Rain slashes down from yet another storm, pouring off my battered warhull in rivers and waterfalls I can feel, but cannot see. The water and my warhull are so closely matched in temperature, there is very little heat difference to give the water a distinct IR signature. It has been raining almost nonstop for a week. I lie in the mud, a flintsteel whale beached on an inhospitable shore. I spend most of my time only semiaware, in a state more conscious than retreat to my survival center, but less awake than Standby Alert.
My proximity-alarm system is set to jerk me into full consciousness if any nonauthorized vehicle or pedestrian approaches my exclusion zone. This extends three hundred meters in all directions—including down. Commodore Oroton is more than capable of ordering sappers to enter the sewers near the massive subsidized-housing tenements—shoddy blocks of concrete twenty stories high and a thousand meters long, where subsistence recipients are packed in like rabbits in a giant warren—that surround my erstwhile depot. It would not be difficult for engineers to tunnel their way under the scorched earth of my former depot. Setting off another octocellulose bomb at point-blank range would doubtless end my career as a Unit of the Line. Not by catastrophic hull-breach, but by the simple expediency of destroying more critical systems than Jefferson's bankrupt government can afford to repair.
I therefore keep my electronic ears to the ground—literally.
The P-Squad guards stationed in a tight defensive ring around me are diligent in doing their duty, rain or shine, which is to guard me from any further possible attack. Why they think this is necessary, I am not sure, since I still have functional antipersonnel guns along prow and stern and starboard side. I am capable, if need be, of taking out any vehicle that tries to approach me. If, of course, I could identify it as a threat in time to act.
On further thought, the guards are not superfluous.
Their diligence is understandable, since Commodore Oroton has, naturally enough, taken full advantage of my critical injuries. The rebel commander has launched a major offensive campaign, coordinating a series of rapier-sharp surgical strikes in every major city on Jefferson. P-Squad headquarters units—having grown complacent and arrogant during their long and uncontested rule over Jefferson's city streets—have been shaken out of their complacency. The P-Squads are under literal bombardment with rockets, hyper-v missiles, and octocellulose bombs.
Rebel strikes have reduced eight major stations to rubble, destroyed fifty-three vehicles, and killed three hundred twelve officers in garrison. Foot and groundcar patrols are shot by snipers two and three times a day. Aircars are only marginally safer from attack, since the rebellion is amply supplied with the means to knock them out of the sky. Mobile Hellbore attacks have demolished weapons storage bunkers, depriving federal and local police of weaponry and munitions.
The broadcast media is calling for retaliatory strikes, without bothering to clarify where, exactly, the strikes should occur, since rebel strongholds have not yet been identified. The House of Law and Senate wrangle daily as members of the Assembly disagree on the best way to end the rebellion's reign of terror. Most of their suggested solutions are completely ineffectual and several are downright disastrous. The measures with the greatest support—and therefore the most likely to be passed into law—are so draconian, humanity's first codified law-giver, Hammurabi himself, would have protested the barbarity.
Meanwhile, nothing actually gets done and the rebels continue attacking.
P-Squad reprisals are turning savage as officers vent their anger, frustration, and fear on forcibly disarmed victims. The flow of convicted Grangers, sympathizers, dissidents, protestors, and angry, disillusioned subsistence recipients has risen from a steady river to a flood that has, by the end of one week, clogged the jails and tied up the courts. The speed with which Jefferson rockets its way toward planet-wide crisis surprises even me.
And there is very little I can do about any of it.
At the request of engineers from Shiva, Inc., Vishnu's preeminent weapons lab, I have sent detailed diagnostics via SWIFT, listing system failures and the necessary parts required to repair or replace them. The ship is already in transit, leaving me with very little to do but await their arrival—
A massive explosion rocks Madison. The flash creates a heat strobe that momentarily blots out every IR sensor still functioning. The shockwave rockets across my warhull with sufficient force to sing through my stern-mounted sensor arrays. The blast-point is less than three kilometers away from my position, originating in an enclave where Jefferson's movie stars and POPPA's upper echelon party members have built mansions behind heavily guarded gates and electrified perimeter fences.
An eerie, chilling silence follows the blast. For a moment, it seems almost like the entire city has gone silent, listening for echoes of that explosion. Rain, pouring relentlessly from leaden skies, will at least help the fire department battle the blaze from whatever was just destroyed. This attack deviates sharply from previous rebel strikes, in that it has apparently targeted an entire neighborhood, rather than a surgically precise action against a specific individual. I am trying to consider the ramifications of this when a wildcat broadcast preempts the datanet.
"Pigs of POPPA, be warned!" an angry, exultant voice shouts. "You ain't seen nuthin', you murderous bastards! You think Grangers are bad-ass? Hah! Oroton's a goddamned pussy with gloves on. There ain't never been gloves on our hands and there ain't never gonna be, neither. We're the Rat Guard Militia and we're your worst fuckin' nightmare!"
The illegal broadcast ends.
Vittori Santorini has a new enemy.
Sirens have begun to scream as emergency vehicles rush toward the conflagration that is still burning, despite the heavy rain. By my conservative estimate, the bomb that went off was larger than the one Oroton's crew detonated in my face. I wonder, abruptly, if Commodore Oroton really was the mastermind of the attack on me. Frank did not look or sound like a Granger. It would be nearly as difficult for a Granger to masquerade as an urban thug as it has been for an urban spy to pose as a Granger. Frank was one of a select crew that passed muster as politically trustworthy. Sar Gremian vetted the repair crew, himself, which suggests that Frank had no ties at all to anything or anyone remotely connected to Grangerism.
In one sense, I am surprised that it has taken this long for an urban resistance movement to blossom. I mull variables and surmise that subsistence recipients, carefully indoctrinated with learned helplessness and systematically deprived of a genuine education, have never understood that thinking for one's self is a desirable trait. It has taken both time and extreme discomfort with living conditions to rouse the urban population into a simple realization that something could be done and that they, themselves, can act on their own behalf.
Clearly, it has occurred to someone, now.
This does not bode well for the future of civil tranquility. The urban poor have been encouraged, for nearly twenty years, to turn their dissatisfaction into violent action, rioting and looting at command. POPPA's favorite tactic for crushing Granger independence has now reached its ultimate and logical denouement: the mob has turned on its creator, as mobs have done throughout humanity's gore-stained history.
I pick up broadcasts as news crews rush to the scene of the explosion. I am able to "see" the damage via their electronic video footage, since it can be routed directly through my psychotronics, bypassing my malfunctioning sensors. That footage is spectacular. Breandan Shores, the most exclusive enclave of mansions anywhere on Jefferson, is a cratered ruin. The blast radius is nearly half a kilometer wide. It is impossible to tell how many homes have been destroyed, because there is very little left but mangled piles of smouldering rubble. Steam rises from it, meeting the rain that pours into the heart of the incinerated mass.
The ring of secondary damage, beyond the actual crater, is a scene of carnage, with houses and retail stores caved in, windows shattered, and ground vehicles flipped end-for-end like jackstraws in a high wind. Emergency workers are searching the rubble, looking for survivors. There are not enough crews anywhere in Madison to deal with destruction of this magnitude. Madison's civil emergency director issues a plea for rescue teams and medical professionals from other cities to help with the crisis.
Pol Jankovitch, Jefferson's preeminent news anchor, sits in his studio in downtown Madison, watching the footage from camera crews on the ground and in hovering aircars, and cannot find anything coherent to say. He mumbles in disjointed snatches. "Dear God," he says over and over, "this is terrible. This is just terrible. Hundreds must be dead. Thousands, maybe. Dear God, how could they do it? Innocent people . . ."
I doubt that Pol Jankovitch appreciates the irony of what he has just said.
He has fostered, aided, and abetted a government that routinely and systematically scapegoated innocent people as a method of acquiring political power. He does not see, let alone understand, his own culpability, the personal responsibility he bears for having helped create the POPPA regime—and therefore, by logical extension, his responsibility for today's bombing, in rebellion against POPPA's preferred methods of governance.
My personality gestalt circuitry, in a cross-protocol handshake of checks and balances, suppresses that line of thought. This is dangerous ground for a Bolo to tread. I am programmed for obedience to legitimate orders. I am not required to like or approve of those giving my orders. I am not designed to question the motives of those issuing orders, unless I am presented with clear evidence of treason to the Concordiat or am told to do something that violates my primary mission. I dare not enter the minefield of moral ambiguity that inevitably surrounds any questions of personal responsibility and duty.
I concentrate, instead, on the unfolding news coverage as Jefferson's media moguls attempt to come to grips with the reality of this newest attack. Speculation on who might have been killed runs rampant during the next thirty confused minutes. Pol Jankovitch, working from a hastily assembled map of the bombed area, runs down a laundry list of Jefferson's glittering elite whose homes were inside the circle of destruction.
Mirabelle Caresse, owned a mansion at what appears to have been the very center of the crater. Close neighbors included media tycoon Dexter Courtland; the mayor of Madison; and the Supreme Commandant of Jefferson's P-Squads. Her closest neighbor, however, was Isanah Renke, who began her career as a POPPA party attorney advising the Santorinis as to what methods would prove most effective, from a legal standpoint, in their bid for power. Her reward for this fanatical support of POPPA's credo of "universal fairness" and "the birthright of economic equity" was appointment to Jefferson's High Court, where she has carried out a never-ending assault on various provisions in the constitution that the Santorinis found inconvenient, convincing other High Justices to uphold legislation that is at direct variance with constitutional provisions. She has also aided and abetted the destruction of the Granger population and culture by convincing the High Court to permit POPPA's "work camps" to stand as legal, lawful entities.
It would appear that Isanah Renke's influence in the High Court has just come to an explosive end, since this is a Saturday and most government and corporate offices—including the High Court—are closed for the weekend.
Witnesses from the edges of the blast zone describe in shaky detail the experience of being caught in the shockwave, which turned broken windows into flying knives and debris into shock-thrown shrapnel. Several of these surviving witnesses claim to have been inside the guarded enclave just before the blast, having delivered truckloads of supplies for a major social function at Mirabelle Caresse's mansion. I theorize that at least one of those trucks was packed with something besides catering supplies.
Thirty-eight minutes into the news broadcast, Vittori Santorini's press secretary and chief propagandist, Gust Ordwyn, makes an appearance from the studio built inside the new president's residence, the so-called "People's Palace" commissioned by Vittori Santorini shortly after his landslide election. Mr. Ordwyn is visibly shaken as he steps up to the podium, where he faces a sea of reporters clamoring for details. There is fear in his eyes, but anger in his voice as he begins to speak.
"The monstrous attack on Breandan Shores, today, has claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians and injured thousands more. This attack reveals with cold and graphic clarity how inhuman Granger cult fanatics really are. Their so-called rebellion is no longer a matter of attacks against hard-working police and dedicated public servants. These filthy terrorists will not rest until every decent, honest person on Jefferson is either dead or helpless under Granger guns and bombs. President Santorini is shocked and horrified by the carnage inflicted today. He understands only too bitterly the grief, the anguished outrage, suffered by the families of today's victims. He, too, has lost a dearly loved family member. Vice President Nassiona . . ." Gust Ordwyn's voice goes savagely unsteady.
He wipes tears from his eyes as reporters watch in stunned silence. "Our beloved Nassiona, you see, was in Mirabelle Caresse's mansion, today. Mirabelle had graciously opened her home to host a charity benefit, this afternoon, to raise money for medical care for poverty-stricken children. Nassiona had been in the mansion since early this morning, helping Mirabelle with preparations for the benefit. She was greeting guests when that foul, murderous bomb . . ."
Vittori Santorini's chief propagandist halts, choked into silence by the all-too-apparent rage and grief visible in his face. The reporters sit motionless, so stunned by this news that not one of them interrupts with questions. Despite the on-going attacks against police patrols and corrupt officials, Jefferson's news media apparently believed that POPPA's upper-echelon leadership was inviolate, safe from reprisals simply by virtue of their sanctified positions in the party. They are inviolate no longer. The reporters are confronting, for the first time in their professional careers, the brutal fact that no one, no matter how highly placed, is safe from the retribution of people who have had enough.
Gust Ordwyn is preparing to speak again when a door to the left of the podium crashes open. Ordwyn turns sharply. The cameras swing around. Vittori Santorini bursts into the room with a thunderclap, eyes wild and full of lightning. Reporters surge to their feet, electrified by the appearance of Jefferson's president. There is mad grief in Vittori Santorini's gaze and hatred in the clawed fingers that shove Gust Ordwyn aside and latch onto the podium. He glares into the cameras, staring at something I suspect no one else can see, like a lunatic attacking shadows that do not exist. His mouth works soundlessly for seven point three-five seconds.
When he finds his voice, the sound is harsh, like power saws biting into stone.
"The people murdered today, helpless, innocent people in their own lovely homes, will be avenged. This savagery will not go unpunished! I will not rest until justice is served. I will not stop until we have spilled enough blood to appease our loved ones' murdered souls. We must—we will—destroy these butchers, down to the last mad killer. Death, I say! Death to all of them, to all our enemies, everywhere. These terrorists must die. Must suffer terror and agony, as we have suffered. I swear before the gods of our ancestors, I will destroy these fiends!"
The reporters sit in stunned silence.
"Mark me well, for my patience is at an end. I have done with playing by civilized rules. The Granger scourge has forfeited any right to justice or compassion. They have nurtured their deadly cult of violence like a gardener tending rank weeds. They hate us blindly and absolutely. They have fed that hatred, fed it lovingly, like a madman flinging meat to wild lions. They have poisoned our soil, destroyed our world's prosperity. We must heed the lessons taught by our holiest of books, lessons that give us this warning: 'By their fruits shall ye know them.'
"I ask you, my dearest friends, what are the fruits these Grangers have produced? Terrorism! Hatred! Murder! An army of sick monsters! They have fed their hatred with lies. They have smuggled in weapons from off-world gunrunners. They have ordered their butchers to kill us like rabid wolves. They have plunged a knife into the hearts and souls of POPPA's finest and most generous . . ."
His voice breaks apart like thin ice. He stands motionless behind the podium, staring wildly at nothing, not even the cameras. He swallows rapidly, blinks to clear wet eyes, then snarls with sudden rage.
"It is not enough to arrest these fiends. The Granger scourge must be wiped out at the roots! And that is exactly what I pledge. I will use every means at my disposal to destroy that scourge. I will not be satisfied until every Granger on our lovely, wounded world has been rounded up and made to pay for their monstrous crimes against humanity! Death to Grangers!"
Spittle flies. President Santorini is as out of control as the civil war raging through Jefferson's canyons and city streets. It is, perhaps, impertinent of me, but no one appears to be interested in reminding the president that Grangers did not set off the bomb that killed his sister. I question his mental fitness to command, which sets up internal alarms and warnings that skitter and jump through my admittedly addled circuitry. Vittori Santorini's personal grief—or rage—is not my affair.
He is distraught, held fast in the grip of powerful emotions, but his orders regarding the Grangers are within the emergency powers granted the president by the constitution. Given a great-enough provocation, the total elimination of a deadly enemy is a viable response and is well within the parameters of my own battlefield programming. Today's attack demonstrates more than sufficient provocation.
The mastermind behind this raid is willing to destroy hundreds of innocent bystanders to assassinate a relative handful of prominent officials and party supporters. This action—and the concomitant threat of future atrocities—not only changes the playing field, it changes my role as one of the players. I am no longer merely an instrument by which POPPA maintains political control. I am a Bolo of the Dinochrome Brigade, a Unit of the Line charged with the defense of this world, which now hosts an enemy as deadly to the common good as any Deng Yavac I have faced.
I revert to my true and primary function. There are only two questions remaining as barriers between this moment and one that lies inevitably ahead, when I will target the last enemy in my gunsights. How do I assign guilt where it belongs? Am I looking at two separate insurrections, one urban and one Granger? Or one all-encompassing alliance? And how long will it take the repair team on its way from Vishnu to restore me to battlefield status? I am still pondering these questions when Vittori Santorini—having reined in his wild emotions and regained his power of speech—addresses the shocked people in the studio and those listening to this broadcast.
"We cannot hope to stop these foul killers without changes—drastic changes—to the laws governing pursuit, detention, and prosecution of criminals. The time for playing by civilized rules is past. Long past. I am therefore invoking a planet-wide state of emergency to deal with this crisis. The POPPA Squadrons must be able to function swiftly and decisively, without being hamstrung by legal mandates requiring prisoners to be either formally charged based on hard and fast evidence or released no later than fifty hours after arrest. We cannot—dare not—run the risk of freeing the terrorists we manage to take into custody, since they will only contact their command structure, re-arm themselves, and strike again.
"To that end, I am formally outlawing all forms of public assembly in groups of five or more individuals, for anyone except governmental officials carrying out the duties of their employment. If groups of private citizens are caught meeting on public streets, they will be detained as subversives and treated accordingly. All civic organizations—including worship services held by organized churches or temples—are likewise forbidden to assemble, whether publicly or in a private building or home. Any persons violating this stricture will be arrested, charged with threatening public welfare, and prosecuted to the greatest possible extent of the law.
"I hereby order all peacekeeping forces, to include federal P-Squad officers, local police units, and military troops on active or reserve standby, to arrest anyone with known or suspected ties to dissident organizations. Arrest any individual known to hold antigovernment opinions. And I demand the immediate reimprisonment of every single individual who has been arrested or questioned on suspicion of terrorist ties within the past calendar year.
"This is a beginning, my friends, but even this is not enough. We must halt the flow of illegal weaponry and supplies entering Jefferson from off-world. We know that thousands of criminals have been smuggled off-world, in illegal defiance of our best efforts to protect the innocent people of this world. These criminals have not only escaped justice, they are actively aiding the Granger terrorist network, serving as gunrunners and procurers of off-world mercenaries. I demand the immediate arrest of any individual who is known—or even suspected—to have family members illegally smuggled off-world. Find those individuals and extract names, munitions shipment dates, the names of ships and freighter captains helping them wage war against us. Find out who they are—and destroy them!"
He brings down both fists against the podium, slamming the wood so hard, the nearest reporters jump with shock. "I have already sent a message to our embassy on Vishnu. I've ordered embassy officials and students loyal to the POPPA party to identify Granger agents working on Vishnu and Mali. Once we have rooted out the identity of these off-world murderers, we will crack open the network they have created in our midst and destroy it without hesitation, pity, or remorse. They have shown none to us. We will burn their bodies to ashes and sow their land with salt. And I swear to God and all the devils of hell, I will no longer feed enemy soldiers and dissidents whose sole aim is the destruction of this government.
"Under my authority as president and commander in chief of Jefferson's armed forces, I hereby order P-Squadron commanders to eliminate all enemies of the state currently held in custody. We will not waste our precious food resources on hardened butchers who want the rest of us dead. By God, we will not even waste ammunition on them. The people's hard-earned taxes must pay for ammunition to launch an aggressive assault into rebel territory. I therefore direct commandants of prisons and work camps to find alternative means of dispatching the enemy soldiers and traitors already in custody. Use whatever means necessary to comply with this directive. Food resources currently earmarked for feeding traitors must be reallocated to support a new division of federal troops, which is being assembled as we speak, under the command of General Milo Akbarr, Commandant of Internal Security Forces."
I surmise from this statement that General Akbarr is preparing an assault on suspected Granger strongholds in the Damisi Mountain range. I believe this assault to be misguided, since I do not believe that blame for today's blast can be laid on the Granger rebellion. There are several good reasons for this conclusion.
It does not fit with Commodore Oroton's modus operandi, which has demonstrated again and again his dedication to taking out only those individuals proven by their own actions to be corrupt and dangerous to Granger survival. Oroton has taken great care, in fact, to spare the lives of innocents in close proximity. I cannot believe that a commander as shrewd as Commodore Oroton would have authorized an attack of this magnitude, understanding as he does that any such attack would bring down the wrath of the entire POPPA party machine. He is no fool. I refuse to believe that such a commander would deliberately provoke the retribution that is, at this moment, falling on the heads of disarmed and vulnerable Grangers.
No. Commodore Oroton did not engineer, orchestrate, or approve today's bombing. There are too many people already in custody—and far too many more who shortly will be in custody—to risk those prisoners' lives in a guaranteed bloodbath. By my calculation, which is doubtless lower than the actual number, there are three quarters of a million people in custody at work camps, holding facilities, and local jails. These people have no defense. Commodore Oroton knows this.
Therefore, the wildcat broadcast taking credit for the attack can, I believe, be taken at face value. There is a separate, urban-based movement, with a far more ruthless approach than Oroton's. I do not believe that Grangers can be implicated, let alone blamed, for today's bombing. That does not appear to matter to Vittori Santorini, who apparently has no intention of discovering who was ultimately responsible for today's blast. The legacy of Vice President Nassiona's death will make a search unnecessary, since he has vowed to arrest anyone disagreeing with him, whether a person is a Granger or an urban dissident.
I predict overtures from the Rat Guard Militia to Oroton's Granger guerillas, to create an alliance that will, if allowed to blossom, prove fatal to POPPA and its leaders. Unless, of course, I am restored to some semblance of battlefield readiness in time to stop the inevitable slaughter.
While I wait, that slaughter begins.
"Absolutely not!"
Kafari glared up at Dinny Ghamal, whose violent objection to her plan burned like hellfire in his eyes. She measured him with one long, ice-cold stare. "Mister, I don't recall anyone electing you commander of this rebellion."
Dinny's skin was dark enough, anger didn't show up as the bright flush that stained lighter complexions crimson, but there was no mistaking the anger that turned jaw muscles to iron and flared his nostrils. He bit down on the worst of the retort she could see balanced on the tip of his tongue, bit down and held it. When he could control the words trying to explode into the hot sunlight, he spoke with rigid formality. "Sir, we can't afford the risk. If we mount a rescue operation—any rescue—it'll have to be in the next few minutes or there won't be anything to rescue but corpses—"
"Which is exactly why we're going in!" Kafari snarled.
"Hear me out!"
Kafari was on the ragged edge of shouting at him for insubordination when she saw the anger in his eyes shift, almost imperceptibly, into something else. Something dreadful. Stark fear. For her. She clacked her teeth together and breathed hard for several seconds. "All right, soldier," she finally growled, "make it fast. People are already dying out there."
"I know," he groaned. The memory of his mother's death drew a veil of shadows across his eyes. "Believe me, I know. But if we hit those camps now, in the middle of the afternoon, we'll have to move openly, in daylight. If the satellites don't pick us up, you can bet your next paycheck some P-Squadder manning a radar array will. Even if we do nothing but fire high-angle mortars or launch ballistic missiles from hiding, they'll track the flight path back to the point of launch. If we run for it—which we'll have to do, once the shooting starts—they'll pinpoint these camps within minutes. And I wouldn't give a snowball's chance for the lives of any Granger caught within a hundred kilometer radius of our base camps. If we try to stop the massacres, we'll risk losing the entire rebellion."
It was soundly reasoned. Kafari couldn't fault him on that. She'd already considered every single argument he'd made. If this had been any other soldier—even Anish Balin—she would've simply overruled his objections and ordered him to comply or else. But this wasn't any other soldier. It was Dinny Ghamal. She tried to find the right words to explain, because she needed Dinny's support, not just grudging obedience to orders.
"Simon once told me there comes a point in every battlefield commander's career," she said softly, "where the price for choosing safety—personal safety or the safety of one's command, one's troops—comes with too high a price tag. I started this war because I watched the brutal massacre of helpless people. Now there's another massacre underway, only it's far worse, this time. They're not running over a few hundred protestors, they're systematically executing seven-hundred fifty thousand helpless civilians. This is what we're fighting the rebellion for, the whole reason we're out here. If we fail these people, if we don't even lift a finger to help them, we might as well just shoot ourselves and spare POPPA the trouble of doing it for us."
Dinny winced.
Kafari said, as gently as possible, "It isn't as suicidal as it looks, at first glance. Sonny's out of commission—"
"He's still got functional guns."
"Yes, he does. But he's got to know where to shoot and that gives us an edge. A pretty good one, actually. Simon's got a full list of everything that's malfunctioned, courtesy of Vittori, himself. He had to send a parts list to the Shiva Weapons Labs and Simon got hold of it. Sonny's sensors are out. Everything but thermal imaging. As long as we keep our distance, he can't do much more than take pot-shots in the dark. Trust me, I have no intention of sending any of our people close enough to that Bolo to register as a heat signature he can shoot at. I didn't pick the timing and I'd like to strangle the commander of that damn-fool pack of idiots calling themselves the Rat Guard Militia, but whatever else is true, the odds will never be better. If Simon were here, he'd say we've just reached our Rubicon. All that remains is to decide whether or not we cross it."
"Rubicon?" he asked, frowning. "What the devil's a Rubicon?"
"A boundary. A line in the sand. A river crossing that divides a person's life. On one shore, there's only blind, unquestioning obedience to authority and on the other shore is the courage of your convictions. Once you've crossed that river, for good or ill, there's no going back. Vittori's crossed his Rubicon for all the wrong reasons, issuing the order to execute helpless people. You and I must decide whether or not to cross our Rubicon for all the right reasons, trying to rescue helpless people. If we don't cross this river, Dinny, if we stay hidden in our safe little bolt-holes in these cliffs, we'll never be fully human, again. Will you and I be able to look at ourselves in the mirror without flinching, if we hide in safety while three quarters of a million people are slaughtered? We must act, Dinny. If we don't, we will never free this world—"
"How can you say that?" Anguish and anger fought for control of his voice. "If we go out there now, if we just give away the location of our ammunition depots, our field rations, our equipment caches, they'll throw everything they've got into scouring us off the face of this planet! They've got twenty-five thousand troops, fully trained, and every damned one of 'em lives and breathes for the chance to destroy us. It would be bad enough to lose the people we'd have to send out against those trigger-happy bastards. But if we lose you—"
"If I'm that indispensable, Dinny Ghamal, then try putting a little faith into what I have to say."
He stood glaring at her for long, dangerous minutes, breathing like a foundered stallion with a jaglitch closing in for the kill.
"At least," Kafari added, gentling her voice, "do me the courtesy of listening."
A low, frustrated groan tore loose, a sound like a tree splitting down the center on a bitter winter's night, torn apart by the stress of ice expanding through the heartwood. "I'm listening," he said through gritted teeth.
"We have one chance, Dinny. One breathless, fleeting chance, to turn the tide of this war to our advantage. We have to hit them hard and fast and we must do it right now. The Bolo is out of commission and the bulk of their own troops have scattered to round up more people to slaughter. Have you stopped to think—really think—about what will happen if we liberate six or seven hundred thousand people in one fell swoop?"
He frowned, trying to suss out where she was headed and not able to see it. "We'll have a hell of a provisioning problem," he muttered. "But something tells me that's not what you're getting at."
"No. It isn't. We've been thinking about the P-Squads and their twenty-five thousand officers from the viewpoint of guerilla soldiers. We are vastly outnumbered by a well-armed enemy. That's about to change, my friend. Even if we manage to walk out of this with only a quarter of those prisoners still alive, we're talking a hundred eighty thousand new soldiers fighting on our side."
His eyes widened. "Holy—"
"Yes," she said, voice droll with understated humor. "Our guns can turn the tide, Dinny, but we have to act right now, before the hour is out. Our guns and crews can get those people out. We can kill those trigger-happy guards and blow those electrified fences apart. And once we've got the prisoners out, we take this stinking game they're playing and turn it on them. Is it worth the risk? You're damned straight, it is."
She didn't say the rest of it. She didn't have to, because he said it, for her.
"You came for us, that night," he whispered. "That ghastly, horrible night on Nineveh Base . . ." He lifted his gaze, met hers, held it for long moments. "All right," he muttered, "let's go cross this Rubicon of yours and get it over with, 'cause somebody's got to watch your damn-fool backside while we're doing it."
Twenty minutes later, they were airborne, flying nap-of-the-earth in a tight formation of seven aircars. They'd made modifications to a whole fleet of aircars, months previously, knowing that eventually, a day like this—a moment like this—would come. For good or ill, they were at least ready. Kafari flew rear guard, letting Red Wolf do the actual piloting so she could concentrate on coordinating the multipronged attack. They couldn't reach all the camps, not directly. She would do the best she could, by targeting the farthest ones with ballistic missiles capable of traveling halfway across the continent to strike the most remote camps.
Her years of work as a spaceport psychotronic engineer were about to pay off. She waited until flashes of code reached her, signaling readiness from the entire strike force. Kafari touched controls on the console built into her command aircar. A signal raced out, providing the codes necessary to interface with Ziva Two's communications systems, which in turn activated connections with the entire satellite system, eleven eyes in the sky that gave Kafari an unprecedented view of the field of war about to erupt below.
She jabbed out the code that sent eighteen long-range missiles screaming through Jefferson's skies. She could actually see the contrails as they gained altitude and kissed the stratosphere, high above any ground-based air-defense system. Savage satisfaction swept through her as the missiles streaked across the heavens then plunged back toward the ground.
"Fly, you sweet little moth-winged mothers . . ."
The total lack of jabber on official military and police channels, which she also monitored, was music in her ears: her missiles were literally three seconds from impact and the attack hadn't even been noticed, yet. She sat with her finger poised over the console, ready to transmit the code that would allow her to jam the weapons platforms and communications satellites, if somebody on the ground realized what was happening and tried to shoot them down.
The first wave of missiles impacted.
Gouts of flame appeared on her screen, tiny flickers as seen by POPPA's orbital spy-eyes. Kafari said a prayer for the people trapped in those camps, because that barrage of missiles was all the help they were going to get. She hoped it was enough. Then Red Wolf said, "We're going in!" She touched controls, brought up a different view. The camp Kafari's strike force had targeted lay dead ahead. It had been built on the desert side of the Damisi, down in the foothills, where the only thing green was the paint on the landing field. High, electrified fences enclosed the camp, which had been designed to house close to a hundred thousand people, not counting the guards.
The sprawling buildings, cheap barracks thrown together like tar-paper shacks, shimmered in the heat haze. Ground temperatures were hot enough to fry eggs on bare rock faces. Guard towers punctuated the high fences, jutting up every twenty meters. There were automated weapons platforms on the towers, infinite repeaters that could be triggered manually by the guards or left on automatic, to shoot at anything approaching the fence without a transmitter broadcasting on the correct frequency. A huge trench had been gouged out of the hard-baked ground, just inside the fences. The deep pit wasn't new. Its first ten meters had been partially refilled, already.
Kafari didn't have to wonder what it was for, because the guards were hard at work, filling up the rest of it. A massive crowd of people had been herded to the edge of that ghastly trench, forced into position by the automatic guns on the fences, which were strafing the dirt in every direction except into the pit. Bolts of energy flew like horizontal rain, forcing the crowd to retreat. There was only one place for them to go: into the trench. The guards didn't even have to shoot them. The ones on the bottom would be crushed and suffocated to death. The ones on the top might live long enough to be buried alive by the bulldozer that idled in the hot light, waiting its turn.
"Red Wolf," she said through clenched teeth, "remind me to kill the commandant of this camp. Slowly."
"Yes, sir."
Then the aircars in the lead fired their missiles and the guns nearest the crowd exploded in towering gouts of flame. The fences came down. The guard in the nearest tower started shooting at the leading aircar. It jagged sideways, avoiding the hail of bullets, and cleared the way for the second aircar crew. A hyper-v missile shrieked into the tower, fired virtually point-blank. Tower, guard, and gun ceased to exist. People on the ground were screaming, trying to run. More fences came down. More guard towers exploded. Savage delight tore through Kafari as Red Wolf made a strafing run, taking down two towers. She was picking up reports from other crews at other camps. The battle was well underway and going better than—
"ARTILLERY!" Red Wolf yelled.
Kafari never saw the gout of flame or the shell. The aircar slammed her against the restraints as Red Wolf sent them screaming toward the sky. He fired air-to-air missiles in the same instant. The aircar rolled into a sickening move that sent the smoking sky and the hot, glaring stone spinning in wild and blurred confusion. Something detonated just below Kafari's window. Flame and smoke engulfed them for a single, split second. Then they were in clear air again and gaining altitude fast.
Red Wolf, she realized belatedly, was blistering the air with curses.
"That was a genuinely fine maneuver," she gasped, voice unsteady.
"The hell it was. Dinny Ghamal is going to rip 'em off and stuff 'em up my ass. They got way too close to you."
"A miss," she said, still breathless with reaction, "is as good as a mile."
"Nobody has calculated in miles for a thousand years," Red Wolf growled. He was circling back around, keeping his distance as the other aircars continued the attack. The artillery gun that had come so close to toasting them was, itself, toast, along with the building it had been hiding in. Less than three minutes later, Kafari's team was in complete control of the camp.
Red Wolf kept them airborne until their own people had cleared the site, satisfying themselves that there were, in fact, no more P-Squadders anywhere. Several guards who'd tried to barricade themselves into the administrative building had been killed by the prisoners, themselves. Once the shooting had started, the prisoners had turned into a howling mob bent on vengeance. They had rushed the building and torn apart the guards, with their bare hands. By the time Kafari's aircar landed, her people had brought a semblance of order to the chaos.
The people who'd already been forced into the trench were rescued, with a surprisingly high survival rate. Survivors were organizing themselves, triage style, with the ill and the injured helped into barracks by those still strong enough to render aid. When Kafari climbed out of her aircar, people stopped in the midst of whatever task they'd undertaken, and followed her with their eyes, electrically aware that she was in command. People whispered as she passed, thousands of voices hushed with a sound like wind rustling through ripened wheat. She wished she could have risked removing her battle helmet, with its necessary, concealing visor, because the pain and joy in these people's faces deserved that small courtesy from her.
But she didn't dare.
Not yet.
Somehow, they seemed to understand.
"Commodore," Dinny saluted crisply, "the site is secured and we're ready to start shipping people out. But there's someone you need to see first, sir. We've asked him to wait in the commandant's headquarters."
"Is the commandant still in them?"
"In a manner of speaking, sir, yes, he is. There's not much left to look at."
"Ah, well. So much for a long tete-a-tete with him."
Dinny's eyes glinted, hard as flint. "It would've been nice, wouldn't it? But I can't blame these folks, if you catch my meaning."
"Very clearly. Let's get this out of the way. I want this place cleared out fast."
Dinny nodded and led the way through the erstwhile camp.
Someone had cleared out the remains of the commandant. Judging by the pool of sticky blood that had filmed over like scalded milk, those remains had been scattered rather more widely than a human body normally would've occupied. There were two men waiting for her arrival. One was a boy, little more than seventeen or eighteen, at a rough guess. The other was older, tougher, with shrewd eyes and a nano-tatt that had cost him a bundle of money. They were both watching Kafari, the boy with wide-eyed wonder, the man with narrow-eyed speculation.
"You in charge?" the older one demanded.
"Who wants to know?"
"Somebody with information you could use."
Kafari swept her gaze up and down and saw very little to commend him to anyone, let alone to her. He looked like a street tough who made his living preying on others, maybe not as vicious as a rat-ganger, but definitely on the greyer edge of lily-whiteness. She wondered coldly what he thought he could wheedle out of a deal with Commodore Oroton. She spoke into the vocorder, which deepened her voice into a masculine bark. "I don't have time to deal with assholes who think they can sell me some priceless piece of crap I've no earthly use for." She started to turn on her heel. Then paused when he grinned. His nano-tatt flared golden, in rippling patterns like flame.
"They said you was a hard-assed bastard. Okay, try this one out, Mr. Commodore: I'm the fuckin' Bolo's mechanic."
She swung back sharply. "You're what?"
His grin widened. "I'm the Bolo's mechanic. For the last four years. 'Til this little nosewipe," he nodded at the boy, who flushed crimson, "got himself mixed up in a food riot and was sent out here t' this country club. Sonny told me what happened, when he disappeared so sudden, and I got so damn pissed off, I hadda say something, you know? I hadda tell folks, 'cause it wasn't right. Giulio's a damn-fool kid, gives my sister migraines, just dealin' with him, but he's a clean kid, you gotta give him credit for that, and he for damn sure didn't deserve this." He swept one disgusted gesture at their surroundings. "So I shot my mouth off, said enough to make the P-Squads mad as fire, and ended up out here, keepin' him company."
Kafari considered him for long moments, resting her hands on her hips and studying his eyes, his posture, everything she could notice, trying to read the nuances of what he was saying—and not saying. "All right, Mr. Mechanic, how would you go about repairing damage to an infinite repeater cluster?"
"You talkin' about the internal guidance-control circuits or the semiexternal quantum processors that route fire-control signals? You shot a fuckin' hole through one a' them, a while back. I hadda steal half a dozen computers off campus, just t' cobble together somethin' t' bypass it. And it still don't work right, I bet. And what you done to his tracks outta be outlawed. The worst of it, though, was the rotational collar on his rear Hellbore. Did'ja know you cracked the mother? He can't use it for nuthin', not without a new collar, or he'll rip that whole damn turret to shreds, first time he fires it."
Kafari's jaw had come adrift, mercifully hidden behind her battle helmet. "You do know a thing or two, don't you?"
"Mister," he said, narrowing his eyes as he stared at the featureless visor she wore, "you got no idea how hard I worked my ass off, the last four years, tryin' to learn enough to keep the Big Guy runnin'. Them assholes in charge of the schools never taught me jack shit. I hadda learn how to learn, before I could learn how t' fix what was wrong."
"That," Kafari muttered, "doesn't surprise me at all."
"I'll bet it don't." A sudden fierce grin appeared and the golden color of his nano-tatt flared orange around the edges. "You got a pretty low opinion of me, don't you? And you're right. I ain't nothin' or nobody, but what I got—what I had, before this," he waved a hand at the camp, "I hadda work hard for, and I got to like knowin' how to do things, for my own self." His face went hard, then, with the cold, dangerous look of the street tough she'd taken him as, at first glance. "And I got a real big itch to pay back the hospitality they been dishin' out to folks. What I know about the Bolo's small peanuts, compared to what else I know that you could use. Like the folks I know, who know folks, if you catch my drift? I got a pretty good idea who hit Madison, today."
"You know about that?" Kafari asked sharply.
The mechanic went motionless, looked for several seconds like a sculpture hacked out of mahogany with a chain saw. The look in his eyes sent chills down Kafari's spine. "Oh, yeah," he said softly. "The guards was nice enough to share it with us. Right before they dug that goddamned pit and started shovin' people into it."
The boy with him had a haunted look, with memory burning in eyes that had probably been young, a few short days ago. "What do you want from me?" Kafari asked.
A muscle jumped in the mechanic's jaw. "A chance to even the damn score."
"Fair enough."
He looked surprised. "You ain't gonna argue?"
"I don't have time to waste, arguing over something that gives us both what we want. You say you have a good idea who detonated that bomb. They've thrown my timetables all to hell, but a potential ally is priceless. Particularly if we can push matters before they repair the Bolo."
"I ain't gonna fix him, that's for damn sure. I like the Big Guy, don't get me wrong. But I don't wanna look up into them gun barrels knowin' he's got a good reason to shoot me. Time was, I was too stupid t' be scared of him. That ain't so, any more."
"I'm told," Kafari said softly, "that even his commander was afraid of him." She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering the look in Simon's eyes, that night, remembering the sound of his voice. Her husband loved Sonny. But only a fool didn't feel at least some fear, when standing in the presence of that much flintsteel and death, with a mind of its own and unhuman thoughts sizzling through unhuman circuitry.
Simon was right. A sword with a mind of its own was a damned dangerous companion.
The mechanic muttered, "Somehow that don't surprise me at all." He held out a hand. "I'm Phil, by the way. Phil Fabrizio."
Kafari shook his hand. "Commodore Oroton."
He grinned. "A distinct pleasure, that's what it is, a genuine, distinct pleasure. So how's about you tell me what you need from me and we'll get this show on the road?"
"All right, Mr. Fabrizio. Tell me about these friends of yours. . . ."
Yalena felt strange, being on the Star of Mali, again. She had somehow expected the freighter to look different, to have gone through the same radical change she, herself, had made over the past four years. It seemed faintly obscene to find the exact same metal walls painted in the exact same shades recommended by long-haul jump psychologists—warm reds and golds in the mess hall, cool and soothing pastel blues and greens in the passenger and crew cabins—and the exact same shipboard schedules and routines. It was a surprise, since she, herself, had changed so dramatically.
Captain Aditi, who invited Yalena, her father, and both cousins to sit at the captain's table for dinner, commented on it halfway through the meal.
"You've grown up, child. I was worried about you, after that last voyage you made with us, and that's no lie. It's good to see you've bounced back and decided to do something positive with all that hurt."
Yalena set her fork down and swallowed a mouthful of salad before answering. "Thank you for thinking kindly of me at all, ma'am," she said in a low voice. "I know what kind of person I was, then. I've worked very hard to be someone better than that."
Captain Aditi exchanged glances with Yalena's cousin Stefano, then said, "It shows, Miss Yalena. And that's the best any of us can do, in this life. Try hard to be better than the person we were yesterday."
It was, Yalena realized, a blueprint for the way to live, a simple yet powerful way that was foreign to everything she had known during the first decade and a half of her life. Vittori Santorini might have the power to blind people to reality, telling them what they wanted to hear, but he needed an army of thugs, a whole regiment of propagandists, a disarmed and helpless populace, and a cadre of political fanatics to stay in control. He didn't understand power—real power—at all. The kind of power that came from within, unshakable and rooted in the most essential truth a human could learn: that caring about the welfare of others was the definition of humanity. Without the belief that others mattered, that their lives were of value, that their safety and happiness were important enough to defend, society ceased to be civilized—and those in charge of it ceased to be fully human.
That was the power that had put one hundred seventy-three people onto a freighter, on their way to fight for the liberation of a whole world and the people in it. And that was the power that had transformed a spoiled, selfish, unfit-for-polite-company toad into a soldier. Or, at least, the beginning of being a soldier. She had a lot to learn and miles to travel on the road to experience, before she could truly give herself that title. But she had made a start and with every passing hour, the Star of Mali carried her closer to the fields where she would try to redeem herself.
There was more than enough to do, getting ready for that moment. On the second day of their interstellar transit, the whole company met in the ship's mess, where passengers and crew took their meals in shifts because of the sheer number of people crammed into the freighter's limited passenger space. Her father called the meeting to hammer out details of their battle plan, which had been roughed out on Vishnu. With a hundred seventy soldiers and students, plus the official repair team, there wasn't even sitting room left on the floor.
"We'll need two teams," he said, speaking with brisk authority, revealing a facet of his character that she'd never really seen, before. "One team goes in with the repair crew to fix my Bolo." His sudden, evil grin startled Yalena, it was so unexpected and so seemingly out of place, given the subject at hand. Then, as the group caught the double entendre and started to chuckle, his purpose made abrupt sense. The brutal tension gripping the jam-packed room relaxed its grip, allowing everyone to focus on the battle plans, rather than the emotions that had brought them all together, in the first place.
"Shiva Weapons Labs has given us five highly qualified engineers to give that team the bona fides it needs to pass muster. Ordinarily, those engineers would bring their own team of support technicians, but we'll be providing those, instead, from our own people. That team will play hob with Sonny's innards, following the specs Captain Brisbane and I have provided. The cover story we've provided will, at least, allow you to have the Bolo's schematics in your possession. Still, I'll expect each of you to memorize the key systems to sabotage, since I won't risk your lives or our cause with information proving that we intend to cripple their Bolo.
"The second team, consisting of our students and combat veterans, will deliver critical equipment, munitions, and supplies to rebel outposts. Those posts are running low on everything from ammunition to bandages and field rations. God knows, some of these people have been living on little more than shoe leather and beans for months, and no one can fight indefinitely on an empty stomach, no matter how bitter the anger or how righteous the cause. Now, before we get into details—"
He paused, lifting his glance to something behind them. Yalena turned in her seat and found the freighter's communications officer standing in the doorway.
"Sorry to interrupt, sir, but there's an urgent message for you. It came in via SWIFT, just now."
He was holding a printout. Whatever that message said, the commo officer hadn't been willing to pipe an audio or video playback for the whole assembled strike force to hear. That was ominous. The room was too crowded for the commo officer to take the message to Yalena's father, so it was passed forward, row by row. No one glanced at the printout, despite looks of burning curiosity. The discipline that took was impressive. When her father read the message, he turned white. Yalena's heart thumped in a painful, ragged rhythm. She waited, terrified that he would tell them what was in the message and terrified that he wouldn't and nearly ill with the stress of wondering if her mother had been killed.
Without warning—and without a single sound—he simply headed for the door, climbing over people to reach it. Students scrunched together, making way for him. He left with the communications officer, moving rapidly down the corridor that led from the mess to the communications station on the bridge. Yalena exchanged worried glances with Melissa Hardy and both of her mother's cousins. Somebody cursed out loud, which broke the silence. Speculation ran wild until Estevao shouted for order.
"There's no point in guesswork. Whatever's happened, Colonel Khrustinov will brief us soon enough. Our time's better spent going over the portions of our mission that aren't likely to change. The damage to the Bolo has worked to our advantage in a number of ways, not least of which is how we're getting down from orbit.
"Under ordinary conditions, we'd be docking at Ziva Two space station and we'd have to undergo spot checks by customs agents. But the bomb that damaged the Bolo also flipped it onto its side. They've tried to pull him over onto his treads again, with no luck. They don't have anything strong enough to move him. They need a heavy lift sled, like the ones the Brigade uses for combat drops and recalls.
"Fortunately for us, Captain Brisbane, Vishnu's Bolo commander, has one, since she's responsible for defending both Vishnu and Mali and needs to move between the planets. She also has wide discretionary power to make decisions in the Ngara system's best interests. Right now, those interests include deposing POPPA. It's a little convoluted, but Vishnu's Ministry of Defense asked our friends from Shiva Weapons Labs," Estevao nodded toward the engineers on loan, "to recommend using a heavy lift sled to turn Sonny over. Toward that end, Captain Brisbane has loaned us her sled."
A stir ran through the room. The students weren't the only ones surprised by that news. Even the veterans looked startled, which gave Yalena a clue as to how unusual Captain Brisbane's decision was. She was taking a gamble, counting on the quiet war front in this sector to risk allowing that sled to leave the Ngara system. Captain Brisbane obviously took their mission very seriously, indeed.
Estevao waited for the flicker of reaction to die down, then went on. "Thanks to that loan, we'll be able to bypass Ziva Two—and the inspectors—entirely. Colonel Khrustinov intends to drop every bit of our equipment and supplies with the sled, in one trip."
Melissa, seated beside Yalena, lifted a hand to gain Estevao's attention.
"Yes?"
"Isn't that going to make it harder to disperse our people and supplies? If we put everything on the load going to the Bolo's depot, how will we smuggle anybody out to the base camps?"
"We'll orbit the sled a couple of times to make sure it's functioning properly and make our initial descent over the opposite hemisphere. According to Colonel Khrustinov, the satellite coverage for the hemisphere opposite Madison is virtually nonexistent, since most of it's ocean. When they replaced the satellites after the Deng war, they put most of them in geosynchronous orbit above Jefferson's major cities. That made sense, at the time. They put a few communications satellites into standard orbits, mostly to keep emergency channels open for the fishing fleet. We'll time it to avoid as many as possible, maybe even all of them. If necessary, we'll jam them for a few minutes, just long enough to drop a few air buses and let them disperse to various camps. They'll fly under the radar net, while we draw most of POPPA's attention, aboard the main sled—"
He halted. Yalena turned around and found her father standing in the doorway. Her heart skidded painfully toward her toes. He met Yalena's gaze, then swept his glance across the others who waited in such anxious silence. Moving slowly, stepping with caution between the people sitting on the floor, he returned to the front of the room, thanking Estevao in a quiet voice for taking charge in his absence.
Then he faced them with the news. "An urban resistence group has exploded a bomb in the most exclusive POPPA residential enclave in Madison. Nassiona Santorini has been killed. So has Isanah Renke. Along with half of Jefferson's military high command and several critical members of the Senate, House of Law, and High Court."
Utter silence held the briefing room. No one shouted for joy, because they all knew what POPPA's reaction would be. Her father confirmed their dire suspicions with brutal candor. "Vittori has ordered the execution of every prisoner in every POPPA work camp and prison. Three-quarters of a million people . . ."
Yalena shut her eyes, as much to hide from the ghastly look on her father's face as to shut out the pictures filling her imagination: P-Squads firing on helpless people. Her father added, "Commodore Oroton has launched a rescue attempt. I think we all know exactly what that means."
Yalena opened her eyes again, took in the dismay on the faces of the combat veterans, saw, as well, the dawning of sudden, brutal understanding in the eyes of students she'd helped organize into a fighting force. That same understanding ignited like cold fire in her own heart. To mount a rescue attempt, Commodore Oroton had to come out of hiding. Fear jolted like icicles along her nerves, robbing her of the air she needed to breathe. There might not be a rebellion left, by the time their freighter reached Jefferson.
Her father's voice jerked her attention back. "I would suggest that we revise our plans. We're only three days from Jefferson, which means federal troops can't react fast enough to eliminate every Granger community and farmhold, particularly not if they're kept busy fighting Commodore Oroton's people for control of the prison camps. The commodore is already organizing Granger civilians into self-defense militias, particularly in the Damisi canyon country. Oroton has already warned Grangers to abandon indefensible farms and take shelter where blockades can be held by relatively few defenders.
"The rebellion is also funneling weapons into the hands of the militias, including a few heavy artillery guns to hold the mountain passes and canyon entrances until we can arrive to help. It won't take a lot of firepower or manpower to turn places like Klameth Canyon into fortified strongholds. Frankly, it'll be much harder for POPPA to take Klameth than it was for the Deng. They can't mount an air assault, because POPPA doesn't have a functional air force left. Without Sonny, they don't have the firepower, either. So . . ." Her father flicked his glance across the crowd. "Estevao."
Her mother's cousin responded crisply. "Yes, sir?"
"Our combat veterans have just become the backbone of the civilian defense effort. We'll allocate part of our equipment and supplies to your mission, arming residents and showing them a few tricks of the trade, defending entrenched positions from aggressors. How much we allocate will depend on events between now and the time we make orbit. I'll keep you updated as we receive word from Commodore Oroton."
"Yes, sir."
"Yalena."
"Sir?" She jumped half out of her skin, gulping as she met her father's gaze.
"Your group has just been promoted from supply delivery to command-liaison and infiltration duty."
"Sir?" she blinked, totally confused.
"You," he said with a strange glint in his eye, "have more experience operating inside the POPPA propaganda machine than anyone in this combat force."
Her cheeks stung with sudden heat, then ran chill again as every person in the room turned to look at her, eyes shuttered.
"Instruct the other students, please, in how to think inside the POPPA paradigm. Commodore Oroton thinks we can make contact with the urban group that's taken credit for today's bombing. We need somebody who can speak their language, who understands the urban mindset and can help us forge an alliance with these folks."
Yalena nodded, feeling almost numb. Working with urban guerillas was a far cry from courier work, distributing guns, bullets, and food to Granger camps. The lives of her friends—and potentially many more brave people—lay in her hands, in the job she must do, training the other students to understand how the masses, brain-washed for twenty years by POPPA hogwash, might think as their loyalty turned to hatred and the will to kill. She found herself reaching back through time and memory, trying to recapture the nasty blend of arrogance, greed, selfishness, and stupidity that had been her entire life for fifteen years.
It was more distasteful than she'd expected. And easier than she would have liked to admit. Thinking for herself and making her own decisions was hard work, nearly as hard as trying to be Simon Khrustinov's daughter—or Kafari Khrustinova's. The lure of letting someone else do one's thinking and make one's decisions was a siren's song, fatally attractive, and the entire urban population of Jefferson had spent two decades living under its spell.
It wouldn't be easy to teach self-reliant infiltrators how to behave like people who had abdicated responsibility for virtually every decision an ordinary person made a thousand times a day. The size of the job she faced was daunting enough to terrify her. Worse, in its way, than the idea of going into combat. It took a different kind of courage.
The rest of the voyage rushed past in a blur. Yalena worked twenty-hour days, drilling the students in POPPA's mindset, belief structure, and behavior. They were appalled by the culture she was preparing them to interact with, but they also worked like fiends, trying to understand and get it right.
When she wasn't teaching, she sought out her cousin Estevao and the other combat veterans, listening to their plans, trying to learn how they thought—and why they thought that way. She listened until weariness dragged her eyelids down, then she toppled into her bunk and slept long enough to start again the next day. She didn't feel nearly ready enough when they shifted out of hyper-space and dropped into Jefferson's star system, shedding velocity for the cross-system approach to Yalena's homeworld.
They gathered in the ship's mess to watch their progress across Jefferson's star system from the big viewscreens installed there. The students watched with sharp, puppyish excitement. The combat veterans watched in tense silence, a controlled tension like caged lightning, waiting for the thunderclouds to part, allowing them to release the pent-up need for violent action. Yalena found herself watching their faces far more than she did the viewscreens, which showed very little of their passage through the empty reaches of in-system space. Jefferson's planetary neighbors were sprawled in their orbits like a child's set of scatter-jacks, some of them on the far side of Jefferson's sun, others whirling far to port and starboard as they plunged sunward.
The only thing to see, as a result, was Jefferson, itself, which was slowly growing from a pinprick of light to a garden pea to a marble. The sight of her homeworld set up a longing Yalena couldn't deny, along with a complicated ebb and surge of fear and fierce protectiveness and sharp, rapier-keen hatred. Her lovely little homeworld, shining like a bauble around God's wrist, was ruled by people with hearts as cold and empty as the darkness in which Jefferson floated. The faces of the veterans as they, too, watched and wrestled with disturbing thoughts, were far more riveting than the blur of color they were all trying so hard to reach.
So she watched the veterans, trying to read the complex kaleidoscope of emotions shifting behind their eyes. When Estevao noticed her attention, he held her gaze, started to speak, then paused, visibly baffled by the attempt to communicate the incommunicable. She managed to produce a wry little smile, trying to let him know that she understood, at least a little, about his inability to talk about it. He held her gaze for a long moment, then gave a sharp little nod of satisfaction and turned his attention back to the viewscreen. Yalena discovered tremors in her hands. That silent exchange, so brief it hardly qualified as a conversation of any sort, had shaken her deeply. It also served to tell her that she couldn't learn the one thing she needed to know, not just by talking to or watching men and women who'd been there when worlds died.
She didn't want to think about worlds dying.
As they settled into final approach, guided in by the navigational buoys marking the clear lanes past Jefferson's moons, Yalena didn't want to think about anything at all, because every thought rattling around in her mind was a frantic flutter of panic, like terrified birds' wings trying to batter their way to safety. There was no safety. Not anywhere on Jefferson. Not even on this freighter which would, in all too short a time, be opening her cargo bays and boarding hatches to the enemy.
Moving quietly, Yalena left the crowded room and headed for the cabin she'd shared with eleven other people, sleeping in shifts. Let the others watch their final approach. Yalena needed to be alone with her thoughts, for a little while. All too soon, she would be walking into the lion's den. And after that . . .
She would no longer have to guess the thoughts behind a soldier's eyes.
My repair team has arrived from Vishnu.
But they have not arrived on Jefferson. Nor do they appear likely to do so in the immediate future. Heavy fighting rages across the Adero floodplain to the Damisi foothills. Repeated bombing attacks have crippled Port Abraham, destroying ruinously expensive shuttle gantries and smashing loading docks into rubble. Relentless attacks on highly placed officials—which appear to be coordinated through an alliance between Granger guerillas and urban insurrectionists—have speeded Santorini's loosening grip on reality. Given these unstable conditions, the Star of Mali's captain has refused to send her shuttles anywhere near Jefferson's soil.
Vittori Santorini, himself, tries to coerce the Star's captain. "You'll land those damned specialists and supplies or I'll use my Bolo to shoot your goddamned freighter out of orbit!"
"The way I hear it, that machine is too blind to see me and too crippled to shoot at anything. Besides which, I don't think you can afford to pay for another load of parts. And Shiva Weapons Labs wouldn't feel obliged to provide a second team of engineers, if you blow up this one."
Santorini's response disintegrates into incoherent screams which the captain cuts off, mid-shout, simply by turning off her radio. Eight minutes later, Milo Akbarr, Commandant of Internal Security, contacts the Star of Mali from his command post in the field. He is directing an attack on Klameth Canyon, where rebel troops are defending not only Granger residents, but also refugees who have flooded into the canyon by the hundreds of thousands. Akbarr's attempt to coerce Captain Aditi is a simple threat to impound her ship.
Five point eight minutes later, rebel artillery opens fire on his communications shack, homing in on the conversation raging between him and Captain Aditi. His tirade is cut short by explosions which deprive Jefferson of its Commandant of Internal Security. Captain Aditi continues to sit tight on a shipload of parts I must have and which I begin to despair of ever seeing. Thirteen point nine minutes later, Sar Gremian hails the Star's captain.
"This is Sar Gremian," he informs her in the perpetually bitter, biting tone that is his standard method of conversation. His next words startle me. "I am Jefferson's Supreme Commandant for Internal Security and the worst nightmare you've ever tried to shake down for more money. You were promised a whopping bonus to bring our cargo. Don't make the mistake of trying to blackmail this government into paying more. That kind of mistake will be fatal, I promise you most sincerely."
"Don't threaten me, sonny boy. I was supposed to be at Mali two days ago and let me tell you, that's cost me a pretty penny, wrecking my schedule for this run. Your government promised to pay a bonus worth my time and trouble, diverting here, but you can't pay me enough to risk my shuttles to some bomb-happy terrorist at a spaceport you can't even defend from your own people."
"You agreed to deliver our order. You will, by God, put our equipment and our supplies on your shuttles or you'll never dock at Jefferson again."
"You call that a hardship?" She actually laughs. "I'm damn near the only freighter captain still willing to run this route and after today, I'll be cursed for a fool if I make it again. There's not enough profit to be made from your sordid little hellhole to put up with the crap your people dish out, let alone risk my cargo shuttles and my crew to a bunch of wild-eyed lunatics. You want the cargo in my holds? Fine. I'll strap it all to that heavy lift sled you rented and send it down together in one tidy package.
"And just to round out the load, I'll send along those riot-happy brats Vishnu kicked off-world. The Ministry of Defense shoved those kids onto my ship at gunpoint and told me to whistle for the cost of transporting them. I wouldn't give a damn even if they were war orphans. I'm not running an orphanage. You want your supplies? You'll take 'em in one load on the lifter and you'll pay me the cost of transporting and feeding that unholy horde of brats, because that's the only way you'll get your spare parts, sonny boy. Take it or leave it."
"Do you think I'm a fool? We're fighting a civil war, down here! And we know that somebody on Vishnu is supplying the rebels with guns and high-tech equipment. Do you honestly expect me to authorize the kind of security violation you're suggesting? Our inspectors will board your ship and go over that cargo load by load or I'll impound your freighter and freeze your payment—"
"You try boarding my ship and I'll dump your police and your precious cargo out the nearest airlock. Cut the crap, Gremian. Threaten me again and I will by God warp out of orbit and shake your dirty dust off my jump jets. And you can jolly well whistle up your ass, trying to get another twenty-billion shipment out of Vishnu's weapons labs, let alone another heavy lift sled capable of flipping that war machine of yours back onto its treads."
Sar Gremian breathes hard for seventeen point nine seconds. I am startled by the size of the price tag attached to the shipment circling above Jefferson's skies. The inflation rate is literally double what it was two weeks ago. Jefferson's currency is not merely declining in value against the Ngara system's, it is imploding. I surmise that open civil warfare and the successful liberation of POPPA's death camps have fueled this implosion. This bodes ill for Jefferson's economic future, which is already grim enough to qualify as a star-class disaster.
Sar Gremian cannot afford to lose this shipment. "All right," he snarls, "you have a deal. Load my property onto that sled, then get the hell out of my star-system."
"With pleasure!"
The transmission ends, with abrupt finality.
Twenty-one minutes later, the heavy lift sled leaves the Star's cargo bay and orbits Jefferson twice, dropping cautiously lower. The sled's psychotronic control system signals its intended descent path, which will bring the sled down on the other side of the planet from Madison, above empty ocean. It is a logical maneuver, since rebel guns and missiles cannot easily open fire on a target thousands of kilometers away and cannot move into position to meet the descending sled, given the total lack of dry land in the zone of descent. The sled will cross open ocean in perfect safety and make final approach to my location from the sea-side escarpment five kilometers west of Madison.
Sar Gremian orders the federal troops stationed in Madison to clear a corridor of tightly secured airspace from the beleaguered spaceport to my overturned warhull and threatens mass executions of any federal unit that allows rebel antiaircraft missiles or artillery to open fire on that sled. The P-Squad commanders know Sar Gremian well enough to realize this is no idle threat. They must also know that Commodore Oroton will risk hell, itself, to take down that sled, since the cargo and technicians it carries spell repairs for me and death for his rebellion.
When the lift sled is seven kilometers west of the escarpment, with its spectacular waterfall, P-Squad commanders report missile launches from positions north and south of Madison. Commodore Oroton has made his predicted move against the incoming lifter. P-Squad artillery batteries destroy the missiles with ease and launch an immediate counterstrike, claiming direct hits on both targets.
The lifter holds course, coming in on final approach. It is less than one kilometer from the escarpment when a mobile Hellbore opens fire from behind Chenga Falls. The attack catches federal troops totally by surprise. The lifter's pilot reacts far more swiftly, slewing the sled violently midair the instant the Hellbore powers up for the shot, which just misses one corner.
The lifter's auto-defenses fire a snap-shot response with infinite repeaters. Hyper-v missiles scream straight into the cliff face behind Chenga Falls. Explosions shake the bedrock with sufficient force to register on my sensors.
"Direct hit," the pilot reports. "Sorry about your waterfall. We took a big bite out of it. Got the damned Hellbore, though. Anybody care to explain how a bunch of terrorists got hold of Hellbores, for God's sake?"
Nobody answers. No further attempts are made against the sled, either, which enters the airspace over Madison and follows a direct route toward me at virtual rooftop level. At that altitude, the massive engines must be shattering windows along a half-kilometer-wide swath. At the very least, the lifter's sheer bulk—great enough to accommodate my entire warhull—will serve as a psychological shock to the entire population of Madison, including the urban insurrectionists.
An escort of aircars rises to meet the heavy lifter, including one that broadcasts Sar Gremian's personal ID signal. The sled finally sets down twenty meters from my overturned warhull. The escorting governmental aircars land beside the nearest corner of the lifter, which dwarfs them into insignificance. The passengers and pilot aboard the sled disembark first. There are thirteen, counting the pilot.
I cannot see them as anything but patterns of radiant heat against the cooler, darker colors comprising the ambient background. Sar Gremian—or someone wearing his wrist-comm—emerges from his aircar while others climb out of the remaining cars and spread out along my flank, creating a defensive line. These defenders carry objects that show as long, dark shadows against the heat of their bodies, shadows shaped like combat rifles. I conclude that they are the guards assigned to the repair team—or possibly to stand guard over me, while watching the repair team for potential sabotage.
This precaution would be in keeping with Sar Gremian's distrust of everything.
One member of the repair team greets Sar Gremian with a droll observation. "Your rebels made a for-sure-enough mess of that machine, didn't they? I'm Bhish Magada, chief weapons engineer, Shiva Labs," he adds, approaching the thermal signature that corresponds with the ID transponder in Sar Gremian's wrist-comm. "You'll be Sar Gremian? Can't say it's a pleasure, but as long as you pay us, you'll get your money's worth."
"I'd damned well better," he says with heavy, sullen threat in his voice. "It's a long walk home for you and your people."
Having duly disposed of the obligatory threat and counterthreat, the team's spokesman performs perfunctory introductions that include nothing but bare names and titles. Four are engineers. The other seven are technicians with various specialties, running the gamut from psychotronic calibrationists to master gunsmiths with Shiva's armories.
The sled's pilot is not an official member of the repair crew, but he is on Shiva Weapons Lab's payroll, according to Bhish Magada, who refers to him as a retired navy pilot looking for a second income. This explains his quick reaction time and level-headed response under fire, traits lamentably lacking in civilian pilots. I find myself wondering how many of Shiva's employees are former combat veterans and what bearing—if any—this may have on my personal security.
Sar Gremian, with a voice as distinctive as his fingerprints, addresses me with his usual abrupt growl. "Bolo, lock onto these thirteen ID signals. They're your official repair team. They're authorized to do whatever's necessary to get you back into action."
"Acknowledged."
"Get busy, then," he tells the engineers and technicians. The team begins the heavy job of off-loading crates and setting up a field-grade depot, beginning with prefab tool sheds and a prefab workshop from which they will conduct much of their exacting work. Sar Gremian stays just long enough to satisfy himself that they know what they are doing, then climbs into his aircar and leaves, heading back for the president's palace and the urgent business of coping with an on-going rebellion.
It takes the repair team three days just to run diagnostics. The process is slowed time and again by the P-Squad guards. Each and every step of the complex diagnostics is delayed by the security protocols, which are so unwieldy the technicians cannot flip a switch or push a button on their equipment without enduring a twenty-minute security interrogation on the use of said button or switch and a polygraph analysis of the answers, looking for stress variables that would indicate an untruthful answer. The resulting delays bring the repair process to a screeching halt.
When Sar Gremian discovers that diagnostics are still underway, with no repairs even begun, he explodes.
Bhish Magada cuts him off mid-tirade. "You want that machine fixed? Tell your goons to get off our backs and let us work. Those gorillas interrupt us every three seconds—"
"They're following orders! Oroton will stop at nothing to sabotage that Bolo. Security has to be tight. I suggest you cope."
Magada slams a reticulated servo clamp onto the desktop. "That's it!" he snarls. "Get yourself another whipping boy, Gremian!"
He emits a shrill whistle and shouts, "Hey! Ganetti! Pull the team out right now. Get 'em back to the hotel. I've had enough of these anal-retentive assholes."
Before Sar Gremian can respond, the Irate Bhish Magata kills the connection. He has literally hung up on Jefferson's head of security. Twenty-three seconds later, Sar Gremian calls back.
"All right, Mr. Magata, you've made your position clear. What do you need?"
"Breathing room," Magata says after a long, silent moment. "Those brainless baboons demand explanations for every single action we take, every piece of equipment we unpack, every tool we pick up. They want to know every single detail and then they demand to know why. When they don't understand the answer—which they never do—they hold us at goddamned gunpoint until they're satisfied. Since they don't have enough brain cells between them to understand anything more complicated than 'it's broken and we're trying to find out why,' we end up spending most of the day trying to explain high-tech military science to a pack of trigger-happy morons who make bacteria look smart. Call them off or find yourself another repair team."
"You have no idea what my problems are—"
"And I don't give a crap about 'em, either. But you'd jolly well better start worrying about ours. Your security guards are keeping that Bolo out of action, not us. We could've finished the diagnostics and moved forward with repairs two days ago, if they'd just let us get on with it. So here we sit while your final invoice just keeps getting higher. You've already paid for those replacement parts and you've already paid advance rental fees for most of the equipment. But you're paying us—engineers and technicians—by the hour, at mandatory union rates. It's your money to waste. You can spend it having us fix your Bolo or you can pony up the cash to pay for day after day talking to idiots who can't add one plus one and come up with two. So make your decision. But don't you dare snarl at me or my people for taking too long, when it's your own stupid fault."
Sar Gremian spends three point five minutes cursing at the guards in barracks-room language strong enough to peel paint. He then orders them to stop delaying the repairs. The crew finally gets down to business. I begin to entertain hope that I may actually be restored to battle worthiness. Given the steadily worsening news reports and emergency calls from police units, there is very little time left in which I or anyone else will be able to act decisively enough to crush the rebellion.
It would be a fine irony if Vittori Santorini spent twenty billion repairing me, only to find himself looking down the wrong end of Commodore Oroton's gun barrel, before I am functional enough to prevent the rebellion from deposing him. I do not know, in my own flintsteel heart, whether I would feel chagrin or relief. It troubles me even more that the answer to that question has nearly ceased to matter. I do not like the job I am likely to be given, once repaired. Worse, I see no way to avoid it. So I wait in silent misery while the engineers begin their work.