No one was at the counter on the left side of the anteroom. The plaque on the door to the right read Communications. A hallway ran past that room toward the back of the building. The door beside the commo room was steel with the stenciled legend Keep Locked at all Times. Other doors were wooden panels, some of them ajar.
Stephen signaled Kiley and Maher to watch the hall, then tapped his own chest before pointing to the commo room. Lightbody gripped the door handle and rotated it minusculely to be sure that it wasn't locked.
He nodded. The rest of us poised. Stephen lunged in behind the opening door.
No one was inside the windowless room. The atmosphere was stifling and at least 10 °C above the muggy heat outside. The air-conditioning vents in the floor and ceiling were silent; banks of electronics clicked and muttered among themselves.
"I've got it," I whispered, stepping to the box that controlled the building's own alarm system.
"Just because you can breathe the muck here," Loomis said in genuine indignation, "that's no cause to let your air-handling system go like this. What kind of people are these?"
On Venus, as surely as in interstellar space, a breakdown in the air system meant the end of life. Loomis' father supervised a public works crew in Betaport, but I think we all felt a degree of the same outrage.
"Lightbody, watch Jeremy's back," Stephen said. "The rest of you come along. There's somebody supposed to be on duty, and they may not have gone far."
The job centered me so completely that I wasn't conscious of setting the cutting bar down to open my tool kit. After I disconnected the alarms, I went to work on the port's defenses.
A vehicle clanging its alarm bell pulled up beside the building. My hand moved for the cutting bar as I looked at Lightbody in the hallway.
He nodded and stepped out of my angle of vision. I heard the front door open, then close. Lightbody was back. "It's all right, sir," he whispered. "It's the Black Maria bringing a load of drunks to the lockup down below."
I went back to work. A fire director in the southern gunpit controlled the four laser batteries. I couldn't touch the director itself, but its data came from the port radar and optical sensors. I switched them off, then used the tip of my bar to cut the power cable to their console. Sparks snapped angrily between strands of wire and the chassis, but the tool's ceramic blades insulated me.
I heard steps in the hallway. "It's Kiley," Lightbody said.
"There's four guys in the lounge," Kiley said as he joined Lightbody in the hall. "We're tying them up. Mister Gregg didn't want you to worry, sir."
I nodded. I'd found the circuitry powering Corpus Christi's landline telephones. I could shut the system down, but I wasn't sure I wanted to. If the phones went out, people all over the community would run around looking for the cause of the problem. Some of them would come here.
The steel door clanked. Somebody had rested his hand against the other side as he worked the lock. I moved to the commo room doorway with my cutting bar; Kiley and Lightbody flattened themselves on either side of the steel door.
The panel swung inward. A Fed in a gray tunic and Constabulary brassards on both arms stepped through. He had a cut on his forehead and an angry look on his face.
"Hey!" he snarled. "If you fuckers can't get the air-conditioning fixed, we're going to have somebody croak in the cells down there!"
He glared at us momentarily. Concrete steps led down behind him to a room full of echoing metal and alcoholic vomit. I grabbed his throat in my left hand and jerked him forward. Lightbody clubbed the Fed behind the ear as Kiley pulled the door closed.
I let the Fed fall as a dead weight. I drew a deep breath. Lightbody took the man's wrist and pulled him into the commo room.
"I think he's still alive, sir," Lightbody said. He poised the buttplate of his carbine over the man's temple. "Do you want me to. ."
"Yes, tie him," I said. I was pretty sure that wouldn't have been Lightbody's first suggestion. Lightbody shrugged and undid the Fed's belt for the purpose.
"Here's the others coming," Kiley murmured.
"Come on," I heard Stephen's muffled voice say. "We'll head back to the cutter."
I went to the console and dumped the phones after all. The more confusion, the better. .
"Wouldn't it be better to go to the new ship?" Loomis asked.
"Only if we knew which it was," Stephen replied in a tone so emotionless that I shivered.
I opened the unit's front access plate. There were three circuit cards behind it. I pulled them.
Stephen stuck his head into the commo room. "Trouble?" he said, glancing at the unconscious Fed.
"No sir, not so's you'd mention it," Lightbody said.
The unlocked stairwell door swung open. Stephen turned. Loomis tried to point his shotgun but the steel panel banged closed again, knocking the gun barrel up.
"Grubbies!" shrieked a voice attenuated by the armored door.
"Outside!" I shouted as I zipped my kit closed over a jumbled handful of tools.
Stephen pushed the door open and fired his flashgun down the stairs one-handed. Metal in the cells below vaporized, then burned in a white flash. Stephen clanged the door shut again.
We bolted out the front of the Commandatura, carrying our weapons openly. Lightbody jumped aside to let me lead.
The van towing the cage was pulled up to the side door. Nobody was inside the vehicle, but the diesel engine was running. A Fed ran out the constabulary door. Kiley fired, knocking the man's legs out from under him with a charge of buckshot in the thighs.
The constabulary door banged against its jamb and bounced a few centimeters open. Stephen's laser spiked at a nearly reciprocal angle to that of his first bolt. Men screamed as more burning metal sprayed.
I'd never seen controls laid out like those of the van. The steering wheel was in the center of the front compartment. There were hand controls to either side of the wheel, but no foot pedals.
"I'll drive, sir!" Loomis cried, handing me his shotgun. I slid across the bench seat as the others piled in.
Loomis twisted the left handgrip and let a return spring slide it to the dash panel, then pulled the right grip out to its stop. The diesel lugged momentarily before it roared, chirping the tires. We pulled away from the Commandatura. The door of the trailer for prisoners wasn't latched. It swung open and shut, ringing loudly each time.
Loomis turned us and headed up the paved street directly toward the gate. The trailer oscillated from side to side. It swiped a stand of pickled produce, hurling brine and glass shards across the front of the nearest building, then swung the other way and hit a cursing pedestrian who'd managed to dodge the careening van.
A siren sounded from the spaceport. It can't have had anything to do with us, there wasn't time. Stephen reached past Loomis from the other side and flicked a dash control. Our bell began to clang.
Three Molts were swinging a gate of heavy steel tubing across the port entrance. Their officer, a human wearing a gray tunic, saw our van coming. He waved his rifle to halt us.
The four Molts who crewed the port-defense laser were watching the commotion among the ships on the field. The siren came from the Yellowknife. All the Fed warship's external lights were on, flooding her surroundings with white glare.
Loomis steered for the narrowing gap between the gate and its concrete post. The Molts continued to trudge forward. The officer threw his rifle to his shoulder and aimed. Stephen's flashgun stabbed. The Fed's chest exploded.
Our left fender scraped the gatepost. My door screeched back in an accordion pleat. The right-side wheels rode over the bottom bar of the gate. The second and third bars bent down but the sturdy framework as a whole didn't flatten.