Rickalds had closed the cockpit hatch when the last of the soldiers lumbered out. The soil, heated white by the Gallant Sallie's exhaust, radiated unpleasantly into the cabin otherwise. The troops were in full hard suits not as protection against the defenders' small arms (half armor would have been a better compromise for that purpose) but rather so that they could attack immediately across the plasma-seared terrain.
The area had cooled by now. Sal rose from the navigation console and reopened the hatch so that she could look at the Commandatura directly instead of on the Gallant Sallie's screen. While Harrigan and the other men examined damage the barge had caused to the hold, Brantling was alone with her in the cabin. He watched Sal but didn't speak.
Humming like a swarm of hornets, a large aircar driven by pairs of ducted fans bow and stern rose into view beyond the Commandatura. The car mounted a squat weapon behind the pilot's hatch. Troops, most of them Molts, looked out from both sides of the central cargo compartment. There must have been forty of them.
The weapon in the car's bow was a multitube laser. It fired three strobing pulses at the Commandatura. Fed troops in the aircar were shooting also.
The laser disintegrated like a bubble popping with a violet flash. The snickWhack/snickWhack/snickWhack of the pulses' slapping impacts on the building arrived a measurable second after the laser's destruction.
Sal couldn't see what was happening on the roof of the Commandatura from her angle. Her heart surged at what the event implied, however: Stephen Gregg was alive, and he still had his flashgun.
The aircar banked, circling a stone's throw from the Commandatura at thirty meters altitude. The roof coping would have protected the Venerians against troops shooting from the ground, but it was less use against rifles fired from above.
Rock dust danced from the side of the building. This time Sal saw the spark of Stephen's flashgun, a saffron needle that ripped a puff of metal from the aircar's bow. The vehicle continued its circle unhindered. Guns banged from the cargo compartment. Distance dulled the reports.
The aircar was a military vehicle. The pilot used remote viewing rather than a clear windscreen, and the polished skin was resistant to if not entirely proof against a flashgun's bolt. The fans and the motors driving them were buried deep in the hull, shielded unless the pilot overflew the shooter.
The troops in the cargo compartment could be hit-one of the Feds dropped in the instant the situation formed in Sal's mind. But there were a lot of them, and the vehicle gave them better protection than Stephen and his fellows had. The squadron wouldn't be down before-
"Brantling, help me-" Sal shouted as she turned from the hatch and realized the guns weren't there. The Gallant Sallie's plasma cannon were still in orbit, so Sal couldn't blast the Fed vehicle from the air with them after all.
Sal jumped from the hatch. The ground was still too hot for slippers, but she was three steps around the vessel before she noticed the heat. It wouldn't have mattered anyway.
"Captain?" Brantling called from the hatch with nervous concern in his voice.
"Mind the console!" she shouted back.
The revolver holster slapped her left thigh as she ran for the gun tower. The tower platform was ten meters off the ground, supported on four squat concrete legs. Spiral steps were cast into each leg. There was a hatch into the platform at the top of the helix. Halfway up Sal realized she was mounting the northwest leg while Major Cardiff had led his troops up the southwest stairs.
I should have brought a cutting bar in case the hatch was locked. Sal drew her revolver, though the chance of shooting a metal door open was a lot slimmer than the chance of killing herself with a ricochet.
Harrigan shouted from the ground. Sal ignored him. Gunfire from the Commandatura was a constant muffled rattle, and she tried to ignore that as well. She grabbed the latch lever and turned it. There wasn't a lock mechanism.
Sal jerked the door open. The Fed hiding in the compartment beyond screamed, "Mother of God!" and swung a crowbar at her. He hit the low ceiling instead.
Sal shot him in the face. The muzzle flash was a saturated red-orange, so vivid in the dimness that she almost didn't notice the thunderous report.
The Fed flopped backward. His forelock was burning. Sal stepped over the body and lifted the trap door to the gun platform beyond.
A Venerian soldier with his faceshield raised saw her, jumped back, and tried to aim his shotgun. Major Cardiff knocked the weapon aside with a shout of fear and anger.
"Where's the fire director?" Sal demanded as she clambered out. There were a dozen corpses on the platform, most of them Molts. Cardiff's men were dragging more bodies from the four metal turrets. The cannon still pointed skyward.
"Mistress Blythe, you shouldn't have come here!" Cardiff said. "You could have been killed!"
"Where's the fire director, you stupid whoreson?" Sal shouted. "There's men dying at the Commandatura now, and there'll be more unless we get our fingers out of our butts and help them!"
Cardiff's head jerked as he looked toward the Commandatura. He'd been too involved with his own operation to consider what was happening across the spaceport. "Yes, I see," he said.
He glanced across his visible troops. "Davis, Podgorny!" he shouted. "Let's get these guns working!"
The northeast turret was the same diameter as the others but was taller by two meters to add space for equipment. Cardiff ran toward it, sluggish in his hard suit. "They've been gunners," the major added as he saw Sal was keeping pace with him.
The fire director was a Janus-faced console in the center of the room beneath the turret. On one side was a narrow Molt-style bench; integral to the other side was a cushioned human chair. The walls and equipment were splashed with ichor, already crusting in the heat, but the bodies had been removed.
"Get one of these guns to bear on the car that's attacking the Commandatura!" Cardiff said to his men. "Can you do it? And don't on your souls hit the building!"
The major stepped back. Davis and Podgorny-Sal didn't know which was which-stepped gingerly to the console. They took off their gauntlets and tossed them clashing to the floor.
"Tubes are loaded, at least," muttered the soldier with a black mustache flowing into his sideburns. He squinted at the screen's pastel images. "Standard gear, but it's not going to track a car flitting like that."
"Just get moving, wormshit!" Sal said. "If you put a twenty-centimeter bolt through the air beside that car, they aren't going to stick around to see where the next shot goes."
The soldier looked up, startled at the words in a woman's voice. The other man said, "Here, I think I've got a solution. I'm not sure which-"
Gear motors whined in the roof of the control room. A soldier outside shouted, "Hey! The turret's moving!"
"It's all right!" Major Cardiff shouted out the hatchway. "Everybody put your visors down, though!"
Cardiff noticed the forearm of a Molt, severed by a cutting bar. He half scraped, half kicked the limb out onto the platform. Sal heard a nearby rifleshot.
"The concrete's a honeycomb, not solid," Cardiff explained. He raised his voice to be heard over the rumble of the turret mechanism. Tonnes of metal were turning in perfect balance. "The gun crews were living up here. The bugs in the crews, at least. The boys are still flushing some of them out."
Sal nodded to indicate she understood. Her face felt stiff. She moved behind the mustached soldier so that she could view his display. He had to lean over the chair to reach the keyboard, since his hard suit was too bulky for him to sit normally at the console.