Slade was the first man through the cargo hatch, because there was no one else aboard he had trusted to lead the rush on the gun position. In fact, half a dozen of his thirty-man assault company were pounding across the rammed-earth field as more pirate freighters roared in to land and the personnel of Desireé Port reached for weapons they had forgotten.
The field was defended by a pair of heavy powerguns on opposite sides of the perimeter. The ball-mounted weapons were hardened, but not to the point that Slade would not have preferred to take them out with bursts from a tribarrel. None of the ships in this rag-tag assemblage would admit to having more than small arms aboard, however.
Levine had landed a full seventy-five meters from the gun Slade was to assault. The chill air and icy footing effectively doubled the distance that was already too long. Shots were being fired, some at random, some in the attack on the control tower that another vessel had been told off for. A bolt ripped a long gouge through the snow near Slade. One of the pirates following the tanker threw away a pistol and began to run back toward the ship.
The door to the gun turret was flush-fitting and locked. One of the pirates fired at it from a meter away. Steel crashed and sprayed. The gunman howled as he danced back. He began swatting at the sparks that had ignited his tousled hair.
"Back, Via!" Slade shouted. The oval gouges in the door surface were bright orange, but the lime core within still glowed white and smooth. Gimbals squealed above the attackers as the gun tube shifted from its vertical alignment. Slade wore a set of back-and-breast armor, too small for him and so joined along the right side with leather straps. The armor prodded him over the collarbone as he slapped the home-made limpet mine over the lock plate of the door. The tanker had a helmet but no commo. He was point-man, not commander, might they all burn in Hell!
The gun fired above them. It was a sharp crack and a cone of heat that fanned across the snow. A pirate freighter, fifty meters up and settling on thrusters, collapsed inward around a cyan flash. The ship hit the field hard enough to bury half of itself before it blew up.
"Fire in the hole!" Slade shouted into the ringing pandemonium. He was unreeling the four meters of wire between the battery pack and the blasting cap in the mine. That length should take him safely around the curve of the gun emplacement. "Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!"
Somebody in the Control Tower blew divots from the concrete to either side of Slade's head. The tanker threw the switch, knowing that if he ducked he would be back in the blast cone. Two of the outlaws who had followed Slade did duck. They were hurled sideways as the mine blew in the door. Slade was through the gap while the smoke still roiled. His submachine gun hosed a long burst as if the bolts were a knotted cord dragging the big man into the gun emplacement.
There were three men in civilian clothes within. One was on his back, unconscious. Two were screaming and frightened, with their hands rising even as the bolts savaged their torsos. . . .
"But after we traded on Desireé, they decided to touch down on a place called Mandalay," Don Slade said to the Elysian citizens before him.
The castaway's nails were tight against his palms because of his memories of the raid. The initial butchery, and then the savage counter-attack which the locals were able to mount because no one would listen to Slade shouting they should cut and run before Desireé had time to organize. Looting and raping . . . and then, for many of the outlaws, dying. The universe was better for that result, of course.
"I was against it," Slade's mouth said, "but all I could get was a delay for GAC 59. We held a light-minute out while the rest of the fleet landed."
"This is crazy!" Blackledge cried. He threw up his hands for emphasis. The outlaw was careful to speak toward the commo screen and not toward Don Slade who sat against a bulkhead on the edge of a plotting can. "There's five thousand of us, that's more'n in the whole settlement down there. They're not going to ladle cop on us, even if we weren't allies, like to say."
"The fact they're a bunch of bandits and you—we're a bunch of bandits," said the black-haired tanker, "doesn't make anybody allies. Besides—" He absently fingered the fresh scab on his biceps, a memento of concrete flying during the Desireé raid. "I could tell you stories about allies."
The main bridge screen was slaved to one of the exterior pick-ups on the flagship. An Awami League hasildar named Al Husad styled himself Fleet Admiral now. He was accepted as such in much the same way that Slade was a captain. Al Husad owed much of his position to hints that his vessel mounted ship-killing guns in one cargo bay. The Admiral had denied that loudly during planning for the Desireé attack; and Slade's duties had not kept him too busy to see that the flagship landed on Desireé after both gun emplacements were in pirate hands.
The digital signal feeding the screen was riddled with static. The view of the spaceport and the ships landing with various levels of skill was made pale by the white static flares of individual receptors.
"Curse it, they'll have all the women," moaned one of Blackledge's henchmen, with him on the bridge. The outlaw would have muttered about liquor, but Slade had reprogrammed the waste processor. The unit could now turn out ethanol, diluted by its own hygroscopic tendencies to about 95% but otherwise chemically pure.
"You think they're going to grow shut, Dobler?" Slade gibed. Dobler's blue hair looked particularly silly because it fringed his bald spot. Many of the mercenaries aboard GAC 59 had taken up the Aylmer fashion when they turned pirate. A few had changed back after the raid, though. Seal rings like the one Don Slade wore were having a certain vogue. "I tell you, if any of you had the sense to really listen to me, we'd wait here three days instead of three hours. We'd be the only suckers on Mandalay with money to spend—and you'd be amazed how much cheaper you can go around the world, then."
"What is this cop?" demanded a crackly voice. Mandalay Control was talking again to Al Husad. The weak signal was rebroadcast by the flagship, but the static was amplified as well. "You say twenty-one and there's only twenty."
Service vehicles of some sort were flitting through the field of the vision blocks feeding the screen. Steam and dust drifted from the score of vessels. Anyone who had been present at a landing could imagine besides the hiss and pinging as metal cooled.
"They'll flood the market, though," said Captain Levine dolefully. None of the ex-mercenaries save Slade had an appreciation for the economics of being first to port. "Because you're afraid, we'll get cop for our cargo."
"Nope," said Slade. He had convinced the wrangling leaders of his vessel to go along with the delay. Now, faced with the fact of it, there was a chance that the only consensus left would be to lift the tanker's head. Slade held to his wrist the last of the cache of stim cones he had looted during the raid. "Our cargo's thrusters from the Desireé repair docks, not jewelry and trash like most of the others loaded. Our price won't go down."
"Had one drop its navigational computer," said Al Husad's voice. "If it don't get on line in a couple days, maybe we'll send help. But say, what about clearance? You come on with all this cop about staying sealed till you clear us, and then you sit on your thumbs. I got boys been in Transit three weeks, ready to tear the roof off this little burg."
"Do you?" replied Mandalay Control. The audio link roared into garbage. The image on the vision screen rocked, but it still showed bombs blowing in the hulls of every ship in sight.
Men with grenade projectors and full atmosphere suits leaped from the beds of the service vehicles which had earlier set the explosives. The grenadiers began firing projectiles into the jagged openings. From the way the Mandalay troops were dressed, Slade was sure they were lobbing gas rounds into the pirate fleet.
"B-b-but God in heaven!" babbled Captain Levine. "They aren't, I mean—Mandalay's a pirate haven, everybody knows that, they trade, they don't—" His circling hand indicated the carnage on the screen.
The local forces were not very numerous, probably no more in total than the few hundred men carried by any ship in the fleet that had just landed. That was quite large enough a force for the present purpose. The outlaws of the fleet were trapped like so many sheep in a slaughter pen.
The cargo hatch of one of the ships began to rise slowly on its hydraulic jacks. It had opened a little more than a hand's breadth when a trio of directional mines went off in the gap. The hatch continued to rise. Shrapnel had painted the interior of the cargo bay with the blood and brains of the men huddled to rush through it. With an almost leisurely calm, one of the Mandalayan troops turned toward the bay and shot in two grenades. On impact they began to gush black fumes, one of the skin-absorptive nerve poisons like KD2.
"Remember how Al Husad was talking?" Slade asked, from his corner. The tanker was calmer for being proven right. None the less, he had to hide the fact that the butchery on the screen horrified him as much as it did the gaping outlaws around him. It had not always been possible to be a Slammer and be choosy about the cause for which you were fighting. Slade was a civilian now, and in another context he could have laughed as he pulled the plug on the pirates the way someone on Mandalay had just done it.
But right now, there was nothing intellectual involved. Slade was watching his peers die in an ambush that had been meant for him as well.
Everyone on the bridge continued to stare at the screen. The tanker was not even sure any of the outlaws were aware that he had spoken. He went on anyway. "Like I heard here, as a matter of fact. `Might just take the place over, nothing they could do with so many of us. Hell with using Mandalay just for trade.' They're hard boys here, friends, and it seems they're not stupid ones either. They know there were too many of us to be safe if they let us swarm all over the place. One ship, maybe three . . . but not twenty-odd together. So they did something about it, is all."
Slade pointed toward the screen. The suited attackers were beginning to clamber aboard the ships they had disabled. There would be some resistance, some casualties, but panic and disorganization would have exposed almost all the pirates to the touch of the gas bombs. KD2 needed little more than that. One touch and nerve cells would begin to die in shrivelled black traceries until the rot reached the brain stem.
"I'd as soon," the big man said, "be gone when they come to finish the job." But his great, scarred hands were twisting as if they wished they held a weapon.
"Cunning has value," noted one current of the community.
"It's scarcely a virtue, though, is it?" demanded the other viewpoint. It was an amalgam like the first, of every mind; not a segment polarized against the rest of the body politic. "A human virtue, that is."
"Have we been wholly open with him, then?" rejoined the first viewpoint. It was hard to say which advocacy was the Devil's. "Or are we being . . . cunning?"