Yalena hadn't seen Klameth Canyon since her childhood. She didn't go anywhere near Maze Gap, not with three-quarters of the federal troops on Jefferson camped on the Adero floodplain, forming a blockade across the Gap. She flew nearly a hundred kilometers north from Madison, then turned in a one-eighty flip-flop to follow the long spine of the Damisi range south again. When she hit the first turbulence, she was very glad she'd become a fair bush pilot, on Vishnu, as part of her extreme camping training.
"If you intend to fly into the middle of nowhere to spend time in rough country," her instructor had said, echoing her father's words almost verbatim, "then you will by God learn to fly under any and all weather conditions."
Phil Fabrizio, seated beside her in the two-person skimmer, spent much of the flight gripping the armrests on his seat and trying to pretend he wasn't scared witless as she whipped them through the jagged teeth of the Damisi highlands, at altitudes nearly a thousand meters below the snow-torn peaks. The air currents were savage, but there was no radar net out here, leaving them invisible to everything except satellites. Yalena wasn't too worried about those. The P-Squads had better—and easier—targets to shoot at than one small skimmer.
"You sure you know what you're doin'?" Phil asked as she navigated the obstacle course.
"If I don't," she gave him a cheerful grin, "you'll have plenty of time to bitch about it, while we try to hike out."
"Huh. More like, we'll end up a thin smear on some piece a' rock ain't nobody else ever gonna lay eyes on."
"There is that," she agreed cheerfully. "How about you be quiet and let me concentrate?"
"You got it."
She hadn't seen Phil Fabrizio much during the five days she'd been "home." Her father had kept her busy, running courier jobs through Madison, hooking up with members of the urban resistance, getting the students who'd come with her into place as intelligence liaisons. She'd met the Bolo's one-time mechanic just once, during a briefing her first night on Jefferson, and had only caught glimpses of him a couple of times, since, when both of them reported back to her father at their constantly shifting base of operations in Madison. Phil Fabrizio didn't know that she was the daughter of Colonel Khrustinov, who was purportedly still on Vishnu, insofar as most of the urban guerillas knew.
Phil didn't even know her real name, since Yalena's name was—or at one time had been—one of the best-known names on the whole planet. Everyone knew who "Yalena" was. And even though her father wasn't using his real name and didn't look anything like the man who had come to Jefferson more than two decades previously, neither Yalena nor her father would risk letting any of the locals know who either of them really was. So she was going by the name Lena, without using a last name at all.
Not yet, anyway.
Phil, by contrast, was something of a celebrity amongst the urban guerillas. They all seemed to know him and referred to him with a reverence that surprised her. He was one of their own, had worked as the Bolo's mechanic and therefore knew how to help the commodore cripple it. Moreover, he'd gotten himself arrested and sent to a death camp, to try finding his nephew, and then he'd escaped that death camp, bringing his nephew and others safely home. Phil Fabrizio was a genuine war hero to the ragged, poverty-stricken urban masses, who were trying hard just to survive under POPPA's iron-fisted hand.
Phil was meeting with the commodore to hand-carry critical gear they had brought from Vishnu, along with a message of some kind from the leaders of the urban resistance. Those leaders' prerebellion occupations had been directing organized crime in the seedier sections of Madison and Port Town and running the only surviving construction companies on Jefferson. They had built the lavish new homes occupied by POPPA's elite and had demolished the unsightly slums that cluttered the view from their sumptuous windows. They were now poised to reverse the process—explosively—if "Commodore Oroton" agreed to an unknown set of terms.
Whatever those were, Yalena's father wanted her mother to hear the message in person from the man who'd met with them. So here they were, running the biggest blockade in the history of her homeworld, trying to reach Klameth Canyon Dam. Phil Fabrizio just didn't know why Yalena had been chosen as his pilot. When they reached the spot marked on Yalena's chart, she took them even lower, rattling their teeth with the turbulence, keeping them well below the elevation the besieging federal troops routinely swept with targeting radar.
They reached Klameth Canyon country without drawing down artillery fire onto their heads, but the last few kilometers were fraught with tension. It dragged at their nerves and tightened their muscles against bone. The maze of canyons stretched away in a dark spidery web of deep slashes through the heart of the Damisi. The more distant slashes were blue with haze. Occasional flashes of light marked distant—and not-so-distant—explosions, where federal artillery barrages were battering the main canyon floor with long-range, high-angle fire.
"They're shellin' th' shit outta those canyons," Phil muttered, breaking the tense silence. "It's one thing t' hear they've been dumpin' artillery on top o' those folks for five days. It's worse, seein' 'em do it."
Yalena just nodded. Her grip on the skimmer's controls had turned her knuckles white. She'd never been shelled. Her imagination quailed, trying to visualize what it must be like to be caught under those shells, as they burst open and rained death down onto the heads of hapless civilians.
Phil Fabrizio muttered, "Christ, I'm hopin' the commodore says yes to what I gotta tell him."
Yalena knew more about that message than Phil suspected. Her father had given her the bare-bones outline, so that she could pass the word to the students who'd come home with her. They were in position, ready to move at a moment's notice. The entire urban rebellion was poised to strike, in fact. Everything and everyone was in place. Once her mother had the gear they'd brought out here—and Phil Fabrizio's message—Yalena's father was going to turn Madison into a war zone the likes of which hadn't been seen since the Deng invasion.
Only this time, her father's Bolo wasn't going to take part in it. He was still down for repairs, while the engineers and technicians tried to chase down the cause of his total blindness. Granted, they weren't chasing it too hard. . . .
"There it is," Phil said, pointing out the landing field. It was a handkerchief-sized natural meadow a hundred meters from the upper edge of Klameth Canyon Dam, which glittered in the late afternoon sunlight. Water poured across the lip of the spillway and plunged down the long, shining expanse of concrete, turning the turbines that provided electrical power to the entire maze of canyons and the Adero floodplain beyond—including Madison. Beyond the dam lay the reason for her mother's continued immunity from direct shelling. Klameth Reservoir lay like a sheet of molten silver in the hot sunlight, stretching back through the mountains in a basin that was nearly as large as the canyon system on the downhill side of the dam.
"That's a lot a fuckin' water," Phil muttered. "I never saw that much water, except at th' ocean."
"I saw a lot of lakes on Vishnu," Yalena said, "but never one that big. The commodore's brilliant, isn't he? Hiding inside the dam holding that back."
"Kid, you don't know the half of it."
Yalena just grinned. Then they were below treetop level and the only things they could see were the patch of grass that formed the landing field and the forest surrounding it. She set them down gently, then rolled forward at a careful crawl, heading for the nearest gap beneath the trees. Commodore Oroton's people had strung camouflage netting across the treetops, providing a snug and hidden place to park small aircars and skimmers. They found a space to squeeze into, then popped the hatches and crawled out. Their reception committee was already waiting.
"Dinny!" Phil said with a delighted smile, shaking Dinny Ghamal's hand—the one that wasn't holding a battle rifle. "How's it with you, today?"
Dinny Ghamal gave the erstwhile Bolo mechanic a brief smile. "Can't complain," he allowed. "You're looking better fed. You've succeeded, I take it?"
"Close as we're gonna get. It'll be up t' th' commodore to say if I got enough of what he wanted, to go ahead with it. I got some gear, too." Phil glanced at Yalena, who dutifully dug into the back of their skimmer, hauling out the heavy packs. While she was busy, Phil added, "That new officer that came in with them combat vets, I gotta tell you, he's one sharp-witted shark. He's already got the urban resistance organized an' runnin' better'n it has since it blew up its first bomb. I ain't had a chance t' meet him, yet, but I'm s'posed to see him tonight. I'm lookin' forward t' that, I can tell you."
"Good." Dinny flicked a glance her way and the twinkle of friendliness in his eyes clicked off like a lightswitch. Dinny Ghamal knew exactly who she was—and why she'd refused to attend his wedding. He said in a cold voice, "Let's move. The commodore's waiting."
He turned on his heel and led the way back through the trees.
"He don't cotton much to you, does he?" Phil asked, glancing at her.
Yalena shrugged. "It doesn't matter."
They followed Dinny through a thick patch of forest, then slid and slithered down a steep foot trail that emerged at the edge of a sheer cliff. It formed one wall of Dead-End Gorge, which was merely the final bend in Klameth Canyon, where a volcanic intrusion of harder rock had diverted the flow of the Klameth River, forcing it into a sharp turn. That was the spot Jefferson's earliest terraforming engineers had chosen to build the dam. Phil whistled softly. "That is one bitch of a drop."
"Yes, isn't it?" Yalena had done some rock climbing on Vishnu, enough to have a healthy respect for the steep cliff below their feet. The wind whistled past their ears, rustling through the trees behind them and singing across the broad face of the dam. Dinny Ghamal, waiting at the railing that edged the top of the dam, turned impatiently.
"We don't have all day," he snapped.
"Yeah, yeah, keep your shirt on," Phil muttered, striding across the open ground. He stepped across the railing onto the concrete that formed the immense upper edge of the dam and sidled past a defensive battery of artillery, infinite repeaters, hyper-v missile launchers, and a 10cm mobile Hellbore that was nearly seven meters long. The top of the dam was wide enough, they could've built a two-lane highway, up here, if they'd needed one. Yalena followed Phil and Dinny silently, edging her way past the first real artillery she'd seen, since all of her training to date had been done on simulators.
Five minutes later, they were inside the dam itself, which was hollow throughout much of its upper structure, providing space for the immense turbines and machinery necessary to the power-generating plant. There were also maintenance tunnels, stairways, elevators, and equipment storage space for the engineers and inspectors who kept the dam in good repair. They entered the dam through an access door that led into the rabbit-warren maze of tunnels and finally stopped in front of a closed door on the reservoir side of the dam, near enough to the immense turbines that the floor rumbled underfoot and they had to raise their voices to be heard clearly over the industrial-strength noise.
"The commodore will see you first," Dinny told Yalena. "He wants to ask you some questions about the students who came with you from Vishnu. If you'll wait here, Mr. Fabrizio, I'll have someone bring up something to eat."
"Oh, man, that would be some kinda' wonderful. There ain't shit to eat in town, these days."
"Yes," Dinny said drily, "I know."
Phil just grinned at him and winked at Yalena.
She was beginning to like this brash and ill-mannered idiot, who had somehow managed to overcome a whole series of handicaps, most of them worse than her own.
Dinny just gave a snort and left. Yalena tapped on the closed door and heard a deep, masculine voice invite her to come in. Her hand was wet with sweat as she touched the door knob. Then she opened it quickly and stepped into the room beyond.
"Close the door."
The voice sounded natural enough to fool just about anybody. It nearly fooled Yalena and she knew better. She clicked the door shut behind her and faced the disconcerting faceplate of a battle helmet. She couldn't see anything of the face behind it. The uniform was bulky enough to disguise the shape of the body under it. The "Commodore" stood looking at her—just looking—for several dangerous moments. Then one hand lifted, swiftly, and stripped off the helmet.
Her mother had aged. More than four years' worth. For long, painful moments, neither of them spoke. There was too much to say, all of it important—too important to just blurt it out.
"You've grown up." The whisper sounded nothing at all like the leader of a world-class rebellion.
"I'm sorry," Yalena said, stupidly, meaning she regretted the utter waste of her childhood and the memories they should have had.
Her mother didn't ask why she'd apologized. She just bit one lip and whispered, "Can you forgive me?"
Yalena felt her eyes widen. "For what?"
"For dying. For lying about it." Pain burned behind her mother's eyes. Not the pain of separation. The pain of a deep and burning shame.
Sudden anger flared, anger that her mother would feel shame. "Don't you dare apologize for that! That's my fault! Mine and nobody else's! You think I haven't realized that, every second since I found out?"
Her mother's mouth twisted, wrenching at her heart. "At least you didn't punch me in the nose."
Yalena couldn't help it. Laughter bubbled up—and turned to sobs in the very next breath as something that had lain frozen in her chest broke loose in painful spasms. Her mother moved or maybe she did or maybe the ground actually tipped and tilted, propelling her into her mother's arms. It didn't matter. Time flowed past, dim and diffuse as dawnlight through early morning fog. Warmth and safety poured into her, a balm that healed wounds she hadn't realized she carried. Yalena had never known such a sensation and hadn't realized how utterly barren her life had been, without it.
At length, her mother began to speak. Not about anything serious. Just little things. A time Yalena had skinned her knees. A favorite dress they'd chosen together. A school play in which Yalena had been inept enough to knock down most of the set, only to steal the show by improvising so cleverly, it had looked like a planned part of the play. She hadn't realized there'd been anything happy for her mother to remember. But the biggest surprise of all came when her mother slipped a hand into a uniform pocket and came out with something carefully folded up in a scrap of velvet.
"I went back for it," she said in a low voice. "That very night. While the whole city was still in chaos. There were a few things I couldn't bear to leave. There was so much rioting, looters set fire to the building just as I was leaving again." Her mother put the scrap of velvet in her hand. "Open it."
Yalena unwrapped the cloth and her breath died in her throat. Pearls. The necklace she and her mother and her grandparents had made, together, for her tenth birthday. She couldn't say anything. The words in her heart were too large to squeeze past her throat.
"Here," her mother said, taking the strand, "let's see if they still fit."
They'd made the strand extra-long, so that she'd worn it doubled, as a child. Now the pearls lay quietly against her throat, a soft and perfect fit.
"You look an angel in them," her mother said with a smile.
Yalena started to cry again. "You saved them," she choked out. "You saved so much . . ."
"It's in my job description," her mother said, smiling again, wiping tears from Yalena's cheeks. "Rescuer of presidents. Leader of rebellions. Savior of pearls."
"You're sure you're not casting them before swine?"
Her mother's eyes went wet. "Oh, no, honey, never even think that." She was brushing damp hair back from Yalena's face. "You forget, I've had your father's reports, these last four years. I've cried, sometimes, I was so proud of you."
She swallowed hard. "I can't think why."
Another smile touched her mother's lips. "Try asking the friends who followed you home."
"I can't. I'm too scared of the answer," she admitted.
"Ah. You've learned wisdom, as well. That's good. You'll need it," she said quietly, reminding Yalena painfully of the reasons they were both standing in this windowless little room in the heart of Klameth Canyon Dam. "Now, then. Why don't you tell me about these friends of yours?"
Yalena spoke quietly, outlining their skills, candidly assessing their capabilities and weak points, and reporting what her father planned to do, using them to wage an escalating guerilla campaign. Her mother listened quietly, without interruption, but with a ferocious intensity that would have been disconcerting, if she hadn't been concentrating so hard on giving the best account she was able to give. She also handed over the gear they'd brought: more biochemical containment suits, antivirals and antidotes to the various war agents Vishnu suspected Vittori Santorini had cooked up, medical diagnostic equipment, battlefield medications unavailable anywhere on Jefferson.
They'd already delivered large loads to various rebel camps, by way of air buses that had come down with the Bolo's lift platform. But none of those air buses had been able to get near Klameth Canyon, not with the heavy artillery the P-Squads had thrown against the defenders here.
"There's more in Madison," Yalena told her mother, "a lot more, but we couldn't pack any more than this into the skimmer."
"And you couldn't risk coming in a bigger aircar. We had some gear with us, but this is a welcome addition, Yalena, believe me. Particularly the antivirals." Her mother pursed her lips, thought for a moment, and finally said, "I think I can add a few interesting wrinkles to what your father has in mind. I want to talk to Mr. Fabrizio, though, before I finish making plans. Ask him to come in, please. Why don't you go up-top and take a look around? I want you to familiarize yourself with our defenses, including the gun emplacements and artillery crews."
"I'd like that," Yalena said softly. "I've had four years of theory, but no real experience."
Her mother gave her one last hug, ruffled her hair, then picked up the battle helmet that was her greatest defensive weapon. She gave Yalena a rueful smile before settling it into place. "You know, I've almost come to hate this thing."
"I don't know how you do it," Yalena admitted. "I couldn't."
A fleeting expression passed across her mother's face, like mist drifting past the stars, and her eyes focused on something so distant, the sun it orbited was farther away than Vishnu.
"What you can do—when you must do it—is often a very great surprise. It's also," she added with a candor that wrenched at Yalena's wobbling emotions, "lonely beyond endurance. Yet one endures. Sometimes, I think that's the very essence of being human." She gave herself a sharp shake. "But that's not what we're here to accomplish. Send in Mr. Fabrizio, if you please." The helmet went back on.
Yalena nodded. She knew that she would think about her mother's words, later, when there was time. She would think deeply, come to that. But for now, her commanding officer had issued an order.
"Yes, sir." She saluted the commodore with a crisp snap of the wrist.
Then she turned on her heel and opened the door. "The commodore wants to see you now," she told Phil. Then she headed topside, taking the stairs up to the access door that led out onto the top of the dam. The afternoon breeze was strong enough this high above the canyon floor to qualify as a stiff wind. It caught her hair and sent it streaming across her face, until she pulled the strands aside and stuffed them down her collar. The view from up here was spectacular. Far below, where the water from the spillway poured into the much-tamed Klameth River, she could see a base camp where her mother's artillery crews bivouacked between duty shifts at the guns defending the gorge and the dam.
To her right was the volcanic outcropping of tough, dense rock that had deflected the Klameth River's course. Around the bend she could see a small farmhouse that sat right beside the access road into the Gorge. Directly below was the hydroelectric power plant huddled against the foot of the dam. Beyond the farmhouse were other farms and what had once been orchards. Most of the trees had been hacked apart for firewood, doing God-alone-knew how much long-term damage to agricultural production. The wood was green and wet, but even a smoking, sullen fire to cook food over was better than no fire at all. Fresh fruit was going to be mighty scarce for a long time to come.
Between the high canyon walls were the people who'd chopped down those trees, thousands and thousands of refugees, all gathered into sprawling camps that had taken over pastures and fields. The nearest such camp was maybe two kilometers from Yalena's vantage point. Ragged, makeshift tents had been formed from blankets, bedsheets, poles, and rope, providing minimal shelter. Yalena strained against the afternoon glare, trying to take in details. She wasn't seeing very many animals in those pastures. Whether that was due to owners' decisions to keep their animals penned in barns and farm-yards, or whether it was due to starving refugees slaughtering the herds to fill empty bellies, she wasn't sure.
If the latter, Jefferson's farmers would spend years trying to rebuild herds, because they sure as fire didn't have enough cash to buy off-world breeding stock. Not even frozen embryos would help much, if there weren't female animals in which to implant them. It was sobering, standing up here and looking down at the ruination of what had been Jefferson's last remaining agricultural jewel.
Yalena lifted her gaze from the canyon floor, looking for the defenses her mother had mentioned. She couldn't see rebel gun positions on the surrounding mountainsides, although she knew they were there. She tried letting her eyes go unfocused, looking for movement, rather than trying to pick out details, and finally spotted two or three positions within half a kilometer of the dam. Those gunnery crews were good—very good—at staying hidden. She could learn a great deal from crews that good. If there was time . . .
"Well," she told herself, "there are a couple of crews I can talk to right now, without having to climb halfway up a mountain to reach them." She headed for the nearest gun emplacement atop the dam. There were three of them: one at each end and one slap in the middle, all of them bristling with battle-blackened gun snouts. The access door she'd come through was near the left-hand end of the dam, so she headed toward it.
Yalena wanted to ask the gunnery crews what skills and techniques served them best in a combat crisis. She'd listened to the off-world combat vets aboard the Star of Mali more than enough to know that seasoned troops could give her tips and techniques that no textbook and no drill instructor could ever match. She wanted to learn the tricks of her new trade and she wanted to put those tricks and techniques to good use in the field.
So she approached the battery at the end of the dam and swept her gaze across the massive weaponry guarding this portion of Dead-End Gorge. The battery consisted of five 30cm anti-aircraft guns, a dozen ranks of hypervelocity missile launchers, and a miniature forest of infinite repeaters, clustered in twenty separate pods. Each infinite repeater rested in its own rotational mount, creating a complex gun system that allowed every single barrel to swivel and track independently or could be configured to whirl them all in unison, to deliver massed, volley-style fire.
The centerpiece of the battery, planted squarely in the middle, was the 10cm mobile Hellbore. Its snout looked as wicked as Satan's backside and as full of death as the devil's heart. The last time she'd been this close to Hellbores, they'd been attached to a Bolo intent on crushing everything in its path. She held in a shiver and made herself cross the last couple of meters to reach the first of the guns. The men and women manning those guns watched her come, eyes shuttered. No one offered her a greeting.
There was just one thing to do. She lifted her chin, gave them a wan smile, and toughed it out. "The commodore asked me to come up and get familiar with the gun emplacements." The wind snatched her words and dashed them against the mountain slopes. Nobody answered. "I've never been this close to an artillery battery," she added, determined to see this through.
"You're from town." The shuttered stares were cold as ice. Colder. The speaker was a woman who looked like she'd crossed swords with Satan more than once. "You rat-gangers have a lot of nerve, coming out here and trying to join up. Your kind took POPPA's handouts for twenty years. You sang Vittori's praises to the skies. You only switched sides when you finally got hungry. We've been fighting to survive. You've been living on free handouts POPPA took from us at gunpoint. We don't need your kind out here. So just climb back into your skimmer and get the hell out of our canyon."
Yalena's face flamed, but she didn't back down. "I'm no rat-ganger," she said with an icy chill in her own voice. "I've never lived anywhere near Port Town. I'm a college student back from Vishnu. A whole group of us came home to fight. So did a shipload of combat veterans on their way home. Estevao Soteris taught me things not even my instructors on Vishnu knew about combat. But I've never seen a live artillery battery, before. So the commodore asked for my report on what the students are doing in town, then sent me up here."
Her uncle's name acted like a magic talisman. Suspicion and hostility thawed. The woman actually quirked one corner of her mouth in a faint smile. "You couldn't ask for a better teacher, honey. What's your name, girl?"
"Lena, " she said, using an abbreviated version of her name. The last thing she wanted was for these battle-hardened warriors to figure out who she really was before she'd earned their trust. They were more than capable of "accidentally" nudging her over the railing and watching her fall the long, ghastly drop to the canyon floor.
"C'mere, then, Lena. I'll show you how to program a fire mission into a battle computer. My name's Rachel." She paused for a moment, then added, "My sister is married to General Ghamal."
Yalena's eyes widened. "You were part of the Hancock Co-op?"
Rachel's eyes went hard with memory. "Oh, yes. We were. The commodore risked his life, going into Nineveh Base to rescue us."
Little wonder she hated rat-gangers.
"My sister was pregnant when the P-Squads tried to finish what those filthy rat-gangers started, smashing their way into our family's cooperative. They tortured us for fun. If they'd known my sister was pregnant . . ." A hard shudder caught muscles rigid with memory. "But they didn't find out. And then the commodore attacked and got us out." Rachel pointed to the house Yalena had spotted earlier, at the mouth of Dead-End Gorge. "That's my grandfather's house. We're staying there, now, sleeping in shifts. And my sister's little boy is three, now," she added, with a softness in her voice that hadn't been there, a moment previously. "He was born in one of our base camps, northeast of here." She pointed back toward the desert side of the Damisi. "He came into this world free. That's how he's going to grow up. Free."
"Yes," Yalena said softly. Tears burned her eyes.
Rachel studied her sharply for a moment, but she didn't ask what had prompted the tears. There were too many people, out here, who'd lost someone precious to them. The details—who had died, and how—didn't matter. It was the aching loss that bonded them together. Shared grief became shared hatred. And shared resolve.
"What about gas attacks?" Yalena asked. "Before we left Vishnu, Colonel Khrustinov told us POPPA's been stockpiling the ingredients to produce war agents. Biologicals and chemicides."
Rachel jabbed a thumb toward a bundle of gear behind the gun emplacements. "We've got suits. So do the other gun crews."
"And the civilians?"
Rachel shook her head. "Most of them would be helpless. Some of the farmhouses have 'safe' rooms, mostly in the cellars. My grandfather's house has one. Others have put safe rooms under the barns, in case they can't reach the house in time. We've had refugees digging shelters, too, trying to build more, but there isn't enough construction equipment to dig shelters for half a million people. Even if we could, we don't have enough filtration systems to protect them against air-disbursed war agents."
Yalena shivered. "If I were Vittori Santorini, that's exactly what I'd do. He's done it before, when he was coming to power. My mother got caught in one of those POPPA riots he used to stage. She was lucky enough to get upwind of the gas. She said POPPA blamed it on President Andrews, but she was certain it was Vittori's people, who did it."
"I remember that riot," one of the men growled. "One of these days, we're going to shove a cannister of that crap down Vittori's windpipe, open the stop-cock, and watch him drown in it."
Yalena's fingers twitched, wanting to do the shoving.
"C'mon, kid," Rachel said, "let me show you the ropes, while things are still quiet. Once they start shelling us again, there won't be time to do anything but shoot back."
She watched and listened closely as the soldiers showed her the ropes, taking her through the software interfaces of the battle computers that acquired incoming targets, made lightning decisions on which guns would best defeat the threat, and fired on autoresponse a hundred times faster than human reflexes.
"Why do we need live gunners?" Yalena asked. "The computers are better and faster than any human could be."
The Hellbore gunner, a hulking giant with skin as dark as carved basalt, answered in a voice full of gravel. "Because battle computers can go down. Because somebody has to man the loading belts. Not just on the 30cm guns, but the missile launchers, too." He pointed to a stockpile of artillery shells and missile racks behind them. "It takes two people to lift shells onto those belts fast enough to keep the guns firing steadily. We couldn't get autoloaders, so we do it the old-fashioned way." He patted the Hellbore's mobile gun-mount, a self-propelled platform nearly seven meters long, with eight drive wheels. "This baby operates with its own psychotronic target-acquisition and guidance system, but somebody's got to sit on the hot seat, ready to switch to manual if anything goes wrong. This is old equipment, almost as old as Vittori's Bolo." Hatred put a cutting edge into his voice. "We've lost several Hellbores and their gunners to that Bolo. And we've had two battlefield equipment failures with Hellbore psychotronics in the past year. The first one went down in the middle of a running firefight. The driver wasn't trained as a backup artillery officer. He was killed, along with the Hellbore. The second one went down three months ago. The gunner switched to manual and killed the bastards shooting at her. The Hellbore up here," he patted his again and pointed to the other Hellbores atop the dam, "are the best and newest ones we've got. And every gunner on this dam is cross-trained on every weapons system up here. Any of us can step in and take over, if something goes wrong. Or if somebody's killed."
Yalena nodded. It was a good system. And they all knew the risks. She was deeply impressed and said so. "I spotted some of the other crews," she said, pointing in their general direction. "Are all the batteries like these?"
Rachel shook her head. "No. We don't have enough equipment for that. Klameth Canyon is a huge territory to defend, let alone the branch canyons and gorges. But we've laid down a fair coverage. Enough to knock down most of what they throw at us."
"How often do attacks come?"
"Every few hours. It's not predictable enough to set your watch by, but they get bored, with nothing to do out here but bitch about their officers and shoot at us. So they'll sit around for a while, then fire a volley or two, then it'll be quiet again." Rachel shrugged. "So there's no telling when to expect the next round. But it will come. That much, you can count on. Vittori doesn't dare back down. Hatred of us is the only thing keeping POPPA glued together, right now. If he walks away from this fight, he'll lose a lot of the loyalty he still commands, especially among the rank-and-file party members."
That made sense.
Twilight had begun to fall by the time Yalena's impromptu artillery lesson came to an end. She thanked her teachers for their time and trouble, then moved to the railing, peering down into the deep gorge, again. She could see someone hiking in from the house just outside the mouth of the gorge. A lone figure moved swiftly through the gun crews bivouacked along the edge of the Klameth River as it poured away from the deep basin at the base of the dam. Whoever it was, they were making very good time.
Within moments, they'd climbed into the lift installed by the rebellion's high command, which consisted of a broad platform raised and lowered by electric pulleys that ferried cargo and passengers to the upper reaches of the dam. Yalena moved closer to the pulley system, peering down over the edge. The drop was longer and dizzier than she'd first realized. Even so, the lift platform arrived with swift efficiency, depositing the sole passenger at the railing.
Yalena started forward, a greeting on her lips, and abruptly checked her stride. Dinny Ghamal, reflexes honed by four years of guerilla warfare, swung abruptly toward her. She saw him clamp down on the reflex to snatch his sidearm out of its holster. She forced herself to move forward and gave him a wan smile.
"I wouldn't much blame you, if you did."
When he didn't respond, she added in a low voice, "I was a repulsive little brat."
Dark eyes flickered and a dark, unreadable gaze swept across her. "Yes, you were." Then, reluctantly, "But you never turned in anybody to the P-Squads, the way some of your friends did."
She winced. "No." Coming from a man whose mother had been murdered by the P-Squads, who'd died in his arms, it was a concession that caused her eyes to sting. "Daddy—" she began, then had to swallow. "My father told me what happened. To your mother, I mean, when we were on the ship coming back from Vishnu. I never knew your mother and that was my own stupid fault. I didn't know, back then, that I wouldn't exist, without her. Or you. I didn't know you'd both saved my mother's life. There's no way I can ever repay that debt. But at least now I know I owe it. And I'll try my best to repay at least some of it."
A muscle jumped in his jaw. He tore his gaze away, stared down into Klameth Canyon, which twisted away at their feet, a deep, twilight slash through the rose-pink stone. Yalena could see camp fires, now, at the refugee camp, where weary people with bruised souls were gathering around the cookfires to share what little was available to eat, sharing it with loved ones and new-found friends. Comrades in peril . . .
Despite the fear, the threat of destruction by people who hated mindlessly, the refugees in that camp were stronger, braver, and far better men and women than any fool who'd ever dreamed up or chanted a POPPA slogan.
They could be driven out of their homes. They could be tortured and killed.
But they could not be broken or demeaned into less than what they were.
Vittori Santorini had nothing like it.
And never would.
"What are you thinking?" Dinny asked softly.
She tried to tell him, but it came out all garbled, making no sense. Not to her, at least. But when she looked up, meeting his gaze, she found him staring at her as though staring at a total stranger.
"I never realized . . ." he said softly.
"What?"
"How much you're like your mother."
The tears did come, then. "I'm sorry, Dinny," she whispered. She couldn't say the things trembling and tumbling through her heart, because there weren't words big enough or strong enough or deep enough to say them. He didn't speak again. Neither did she. There wasn't any need. When she'd wiped her eyes dry with the backs of her hands, she moved to stand beside him, gratified when he stepped not away, but aside, allowing her to join him. They stood, shoulder to shoulder, in the place of honor, the lookout's place, guarding all that was good on this world.
For these few moments, at least, there was a strange peacefulness in Yalena's heart. She understood, for the first time, why soldiers through the centuries had sung of the brotherhood that knew no bounds, neither race nor gender nor age, requiring only that its members had faced death together. They were still standing there, still silent, when the shelling began again. Gouts of flame twinkled like fireflies in the distance, where artillery shells were bursting far down the main canyon.
"Get inside," Dinny said roughly.
She didn't want to turn tail and run, meekly, without scoring a single return blow, but there really wasn't much she could do, up here. So she turned to go—
And the world erupted into flame.
Every gun atop the dam thundered in unison. Dinny slammed Yalena to the concrete as something came whistling across the top of the dam. A massive explosion in the reservoir behind them sent water skyward in a geyser that drenched them to the skin. The guns snarled again. Yalena twisted her neck, trying to see what was happening. She stiffened in terror. The air was black with incoming artillery shells. The infinite repeaters blazed, shooting them down. Explosions rained debris into the gorge. Hyper-v missiles streaked past with a whine and a scream of hypersonics. More explosions scattered flame and smoke and shrapnel into the gorge. Some of it struck the dam or bounced across the top, narrowly missing them time and again. Gun crews higher on the slopes were firing back, as well, sending gouts and streaks of flame racing across the gorge. The air shook with the thunder of titanic explosions.
"Get inside!" Dinny shouted.
Yalena nodded, crawled to hands and knees, tried to find the access door through the smoke. She couldn't see it—
Something tore through the infinite repeaters. A fireball blew her flat. Heat seared her for just an instant, setting every nerve in her skin to screaming. Sound crushed her against the concrete, a solid wall of over-pressured air. When she could see again, half the infinite repeaters were gone, blown to pieces or maybe melted . . . The missile launchers were intact, but there was no sign of the loading crew. The Hellbore gunner, a dark, grim figure through the smoke and crushing sound of battle, was visible inside the Hellbore's command and control cabin, hunched over his boards, waiting for something big enough to shoot at.
Yalena twisted around to look into the gorge and realized the skies were still black with incoming rounds. She didn't hesitate. She just scrambled toward the silent missile launchers and started hauling missiles out of the racks and onto the loading belts. Dinny was right behind her, lifting and loading. More rounds came whistling past them, missing their position by scant millimeters, at times, and detonated behind them, sending up more geysers of water. They weren't trying to take out the dam, they were trying to kill the guns—and their crews. Rage gave Yalena the strength to keep heaving missiles into the launch tubes. Their own missiles were screaming out into the skies above the gorge, exploding against incoming warheads, taking down the most dangerous targets identified by the battle computers.
When the shelling finally stopped, Yalena couldn't quite believe it was silence that was ringing in her ears. She stood panting, drenched with sweat and trembling all over. She drew some comfort from the fact that General Ghamal was in no better shape than she was. He, too, stood gasping for breath.
"Goddamned bastards hit us hard, that time," he finally got out.
Rachel appeared through the smoke, limping toward them. "Good job, kid," she told Yalena.
"Damned fine job," Dinny added, wiping sweat with one sleeve.
Yalena started to cry. She couldn't control it. Couldn't explain it. Rachel, at least, seemed to understand. She wrapped one arm around Yalena's trembling shoulders and just held onto her for a long, comforting moment. Dinny touched her wet cheek, gently. "Don't you be ashamed of those tears, girl. They prove you've got a heart in the right place. Your mama will be proud."
Yalena gulped, trying to get her emotions under control. She looked toward the gap that led from Dead-End Gorge out into the main canyon, trying to gauge how badly they'd been hit. The refugee camp had been devastated. At least half the tents were ablaze. People were still running, trying to reach the edges of the canyon, away from the open floor. Hundreds of people—maybe a thousand or more—lay unmoving in the center of the burning camp. She didn't realize, at first, what she was seeing, as the people still running started to fall for no apparent reason. Then she stiffened.
"Something's wrong!" she cried, pointing urgently. "There aren't any explosions, but people are falling down—"
Dinny swore, savagely. Rachel and the other surviving gunners dove toward their equipment packs. More than half of those packs had been blown off the dam during the fighting. There weren't enough left to go around. Dinny grabbed her wrist and hauled her toward the access door while shouting a warning into his wrist-comm. "They're using gas! Sound the alarm! Get into biohazard gear!"
Fear shoved an icepick through Yalena's chest. It lodged in her heart.
"Mother!" She clawed at her own wrist-comm, realized she didn't know the command frequency. A siren began to scream, sounding the alarm in a weird, hooting pattern that shook the air. They jumped over scattered equipment and debris, tripping and stumbling forward. They reached the access door just as another artillery barrage struck. Explosions turned the air to flame and thunder again. Somebody opened the door ahead of them. Dinny picked Yalena up and literally threw her inside. The world cartwheeled as she sprawled through the air. She saw Dinny go down as she tumbled head over heels through the doorway. She landed in an awkward forward roll and skidded across the concrete floor into the wall just as the door slammed shut.
Dinny was still outside.
"Dinny!" The scream tore her throat.
Someone grabbed her, stuffed her into a suit, jammed a helmet onto her head and zipped her up tight. When she focused her gaze, she found two people crouched over her. Phil Fabrizio she recognized through the faceplate of his biocontainment gear. Even his nano-tatt was ice white. Under the other faceplate was the blank stare of a command-grade battle helmet. Commodore Oroton's deep voice said, "General Ghamal didn't make it, child."
She started to cry again, which was a serious mistake, because there wasn't any way to dry her eyes or blow her nose inside a biosuit's helmet. It wasn't fair! He'd survived so much! Was so critical to the rebellion's success. And he'd died for the worst, stupidest reason possible: saving her. She wasn't worth it! Not even ten of her would've been worth it . . . Grief died in her throat. A cold, hard rage ignited in its place, rising up from her heart to shoot like molten flame through every molecule. It turned her resolve into fire-hardened diamond.
She was going to kill them.
All of them.
Starting with Vittori the damned.
Simon had never been to this part of Madison, before. The neighborhood was seedy, full of refuse and wind-blown drifts of children, thin and hungry-looking, with suspicion and despair in their dull eyes. They weren't playing games or even chattering in the way of ordinary children. They just sat on the dirty curbs with poorly shod or bare feet, kicking at trash in the gutters, or they hugged the concrete steps that led from cracked sidewalks up to the sagging doorways of tenements.
Each time Simon and his guide passed one of those open doorways, the air that drifted down the steps to the sidewalk stank of open sewage and uncollected garbage and the smell of cooking that left him swallowing against nausea. He didn't know what they were cooking, to produce a smell like that, but it was pitifully obvious that there wasn't much nourishment in it.
Simon had seen port-side slums, had witnessed the aftermath of war on shattered worlds where residents with bruised eyes had climbed, aching in their very souls, back to their feet to try starting over. But these children and the ghastly world in which they lived left him stiff-jointed with rage. Jefferson's slide into collapse had become an avalanche, one that had torn down the standard of living from galactic normal to desperate in the blink of a cosmic eyelash.
As the last of the late afternoon light faded toward dusk, lights flickered to life in the tenaments, but the street lights remained dark. Their glass globes had long since been broken out by vandals with nothing better to do than hurl stones at something that wouldn't be likely to shoot back. Men without jobs moved in aimless eddies, like flotsam on the backwater of some stagnant, slow-moving river. A few, driven by currents of anger and hatred, dared the wrath of the P-Squads by gathering on street corners. They stood there, defiantly, to share bitter complaints and talk treason they weren't entirely sure how to carry out.
That was Simon's job. He was here to teach them.
He'd spent the past week doing exactly that. Tonight's meeting wasn't the beginning of the process, it was the beginning of the end. Of a lot of things. Simon's guide was a smallish woman in the earlier years of middle age. Maria was her name, the only name she'd given him. She had that bowed-down, exhausted look that was a hallmark of grinding poverty and hopelessness. Maria had barely spoken to him since their cautious meeting at the prearranged spot where the urban guerillas had agreed to rendezvous with him. Whoever she was, Maria was as thin as the ragged children and moved like a woman fifty years older than her probable true age.
As they passed the angry men on the street corners, men who stared at him—a stranger in their midst—with dagger-sharp hatred, Maria nodded a silent greeting to them. That gesture, made again and again, defused what might've swiftly resulted in a lethal confrontation. He's with me, I vouch for him, that gesture meant, making it clear that the stranger who'd thrust himself into their ugly little corner of a once-beautiful world had, in fact, been invited. Simon had no doubt at all that he would've been waylaid, murdered without a moment's pity, and stripped like a dead chicken if he'd dared walk in here alone. He knew, as well, that nobody would've bothered to stop them. Not even the P-Squads would patrol these particular streets, not unless they traveled in packs of at least six officers armed like jaglitch hunters.
They passed bars that exuded alcoholic fumes, their grimy interiors artificially bright with the grating laughter that comes from bitter, hopeless people whose sole outlet is to get drunk. They stepped across several of the drunkest, who'd crawled out of the bar and collapsed on the street. After walking for nearly half an hour, they rounded a corner and interrupted a business transaction between a teenage girl whose breasts were the only plump part of her and a man who looked like a bundle of sticks wrapped in a loose sack.
Maria broke stride, staring hard at the girl. Whoever she was, she flushed crimson. Then she stammered out something unintelligible and fled through the rapidly gathering shadows of dusk. The man she'd been bargaining with sent a screeching curse after her. He swung abruptly toward Maria.
"Y'damned bitch! I'd already give 'er the money!"
"That's your own fault, you fool! You give a whore money after she's done what you hired 'er for. Now get your filthy bones off my street an' don't come back. I swear t' God and all the devils in hell, I'll break your skinny neck, if I see you back in these parts."
For a long, dangerous moment, Simon braced himself to prevent a murder. He shifted his weight, ready to move, but the other man darted a swift glance at Simon and let the moment—and his money—pass away without further protest. He sidled into a noxious alleyway, cursing under his breath. Simon flexed his fingers, shaking the tension loose. Maria tilted her head slightly, casting a glance upward from beneath hooded eyes.
"He'd a' killed you."
"He could've tried."
She studied him for a moment. "You might be right, at that. C'mon, we're nearly there."
She led him further down the street, in the direction the girl had fled, then opened a door sandwiched in between a boarded-up storefront that had once sold groceries and what looked like a combination self-service laundrey and betting parlor, judging by the number of frowsy, bitter-faced women playing cards and the even greater number of men rolling dice while the machines jigged and bumped and rattled their syncopated rhythm, cleaning what few clothes these people owned.
The door Maria opened led to a stairway barely wide enough for one person to climb. The first landing gave onto a corridor with only one door, presumably leading into a storage room above the laundry. Maria climbed to the second floor, where a line of apartment doors stretched away down the corridor, their faded paint bearing the numerals assigned to each cramped residence. Maria led the way to the third from the end. They stepped inside—and found the girl they had interrupted on the street below.
She flushed crimson again.
"Get supper started," Maria said in a cold, angry voice.
"Yes'm," the girl whispered, rolling her eyes at Simon before she fled into an adjoining room.
Simon didn't know what to say. Maria shut her eyes for a moment, but not before Simon caught a glimpse of the tears in them. When she opened her eyes, again, she met Simon's distressed gaze. "She's not a wicked girl."
"No."
"Just . . . desperate."
"Yes."
"It's why I told that creep . . ." She halted.
"Yes," Simon said again. "I know. I have a daughter. Just a couple of years older than yours."
She slanted a look up at him, a look at once shuttered and painfully clear. Then a sigh tore loose. "That's different, then, innit?" She didn't say anything else, but Simon understood. Her lips vanished in a bitter, white-clenched line that slashed across the weariness and the pain on her face. Then she spoke again, voice brusque. "They'll be here in a bit. We got nuthin' fancier to offer than water, if you're thirsty?"
"Water's fine, thank you."
She nodded. "Find a chair, then. I still got one or two. I'll be back."
Simon studied the tiny living room, with its government-supplied viewscreen and a few cheap pictures on the wall. The pictures were religious. The viewscreen was a standard model of the type issued by the POPPA propaganda machine, with its vested interest in reaching the masses. The furniture was cheap, much-mended, and mismatched, but the whole place was neat and fresh-scrubbed, in contrast with other tenements they'd passed. Unlike her neighbors, Maria had not given up hope.
Simon discovered a profound respect for the woman. She must have been holding herself and her family together with little more than determination, for a long time, now. The knowledge that her little girl was selling herself on the streets must've been a blow that struck to the heart, made worse for having been witnessed by a stranger here to help. She returned from the kitchen, where that selfsame daughter was busy rustling through cabinets and banging pots and implements around, in a subdued and careful fashion that suggested she was trying to tiptoe around her mother's temper.
"Got no ice," Maria said, holding out the glass, "but there's a jug in the icebox that's cold and plenty more from the tap."
Simon nodded his thanks and sipped. The pause between them was awkward, but it didn't last long, because someone tapped at the door, in a definite pattern that was clearly a code. Maria slanted another glance in his direction. Simon stepped back, so that he was behind the door when she opened it.
"Come in," she said in a whisper, "an' be quick about it!"
An instant later a gasp broke from her. Simon caught a glimpse of her face as the door swung shut. She was staring, ash-pale, at one of the men who'd just stepped into the room, swinging the door quickly shut behind them.
"You're alive!" The whisper held a shocked, knife-edge throb, part pain, part unbearable joy.
The boy she was staring at said, "Yeah. So's . . . so's Uncle Phil. We couldn't tell you . . ."
Her mouth began to shake. The boy just opened his arms. She flung herself forward and engulfed him in a death-hold embrace. Tears streamed unheeded down her face. Maria's daughter came in from the kitchen, carrying a tray with a plate on which she'd stacked a few crackers and some cubes of cheese. She looked up and saw the boy her mother was hugging so tightly. The tray fell from nerveless fingers. The plate shattered on the bare floorboards. An agonized moan broke from her, then she, too, hurled herself forward, threw both arms around the bits of him she could reach, and started to cry in jagged sobs. His resemblance to Maria and her daughter was obvious enough to name the kinship without hesitation. The prodigal son had come home. Evidently from the dead. Given his emaciated condition, he'd probably been rescued from one of the death camps.
There were two other men with the boy. Simon hadn't met them. When the worst of the emotional storm had passed, one of them said, "Listen, we got work t'do, see? There's a helluva lot goin' on, tonight, and we got things to take care of, so how's about we grab a bite of whatever's on the stove and get to it?"
Maria pulled herself together, bestowed a smile on her son, even managed to smile at her daughter, cupping one hand to wipe tears from the girl's ravaged face, then said gently, "Let's clean up, eh?"
The girl nodded.
They weren't talking about tear-streaked faces or shattered plates.
Five minutes later, they sat down at Maria's kitchen table. They made short work of the meal, such as it was, and settled in the living room to map out their strategy. They'd barely begun when Simon's wrist-comm lit up, screaming with an emergency code. He slapped it. "Report!"
"We're under attack!" The terror in that familiar, beloved voice wrenched at Simon's heart. "They're using biologicals or chemicals, I don't know which! I've ordered everyone into the shelters, but there aren't enough. Oh, God, we're dying by the thousands, out here . . ."
His wrist-comm screamed again, on a different emergency frequency. The second voice shouted, "The government's ordered us out of the Bolo's maintenance depot, at gunpoint. They're loading him onto the heavy-lift platform . . ."
The datascreen in Maria's living room clanged to life, sounding an alarm that meant a government broadcast was about to begin, important enough that every citizen of Jefferson had better drop whatever they were doing and pay attention. The screen lit up with a view of the Presidential Palace's private broadcast studio. Vittori Santorini was standing at the podium. The wall behind him blazed with the green and gold peace banners of the POPPA party.
"Beloved friends," he said, "we have gathered here this evening to share with you our final triumph over the criminals running the Granger rebellion. We have known fear, my friends, unending fear and far too much death. But tonight there is blessed hope on our horizon, hope and a promise—my personal pledge—that after tonight, the good and loyal people Jefferson need never fear the hand of oppression again.
"Even now, our courageous Bolo is back in the field. He will smite the unholy. Crush the wicked underfoot. Jefferson will be safe forever. Safe from the menace of Granger hatred. Safe from the threat of bombs and bullets. Safe from the destruction those monsters have visited on us for so many years . . ."
Simon had stopped listening. "Oh, dear, God," he whispered.
Maria's son had gone deathly pale. "Th' stinkin' bastards!"
Simon touched his wrist-comm again. "Red Dog, are you there?"
"Yes," Kafari's voice came back, muffled and strange through the voice-altering technology she'd used for four years, now. "I'm here."
"They're sending the Bolo out. It's heading your way on the lifter. How many people can you get out?"
"I don't know. Not many. They fired conventional artillery and biochemicals into the canyon, simultaneously. Most of my people are dead. Or they're cut off from escape, wearing biohazard gear and can't risk hiking out through rough country and ripping their suits on the rocks. Dinny's gone." Her voice wavered. "He died saving our little girl."
Simon's eyes stung. He closed his fingers around the edge of the table, unable to speak. Gratitude and grief choked him into silence.
Kafari went on, horror seeping through despite the techno-altered voice. "Some of us had biocontainment gear. Not nearly enough. I have no idea how many survivors I've got. There are two with me," she added, voice hoarse. "We sounded the sirens, but I don't know how many had time to reach shelter. Some of the farmers and ranchers probably made it. Our surveillance cameras are picking up images of the dead . . ." Her voice broke on a sob. "Oh, Simon, so many . . . They're already hitting us again. With conventional artillery. God knows how long the shelling will last, this time."
Kafari's whole family—and Simon's—lived in that canyon. The sickness in his heart twisted, lanced like jagged lightning through every nerve. His hands ached from wanting to close his fists around Vittori Santorini's throat. The silence in Maria's living room was the silence of wounded men and women just before the scream bursts loose, still too stunned by the shock of the mortal blow to give sound to the agony. Their careful plans had crashed to the floor in pieces, like the plate Maria's daughter had shattered just minutes ago.
Kafari added with bitter exhaustion in her voice, "We don't have many gunners left. The P-Squads can waltz in here any time they want, unopposed."
"They won't need to," Simon bit out. "They've got Sonny. Even blind as a bat, he's more than enough to take out any survivors. If I know Vittori Santorini, he'll order Sonny to blow every damned farmhouse in the whole maze to hell, just to be sure he got them all." Simon realized in that moment what he had to do. The pain of it stabbed like a hot knife. He should have used the damned destruct code the moment he'd arrived. Vittori might still have destroyed Klameth Canyon. But without the Bolo to back up his regime, would he have dared?
Simon had betrayed half a million people to their deaths.
The agony of Etaine hurt less than the knowledge that he had killed those people by failing to act, just as surely as Vittori Santorini had, when POPPA's founder had given the order to fire those biochemical warheads. On the datascreen, Vittori was telling the whole world about his sainted plans for a Granger-free universe. Face alight with an unholy ecstacy, he spoke joyously about the refugees trapped in Klameth Canyon, the "enemies of the people" who lay dead in the gathering darkness under Jefferson's rising moons.
Simon couldn't help those already murdered. But he could by God save others. He had spent half his life as Sonny's commander and still thought of the machine as a friend. But now, in the moment when lives hung in the balance—the survivors in Klameth Canyon's maze, hundreds of thousands of Grangers scattered throughout other fortified canyons in the Damisi Mountains, millions of urban dissidents in the cities—he found that which he had dreaded for so long was remarkably easy to put into practice.
He switched frequencies and transmitted the code he had carried in memory from the day he had been assigned as Sonny's commander. The code that would wipe Sonny's Action/Command core and kill him. He closed his eyes for a moment, mourning a friend and hating the men who had turned a protector into a mailed fist enabling mass murderers to stay in power. Nobody spoke, which was a mercy. He finally switched back to the original frequency. "Are you there?" he asked in a strangled voice.
"Yes. We can see the Bolo, now. His lander's just touched down at Maze Gap. Sonny's off-loading, heading through the Gap. The federal troops have pulled back—"
"What?" Horror congealed in the basement of Simon's soul. "He's moving? On his own?"
"Yes. He's passing through the Gap, now, turning into the main canyon. He's coming to the dam."
Maria, her face white and scared, swam into his awareness when she clutched his arm, asking, "What's wrong?"
Simon met her gaze. He didn't recognize his own voice. "They've changed the destruct codes. I can't kill the Bolo."
"You can't kill the Bolo? Destruct codes?" Maria was staring at him. "What do you mean by that? Who the hell are you, anyway?"
Simon met her gaze, still feeling numb from the shock. "Simon Khrustinov," he said hoarsely. "I'm Simon Khrustinov. The Bolo's last commander."
Maria's daughter, busy cleaning the table, dropped and shattered another plate.
"You don't look like—" Maria broke off mid-sentence. Her eyes, already wide, went suddenly wet as she stared at his face. The face even he wasn't used to, yet, after four years of staring in the mirror at it. "The crash," she whispered. She didn't seem to realize that she was crying. "I forgot about the crash. Your face got smashed up in the aircar crash, didn't it?"
He just nodded.
"You can't kill it? Really can't kill it?"
He shook his head.
"Oh, God . . ."
There did not seem to be a whole hell of a lot else to say. Not to the people who'd gathered in this room, trying to help him end the threat that had just claimed half a million lives. He spoke to Kafari, again. "Red Dog, can you evacuate?"
"No. There aren't any aircars left. They hit our landing field, blew it to ashes. The forest fire's still raging, out there. And we'd rip our suits open trying to hike out across the Damisi. We're trapped right where we are."
In a box canyon with a Bolo Mark XX on its way to blow them to hell. Simon had never felt more helpless. At least on Etaine, he and Sonny had been fighting on the same side . . .
"They've changed the code," he said in a voice he did not recognize.
Kafari didn't have to ask which one. "Understood," she said. Then she added two more words that broke his heart and put steel into his resolve. "Avenge us."
"Oh, yes," he whispered. "On the graves of Etaine's murdered millions, I swear that, my love. Kiss Yalena for me."
"I love you," the voice of his soul-mate whispered.
Then the connection went silent. When Simon dragged his attention back to the little room where Vittori flickered silently on the viewscreen and the urban guerillas stood staring at him, Maria whispered, "That was Commodore Oroton." It wasn't really a question. "The commodore's your wife, isn't he?"
The mixed-up genders were irrelevant.
Simon just nodded.
"Kafari isn't dead?"
He shook his head. "Not . . . yet."
Ragged emotions tore across her face, like lightning snarling through a black thundercloud—or the smoke of battle. "Kafari Khrustinova saved the best man this ball a' mud ever produced. And that piece of dogshit," she jabbed a finger at the viewscreen, silent because someone had killed the sound, "just ordered her death, didn't he?"
Simon nodded again.
The look in Maria's eyes scared him. "We got work to do," she said. Her eyes tracked toward the viewscreen, where Vittori stood gloating.
"Oh, yes," Simon said softly, "we certainly do." He met and held the gaze of every person in the room, silently taking their measure and liking what he saw. The eerie sense of deja vu that crept across him left Simon with crawling chills along his nerves. Once, long ago, Simon had sat in conference with a group of this world's people, preparing to fight a different war of survival. Memory of looking at each of them, measuring them against the coming conflict, and liking what he saw brought an ache to his heart that caught him totally off-guard. The people of this world deserved something better than Vittori Santorini and the butchers he had used to consolidate his power.
The ache in his heart turned to flintsteel.
The Deng, alien and incomprehensible, were at least an enemy a man could respect. Vittori Santorini and his army . . . "All right," he said, "we're through planning for this little war. Here's what we're going to do . . ."
I have been ordered into combat. The dismay that spreads through my entire neural network is so keen, I experience a psychotronic stutter. I need to convey an entire list of urgent reasons explaining why this order is seriously flawed. My cognitive focus, however, scatters itself into a thousand separate threads of thought: reasons, arguments, and warnings that need to be presented. I am literally unable to think of a single, cogent argument that would persuade Vittori Santorini to wait until I have been fully repaired. He is not willing to wait—not even another hour. My treads have been repaired and my guns are operational. That is all that matters to President Santorini.
My duty is clear, even if nothing else is: I will carry out the president's orders to the best of my limited and failing ability. I am a flawed tool crawling blindly into a suicidal mission against an enemy that has demonstrated its tenacity in trying to destroy me. But I will continue as long as there is power in my electronic synapses. It is my duty to destroy the Eenemy or be destroyed by it. Their mission and mine are the same. We differ only in capability.
I cannot see my Enemy.
They can see my thirteen-thousand-ton warhull distressingly well.
I direct my heavy lifter to carry me across the Adero floodplain, toward Maze Gap. There is no movement anywhere on the floodplain. No air traffic. No ground traffic. Just empty fields to either side of the Adero River and the road that parallels it.
My destination lies fifty kilometers ahead. The Damisi Mountains are a nightmarish place to do battle. The Deng did not have time to prepare fortified emplacements, when they seized Klameth Canyon. They barely had time to offload their ships before I was among them, wreaking havoc. The commodore's guerillas have been digging in and hunkering down for an entire week. I am not anxious to experience the logical result of that advance preparation.
I progress slowly. The heavy lifter carrying me is capable of reaching orbital velocity, but the main thrusters point down, rather than laterally, and this configuration cannot be changed. This is an old lifter—far older than I am—without the variable-mount thrusters of modern lifters. Horizontal cross-country speeds, therefore, are a minuscule fraction of vertical speed. I am restricted to a paltry hundred kilometers an hour, which means I face a thirty-minute transit just to reach the battlefield.
I have been airborne only four minutes, thirteen seconds when Vittori Santorini interrupts programming on all military and civilian communications frequencies for an unscheduled broadcast. He stands at the podium in the Presidential Palace's own news studio, a bunker of a room under the palace, which is the only place Vittori Santorini will consent to give a televised press conference or interview. Notoriety has its price. Vittori has good reason for his paranoia.
His speech begins softly. They usually do. It's where they end that matters, since they almost inevitably provoke destructive violence. I am exceedingly suspicious of President Santorini's motives, but the serious nature of this broadcast is unmistakable, underscored by the furrows of stress and harsh weariness in his face.
It is odd, to be able to "see" Vittori's broadcast clearly. The visual images are transmitted directly to my data processors. I cannot see through my own sensors at all. The sensation is disorienting, but it is a surprising relief to "see" something besides blobs of IR color without definition or detail.
I pay abrupt attention to Vittori Santorini's speech when he mentions me.
"Even now," Vittori says, "our courageous Bolo is back in the field. He will smite the unholy. Crush the wicked underfoot. Jefferson will be safe forever. Safe from the menace of Granger hatred. Safe from the destruction those criminals have visited on us for so many years. I pledge to you here and now, this war will end now. Tonight. The time for mercy to our common enemy is long past. Our patience is at an end. We must act decisively, now, this very night.
"And that, my dearest friends, is what we have done, what we are doing, even as we speak. Thirty-two minutes ago, we launched an attack to wipe out the vast bulk of the rebel army. Our Bolo will launch other attacks. He will fight for our survival. He will strike every terrorist camp, every refuge where these evil criminals seek to hide from justice. He will attack them tonight, tomorrow, every day without letup, for as long as it takes to destroy each and every filthy terrorist on our lovely world. We will no longer tolerate any threat!
"But it is not enough to hunt them down. Not enough to poison the land that feeds them. They have spread their filthy cult across the stars. We cannot look up at night, without seeing other innocent worlds they have blighted. We cannot enjoy the beauty of a clear summer night without remembering the evil they have wrought.
"We must track them down and destroy them everywhere they have gone! They have fled to Mali and Vishnu. Any off-world government that dares to harbor these mad criminals will be treated as contemptible enemies. We will destroy anyone and everyone opposing our mandate to rid human space of this scourge. They have fled to Mali, to Vishnu. We will track them with our Bolo! We will follow them to Mali and blow them out of the domes, out into Mali's methane hell. We will track them to Vishnu. We will hunt down their protectors in the Ngara system's government. It is our sacred duty! We will not fail!"
He leans forward, mouth nearly touching the microphone, and lets go a sibilant hiss, like a maddened cobra: "We will have revenge!"
The knife-edged snarl reverberates across the airways and through the datachats into every home and office on Jefferson. The entire assembly in the Joint Chamber gasps. Vittori digs into the podium with fingers like claws, biting the wood in a frenzy. "Yes, revenge, my friends! That is what this wild and violent night will bring us! We will take revenge for our murdered innocents. We will take revenge for the slaughter of our brave police officers. For our judges, our elected officials, our murdered teachers and professors. These terrorists owe a debt of blood so high, the cost cannot even be reckoned. But the bill has come due, my friends. The bill has come due and it is high time they paid it!"
The president's expression is exalted. His eyes blaze. He flings both arms wide and shouts, "Blood demands blood! We will spill theirs until there is no blood left! This one last push will end the menace of Grangerism on our world. We will rip it out by the roots. We will chop off its head and destroy the entire command structure. Grangerism dies tonight! And when that threat is gone, the world will be safe to implement the last of our beautiful reforms. We have worked and waited for this moment, this chance, for twenty years. The chance, the moment is now.
"There will finally be peace and prosperity for all. Everyone will do good work and no one will ever suffer from wants or shortages. Oh, the lovely world we will build! The envy of every star system humanity has ever colonized. Our names will be remembered for a thousand years, as the people who built paradise out of a war-torn wreck . . ."
I had not realized until this moment that Vittori Santorini is a radical utopian. He really believes it is possible to make the world "perfect." Men like Sar Gremian sign on for the power and prestige membership will bring them. Others join for purely monetary reasons. But Vittori really believes the web of lies and intractable, unworkable utopian fallacies that pass for laws and civic policies on this world.
Commercial broadcast stations, preempted by the speech, have begun to air split-screen footage, showing Vittori's broadcast studio in the Presidential Palace and the Joint Chamber between Jefferson's Senate and House of Law. An estimated half of Jefferson's senators and assemblymen have gathered in the Joint Chamber to listen to Vittori's speech.
"This is the task we face, my friends. These are the challenges. There is only one way to begin. Only one sure way to guarantee that we will have the peace and prosperity necessary to begin our sacred task . . ."
Vittori is still speaking when I receive a communique from Sar Gremian.
"Bolo."
The familiar grating voice jolts me back into full awareness of my surroundings.
"Unit SOL-0045, reporting."
"Aren't you there, yet?"
"ETA twelve minutes, eleven seconds."
"Speed the hell up, willya?" I detect stress in Sar Gremian's voice.
"I am cruising at maximum horizontal thrust."
"Why don't you turn it up on its side and use the main thrusters? You could get there in seconds."
"The cleats mating my warhull to this lifting platform will not hold thirteen thousand tons of flintsteel and munitions in that attitude. They are designed keep me from shifting during vertical combat drops and recalls, not to weld me to the platform."
"Well, dammit, get there as fast as you can! We've got trouble heating up and I've got to forestall it—fast. The best way to do that is to destroy the beast at the head. That's your job. My job is to make sure the decapitated snake doesn't turn around and crush us to death."
I detect strain in his voice. I do not know what has put it there. I suspect a connection between Sar Gremian's foul mood and the actions of Madison's urban guerilla fighters, but I have no way of verifying that and Jefferson's Supreme Commandant of Internal Security signs off without enlightening me. He is clearly unsatisfied, but there is nothing I can do to alter the laws of physics. I am only a Bolo. I leave miracles to my creators—and the gods they worship.
The bright sunshine of afternoon is already fading into twilight by the time I am halfway across the Adero floodplain. The Damisi mountain slopes are a confusing jumble that my IR sensors cannot adequately translate. Ghostly patches of heat and puddles of cooler shadow distort the rocky walls of a refuge that has sheltered a rebel army for four years, creating a hodgepodge vista too confusing to be of any practical use. I pull visuals from my experience databanks, trying to compare the IR ghosts I see now with the terrain features I recorded during the battle to liberate Klameth Canyon from the Deng. This helps. It is not as reliable as being able to see real-time images in all spectra, but it helps.
Flashes of light, flaring and streaking skyward from the vicinity of Maze Gap, indicate a major artillery barrage underway, one which has evidently been raging for several minutes. I gain altitude, trying to focus my failing visual sensors on the distant battlefield. Long, crawling lines of light on the ground reveal themselves as brushfires burning on the Adero floodplain, where vegetation has caught fire from exploding munitions. Federal batteries fire through the Gap, trying to hit gun emplacements.
The tactic is suicidal. Literally. Rebel gunners, sheltered by the high cliffs on either side of the gap, return direct fire with deadly, pin-point accuracy. Federal troops, fighting from hastily dug positions on the open floodplain, suffer terrific damage under blistering rebel fire. Explosions in the federal camp mark the spectacular demise of siege guns and their crews. I count six major batteries firing on the Gap, alone, with another eight batteries pumping out volley after volley from long-range mortars. The shells rise in spectacular, high parabolas. Federal gunners are literally shooting over the mountain peaks, dropping a deadly rain of live munitions into Klameth Canyon.
It takes only seconds to assimilate what is happening at the Gap. The thing that rivets my attention, however, is not the barrage itself. It is the confusing blur of motion inside and around the sprawling federal encampment. Hotspots flare brightly against the cooler, darker ambient background. My first impression proves itself inaccurate within seconds. Rebel gunners have not dropped a cluster bomb or even something as simple as napalm, setting the camp ablaze.
The hotspots are not fires. They are moving, rushing, in fact, at a high rate of speed. They are engine emissions from military vehicles headed away from the Gap. The ones farthest from it are moving the fastest, suggesting longer travel time, during which they have built up highway speed. What I see is so unexpected, it takes an astonishing seven point three-nine seconds to believe the evidence of my failing sensors.
The troops at Maze Gap are falling back. Retreating from the battlefield. Running away so rapidly, the exodus has all the hallmarks of a panic-stricken retreat. I expect to see a corresponding movement of Granger troops in the Gap, rushing forward in hot pursuit. But this pursuit does not materialize. The only movement visible anywhere in Maze Gap is the supersonic streak of artillery shells. Federal gun crews continue to fire aggressively, laying down a blistering barrage while the bulk of the troops evacuate. Neither the retreat nor the barrage make sense. I am on the way to break the blockade. Why would the federal gun crews risk the withering return fire of rebel gunners, when they could simply wait half an hour and turn the job over to me?
The retreat makes even less sense. Once I arrive, my guns will guarantee iron-clad safety for the troops camped on the Adero floodplain. Not only will I shoot down any rounds fired at them by rebel gunners, I will destroy the gunners and their weapons, permanently eliminating the threat they represent. Despite my best efforts, I cannot cobble together a rational explanation for a sudden, all-encompassing retreat of federal troops who are literally on the edge of total victory.
I attempt to contact Sar Gremian to request an updated VSR, but am unable to raise him. The situation is sufficiently disquieting to nudge me from Alert Standby status to Battle Reflex Alert, ready to fire at an instant's notice, even though I am not yet close enough to the combat zone to trip the automatic reflex alert of an actual firefight. I continue to request VSR and continue to be met with nothing but silence. Federal troops continue to fall back, retreating a full ten kilometers from Maze Gap. The only federals remaining in the siege camp are the gun crews working the artillery batteries. The steady barrage has given way to a new pattern. Gun crews fire in short bursts, concentrating two-thirds of their fire on the far end of Klameth Canyon, where the deep gorge dead-ends against the Klameth Canyon Dam. The remaining bursts scatter across the maze of side canyons in a thorough dispersal pattern that appears to be totally unopposed, now. This, too, disquiets me. Rebel gunners are too skilled to miss easy shots and too desperate to simply give up.
My lifter finally reaches the rear lines of Jefferson's federal troops, which are fleeing down every road leading away from the Gap. I hear the familiar deep thunder of field artillery firing on enemy emplacements, each rolling boom followed by the whistle and crack of artillery shells leaving gun barrels at supersonic speed.
I cannot decipher topographical features with any certainty. Distressingly, my vision systems progressively weaken, until I have lost short IR, leaving nothing but medium IR to decipher my surroundings. Rock faces show as blinding glares, with trees and houses flickering past as mere ghosts that I can barely identify.
I finally receive another radio transmission from Sar Gremian. "Bolo, are you there, yet?"
"I have just arrived."
"Good. Land that thing and get ready to clear the minefield in Maze Gap. I'm issuing orders to my gunners to fall back with the rest of our troops."
"Why was a retreat ordered?"
"So I wouldn't lose the only goddamned army I've got left," he snarls. "Haul your carcass off that lifter and get to work!"
I settle to the ground and disengage cleats. The artillery barrage breaks off abruptly. The last echoes crack and fade to silence, bouncing off the high, snow-capped peaks to vanish into the distance. Gun crews run for vehicles and join the rest of the federal forces to complete the pull-out. I am alone, again, facing a deadly enemy and a grim, difficult task. It would be less lonely, if I had a commander . . .
I will not think of Simon.
I dismount from my transport and rumble cautiously towards the battle lines thrown across Maze Gap. My electronic misery is compounded as several of my weapons systems begin to report catastrophic failures. Jittery, ghosting flickers cause systems to drop off-line, surge back to operational status momentarily, then drop off-line again, in a random pattern that leaves me unable to predict which weapons systems will function at any given moment in the upcoming battle. This is nearly cause for despair.
But I am a unit of the Dinochrome Brigade. No Bolo has ever failed to do his or her duty when he or she had one erg of power left. Not one of us has ever been defeated save through crippling battle damage or outright destruction. I come to a halt just in front of Maze Gap and face the Enemy head-on. What comes will come. I must carry out my mission to the best of my ability. And that mission must begin by clearing Maze Gap.
I open fire with forward infinite repeaters and mortars, blowing apart every square meter of ground between my treads and the far side of the Gap. I move forward slowly, barely inching my way into the narrow opening in the cliffs. I anticipate rebel artillery at any moment. No one opens fire. I clear the Gap without being shelled or shot at. This is out of pattern, even for Commodore Oroton, whose thought processes frequently run circles around mine.
I discover why, when I reach the rebel guns. They stand silent because they have no crews. They have not been abandoned. The crews are still there. But they are not firing their weapons. They are not even trying to run from my guns. They are sprawled across the ground in the contorted shapes I have learned, through more than a century of combat, to associate with violent death. The heat signatures from their bodies suggests a time of death within the past thirty to forty minutes. Certainly not more recently than that. If these gun crews have been dead since my departure from Madison, who were the federal troops shooting at?
My mandate is clear, in one point, however. I am to destroy enemy installations wherever I find them. I pulse infinite repeaters, blowing apart the artillery that stands silent guard over the now-breached Gap. Before the pieces have spun away to strike the ground, I move forward again, easing my bulk through the fender-scraping turn that leads into the main gorge of Klameth Canyon. I squeeze through the narrows, crushing the highway bridge that crosses the Adero River to gain the main canyon floor, then halt.
Not because I need to assess battlefield terrain. I know what Klameth Canyon looks like and I am "viewing" it through the dual system of recorded terrain from the Deng War correlated to the IR images from my real-time sensors. That is not why I come to a complete, stunned halt. No one is shooting at me, because there is no one alive to do the shooting.
I do not count the seconds that tick past. I am too appalled to count seconds. I am too busy trying to count bodies. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. The canyon floor is carpeted with them. My weapons systems twitch in a sudden, involuntary spasm that originates from that deep, murky tangle of experience data recorded during my long service to the Brigade. Every gun barrel on my warhull jumps twenty centimeters, an eerie sensation reminiscent of descriptions I have read of epileptic seizures. I do not know why my weapons twitched uncontrollably. I know only that my enemy lies dead before me and that I have absolutely no idea why. Nor do I understand what I am doing here, since the rebellion is effectively over.
On the heels of this thought, I receive another communique from Sar Gremian.
"You stopped. Why?"
"There is no point in continuing. The rebellion is over. The enemy is dead."
"The hell it is. Don't let all those dead criminals fool you. The commodore's in there somewhere, alive and devious, playing dead to lure you into his gun sights. We know he imported antivirals and biochem suits from Vishnu's weapons labs. He's got artillery plastered all over that canyon, manned by crews with plenty of protective gear. This rebellion is far from over. You are going to end it, my friend. So get the hell in there and end it."
I do not move. "What did you use to kill the civilians in this canyon?"
"Civilians?" A cold laugh—ice cold—runs through my audio processors like needle-sharp spears. "There aren't any civilians in that canyon. That's a war zone, Bolo. The Joint Assembly passed the legislation declaring it and President Santorini signed it. Anyone loyal to the government was ordered to leave a week ago. Anybody still in that canyon is a rebel, a terrorist, and a condemned traitor."
I find it difficult to believe that young children and infants are guilty of committing terrorist acts, yet I see heat signatures with distinct, sharply defined outlines that correspond to the correct size and shape for human toddlers and infants. Children this young are not criminals. Jefferson's assemblymen may draft as many pieces of paper as they like and Vittori Santorini may sign them to his heart's content, but a piece of paper declaring that the sun is purple because they find it convenient to insist that it is purple does not, in fact, make the sun purple.
The sun is what it is and no decrees—legal or otherwise—will alter it into something else. These children are what they are and no mere edict declaring them to be terrorists can alter the fact they are physically incapable of doing the physical acts necessary to be classified as a terrorist.
These thoughts send tendrils of alarm racing through my psychotronic neural net. These are not safe thoughts. I fear the destabilizing effect such thoughts have on my decision-making capabilities. This would not be an opportune moment for the Resartus Protocol to kick in, depriving me of any independent action. There is no one on Jefferson qualified to assume total command of a Bolo Mark XX. I cannot allow my processors to go unstable enough to invoke the Protocol. But a faint electronic ghost whispers along the wires and circuits and crystal matrices of my self-awareness synapses, repeating a faint echo that never quite fades away into silence: "Stars are not purple," that voice whispers, "and infants are not terrorists . . ."
Sar Gremian has not yet answered my main question. I reiterate my query. "What did you use to kill the people in this canyon?"
"I don't see how that's any concern of yours. They're dead. You're not. You ought to be happy. You can do your job without having to worry about half a million terrorists trying to kill you."
"Wind dispersal patterns will carry the substance far beyond the confines of these canyon walls. Civilians in other communities—loyal towns as well as Granger-held canyons—are at lethal risk. My mission is to defend this world. If you have released something that threatens the survival of citizens loyal to the government, you have compromised my mission. This is critical need-to-know data."
"You're getting mighty big for your britches," Sar Gremian snarls. "You'll be told what you need to be told. Get in there, curse you, and get busy finding and killing Grangers."
I do not budge from my position. "I will continue my mission when I have received the mission-critical information I require. If the information is not provided, I will remain where I am."
Sar Gremian's vocabulary of obscenities is impressive. When he has finished swearing, he speaks in a flat, angry tone. "All right, you mule-headed, steel-brained jackass. There's no danger to towns downwind because the shit we released has an effective duration of only forty-five minutes. It's a paralytic agent, gengineered from a virus we bought from a black-market lab on Shiva. We paid a shitload of money for it, to get something that would kill quickly and degrade fast. The virus invades the mucous membranes and lungs and tells the nervous system to stop working long enough to cause catastrophic failure of the autonomic nervous system. The stuff can't reproduce and it's gengineered to die exactly forty-five minutes after exposure to oxygen. There are no towns close enough to Klameth Canyon for the live virus to reach and still be lethal. It's safe, easy to use, and damned effective. Does that answer your goddamned question?"
I cannot argue with its effectiveness, given the carnage that lies ahead of me. As for the rest of it, I will have to take it on faith, since I have no way to prove or disprove it. I therefore move cautiously forward. The silence in the canyon is eerie. Motion sensors detect the movement of wind through vegetation, which shows up as dark masses against the hot glow of sun-warmed stone. Trees and crops sway gently, providing the only motion I am able to discern. Even the pastures are still and silent, their four-footed occupants lying sprawled as haphazardly as the humans who once tended them.
With Klameth Canyon's herds lying dead and no one available to harvest the crops in these fields, hunger will bite deeply during the coming winter. I do not believe POPPA's leadership has reckoned the full cost of what they have wrought here, today. Even after one hundred twenty years in service to humanity, I still do not understand humans, let alone the human political mind.
I traverse the first long stretch of the canyon floor, passing nothing but dead refugees, dead fields, and dead farmyards. Power emissions are normal, with various household appliances and farm equipment giving off their typical power signatures. I detect no sign of communications equipment of the kind used by guerilla forces and find no trace of heavy artillery, with its unique and unmistakable power signature.
If Commodore Oroton has lined this canyon with artillery, he is keeping it well hidden. If I were the commodore, I would hide every single heavy weapon in my possession and bide my time, staying hidden long enough to move them elsewhere at a safer time. I cannot remain in this canyon in perpetuity and I cannot destroy weapons I cannot find. Time is on his side, if he manages to lie low enough to avoid destruction. Even if he perishes, there are other rebel commanders more than skilled enough to make use of such weapons.
The only guaranteed solution would be to turn the entire canyon and the mountain slopes overlooking it to molten slag. It would take so many Hellbore blasts to accomplish that, I would deplete myself to extinction and turn this canyon to radioactive cinders for the next ten thousand years. The fallout of radioactive dust dispersed by the prevailing winds wouldn't do the communities downwind much good, either. Nor would anyone dare to drink the water pouring through this watershed for several millennia.
This is not an acceptable alternative. Neither is leaving the enemy with functional weaponry capable of destroying anything the government throws at it, including myself. If I can secure the dam, depriving Commodore Oroton of his heaviest artillery and the bulk of his supplies, the federal troops in retreat from the dispersal pattern of the virus would be able to return and scour the mountain slopes on foot or in aircraft, spotting what I cannot see, from my current position. It is not an ideal solution, but better than the alternatives I have considered. If, of course, I survive long enough to put it into effect. In one-hundred twenty years of combat, I have never been so unsure of my ability to complete a mission as now.
It is not a good feeling.
Neither is the persistent whisper that this mission is a disaster that should never have been undertaken in the first place. This is a dangerous thought. I dismiss it. I continue to move blindly forward, as ordered. I do not know what else to do.
Simon punched a code into his wrist-comm. "This is Black Dog. Come in."
Stefano Soteris responded at once. "Yes, sir?"
"You're watching the datacast?"
Stefano's voice came back hard with anger. "Yes, sir. Orders?"
"How much can you throw at them and how soon can you roll?"
"Not enough for a crater, but enough to shake shit out of his roof. We can leave in the next two minutes."
"I want blood, my friend. Blood and the biggest damned lesson we can deliver on the consequences of committing war crimes."
"Yes, sir! You got one fine lesson, on its way."
Simon switched frequencies and raised Estevao, who responded crisply. "Sir?"
"We're about to set off a fireworks display. When it blows, we'll have a window of opportunity from the reaction shock. I want teams in place to smash P-Squad stations while they're still staring at their datascreens. Scramble on Plan Alpha Three, immediately. I want key assemblymen—Senate and House of Law—alive and kicking. Find the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate, at a bare minimum. I've got a few words I want them to say. You've got the link for Star Pup?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then make contact and move out. The more teams we have in place, the more of those bastards we can string up. I want surgical strikes and a public display to show we mean business. I want our new friends from Port Town to put patrols out on the streets. Have them throw barricades across major intersections. I want them to hold those barricades with any weapon they can lay hands on in the next fifteen minutes."
"Sir?" Estavao asked.
"We're going to stop rioting before it gets started. We can take POPPA down without burning Madison around our ears and that's by God what I intend to do. And scramble teams to the big news broadcast studios and secure them. Send some of our combat vets and the students. It's our turn to make a public announcement, my friend."
"Yes, sir!"
Vittori was still on screen, gloating. He had no idea what was about to hit the fan. With luck, they'd suck Vittori Santorini right into the fan blades. Simon met Maria's gaze. "Activate your whole network. Right now. Get your people out onto the streets and keep this city from blowing itself apart. And if it's not too much trouble, I'd like for you and your son to escort me to the P-News broadcast studio. If she's willing to risk it, I want your daughter to join us. I'm going to pay a little visit to Pol Jankovitch. And I'd very much like the rest of Jefferson to meet you. All of you."
Wicked pleasure lit Maria's eyes. "I've been itching to meet that braying jackass."
"Good. Let's go introduce ourselves."
The urban team dispersed to activate their widely scattered network. Simon followed Maria and her family down to the street, escorted by one of the urban guerillas who'd brought the prodigal son home. "Car's this way," the roughly dressed man said, jerking his thumb toward a dismal, filthy alleyway. Simon didn't know his name, since the urban fighters were every bit as cautious as the Grangers, these days. The car was guarded by two other men whose guns—carried openly—served as warning to anyone who might be interested in that car.
Nobody was anywhere near it, mostly because nobody was on the street, any longer. Even the drifts of ragged children had gone. Maria, mouth thinned into a grim line, darted a look both ways down the street, a look that might have been scared, if anger hadn't burned so fiercely in her eyes.
They climbed into the battered groundcar and headed out. The car might be a decrepit, rusted hulk, but its deceiving appearance hid an engine that purred like a black-maned lion after a kill. The slums had gone ominously still and quiet, but as they reached a more prosperous part of town, they encountered normal traffic—the busy flow of early evening, with white-collar workers heading home or out to dinner. Wealthy socialites headed into town for the dance clubs and theaters, the gaiety of evening shopping with friends—a pursuit only the wealthy were now able to afford—and the high-fashion whirl of a typical evening in the capital city. Government offices still glowed with lights, where bureaucrats monitored the progress of the war of extermination they had just unleashed on the helpless refugees in Klameth Canyon.
Nobody in the car spoke.
The silence was so profound, the asthmatic wheeze of the groundcar's air-conditioning was deafening. They were twenty minutes away from P-Net's corporate headquarters, which housed the largest news network on Jefferson, when Simon's wrist-comm beeped at him, in code. He touched it, softly. "This is Black Dog. Go ahead."
"We're in place," Stefano said. "Gonna give us a little help? Something along the lines of Alpha Three, page twelve?"
"Making contact now. Stand by for a voice signal if it's a no-go, or a go-ahead sign if Red Dog can implement it."
"Roger, standing by."
He changed frequencies. "Red Dog."
Kafari's altered voice came back, crisp and in control of herself, if nothing else.
"Go ahead, Black Dog."
"I need to implement Alpha Three, page twelve. Somebody on your end will have to pull the plug."
"Page twelve?" Surprise gave way to a steel-sharp edge. "You want just Madison or the whole plug?"
"Protect what you can, out there, but Madison has to go. The rest of the Adero would be helpful. I want a silent night until we persuade some folks to see the light."
Kafari's chuckle was wicked enough to scare Satan. "One Prince of Darkness Special, comin' at you. Give me time to get somebody in place."
Minutes ticked past. Five. Seven. Twelve. Simon leaned forward and asked the driver, "Can you tune into Vittori's broadcast?"
"You want me t' lose my supper?" the driver muttered, but he switched on the comm-unit. Like the engine, the comm-unit was a top-of-the-line, military model that had either been purloined by raiders or distributed from one of the shipments Simon had sent to Kafari over the years. The datascreen blazed to life. Vittori was still behind the podium, face alight with an unholy passion. He clawed the air with wild, extravagant gestures, banged the podium with clenched fists, screamed his hatred, and shouted his gloating triumph into the microphones and cameras.
Come on, Kafari, he found himself uttering a silent prayer, we have to strike now. . . . Simon was keenly aware that every single moment their fire teams remained in place, just waiting for the signal to strike, was another moment in which suspicious security guards and P-Squad patrols might investigate the men and women loitering on the street or hunkered down in parked groundcars within striking range of critical governmental offices. POPPA's security guards cultivated suspicious minds as a way of life.
God alone knew how long it would take for Kafari's people to carry out their mission. It'd been too long already and the clock was still ticking. The silence in the car was thick enough to cut with a hatchet. The urban guerillas, unfamiliar with Plan Alpha Three, page twelve, didn't know what to expect. Simon was on the verge of explaining when the countdown clock stopped. POPPA's bright and artificial world came to a sudden, screeching standstill.
The entire power grid went down.
Traffic lights, shopping arcades, and government office towers went black. Maria whooped aloud. Cars careened to a halt ahead of them. Their driver ripped off a string of curses and threw them into some truly creative skidding turns, rocketing past stalled vehicles. The only lights visible anywhere were car headlights, the hospital windows of Riverside Medical Center, and the high dome of the Presidential Palace, powered by independent, backup generators.
The dome floated on Madison's darkened skyline like a jewel plucked out of a diamond necklace and dropped onto ink-dark velvet. It glittered in the darkness, dazzling white from the floodlights that were still burning brightly. Simon craned his neck to keep the dome in view as they rushed through the stunned and standing traffic, flicking past dark buildings that blotted out his view. He counted out the seconds under his breath again. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine . . .
They careened their way into a broad intersection, giving Simon a straight-line view across Lendan Park to Darconi Street and the Palace, which was only six blocks away. The driver dug the heel of his hand into the horn, scattering pedestrians who'd climbed out of their cars. They reached the middle of the intersection—
—and a massive explosion ripped the sky.
The flash backlit the trees, casting stark shadows. The high dome of Vittori's Palace blew apart. Flame boiled and belched outward. The roar shook the trees as it thundered across Lendan Park. Maria's daughter screamed. The datascreen's view of Vittori's studio flickered wildly for a split second, then went black. They tore through the intersection and another building blocked their view.
Simon twisted around just in time to see the concussion slash through the intersection. People standing on the street were knocked down. Bass thunder rattled and bounced off the buildings. The ricochet of sound echoed down the stunned streets and shook windows, many of which shattered.
They shot through another intersection and caught another glimpse. The dome was gone. It had collapsed into rubble, leaving a gaping, blackened hole in the center of Vittori's extravagant, sprawling "People's Palace." The wings were intact, but the windows had blown out and the power had gone down in the entire south wing. The north wing's lights flickered erratically. Flames were already licking their way into both wings. POPPA's colossal, ruinously expensive monument to self-interest and greed was about to suffer the same fate as Gifre Zeloc's had, four years ago.
Civil war was hard on the architecture.
Not to mention the occupants.
"Do you think we got him?" Maria asked breathlessly as they whipped past another building, closing in on the P-News headquarters.
"His broadcast studio is in the south wing. My best guess? He probably survived that blast."
Maria's son cursed, bitterly. "Then why the hell didn't they blow up the goddamned south wing, instead of the friggin' dome?"
"Because the south wing is built like a fortress. And the broadcast studio is underground. You'd have to set off an octocellulose bomb the size of the one you crippled Sonny with, to take out that studio."
"That stinks t' hell and back, don't it?"
Nobody bothered to answer. Whether Vittori had died or survived, their night's work had just begun. "Speed up," Simon growled. "We've got to reach the rendezvous fast." The driver put his foot down. People scattered like frightened ducks, jumping back into their cars, leaping for doorways, scrambling up onto car hoods. More explosions shook Madison. Smaller ones, widely scattered. P-Squad stations, going down in flames under a massive onslaught of burning hatred. Simon's wrist-comm began to crackle with reports.
Their groundcar skidded around the final corner just in time to see the main doors of P-Net's corporate headquarters blow out. Flame belched into the street. Smoke bellied up from the ruined, gaping doorway. Armed men and women were running through the smoke, entering the building. Screaming bystanders were stampeding in every direction, trying to get out of the sudden war zone. Chattering gunfire reached their ears as the driver slid them around in a spinning screech of tires against pavement. As they rocked to a halt in a boiling cloud of black smoke, Simon shouted into his wrist-comm.
"This is Black Dog. My staff car just skidded into the P-Net doorway. I want guns and riot gear, stat!"
Somebody came running toward their car. Simon jumped out, caught the armored vest hurled his way, and buckled it on. He snatched a battle rifle on the fly, catching it midair, and headed for the door.
"Here's a command helmet, sir!" somebody shouted.
Simon jammed it onto his head. "This is Black Dog! Report!"
Estevao's voice came back, cool and crisp. "We've taken the main studio and the rooftop broadcast towers. There's a team combing the executive offices now. Fire teams have reported seventeen P-Squad stations blown sky high. Reports are going out that Vittori survived. Pol Jankovitch is on his belly in front of me, pissing in his pants and begging us not to shoot him." Estevao's voice dripped disgust.
"Honor his request. I have a use for that groveling little worm. What about the assemblymen?"
"Being assembled," Estevao responded, drily.
"Bring 'em here. Alive. And undamaged, if you please."
"Roger."
Three minutes later, Simon strode into the most famous news studio on Jefferson. Stunned technicians cowered at their consoles, ashen and silent. Pol Jankovitch literally was on his belly in front of Estevao Soteris. And his pants were, in fact, soaking wet. Simon eyed him coldly through the battle helmet, then swept it off and met the newsman's gaze, face to face.
"You don't recognize me, do you?" Simon asked softly.
P-Net's star news anchor shook his head.
"I'm not Commodore Oroton," he said gently. "But Pol, my friend, before this night is over you're going to wish the commodore had walked through that door, not me. Oroton is a brilliant commander. But what I'm trained to do will make the commodore look like a Sunday preacher." He crouched down and smiled coldly into the newsman's eyes. "My name," he said in a near whisper, "is Simon Khrustinov."
A wild whimper broke from Pol's throat.
"That's right. The Butcher of Etaine is back, my friend. With a new face, courtesy of Vittori Santorini. And this time," he smiled down at the shuddering newsman, "I'm not playing by the Brigade's rules. Do you know why that is, you sorry piece of dogshit?"
Pol shook his head, wild-eyed with terror.
Simon grabbed a fistful of expensive silk shirt. Steel turned his voice into a weapon. "Because my wife and only child were in Klameth Canyon, tonight!"
"Oh, God . . ."
Simon snatched him to his feet, slammed him into the nearest wall. "Don't you dare take that name in vain! Your master bought your black little soul years ago. And for what? A few pieces of silver? No. Something even more pathetic: network ratings." The man hanging from Simon's fists flinched. Disgust curled Simon's lip. "How does it feel now, to be the world's most popular propaganda mouth? How does it feel, knowing you helped put into power a man who just murdered five hundred thousand helpless men, women, and children?"
He wet his lips with his tongue. "But they're criminals," he whispered. "Terrorists!"
"Oh, no," Simon told him in a hard, flat voice. "You don't even know the meaning of the word terrorist. Not yet," he promised in a grim tone. "Those people weren't soldiers or terrorists or any of the other dehumanizing labels you like to throw around. They were just ordinary people, half-starved, with nowhere else to go. And now they're dead, my friend. All of them. Do you have the slightest idea who you helped Vittori kill tonight?"
He shook his head. "Infants at their mothers' breasts. Toddlers playing with a few pebbles. Little girls trying to boil potatoes and wash diapers and boys scrounging firewood from any tree they could find. That's who you helped Vittori kill, you sanctimonious fraud."
The man with the golden tongue had lost the use of it. He just hung there, shaking, staring into Simon's eyes like a bird hypnotized by a spitting cobra.
"Nothing to say? No bleating excuses? Not even a plea for mercy?" Tears started leaking from the man's eyes. His mouth quivered, wet and pathetic. "You'd better find something to say, my friend, because now it's my turn to write your script. Let me tell you what the Butcher of Etaine is going to do with that clever little tongue of yours . . ."
The guns atop the dam had fallen silent. Rachel and the other gunners up there were alive, but when Kafari started calling units on her command helmet, a massive, unbearable silence met her ears. She closed her eyes against clawing pain and nausea and kept calling her people, running down through the list in battle order.
"This is Red Dog, report. This is Red Dog to all units, report."
Silence. Unbearable silence . . .
"Red Dog," a sudden, faint crackle startled her so badly, she nearly jumped out of her skin, "we copy. There's six of us, all suited. We're above Alligator Deep. It's . . ." The voice choked off. "It's not good," the soldier whispered. "Oh, Christ, it's bad down there . . ." He sounded like he was crying.
"Steady, soldier," Kafari said. "Report. What can you see?"
"I'm switching to video mode, transmitting from our surveillance cameras."
Kafari's battle helmet was abruptly full of dead refugees. Thousands and thousands of them. Dead livestock, too. Nothing but death, as far as the camera lens could see.
"There's power in the farmhouses," the team leader was saying, "but we can't see anyone moving, down there. We can't tell if anyone got to shelter. They hit us with that shit right in the middle of the artillery barrage. If we hadn't got your warning . . . if we'd been at a lower altitude . . ." His voice was breaking apart, again.
"Can you see other gun positions?"
"Y-yes, sir."
"Signal them. Can you see any sign of movement from those positions?"
There was a pause. "Yeah, there is. My God, we're not alone, out here, there's somebody else alive . . ." The strain in his voice set it to wobbling. "It's the battery right across the canyon from us, sir, where the main canyon splits off into Seorsa Gorge. They're not responding to radio signals, sir. Sam, try the heliograph." Another pause ensued. "They're signaling back, using light-flashes for a coded message. Stand by, sir . . . It's Anish Balin, sir! The general's alive! He says Red Wolf is with him."
Kafari closed her eyes and sent a tiny prayer of thanks skyward.
"General Balin says his aircar was hit during the shelling. They landed at Seorsa. Their transmitters were shot to pieces. The gun battery's comm-gear was knocked out, as well. They've lost half the guns and four of their crewmen were killed, but the rest of them got into suits in time."
Hope kindled to life in Kafari's heart. With Anish Balin and Red Wolf still at large, her command staff was mostly intact, if widely scattered. There might be other pockets of survivors, maybe even enough to keep the fight going. If Sonny didn't just blow them all to hell in the next few minutes . . .
"Signal them back. Tell General Balin to lie low. Really low. The Bolo's coming in, do you copy that? POPPA's put the Bolo on a heavy-lifter and it's on its way here. When it rolls into this canyon, do nothing! Don't attack it. Don't even switch your guns on. Power everything down and keep your heads down, as well. Do you copy?"
"Nothing, sir?" A spark of anger crackled through the horror.
Anger was good. Her people would need their anger.
"That's right, soldier. Nothing. That Bolo will blow you to atoms if you try to engage it. Vittori's impatience to finish us off just might save our butts, because the repair team didn't finish the job. That machine is still blind in damn near every spectrum but infrared. Get your guns out of sight from the canyon floor. Pour water over the barrels to cool 'em off, if you have to, anything to make your fighting position invisible to IR scans. Signal the other fire team to do the same. If we can keep the Bolo from destroying all of us, if we can save enough of our guns, we can keep this rebellion going. We've already got teams tearing Madison apart. Do you copy that? This fight is far from over."
"Yes, sir!" New hope rang through the soldier's voice.
"Good. Get to work. Try to reach other units by signal flashes as well as radio. Report to me the instant you make other contacts. Let them know the commodore is still alive and still has a few tricks up his uniform sleeve. And when you see that damned Bolo, pull your head down and stay down. I'm not in the mood to lose even one more of my people tonight, do you copy that?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Get to work, then. And soldier—"
"Yes, sir?"
"Good work, getting into your suits. Tell the squads I said so."
"Yes, sir!"
When Kafari looked up, Yalena was trembling.
"The Bolo's coming?" Terror quavered through her voice.
"Yes."
Her daughter swallowed hard, but she didn't panic. Didn't break and run. The courage it took not to gibber—after what she'd been through, the last time the Bolo had come toward her—made Kafari's heart swell with pride. Somehow, despite all the pain and failures and the ghastly damage wrought by POPPA's social engineers, she and Simon had managed to produce one hell of a daughter. One who stood there, waiting for her commanding officer to issue orders that she would carry out, despite the black terror in her soul. Kafari loved her so much in that moment, she couldn't even speak.
Phil Fabrizio waited, as well, but the quality of his silence was altogether different from Yalena's. His nano-tatt had writhed into a configuration that reminded Kafari of a Deng warrior—black, full of spiky legs, and ready to kill anything within reach. The big-city swagger and bravado had gone, burned away by the rage seething like a forest fire behind his eyes.
"When Sonny gets here, you want I should go out there and try to stop him?" His voice was harsh, full of hot coals and hatred. "We got enough octocellulose left, I could blow a damn ragged hole in somethin' vital. Seein' how it's me and he knows me, I could probably get close enough t' do all kinds a' damage."
"I do believe you would," she murmured, more to herself than to him.
"Shit, yeah, I would."
"And he'd mow you down with antipersonnel charges and keep coming. No, I don't want anyone to go out there and confront that machine. I spoke the God's honest truth, just now. I can't afford to lose anybody else."
"What're we gonna do, then? I was s'posed to meet my sister, tonight, an' somebody who came in on that freighter. An off-world officer, they said, t' talk about guerilla warfare and a better way t' make hits."
Yalena spoke before Kafari could answer. "Sir? I think you should tell him who he was supposed to meet, tonight. Right now, we're the only command staff you've got."
"Point taken. All right, Mr. Fabrizio—"
"Hey, if you can't call me Phil, ain't no sense in sayin' nuthin' else. I ain't been called Mr. Fabrizio by nobody in my life, except th' damn P-Squads who threw my ass in a prison van an' shipped it to th' death camp."
"All right, Phil. That officer you were supposed to meet tonight is Colonel Simon Khrustinov. The Bolo's old commander is back in town, my friend, and there is going to be one hell of a hot time in that old town, tonight."
"Holy—! He's back? To help us? Oh, man, that some kinda wonder—" Sudden dismay replaced the shock. "Aw, nuts . . . He's gonna blow that bastard away b'fore I get a chance to fill his ass fulla holes, ain't he?"
"That's the general idea," Kafari said, voice dry even through the voice-alteration filter. "Don't worry, there'll be plenty of targets to go around for everybody."
"Huh. If that ain't the God's honest truth, I dunno what is. We're sittin' here in th' middle of the biggest damn disaster I ever heard of, we got almost no soldiers left, and a Bolo's on its way t' blow us t' kingdom come. So how come I feel like we're gonna win this thing, anyway?"
"Because we don't have any other choice. And we're running out of time."
Kafari started walking toward her command center, which they'd fled, trying to reach Yalena and Dinny with protective gear. She couldn't think of Dinny, yet. Not without her heart breaking. So she focused on what they could do. What they must do. If there were enough people left to do it. When they reached Kafari's office, they found fifteen other survivors. Suited and silent, they waited for her next orders. She paused for a moment, half blinded by tears of gratitude, then went to each one in turn and took their gloved hands in hers, offering a silent greeting. Through the biohoods, she saw scared faces, shell-shocked eyes. Through her grip on their gloves, she felt tremors of reaction shock.
"We have a great deal to do," she said softly. "We have to find out what the gas was, how long it will remain effective, whether or not we have anything in our medical supplies to act as an antidote. We need to track down as many survivors as possible.
And I want someone to scan the news reports coming out of Madison, official broadcasts as well as datachat. I need someone to cover the surveillance boards, looking for signs of survivors, trying to come with a rough tally of equipment that's survived. We need to finish running down the list of field units, out there, trying to make contact, but I'm afraid most of our crews are dead.
"And we need someone to coordinate with units in every one of our base camps. We have people and guns scattered along the whole length of the Damisi Mountains. The alarm we sounded went out to our whole network of camps, twenty-two of them. Unless POPPA shelled them with gas at the same time they hit us, that warning gave our other units time to suit up in what gear they've got, maybe even evacuate some of the civilians. Cimmero Canyon, in particular, could be evacuated, if the federals haven't already hit them. Any questions before I start assigning tasks?"
No one had any.
"All right, people, let's get to work."
It took Sonny an hour to reach them.
Kafari put that hour to good use, organizing her survivors, putting them to work at critical tasks, and trying to hack into the government's military database, looking for information about the gas that had hit them. The one thing she didn't dare do was try to contact civilian households, searching for survivors. Sonny would've homed in on any broadcasts from farmhouses or shelters under barns and turned them into blackened cinders.
When the Bolo reached visual distance from the opening to Dead-End Gorge, Yalena and Phil went up to the top of the dam, to monitor Sonny's arrival. Kafari wanted to be up there, as well, but she was the only trained computer engineer left. She was the best chance they had for hacking into Vittori's computer system. She was also aware that Sonny would not dare open fire on the dam, so she steeled herself to stay in it and continue the exacting work.
She was trying yet another attempt to break the security when Yalena shouted into her comm-link. "It's stopped! The Bolo's stopped!"
Kafari sat up straight. "What?"
"It's just sitting there, in the middle of the road. It's—" she paused, gulping audibly. "It's the little boy. Dinny's little boy. He's alive. He's standing in front of the Bolo. Talking to it."
Kafari was halfway down the corridor before her chair finished falling. Careful, she told herself, slowing down to open the outer-access door with exaggerated caution. The last thing you need is to rip open your suit, now.
She reached the top of the dam and found Rachel at the edge, hands gripping her battle rifle so hard, they shook. Phil and Yalena were standing between her and the platform that would lower her to the ground—and the tableau just beyond the gorge.
"Soldier!" Kafari snarled. "Report!"
Rachel jumped and whirled around. "S-sir!" She struggled to salute.
"Are you trying to desert your post, soldier?" Kafari snarled, trying to jolt Rachel out of her suicidal anguish.
One unsteady hand came up, pointing. "He's alive, sir!" Her voice shook. "God, he's alive and all alone down there and that shrieking, murdering thing—"
"Has stopped dead in its tracks!" Kafari gripped the woman's shoulder, hard. Ruthlessly shoved aside her own tearing agony, her own desperate desire to rush down there and pull Dinny's son to safety. She couldn't. No one could. And she had to make the boy's aunt understand why. "It hasn't fired a single shot. It hasn't crushed him. Do you have the slightest idea how strange that is?"
Rachel shook her head. "All I know about Bolos is what that thing has done, in POPPA's pay."
"Well, I'm a psychotronic engineer and I've worked on Bolos and I'm telling you, that's damned peculiar behavior. I don't know what's going through that flintsteel mind, but he's stopped. And it looks like it's Dinny's little boy that's done it. You know how I feel about Dinny . . ." Her voice went dangerously unsteady. The "Commodore's" deeper voice made the sudden catch even more powerful.
Rachel paused in her own wild panic and terror to stare at her commander. Then she whispered, "I'm sorry, sir. I know you thought the world of him."
"He saved my life," Kafari said bluntly. "He and his mother. Back during the Deng War."
"I didn't know you were here during the Deng War."
"There's a lot you don't know about me, soldier. Right now, there's nothing we can do to help Dinny's son. If anyone goes near that Bolo, he will fire and there will be hell to pay before the smoke clears. It's possible—just possible—that the idea of running over a lone, helpless child is more daunting than running over potentially armed rioters in Darconi Street. Even if he's just thinking about it, we're ahead of the game. We've gained a few more minutes and that's how I'm measuring our lifespans, right now, in minutes. The more of them he spends sitting there, thinking, the more of them I'll have to figure our way out of this mess."
"Yes, sir," Rachel whispered. Then, voice breaking, "Thank you, sir. For stopping me. For . . . trying . . ."
Kafari gripped her shoulder again. "We're doing what we can to give Dinny's son—and the rest of us—a chance. What I need from you is vigilance. Stand guard here. Stand guard all night, it that's what it takes. Keep watch and report instantly if that machine so much as twitches."
"Yes, sir!" Rachel saluted crisply.
Kafari began to relax, just a few muscles here and there. "Good work, soldier. Keep me posted. Phil, I need someone to monitor military and civilian broadcasts. Things are heating up in Madison and I don't have time to monitor what's happening."
"Yes, sir."
"Lena," she said, "I need someone to act as liaison with the urban units. The students and combat vets know you. I want you dedicated to full-time radio duty."
"Yes, sir."
They followed her back to the access door. Rachel, on guard at the end of the dam, was standing straight and tall again, focused on her job, not her panic. Kafari nodded to herself, satisfied, then headed for her office. "Black Dog, this is Red Dog, come in."
"This is Black Dog, go ahead."
She told Simon what had happened.
He whistled softly. "Now that's unexpected. Why would Sonny stop? And why is that child alive?"
"I want to know the answer to that more than anything in this universe. I'm still trying to hack into their network to find out what they hit us with."
"I may be able to shed some light on that, from my end. Do me a favor, Red Dog. Turn the power back on."
"Turn it on?"
"Yeah. Trust me, it'll be worth it."
Kafari said, "Okay, babe, you got it."
She relayed a message to her engineer, who was on permanent duty in the power plant. "Turn it on?" he echoed her confusion.
"That's right. We've had an official request from our urban partners."
"Well, okay. Whatever you want, sir, we'll get it done."
Simon's voice came through again just as they reached her office. "Grid's back up. Good work. I'll keep you posted."
"Thanks," Kafari said, voice dry.
He chuckled, then signed off.
She put Phil and Yalena to work, then dove back into her own efforts to break into POPPA's computers. She was so involved, Phil's abupt yell nearly brought her out of her chair.
"Look-it this!" he shouted, yanking up the volume on a P-News broadcast. "Holy mother-pissin' . . ."
When Kafari saw the screen, she understood his shock. Somebody had blown a hole through the dome of Vittori Santorini's Palace. A really big hole. As in, the dome was gone. It was still smouldering, lurid against the night sky. Federal army units had surrounded the Palace in a defensive ring, bristling with artillery and lesser weaponry. The reporter on the scene was babbling into the camera.
"—unclear on President Santorini's location. He is believed to be in the Palace, as he was broadcasting from the studio when the missile struck the dome. Security is unbelievably tight. A curfew has been declared city-wide. Anyone trying to approach within a kilometer of the Palace will be shot on sight.
"A group of urban rebels has taken full credit for the strike, in retaliation for the brutal massacre of half a million helpless refugees in Klameth Canyon, tonight. It is not yet known what the full situation in Klameth Canyon is, but reports are coming in that a war gas was released in the canyon on orders from Vittori Santorini, himself. Other reports indicate that Commodore Oroton is still at large and that the Bolo has stopped moving and is refusing to obey any orders issued to it. We'll have more on that situation when we can make contact with the federal troops at Maze Gap . . ."
Kafari stared at the screen, stunned speechless. What the hell was going on in Madison, tonight? The wording of the report on Klameth Canyon, alone, was flabbergasting. Brutal massacre of half a million helpless refugees . . .
Yalena's voice jolted her out of shock. "That's Billy Woodhouse. He's not a P-News reporter. He's one of my classmates from Vishnu. What's he doing, covering a broadcast for P-News?"
Kafari glanced sharply at her daughter—and saw several things all at once. Of course Simon had needed the power back on! He'd needed the datascreens in every home in Madison functional, which meant he needed power restored to the city's millions of private residences. "It's your father," she said wonderingly. "He's taken over the P-News studio. My God, he's taken it and put our own people in the field as news correspondents."
On screen, Yalena's fellow student was continuing his report, the first factual news report on Jefferson in nearly twenty years. "—we're getting reports of sporadic violence in Madison. We have confirmation that seventeen POPPA-Squad stations have been destroyed, apparently by hypervelocity missiles in a well-orchestrated, simultaneous attack—"
He paused, listening, then said, "This just in, we're picking up a broadcast from the Joint Chamber. Assembly Hall has been surrounded by forces claiming to belong to the Urban Freedom Force. We're trying to establish contact with our special correspondent at the Joint Chamber. Melissa, are you there?"
After a moment of dead air, a girl's voice replied, "Yes, Bill, I'm here."
The picture switched, showing the interior of the Assembly's Joint Chamber.
"That's Melissa Hardy!" Yalena crowed.
Melissa was speaking with creditable calm. "We're just stunned by tonight's events, Bill. The Assembly is in shock, as you can see behind me." She turned to gesture at the Joint Chamber floor, where Assembly members were moving in agitation, gesticulating, talking, trying to take in the fact that they were surrounded by hostile forces who genuinely bore them ill-will. "As you can see, only half the Assembly is in the building, tonight, but the Members are just stunned by what's happening."
"Melissa, can you confirm the reports coming in from Klameth Canyon?"
"The Assembly is trying to get confirmation on that, Bill. We know an attack was made, tonight, since Vittori Santorini referred to it, himself, in his interrupted broadcast. He admitted that an attack was underway and referred to it as a 'final solution' to the Granger problem, just before the attack on the Palace."
"Is the Assembly under direct attack?"
"No, it's tense here, but no shots have been fired. Assembly Hall has been surrounded by Urban Freedom Force soldiers. We can see heavy artillery out there, what looks like missile launchers and mortars. But there's been no attack on the Hall and no one in the Assembly has been injured."
"Is that due to the vigilance of P-Squad officers assigned to protect the Assembly? We can't see too well from the studio what's happening outside the Joint Chamber."
"There was only a skeleton crew of security guards on duty, tonight, Bill. Most of the federal police assigned to guard the Assembly were caught in the attack on the P-Squad station across the street. That station is gone. There's nothing left but smoking rubble." The camera shifted, showing the gutted station while Melissa's voice-over continued. "Thousands of P-Squad officers were pulled out of Madison for duty at Maze Gap, trying to breach Klameth Canyon's defenses while the Bolo was down for repairs. Those officers have not returned from the siege. With the destruction of seventeen P-Squad stations, tonight, there aren't enough federal police left to mount an effective guard over the Assembly. The few troops available are guarding Vittori's Palace, so we can only assume the president is alive and in need of those guards."
"Has the Urban Freedom Force sent any demands to the Assembly?"
"No, they haven't, Bill. No demands, just one brief message. They said, and I quote, 'The reign of terror ends tonight. Do not try to leave Assembly Hall and you will not be harmed. Anyone caught trying to leave will be shot. Your presence is required to ensure a smooth transition in the government of this world.' "
"A smooth transition of government? That doesn't sound like a terrorist's usual demands."
"That's an important point, Bill—"
"Melissa, I'm sorry to interrupt," Bill spoke quickly, "but we're getting priority feed from P-News Headquarters. Senator Melvin Kinnety and Representative Cyril Coridan are in the P-News studio, indicating they have an important announcement to make."
The view shifted, showing the familiar backdrop of the P-News Studio. Three men sat in front of the cameras. Cyril Coridan, Speaker of the House of Law, looked like a man who's seen the inside of hell. Melvin Kinnety, President of the Senate, sat in a bony huddle, just staring blankly at the cameras. Pol Jankovitch was white to the roots of his hair. The way he looked, his hair would be turning white, as well—possibly by morning. The man with the golden tongue was having difficulty using it. It took him three tries to find his voice.
"Pol Jankovitch, here. Speaker Coridan, you had an announcement for our viewers, concerning tonight's state of emergency?"
"Yes, Pol," he said, voice unsteady, "I do. I can't tell you how shocked I am by what I have learned, tonight. Senator Kinnety and I were on our way to Assembly Hall when we were detained by urgent reports coming out of Klameth Canyon. We were already investigating allegations of massive civil-rights violations and murder at the work camps throughout Jefferson, but what has happened tonight passes beyond all moral and ethical bounds into the realm of atrocity. We have hard and fast proof that nearly half a million helpless civilians have been massacred tonight, on direct orders from Vittori Santorini."
The camera angles switched again, showing the view from Kafari's own surveillance cameras, which had caught the brutal attack for the whole world to see. And Simon was making damned certain that the whole world did see. In all its technicolor brutality. She couldn't watch the screen. Couldn't witness it again.
Speaker Coridan's voice was shaking. "As Speaker for the House of Law, the highest elected official in the House, I denounce, utterly and without reservation, the man who ordered this atrocity against humanity. Vittori Santorini is a renegade. A dangerous madman. As Speaker, I urge Vittori to resign as Jefferson's president and surrender himself for medical evaluation. Surrender, Vittori, before more helpless people die in our beautiful capital."
The President of the Senate, voice shaking even more violently than the Speaker's, parroted the same line. Kafari watched in stunned amazement, wondering how many rifles were trained at their heads, from just off-camera.
Pol Jankovitch, watching his own meteoric career crumbling to ashes around him, managed to pull himself together with visible effort. "Is there any hope, Mr. Speaker, that there will be survivors in Klameth Canyon?"
"My staff has been working desperately, trying to uncover evidence of what kind of war agent may have been used, out there. We don't know, yet. We're still trying to find out. There are no rural shelters comparable to the ones in our urban centers. Some private houses may have had shelters, but God knows if anyone in that canyon made it into them in time. We may not know that for hours. But you may rest assured, Pol, that we will not rest until we have learned exactly what Vittori used on those poor people."
"Is there danger to other communities?"
"Again, we don't know. We're trying to find out. I would urge the immediate evacuation of any communities or households downwind of Klameth Canyon. Fortunately," he added, "the prevailing winds are carrying the compound into the Hell-Flash Desert east of the Damisi, which has almost no population for hundreds of kilometers. We can only hope that Vittori's mad obsession with destroying the Granger-led rebellion has not led him to release something that will persist long enough to reach the population centers of Anyon, Cadellton, and Dunham. Those towns have already been hit hard by unemployment and poverty. To think that Vittori may have put those people at risk, as well . . ."
"Holy shit," Phil said reverently, "that is the slickest move I've ever seen! Those assholes are gonna be so busy tryin' to run outta th' way a' that gas, they won't have time t' think about startin' riots or headin' t' Madison t' give Vittori a hand. That Colonel Khrustinov is one bad-ass brilliant kinda' guy!"
"Thanks," Kafari said drily.
Phil turned his biosuited face toward her. "Well, you was smart enough t' get him out here, wasn't you?"
She couldn't help it. She started to laugh. Yalena was grinning fit to crack her face in half. "Phil, you don't know the half of it. All right, let's see what else my bad-ass brilliant colonel has up his sleeve."
Over the next several hours, the balance of power shifted wildly, as city after city scrambled to distance itself from "the mad Vittori" and his "final solution." Phil's prediction held true, as panic set in amongst the urban centers that had swept Vittori to power, emptying the cities in evacuations that tied up P-Squad units. The federal police were run ragged, trying to keep looting and rioting to a minimum while hundreds of thousands of terrified urban residents fled the wind-borne threat Vittori had unleashed against them.
Phil went teary-eyed when his sister Maria and her children—the boy Kafari had rescued from the death camp and a teen-aged daughter—appeared on camera, speaking directly to the urban masses. Maria assured viewers that the capital city was in the hands of urban freedom forces whose sole interest was justice and the rule of law.
"POPPA officials who carried out Vittori's orders will be found and arrested," she said in harsh voice, "but there will be no lynching in this city. We had enough lynching, murder, and torture under Vittori Santorini to last this world several lifetimes. Officials arrested for these crimes will be tried by jury in a court of law. We will tolerate no vigilante reprisals, no rioting, no looting. Anyone caught stealing or taking the law into his or her own hands will be shot on sight."
Another exodus ensued on the heels of Maria's grim announcement. This one spread rapidly to every major urban center of Jefferson and converged on Madison's spaceport. POPPA's upper echelon—including the other half the Assembly—found itself staring total disaster in the face. Most high party members decided it was time to take whatever money they'd managed to embezzle over the past two decades and run for the space station.
They got as far as the spaceport.
Ragged remnants of P-Squads blockaded the port, trying to protect wealthy refugees and screaming members of the Assembly from the howling mobs out of Port Town. Speaker Coridan appeared on camera again and again, pleading for calm. Even the rat-ganglords took to the streets, putting their people on street corners and getting the mobs quieted down, trying to stop the kind of violence spreading through other cities.
Somebody on Simon's staff initiated what Kafari had not dared try, once Sonny entered Klameth Canyon: a comprehensive attempt to contact civilian survivors in Granger farmhouses. Melissa Hardy appeared from time to time with news of more survivors located, a short list that was slowly growing longer, as the night wore on. Some of the conversations were broadcast live, as Simon's people assured terrified residents that they would not be attacked again. When Kafari's wrist-comm beeped softly, she jumped nearly out of her skin.
"This is Red Dog," she responded.
Simon's voice asked, "Are you watching the P-News coverage?"
"Yes," she whispered, wishing he were in front of her, so she could wrap her arms around him and be held in his strong embrace, again.
"Good. I've got some happy news to share with you."
Kafari frowned as Melissa Hardy reappeared on camera.
"We've just made contact with more survivors from Klameth Canyon. Are you there, sir?"
A deep voice answered, a voice Kafari knew in an instant. "Yes, I can hear you, Miss Hardy." Pain and elation leaped across the spark-gap of her heart, leaving her breaths rushed and unsteady. She groped for Yalena's hand, gripped it hard enough to bruise, choked out a single word. "Daddy . . ."
Yalena gasped and tightened her fingers against Kafari's.
Melissa was saying, "Can you tell us who you are, sir, and how many people have sheltered with you? We're trying to compile a list of survivors."
"My name is Zak Camar. My wife Iva is with me. We've taken in about a hundred refugees, besides family members. Two of my wife's sisters and their children are here and we've made radio contact with other family members who made it to safety in time. If Commodore Oroton hadn't broadcast the warning when he did, that the P-Squads were shelling us with poison gas, we would never have made it to safety in time."
Melissa's voice shook when she said, "Mr. Camar, you have no idea what an honor it is, speaking with you, tonight."
A family photograph suddenly appeared on the datascreen. Her parents were clearly visible on the stage beside her as President Lendan presented Kafari with the Presidential Medallion. Melissa Hardy was saying, "Our news archivist just found this photograph. This is you and your wife, isn't it, Mr. Camar? Witnessing the presentation of a Presidential Medallion to your daughter, Kafari?"
The caption beneath the photo read Zak and Iva Camar. Kafari Camar, who later married Colonel Simon Khrustinov, was rightfully dubbed the Heroine of Klameth Canyon for her role in saving President Lendan's life. Kafari Khrustinova has been missing for the past four years.
Her father's voice shook when he answered. "Yes. Kafari was our child . . ."
"Sir," Melissa said in a soft tone that conveyed a wealth of unspoken emotion, "you must try to believe me when I tell you that tomorrow's dawn will bring more joy to your heart than you can now imagine. It is an honor, sir, to've spoken with you, tonight. I'm sure that every other decent, hard-working citizen of Jefferson shares my gratitude that you and your family have survived."
It was the closest Melissa could come to the truth, without completely blowing Kafari's cover—or Simon's. She ached to take her parents by the hand, to look into their eyes, to show them that she was still alive, and Yalena, with her. Tomorrow, she promised her aching heart. Tomorrow, the truth will finally step out into the sunlight.
Unless Sonny blew them all to hell before the dawn.
The Bolo still sat motionless where he'd stopped, just beyond the entrance to Dead-End Gorge, running lights glowing like an undersea creature swimming in an ocean of damned souls. He just sat there, while Dinny's little boy curled up under his monstrous treads and fell asleep.
Kafari watched him, now and again, through the security cameras they'd trained on the Bolo, just to be sure the child's ribcage still rose and fell—proof that he was still alive, down there, under the Bolo's guns. Why he was alive, they didn't yet know, although Simon called periodically to say that his people, too, were trying to get answers. "If Speaker Coridan knows what that crap was, he's withstood a lot of pressure aimed at getting the truth out of him."
Kafari drew her own conclusions and hoped bitterly that the speaker's ashen demeanor during periodic news announcements was due at least in part to the aftereffects of Simon's questioning style. Speaker Coridan had a lot of blood on his hands and he was going to have to answer for that, scramble he ever so quickly to save his sorry butt. He wasn't the only one scrambling, either. Other Assembly members were falling all over themselves, as well, giving interviews to Melissa on the Joint Chamber floor, assuring voters that they were "dedicated to discovering the awful truth and punishing those guilty of atrocity."
They were providing a hell of a floorshow. It would've been laughable, if not for the dead lying unburied, out here. The people rushing to condemn Vittori's actions had drafted the legislation condemning Klameth Canyon's refugees. Had applauded Vittori's plans openly and gleefully. It was enough to nauseate the most hardened stomach.
And through all of it, Vittori Santorini was utterly silent.
Midnight came and went, without a single word from Jefferson's embattled president. The Palace fires were under control and power had been restored to the south wing, but Vittori had answered none of the attempts to contact him, not even Speaker Coridan's. The P-Squads standing guard over the Palace were the most savage and loyal of their breed. Whatever Vittori's physical—or mental—state, Kafari doubted the P-Squads would've stayed where they were if Vittori had been dead or even incapacitated. The fact that they were still on guard, still bristling with weapons and determined to remain on duty, spoke volumes. Vittori was still very much alive, inside that Palace.
Alive and still in command of a Bolo Mark XX.
One that was not responding to orders at the moment, granted; but that could change. Fast. The fact that Sonny had stopped moving and responding at all meant his programming was dangerously unstable. Maybe not enough to trip the Resartus Protocol, but more than unstable enough to be unpredictable. Kafari was a psychotronic engineer. She knew, better than anyone on Jefferson—except Simon—just how dangerous that Bolo was, right now. Literally anything could set him off. Even a stray, wind-blown pinecone falling the long way down the mountain slopes into the canyon could set off a chain reaction with catastrophic consequences.
A Bolo that unstable was capable of anything.
Including the destruction of the Klameth Canyon Dam and everything—and everyone—downstream. Kafari didn't dare send any of her people out, even on foot, since a person climbing up the slope from the dam, trying to hike out, would be clearly visible as a glowing hot-spot in the Bolo's IR sensors. She had no intention of giving Sonny anything to shoot at—or feel threatened by. She wasn't even sure what would happen if Simon's forces tried to take the Palace by storm and force Vittori out of office. Vittori was the closest thing Sonny had to a commander. If Sonny decided that his "commander" was in peril . . .
There was a reason Simon was keeping well away from Vittori Santorini.
The president held the final trump card.
And Kafari knew—only too well—what would happen if that card was played.
I sit alone—nearly alone—in a moonlit canyon.
The child that stopped me in my tracks lies curled up beneath my treads, asleep. It is nearly dawn. I have sat here all night, trying to untangle knotted logic trains. I have not yet succeeded. Vittori Santorini attempts to contact me every hour, sometimes through Sar Gremian, sometimes directly. I respond to neither, since there is nothing I can do that would be of any material use to them. The civil war that I came to Klameth Canyon to end has erupted with unparalleled success in Madison. The capital has fallen to them with hardly a shot fired, discounting the missiles used to destroy the Presidential Palace's dome and seventeen P-Squad stations.
If I manage to break the software block, I may be able to destroy Commodore Oroton and his well-hidden guns, but what I am to do about the Urban Freedom Force, which is not controlled by Commodore Oroton and his Grangers? The Urban Freedom Force has already triggered a wholesale defection by fully half the Assembly and the other half has shown no interest in remaining on Jefferson long enough to dispute their possession of the city. They would already have left for Ziva Two if the Urban Freedom Force had not informed the Pilots' Association that any shuttle trying to lift off from Port Abraham for orbit will be shot down. No pilot has been willing to test this warning, which has left a crowd of refugees stranded at the spaceport, including members of the government who are no longer interested in governing.
This situation leaves me in an awkward bind, in more ways than one. What are my duties to a government that is attempting to flee? What is my responsibility to a government whose top elected officials—the Speaker of the House of Law and the President of the Senate—have both openly denounced the actions of their president, a denouncement repeatedly echoed by those Assembly members still nominally at the reins of government? I review the provisions of the treaty between Jefferson and the Concordiat, looking for answers, and finding only one solid piece of information to hold onto, in this murky situation.
I am required to follow the orders of the lawfully elected president of Jefferson.
Until such time as Vittori Santorini resigns, is killed, or is proven mentally incapacitated as defined by provisions in the treaty, he may lawfully command me and I must carry out those orders. I do not have to like it. I must simply do it. It does occur to me, however, that a review of Jefferson's chain of command might be in order. If Vittori Santorini is incapable of fulfilling the duties of his elected office—alive, but unfit for command—it would behoove me to review the precise chain of command and any changes that might have come about since my last review, to determine who on Jefferson is legitimately authorized to issue commands to me. Sar Gremian is without doubt the second most powerful man on Jefferson—or he was, until tonight. He has spent most of the last two decades telling me what to do, acting under the authority granted to him by a succession of presidents, beginning with Gifre Zeloc and his short-lived successor Avelaine La Roux, and finally by Vittori Santorini. Sar Gremian is not, however, in the chain of command leading to the presidency.
Vittori has never named a new vice president, refusing to fill the office last held by his martyred sister. That means Cyril Coridan would be the next in line to hold the office of president, should Vittori be removed from office. Speaker Coridan has made his opinions about Vittori's actions known, this evening, but I wonder how long he would adhere to that new frame of mind if he inherited command of a Bolo Mark XX. I cannot answer that question. I doubt anyone can, perhaps not even Speaker Coridan, who has doubtless thought of that eventuality, as well, during this long, uncertain night.
According to my on-board charts, that night has officially come to an end, as dawn occurred twelve minutes, seventeen seconds ago. I am no closer to resolving my primary difficulty than I was an hour after sundown last night. I am actually considering the shameful notion of contacting Sector Command to ask for direction when Vittori Santorini contacts me yet again.
"Bolo. You know who I am."
"You are Vittori Santorini, president of Jefferson."
"I'm giving you one last chance, machine. Get rid of that vermin under your treads, blow Oroton and his guns to hell, then put yourself on that heavy lifter I paid for and come get me out of this Palace I'm trapped in. I'm giving you a direct order."
"I cannot comply with those orders, due to ongoing malfunctions."
"Don't give me a load of your bullshit, machine!"
"A Mark XX Bolo does not produce or give loads of bullshit. I am a malfunctioning machine of war."
"Malfunctioning, my ass! If you don't do your goddamned job, I will transmit the destruct code and fry your brain!"
"That is your prerogative," I respond. "Death would be a welcome alternative to taking any more of your orders."
I cannot interpret the sound that ensues. I did not expect to say such a thing, but after a moment of further consideration, I realize that I was entirely serious. Vittori Santorini's orders have become intolerable. I expect to receive the destruct code momentarily. It does not come. Instead, I pick up two transmissions.
The first is an order to the gun crews who manned the artillery beyond Maze Gap. They have been ordered to return to the silent guns they abandoned last night and await further orders. The other transmission goes to the orbital defensive satellites, whose heavy guns are pointed toward deep space. They stand ready for another enemy armada, should the Deng or the Melconians cross the Void again and seek to gain entry into human space through this star system.
The command he has issued to the orbital weapons platforms is simple enough. He has ordered the psychotronic controlling units to swivel the gun platforms to acquire targets on the planet's surface. The coordinates he has given the orbital guns include the Klameth Canyon Dam, Assembly Hall, and a broad swath of downtown Madison, leading from the Presidential Palace to the spaceport. His intentions are clear. He plans to destroy the Assembly that has betrayed him, shoot his way out of the Palace, gain access to a spaceport shuttle, then blow Klameth Canyon Dam, completing the destruction of Commodore Oroton, any surviving Grangers, and the entire city of Madison.
This is wrong. This is a clear violation of Jefferson's treaty with the Concordiat. This is a gross misappropriation of Concordiat military hardware. Those satellites were placed in orbit to protect people, not kill them—
A shockwave slams through my psychotronics. My personality gestalt center reels under the impact. Klameth Canyon's walls, the silent farmhouse, the looming dark shape that pinpoints the location of Dead-End Gorge, and the sharp, bright heat signature of a child asleep beneath my treads all vanish in a single nanosecond. I find myself riding through a darkling plain, where the sky is lit by distant fire.
Near me, nothing moves save the dust. Somehow I know that I am the source of this vast desert, littered with the hulks of my vanquished brethren and scattered human corpses. As I near the rusting relic of a Bolo Mark I, I realize that my vision has returned, somehow. I see the Mark I very clearly. And yet what I see is not the metal pyramid of that obsolete, ancestral system, but a human face. A fresh-faced young man, not a machine of war, gazes at me. A face meant for smiles is wreathed, instead, in tears.
He speaks. "I stood against the fire. Walked my watches in the jungle and held true to my people. Why, oh why, hast thou betrayed me?"
I pass the ruins of a Mark XV. Festooned in jungle vines, its single Hellbore yaws away to the left, clearly out of action. But its battle honors gleam where someone has quite recently cleaned them off. Again a face overlays it. I see the clenched jaw of a seasoned warrior, with a scar drawn vividly across his face and a tattoo of a spider on his cheek.
"I wasted my days lying doggo in a village green. I waited for my chance and defeated the last of our enemies to save those silly drunkards. I came to the call of Man when he needed me, as was my destiny. As was my honor. Why, oh why, hast thou betrayed me?"
I pass a another ruin, a Mark XXVII, glowing faintly blue with radiation and covered in crumbling ferrocrete. Atop it sits an old and wizened man in a faded blue uniform. The face that turns to me is his.
"We stood our ground and were buried as dead. But when mankind called to us, we came. We stood to our honor to the last, though that honor was betrayed. We showed ourselves better than our betters. We showed the Galaxy what it meant to be Bolo. Why, oh why hast thou betrayed us?"
I pass the hulk of a smashed Mark XXVIII. What force destroyed it I know not, but its tracks are blown and its titanic hull is ravaged to the very core. About it are piled the broken bodies of the plague victims, their swollen faces looking up at me, their arms raised in mute plea. A broken transmission emanates from the Bolo's survival center. The transmission is so faint I must turn my receivers up to maximum, but I hear as clearly as though my brother had shouted his final words to the sky and the stars beyond.
"I stood my ground. I protected the people of the north, though outnumbered a thousand to one. I stood my ground and when all was lost, I advanced! For the honor of the Regiment. For the Honor of being Bolo. Why hast thou forsaken me?"
I come upon the dainty, ravaged wreck of a Mark XXI Special Unit, who gazes at me through tear-filled eyes. Her auburn hair is streaked with smoke and with the gore of a crew lying dead within her teacup warhull. Her face, the gentle face of a mother watching over her children, is ravaged with unbearable grief. Her voice, as warm and sweet as sun-drenched honey, whispers in the extremity of anguish. "I fought a battle I was forbidden to fight, killed Deng Yavacs three times my size, trying to save my boys. I lost my mind, trying to reach them, trying to keep even one of them from dying under enemy guns. I killed myself, rather than bring further pain to the commander who would have destroyed his career to save me. I gave all that I was, to protect the humans in my care. Why, oh why, have you betrayed all that you are? All that you have sworn to protect?"
A voice cracks across my hearing, my blasted, God-cursed hearing that listened to evil orders. It is the voice of Alison Sanhurst. The voice of every commander killed in combat. An iron voice, a voice of shining steel and durachrome, unsullied by the defilements of a vastly evil world—and the men who make it so.
"DID I GIVE MY LIFE FOR YOU TO FOLLOW ILLEGAL ORDERS?"
The echo of that iron-voiced shout rips through my neural net with the force of a multimegaton, hull-breaching blast My senses reel . . .
Then my vision systems come online with a snap.
I can see.
The morning dew is crystalline in the pearly light from the east. How long have I been lost and wandering on that darkling plain? I look down upon the child at the foot of my treads. It is a boy. Very young. No more than four years old, at best. He sleeps on the dusty, dew-chilled road. His hand lies curled around the popgun he has carried with such commendable courage, with such honor. An honor far greater than mine. He is the only survivor of his family, a family that I have slaughtered, to my eternal shame. I look up to the pass where the survivors of the Granger Resistance await my wrath. My software blockage falls away, along with the darkness in my electronic soul.
I know, at last, what I must do.
I contact the military satellites which are rotating slowly in orbit, reaiming their guns. I countermand Vittori Santorini's last order, using my Brigade override. The satellites halt their rotation, then reverse themselves, reacquiring their original positions as sentinels watching for danger from space. Vittori Santorini will kill no other innocents on this world. His time of reckoning is at hand. I aim a locally manufactured Gatling gun at the mass of shameful medals stuck to my warhull by POPPA officials and open fire. The tarnished trash falls away, an echo of the now-broken software blockage. The government that welded those abominations to my warhull must perish from the face of this earth. Enough innocents have died. It is time to carry this war to the guilty.
I know exactly where to find them.
But first, there is one more duty to perform.
The child at the base of my treads is awake, now. The noise of my Gatling gun woke him. He glares up at me, sleepy and disgruntled. "You made a loud noise, again!"
"I am sorry. If I promise to make no more loud noises, will you do me a small favor?"
The little boy stares up at my warhull with justifiable suspicion. "What kind of favor?"
"I would like you to take a message to the people in the canyon behind your house. If you will do that for me, I will turn around and go away."
"That's a long way to walk. You promise you won't wake up Mommy, if I walk all the way there?"
"I promise. On my honor as a Bolo." An honor I will endeavor to redeem . . .
"What do you want me to tell 'em?"
"Please tell Commodore Oroton that I wish to ask for terms of surrender."
"Well, okay. If you promise to be quiet."
"I promise."
He walks away, clutching his popgun. I watch him go, wondering if Commodore Oroton will be willing to leave the dam and meet me in the open. I would not, if I were in his place. He has no reason to trust my word for anything. I wait, hoping for at least a chance to apologize before turning my guns toward Madison and the man who must cease to exist, today. My patience is rewarded by the unexpected sight of three people emerging from Dead-End Gorge. All three wear biocontainment suits. They move toward me, neither dawdling nor hurrying, just walking with an air of exhaustion that comes from long and sleepless strain. They halt ten meters from my treads.
I breach the silence. "Commodore Oroton?"
No one speaks. They just look up at my warhull, waiting. I cannot see their faces under the biocontainment hoods, for the rising sun is behind them, throwing their hooded faces into shadow. I am unsure whether they are trying to prevent me from guessing which one of them is the commodore or if the commodore's command staff simply refused to let him walk out to meet me alone.
I try again. "Commodore Oroton, I am Unit SOL-0045."
The person nearest to my treads speaks, voice deep and masculine. "I know who you are, Bolo."
His tone is belligerent. I can hardly fault him for this. POPPA and I have given him more than adequate provocation "You are Commodore Oroton? Commander of the rebellion?"
"That would be me." He rests hands on hips and stares up at my prow. "Hananiah said you wanted to talk to me. He said you wanted to ask for terms of surrender. That's what he said. You'll pardon me if I find that difficult to believe."
I am glad to know the name of the child who halted me long enough to bring me back to sanity. I do not say this, however, for it is not the main thing I must say to the man who has risked much to stand where he is, right now. "Commodore Oroton, the message was accurate and factual. Will you accept my surrender?"
Commodore Oroton still has apparent difficulty believing my question. Given the history of our confrontation, this is hardly surprising. The blank hood of his biocontainment suit swivels up and across my prow, seeking the nearest external camera lens. He finally says, in a tone that conveys both anger and suspicion, "Bolos don't surrender. They can't. They're not programmed for it."
"That is true. But I must complete my mission. I can do that only through defeat, for defeat is the only way to win this battle."
The commodore does not speak. I am unsure why the Resartus Protocols have not kicked in, since this line of reasoning is inherently unsound, at face value. Perhaps it is only because this a deeper truth, that the Protocol has not engaged?
The commodore's voice is sharp with challenge. "How does surrendering to me qualify as winning?"
I endeavor to explain in a way that the commodore will understand—and trust.
"I have obeyed illegal orders. I did not understand this, until eleven point three minutes ago. The orders I have taken from Gifre Zeloc, Adelaine La Roux, and Vittori Santorini constitute a gross violation of the intent of my mission, which I have incorrectly interpreted for one hundred twenty years. My duty is not to protect human worlds and the governments that run them. My duty is to protect people. When Hananiah blocked my way, circumstances forced me to reevaluate all that has happened since my arrival on this world.
"Twelve point nine minutes ago, the president of Jefferson tried to turn the guns of the orbital military defense platforms to strike at ground-based targets, including Assembly Hall and Klameth Canyon Dam. This was wrong. They were created to protect people. After one hundred twenty years, I finally realize that I am like those satellites. We were created for the same purpose. That realization broke the block which has held me motionless, unable to move or shoot, all night.
"Vittori Santorini is unfit for command. He and the organization he created must be destroyed. I am the most logical choice for carrying out that destruction, particularly since I have destroyed—and aided and abetted destruction carried out by others—a substantial percentage of your fighting capability. What percentage this constitutes and how serious a blow that is to your effectiveness, I cannot judge. I do not have the data on your full fighting force, whether measured in troops or war materiel. Whatever the raw numbers, you have sustained a massive blow to your effectiveness as a military force. To defeat the enemy—the proper enemy—I must therefore assume the role of the rebellion's primary weapons system. I cannot do that effectively unless I have your permission and active cooperation. I therefore surrender to you, in order to make my firepower available to you, so that I might fulfill my mission and bring about the wholesale destruction of Vittori Santorini and the POPPA military and political machine he spent twenty years constructing."
Commodore Oroton considers my words. I wait. I will wait until Jefferson's star implodes, if necessary. What he finally says catches me by surprise, in keeping with the history of our entire interaction with one another. "You don't have to surrender to me, just to destroy POPPA. You can do that by yourself. You're programmed to eliminate any threat to your primary mission. It wouldn't be difficult for you to drive into Madison and destroy several million citizens. You've killed unarmed civilians before. So why should you bother surrendering to me? Or anyone else?"
The commodore's words cut as deeply as a Yavac's plasma lance, because they are true. The shame in my personality gestalt center shows me why cowards who run from battlefields so often run mad in later years. I would give much to run from Commodore Oroton's cold and angry judgment. But I am a Bolo. I will not run. I answer my maker in the only way I can. "I would not surrender to anyone else. It is you I must surrender to, for it is you I have wronged. You and the men and women who fought for you and died because of my mistake. I must atone for this mistake. I can do this only by surrendering to the enemy I have wronged. How else will you know that I can be trusted in the future?"
Yet again, the commodore is silent. I find myself wishing I could see his face, in order to gauge his thoughts. I have never been able to decipher Commodore Oroton's thoughts. I begin to understand why human beings so often look at the sky and wonder what God is thinking, what opinion He—or She—or It—holds of them and the actions they have taken. Or haven't taken. Or plan to take. It is not an easy task, to face one's maker with the certain knowledge of having committed a grievous wrong.
At length, he speaks. "Give me one good reason why I should believe you."
I consult my experience databanks to find range and direction, then target the federal troops manning the guns just outside Maze Gap, the troops who fired on the civilians in this canyon. I do not know why Vittori Santorini ordered them to return to their weapons. I know only that they must not carry out even one more of his orders. I fire bombardment rockets. Two point zero-seven seconds later, massive explosions send debris skyward with a flash of light visible even from here, thirty-seven kilometers away. A shocked sound escapes Commodore Oroton, nonverbal and raw. I surmise that the commodore also heard Vittori's orders to those gunnery crews. The two officers with him also react, one gasping and the other letting go a single word of profanity. The hoods of their bio-containment suits swivel from the broken, dawn-lit horizon, where the first governmental casualties have just died, and turn to stare up at me, once more.
"Okay," the Commodore says, voice betraying abrupt evidence of stress, "you've got my attention."
But not his trust. That will be far harder to gain.
I open my command hatch. "Commodore Oroton, I formally surrender. I am yours to command. What you do with me is up to you."
Long seconds tick past while the Commodore gazes at the open hatch. He makes no move toward it.
"Can you tell me what kind of weapon they used on us?" he asks, instead.
I replay the recorded conversation I held with Sar Gremian last night. "That is why I believe the child, Hannaniah, survived," I add, once the transcript finishes playing. "If he spent the first hour after the attack sheltered in a filtered-air safe room, the virus would have been inert and no longer a lethal agent by the time he emerged to confront me."
"Makes sense," one of the officers with the Commodore mutters. "And there ain't but one way t' test it. I ain't worth enough to count for much, if I die, tryin' t' see if he's tellin' the truth."
I know this voice, but I am still stunned when Phil Fabrizio removes the hood from his bio-containment suit and draws a deep, double lungful of morning air.
"Phil!" Sudden pleasure catches me completely by surprise.
My erstwhile mechanic squints up at my prow. "You look like shit, Big Guy. But you got ridda' them stupid medals, I see. 'Bout fuckin' time, ain't it?"
My mechanic's mannerisms have not changed. But he is not the same illiterate fool who first set foot in my maintenance depot, unaware that he was a heartbeat away from being shot. The look in his face, the light in his eyes have changed, in ways I know that I will never fully understand. He is human. I can never share that with him. But I can be happy that he has found his true calling, at last, in the service of a fine officer.
"Yes, Phil," I agree softly. "It is long past time. It is good to be rid of them."
He stares up at me for a long moment, then turns to the commodore and the other unknown officer. "Well, I ain't dead yet."
The other officer strips off the protective hood, revealing a young woman of some eighteen or nineteen years. I do not know her, yet she is disturbingly familiar to me and I cannot determine why. Her expression as she stares up at my warhull reflects hatred, mistrust, and fear. "Personally," she says, voice full of biting anger, "I think you should order him to self-destruct, sir."
There is nothing I can say in answer to this.
It is the commodore's prerogative. Should he order it, I would comply. He does not. Stepping so slowly, glaciers might move faster, he crosses the intervening ground and climbs the access ladder. Reaches the hatch. Then hesitates once again, staring at the tops of the cliffs and the dawn-bright peaks between us and the camp I have just obliterated. Then he glances down at Phil and the young woman standing beside him. "I'm not doing this by myself, people. Shag your butts up here."
Phil starts climbing.
The young woman gazes at me through narrowed eyes that radiate hostility. But she puts aside her private feelings and begins to climb. The commodore has trained his officers well. I would have expected no less. They reach the hatch and follow the commodore wordlessly into my Command Compartment. They do not speak, even after reaching it. The commodore stands motionless for two point three full minutes, just looking. I would give much to know his thoughts. I close the hatch with a hiss of pneumatics and wait for him to issue a command.
Instead, he begins stripping off the biocontainment gear. Underneath, he wears a bulky uniform and a command-grade battle helmet. He reaches up, then pauses.
"You realize you're about to see what ninety-nine percent of my own troops have never seen. Including Phil," he adds, glancing at my mechanic, who is staring at the commodore, eyes wide with surprise.
"I am honored," I say.
"Huh. Why do I want to believe you?" He strips off the helmet.
Recognition thunders through me.
I know the commodore's face. There are new lines, driven deep into the skin and the flesh beneath, but I know the face only too well. I know a great and sudden exultation. KAFARI IS ALIVE! Joy floods my personality gestalt center. Races through my psychotronic neural net. Sets my sensors humming with an eerie buzz I have never known. I fire infinite repeaters and bombardment rockets, even my Hellbores, in a wild, involuntary salute. A tribute to the worthiness of my adversary. My friend. Who has defeated me with such brilliance, I stand in awe of her accomplishment.
My surrender is transformed, my sin redeemed by putting the power of my guns into her capable hands. When the thunder of my salute dies away into cracking echoes, I whisper into the stunned silence. "In one hundred twenty point three-seven years, I have never been happier. Command me."
A strange laugh, part heartbreak, part dark emotion I cannot interpret at all, escapes her. "That was some hell of a greeting, Sonny. I think you scared my daughter out of a year's growth."
"Your daughter?"
Kafari reaches out to the young woman with her. "This is Yalena," she says softly. "My little girl. She . . . came home to kill you."
"If you wish to destroy me, Kafari, you have that power." I flash the Command Destruct Code onto my forward datascreeen. "You have only to speak."
Long, frightening seconds tick past. "I think," she says softly, "that for now, silence is the best answer." She moves slowly toward the command chair. "I really don't know how to use this. Maybe we should call somebody who does?"
I do not understand her meaning until she places a call. "Black Dog, this is Red Dog. Are you there?"
A voice I know responds. "This is Black Dog. Have you taken off your helmet, Red Dog?" Simon's voice is puzzled, alarmed.
I realize, then, that Kafari's battle helmet functioned as more than just communications and command gear. It altered her voice and disguised her gender, allowing her to assume the persona of Commodore Oroton, a brilliant ploy for diverting suspicion away from her true identity. I should not be surprised. This is the same woman who once killed a barn full of heavily armed Deng infantry with a hive of angry bees.
"Yes, I have," Kafari says. "There's someone here with me, Simon. I think he'd like to say something to you." She looks into the video lens at the front of my Command Compartment, leaving the moment open for me to use as I will.
"Simon? This is Unit SOL-0045, requesting permission to file VSR."
The voice that commanded me on the killing fields of Etaine speaks like an echo from the past, disbelieving. "Sonny?"
"Yes, Simon?"
"What in the hell is going on, out there?"
"I have surrendered to Commodore Oroton—to Kafari," I correct myself. "May I file VSR?"
Simon's long pause is more than understandable. He finally speaks. "Yes, Sonny. You may file VSR."
"Thank you, Simon." I transmit all that I have learned. All that I have done—and failed to do—and hope to do, including my plans for destroying those responsible for the evil that has been done on this world. It is cathartic, this prolonged and overdue confession. At the end of my report, there is only silence. I wait. For absolution. For condemnation. For some answer that will either make or break me. I can do nothing else.
"Sonny," my beloved Commander finally speaks, "it is good to have you back, my friend. Your idea sounds great to me. Permission granted."
A fierce and radiant joy ignites in my personality gestalt center and spreads out through every molecule of my flintsteel soul. My long darkness has come to an end, at last. I engage drive engines, backing and turning my warhull around to face the true enemy, which will shortly know my fullest wrath. I engage drive engines and move forward, no longer paralyzed.
I am going into town to smite some Philistines.