Trouble has erupted again.
At 2030 hours, I receive an urgent call from President Zeloc, who does not bother to go through Sar Gremian, this time. Given the disturbance I am tracking through the heart of Madison, by way of law-enforcement broadcasts and news crews, his wild-eyed demeanor is not surprising. His order is no more than I expected to hear.
"Get yourself into town, machine! Now! We've got armed insurrection in the streets!"
I have been scanning all law enforcement, military, and commercial transmissions for the past sixty minutes. A massive Granger protest march is underway, demanding the immediate release of the Hancock Family detainees and opposing the wild demands for weapons confiscation, which the Senate and House of Law have already introduced, less than two hours after the violence at the PSF barracks near Port Town. I see no evidence of Grangers participating in armed rebellion, but the political demonstration underway has rapidly devolved into another explosive riot.
Police units are attempting to clear the protestors, using methods that qualify as brutal under any civilized standard of law-enforcement. The violence has spilled into the streets surrounding Assembly Hall, as urban counterprotestors put in their own appearance, blocking the retreat of the Grangers. From what I have been able to see, most of the Grangers are simply trying to get away from the truncheons and riot-bombs hurled at them by federal police. Those police have not used the paralytic agents that the ill-fated President Andrews used to disperse POPPA rioters sixteen years ago, but they are using what appears to be retch gas, as well as the more ubiquitous tear gas.
Caught between hammer and anvil, many of the Grangers have started tearing up anything that can be used as a weapon, smashing store windows to obtain broken glass and impromptu clubs from the merchandise behind them, tearing down street signs to use as shields, hurling stones and bricks and refuse cannisters at their attackers. With the riot shifting straight toward the Presidential Residence—which is virtually undefended, since most of the city's law enforcement officials were stationed at Assembly Hall to guard the Joint Assembly—the current state of affairs has sufficiently alarmed President Zeloc that he has put through a frantic call to me.
Despite the fact that Gifre Zeloc did nothing to prevent the violence gripping Madison today, the situation must be contained and I am apparently the only force sufficient to disperse a crowd of this size. I therefore leave Phil Fabrizio puttering in my maintenance depot, where he is attempting to learn the use of the major tools of his new trade. I clear the edge of Nineveh Base and enter the city, once again seriously hampered by the presence of panic-stricken motorists and pedestrians. I order the city's psychotronic electric power controller to shut down the grid, only to discover that I have been locked out of the system.
I cannot order the city's computers to turn off the grid. This leaves live power lines dancing wildly through each intersection I traverse, inevitably clipping newly installed cables and dragging down newly replaced traffic signals as I maneuver my bulk through the narrow spaces. It is an expensive business, ordering me to perform riot-control duties at the heart of a city. I broadcast warnings, ordering vehicles and pedestrians out of the way. I am still eleven blocks away when receive a second urgent call from Gifre Zeloc.
"What's taking you so long? Speed up, dammit! Those murderous bastards are practically spilling onto the lawn outside my window! They're armed like soldiers, out there. They're in open rebellion, and you're poking along at a goddamned crawl!"
"I am not authorized to inflict the kind of collateral damage to civilians that would occur if I were to increase my speed. I have avoided crushing anyone thus far, but I cannot maintain that if I am required to transit streets and intersections more rapidly."
"You're not paid to be a Good Samaritan! And your caution won't do me a hell of a lot of good, if you get here too late! Speed up. I want you here yesterday!"
This is an impossible command, since no Bolo ever built can reverse the flow of time. I have been given an order, however, to proceed more rapidly against an armed enemy. When I tap police cameras, I do, in fact, see actual weaponry in the hands of rioters. Whether these guns were stolen from stores along the way or smuggled into Madison is irrelevant. The situation has altered from one of mere riot-clearance duty.
"If I am to engage an armed enemy, I need to assume full Battle Reflex Alert status."
Gifre Zeloc scowls into his data screen. "The last thing I need is a Bolo shooting up downtown Madison! Just drive in here and flatten them. That'll teach the whole dirty pack of 'em the lesson they need. After today, they'll damned well know I won't tolerate armed arrogance."
I attempt to educate the man issuing my instructions. "Without my full battlefield cognitive functions, there is a serious risk of miscalculation—"
"I gave you an order, machine. Shut up and carry it out! If that's not too much for an antique rust bucket to understand."
The transmission ends.
The sensations skittering through my personality gestalt center resolve themselves into bitter, affronted anger. I have never been treated with such blatant contempt in the entire one hundred fifteen point nine-seven years of my active service. I am programmed to take pride in my accomplishments and my devoted service to my creators. Humans have often shown fear of me. This is logical, given what I am capable of doing. But not one human has ever shown me contempt.
I have no referents for dealing with the conflicts this arouses in my personality gestalt center. The blow to pride and prestige literally stuns me for six point nine-three seconds, an eternity of shock. Even as antiques, we are immensely capable machines, commanding the respect of those giving our orders. Is Gifre Zeloc the exception or the rule amongst Jefferson's new ruling class?
Ultimately, the answer is immaterial, as applied to the current mission. I speed up, although this results in an increased level of carnage as I crush cars abandoned by screaming passengers and turn corners too quickly for the terrain, taking off entire corners of buildings in the process and spilling rubble from ruptured walls in my wake.
I encounter the edge of the riot zone just as Gifre Zeloc starts screaming at me again through his commlink. "They're battering down the gates! I don't care how many of them you have to crush to get here, just stop them!"
Hundreds of people dressed as Grangers are spilling against the ornate scrollwork fencing. Those not carrying rifles and handguns are ripping iron stanchions out of the fence. They are shooting at anything and anyone that appears to be a threat. Gifre Zeloc is the legally elected head of Jefferson's government. Jefferson is a Concordiat-allied world, for which President Zeloc speaks as the official voice of the Concordiat. He acts as the Concordiat's officially designated commander. His life is in immediate and clear danger. The mob attempting to enter the grounds of the Presidential Residence can offer no harm to me, so I do not go to Battle Reflex Mode and do not engage my own weapons systems. But there is sufficient danger to the president that collateral damage to civilians is acceptable. I therefore broadcast a warning to the crowd, engage drive engines, and move forward, plowing through the jam-packed crowd blocking Darconi Street. I do not count the number of people who die beneath my treads. I have no wish to count them. My mission has been narrowly and explicitly defined. I turn off external audio sensors, unwilling to listen to the screams of those I have been ordered to crush on my way to the gates of the Presidential Residence.
I am fifty-three meters away from the gates when the entire scrollwork fence sways and goes down, pushed over by the panic-stricken crowd trying to escape. A massive wave of people spills across the Presidential Residence's lawn. Within two point zero-three seconds, the crowd engulfs the Residence. A substantial portion of the mob simply spills around it, intent on running as far and as fast as possible now that they have gained a space in which to run. Others, however, enter the Residence, intent on retribution. I cannot penetrate the walls deeply enough, even using ground-penetrating radar, to track their progress inside the Residency walls. I can, however, monitor the windows and do so, focusing on the massive round window of the president's office and smaller windows to either side, that reveal the interiors of adjacent rooms and the corridors beyond.
Gifre Zeloc has barricaded himself in his office, which overlooks the war-torn gardens. I do not know the location of the vice president. A mob of battle-enraged Grangers, clearly visible through adjacent windows, storms the corridor outside the president's office. I take immediate action. Snapping to full Battle Reflex Alert, I target through the Residency's outer stone shell, allowing for proper lead-time on a moving target, and fire 30cm cannons. The rounds punch through the walls and windows with satisfactory ease. I rake the mob inside the Residence with short bursts, taking down those in the leading edge first. This serves to create a barricade that others must either jump across or retreat from—or join, should they continue to exhibit hostile action.
The Grangers near the back of the mob inside the Residence hit the floor. Most of them drop their weapons as I send more live rounds through their ranks. They attempt to crawl back the way they came, leaving their weapons behind. I allow this, as their retreat does not endanger the president. I judge him to be safe from further assault—
Gifre Zeloc picks up a heavy chair and throws it through the window behind his desk. Glass shatters and falls to the garden below, where the mob from Darconi Street is still pouring across the downed fence and surging into the lawn ahead of my treads. Evidently panicked by the gunfire seven meters south of his office, he commits the most breathtakingly stupid act I have ever witnessed. Gifre Zeloc actually jumps out the window. He lands in the midst of a tight-packed mob of Grangers. I cannot fire without hitting him.
Seven point two seconds later, there is no longer a reason to fire. Gifre Zeloc has been reduced to a pulpy red mass under the clubs and feet of people pushed past break-point. A fire begins to blaze inside the Residence. The streets are too choked with debris and fleeing rioters for fire and rescue squads to reach the Residence, which begins to burn fiercely. I halt in stunned disbelief, with my treads zero point eight meters from the downed gates of the Presidential Residence.
He jumped.
He actually jumped into the middle of a blood-crazed mob of people with excellent reason to hate him. I see no further point in shooting into the crowd, which is a hopelessly tangled mixture of Grangers and urban counterprotestors, all of them intent on one goal: escape. Without a lawfully elected president to issue directives, I am left to make my own decisions, rendering me temporarily immobilized. I have, for the moment, full access to my Battle Reflex Alert logic processors, but even fully awake, I do not know what to do.
If this were a battle against Deng Yavacs or even the Quern, my duty would be clear. I would fight the enemy with every weapon I carry until the enemy was destroyed or I was. But I do not know what action to take in the aftermath of a riot that has claimed the life of the only civilian authorized to issue instructions to me. Perhaps, if I were human, my task would be clearer? I might mobilize the remnants of Jefferson's military forces. I might seek to impose a martial-law curfew after clearing the streets. I might order the Senate and House of Law cleared and the Assembly members escorted to a safe shelter.
I am a Bolo. I do not have the authority to do any of these things. I cannot even instruct the city's psychotronic system to turn off the power grid. A scan of the city behind my stern shows rising columns of smoke where fires have broken out in the wake of my passage. This is a dreadful situation. I have no idea what to do. I consider contacting the Brigade for help, but am unsure Sector Command would be able to offer any useful—let alone timely—advice on how to resolve a volatile situation on a world that is no longer of concern to most of the Brigade's command structure.
I am on my own.
And I do not like the choices facing me.
It finally occurs to me to review Jefferson's constitution to discover the chain of command regarding who is in line for the presidency. I must at least discover who is constitutionally authorized to make decisions in the event of a president's untimely departure from office. I do not know the whereabouts of Vice President Culver. She normally maintains an office in the Residence, but I do not know if she was in that office, which is now fiercely ablaze despite internal fire-suppression systems, which seem to have malfunctioned.
I put through a call to the vice presidential residence, attempting to ascertain her location, but no one responds to my signal. I theorize that they are too busy watching the fire consuming the Presidential Residence to answer something as relatively trivial as a transmission from a fthirteen-thousand-ton Bolo parked across the street. The next official in line for command is the Speaker of the House of Law, the most senior position in the Assembly, with the President of the Senate coming next in the list. I check security-camera feed from the Joint Chamber, where the Assembly watches a five-meter-tall datascreen in stunned silence. The images on that datascreen show the burning Residence and my own warhull, parked atop an unknown number of dead rioters.
I tap the datafeed and address the Assembly, much of which jumps in shock at the sound of my voice issuing from the speakers. "President Zeloc has been killed. I do not know the whereabouts of Vice President Culver. There are fires burning at the Presidential Residence and in the city, where downed power cables have sparked electrical fires consuming damaged buildings. It would be advisable for the Speaker of the House of Law to assume temporary command until the whereabouts of the vice president can be established. Madame Speaker, I require instructions."
The shaken woman who has held the post of speaker for eleven years—a span of time she has enjoyed thanks to the revocation of term limits, enacted by POPPA jurists appointed to the High Court—stares at the datascreen for twelve point three seconds, speechless and pale to the roots of her carefully colored hair. She finally regains the use of her wits and her voice.
"What am I supposed to do? Who is this? Who's talking?"
"I am Unit SOL-0045 of the Jeffersonian Defense Forces. I require instructions."
"About what?"
"I am a machine of war. This situation is not the type of combat I was designed to conduct. I do not know what to do. I require instructions."
Avelaine La Roux apparently has no idea what to do, either. She stares at the gavel in her hand, stares at the stunned faces of her colleagues, swallows convulsively several times. She finally finds something to say.
"We have to find Madeline. That's the important thing, we have to find Madeline. She's the president, now. You're sure Gifre is dead?"
"He jumped into a crowd of rioters and was bludgeoned to death before I could fire on those attacking him."
A collective shudder rushes through the room, followed by a rising snarl of anger. I foresee an impending planet-wide explosion of rage that will make all prior-existing anti-Granger sentiment look like attenuated smoke on the wind, by comparison. I do not foresee a likelihood that the Grangers will accept this without a fight. I offer a suggestion. "I would advise immediate mobilization of what military forces remain in operational condition. Public sentiment will doubtless express itself violently."
"Yes," Avelaine La Roux says, running a distracted hand through her hair, which disarranges its careful coiffeur. "Yes, I think you're right. Uh . . . How do I do that?"
It has been sufficiently long since Jefferson had a truly operational military structure, the person third in line for the presidency does not even know how to scramble the military for a world alert. She is, in large measure, responsible for the dismantling of that military structure, insisting that tax money was more productively spent protecting the rights of the urban poor and providing a "decent living wage" for those unable or unwilling to find gainful employment.
As a result, there are insufficient military resources to step in and act as peacekeepers until tempers have cooled and public hysteria has been calmed. I am not a policeman, but I fear that I may be forced into that role, by default. This does not send joy of any kind through my personality gestalt center. Darconi Street is covered with blood and spilled chemicals from ruptured vehicles. Flame and smoke blacken the skies from structural fires and spilled fuel and solvents which burn with a characteristic, dirty smoke. Once again, the heart of Madison resembles a war zone. This is not a war in which I am proud to have fought.
For the first time in my career, I know shame for having done my duty.
Kafari was halfway to Madison, flying at the Airdart's minimum speed in an effort to compose herself, when her wrist-comm beeped. It was an emergency signal, from Yalena. "Mom? Oh, God—Mommy—we're in trouble—"
The transmission was patchy, fading in and out. Kafari could hear a snarling roar in the background, the roar of thousands of voices locked in combat.
"Where are you?"
"I don't know—somewhere on Darconi Street. Ami-Lynn and I came down here to find out what's really going on. I went on the datachat boards, Mom, like you told me to, and it was just awful. So I called Ami-Lynn and Charmaine and we came downtown. We got caught in the mob and now we can't get out. There's barricades up everywhere and P-Squads blocking all the streets—we can't get out!"
Kafari hit the throttle. The Airdart roared forward, kicking her back into her seat. "Keep your wrist-comm on send. I'll home in on your signal. Can you get into a building somewhere?"
"No—we can't get near a doorway—too many people—"
The transmission broke up again. It sounded like Yalena was coughing. Or throwing up. Kafari was almost to Nineveh Base when she saw it. An immense, dark shape in the twilight. A moving shape, bristling with guns and speckled with running lights. Sonny. The Bolo was out of his maintenance depot, moving toward Madison. Fast. Something that big shouldn't move that fast. A mountain of steel and death, outsprinting her aircar . . .
"Oh, God." She jammed the controls to maximum acceleration and shot forward, flying nap-of-the-earth and hoping desperately that Sonny wouldn't decide her aircar was an enemy ship to be blasted from the sky. She homed in on Yalena's signal and tried to raise her daughter.
"Yalena? Can you hear me? C'mon, baby, can you hear me?"
A choked, garbled sound came back. "Urghh—y-yeah—hear you, Mommm—"
More horrible sounds left Kafari ice cold. "Yalena?"
"Yeah?"
"Baby, the Bolo's coming! Get off the street—I don't care how, just get off the street!"
"Trying—" More ghastly sounds came through.
Did those bastards use retch gas?
Better gas than nerve agent. Kafari raced Sonny neck-and-neck, pulled ahead, reached Madison's outlying suburbs before he did. The streets would slow him down. She might make it. There might be time to get in, to get Yalena and her friends out. She roared into Madison at lamp-post height, whipping around corners between office towers, car-sales lots, restaurants. Kafari was no fighter pilot, but Uncle Jasper would've been proud of her. She zipped under traffic-signal cables or whipped her nose up and shot over them, where trucks took up necessary airspace.
The signal from her daughter's wrist-comm was getting closer. Peripheral vision showed her a dense throng of people dead ahead, blocked by barricades and P-Squads. Madison's infamous enforcers stood shoulder-to-shoulder with shields locked, doing nothing to stop the riot, but preventing anyone from getting out of the riot zone. They were funneling people straight down Darconi Street, toward the Presidential Residence. Right into the path Sonny would follow.
It's murder, she realized in a split-second moment of horror. They mean to kill the protestors! And somewhere ahead, lost in a heaving, surging mass of trapped humanity and riot gas, Kafari's little girl was fighting to stay alive. Anger blazed to life. He's not killing my child!
Kafari slapped controls, killing her air-intake system, then her aircar slashed through trailing tendrils of gas, an arm's length above the helmeted, armored line of the P-Squad's dragoons. Somebody shot at her. She heard the impact against the undercarriage. A warning light flashed urgently on her boards. She swore viciously, unable to tear her attention away from navigating the riot gas and packed streets.
Uncle Jasper must've wrapped ghostly hands around hers more than once, as she whipped through the heart of the riot, on a virtual collision course with the Presidential Residence. Kafari was one block away from Yalena's wrist-comm signal when her aircar started losing power. "Damn!"
There was nowhere to set it down. Just a vast river of struggling, running, fighting people, punctuated by outcroppings of parked cars, toppled delivery vans, and wrecked signposts jutting up like spears where their signs had been ripped down. Then she spotted it. The long, low rooftop of a trendy dance club. Kafari gunned the engines, yanked on the controls, brought the nose up by sheer willpower. She gained precious elevation while the engines screamed, bleeding noise and God-alone knew what kind of parts across the packed streets. She was going to hit the upper windows. She wasn't going to make it—
The belly of her fuselage scraped the edge of the roof. They skidded across, leaving a metoric trail of sparks. Kafari cut the forward thrust, shunted all remaining power into the side-thrusters, and sent the air-frame into a wild spin. The world reeled out of control . . . Then firmed up again as the combination of friction and counterthrust brought her careening to a halt. She hung against the crash webbing for several ghastly seconds, just shaking.
I'm too old for this. Last time I did this kind of thing, I was still in college . . .
Then the world swam into focus and showed her a sight that dumped more adrenaline into her jangled system. An upper turret, studded with guns bigger than any trees Kafari had ever seen, was crawling its way down Darconi Street. Toward the Presidential Residence. Toward her. And Yalena . . .
Kafari slapped the restraints loose, tumbled out onto the roof. She dug into the bin under her seat and came up with the gun she had been carrying illegally for years. Kafari dragged on her belly-band holster, which tucked the gun snugly between her abdomen and the elasmer band, then hunted frantically for a way down from the roof.
There was a fire door. Locked from the inside. Kafari snatched a tool kit out of her car and jimmied the whole door off its frame. Terror lent her strength as Sonny's massive guns crawled inexorably closer. She could hear the sound of his treads chewing up pavement and cars and smaller things, the kind of things that screamed in mortal terror as they died. When she realized what she was seeing and hearing, Kafari ran cold to the bottom of her soul. They hadn't just ordered Sonny to break up the riot. The Bolo was running over people. Lots of people.
Her breath caught in her lungs for one horrified instant. Then she pulled the door the rest of the way off its hinges. She clattered down the stairs, found herself rushing through a building eerily empty by daylight. The dance hall was full of ghostly, discordant shadows. Memories lingered, revelries filled with the intoxicating taste of ruling-class luxury and power. Dusty shafts of sunlight lent the room a surreal, churchlike atmosphere, while outside, a rising shriek of terror, metal against bone, ran thick as blood.
She found another staircase that took her from the dance floor to the street level. She emerged into a restaurant that fronted Darconi Street. The restaurant was packed with people. More were trying to shove through the door, creating the worst log-jam of human bodies Kafari had ever witnessed. The only way to cross the restaurant was by going up. Kafari jumped onto the nearest table and started running, leaping from one table to the next, scattering cutlery and water glasses and plates full of food. People around her were screaming, but she hardly heard them over the volcanic roar in the street.
When she reached the tables closest to the windows, she searched frantically for her daughter in the crowd beyond. The signal on Kafari's wrist-comm said she was close, so close, she ought to be able to see her daughter by now. "YALENA!"
Screaming at the top of her voice made about as much noise as a bee's wings trying to flee an erupting volcano. Then she spotted a wild shock of neon-green hair and recognized Yalena's best friend, Ami-Lynn. Charmaine was with her, too. And there was Yalena. They were close to the sidewalk, caught in a mass of people with nowhere to go. For Yalena, there was no way in. For Kafari, there was no way out.
So she made one.
Kafari snatched up an overturned chair and threw it at the plate glass. The window shattered, raining slivers onto the heads of stunned people on the sidewalk, who couldn't quite believe that somebody would want to go out instead of in. "Yalena!"
Her daughter looked around, saw her standing in the shattered window.
"MOM!"
"Get through the window! Sonny's coming!"
Yalena looked back, saw the Bolo for the first time. Her eyes, streaming and blood-red from the retch gas, widened. "Oh—my—God—"
She started shoving her way toward Kafari. Other people were moving toward the broken window. Terror-stricken people, who shoved against the splintered glass, pushed the broken shards out of their way, climbed across the busted-out sill. Kafari snatched people up by shirt collars, belts, the backs of expensive dresses, throwing them into the restaurant. Anything to clear enough space for Yalena to reach the window. Her daughter was fighting through the crowd, dragging Ami-Lynn and Charmaine with her. The roar from the street was bone-shaking. Sonny's massive warhull blocked the fading twilight, half-a-block away and coming like a flintsteel tide. She could hear his voice, familiar, horrifying. He was broadcasting loudly enough that the words were clearly audible, even above the roar.
"I have been ordered by President Zeloc to run over anyone between me and the Presidential Residence. Clear the streets. I have been ordered . . ."
Yalena was two meters away . . . a meter and a half . . . a meter from Kafari's outstretched hand. "Come on!" she shouted, "Keep moving!"
People were struggling to pass her, trying to shove Yalena out of the way. A big, beefy lout with a broken signpost in each fist was clubbing people, trying to reach the window where Kafari had created the only way out of the street. He started to swing at Yalena—
Kafari ripped the gun loose from her holster and fired. From a meter and a half out, the bullet slammed into his face like a sledgehammer. It left a stunned expression of disbelief on his face. And a hole straight through his braincase. The club slid from his hand and he toppled, falling against a woman behind him.
Yalena lunged forward. Ami-Lynn and Charmaine tripped and fell. Both girls went down. Just beyond, Sonny's treads were the only thing she could see. The immense treads were red, drenched in blood and other things . . .
"Yalena!" Kafari screamed, tearing her throat. The world paused. Everything came to a ghastly standstill. The crush of people, the crackle of heat, the wind. Even Sonny. Just long enough. Kafari leaned out into a tunnel of silence. Grabbed her daughter's hand. Hauled her across the broken glass. Then Yalena was in her arms. She dragged her daughter away from the window, making room for others. She couldn't see Ami-Lynn or Charmaine anywhere.
Then a massive shadow blocked the sunlight. Darkness engulfed the little restaurant, like a sudden eclipse of the sun. Sound roared back into her ears. The walls rattled. Overhead lights jangled. Dishes danced, some of them crashing to the floor. Nightmare memories broke loose, memories of the ground shaking under her feet as titans fought to possess it. Only this time, the titans weren't defending them. Sonny's treads scraped the edges of the restaurant. Kafari turned her head, unable to watch the slaughter of those still outside, but the screams were etched onto the marrow of her bones.
Yalena clung to her, sobbing and trembling. The ghastly silence that followed in the Bolo's wake was almost worse than the screaming. Nobody seemed willing to move. Sonny kept grinding his way toward the Presidential Residence. The farther he moved toward it, the worse the silence grew.
The sudden discharge of his guns sent a shockwave through the jam-packed restaurant. Screams erupted again. Yalena jumped in Kafari's arms. Kafari shut her eyes, not even wanting to know what he'd just fired at. All she wanted was to get her baby out of this horror. With her aircar a wreck on the roof, she didn't have the faintest idea how to get out. They couldn't walk out, that was certain. She had no desire to tangle with the P-Squads who'd made sure their victims couldn't escape.
Worse, she was carrying a gun. Had shot a man with it, in front of several hundred witnesses, any one of whom could put Kafari in jail or a rehab facility for life. This was mostly an urban crowd, people who already hated Grangers and their so-called "cult of violence." They were more than capable of lynch-mob destruction if provoked.
They had just been provoked.
She shook Yalena and said in a low, urgent voice, "C'mon, baby, we've got to go. Now." Yalena looked up through swollen, tear-reddened eyes. "Wh-where are Ami-Lynn and . . ." Her voice trailed off when she realized her friends weren't in the restaurant with them. She started to get up. Looked out the broken window before Kafari could stop her. Turned dead-fish white. The shock in her eyes ran to the bottom of her soul.
In that moment of acid-etched pain, the girl POPPA had stolen from them abruptly proved herself Simon Khrustinov's daughter. Her eyes went hard and her chin came up. She spat through the window, the most eloquent gesture of defiance Kafari had ever witnessed. Then she stood up on shaking legs and started looking for exits.
"Across the tables." Kafari said, grimly pulling her daughter behind her. They retraced Kafari's path a little drunkenly, since many of the tables had been knocked over in the panic-stricken crush of refugees. Most of those refugees looked up in numb silence, too shell-shocked to respond to their exodus. Given time—maybe as little as two or three minutes—that stunned crowd was going to transform itself into an unholy killing mob.
They made it to the staircase and fled silently upwards, reaching the dance hall's cathedral solitude. Kafari closed the upper doors softly and slid part of a microphone stand from the stage through the door handles, forming an effective if temporary lock.
Once the door was as secure as she could make it, Kafari turned to survey the room. The damage from Sonny's passage was apparent, even here. Some of the stained glass had been broken out. Yalena was having trouble walking. For reasons she didn't have time to determine, her daughter was staring at Kafari in a way nobody had since Abraham Lendan had met her gaze across the rubble of a refuse-strewn cellar, asking her what to do next.
"We have to get out of Madison. This part of it, anyway. Those folks downstairs are going to start looking for somebody to blame. I have no intention of that someone being us."
Yalena looked like she wanted to ask something important, but didn't want to interrupt their escape to do it. "What do we do?" she asked, instead.
"We find food and water we can carry and we get the hell out of this building."
A curtain concealed the back of the stage. Kafari headed that way, betting there were dressing rooms where band members grabbed a bite to eat between dance sets. They found a small kitchenette stocked with food and plenty of beverages. "Fill your pockets. In fact, grab some of those costumes," she nodded toward a rack full of glittering clothing, "and tie off sleeves and pants legs to form carry-sacks. God knows how long we're going to have to hide before it's safe to come out."
"Where . . ." She got her voice under control. "Where are we going to hide?"
"I'm trying to work that out. We're short on time and options are limited. Do you have a hand-comp with you?"
Yalena shook her head. Kafari's was sitting on the passenger seat of her aircar, or had been before that wild skid. "Mine's in the aircar. I've got to know what's happening. If you hear anyone trying to break down those doors, head for the roof and we'll figure something out."
"The aircar? Can't we just fly out?"
Kafari grimaced. "No. The P-Squads shot me down. More or less. I crashed on the roof."
"Oh. God, that must've been . . ." Her voice trailed off, helplessly.
Kafari summoned a brief grin that stunned her daughter. "The landing was nothing to the flying I did, getting here ahead of Sonny. I had to fly all the way from Klameth Canyon."
Yalena's chin shook for a dangerous moment and she blinked hard, then she just nodded and started dumping food and bottled water into the makeshift carry sacks. Kafari headed for the roof. She was worried about the wrecked aircar. It had her identification in it, some of her personal belongings. When it was noticed, someone was going to start poking around, looking for the owner. That attempt might lead to a number of very unpleasant outcomes.
The broken door was still ajar from her frantic rush down. She took a quick look around, then crouched low and sprinted for the aircar. The damage was evident at once. The airframe had tipped slightly on its skid across the roof, tilting it enough to see the hole where a riot gun had punched through the relatively thin outer hull. The pilot's compartment had been reinforced heavily, but the alloy in the airframe, itself, was of necessity lightweight. A 20mm slug had chewed its way through the housing and sliced into an assembly that fed power from the drive engines to the lift vanes. No wonder she'd lost acceleration. If she could replace the damaged module, they could fly out.
She didn't feel like scrounging for a replacement, not with the kind of security that would be crawling all over them, pretty soon. From her perch atop the roof, she could see Sonny's warhull. He had halted at the edge of the lawn around the Presidential Residence. A crowd of people had surged over the high fence, fleeing the Bolo's treads. Most of the people in it were busy running away as fast as mere feet could carry them. Then Kafari blinked, suspicious for a moment that her eyes were playing tricks on her in the drifts and eddies of riot gas in the last of the twilight. It had looked at first glance like the Residence was burning. Then she saw flames in the upper-story windows. It was burning.
Somehow, in the middle of the craziness, the Residence had been torched. By Sonny? She found that hard to believe, although it looked like a dark line of holes had been stitched across the side of the building, just to the left of the famous rose window of the president's office. That window bled light from the inside, where the glass had been shattered. What had Sonny been shooting at, when they'd heard the discharge of his guns? Enraged Grangers? Had they stormed the Residence, bent on vengeance?
She crept into the cockpit, found her hand-comp on the floor, switched on the viewscreen. The news reports were garbled, but none of them showed the truly hair-raising sight of the Presidential Residence going up in flames. She narrowed her eyes. Somebody was censoring the news. On a really big scale. Why? There were no aircars visible anywhere in Madison's skies. Not even news crews with aerial cameras.
POPPA censorship had never been used for humanitarian reasons, so their goal couldn't be an attempt to defuse the anti-Granger violence bound to erupt in the wake of a riot this big. Why, then? Her eyes widened as the implications hit home. Something had happened to the president. Maybe the vice president, as well. "My God," she whispered, crouched on the bottom of her aircar's cockpit. "They'll spark a witch-hunt. The mobs will turn the Adero farms into slaughterhouses." They'd kill anybody who looked even faintly like a Granger. She had to get Yalena out. Now.
How?
Mind spinning, she tried to think what to do, how to get herself and a shell-shocked adolescent girl out of a killing ground that the government had blockaded and would lock down so tightly, not even a rat would be able to wriggle its way through. She could call for help, but the nearest help was in Klameth Canyon. By the time anyone could reach them, somebody would have thought to ground air traffic planet-wide, controlling movement by potential "enemies of the people."
They couldn't get out through the streets. They had to go either up or down. Up was not possible. That left down as the only viable option. The sewers presented themselves as an attractive alternative. Kafari narrowed her eyes. If they could crawl through the sewers, come up a few streets away . . . Coming up would be a problem, with Madison set to explode. The civilian emergency shelters would be more sanitary, if they were close to any. Downtown Madison was supposed to be riddled with below-ground shelters, in case of renewed attack by the Deng.
She keyed her hand-comp to access the datanet and found an emergency evacuation map. There wasn't a shelter anywhere near the dance club. Not close enough to gain it without going out into the streets. Scratch that idea. It was the sewers or nothing. Kafari moved across the roof at a low crawl, easing her way gingerly so she didn't skyline herself. She slid herself to the back of the dance club, which overlooked an alley through which delivery trucks brought in supplies for the restaurant and dance club. There were dumpsters for refuse and a couple of groundcars parked near the service exit. The building behind the dance club was taller, a three-story structure that apparently housed tri-d screens stacked vertically, to conserve expensive downtown real-estate.
Between the two buildings, Kafari spotted a tell-tale metal circle embedded in the pavement, providing access for sewer-system maintenance techs. All they had to do was reach the alley, pry up the cover, climb down, and pull the lid back on top of themselves. And at the moment, nobody was in sight to notice them doing it. Kafari peered over the edge of the dance club's roof, trying to see if there might be a way down from here. She spotted a fire escape farther along, allowing rapid exit through one of the dance hall's windows. That ought to serve nicely. Kafari rolled back from the edge, crawled across the roof, then skinned her way down the stairs and found Yalena waiting for her.
"The Presidential Residence is burning. There's no report of it anywhere, no aerial news crews, not even a peep on the datachats. I think Gifre Zeloc's been killed and a news blackout's been ordered."
Yalena gasped. Then once again, she demonstrated her father's cool level-headedness under fire. "They'll blame Grangers. Won't they? We have to get out of Madison. And . . ." She bit one lip, then said it anyway. "And we have to warn people, somehow. On the farms." She swallowed, realizing how that sounded, coming from her, then she lifted her chin in defiance and said, "Well, we do. Especially the Adero farms."
Kafari reached out and touched her daughter's tear-stained cheek, smeared with makeup and dirt and horror. This stubborn, brainwashed child had just slashed through fifteen years of indoctrination, had finally realized that people she had considered "the enemy" all her life were about to be slaughtered without mercy. "Yalena," she said, reaching back across the years to a memory very precious to her, "I am proud to be your mama."
Yalena started to cry, gulped the sound back, tried to stiffen her shoulders.
In that moment, Kafari knew they would be all right. If they could survive.