"Sir," Lao commanded, "heal."
The marine doctor looked up at her, an awful expression visible on his face through the thick, transparent ceramic of his helmet visor. He was trying to speak; a terribly, terribly bad idea.
Despite the howl of pain in her shoulder, the imminent danger of Rix attack, and the general need for her attention to be focused in all directions at once, Lao had to close her eyes when the doctor vomited, two lungfuls of green oxycompound splattering onto the inside of his faceplate.
She reached over to unseal the helmet. The doctor wouldn't drown in the stuff, naturally, but it was much nastier when you inhaled it the second time.
CAPTAIN
"Stasis field up in the council chamber, sir," Executive Officer Hobbes said softly.
The words snapped through the wash of visual and auditory reports streaming through the Lynx's infostructure. Captain Laurent Zai had to replay them in his mind before he would believe. For the first time in four hours, he allowed himself to feel a glimmer of hope.
Acoustics had finally analyzed the explosive sound in the council chamber, which had turned out not to be a firearm at all. Probably the glass in which the Intelligencer had secreted itself had been overturned, and the crash magnified by the small craft's sensitive ears. So Zai had launched the rescue needlessly, but thus far the rescue was working. Such were the fortunes of war.
"Rix number five dead. Four more marines lost," another report came.
Zai nodded with approval and peered down into the bridge airscreen. His marines were spread across the palace in a nested hexagonal search pattern, its symmetry only slightly distorted by the exigencies of crashing down from space, avoiding booby traps, and fighting the remaining two Rix commandos. His men were doing quite well. (Actually, seventeen of the two dozen marines were women, but Vadans preferred the old terms.)
If the Child Empress was still alive, Zai thought, he might yet survive this nightmare.
Then doubts flooded him again. The Empress could have been killed when the council chamber had been railgunned. Or when the marines had burst in to take control. The Rix might have murdered the Empress the moment they took her hostage, insurance against any rescue. And even if she was alive now, two more Rix commandos remained concealed somewhere in the tangled diagram of the battle.
"Phase two," Zai ordered.
The Lynx shuddered as its conventional landers launched, filled with the rest of the Lynx's marine complement. Soon the Imperial forces would have total superiority. Every minute in which disaster did not befall him took Laurent Zai closer to victory.
"Where's that damned Vecher?" the captain snapped.
"He's under the stasis field, sir," Hobbes answered.
Zai nodded. The doctor's battle armor couldn't broadcast through the field. But if the marines had bothered to put the stasis field up, that implied that the Empress was still alive.
"Rix fire!" the synthesized voice of a marine came from below; they were still breathing oxycompound, in case the enemy used gas. The bridge tactical AI triangulated the sound of blaster fire picked up by various marines' helmets; a cold blue trapezoid appeared on the wireframe, marking the area where the Rix commando should be.
Zai gritted his teeth. In urban cover, Rix soldiers were like quantum particles, charms or fetches that existed only as probabilities of location and intent, never as certainties--until they were dead. The nearest edge of the marked area was almost a hundred meters from the council chamber. Close enough to threaten the Empress, but far away enough to...
"Hit that area with another round of railgun slugs," Zai ordered.
"But, sir!" Second Gunner Thompson protested. "The integrity of the palace is already doubtful. It's not hypercarbon, it's stone. Another round--"
"I'm counting on a collapse, Gunner," Zai said. "Do you think we'll hit that Rixwoman with dumb luck?"
"The stasis field is only level one, sir, but it should hold," Hobbes offered quietly. At least his executive officer understood Zai's thinking. Falling stone wouldn't harm anyone inside a stasis field. Everyone else--the other hostages, the marines, the rest of the palace staff--was expendable. In fact, the Rix and the Imperials were in battle armor, and wouldn't be killed by a mere building falling down around them. They would simply be immobilized.
"Firing," came the first gunner, and straight bolts of green light leapt onto the airscreen, lancing the blue trapezoid like pins through a cushion. The thunk of the shots reached Zai's soles, adding to all the other sensations of movement and acceleration.
What a powerful weapon, he thought, to shake a starship with its recoil, though the shell weighed less than a gram.
After four shudders had run through the Lynx, the gunner reported, "First rounds fired, sir. The palace seems to be holding up."
"Then fire again," Zai said.
SENATOR
The other three senators stood a few meters away from the legislation, a bit daunted by its complexity, its intensity.
As Nara Oxham took them through it, however, with simple words and a soothingly cobalt-blue airmouse pointing out particulars, they drew gradually nearer. The legislation consumed most of the aircreen in the Secularist Party Caucus chamber. A galaxy of minor levies formed its center: nuisance taxes on arms contractors, sur-tariffs on the shipment of strategic metals, higher senatorial assessment for regions with a large military presence; all measures that would, directly and indirectly, cost the Imperial Navy hard cash. Surrounding this inner core were stalwart pickets of limited debate, which restricted ammendments and forestalled filibuster, and loopholes were ringed with glittering ranks of statutory barbed wire. More items in the omnibus floated in a disorganized cloud, cunningly indirect but obvious in their intent to the trained eye. Duties, imposts, levies, tithes, tariffs, canceled pork, promised spending temporarily withheld--a host of transfers of economic strength firmly away from the Spinward Reaches. All carefully balanced to undo what the Emperor and Loyalists intended.
Senator Oxham was proud that her staff had created so complex a measure in less than an hour. The silver proposal cup at the center of the airscreen was barely visible through the dense, glittering forest of iconographics.
The edicts flowing from the Diamond Palace were a sledgehammer, an unambiguous step toward war. This legislation, however complex its point-clouds of legislative heiroglyphics, was in its own way just as simple: a sledgehammer swung in return, carefully balanced in force and angle to stop its counterpart dead with a single collision. Some of the other Secularist Party senators looked unhappy, as if imagining themselves caught between the two.