Skeeter sent his troops into the open bay warehouse. He put Molly in the lead, since she had the only pistol, with Corydon and Chenzira Umi backing her up with the other two projectile weapons. Skeeter charged past the open bay's door and raced down the corridor toward the unfinished section of wall where Bergitta lay bound to the uprights. Hashim, too, had confiscated an abandoned weapon: a sharpened screwdriver. They crept past the last of the drywall, then crouched low to peer into the warehouse beyond.
About half of the fourteen remaining men had run toward the doorway, shouting obscenities at Skeeter's attacking troops and charging to the attack. Several others had taken refuge behind stacked supplies, wailing—or so Hashim whispered—that they should never have attacked the crew foreman and brought the woman down here, that they hadn't counted on killing so many people, couldn't they just abandon the whore and run? Only two men had been left behind to guard Bergitta. She was barely conscious, face swollen and bruised, mouth and nose bleeding where they'd hit her repeatedly. Neither guard was paying any attention to her, which meant they weren't looking at the open "wall" behind her, either.
Hashim slipped through first, easing past the two-by-fours on Bergitta's left, while Skeeter edged past on her right. When Molly started shooting, the guards left with Bergitta moved even further away. That gave Skeeter and Hashim the chance they needed. The down-time boy struck first. He drove the sharpened screwdriver into the nearest guard's back with a snarl of hatred. The man screamed. The other guard whirled, bringing up a knife—
Skeeter slashed with the sharpened trowel. The blow severed fingers. The man screamed and fell to his knees beside the clattering knife. A kick to the man's head sent him sprawling. "Wire his hands!" he yelled to Hashim, who was already crouching low over Bergitta. A twist of Skeeter's claw hammer served to break the wires around her wrists and throat. Skeeter picked her up, then shouted at the embattled construction workers, "I've got your hostage! You might as well give it up and surrender! Security's on the way and there's no way off this station! Surrender now and maybe these down-timers won't kill you like they did your pals just now!"
Hashim translated into Arabic for good measure.
Moments later, it was over. Security did, in fact, arrive in force, led by Wally Klontz and the crew foreman, Riyad, along with several of his enraged crew who'd been jumped and knocked out. They started cleaning up the mess. Skeeter carried Bergitta up to the infirmary, himself, not trusting the job to anyone else. He ran the whole way, while Bergitta lapsed into unconsciousness. He skidded, out of breath, into the infirmary, where battered tourists and the irate Senator Caddrick were being treated for injuries from the riot at Primary.
Rachel Eisenstein, who was busy rinsing tear gas out of Caddrick's reddened eyes, took one look at Bergitta, blanched, and abandoned Caddrick. "What's happened?"
"Some of the Arabian Nights crew dragged her down to the basement, beat her nearly to death, gang-raped her..."
"I need a trauma team, stat!" Rachel shoved past the shocked and red-faced senator, who sputtered an outraged protest at being abandoned.
Skeeter carried Bergitta in Rachel's wake, shoving his own way past the angry senator, and followed the station's chief of medicine into a treatment room. Skeeter turned Bergitta over to Rachel's care, gratified by the swiftness of the trauma team's arrival, and found himself abruptly trembling from head to toes with the aftershock of battle. He dragged his hands across his face, decided he'd better find someplace to sit down, and stumbled back toward the front of the infirmary.
And ran slap into Mike Benson.
"Jackson!"
He glanced up just in time to see the handcuffs. He was so off-balance and exhausted from the fight, from the desperate rush to get Bergitta to a doctor, he didn't even have the strength or presence of mind to slip out of the way. Benson slapped the cuffs around his wrists, cold and terrifying, and tightened them down with a savage twist. "We've got a basement full of bodies, Jackson! And for once, you're not gonna wriggle out of it! Not with Caddrick on station, threatening to shut us down!"
Too badly shaken to do more than stumble, Skeeter followed numbly when Benson hauled him past gaping orderlies, nurses, newsies, and injured tourists. Ten minutes later, Skeeter was in the aerie high above Commons, facing down Ronisha Azzan, Shangri-La's tall deputy station manager. She'd clearly taken over when the feds had dragged Bull Morgan away to jail. Like Time Tours CEO Granville Baxter, Ronisha Azzan claimed Masai heritage and wore richly patterned African textiles done up in expensive suits. At the moment, she towered over Skeeter, glowering down at him from the other side of Bull's desk, while Benson blocked the exit, standing between Skeeter and the elevator doors. Skeeter stood swaying, wrists aching where the too-tight cuffs were cutting the skin, badly shaken and beginning to despair.
Ronisha Azzan said coldly, "We've taken into custody half-a-dozen down-timers on murder charges, Skeeter. What I want to know is—"
The elevator doors slid open with a soft ping! and Kit Carson crashed the party.
"Move it, Mike," Kit growled, facing down Benson when the head of security thought twice about letting him into the aerie. Kit brought one arm up to keep the elevator doors from closing again. "I'm in no mood to play games with anybody."
Benson locked eyes with the retired scout, then grunted once and wisely stepped aside. Skeeter sank, shaking, into the nearest chair, having been on the receiving end of Kit's rage once before, but after a moment's utter panic, he realized what Kit's presence here meant.
Kynan Rhys Gower had sworn an oath of fealty to Kit, several months back. The retired time scout had rescued him from Portuguese traders intent on burning the Welshman and Margo as witches on a beach in sixteenth-century East Africa. Kit was therefore obligated to speak on his behalf as the Welshman's liege lord. Kit Carson might, yet, take Skeeter apart for involving his vassal in something as serious as murder, but for the moment, his attention was rivetted on Ronisha Azzan.
Then he spoke, voice flat with anger, and darted a glance at Skeeter's manacled wrists. "Was it really necessary to cuff him?"
Benson snapped, "I thought so! There's half a dozen dead men down there—"
"And damned near a dead little girl!" Kit's lean face ran white with barely controlled fury. "That poor kid's been raped and beaten unconscious! Rachel's staff said they're not even sure she'll come out of surgery alive!"
Skeeter blanched.
"Take the cuffs off, Mike! Skeeter's not going to attack one of us. And even if he did, I could throw him through the nearest window without batting an eyelash, which he knows!"
Skeeter knew, all right.
He had no intention of going one-on-one with Kit Carson under any circumstances. But thanks to Kit, Mike Benson grudgingly unlocked the handcuffs, freeing Skeeter's wrists. He flexed them gingerly and rubbed the chafed skin.
"Thanks."
Benson just glowered at him and retreated to a watchful stance between Skeeter and the elevator door. Ronisha slowly seated herself in Bull Morgan's chair, studying Skeeter intently. "All right, Kit. He's uncuffed. Now. You want to explain this mess, Skeeter? If I didn't have my phones forwarded down to the war room, I'd have every reporter on station demanding to know why half-a-dozen construction workers were just murdered on a station totally out of control. Not to mention Senator Caddrick, who's demanded to see me the minute he's released from the infirmary, and I think we can all guess what he wants. This isn't going to play well in the press, Skeeter. The station's in very serious trouble, even without Caddrick on the warpath down in station medical."