"Jesus!" Gregg said, letting his breath out for the first time in too long. The air stank of cooked filth, the effluvium of the torso shot into the previous guard. His hands were shaking and he almost gagged.
Molts were widening the narrow aisle into the blockhouse. Piet put a comforting hand on Gregg's arm. "I want to clear the loopholes inside," he said. "We may need them before we're done."
"Right," Gregg said. He looked down at the receiver of his flashgun. The present locked into focus again.
"Right," he repeated. "I can't believe they blocked those wall guns off. You'd think the Feds would've learned a lesson from our first raid, wouldn't you?"
"They learned they didn't have to be afraid of raiders," Ricimer said with a slight grin. "Not every lesson is the right lesson."
"There's more coming, sir," Stampfer called from the shelter to which he'd returned. "Molts, anyhow."
"We'll handle them the same way," Ricimer replied. "Maybe we won't have any real problems with this."
"Captain!" Jeude called from inside the blockhouse. "There's somebody on the radio, wondering where his cargo is."
"I'll handle it," Ricimer said, brushing past a Molt coming out of the building with a case of chips.
"Look at this, Mr. Gregg," Dole murmured, holding up their first captive's rifle. "Don't it look like it's. .?"
"It sure does. ." Gregg agreed. He handed his flashgun to Dole and took the richly-carved pump gun. The chance of there being another rifle so much like Captain Schremp's wasn't high enough to consider.
The blond captive lay on his side, with his ankles and wrists tied together behind his back. Gregg knelt beside him, waggled the ornate weapon in his face, and then touched the muzzle to the prisoner's knee.
"Tell me exactly how you got this rifle," he said. His finger took up the slack on the trigger. He hadn't checked to be sure there was a round in the chamber, but they'd learn that quickly enough when the hammer fell.
"I bought it!" the Fed screamed. "From the flagship's purser! I swear to God I bought it!"
Gregg eased off the trigger very slightly. He tapped again with the muzzle. "All right," he said. "Where did the purser get it?"
"Oh, God, I just wanted a rifle," the blond man moaned. He squeezed his eyes shut, but he couldn't escape the caress of the weapon. It would blow his leg off at this range. "I don't know, I just asked around when the convoy landed. They all do a little business on the side, you know how it is, and I had a few chips saved back. Oh God oh God."
"Blauer, you make me want to puke," sneered the female prisoner unexpectedly. She turned her head from her fellow to Gregg. "You want to know where it came from? From a pirate like you!"
"Go on," Gregg said. He raised the repeater's muzzle and handed the weapon back to Dole. Threatening the woman would be counterproductive; and anyway, she had balls.
"We caught them on Rondelet," she said. "They were attacking a mansion when we came out of transit. We smashed their ship from orbit and they all surrendered. Were they friends of yours?"
Piet joined the tableau. He didn't interrupt.
"Not really," Gregg said. By habit, he checked the flashgun Dole returned to him. "What happened then?"
"Then we hanged them all," the woman said. "After we'd convinced them to talk. Too bad they weren't friends!"
Gregg stood up. "Well," he said mildly to Ricimer. "We know what Schremp did after he left us. I can't say I'm sorry he's gone."
Ricimer nodded. "We can get to one of the wall guns now," he said. "It's a one-kilogram. There's only a few shells for it."
Molts pushed laden tramcars into the Mirror one after the other. They moved at a measured, almost mechanical pace, a skill learned to prevent them from running up on each other's heels in the hellish void beyond the transition layer.
Ricimer stepped past Gregg to peer at the labor party trudging up from Umber City. "They'll be here in a few minutes," he said.
Gregg smiled tightly. He indicated the female prisoner with the toe of his boot. "Gag that one," he said to Dole. "Or she'll try to warn the next batch. And I don't want to kill her."
Piet Ricimer squeezed his friend's shoulder again.
45
Umber
The Umber tramway had thirty-four cars. There'd been thirty-five when the Venerians arrived, but Gregg had bent the trucks of the one that carried him when he kicked his way free. He didn't remember anything so violent occurring, but his right leg ached as though a piano'd fallen on it.
The Molts were starting a second round trip to mirrorside. Because there was only a single trackway, none of the cars could return until all had gone across. The blockhouse was nearly emptied; five bound and gagged Federation guards lay out of sight within it.
Lightbody had draped a tarpaulin over the corpse. Gregg hadn't killed anybody since that one. The sudden dissolution of the man's chest had merged with the soul-freezing trip through the Mirror in a shadowland that Gregg would revisit only when he dreamed.
The front of the blockhouse was pierced by four loopholes, though there were only two wall guns. Ricimer watched Umber City from one of the clear openings while he responded to radio traffic with a throat mike and plug earphone.
Gregg remained at the right rear corner of the structure. Ricimer looked back over his shoulder at his friend with a wan smile and tapped the earphone. "The watch officer on the Triple Tiara's getting pretty insistent about where his cargo is," he said. "He doesn't get to join the party until it's delivered."
Gregg tried to grin. The result was more of a tic, and his eyes returned to the street beyond immediately. "That's Carstensen's flagship?" he said.
"Yeah. I told him I had the same problem, but once the porters left here, there wasn't a thing I could do about how fast they marched."
The fireworks had ended. Snatches of music drifted up when the breeze was right. The captured guards said there was always a banquet when the convoy arrived: a sit-down meal in the Commandatura for the brass, and an open-air orgy in the park for common sailors and the journeymen of the community's service industries.
Both sites had suffered during the previous raid. If anything, that would increase the sense of celebratory relief.
Gregg heard the ringing sound of a distant engine. A green, then a red and a green light wobbled into the sky beyond the rooftops.
"They're coming!" Gregg called. "One of the ships just launched an autogyro."
Four of the Venerian enlisted men were with Piet inside the blockhouse, crewing the 1-kaygees. Jeude squatted behind one of the shrinking stacks of boxes. Like Gregg, he wore a white jumper stripped from a prisoner. He kept out of sight because the guards with the two remaining labor gangs might nonetheless realize that he wasn't one of their number.
An autogyro wasn't a threat. One of the watch officers was sending a scout to track down the missing cargo. No problem.
Ricimer murmured to the gun crews, then handed the communications set to Dole. He strode back to Gregg and eyed the situation himself.
"Jeude," Gregg said. "Stand up-don't look like you're hiding. If he lands, we'll pick him up just like the guards. No shooting."
He looked at Piet. "Right?"
"Right. ." Ricimer said with an appraising frown. "That would be the best result we can hope for."
The appearance of things at the tramhead shouldn't arouse much concern. The raiders had been sending excess Molt laborers back to mirrorside to load the ships under Guillermo's direction. Ch'Kan acted as straw boss here. If shooting started, Guillermo could be better spared than any of the Venerians-though Gregg wouldn't have minded the presence of K'Jax and a few of his warriors.
Piet looked over the remaining cargo and pursed his lips. "We shouldn't get greedy and stay too long," he said.