Leaning against the wall on the garden side, she observed, was a saw, a sharp-toothed blade fixed in a metal frame and equipped with a pistol grip.
“Who do you work for?” the servant demanded as Sula claimed the toolbox and lowered it carefully to the ground. “I shall contact your employers with a complaint.”
“Please don’t do that, miss,” Sula said as—her eyes scanning the street—she reached for the pistol grip of the saw.
“Twenty-five seconds,” Spence reported—a quarter minute, more or less.
“You are impudent and careless with your employer’s property,” the servant said as she leaned intently over the wall. “You have—”
Sula slashed her across the throat with the saw. The Naxid reared back as she had when she’d first seen Sula, hands scrabbling for her neck.
“Comm: abort! Stand by!” Sula said. “Comm: send!”
“Abort” and “Stand by” were actually two different orders, but Sula didn’t have time to sort them out. With any luck, Spence would take her binoculars off Makish and see what was happening at the Urghoder Palace.
The Naxid fell to the sidewalk in a tangle of elaborate livery, her polished shoes kicking. Sula peered over the wall and looked down the Boulevard of the Praxis: she saw Judge Makish and his guards, and accompanying them an officer in the viridian green of the Fleet. Badges of high rank glittered on the officer’s shoulders and medals gleamed on his chest.
“Standing by,” came Spence’s reply. Sula was aware of Macnamara emerging from cover, a pistol held warily behind his leg.
She picked up the bomb and vaulted the wall. The servant gasped and sputtered at her feet, black scales flashing red in what Sula hoped were unreadable patterns. Sula turned toward Makish and his group and advanced at a trot.
“Sir!” she called, waving. “My lords!”
The bodyguards swept to the front, alert, hands reaching for weapons. “Your servant is ill!” Sula said. “She needs help!”
The entire group increased speed, bodies weaving as the foremost pair of limbs dropped and began to be used as legs. Sula had to leap out of the way. Surprise swirled through her head as she looked at four receding Naxid backs, at black scales glittering in the brilliant light of Shaamah. Sula put the bomb down and followed the Naxids, her hand reaching into her thigh pocket for her pistol. The two guards—trained in first aid, no doubt—bent over the wounded servant, hands plucking at her livery.
The flat Naxid head served only as a platform for sensory organs: a Naxid’s brain was in the center of its humanoid torso, with the heart and other vital organs being in the lower, four-legged body. Sula would prefer to have shot the guards first, but Makish and the Fleet officer—a junior fleet commander, no less—stood between her and the military constables, so she chose the more dangerous of the two and put a pair of shots into the center of the fleetcom’s back.
As she shifted her aim, a long series of shots rang out, and her startled nerves gave a leap with each angry crack. Had the bodyguards got to their weaponsthat fast ? she wondered. She shot Makish, her body braced for the impact of enemy bullets that didn’t come, and then she realized that the other shooter was Macnamara, firing over the stone wall and catching the enemy in a cross fire.
There was a pause in which the only thing Sula heard was the singing in her ears caused by the shots’ concussion. The pistols PJ had given them proved rather noisy. There were Naxid bodies sprawled on the sidewalk and a lot of deep purple Naxid blood.
“Run!” Sula said, the idea occurring to her suddenly; and she sprang over the Naxid bodies, the pistol still in her fist. Behind, Macnamara vaulted the wall and pelted in her wake.
“Comm: stand by! Any second now! Comm: send!”
The bomb was now redundant as an assassination device, but it could still serve as a propaganda weapon. The government might deny a pair of assassins with pistols, but they couldn’t deny a big explosion on the Boulevard of the Praxis, right in the middle of the High City.
A file of Naxid children approached, neatly attired in school uniforms, their bodies snaking from side to side in the wake of an adult supervisor.
Sula preferred not to murder children, not even if they were Naxids, but fate had not consulted her, and she wasn’t about to slow down and explain things. “Run!” she said as she dashed past. “Bad things!”
“Wait!” the supervisor said, her black-on-yellow eyes going wide. Sula didn’t spare her a backward glance.
She skated around the side of the Urghoder Palace and into the narrow lane that ran down its side. The cool shade of the lane was welcome after the afternoon sun. Sula slowed to a trot, and Macnamara slowed in her wake, pausing to pull an emergency flare from his pocket, strike it on the cool sandstone wall, and toss it behind them. Their retreat would be covered by billowing red smoke.
Sula gasped for breath, her hand trailing on the palace wall for balance, and she wondered how much time to give the Naxid schoolchildren to get out of the way. She counted to ten, then spoke.
“Comm: detonate. Comm: send.”
A scant second later the sandstone wall punched her fingers with surprising strength and the ground lurched beneath her feet. She didn’t feel the explosion so much with her ears as with her insides, an uneasy stirring as the shock wave passed through each organ. The red smoke at the end of the lane was blown over them in a thin scarlet fog; and suddenly they were in a rain of rubble and trash blown off the Urghoder Palace roof. Sula tried to knock the stuff off her cap and shoulders as she ran.
She unfastened the gray jumpsuit as soon as she made her way out of the cloud, and when they got to Macnamara’s two-wheeler, they both peeled out of their suits and took off their headgear, revealing richer clothing beneath. The workers’ costumes were shoved into the two-wheeler’s panniers, and with Macnamara driving, the vehicle moved out into traffic, the two passengers to all appearances a pair of upper-middle-class youth on a summer joy ride. Anyone looking closely would have seen that the clothing was soaked through with sweat, but the gyroscopically stabilized two-wheeler was moving too fast for that, weaving through the traffic, darting into lanes and alleys.
Behind them the gray cloud of debris towered over the High City like an omen foretelling dark events to come.
“The plan was too elaborate,” Sula said, blinking against the setting sun. “It would have been safer to plant the bomb somewhere along the route or pull up alongside Makish in a car and gun him down.”
“You wanted something noisy,” Spence pointed out.
“The big boom was the only thing the plan had going for it. The rest was fucking stupid.” She looked at Macnamara. “If you hadn’t known exactly what to do at the critical moment, we would have been neck-deep in the shit.”
The flaws in the plan seemed so obvious now: she only wished at least a few of them had occurred to her at the planning stage.
Action Team 491 stood in the shade of an ammat tree on the broad terrace of the Ngeni Palace, looking down the cliff at the Naxid checkpoint at the base of the road that zigzagged up the acropolis to the High City. The Naxids had shut down traffic entirely, and the long line of vehicles on the switchback road hadn’t moved in some time.
Probably the funicular wasn’t moving either. The High City was being sealed off while the search went on for the assassins.
“Cocktails?” PJ Ngeni said as he arrived with a tray.
Sula took a Citrine Fling from the tray and raised the other hand to lightly fluff the damp hair at the back of her neck. On arrival at the Ngeni Palace, she’d first insisted on a bath and a change of clothes before conducting her debriefing. The tub PJ had offered her was large enough for a troop, and once she’d applied a lavender-scented bath oil to the steaming water, she remained in the tub till her toes wrinkled.
Macnamara and Spence took their cocktails, sipped, and made gratified noises. PJ smiled.
“Any news, my lord?” Spence asked.
“No, Miss Ardelion.” Using the code name. “There hasn’t been a word on any of the news channels.”
“They haven’t made up their minds how to report it,” Sula said. “They can’t deny the explosion, and they can’t deny closing all the exits to the High City.”
“What are they going to do?” Spence’s dark eyes looked worried. “Search the High City for us?”
“I don’t think they’ve got enough personnel. The High City’s big, and they don’t have that many people here.” With the ring and its elevators destroyed, the Naxids had been forced to bring their forces to the surface using shuttles propelled by chemical rockets, shuttles of which they had a limited supply. The actual numbers of those brought down from orbit were still fairly small, and the new arrivals depended for order on Naxids already on the planet when they arrived.
“They could bring in Naxid police from outside the city,” Spence said.
Sula looked down at the road with its traffic frozen in place. “We’ll see them from here if they do. But I don’t think they will.” She sipped her Fling and gave a cold smile. “With all access to the High City cut off, the Naxids are essentially besieging themselves up here. I don’t think they can afford to keep it up for long.”
Team 491 and their host had a pleasant cocktail hour on the terrace, after which they adjourned to the sitting room to watch the news and await the arrival of the caterer. The last light of Shaamah gleamed a greenish pink on the window panes when the Naxid announcer said that a truck containing volatile chemicals had overturned on the Boulevard of the Praxis, causing an explosion and the unfortunate death of Lord Makish, Judge of the High Court, and his companion, Junior Fleet Commander Lord Renzak.
Sula broke out in laughter. “They denied it!” she said. “Perfect!”
No mention was made of a platoon of Naxid schoolchildren being wiped out, so Sula assumed they had weathered the bomb without many serious injuries.