the calls that got medical gear and professionals flowing down from the ship. Despite the best efforts of Kris’s Marines, there were still a lot of bleeding civilians. Lander’s Rest had once had a good hospital, but its entire staff had fled. Calls to the farms downstream got some of them coming back in.
But travel took time, and people died waiting.
Kris needed a dirtside headquarters. The airport looked good, but too distant from a city where most people were reduced to walking. With a sigh, Kris settled into the rapidly vacated house on Tranquility Road that had been Her Terribleness’s headquarters. It put Kris in the middle of things as she buried herself in work to erase the memories of broken bodies and shattered lives.
There were mouths to feed. The landing boats emptied the Wasp’s supply of famine rations. She issued a call to any Squadron 10 ships nearby to help and started shipping down food from the Wasp’s own supplies.
Before all hell broke loose, Kaskatos had been a happy and invisible colony of about a half million souls. Then three million refugees showed up.
More arrived, but that group included Jackie Jackson, and one of the first things she did was end the population counting by confiscating the city’s computer net. Some of the computers went into setting up her security system around the big house. Most went into an entertainment and gambling net she set up for her henchman.
The city IT manager did succeed in making a final backup of the system before it got wrecked. His widow found it hidden in the back of their closet and brought it in to Kris the day after the shoot-out.
Between Nelly and Chief Beni, the city net was back up and properly employed within a few days.
That helped Kris figure out a rationing system and issue new IDs to both locals and transients.
But that was hardly a dent in Kris’s problems.
Despite the tendency of the gunslingers to go down shooting, Kris still ended up with a lot of prisoners. For now, she kept them in a hastily constructed stockade on the grounds of her command center.
That had at least one advantage. It assured that when trouble started over the prisoners, it quickly got dropped in Kris’s lap.
The sixth morning, Tranquility Road was suddenly filled with a mob of people with guns shouting their strongly held opinions about just how long the former holders of those guns should go on breathing.
Kris’s street had been a lovely, tree-lined lane. Now, most of those trees had ropes slung over their lower branches. A smoldering crowd of armed people screamed for people to dangle from the end of those ropes.
The job fell to Penny to interrupt Kris with the word on what all the commotion outside her window was about.
“I wonder how many of them have actually seen a hanging,” Penny muttered.
“None,” Kris said as she strode across the lawn, “and I’d like to keep it that way.”
Kris halted inside the iron fence from which the heads had been removed. A Marine sergeant brought Kris a bullhorn, a bit battered and scorched but still working.
“I am told that you use elected judges in your courts,” Kris said to the crowd, not quite yet a lynch mob.