Spartan Planet - A. Bertram Chandler [48]
"What pickings?"
"Food . . . wine . . . Those . . . bloody . . . doctors . . . worse . . . 'n . . . bloody . . . soldiers . . . Small . . . wonder . . . the . . . King . . . has . . . turned . . . against . . . 'em."
"And . . . the Arcadians?"
"Wouldn't . . . touch . . . one . . . o' . . . them . . . wi' . . . barge . . . pole. Unsightly . . . monsters."
Ahead, the roar of the mob had risen to an ugly and frightening intensity. There were flames, too, leaping high, a billowing glare in the night sky. The crowd had broken into a villa close by the crèche, the Club House of the senior nursing staff. They had dragged furniture out into the roadway and set fire to it. Some of its unfortunate owners fluttered ineffectually about the blaze and, until one of them had the sense to organize his mates into a bucket party, were treated with rough derision only. And then the crowd turned upon the firemen, beating them, even throwing three of them into the bonfire. Two of them managed to scramble clear and ran, screaming, their robes ablaze. The other just lay there, writhing and shrieking.
Brasidus was sickened. There was nothing that he could do. He was alone and unarmed—and most of the soldiers among the rioters carried their short swords and some of them were already using them, hacking down the surviving nurses who were still foolish enough to try to save their property. There was nothing at all that he could do—and he should have been in uniform, not in these rags, and armed, with a squad of men at his command, doing his utmost to quell the disorder.
Damn Diomedes! he thought. He knew, with sudden clarity, where his real loyalties lay—to the maintenance of law and order and, on a more personal level, to his friend Achron, on duty inside the crèche and soon, almost inevitably, to be treated as had been these hacked and incinerated colleagues of his.
The Andronicus warehouse . . .
Nobody noticed him as he crossed the road to that building; the main body of the rioters was attempting to force the huge door of the crèche with a battering ram improvised from a torn-down streetlamp standard. And then, looking at the massive door set in the black, featureless wall of the warehouse, he realized that he was in dire need of such an implement himself. He could, he knew, enlist the aid of men on the fringes of the crowd eager for some violence in which they, themselves, could take part—but that was the last thing that he wanted. He would enter the crèche alone, if at all.
But how?
How?
Overhead, barely audible, there was a peculiar throbbing noise, an irregular beat. He thought, So the Navy is intervening, then realized that the sound was not that of an airship's engines. He looked up, saw flickering, ruddy light reflected from an oval surface. And then, in a whisper that seemed to originate only an inch from his ear, a familiar voice asked, "Is that you, Brasidus?"
"Yes."
"I owe you plenty. We'll pick you up and take you clear of this mess. I had to promise not to intervene—I'm just observing and recording—but I'll always break a promise to help a friend."
"I don't want to be picked up, Peggy."
"Then what the hell do you want? "
"I want to get into this warehouse. But the door is locked, and there aren't any windows, and I haven't any explosives."
"You could get your friends to help. Or don't you want to share the loot?"
"I'm not looting. And I want to get into the crèche by myself, not with a mob."
"I wouldn't mind a look inside myself, before it's too late. Hold on, I'll be right with you." Then, in a fainter voice, she was giving orders to somebody in the flying machine. "I'm going down, George. Get the ladder over, will you? Yes, yes, I know what Commander Grimes said, but Brasidus saved my life. And you just keep stooging around in the pinnace, and be ready to come a-runnin' to pick us up when I yell for you .