Audacious (42 page)

“I think the ambulances are moving, finally,” he announced, “Yes, those blasted whirley gig lights are finally moving.”

“Let me know when the first one gets here,” Kris ordered, not releasing her grip on one pale, political fish. Maybe he was finally getting a good look at what lay around him.

Or maybe the closeness of his own brush with mortality was settling in.

A long minute later, the first ambulance arrived.

Kris didn’t even waste a sigh when she tossed the politician aside. His knees failed to support him, and he fell on a still oozing body. The lovely blonde did not stoop to offer him solace.

She’d spotted a newsie coming in and made a beeline for him.

Lieutenant Martinez arrived in the first wave, a pair of alternate media reports at his elbow. They looked around wide eyed. One lost her lunch, but they kept their cameras rolling.

This was not something that would be lost somewhere between the happening and the eleven o’clock news.

Oh, and Inspector Johnson showed up.

He made a beeline straight for Kris.

57

Kris
had a command to care for. One that had bled deeply.

Gunnery Sergeant Brown announced he was the proud owner of ten prisoners. “Would have been eleven, but dang if the officer that I personally plugged didn’t managed to smash a tooth or something and kill himself.”

“I sure wanted to talk to him,” Gunny finished.

“So did I, Gunny, but I’m starting to think Greenfeld’s powers that be don’t want to be at war with us any more than our honchos want to be at war with them, official like.”

Which seemed to leave Gunny Brown with something to chew on.

Kris knew that the first thing she should have done was go hunting for the ambassador. Instead, she trotted for the riverside walk to check on Captain DeVar. No surprise, the zoo collecting around her, trotted right along. Even Johnson.

The wounded captain was just being lifted onto a stretcher.

“He going to be okay?” Kris asked the nearest medic.

The woman looked worried. “He’s lost a lot of blood. We got to get him to Doc fast.”

“I’m too mean to let a little leakage put me down,” the captain grumbled, but his words were slurring.

“Gunny,” Kris said into her commlink, “we need a rig here fast for the captain.” She glanced around the field. There were several casualties that looked to have been hit hard by the auto-gun. More that had been hit too hard and were beyond aid.

“I got one rig able to roll. That whale of yours needs a new tire. Once the driver changes it, I’m sending it back to the embassy with the walking wounded.”

“Do that,” Kris agreed. “Just get me something back here that can handle four,” she said, eyeing the medic. The woman held up a hand with all fingers spread. “Five stretchers.”

“Damn, was it that bad back there?”

“It looks it,” Kris answered.

A Marine rig quickly arrived, shot up and limping, but going nevertheless. Tailing it were a pair of private rigs driven by loyal members of the Fraternal Order of Proud Caballeros.

And a newsie made to jam a mike under Kris’s oversize nose.

Inspector Johnson got in the way. “You can’t interview her.”

“Why not?”

Martinez stepped forward. “Because he doesn’t want you to know the only thing that stood between the liquidation of all our leaders and the survival of the few who did was these Marines from Wardhaven.”

“That’s not true,” Johnson insisted.

“Pan your camera over this field,” Martinez went on. “Who do you see down? Not Eden troops. You drove by the wreckage of our rapid reaction force. How close did it get?”

“Not very,” the reporter said.

“You’ve taken pictures inside the hall. Did you see any of our guards still alive?”

“My producer isn’t allowing us to show those pictures.” The reporter shivered at a memory. “It’s too bloody, but I can say that all I saw were Marines and a few private guards still alive. And some of their patrons,” she hastily added.

“You can’t say that,” Johnson insisted.

“I just did,” the reporter shot back. “And I said it to the”— she tapped her earbud—“to our ten million subscribers, including the nine million that just joined us tonight.”

“I’ll have your license canceled,” Johnson snapped through gritted teeth.

“You and what government?” the reporter snapped back. “Shirley Chisel of the opposition has already called for new elections.”

“They can’t make such a call.”

“They can if they’re not the opposition,” the reporter said with a grin. “A lot of them weren’t invited to this shindig tonight. And just making an educated guess at the survival rate of those that were, I’d say the majority party doesn’t have anything like a majority anymore. How many votes do you think they’ll have in the morning?”

Johnson paled.

And Kris did a quick look at her options.

Eden was changing. It could never be the same after this night. Oh, people like Johnson and his boss might try, but this tide was in full flow, and only fools got in the way of a riptide.

So what did that mean for her?

King Ray would probably try meddling in these people’s affairs. Kris was no longer blind to some of his less socially desirable habits. But she was here and he was not.

These people did not need a Longknife. Or rather, they’d had about all of a Longknife that they could take.

With a shrug, Kris made up her mind.

“If you will excuse me, I have wounded Marines I need to get to care before we lose them.” Kris saluted the reporter and the police lieutenant, and turned away.

“And my cops and caballeros are searching the great hall for any living soul,” Martinez said. “What do you say we get more pictures your producer can try to edit for public consumption?”

“Who did this?” the reporter asked as they left.

“We’ll be a long time investigating that question,” the cop said carefully. “Things like this aren’t accidents that just blow up one day. But at the bottom of it all, I think we’ll discover that we did this to ourselves.”

Kris went about her duty, hunting through every nook and cranny where a Marine might have fallen. She would leave no one behind. No one for the civilians to stumble across.

The wounded were dispatched to the embassy at first. But Doc was quickly overwhelmed. When Kris’s limo took off with the walking wounded like Penny, it headed for a hospital.

The search went through the night. The embassy sent a team of Foreign Service officers to hunt for the ambassador. They found him, along with the third political officer, a lovely middle-aged woman who had taken Kris’s place on his arm. They were among the dead on the ground floor. The attackers hadn’t even considered him important enough to herd upstairs.

Wardhaven’s officers took their leader back to the embassy.

Grant von Schrader was also found. The bronze foot of one of the landers had taken him full in the face, smashed his skull, and pinned him against the wall. They identified him by the contents of the wallet in his hip pocket. Kris ordered him left to hang there. “Let Eden pick up its own trash.”

The Marines gently collected their own honored dead on the grass in front of the west portico. The last of them was gently laid out just as sunrise colored the dawn sky. The pink of the reborn sun blushed their cheeks, tried to make them look warm and alive. The lie was painful to observe.

One of Martinez’s men showed up with blankets to give them decent cover.

And Kris had her final run-in with Inspector Johnson.

58

“The
President wants you and your Marines out of here,” Inspector Johnson started without preamble. “Off this planet. Out of the reach of these newsies and their cameras.”

“Your president is dead,” Princess Kristine, daughter to Wardhaven’s Prime Minister, reminded the inspector. It had been a rough night. Was the obvious slipping out of focus?

“The third vice president is not dead, and he is taking charge.”

Kris knew that such transfers were often automatically assumed by the uninformed. But there were procedures to be followed. “Has he taken the oath? You know, being third in line is still third in line until you raise your right hand and swear the words.” Politics turned on such fine distinctions.

That seemed to give Johnson pause. He blinked several times.

Kris gave him a moment to absorb that, then went on. “Besides, if the blond bimbo I saw him with right after the shooting stopped wasn’t his wife, I suspect your man is as politically dead as your president is physically.” Kris, after all, did grow up on politics.

Now Johnson blanched.

“I have my orders” had to be the final fallback of any poor bureaucrat.

“Is your third vice president aware I have dead and wounded to take care of?”

Another blank stare. Of course this politician had no idea what price had been paid by fighting men while he was up with his bimbo. Of course Johnson had no idea what Kris owed the wounded or fallen. Guys like Johnson wouldn’t have thought they owed them a dime.

“Nelly, get me Doc if you can.”

“Doc here” came back immediately.

“You in surgery?”

“No, Your Highness, I’ve got the worst of them stabilized. Which doesn’t mean we won’t lose a few more. Your Commander Mulhoney is in bad shape. I won’t know until this evening.”

“Should I come for a visit?”

“Your Highness, it’s not for me to tell you what to do, but everyone I’ve got here is asleep and needs to be. If you came, they wouldn’t know you had.”

“I’m being ordered off the planet, dumped into the first taxi in line,” Kris said.

“Ain’t that the way it goes. I keep telling folks that doing good deeds is a waste of time and effort, but who pays attention to a doctor.”

“I may call you back, Doc.”

“I’ll probably be too busy to take it.”

And Kris rung off.

“Can you get Penny?” She was on the line in a few seconds.

“What’s it look like back there?” the intel officer asked.

“Quiet at the moment. What’s it look like your way?”

“We got an entire wing to ourselves. They’re getting around to the last of the walking wounded now.”

“You still lugging that bit of statue?”

“Yep, but they gave me happy juice, so I’m feeling no pain.”

“I’m being ordered off the planet,” Kris said.

“Well, that didn’t take long,” Penny said with a snort.

“I need to know if you and yours are safe.”

“About as safe as we can be. A couple of Martinez’s Gay Caballeros are posted at our doors.”

“I think that’s
Proud
Caballeros,” Kris corrected.

“Well, they look pretty happy to me. I’m told they’re to keep the newsies out, but they’re doing a lousy job of it. I got one newsie at my elbow. We’ve been getting to know each other. Good woman. She’s looking forward to things changing so she can marry the father of her son.”

Beside Kris, Johnson looked to be having an epileptic fit.

“You’ll need to paint me a better picture than that,” Kris said.

“Seems that her baby has voting rights so long as she doesn’t marry or name his father. If she does, the kid’s franchise goes poof. If that dead horse goes away, she’ll marry, but not until.”

Kris smiled at Inspector Johnson. “Sounds like a lot of people are rooting for a change.”

“Sounds that way,” Penny said.

Johnson just shook his head. At the inevitable?

“So I take it that you’re as safe as you can be?” Kris said.

“Looks that way to me. How far they running you off.”

“I don’t plan to go farther than the Naval base on the space station.”

“Then you go make arrangements and us walking wounded will stumble in over the next couple of days. If we need rescue, I’m sure we can count on a Longknife.”

Kris glanced around as her net went silent. A new day was dawning, both literally and figuratively for Eden. There were a lot of newsies reporting it. She could spot at least six within her own field of vision.

With her wounded secure Kris asked the last question.

“How do you propose getting me out of here without a media zoo?” Kris said. She didn’t expect an answer to that one.

Silly her.

“There is a shuttle in the boathouse just north of here. It was there should the president ever have an emergency need of it.”

And the killers were trying to flee to the north. Now that was explained.

Kris had just one more show stopper. “How many Marines will this shuttle hold?” It was bad enough that she was leaving. She would not leave her company to slink back to the embassy.

They’d come here as a fighting unit and that was the way they would leave.

“The shuttle is a Boeing 2737. It holds a hundred.”

The inspector had her there. Maybe it was exhaustion. Or maybe it was an attack of common sense. But Kris said, “Then we shall see how many form up,” and called on Gunny Brown to form the company. Johnson might order her out, but there was one remaining duty Kris would not leave undone no matter how ungrateful this nation was to its saviors.

The Marines came when they were summoned. Some were still searching among the dead for any that might still live. Others had been standing guard because, after the horror of the night, people had discovered a need to guard themselves again.

The medics and lifesavers came with bloody hands and drawn faces.

They formed under Gunny’s watchful eye: First platoon. Second platoon, technical support. There was no spit and polish left on them. Those who had begun the night in bright red and blues finished it as blacked and worn as those who’d charged from the river in full, dripping, muddy, battle gear.

They found their place in rank and file to stand, exhausted, used beyond reason or measure. And counted off.

The count came out painfully short, so they put their heads together to fill it up to its proper measure. Some were on the list of Marines dispatched to hospitals. Others lay under blankets or in the body bags that had been required to collect what could be found.

So when the platoon leaders turned and reported all present or accounted for, Kris could see pride in Gunnery Sergeant Brown’s face as he turned to her and passed along the word.