The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

And maybe a little because she was a woman. "What will you have, citizens?" Eunice called. The porch was designed for speeches. Even without amplification, the modeling walls threw her powerful contralto out over the crowd. "Will you abandon God's Crusade for a whim?"

The uplifted faces were a blur to Tyl in the scatter of light sources that the mob carried. The crosses embroidered in white cloth on the left shoulders of their garments were clear enough to be recognized, though, and that was true whether the base color was red or black. There was motion behind him, but Tyl had eyes only for the mob.

Weapons glinted there. He couldn't tell if any of them were being aimed. The night-vision sensors in his face shield would have helped; but if he locked the shield down he'd be a mirror-faced threat to the crowd, and that might be all it took to draw the first shots . . . .

Desoix'd stepped onto the porch. He stood on the other side of Eunice Delcorio, and he was cursing with the fluency of a mercenary who's sleep-learned a lot of languages over the years.

The other woman was on the porch too. From the way the UDB officer was acting, she'd preceded rather than followed him.

The crowd's silence had dissolved in a dozen varied answers to Eunice's question, all underlain by blurred attempts to continue the chant of "Freedom!"

Something popped from the center of the mob. Tyl's left arm reached across Eunice's waist and was a heartbeat short of hurling the woman back through the doors no matter who stood behind her.A white flare burst fifty meters above the courtyard, harmless and high enough that it could be seen by even the tail of the mob stretching across the river.

The mob quieted after an anticipatory growl that shook the panels of the doors.

There was a motion at the flagstaff, near where the flare had been launched. Before Tyl could be sure what was happening, a handheld floodlight glared over the porch from the same location.

He stepped in front of the President's wife, bumping her out of the way with his hip, while his left hand locked the face shield down against the blinding radiance. The muzzle of his submachine-gun quested like an adder's tongue while his finger took up slack on the trigger.

"Wait!" boomed a voice from the mob in amplified startlement. The floodlight dimmed from a threat to comfortable illumination.

"I'll take over now, Eunice," said John Delcorio as his firm hand touched Tyl's upper arm, just beneath the shoulder flare of the clamshell armor.