Yalena was not the most popular girl in school.
In fact, there was ample evidence to show that she was the most unpopular. There were no students from Vishnu in Yalena's classes, which were special affairs designed to teach Jeffersonian children remedial everything. The closest she came to natives of Vishnu during school hours were the hectic moments in the corridors while changing classes and standing in line at the school cafeteria. Most of the Vishnu kids turned pitying glances on those known to be from Jefferson, but others were openly rude.
Given the way children of POPPA's social and political elite behaved in mixed company, it was not difficult to see why. Yalena had truly not realized how odious a child she had been, until thrown into a society comprised of Vishnunians, POPPA's upper crust, and Granger refugees.
Since Yalena did not fit into any of those social groupings, was trusted by none of them, and did not seek out companionship from any of them, she was quite literally the least popular individual in the entire school. For the first year, it had cut her to the bone. By the time she was sixteen, it had left her in tears on occasions that should have been special and had, instead, been merely excruciating. At seventeen and a half, she was far too busy mapping out her vengeance to bother with mere social trivialities.
She had her eye on college, which was more than enough work for a girl who hadn't really learned anything but how to wash and dress herself. Fortunately, Vishnu's colleges and universities had also opened their doors to Jefferson's disadvantaged students, in a bid to create interstellar neighbors who were at least capable of reading, writing, and calculating basic arithmetic. Yalena had already applied to the college she wanted to attend, which offered the kind of classes she would need if she hoped to return home, someday, and strike back at the people who had murdered her mother and crippled her father.
Yalena's pulse always stuttered a little, when her thoughts turned to her father. Simon Khrustinov was not an easy person to know. He had given her the things she had asked for, to the best of his ability. She had not asked for all that much, in any case, preferring to test out a new concept called self-sufficiency. Her days of demanding—or even whining—were long since over. Mostly she had asked his advice. And that, he had given unstintingly.
When the final bell rang, dismissing school for the day, Yalena gathered up her materials and stuffed them into her satchel, then headed into the crowded hallway. The swirl of happy voices, laughter, and slamming locker doors crested and splashed against her senses like whitewater on the Kirati River, where Yalena had done a whole summer of extreme camping. She had asked her father to send her there as her sixteenth birthday present.
He'd held her eyes for long moments, looking so deeply into her soul, for the motives hidden there, that she'd actually started to tremble. Then he'd given himself a little shake, smiled with a look of pain far back in his eyes, and said, "Of course you can go. If you need any advice on what to take with you, just ask."
She'd asked. And had benefitted immensely from that advice. Yalena had enjoyed that summer, in a grim and solitary fashion. She hadn't won herself any friends—mostly because she made no overtures, being far too busy learning simple survival skills most kids on Vishnu had absorbed by their sixth or seventh birthdays—but she'd won the grudging respect of the instructors.
More importantly, she had proved to herself that she could, given sufficient determination, overcome a decade and a half of indoctrination into the art and science of lunacy, a handicap compounded by indolent living, lazy flab in every muscle in her body and every snyapse in her brain. She'd had to overcome a learned helplessness, as well, that vanished entirely within two days of her arrival at the wilderness area that served as campground.
She'd spent her seventeenth summer in a Concordiat Officer Recruitment Program for high-school students interested in military careers. When she'd told him she planned to enroll, her father's advice had been enormously useful.
"The one thing you must understand," he'd told her the night she'd broached the subject, "is the purpose of that training. You've done a fair bit of homework, that's clear from what you've said. So tell me. What do you think C.O.R.P.'s purpose is?"
She considered her words carefully. "To weed men from whiny boys and women from snivelly girls, for one. To provide the Concordiat with a cadre of trained officers for the combat arms. And to begin training on high-tech military equipment, which takes time. A lot of time."
Her father nodded. "Yes, those are all useful adjuncts to the C.O.R.P. program."
"But not the main reason?"
"No." He refilled his glass, swirled the ice cubes for a few moments, watching the patterns they made in the liquid. "Combat," he said softly, "has a nasty habit of putting you under the kind of stress that breaks people apart from the inside. Your whole world is shattering around you and you know that your decisions and your actions—right or wrong—will not only affect your own life, but those of others. Not just other soldiers, but civilians in harm's way, which is worse."
He fell silent again, for long moments. She waited him out. He didn't often let her see this part of his life and she wanted to understand him, wanted to understand what had made him the kind of person he was. She didn't want to interrupt or distract him, when he was finally speaking of it.
"When the stink and horror of it is all around you," he finally said, voice low and harsh, "when people are dying on all sides, when you want—need, in fact—to run gibbering for the deepest hole you can find, that is precisely the time you must be at your clear-minded best. The Concordiat needs to know if you're the kind of person who can go into a situation that would reduce most people to hysterical panic and make rational military decisions—and carry them out, which is even more important. Are you cool enough under extreme physical and emotional stress to know what must be done? Are you strong enough to do it, no matter the cost? That's what C.O.R.P.'s main purpose is."
Yalena could see the shadows of memory in his eyes. She'd signed onto Vishnu's datanet with the new computer her father had bought her, the week of her arrival, and had looked up Etaine in Vishnu's historical archives. What she had read over the course of the next two deeply shocked hours had deepened Yalena's hatred of school teachers who had systematically lied to her and her classmates. Those lies had poisoned her relationship with a man who should have been canonized as somebody's patron saint.
She knew that her father didn't want her to walk into the mouth of hell, didn't want her to face what he had faced and fought and lived through. Didn't want to see shadows in her eyes—or a medallion of honor that meant he would never see her eyes again. Yet he gave her expert advice, steered her toward resources she would need, even gave her extra training, himself. He was, Yalena had finally understood, trying to give her enough of an edge to survive the course she had set herself upon and seemed to know, without words spoken, that she did not intend to enter the War College at Sector Command.
Not until other, more important business had been taken care of, first.
Yalena stopped at her locker and put away the satchel and sundry items she wouldn't need for another ninety minutes, then headed for the C.O.R.P. practice field, behind the school's sports complex. They'd been studying aikido and other martial arts, this semester, and she was looking forward to another good sparring session. The open field behind the school, used for track meets, was crowded with runners doing laps in the chilly autumn air. The crisp temperature and keen, biting wind spurred the runners to greater exertion, to keep warm. Yalena detoured around the end of the track, then ducked into the gymnasium, since walking through was faster than walking the long way around to reach the C.O.R.P. field.
The smell of chlorine from the gymnasium's basement-level pool mingled with the odors of body sweat, dirty socks, and talc from the various athletes working out on gymnastics equipment, running wind-sprints up and down the bleachers, and playing a fiercely competitive game that involved twenty sweating boys, an inflatable ball, and hoops dangling from various places on walls and ceilings.
Yalena had even less in common with the school's athletes than she did with the ordinary students. They, in turn, tended to regard her as something of a freak, mostly because she refused to accord them the adoration they seemed to think was owed them for the superior manner in which they could make balls go through hoops. Yalena crossed the gym in silence, ignoring those at practice and being ignored, in return, as though she moved through a perpetual veil of invisibility. Which, to some extent, she did, since nobody found her interesting enough to notice.
She took the stairs down to the basement locker area, where she kept her C.O.R.P. uniform, and ran slap into the ugliest little scene she had witnessed since coming to Vishnu. A gang of POPPA brats, eight or nine of them, had cornered a Granger girl on one of the landings. They were dragging her, hands clamped across her mouth, into the men's locker room.
Yalena froze.
They kept going without looking up the stairs. They hadn't heard her open the stairwell door. She knew the girl, by sight, at least. Dena Mindel was a freshman, barely turned fifteen. Her parents had just come out from Jefferson, smuggled out, so the gossip ran, by Jefferson's growing insurrectionist movement. Yalena closed her fingers around the railing, gripping the well-worn wood with an ache through her whole hand. She knew exactly what the sons of POPPA's leading scions intended to do. They were putting Dena back in her place. Forcibly. You may have gotten off-world, the lesson they were about to impart would tell her and all other refugees, but you'll never be more than gutter trash. The threat of retribution to family members still trapped on Jefferson would keep her terrified and silent, too.
Moving very softly, Yalena reascended the stairs and slipped into the equipment room. She picked up a bucket into which she dropped several baseballs, a wooden practice sword used in the martial arts Yalena had studied, and a whole fistful of throwing stars, their edges and points dulled for safety standards, but still dangerous weapons in hands that knew how to use them.
Yalena's did.
She slipped back down the stairwell and glanced swiftly to see if anyone was strolling about. No one was, since the official practice sessions had already begun. She eased her way across the hall. Listened at the closed double doors leading into the men's locker room. A quick glance through the glass windows in the upper half of the doors told her that they'd posted a guard to run interference and to give a warning, should anyone interrupt. That guard was standing with his back to the doors, intent on whatever was happening around the corner.
That was his first—and last—mistake.
Yalena opened the nearest door so softly, he didn't even hear the faint click. Muffled sounds of pain and terror reached Yalena's ears. So did low laughter. And other, nastier sounds. Ripping cloth. A meaty smack that wrenched a whimper from the victim. Yalena tried to build a probable map in her mind, giving her a general placement of attackers and attacked. The sound of zippers going down told her she was out of time.
She held the wooden sword in her left hand, picked up a baseball with her right, then did a swift wind-up and let fly. The hard, leather-covered ball slammed into the side of the lookout's head, just above the ear. He went down hard. The crack and whump got someone's attention.
"What the hell—?"
Yalena came around the corner, moving fast. She sent the entire bucketful of baseballs bounding and bouncing in amongst them, tripping them up as they scrambled to tackle her and slipped flat, instead. She hurled throwing stars in a rapid-fire blur, going for vulnerable spots: eyes, throats, naked groins. Half of them went down, cursing or just whimpering. The others rushed her. Or, rather, tried to. She met the first two with full-force blows from her wooden sword. Bone crunched. Screams erupted, strangled with pain and shock.
She ducked under round-house blows that sailed harmlessly past her and used her attackers' rushing momentum to propel them into nearby walls, breaking more bones. She moved fluidly, focused on the precise actions needed to cripple the enemy, while keenly attuned to her entire environment. She was aware of everything and everyone around her, even the voices coming down the stairwell outside.
They were Granger voices, discussing the whereabouts of the girl lying a short meter from Yalena's feet. They hadn't reached the bottom of the stairs, yet, when the last would-be rapist still on his feet tried to run the other way. He skidded on a baseball underfoot, and went sprawling to the floor. Yalena stepped across and kicked him in the head, not hard enough to break bone, but more than hard enough to render him incapable of further threat. She stood over him for a long moment, breathing heavily in the midst of the carnage she had wrought, and realized with a stunned feeling that it was over.
The entire battle had lasted less than sixty seconds.
Dena had curled up into a ball on the floor, sobbing and shaking. Her dress and underthings had been ripped to shreds. Yalena crouched down beside her, moving swiftly, and wrapped the girl's shaking fingers around the wooden practice sword. Dena looked up, just long enough to register Yalena's identity, then heard her friends' voices in the hallway outside, calling her name. She turned her face toward them, tried to call out, and croaked so softly, even Yalena barely heard her voice.
"In here!" Yalena shouted, causing Dena to jump in shock. "I'm in here! In the boy's locker room!"
Then she took off at a dead run, dodging the remaining baseballs underfoot and whipping through the locker room and showers. She ducked through the doors on the far end, emerging into a corridor that carried Yalena past the wrestling and weight-lifting rooms, up into the main gymnasium, again. She dropped to a carefree stroll across the gym and reached the girls' locker room via another staircase that mirrored the one she'd just used. That corridor led Yalena down past the trampolines and balance beams used by the women's gymnastics team.
Yalena slipped quietly into the girls' locker room, changed into her C.O.R.P. uniform, and reached the practice field only four minutes late. Once there, however, she found it difficult to concentrate on sensei's lesson. Her emotions were beginning to catch up to the rest of her, fractured emotions that ran the gamut from icy rage to shaking fear that she'd be expelled—or jailed—when those little bastards woke up and thought about pressing charges. Woven through all of that was the agony of grief she had not yet purged and might never leave behind. Her mother had been murdered by men just as brutal as the gang she'd laid out on the locker room floor.
Hatred had propelled every single blow.
If Dena's friends hadn't come down the stairwell, would she have stopped? Could she have stopped? She had wanted to kill them. And knew, as well, that she could have. All too easily. The cold, lethal hatred that was shaking through her, now, spoiled her balance and ruined her concentration. Some officer's candidate I am, she told herself savagely. Dad never mentioned what a good officer's supposed to do after the fighting's done. Or what to do when the hatred that makes you want to vomit . . .
She managed to limp through the lesson, mostly because it was interrupted partway through by the arrival of Vishnu's peacekeeping officers and several ambulances. She watched with the others as those ambulances pulled away, lights strobing as they headed to the nearest hospital. Yalena fully expected to be summoned by the officers, who were speaking with other students and teachers, but no one called her over or even glanced her way.
Invisibility had its uses.
She waited all night, in fact, for the questions to come but no one came to the apartment and no one called her father, either. Yalena watched the local newscast, which gave her a clue as to the unexpected lack of legal attention directed her way.
"A hate-motivated crime was broken up this afternoon at Shasti High School when a Jeffersonian Granger refugee was attacked by a gang of students whose parents hold positions of authority in Jefferson's POPPA Party. The attack, which was broken up by Granger students who came to the victim's rescue, has prompted Vishnu's Minister of Residency to revoke the educational visas of the young men charged with the assault. No formal charges have been levied, at the request of the student and her family, but the students named in the case will be deported as soon as they are released from the hospital.
"The Jeffersonian ambassador has protested this decision, charging the Minister with bigotry and cultural bias. The Minister has issued a formal statement warning that visa applications for family members of Jeffersonian officials connected to POPPA will come under sharper scrutiny, given the rise in tensions and the increasing number of violent incidents between Granger refugees and POPPA Party affiliates on Vishnu. The entire Chamber of Ministers has made it clear that Jefferson's internal wrangles will not be tolerated on Vishnu's soil."
That was the whole report. Yalena sat wrapped in thoughtful silence as her father said, "It's about time Vishnu did something about this mess. I'm surprised worse violence hasn't broken out before now. I hope the kid they attacked will be all right. And I hope to hell there aren't reprisals against Grangers still trapped on Jefferson."
Yalena swallowed hard. She hadn't thought about that. Hadn't stopped to consider the long-term effects of her enraged actions, this afternoon. It had felt right, at the time. Still felt right. But she hadn't thought it through and people would suffer for it, as a result. She hadn't had much time in which to decide, given the danger Dena was in, which helped assuage her tremors of guilt. It also gave Yalena a new and visceral appreciation of what her father had been talking about, when he'd tried to explain the purpose of C.O.R.P. to her. She had made the best decision she could, under the circumstances. And now she—and others—had to live with her decision and the actions flowing from it.
Command, she discovered in that moment, was a bitch with spurs.
The next day at school, she was aware of a sharp and silent scrutiny. Not from the POPPA brats, but from the Grangers. All of them seemed to know. It was eerie, to be stared at everywhere she went, by people who had literally ignored her for two and a half years. At lunch, she found herself staring back into Granger eyes, driven by pride and smouldering anger into holding gazes until the others' glances dropped away, puzzled and discomfited no small amount.
By the time school was over for the day, Yalena was ready to disappear into whatever sanctuary she could find, but was duty bound to return to the C.O.R.P. practice field. She did nearly as badly as she'd done the day before and ended up on the ground time and again, sprawled in a winded heap where her instructor and fellow students had sent her flailing through the air. She wouldn't have to worry about proving her worthiness for combat, because she was going to flunk out of basic training.
By the time the session was over, Yalena was ready to do something else violent, just to burn off the frustration. When she emerged from the locker room, having showered and changed into street clothes, Yalena checked abruptly. Fifteen Granger students had formed a barricade across the hall and the stairwell. She considered taking to her heels in a repeat of yesterday's escape through the men's locker room. For long, fraught moments, she looked at them and they looked at her. Then one of the boys, a tall, rough-looking kid named Jiri Mokombo, whom Yalena had seen around school, but hadn't shared classes with, breached the silence.
"How come you did it?" he demanded. "You're one of them."
Yalena didn't have to ask who "them" was. "That's my business," she said in a flat voice, angry and scared and determined not to show it. She didn't want another fight. And she didn't have anything in her hands, this time, except air. And courage. Which wasn't a whole lot when outnumbered fifteen to one.
"Your business, huh?" Melissa Hardy, who was in one of Yalena's classes, pushed her way through the others to meet Yalena's gaze. "You're wrong. You made it our business. Why?"
Yalena took her measure, silently, trying to gauge not the physical dimensions of an opponent, but the psychological dimensions of the exchange. The emotion that burned in Melissa's eyes was more puzzlement than anger. Yalena shook her head. "No, you're wrong, Melissa. I didn't make it your business. I made it mine. Frankly, I didn't much like the odds. Or the assholes involved."
Someone at the back of the group muttered, "You know, she's never made up to any of 'em. Not once. I noticed. And none of them have ever tried to make friends with her, either."
"Of course they didn't, not when her father's the butcher of Etaine," Jiri snarled. "They wouldn't touch her with a fifty-meter pole. And neither would I."
"Nobody's asking you to," Yalena said coldly.
Melissa turned abruptly and glared at her own friends. "Say what you like, she stopped a rape and God knows what else, before they'd had a chance to do more than rip Dena's clothes off. And there's not one of us—not one—who hasn't wanted to break a few of those bastards' bones, ourselves. Only we didn't quite dare, did we? We talk big, but when push came to shove, it wasn't any of us who stopped it. It was her, by herself, against a whole rotten gang of them. Yalena Khrustinova doesn't deserve nasty accusations or name-calling from any of us. The only thing I want to know," she swung around toward Yalena again, "is why."
Yalena realized that this was one of those moments that forever changed your life, if you were smart enough to recognize it and strong enough to act on it. The first such moment in Yalena's life came back to haunt her, now, with memory of a ghastly silence that had followed in the wake of screams she still heard in nightmares.
"The last night I spent on Jefferson," she said in a hoarse voice that sounded nothing like her own, "I got caught in a Granger protest march in Madison. My two best friends in the world were with me. When the P-Squads arrested the Hancock family and lied about it, Ami-Lynn and Charmaine and I went to the protest march. President Zeloc—" she spat the name out like every syllable was pure poison "—ordered the Bolo to run over an unarmed crowd in the street. I was in that street. So were my friends. My mother . . ." Her voice shattered.
The other girl's eyes flinched. They all knew that Kafari Khrustinova was dead. That she'd been murdered by the P-Squads. But they didn't know the rest.
"My mother pulled me to safety. Just ahead of its treads. My friends were behind me. They didn't make it. Have you ever seen what's left when a thirteen-thousand-ton machine runs over a person? There must've been six or seven hundred people, just in the city block I was on, that were crushed to death. And you know what was left? Paste. Red, sticky paste, like pureed tomatoes, with smears of hair and shoe leather . . ."
Somebody whimpered. Yalena didn't care. About any of them.
"Mom and I crawled away through the sewers. All night, in the sewers, wading through shit and blood, while the lynch mobs pulled people off the PSF farms and chopped them up and hung the pieces on light poles and street signs and burned half the downtown. We finally reached the spaceport and she smuggled me out. And then a trigger-happy P-Squaddie killed her. You know what the hardest thing was, yesterday, when I pulled those bastards off Dena? Not breaking their necks, along with their stinking arms and legs. And now, if you don't mind, kindly leave me the hell alone!"
She stalked forward.
They parted like reeds before a hurricane.
She actually made it all the way through the gymnasium and halfway across the track before they caught up. One of them, anyway. Melissa Hardy called her name, running to catch up.
"Wait! Yalena, wait!"
She stopped, not even sure why. Melissa closed the gap, breathing hard. Yalena didn't say anything. Puzzled grey eyes studied her for a long moment.
"I've always wondered," she said slowly, "why you left Jefferson. Why you worked so hard, studying. Why you signed up for C.O.R.P. classes and extreme camping and martial arts. It didn't fit the pattern POPPA brats follow. I didn't realize . . ." She blinked hard for a moment. "I'm sorry about your mother, Yalena. And your friends." Before Yalena could say anything scathing, she added, "My brother was killed in that street, too."
Their eyes met and held. Yalena felt a dangerous crack in her emotional armor.
She swallowed hard. Then whispered, "I'm sorry. For a lot of things."
The other girl said, "I can't even begin to imagine how you must feel. It's got to be awful."
Yalena shook her head. "No. It's worse. I'm going back. To kill them. All of them."
The other girl's breath caught. Then something shifted in her eyes, something Yalena couldn't name, which left chills slithering along her nerves. When she spoke, there was steel in her voice. "I'm going with you."
She took the other girl's measure. Made her decision. "Sounds fair to me. There'll be fewer targets to hit, with two of us."
It was more than a pact, more than a holy alliance.
It was a promise. A threat.
And POPPA's death.
They shook on it.
Kafari had lost a lot of weight, but she wasn't the only person on Jefferson who was thinner, these days. Four years of guerilla warfare had left her lean and hard as a jaglitch. She'd occasionally eaten jaglitch, which could be digested—sort of—with the proper enzymes to break the alien proteins down into something a human stomach considered food. Their store of supplies contained plenty of enzymes, pilfered from pharmaceutical warehouses and fish-processing plants.
Dinny Ghamal stepped into the cavern Kafari called headquarters this week. He was whipcord tough, his face scarred and chiseled by torture and grief, but his eyes were still human. Emmeline had survived. She'd given birth to their first child, a son, six months after their rescue from Nineveh Base. It was a hell of a time and place to begin a family, but it had given many of Kafari's troops heart, reminding them that life could hold onto its sweetness and wonder, even in the midst of desperate struggle and hardship. The boy was the unofficial mascot of the entire rebellion. Dinny's wife, unable to travel fast or far while nursing an infant, had become a crackerjack code breaker, hacking into sophisticated systems that Kafari had taught her how to open. Dinny's wife served the rebellion well. So did Dinny. He bent low to duck under the rocky entrance to her "office."
"Commodore," he nodded, indicating with a single word that someone besides her own most trusted staff officers was somewhere in the camp, "the new supply teams are underway. It's a good haul, sir. We hit three food-distribution centers and wrecked what we couldn't transport. There'll be a passel of hungry Subbies, tomorrow. They'll really be furious by the end of the week. POPPA will have to tighten the rations again."
His smile was predatory, sharp, full of fangs.
So was hers. "Good."
"I have other reports in from the field, sir," Dinny added. "And pouches from several couriers."
"Let's hear the reports, please."
"Team Gamma Five reports success without casualties."
"Oh, thank God," Kafari whispered, closing her eyes against the sudden sting of tears. A penetration team had gone to Lakoska Holding Facility with orders to disrupt the wholesale deportation of convicted dissidents to the Hanatos "work camp." Their target had been Lakoska's barracks, housing more than five hundred dissidents and protestors. Most of them were Grangers, but a surprising number were urbanites desperate for food and medical care and willing to steal to get them. A few were just ordinary looters. Kafari's team of computer hackers had cracked the security codes on Lakoska's transportation schedule. They'd found the date and time of the highly classified transfer that would've sent the newly convicted prisoners to Hanatos tomorrow morning.
Team Gamma Five had, perforce, struck tonight.
Kafari had tried to rescue the prisoners already in Hanatos camp. Tried hard, just six days ago. Her entire team had died in the attempt. Their lives had bought the freedom of just five prisoners, who managed to escape during the wild confusion. Of those five, only one had made it out of the wilderness. Hanatos had been constructed, with great care and ruthless foresight, smack in the middle of prime jaglitch habitat. Once the remaining guards had killed Kafari's team—none of her people had allowed themselves to be taken alive—the retaliatory executions had commenced. The P-Squads had slaughtered fifty prisoners and made two hundred new arrests for every guard her team had killed in the attempt.
Kafari had spent a nasty half hour bent over a basin, losing every scrap of the meal she'd just eaten when the news arrived. Dinny had held her head while she heaved and wept uncontrollably, had wiped her face with a cold, wet cloth while she leaned against him, trembling with the emotional reaction, then sat down with her afterward, focusing her attention on what they could do: plan their own retaliation. Tonight's strike at the less well-defended Lakoska Holding Facility, had freed the latest batch of victims before they could be transported to Hanatos.
"How many did we get out, tonight?" she asked.
"Five hundred seventeen. We split 'em up as ordered and scattered them as best we could. I'm told it went smoothly. The transport buses were already in the parking lot, conveniently assembled for the next morning. We've set up shelters in several abandoned mine shafts, carefully distributed throughout the Damisi network. We managed to keep families together, at least."
"Good." Kafari had ordered old mine shafts to be converted into emergency shelters. She'd also instructed people in Granger country to dig bomb shelters under their houses and barns, with air filtration systems capable of handling biochemical attacks. She would never forget the riot she'd been caught in, with the gas that had very nearly caught her—gas that Simon had been convinced came from POPPA, itself, in a staged attack on its own people. Vittori Santorini had plenty of money to buy ingredients to make whatever nasty biochemicals he wanted to disperse. Since farm folk didn't have publicly funded underground shelters, Kafari had strongly suggested they provide shelters, themselves. The residents of Klameth Canyon, Cimmero Canyon, and hundreds of other canyons scattered throughout Granger country had dug into the topsoil and bedrock with a vengeance.
But Kafari couldn't ask the farmers and ranchers to hide five hundred seventeen escaped convicts. POPPA would be hunting for any trace of those people and Grangers would be under extra surveillance—electronic and personal—as prime suspects for sheltering them. Kafari couldn't risk innocent lives, and her own resources were stretched to the limit. She'd known that when she'd given the order to hit the camp.
"The Ranee came in yesterday from Mali," she said, glancing at Dinny. "You've talked to our friend, Girishanda. I want to send our five hundred seventeen friends out on the Ranee when she breaks orbit."
"He won't want to run the risk."
"Oh, really?" she asked softly, hearing the dangerous tone in her own voice. "If he wants our money for his merchandise, he will by God take them out. As many as we can jam into his cargo holds."
"I took the precaution," Dinny said with a grim smile, "of having a few people brought out here, tonight. To participate, unofficially, in our negotiations. I brought in some of the people we airlifted out of Lakoska. I also brought in Attia."
Kafari hissed. "Yes-s-s-s. Oh, yes. A fine idea, Dinny. That may just do the trick." Attia ben Ruben was the sole survivor from Hanatos death camp. "Very good. Our rescue team did a fine night's work. Be sure the team members know I said that."
Dinny nodded, then gave her a large pouch, just delivered via special courier. Kafari shuffled through the material and whistled softly. "My friend," she said, "this is some kind of good haul."
"Yes, sir," he said quietly. "It is."
It held documents recovered from the home of a P-Squad regional director, who had been involved in all sorts of nastiness. Letters, official reports, directives from planetary HQ spelling out measures to be implemented, along with a timetable, drew another soft reaction from her. "We need to get this off-world," she said in a hushed tone. "There are people on Vishnu who need to see these." If they could just persuade Vishnu's government to help them . . .
"That can be managed. Even if Girishanda won't take our refugees from Lakoska, we still have someone ready to ship out. They can deliver them. I've already made our copies."
"Very good. Handle it, please. Is there anything else?"
"Other than shifting headquarters and interviewing our visitor? No, sir. It's time to move out. The first transports are ready to go. The moons are down and the sentinels are in place. Our friend is here, waiting in the truck, as ordered."
"All right, let's move things along." She had already finished packing up her computer and personal effects, meager as they were, so she donned her command helmet, which covered her face very effectively while giving her an IR view of the cavern. She also wore breast-bands and extra padding to disguise her female shape. She strode out into the main cavern.
"Commodore!" Her people snapped to attention, giving her a smart salute. She returned it, nodding briefly to soldiers who were busy loading equipment and supplies onto horses, mules, and small skimmers. They never made major shifts in larger vehicles, not even at night. Sonny had access to Jefferson's satellites, whose military spy eyes had nothing to watch for in deep space, these days, but plenty to track on Jefferson's surface. So Kafari gave them as little to track as possible, and what little there was, she did her best to make innocuous.
The shifting of Kafari's headquarters would involve only one truck, three personal skimmers, and no more than a dozen pack animals, which would move in groups of two or three over the course of the next three nights. Some of them would amble more or less straight to the new headquarters cavern in a canyon several kilometers to the south, but only after looping through many other stops and layovers. Others would join them tomorrow night and still others the night after that, playing a slow-motion, deadly game of hopscotch under cover of darkness.
Kafari nodded to her people as she crossed the cavern, then climbed into the back of her command truck, which looked like a rickety, rusted-out produce truck with holes in the sides. It was crammed with the most sophisticated technology they'd liberated from Berran Bluff Armory. At the moment, it also held their "guest"—a supply agent from Vishnu who claimed to have good news that he would deliver to Commodore Oroton and no one else. He'd been stripped down to bare skin and had endured the most thorough body search Dinny Ghamal could conduct, a humiliating and painful process involving a fairly sophisticated arsenal of medical equipment, among other things. He'd come out clean. There hadn't even been a nanotech squeak anywhere.
They'd drugged him unconscious and brought him out here. Kafari would speak with him from the back of the truck, which he would not leave at any time, and then they would drug him again and take him back to town so he could return to Vishnu. Or they'd kill him, if the situation warranted it, and drop the body on some well-used game trail frequented by hungry jaglitch.
Kafari climbed into the back of the truck. Dinny Ghamal climbed up behind her and swung the doors shut. Red Wolf, who was already there, nodded to her as she took her seat opposite a small table from their guest. He wore a blindfold and his hands were cuffed to the chair he sat in, leaving him no room to attempt anything untoward. He couldn't even reach her with his feet. All his clothing and his shoes were missing. Kafari had replaced them from her own stores. He had to be feeling mighty vulnerable, which was exactly what she wanted.
Kafari took her seat and tapped her fingertips lightly on the grip of her handgun, which she kept under her hand at all times. She studied the man in the opposite chair for long moments. He was a small man, with skin one shade darker than hers, even after four years in the Damisi back country, where harsh sunlight baked everything it touched. Like many natives of Vishnu, he was very slightly built, with straight black hair worn long. Her guest was showing signs of the emotional strain he'd been under for more than a day, now. "I'm told," Kafari said in a soft voice that her helmet transmuted into a deeper, more guttural and masculine sound, "that you have a message for me, Mr. Girishanda."
He turned his head slightly at the sound of her voice. "That is correct, yes. I have a message for Commodore Oroton."
"You have my attention."
"I would prefer the freedom of my hands and eyes."
"I'll bet you would. I'd prefer to see the sun rise, come morning."
To her surprise, he flashed a smile full of white teeth. "A cautious nature is a wise quality for a leader of rebels. Very well. We speak in the dark."
Kafari waited, giving him no assistance.
"My employers have a certain commodity they feel may interest you."
Again, Kafari simply waited.
Girishanda said, "I am told you have some, ah, fairly heavy artillery."
"You've probably been told a lot, if POPPA's been talking. As for what you hear and what's true . . ."
He chuckled.
Kafari frowned. "You're pretty relaxed for somebody chained hand and foot."
"I am a Hindu," he shrugged, rattling the manacles against the chair frame. "What would you have me say? The things I get wrong this time around, I will have a chance to get right the next time around. As badly as my life goes, sometimes, I suspect I've been trying to get it right for a thousand years. I haven't managed it, yet. At worst, it's a better life than, say, several centuries as a slime mold." Teeth flashed again.
Kafari couldn't help it. She smiled "Very well, Mr. Girishanda. Why are you interested in my artillery?"
"I have very little interest in what you have. I have a great deal of interest in what you might want."
Kafari considered. "And what might you have, that would tempt me?"
"Hellbores."
Kafari sat up straight. "Hellbores? You care to explain that?"
White teeth flashed again. "I have your attention, yes?"
Kafari deliberately waited him out, telling her taut nerves to be patient, because she damned well wasn't going to get what she wanted any faster by jumping at an offer that smelled like a very large rat.
Girishanda smiled in her direction. "Your silence is a sign of patience, my friend. That is good. Even with the cargo I can deliver, you will need patience. And a great deal of cunning. We know what you face, in this struggle. We can help. If the price can be agreed upon."
"There are more things than price to consider."
The smile left his face and he sat up straighter, despite his bonds. "You are very right about that," he said softly, as though she had passed some sort of test. "Very well, Commodore Oroton, I will answer some of the questions you carefully have not asked."
Kafari settled into her chair, prepared to listen. All night, if necessary.
"During the war," Girishanda—or whoever he really was—said, "refugee ships poured across the Void, running terrified ahead of the Deng. Some of those worlds had heavy artillery, not heavy enough to save them, but enough to buy evacuation time. You must know, Commodore, that many more ships came on to Vishnu than stayed on Jefferson. These people were panic-stricken. They wanted as much human space between themselves and the Deng as they could afford to cross. Some of them realized that the heavy artillery their worlds had purchased could be sold for a tidy sum of money, taking them farther away from a border that was shifting too rapidly for their peace of mind. So they brought that artillery with them. To . . . smooth the way, financially, so to speak."
Kafari could see the excitement in Dinny Ghamal's eyes, could read it in Red Wolf's flared nostils. Oh, yes, Mr. Girishanda definitely had their attention. Kafari's, as well.
"You are interested, then?" he asked.
Kafari let him wait, again. If he was worth his salt as a bargaining agent, he would smell their interest. Note to self, a corner of her brain had the temerity to whisper, whenever you're dealing for something really big, have someone light incense, first. Or douse the place with eau du jaglitch first. The very absurdity of the image restored her equilibrium. The long pause caused Mr. Girishanda's self-assurance to falter slightly. Good. He needed to be jolted a bit.
"I suspect," she said at length, "that your price is beyond our means."
"Oh, I wouldn't say that. In case you hadn't noticed, there's not much happening in our corner of interstellar space, just now. The market has shifted. We find ourselves with a stock of goods nobody wants."
Nobody else, he meant, of course.
That was understood.
"You're not worried about another breakthrough from across the Void?" Kafari asked, allowing surprise to color her voice. "Our respective star systems are still slam in the way of any incursion from the Deng homeworlds."
"The Deng," Mr. Girishanda said dismissively, "are in no shape to come calling on anyone. Besides," he grinned, "they'd have to come through you first, which means you'd get better use of the Hellbores than we would."
"Huh," Kafari muttered, "we'd get our asses shot off first, you mean."
He tried to shrug; the manacles rattled. "Your Bolo—"
"It is not our Bolo." The hatred in her voice stopped him cold.
The look on his face spoke eloquently about the difference in attitude one brought to the bargaining table when one's visceral experience of Bolos involved being shot at by one, rather than viewing it as savior and protector from the wrath of alien guns.
"No," he said at length, with an unsettled expression as he tried to imagine what it must feel like to be on the wrong end of those massive guns. "It is not your Bolo. But it is a Bolo, nonetheless, and it's programmed to defend this world from the Deng. Try to imagine what would happen if the Deng returned," he said softly. "How long would it take for Vittori Santorini's little empire to collapse like a house of cards? We're not stupid, Commodore, or blind. Santorini's done a good job with the propaganda, no doubt of that. The news that reaches Vishnu and Mali is full of flowers and honey. And his money talks, as well. Louder on Mali than Vishnu, you must understand?"
Kafari frowned behind her helmet, trying to take in the multiple messages being thrown at her, some voiced, some unvoiced. "Go on."
"He's fooled a lot of people. But spacers talk. So do refugees. And enough POPPA officials have sent their children to our schools to give us a very clear picture of what POPPA really stands for and what it's capable of doing. And," he added with a shrewd glance at Kafari's top commanders, "what it isn't capable of, which is just as important. If the Deng hit Jefferson again, that unholy little alliance of his will come apart at the seams. His P-Squads appear to be very skilled at terrorizing ordinary citizens and shaking down spacer crews for bribes and letting enormous amounts of contraband slip through unquestioned. But go up against Deng Yavacs? Or heavy cruisers? Even Deng infantry?"
His voice held scathing contempt. "You don't even have an air force left, do you? Let alone trained fighter pilots or ground support troops. If the Deng come this way—or Krishna-forbid, the Melconians—your troops, Commodore, and that Bolo are the only defense Jefferson will have. Perhaps it's selfish of us, but we'd like to think there'd be something to at least slow them down, before they head for Ngara and our worlds."
It was a hell of a mess, when a Deng invasion looked positively attractive.
He leaned forward, causing the manacles to clank again. "But consider this, Commodore, because I assure you, we have, more than once. That Bolo of yours takes his orders from the government. If you become that government . . ."
Kafari caught the hiss between her teeth before he could hear. Just what were Mr. Girishanda's motives? And connections? He sounded more like an official with Vishnu's Ministry of Defense than a gunrunner. She narrowed her eyes beneath the battle helmet's face mask. The ministry would doubtless feel a great deal safer if Kafari's rebellion succeeded in removing POPPA and the Santorinis from power. POPPA fanatics would make uneasy neighbors, at best.
When Jefferson's economy collapsed—finished collapsing—the whole damned society would go under. It was inevitable. And the disaster wasn't very far off, either.
And when the collapse came, hungry and angry people were going to go hunting for what they needed to survive. Jefferson still had star-capable travel, with enough guns in POPPA's hands to turn the P-Squads into a ravening horde of armed and deadly scavengers. The closest civilized port of call they could reach lay in the Ngara system. If Kafari had been a highly placed official in charge of defending Ngara's worlds, she would have viewed the situation on Jefferson with alarm. Intense alarm.
Even with the losses the P-Squads had sustained from steady attacks by Kafari's freedom fighters, there were thousands of P-Squad officers out there. Nineveh Base had trained five thousand a year for ten years, before Kafari's assault had wiped the base off the map. Even with the loss of Nineveh's cadre of instructors, however, they still had an army of fifty thousand men already in the field. If pushed to raid off-world for what they needed, that army could smash Mali with ease and do massive damage, even on Vishnu.
There was a Bolo on Vishnu, but in that kind of scenario, it wasn't much use. A Bolo had to know in advance that a ship was a threat, before it could act defensively. A freighter crammed full of P-Squad marauders could land a devastating attack with literally no warning and escape again untouched, simply by picking a target on the other side of the planet from the Bolo's depot. The depot's location wasn't a secret from anyone. Any ordinary school child could tell raiders exactly where to find Vishnu's Bolo. There were several thousand POPPA students on Vishnu.
And now Mr. Girishanda was offering to sell her the kind of firepower it would take to destroy Vittori Santorini and either destroy or take control of his suborned Bolo, which would end the threat POPPA and its fifty-thousand potential raiders represented. If Girishanda wasn't on the Ministry of Defense's payroll, he was acting on the ministry's behalf. And probably on their orders, payroll or not. Kafari was ready to put money on it. Speaking of which . . .
"How many Hellbores do you have available, Mr. Girishanda? And how much money do I have to lay down, to persuade you to part with them?"
"Then you are interested?"
"In winning this war? Absolutely. In your merchandise? That remains to be seen."
Mr. Girishanda's smile blazed like the noonday sun over Hell-Flash Desert. "My dear Commodore, I believe we can both walk out of this deal as happy men."
Kafari couldn't help her own smile. "You think so?"
Dinny Ghamal was grinning fit to crack his face in half. Red Wolf merely looked pained. Girishanda, blissfully ignorant of the byplay, said, "It is my fondest hope."
Kafari leaned forward. "Convince me to put my money on the table."
They settled down to the serious game of dickering a price they could both live with, in every possible sense of the word. It took an hour of the hardest bargaining Kafari had done in her life. Money, per se, wasn't the only factor in her strategy. There was plenty of money, if a person knew how to divert it from off-world investment portfolios and bank accounts. POPPA, itself, was supplying Kafari with most of the money they needed to wage this rebellion. No, the hardest portion of her job tonight would be the other demand that went along with the cash laid on the table.
When Girishanda finally accepted a price that left him looking mournful, but likely beaming with self-congratulatory success in the privacy of his own thoughts, Kafari let the hammer drop.
"There's just one more little condition to meet, before we close this deal."
She couldn't see his eyes behind the blindfold, but the rest of him shifted from easy relaxation to wary tension. "Oh?"
"We have some merchandise of our own to ship out. Important merchandise."
"What does a commander of rebels have to sell?" Girishanda asked.
"This commodity isn't for sale."
"It'll cost to ship it, then," said with a frown. "How much it'll cost depends on what you're shipping. And why."
Kafari turned to Dinny Ghamal, who nodded and rose, leaving the truck and swinging the doors shut behind him.
"Who's that?" Girishanda asked. "Who left?"
"That's not important. We have a perishable commodity, a fairly bulky supply of it."
Girishanda gave her a sudden scowl. "Oh, no. No, you don't. I'm not transporting a shipload of escaped prisoners. I do not want that kind of risk, thank you, kindly."
Kafari regarded him for a moment. "You want to sell some Hellbores. I want to buy them. If you want my money, you'll take my commodity and ship it safely to Vishnu. Or the deal is off."
"Don't be stupid!" Girishanda snapped, sitting up straight and rattling the manacles when he tried to move his arms to emphasize the point. "Confound it, you need those Hellbores or that Bolo will tear you to shreds. You know it. I know it. POPPA knows it. Don't put yourself—or my world—at risk over the fate of condemned criminals!"
His reaction was no more than Kafari had expected. Her gut still clenched in icy rage. He did not, of course, know. Nobody on Vishnu could know, yet. Spacers and refugees might talk, but the former were restricted to the environs of the spaceport, these days, and the latter had fallen to a mere trickle, thanks to draconian shifts in emigration laws. With a total lock-down on interstellar communications and escape from the camps all but impossible, who could possibly have gotten word out to Vishnu? Nobody on Vishnu could know the vicious secret of POPPA's detention camps, except Simon, and he couldn't talk freely without putting her and her people at risk.
"In a few moments," Kafari told him, "you will eat those words."
Puzzlement drove furrows into his brow, but he didn't answer. The door opened again. Dinny had returned with a young girl in tow. She had been pretty, once. Innocent, too. She was fourteen. The sea-green eyes that looked out at the world burned with an eerie copper fire, eyes that reflected the unspeakable horrors she had witnessed and survived. They were ancient eyes, lost in a child's face, eyes it took a strong man to meet face-on and not flinch from. It had taken every ounce of strength Kafari possessed to meet Attia's gaze, when Dinny had first brought her in, two nights ago.
Kafari rose from her chair, taking her pistol with her, and touched Attia's hand gently, beckoning her to take Kafari's seat, then she stepped behind a partition that afforded privacy for a mobile toilet used by the crew in the command post. There was a video system in place, covering the interior of the command post, with its video feed tied into her battle helmet's visor. It gave her a full, unobstructed view of the tableau unfolding out there.
Attia sat down, watching silently as Dinny removed Mr. Girishanda's blindfold.
He blinked a couple of times, then his gaze came to rest on the slender girl opposite him. He sat up so abruptly, the manacles bit into both wrists. He spoke, jaggedly, something she didn't understand. Kafari didn't speak Hindi. She didn't have to. The naked shock in his face was all too eloquent a translation.
"My name's Attia," the girl said in a rough, ruined voice. "I turned fourteen three months ago. In Hanatos Camp."
Girishanda was trying to swallow. The sound was ghastly in the frozen silence. Red Wolf, an unobtrusive presence behind Girishanda's shoulder, had taken out a belt knife and was jabbing the point into the arm of the chair he sat in, mechanically, with fixed concentration.
"Have you ever heard of Hanatos Camp?" Attia asked in a harsh voice.
The gunrunner shook his head. He was still trying to swallow. Kafari gave him credit for guts. His gaze stayed on Attia's face. What was left of Attia's face.
"Ever hear of Professor Mahault?"
Again, he shook his head.
"She wrote a book. The True History of Glorious Jefferson."
Girishanda was frowning. "What does a professor have to do with . . . ?"
"She rewrote our history," Attia said harshly. "Wrote a book full of lies to prove that Grangers had altered the history of our world. Her book gave POPPA the 'proof' they needed to classify Grangers as a subversive sub-culture. One that existed to destroy true civilaztion."
"That's insane!" Girishandra gasped.
"You're damned right, it's insane," Red Wolf growled.
Girishanda's eyes tracked towards Attia, who spoke again in that ruined, harsh voice. "Yes, it is. But there was no one to stop them. Not even the Commodore could stop Jefferson's House of Law and Senate when they passed legislation outlawing Grangerism. Our whole culture, itself, is now a crime. Against humanity, decency, and planetary security. Anyone caught practicing Grangerism is arrested, convicted, and shipped out to the nearest 'work camp.' Once there, we become slave labor. We de-terraform 'raped areas' to allow nature to reclaim its own. Or we're sent into mine shafts to work 'round the clock shifts. It's too expensive to pay miners actual wages, when convicts can be forced to do the work. All that costs is money to buy the guards, ammunition, and just enough food to keep the slaves on their feet and working. And sometimes," she added harshly, "not even that."
Girishanda's eyes flicked across Attia, whose skeletal pallor had not faded in the mere two days she had been free and would not fade for months to come. If she didn't get killed fighting to free others. There were still prisoners in far too many work camps.
Mr. Girishanda met her gaze, once more. He didn't speak for long moments. Then he asked very quietly, indeed, "Would you tell me, please, what happened to you? I'm trying to understand."
Attia's copper-fire eyes searched his face for long moments. "You're from off-world. Vishnu?"
"Yes. I am from Vishnu."
"Are you selling us guns?"
"I am trying to," he said gently, flicking a glance at the partition between himself and "Commodore Oroton." "It seems that the sale is contingent on hearing what you have to say."
She scowled, which pulled the scar tissue in hideous directions. "All right. Then listen up good, 'cause I don't want to relive this out loud, ever again."
Kafari knew exactly what was coming.
Mr. Girishanda only thought he did.
Phil is an hour late returning from lunch when he finally enters my makeshift maintenance depot, a sheet-metal barn topped by a metal canopy that barely accommodates my bulk. The entire, flimsy affair threatens to become airborne each time a storm sweeps in from the ocean west of Madison. Phil is, as usual, swearing.
"You won't believe what happened last night! Those goddamned freedom fighters hit the food distribution centers! Three of 'em! My sister Maria found out this morning, when she went down to collect the week's groceries from the warehouse. I hadda take her to see a guy I know, who wouldn't sell direct to her even if she told him I sent her. It took my whole damn paycheck to get anything for the kids t' eat, and there wasn't a hell of a lot he had left, neither. Not at any price."
"I am sorry to hear that, Phil." I find it interesting to note that Phil no longer calls the Granger rebels by the term "terrorists." This is the only descriptor used by the POPPA leadership when referring to rebels who routinely shoot corrupt POPPA officials in their driveways, ambush police patrols, and execute outspoken broadcast propagandists in their houses—admittedly clean executions that never touch a family member or innocent bystanders. "Terrorists" is not, however, the word drifting through the streets, where food riots have been crushed just as brutally as Granger protests were during the early stages of POPPA's rise to power.
"And that's not the half of it," Phil continues to rage, with his nano-tatt blazing in a blood-red swath across half his face, pulsing in time to his elevated heartbeat. I find the rhythm distracting. "You know what the shit-for-brains Minister of Urban Distributions did about it? Did he tell the P-Squads what he oughta be telling them? Which is what I'd tell 'em, if I was in his shoes. 'Find those bastards or go hungry!' Did he say that? Oh, no, not him. He just went and cut the rations again, that's what! Another unholy, unbearable twenty percent! How'n hell are kids s'posed to grow without nothin' to eat? I ask you, do those POPPA bigshots look like they're goin' without dinner? Hell, no. There ain't no such thing as a skinny cop, let alone a skinny politician."
Phil wipes sweat from his nano-tatt with a hand that is actually unsteady.
"I dunno what my family's gonna do, Big Guy. If Maria loses any more weight, she's gonna collapse. She's nothin' but skin and bones, now. And Tony, that no-account oldest boy of hers, that goddamned little idiot got himself hooked on snow-white and lost the only job our whole family had, except mine. D'you know what's it like, Big Guy, t'be the only person in a whole damn family that anybody respects? Five sisters, I got, all married," he adds with justifiable pride, given the informal methods of procreation practiced by many subsidy recipients, who are desperate for any increase in the baseline payments, "an' all five of 'em has kids, twenty-three kids, all together. And the little ones look up t' me. They say 'I'm gonna be like Uncle Phil when I grow up. I'm gonna have a job!' I ain't smart, Big Guy. I got nothin' much t' be proud of, I know that, and God knows I ain't the sort a kid oughta be lookin' up to, to decide what t' do with his life."
His eyes film with suspicious moisture and his voice assumes a bleak, nearly despairing tone I have never heard from him. "And what chance have they got, anyhow, to be like Uncle Phil? To have a job, I mean, and somebody's respect? There's no jobs now. The trash they're learning in school sure isn't gonna teach 'em how to get one. It's worse now than it was when I was in school, and man, they didn't teach me nothin'. If things don't change pretty soon," he adds, "they won't need to worry about growin' up like anybody, 'cause there's no damn food t'feed em, anyway." His voice turns savage. "Sar Gremian needs me, don't he? T'keep you running? So I eat, while them kids starve. It ain't right, Big Guy, it just ain't right. We never signed up for this kind'a stuff, when folks voted POPPA in, all those years back." He pauses, then adds in a puzzled voice. "How'd it get t'be so bad in such a short time, huh? Seems longer, t'me, but it's just nineteen years since POPPA took over. Spent my whole schooling, just about, in POPPA classrooms, and not one a' them teachers ever told us it could get like this so fast."
Phil's revelations, coming as fast and thick as Y-Band bolts from a Deng Yavac, astonish me. He is more deeply disaffected with POPPA than I had realized. He has also gained far more self-respect and technical skill than I would have believed possible. While his nano-tatt is as colorful as ever and he still shows a predilection for barracks-room language as colorful as his face, he no longer speaks like the illiterate grease monkey he was just four years ago. He has, in fact, become a surprisingly skilled technician.
Granted, he has spent most of the past four years studying the archived manuals and technical schematics pertaining to my weapons systems and other hardware, which required even longer sessions working with a dictionary and the science, mathematics, and engineering texts embedded in my reference banks. I have been forced to grant him access to these, as the Minister for Public Education made a thorough sweep through Jefferson's public educational system, e-libraries, and datasite archives. It is no longer possible to obtain a real education on Jefferson without attending one of the private schools operated for the children of POPPA officials, whose databases and on-line libraries are not accessible to the average citizen.
This fact angered Phil immensely when he discovered the existence of this two-tier educational system, with its built-in mechanism for exclusion of the unequal masses. He might never have discovered this, if not for my urgent need for repairs. I have sustained enough cumulative damage from rebel forces to make constant repair work a necessity. Each time I leave my makeshift maintenance depot to disperse rioters, repel attacks on police stations and military compounds, or pursue guerilla-style raiding parties, I am subjected to direct fire from a surprisingly large arsenal of military-grade small arms.
Nor am I the only thing taking cumulative damage. The guerillas are taking a heavy toll on food distribution networks—trucking centers, packing plants, warehouses—and utilities infrastructure—electrical power generating plants, sewage treatment facilities, public transportation hubs—that cannot be replaced at Jefferson's current level of industrial sluggishness. There are no manufacturing plants left to replace the equipment and buildings being wrecked. The repeated attacks have driven many engineers and technicians to boycott work in a massive protest movement that is crippling Jefferson's cities as effectively as the damage to the infrastructure, itself.
Commodore Oroton is fiendishly effective at his job.
So are his field troops. Rebel marksmen have an uncanny ability to put bullets through external camera lenses and sensor arrays, which is not just annoying, it is downright alarming. Scrounge as he will, Phil cannot keep finding replacement parts indefinitely. Worse, during my transits to and from those conflicts, usually through heavily populated areas, I am also hit by suicide-teams masquerading as ordinary civilians. The bombers get close enough to hurl man-portable octocellulose bombs against my tertiary gun systems and track linkages, inflicting a steady barrage of damage that cannot be repaired fast enough. Not in the face of near-total lack of replacement parts.
I am also burning up antipersonnel ammunition that can only be replaced by diverting it from P-Squad depots, an activity that tries Phil's nerves to their utmost. If Phil Fabrizio is afraid of anything, it is the P-Squads. What is particularly irritating about the expenditure of munitions is the knowledge that I am wasting it on rank-and-file fighters, as I am unable to locate, let alone eliminate, the ringleaders. For all their vaunted prowess, the P-Squads have had no better luck cracking open the rebel network. I do not know if that is because the P-Squads are inadequate to the task or because Commodore Oroton has built a particularly effective guerilla network, with cells difficult to crack open. The rebel tendency to suicide, rather than be taken for questioning, certainly makes it difficult to question those who might otherwise have provided valuable information.
The mysterious Commodore Oroton is an extremely effective commander, with what is clearly a great deal of military experience. I surmise, based on the actions of his hit-squads and the thought-processes behind them, that the commodore has worked with Bolos in the past. If not as an officer, perhaps as a technician or a cadet who failed the rigorous examinations necessary for command. Whoever Oroton is, the situation is rapidly deteriorating into a serious crisis.
Phil mutters, "I'm sorry I'm late. Lemme climb up and look at that infinite repeater processor that got hit last time. I gotta know what parts t'steal."
Phil climbs up the rear port-side ladders and clambers cautiously across my stern, reaching the infinite repeater housing that routes fire-control signals to my port-side and stern infinite repeaters. The guidance-control circuitry is, of course, inside my warhull, but there are semi-external processors that route the signals. These processors are covered with flintsteel housings across my flanks and back. It is a design flaw in the Mark XX series, which was corrected in the Mark XXI and later Bolos. Phil cuts and pries at the warped housing with power tools, sweating and swearing until it finally comes loose. He peers critically at the damage and just shakes his head.
"Big Guy, the tracking control for these rear-port infinite repeaters is out. O-W-T out. There's a hole right through the actual quantum processors and quantum is French for 'Don't fuck with it.' Ain't no way I'm gonna fix this one." He gestures at the damage, evincing extreme disgust. "Maybe I can able to cobble something up t'replace it. I stole a workstation processor last week from the Admin building on campus, but it won't work real well. If Sar Gremian doesn't get us some honest-to-God spares soon, I honest-to-shit don't know what we're gonna do. Next time you go out, try to duck the bullets, huh?"
"I am too big to duck, Phil."
"You said a pissin' mouthful." He wipes sweat off his face with one sleeve. "They're screwin' you up royal, that's for sure. We'd be a blamed sight better if they bought spare parts as rewards, 'stead of sticking so many goddamn made-for-prime-time, gaudy-assed medals up on your prow. Much more a'them shiny things and I won't be able to open the housings on your forward processors."
I am inclined to agree with Phil's assessment of the relative worth of the "medals" I have been awarded by this administration. I, too, would prefer their removal.
Phil is climbing down when I receive an urgent call from Sar Gremian. "We've got a police patrol pinned by rebel gunfire. I'm sending the coordinates now."
Those coordinates show a spot thirty-seven kilometers north of the Klameth Canyon agricultural complex. This is cattle country, with extensive herds of beef cattle, dairy farms, vast hog lots, and poultry houses that stretch for a hundred meters or more and routinely house seven or eight million birds. Most of this was privately held, before the land-snatch programs confiscated and collectivized it. The terrain is comparable to Klameth Canyon, which sets up a trickle of unease through my threat-assessment processors.
"Phil," I say urgently, "climb down faster. I've just been ordered into another skirmish. A police patrol has been trapped in Cimmero Canyon and is taking heavy fire."
Phil just shakes his head in disgust and shimmies his way down ladders until he reaches the floor. "Watch your back, willya?" he says while getting out of my way. "You got enough stuff back there to fix, without adding anything new to the list."
"I will do my best, Phil. Given the state of my treads, this will take a great deal of time."
I head out at the best road speed of which I am currently capable, which is pitifully slow compared to my optimal speed. I have sustained sufficient track damage, I cannot risk my treads to the wear-and-tear they would sustain under greater velocity. At sixteen point two-five kilometers per hour, the journey will take me two and a half hours to complete. Local police attempting to reach their brethren have come under such withering fire, losing three aircars and seven groundcars full of officers, they had retreated and refused a second rescue attempt. Federal troops—consisting of P-Squadron officers—have also refused to risk themselves against an entrenched enemy with effective snipers.
Given Jefferson's wholesale destruction of mothballed military aircraft during Gifre Zeloc's presidency in a "political statement" that involved bulldozers and a crowd of thousands screaming their approval, I am literally the only resource POPPA can fall back on, to neutralize what appears to be a relatively small handful of riflemen. By monitoring police channels, I ascertain that the rebels don't seem to be trying to overrun the patrol, just pin it down. As this does not fit with previous patterns, I exercise caution during my final approach.
There are only three routes I can take to where the patrol is pinned. All three lead through relatively narrow areas. To reach any of them, I must pass the city of Menassa, which grew up in the Adero floodplain at the point where the main entrance to this canyon opens out. It is a fair-sized city with a population of roughly two hundred seventeen thousand people, founded to support the meat-packing and processing industries necessary to turn Cimmero Canyon's herds into cuts of meat ready for shipment. I select the entrance south of Menassa, to avoid bringing the fight directly into the midst of a major civilian center. The city is considerably longer than it is deep, stretching for nearly ten kilometers along the main roads leading to Madison in the south and mining communities to the north.
This portion of the Damisi mountain range is heavily forested. The canyon walls slice through a thick deciduous forest where shifting climate patterns and plate tectonics have brought abundant rainfall to a region formerly dry enough to erode away as badlands. The result is a dense tangle of native vegetation that forms a green fringe along the crown of the cliffs. The ranchers of Cimmero Canyon do constant battle with inimical wildlife drawn to their herds. Cimmero's residents were among the strongest protestors of the weapons-confiscation legislation, for reasons of personal safety as well as predator control to protect their food animals. Indeed, the Hancock family co-op was based in this region.
I do not like this terrain, with its limited visibility and plenty of cover and concealment for enemy gun emplacements. The rebels could hide an entire division in the forested fringe that lies several hundred meters above me and I would not detect their presence until they opened fire. I therefore move ahead with all available sensors sharply tuned. I would be happier if all my sensors were available, but I suffer port-side blind spots, thanks to cumulative sniper-fire damage.
I would be much happier still, if I could conduct aerial reconnaissance, but I have no drones. Although Phil has been able to produce satisfactory aerial surveillance equipment by piggybacking cameras onto children's toys, I am out of them again. The rebel marksmen's skill at shooting them down surpasses Phil's speed at manufacturing new ones. Toy airplanes, like everything else on Jefferson, are in short supply and the cameras are even harder to locate and steal. Using other sensor arrays, I scan across a wide band of visual, audio, and electromagnetic spectra, looking for anything out of the ordinary. I detect no heavy-weapons emissions, only the background power bleed from ordinary household current.
I am approximately one point five kilometers from the coordinates supplied by Sar Gremian when police transmissions from the patrol take on a frantic urgency.
"They're comin' at us again! I'm hit—Jeezus, I'm hit—"
I detect gunfire, not only through the radio link, but dead ahead, with my own sensors. I can hear screams, as well, men in pain. I rush forward through the narrowest part of the canyon, gaining speed rapidly in an emergency sprint that sends me barreling across the intervening distance—
—minefield!
I detect it too late to stop. I kill forward thrust and lock starboard drive wheels. I skid sideways, further slowing my forward motion. My port-side treads slew around, spinning my stern in a dizzy whirl—
SECOND MINEFIELD TO PORT!
Massive explosions rip my port-side treads to confetti. My entire port side rocks upward, off the ground. I am stunned by the concussion. Sensors scream pain warnings all the way down my port-side hull. I have lost seventeen external sensor arrays and four banks of antipersonnel guns. The second minefield was fiendishly placed: precisely where missing port-side sensors had left me blind in several critical spots. I am still assessing battle damage when I catch the unmistakable emissions of a Hellbore coming on-line.
Battle Reflex Alert!
It fires from a point high on the cliff that rises to my right, above my prow. I throw my shields on-line and brace for impact. The Hellbore blast does not strike me, however. It rips through the opposite cliff, directly above my skewed-around, scorched stern. Solid rock blows out nearly a hundred meters overhead. An avalanche smashes down into the narrow passage. I am directly under it. Half the cliff comes down. Damage-assessment sensors scream red-line warnings. Hull-ringing boulders destroy my upper-most sensor arrays. Antipersonnel guns shear off. Impact sensors register several tons of rock crashing into my warhull. My stern-mounted Hellbore's rotation collar cracks catastrophically.
Even as the landslide buries my entire stern, I fire bombardment rockets at the Hellbore that took out the cliff. I score a hit—but others pop online. Two, three, five of them. They fire from defiladed positions, raking my entire port flank along a deadly diagonal line. They fire in unison and concentrate their combined fire on the same, one square meter target. They punch through my defensive screens and melt an entire cluster of infinite repeaters and two square meters of ablative armor. The combined fire scores the flintsteel hull beneath armor plates in a long, molten gouge. If they fire another combined hit on that spot, they will breach my hull.
These bastards have studied Etaine!
I roar into Battle Reflex Mode. I fire bombardment rockets in a massive barrage. Rebel-launched hyper-v missiles scream skyward, knocking down ninety-nine point three percent of my rockets mid-flight. Two get through and score direct hits. Both blasts destroy the mobile platforms to which the Hellbores were mounted. The guns leap off the ground under the impact. Mobile truck-beds flip over midair and plunge down the cliff face to smash into the canyon floor just beyond my prow. They land in the minefield and vanish in a secondary explosion. The mines detonate with sufficient force to scorch my nearest radar arrays. The other Hellbores drop off-line and vanish behind the clifftops.
The attack is over as swiftly and brutally as it began.
I am stunned. Not only by the level of skill and knowledge evinced in this attack, but by the fact that I detected six mobile Hellbore field guns, when the rebels should have been able to field only three. No other thefts of heavy weaponry have been reported from Jefferson's remaining military arsenals. A lack of on-world robberies translates directly into an inescapable conclusion: the rebels have obtained off-world weapons. This means off-world financing, on what has to be an immense scale. And procurement agents who are able to smuggle in large shipments, probably dropped in remote regions via shuttles from an orbital freighter, since not even P-Squad officers on the take would allow mobile Hellbores to pass through their customs check-points.
This is ghastly news.
So is the pin-point accuracy of rebel fire at my major vulnerable points. That second minefield was deliberately placed by someone fully aware of the preexisting damage to my port-side sensors. Indeed, I speculate that these sensors were deliberately targeted in a series of advance raids, specifically to engineer this ambush. The subsequent combined salvos, striking precisely where they did, were neither accident nor unhappy chance. The rebel commander was not trying to cripple me. He was going for a kill.
The fact, taken alone, is hardly surprising, since any sane rebel commander would try to destroy me. What sends shockwaves through my personality gestalt circuitry, however, is the chilling fact that he has acquired the means to do it. Those shockwaves send conflicting reactions jittering through my personality gestalt center. Outrage, dismay, anger, even a welcome relief that at last, I again have an enemy worthy of the name. There is little honor in shooting a sniper with a rifle or a suicide bomber trying to run after throwing an octocellulose grenade into my nearest video sensors. But a commander devious and intelligent and knowledgeable enough to pull off this ambush is a worthy opponent. I begin to relish the thought of destroying him.
When I pull myself free of the rubble, my lacerated left tread simply falls off. For the first time, I have not won an encounter with the rebels. The damage is serious and semicrippling. It will tax Phil to the utmost, trying to repair it. I turn cautiously, using ground-penetrating radar to locate buried mines, which I target and destroy with my forward infinite repeaters. This clears a space through which I can safely limp forward. I proceed with extreme caution, moving at a pitiful crawl on two treads and a rank of bare drive wheels.
When I reach the ranch on which the police squad was pinned down, I do a swift reconnaissance from two hundred meters out. I am wary of further ambushes. A two-story ranch house to my left appears to be deserted. I detect no heat signatures through the windows, none that would correspond to a human-sized target, at any rate. A number of barns and out-buildings suggest hiding places for artillery, but I can see nothing like tire tracks that would indicate the passage of a field-artillery gun through the farmyard. A police vehicle is parked next to a hog-lot. Markings on the doors identify the car as a Madison municipal police cruiser assigned to traffic duty. It is out of its jurisdiction. By a considerable margin. The cruiser has been abandoned with its trunk open. The hog-lot gate is also open. A substantial herd of genetically adapted swine has escaped through this gate, spilling out across the entire barnyard.
I move forward cautiously, broadcasting a query to the pinned-down officers. I receive no response, only static. At a distance of one hundred meters, closing slowly on the apparently deserted farmyard, I spot an open poultry house twelve meters from the abandoned police cruiser. Through the movement and sound spilling through the open doors, I identify several thousand chickens, neatly caged for efficient egg production. A few of the cages have been pulled down and opened, freeing some thirty or forty birds, which mill around the barn floor, looking for food.
The poultry house has been hit by a heavy barrage of small-arms fire. Bullet holes riddle the walls. I halt fifty meters out, scanning with all available sensors and find the missing police officers. All five of them are down. They are all assuming ambient air temperature. Based on heat signatures, I estimate they were overrun and killed at approximately the same instant the rebel Hellbores opened fire on me. The timing suggests all sorts of interesting capabilities in the rebel command structure.
At a distance of twenty-three meters from the farmyard, I am close enough that my forward turret sensors can see inside the police cruiser's open trunk. It contains three freshly killed geno-pigs and the carcasses of at least a dozen chickens. The dead officers were assigned to a Madison traffic-control squadron, not a P-Squad foraging team. Traffic police are not authorized to collect in-kind taxes from livestock producers.
These men are thieves!
I sit motionless for a full seventeen point three seconds, psychotronic synapses crackling, as I attempt to come to grips with what has transpired and why. I have sustained massive damage trying to rescue a pack of illiterate, power-abusing livestock rustlers. Does one rustle hogs? Or merely steal them? I am sufficiently proficient in twenty-seven Terran languages to curse—fluently—if the situation seems appropriate, but I cannot even find words to express my full and penetrating disgust.
The fact that I was lured into an ambush, using them as bait, suggests frequent raids on the region's farmyards conducted by Madison's municipal police force. An isolated incident or two would be insufficient to set up an ambush this elaborate. This kind of operation must, of necessity, rely on a pattern predictable enough to have soldiers, munitions, and artillery in position and ready to deploy rapidly to a target close by. I surmise, therefore, that these officers have been stealing for quite a while, in a pattern predictable enough for Commodore Oroton to take advantage of it.
Disgust deepens. I call a forensics team and send them the map coordinates of the perforated poultry house, then turn around and rattle my way out of the barnyard. I do not even bother to file a VSR to Sar Gremian and the president. Anything I might say at this juncture would only worsen the friction between myself and the two most powerful officials on Jefferson.
Basic military doctrine dictates the need to leave a combat zone by a different route than the one used to approach. I therefore select the nearer of the two remaining routes that will take me back out to the Adero floodplain. I drop out of Battle Reflex Mode, although I maintain the heightened vigilance of Battle Reflex Alert. I navigate the narrow canyon at a snail's pace, grinding along slowly on the drive wheels which automatically dropped down to road-level height to compensate for the missing track. I leave a deep furrow behind where bare wheels cut into the soil. The partially melted wheel drags in its locked position, heating up and warping even further before enough of the surface is ground down by friction that it no longer touches the ground at all.
The route I have chosen takes me past the main generating plant that supplies electricity to the ranches in Cimmero Canyon and to Menassa. The canyon floor has opened out into a broad space that nearly qualifies as a valley, rather than a canyon, with the open Adero floodplain nearly ten kilometers beyond. From the standpoint of human aesthetics, this is pretty country. I find it attractive for reasons of my own. The open terrain makes it more difficult for the Enemy to lay an ambush. There is plenty of forest cover on both slopes, which rise gently toward the heavier timber at the higher elevations, but the Enemy cannot establish firing points directly overhead, concealed from my vantage point.
This is cause for celebration, given my current pitiful state.
I parallel the main road, trying not to crush it under my remaining treads or dig massive furrows into it with naked drive wheels. Beyond the power plant lies a small cluster of single-family dwellings that house utility crews and foremen working at the Cimmero Canyon electrical generating plant. Like the massive Klameth Canyon hydroelectric dam, farther south, this plant produces power from turbines built to harness the outflow of the Bimini Reservoir, created by damming a small river that flows down through a deep, weathered gorge. The reservoir is small, compared with Klameth's, and so is the total wattage produced by the station, but it needs to supply only the ranches in Cimmero Canyon, Manassa, and the small town of Gissa.
Even so, its generating capacity is sufficient to create a haze of background power emissions that crackle through my sensors. The plant was built sufficiently close to the road that I maneuver across a short section of pavement to reach open ground on the other side. I do not wish to knock down, even accidentally, a tower carrying high-tension wires that carry several gigawatts of electrical power. A sprawl of buildings shoulder their way past my port-side drive wheels as I grind my way toward the still-distant mouth of the canyon—
AMBUSH!
The Hellbore blast catches me flat-footed. Raw destruction slashes across my forward turret, targeting the base of my forward Hellbore. I reel. I stagger drunkenly in an attempt to swing my own Hellbores into action. I snap my defensive screen into place just as a second mobile Hellbore flashes on-line. It pours energy into my screen, which strains to contain the damage. Then both enemy Hellbores fire simultaneously, delivering a second one-two punch. It slices perilously close to the previous gouge, trying to punch through my damaged hull.
Fury sweeps through my personality gestalt center. I roar into Battle Reflex Mode, enraged. I dig my bare drive wheels into the ground and execute a spinning pivot-turn to port. I cannot reach either enemy Hellbore with direct fire, not without risking critical power-plant infrastructure. They have, naturally, hidden behind that infrastructure, hoping it will constitute an inviolate shield.
I engage with high-angle mortars. Warheads drop like blazing rain around both enemy guns. Their crews, however, have already taken evasive maneuvers. They manage to avoid the mortar rounds with minimal scorching. They shoot at me on the run, dodging and ducking behind other buildings. Several bolts strike my screens on the oblique, recharging my energy screen rather than punching through. Missed shots whip past my warhull and slam into the valley's far slope, igniting a forest fire. I rush forward, trying to gain a vantage point from which I can shoot without taking out half the generating plant in the process. Minefield warnings sparkle on my threat-assessment processors. I disdain them, smashing my way through to reach an optimal firing position. I sustain damage to my central track, but reach my objective.
I fire on the nearest mobile Hellbore. It vanishes in a violent expansion of flame and debris. The second Hellbore rushes for cover, vanishing from visual contact behind a massive concrete building. I no longer care about collateral damage. I open fire with my forward Hellbore, punching through the concrete structure in an effort to pinhole the fleeing gun crew behind it. One, two, three blasts rip through the building, reducing it to smoking rubble and flying debris. The mobile Hellbore rushes into the open for zero point nine-two seconds, then lurches out of sight, again, behind another structure.
I give chase. I cannot move as fast as the renegade crew trying to escape my wrath. I therefore plow forward on the diagonal, crushing the corners of two houses belonging to the power plant's utility crew. I must destroy the enemy's heavy armaments at all cost, before the rebels deal my own death blow.
I catch a snippet of communications from somewhere nearby, probably not from the running gun crew. It is in code that I cannot break. I cannot even accurately pinpoint its origin, which prevents me from opening fire on the transmitter. The fleeing Hellbore has rushed far ahead of me, having skipped and dodged its way around sufficient bends in the valley that I cannot see it. I am able to track power emissions from its mobile platform and fire more high-angle mortars, trying to blanket the valley ahead with a shotgun peppering of rounds.
I hear detonations, but these are low-tech mortar shells, not smart-rounds that can transmit pictures back to me or allow me to fly the weapon into the target from a remote position. I have long since used up those munitions and POPPA has not seen fit to replace them. I am therefore left with a hit-or-miss proposition known as "carpet bombing" in an effort to strike a small, moving target.
I need intel. My on-board maps show several small feeder gorges into which the crew could duck and shut down, hiding successfully for hours in spaces too narrow for me to pursue. They could also continue their rushing flight through the town of Menassa, relying on the buildings and the civilians in them to deter my pursuit and attack. Or they can run for the nearest maze of major canyons, twenty kilometers south of Menassa. I do not have enough information to determine the crew's intention. Striking out across country would be its greatest risk, but would give it a greater chance of ultimate escape, rather than temporary concealment nearby.
I target the feeder gorges with a steady barrage of mortars, hoping to create a blockade of raining munitions that will prevent the crew from taking advantage of those smaller, closer gorges as a hiding place. My inability to see what I am shooting at is infuriating. I decide the most logical move the crew could make would be to head for Menassa, which will keep it shielded for at least half of its twenty-kilometer dash toward the canyons farther south.
I therefore anticipate loss of visual contact as I reach the valley's mouth and Menassa spreads out in its long, ropy line along Route 103. I am therefore stunned to see the Hellbore's mobile platform rushing straight down the highway, nearly at the horizon line, within smelling distance of safety. The crew has opted for the riskier high-speed dash for safety, thinking my own progress slow enough to prevent me from overtaking them. I do not need to catch them in a road race to destroy them. I exult. I target. I acquire weapons lock. I fire. Hyper-v missiles streak down the long, beautifully straight road, locked onto the vanishing tail-lights of the racing truck.
The incandescent flash of impact leaps up from the horizon line. Smoke and flame billow up, filling the sky with a satisfactory display of dissociated molecules. I have destroyed another Hellbore. I do not know how many mobile Hellbores the enemy still has, but as of now, they possess five fewer than they did at dawn. I have seen six in the past hour, alone. I do not think it likely that the two guns I destroyed in the second ambush were part of the group of six that attacked me during the first ambush. They could not have maneuvered their way through difficult terrain in that short a span of time. I destroyed three of the original six, leaving another three unaccounted for, which is a disquieting realization. So is the suspicion that the third canyon entrance, north of Menassa, probably had another two guns at a bare minimum lying in wait, had I chosen that route.
As bad as this is, my next realization is far worse. The rebel commander correctly surmised my likeliest choices each step of the way and placed his strongest concentration of firepower in the canyon I chose to enter. I have been complacent. The time for complacency is over. I cannot operate in a lazy fashion, making decisions based on my physical limitations and repair woes, rather than the exigencies of battle. The enemy is too canny to risk that error again.
I begin to revise my estimation of Commodore Oroton. He does not think like a Bolo technician. He thinks like a Bolo. I find that unsettling to the point of calling it fear. I know my own limitations, operating without a commander.
So does my enemy.
This is not a good state of affairs.
I send a VSR to Sar Gremian, giving him the location of the wreckage and a terse update on the enemy's firepower, then enumerate my repair needs. He is not amused by the stunning amount of damage that must be repaired. I am not amused by his comment.
"This planet paid a hell of a price to keep that treaty in force, so we could hang onto you. It would've been nice if the Concordiat had sent us an intelligent machine. Get your sorry, whining ass back to your depot. And try to avoid being seen!"
He ends transmission. To avoid being seen, I will have to add nearly thirty extra kilometers to the journey home, since I must swing wide around the eastern end of Madison, to approach my depot from the east, rather than proceeding directly from my current position north of the capital. It will take the better part of four hours, at a bare minimum.
As I set out, I pick up a broad-band message from Madison, on the civil emergency frequency that overrides all civilian broadcasting. The announcement is short, but its impact will be felt for a very long time, indeed.
"Granger terrorists struck a savage blow to civilians and police authorities in Cimmero Canyon, today, inflicting massive damage and killing an unknown number of innocents. The entire city of Menassa has lost electrical power after the destruction of the Cimmero power-generating plant. Identifying and capturing terrorist ringleaders and their operatives has become POPPA's top and sole priority. The government will divert every resource at its command to the task of rooting out and destroying all vestiges of rebellion against legitimate authority. Acts of terrorism will be answered with the greatest possible force.
"To that end and by order of our new president, Vittori Santorini, the right of habeas corpus is hereby suspended to allow arrest and detainment of terrorism suspects. Public gatherings of more than ten individuals must be approved in advance by POPPA Squadron district commanders. All elections are cancelled, to allow the current government to deal with this serious emergency. No visas for off-world travel will be granted without prior, written approval of the POPPA Squadron commander assigned to the applicant's home district. Civil rights will not be restored until all manifestations of rebellion are completely eliminated.
"Law-abiding citizens are urged to report any suspicious behavior to the nearest POPPA Squadron command post. Rewards will be given for information leading to the arrest of known or suspected terrorists. A mandatory curfew of eight P.M. will remain in place for all civilians except emergency crews until further notice. The public will be notified of additional restrictions as they become necessary."
Night is falling as I set out for home.
I do not believe that tomorrow's dawn will be anything but worse.
Yalena knew at first glance that he was a soldier. Spacers moved differently and even the toughest, most jaded old dockhand or jump jockey didn't have eyes like that. Yalena recognized those eyes, even though the face and the man behind it were total strangers. They were her father's eyes.
And hers.
He paused on his way into the bar, gaze snapping around like gun barrels on a swivel mount to stare right at her. Not at her long, lean shape, draped negligently against the bar, sheathed in a dress her father would've consigned to the incinerator, if he'd seen her wearing it. He wasn't staring at the wisp of cloth or the shape under it. He was staring at her face. For a long moment, she actually thought he'd recognized the battle shadows in her own eyes, but that wasn't it, either, because he frowned, as though trying to place an old acquaintance from memory.
"Am I supposed to know you?" he asked, moving toward her. It didn't sound like a pickup line. He looked upset.
"I don't think so. I've never seen you."
The frown deepened. "That's the wrong comeback, isn't it?"
For some reason, heat scalded Yalena's cheeks. What she'd heard all too often from others, in smarmy phrases and lurid glances that usually rolled off her back with a mere shrug, stung her to the quick, hearing them from this man. "I'm a hostess, mister," she bit out, "not a whore."
His eyes widened. Then he flushed. "I'm sorry, ma'am," he apologized, sounding like he really meant it.
Yalena held his gaze for a long moment, then relaxed. "No offense taken. It's an honest mistake, around here."
The frown returned. "Then why—?"
She shook her head. "Sorry, but that's my business, not yours."
He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. "I don't know what's gotten into me," he muttered. "I'm not usually so ill-mannered. But there's something about you, I can't quite put my finger on it. You look like someone I used to know, a long time ago . . ."
His voice trailed off. Yalena drew her own conclusions. "Before battle?" she suggested softly.
His eyes shot wide again. "Good God. I'm not in uniform. How did you know?"
"Your eyes," she said gently. "It always shows."
He blinked. "Yes. But how did you—sorry. None of my affair."
Perhaps it was only a measure of her own loneliness that she wanted to sit in some private little alcove somewhere and just talk to him. The feeling unsettled her.
He changed the subject, evidently determined to take them onto less emotionally charged ground. "So you're a hostess, are you? How does the system work, here?" he asked, glancing at the tables, most of which were occupied by mismatched couples.
Yalena smiled. "You pick a hostess and a table. I persuade you to buy drinks, maybe food. I punch in the orders for you."
"Using a code that gives you part of the outrageous sum charged?"
Her smile became a grin. "You got it."
He surprised her with a chuckle. "All right. Lead on, my lady fair." He gestured at the wide selection of empty tables.
She straightened up from the bar and led the way toward a secluded spot well away from the other occupied tables, not to encourage the kind of physical contact that often resulted in bigger tips, as well as higher bar tabs, but to carve out an isolated space where they could actually talk without spoiling the ambience for other, more involved patrons and hostesses. She could feel his gaze on her back. She didn't need to glance back to confirm that he was watching the sway of her hips. Any movement she made in the ridiculous spike-heeled shoes she'd slipped on for the evening set the dress to swaying and jiggling around her body. Her father would probably have a coronary if he ever discovered it hidden in the back of her closet.
When she paused at the table of her choice, turning to meet his stare with an amused glance, she read more questions in his eyes. He gestured her into the booth, then sat down on the seat opposite the table, rather than beside her. That, alone, differentiated him from ninety-nine percent of the customers in this dockside dive. He glanced briefly at the posted menu.
"Is it cheaper if I order it, myself?"
"Oh, yes."
"Substantially?"
She grinned. "Astronomically."
"How badly do you need money?"
She blinked. Then said gently, "Not that badly."
One brow quirked, but he said nothing. He punched in the order, himself, a fiscal decision that suggested a combat veteran on his way to somewhere, with not a whole lot of money in his pension envelope. The little light on the order box flashed when his drink tray was ready. Yalena fetched it smartly from the bar, sliding the drinks across to him as she sat down again. He slid one of them—a light wine, rather than one of the heavier, harder-hitting liquors—across the table to her.
"Thanks." She smiled, sipping slowly.
He sampled his beer, shrugged, and said, "What's your name?"
"Yalena."
"Pretty name. What's the rest of it?"
She hesitated. As a rule, girls did not give their last names. It was safer that way. He hadn't given her his name, yet, either. So why did she find herself wanting to answer him truthfully?
"Khrustinova," she said quietly. "Yalena Khrustinova."
He sat up straighter, all trace of indolence falling away. "There was a Bolo commander by that name, out this way."
"Oh, hell!" she swore, kicking herself squarely in the metaphorical backside. "You're from Jefferson, aren't you?"
"You bet I am, honey. And pissed all to pieces, because I can't get home. The embassy," he said with an ugly edge in his voice, "doesn't accept appointments except on the fifth Thursday of the month on alternate election cycles."
"They are a lot of stinkers," Yalena agreed.
"Stinkers?" He snorted, torn between wrath and amusement.
She raked him with a shrewd glance. "How long did it take for them to figure out you're a combat vet? I'll bet your level of service sent your request straight into the toilet, didn't it? Armed and dangerous combat veterans are the last thing POPPA wants around."
"Your father doesn't like soldiers?" The edge in his voice suggested what must've been an incendiary conversation with the embassy's automated answering tree, which had been programmed deliberately to shunt any undesirable questioners into phone-tree oblivion, until they simply gave up and went away. But the comment, itself, suggested something else entirely.
She studied him with a sharp stare. "You have been gone a while, haven't you?"
The battle shadows in his eyes blazed to hellish life, again. "Honey, you don't know the half of it."
"No," she said softly. "I don't. POPPA—P.O.P.P.A.—is the Populist Order for Promoting Public Accord. And my Papa—my father—hates it as much as I do."
"Is your father Simon Khrustinov, then?"
"Oh, yes."
"What are you doing here? Going to college on Vishnu, I suppose?"
"What else?" she said, arching her brow and forcing her voice to remain casual. She did not want to tread too heavily across this particular patch of dangerous ground, which was too close to her real reason for being in this port-side dive.
He leaned forward abruptly and reached across to grasp her chin. She jumped with shock as he turned her face toward the admittedly dismal little light recessed above the table. "Yes," he said softly, to himself. "That's why, by God . . ."
"That's why what?" she hissed, pulling sharply away and freezing him with a stare full of dangerous, glittering ice.
"She's your mother," he whispered, as though he hadn't heard a word. "Your nose, your cheeks, even your eyes . . ."
"What about my mother?" The vicious edge in her voice got through, this time. He stared at her for a long, disconcerted moment. Then sat back. "Your mother's Kafari Camar, isn't she? Kafari Khrustinova, I mean. She's my cousin."
"Your cousin?" Yalena gaped. "Who are you?"
"Estevao Soteris. I enlisted the day President Lendan died." He was still staring at her. "I haven't seen her, since then. How is—?" He broke off at the look on her face. "Oh, God," he whispered, voice choked down to an agonized whisper. "What happened?"
Hot tears came, catching her by surprise. Yalena hadn't wept for her mother in four years. Had convinced herself that there were no more tears left to shed. "They shot her."
"Shot her?" His voice half strangled itself on the word. "My God! Who shot her? A mugger?"
"No." The word fell like an axe blow between them. "The POPPA Squads. At the spaceport. Right after she smuggled me out."
The muscles in his jaw turned to steel. Flintsteel. Death blazed in his eyes.
"Where's your father?" he asked harshly.
"Here. In our apartment, I mean."
"Here? On Vishnu? What the hell is going on, back home?"
She told him. The whole hideous, wicked little story. He interrupted again and again, asking for clarifications, trying to draw solid information from every nuance of her voice, her body language, her descriptions. She'd never run across anyone who listened that hard or drew that much information from a not-very-coherent conversation. When she'd finished delivering her very first situation report—because that was exactly what it felt like, being cross-examined by this cold-eyed soldier—he sat staring at the empty beer mug in his hand for long, dangerous minutes.
When he finally looked up again, meeting her gaze, he said, "How many spacers come through this place, bringing news from Jefferson?"
"A few. There are five, no, six ships still making the run. There aren't many captains who bother with the route, these days. POPPA," she said bitterly, "doesn't have much to export except lies and refugees. They're shipping out lies by the freighter-load, but the number of people getting out is down to a trickle. And they've made such a shambles of Jefferson's economy, there's no money to import much of anything, either. Ordinary people can't afford anything made off-world. Even POPPA's elite has started cutting back on imported luxuries."
She slugged back most of the wine in her glass, an act of desecration against the vintage, but the shock of alcohol against the back of her throat steadied her. "We don't know everything happening, back home, but what we do know scares us to death. We—other Granger students, I mean—started working the port town bars, trying to get information. We've even talked about going home and trying to do something about it." She shredded a napkin from the holder. "But there aren't enough of us to do much and what chance does anyone have, against a Bolo?"
He was frowning at her, trying to come up with an answer, when her wrist-comm beeped. She actually jumped with shock. "That's the signal I've been waiting for," she said, a trifle breathless as her nerves twitched. "There's a freighter in dock, from Jefferson. We came down to meet it. To meet the crew, I mean. They've been unloading cargo for a couple of hours. As soon as they've finished, they'll hit the bars and restaurants for a night of shore leave. We have an advance spotter in place at the terminal, to let us know when the crew disembarks. That signal was the heads up that they're about to leave."
"How many of you are out here, tonight?"
"Twenty-three. We've staked out the closest port-side bars and gambling joints, the likeliest restaurants. Freighter crews usually don't travel far, the first night of a shore leave. And this freighter has a big crew, according to the portmaster's records."
"The portmaster? Don't tell me you kids are hacking into secure databases?"
"We are not kids," Yalena bit out.
He reached across again, brushed her cheek with a gentle fingertip. "Oh, yes, little cousin, you most assuredly are. A girl your age shouldn't have that kind of shadows in her eyes. They'll pay for that. Trust me, for that much, at least. They will pay. And I'm not the only Jeffersonian combat veteran who came home on that tramp freighter. There's a whole group of us. We've ridden military convoys and freighters halfway across the Sector, trying to get here."
That startled her. She hadn't considered such a possibility. "How many of you came in?"
He dropped his fingertips from her face. "Thirty-four, on my freighter. And not one of us," he added with a growl, "could persuade the Jeffersonian embassy to honor our travel visas."
"Are you armed? she asked softly.
He studied her for a moment. "Yes," he said at length. "Not with Concordiat military issue, mind. But traveling armed has become something of a habit, with us."
"What branch of the service did you join?"
"Infantry." The harsh tone grated along her nerves.
"That must have been . . . nightmarish." She was thinking of the Bolo.
"Worse." The shadows in his eyes spread, driving furrows through his face. His fingers tightened on the empty beer mug. "We were a mixed lot, on the freighter," he added, voice abrupt. "Infantry, Marines, Air-Mobile Cav, Navy. There's another ship coming in a couple of days from now, with more of us. The ship I came on didn't have enough berths for everyone. When the second freighter comes in, there'll be another sixty."
"That's nearly a hundred combat veterans," Yalena mused, entertaining brief fantasies of a strike force blowing down Vittori Santorini's palatial gates and turning him into red paste on his front lawn. "When do they arrive?"
He smiled. "Our luck was in, when we started hunting for another freighter. The Star of Mali dropped out of hyper-light a couple of hours before my group boarded the Merovitch. The Star was listed in the portmaster's schedules as the next ship due to make the Vishnu run. As it happens, my brother Stefano's crew aboard the Star. So I called him while they were transiting the system and asked how many of us they could bring. His captain agreed to bring them all. They ought to be here in a couple of days."
Yalena blinked. "The Star? Good God. Captain Aditi smuggled me out of Jefferson aboard the Star."
Estevao's eyebrows stole a march toward his hairline. "Really? Then you've met Stefano?"
She nodded. Then lowered her gaze to the droplets still clinging to the sides of her empty wine glass. "Yes. I'm afraid I don't remember much about that trip. I was in a pretty deep state of shock."
"I can well imagine. All right," he mused, toying with his empty beer mug, "tell me about your group. How many people do you have?
"Seventy, all together. Students, I mean. I'm counting the ones determined to go back and do something. There are a lot more Granger students who are too scared to try."
"I think," her cousin said, meeting her gaze, "it's high time I met your father again." When she bit her lip, he added, "I presume you have more, ah, suitable clothes stashed somewhere around here?"
She grinned. "There's a locker room in back, behind the kitchen."
"When's your shift over?"
"A couple of hours. It's a school night. I was very careful," she added with a wry smile, "not to sign up for early morning classes."
"Wise tactic," he nodded in approval.
"I am enrolled in C.O.R.P.—" she began. Her wrist-comm beeped, slicing through her intended comment with an emergency code that meant trouble. In the same instant, she heard sirens wailing in the street outside the bar.
"Oh, hell," she swore viciously. "Something's gone wrong . . ."
Jiri burst into the bar, shouting for her. "Yalena! Trouble at the gate!"
"I'm coming! I've got to get my clothes—"
"No time!" He was striding across a bar full of surprised patrons. "Just kick those damned shoes off and run."
She was peeling off the spike heels.
Estevao Soteris was already on his feet, looking dangerous and competent. Jiri glared at him, ready to argue with what he thought was a disgruntled patron.
"He's my mother's cousin," Yalena said hastily, "just into port. He's an Infantry veteran." She finally had the shoes off. Yalena dropped them on the table and came out of the booth like a gunshot. They ran for the door. "Sorry, Jack," she shouted to the manager on the way past.
"I'll dock your wages, dammit!"
"Suit yourself!" She hurled herself through the door and out onto the street. The gantries and loading docks were a blaze of lights, jeweled towers rising skyward in the darkness, far above the roofs of port-side warehouses, passenger terminals, shopping arcades, and "water trade" establishments that provided space-weary crews everything from liquid amnesia to horizontal recreation. The freighters, themselves, never touched atmosphere, remaining instead in parking orbit, mated to one of Vishnu's five major space stations. But the cargo shuttles were immense ships in their own right, with heavy-thrust engines capable of lifting the shuttles and several tons of cargo from port to orbit.
The pavement was cold under Yalena's bare feet. Her cousin growled, "Put these back on. You'll cut your feet to shreds, out here."
He was holding her shoes, which no longer boasted spike heels. He'd cut them off—or maybe just snapped them with battle-hardened hands. She thrust her feet back into them and took off. The mutilated heels clacked against the concrete walkway. At least her dress was short enough not to hamper her stride. They ran toward the terminal. Police cars streaked past, sirens and horns shrieking a warning to pedestrians and ground cars. An air-lift ambulance shot past at window-top level, rattling wires and street signs with its passage.
Yalena ran neck and neck with Jiri, while Estevao brought up rear guard. They had just reached the terminal when the trouble spilled out onto the street. It was a fight. A big one. Yalena actually recognized some of the faces in the embattled crowd. They were students. POPPA students. She understood in a flash what had happened. POPPA students had always been arrogant and vicious in their effort to keep Grangers in their place. The newest POPPA arrivals, who'd just come in for the start of the school year, sported worse attitudes than most. She'd heard talk on campus about POPPA students' plans to meet freighters coming in from Jefferson, to be sure any "illegal, uppity stowaways" learned from the outset that they were still fourth-class citizens and had better toe POPPA's line if they didn't want relatives back home to suffer.
Clearly, there had been "stowaways" on board this freighter. Lots of them. Hundreds, from the look of things. Their appearance stunned Yalena to the soles of her vandalized shoes. The people spilling into the street were so thin, their muscles so wasted, it was like watching an army of embattled skeletons. Shock held her rooted for long moments—long enough to be caught up in the swirling edge of battle.
Police whistles tore the air as Yalena found herself grappling with a wild-eyed girl whose fingers had twisted into claws. She was snarling incoherently, eyes glazed with hatred and something even worse. She was writhing like a madwoman, trying to gouge Yalena's eyes. Yalena sent her stumbling into the nearest wall. Then ducked under a blow from a stout boy wearing POPPA green and gold. Years of indolence and overindulgence at the supper table made him slow and ineffectual. She sent him spinning into traffic, which had skidded to a halt as the battle spilled across the road and engulfed everything it its path.
The leading edge wavered, broke, and ran as abruptly terrified POPPA students took to their heels, literally running for their lives. The men and women chasing them pursued like blood-crazed hounds. A tall, whip-thin man with burnt holes in his face, where his eyes should have been, staggered and stumbled into her, having been dragged along with the crowd. His hands grabbed at her, clawing their way toward her throat.
"I'm a Granger!" she screamed at him.
He was snarling curses, trying to find the choke-hold on her throat. "You're too goddamned fat to be a Granger, you lying little bitch!"
"I'm a Granger student studying on Vishnu!"
She didn't want to hurt him. The ghastly, sunken holes in his face, scabbed over and not yet healed, were mute testimony to the ordeal he had already suffered. Her cousin waded in abruptly, dragged him off and put him on the ground in two seconds, flat. "Get out of here!" Estevao snarled at her. "Move, dammit!"
She tried. Only to find the way blocked by Vishnu's port police. They did not look amused. Oh, hell . . . What on earth could she tell her father? She suspected he would be a whole lot less amused than the police.
The sight of my battered warhull and tattered treads turns Phil's nano-tatt grey with shock.
"Holy pissing Jehosephat . . ."
"I require repair. We do not have requisite spare parts on hand."
"No shit," Phil mutters, scrubbing his face with both hands. They are unsteady. I detect no whiff of alcohol and Phil's habits do not include recreational chemicals. I therefore attribute the tremors to stress, as he is faced with repairs far beyond his capability to conduct. "Ah, hell, lemme figure out where t' start."
"I will transmit a detailed inventory of damage and parts needed to correct it."
"You do that," he mutters. "I'm gonna get the fork-lift and start movin' track plates. I dunno if that shipment we got last week will be enough." He stares, expression forlorn, at my shredded central tread and bare port-side drive wheels. "What in hell did they hit you with?"
"Six mobile 10cm Hellbores."
"Six? Where'd they get their hands on that kind'a firepower? I never saw any theft reports on the news." His expression twists into a scowl. "Of course, POPPA don't tell us peons the half of what goes on, most of the time, anyway, so why's that a surprise?"
"There have been no thefts since Barran Bluff."
"Where'd they get 'em, then?"
"Clearly, the rebellion has obtained an off-world source of supply."
"That ain't good."
"No, it is not."
Phil does not offer further comment. He fires up the heavy lift required to maneuver track plates and linkages and begins the arduous task of replacing my treads. The slam and clank of the lift and the plates banging into place echo inside the flimsy maintenance bay, with its thin metals walls and thinner roof. The hiss and groan of pneumatic cranes and pully assemblages prompts Phil to don hearing protection. Even with the equipment to manhandle the individual plates and linkages, it is grueling work that requires a great deal of sweat, cautious nudging with the controls, and a purpose-built jackhammer to fasten the linkages, which Tayari Trade Consortium had to manufacture to specs I provided.
The repair job requires me to move forwards and backwards in tiny increments, to allow access to the entire circumference of my treads. Phil is silent during the entire process, an unusual state of affairs, as he normally swears his way through any ordinary job.
After seven hours and twenty-three minutes of listening to the silence, I essay a question. "Is something troubling you, Phil?"
My technician, busy with jackhammer and lynch pins, does not respond. I wait for a pause in the background noise. When he finishes using the jackhammer on the current linkage he is placing, I try again.
"Phil, you appear to be distracted. Is something wrong?"
He pauses, glances around to find my nearest visual sensor pod, and appears to weigh the risks of speaking whatever is on his mind. At length, he decides to answer.
"Yeah, something's wrong."
When he does not continue, I prompt him. "What?"
"It's Maria's boy."
"The one addicted to snow-white, the one failing remedial basketweaving, or the one who needs glasses to read the computer screen at his school desk?"
Phil scowls at my sensor pod. "How come you know all a'that?"
"You are my technician. Your family is an important factor in your effectiveness as a technician charged with maintaining me in proper working order. A crisis in your family therefore affects my overall mission. I keep track of events in their lives as a routine safeguard."
"Oh." He considers this, then accepts it. "Okay. That makes sense. Yeah, it's Giulio, her oldest. He started doin' snow-white and got fired and all, but he's not a bad kid. Y'know? He's got a good heart, anyway, and he felt so bad about losin' the job, he went out and asked the med-station nurse on our street for help t'kick the stuff. He's tryin' hard, y'know, and he's been helpin' around the house, too, watchin' the little ones so Maria can take a rest now and again."
"That does not sound like cause for distress."
Phil shakes his head. "No, it ain't. Trouble is, he disappeared. Last night. He went out to pick up the family's rations from the distribution center and he never came home. Maria was up all night, last night, frantic half to death. There was another food riot, y'see, and we can't find out if he got caught in it, 'cause the P-Squads are the last people you want to get noticed by—for any reason—and the regular cops ain't sayin' who got busted and who didn't. If he don't come home, Maria's just about gonna lose her mind."
I do a rapid scan through law enforcement databases and criminal court records, including the P-Squad master files, which they do not know I can read. The food riot which exploded at Distribution Center Fifteen broke out while I was engaged in combat. The riot resulted in twenty-three deaths, one hundred seventeen critically injured civilians currently in ICU, and four thousand three hundred twelve arrests by P-Squadrons.
Phil's nephew is not listed among the dead or injured. He is listed among those arrested. I explain matters to Phil. "Giulio was pulled in by a police dragnet of rioters. He was arrested, taken to the Eamon Processing Compound, found guilty of rebellion and conspiracy to attempt deprivation of life-critical resources, and was sentenced to Cathal Work Camp. He was transported in a prison convoy at zero three hundred hours today and will serve a life sentence at hard labor in the Hell-Flash District mines."
Phil has gone motionless. He does not even breathe for twenty-three pont nine seconds. His nano-tatt pales to the shade of cut bone, as does his skin.
"But—but—" His whisper slithers to a halt. "But that ain't right! It ain't fair! Giulio's no Granger terrorist. He's just a kid. Fifteen last month. Oh, God, this is gonna kill Maria, it's just gonna fuckin' destroy her, how in hell am I gonna tell her somethin' that awful?"
He is opening and closing his fists, gulping air in an unsteady fashion. I do not know the answers to his questions.
"I gotta go," he says abruptly. He sets down the jackhammer and climbs down from my port-side tread.
"Phil, where are you going?"
He does not answer. This is not a good sign.
"Phil, I still require massive repairs."
He pauses in the open doorway of my makeshift depot, a small and angry figure against the harsh daylight outside, where P-Squads rule the streets. He looks directly into my nearest visual sensor. "Good!"
He turns on his heel and leaves.
I do not know what to make of this, beyond immediate dismay that my urgently needed repairs have just been tabled, for at least the remainder of today. I grow uneasy as Phil climbs into his car and roars into the sprawling urban blight that has engulfed the ruins of Nineveh Base. I do not know where he is going. I suspect it will be unpleasant for all concerned when he gets there. I sit alone, waiting in a state of near-infantile helplessness for somebody to fix me. I wait all afternoon. Night falls and still my technician does not return. The hours creep past and still there is no sign of Phil. I begin to worry.
If Phil does not return to finish the bare minimum of repairs, I will have to call Sar Gremian, to attempt expediting the situation. This is not an attractive choice. I must, however, regain mobility and I cannot do that without a technician. I wait until dawn streaks the sky with a crimson stain that portends bad weather. Satellite images confirm this. A major storm is due to strike Madison and the Adero floodplain today. Storms are the least of my worries, at this juncture. I divide my time between worrying about repairs and worrying about additional rebel strikes.
If the pattern of attacks holds true, there will be further bombings in Madison today, taking advantage of the foul weather to move people and munitions. P-Squad officers on the street have amply demonstrated their willingness to shirk the larger part of their surveillance duties during bad weather. The rebel commander is far too shrewd to allow such opportunities to pass without taking full advantage.
I initiate a search for my mechanic. His wrist-comm is programmed to respond to my signal, overriding any other communication he might be making, but he does not respond. This is disconcerting. I theorize that Phil may have gotten himself blind drunk and is incapable of answering. I am about to initiate a trace to pinpoint the current location of his wrist-comm when a heavy cargo truck pulling a ten-meter-long trailer pulls up to the curb in front of my makeshift depot and the movable trailer that has become Phil's residence. The truck brakes to a halt, situated so that I can see into the cab, but my view of the trailer is largely blocked by my technician's quarters. The driver switches off the engine, rather than pulling into the maintenance yard, doubtless hoping to lessen the chance that I will open fire.
I pause in my attempt to locate Phil and devote my full attention to this truck and its occupants. Two women and four men climb down from the cab and approach my depot on foot. All six are in their early twenties, from the look of their unlined faces, neon hair, stylish clothing, nano-tatts and lip jewelry. The women wear expensive fire-glow nano-shoes with stilt heels, currently popular with female Jeffersonians. The shoes, which are as impractical as their skin-tight dresses for anything but social occasions, catch the early morning sunlight with a brilliant opalescent shimmer.
Neither they nor the men with them are dressed as soldiers or police officers. They do not appear to be tradesmen and their personal adornment marks them as members of a social class several tiers lower than professionals or executives. I am left wondering who they are and why they have driven a large cargo truck up to my front door. As they approach the entrance to my maintentance depot, walking in a close-knit group, they stare up at my battered warhull. Their expressions waver between fear and amazement. As I do not know who they are and must guard against rebel attack, I shift to Battle Reflex Alert.
"Do not move. You are trespassing on a restricted military site. Identify yourselves at once or I will open fire."
"Who said that?" one of the men demands, jumping around to search for the owner of the voice.
One of the women snaps, "The machine, you idiot. Didn't you pay no attention to that lecture they give us last night? It talks, even thinks. Better'n you can, y'lame-brained, slack-jawed dolt."
The recipient of this scathing reprimand scowls and puffs out his chest. "Now you just watch your mouth, y'hard-assed bitch! I ain't near as stupid as I look." When his companions break into derisive laughter, his nano-tatt flares red. "I ain't stupid as you look," he mutters, correcting a statement that appears to be painfully accurate.
I interrupt their dispute. "Identify yourselves immediately." I underscore the demand by swiveling my forward antipersonnel guns at them. This, at least, gains their attention. The self-styled stupid one's nano-tatt fades from red to grey. "It's gonna shoot us!" He bolts toward the truck, which would offer about as much protection from my guns as a sheet of tissue paper.
"Oh, shut up and get your tattooed butt back over here." The woman issuing all the comments and commands is evidently the designated spokesperson. She turns back to stare up a me. "We're your new maintenance team. We're here to fix you. Don't that make you happy? You oughta be happy, 'cause you got a whole lotta shit needs fixin'. I c'n see that from here."
"You are not my authorized technician."
"Oh, f'cryin' out loud," the woman snaps, glaring up at me with hands on hips. "Lemme guess, Sar Gremian never told you we was assigned, huh?"
Apparently, Sar Gremian has a predilection for sending maintenance personnel to my depot without notifying me, first. "I have received no communication from Sar Gremian or President Santorini. Do not move. I will request authorization from the president's office."
She and the others wait as I send a request for VSR to Sar Gremian. "Unit SOL-0045, requesting VSR. Six unauthorized civilians have attempted to enter my maintenance depot. Please verify their assertion that they have been assigned to me as repair technicians."
Sar Gremian activates voice-only transmission. "They're your new mechanics. Satisfied?"
"Where is Phil Fabrizio?"
"Unavailable. We've assigned a whole team to you with orders to get you operational as quickly as possible."
This is somewhat mollifying. "Understood." I end transmission and stand down from Battle Reflex Alert. "The president's designated spokesman, Sar Gremian, has authorized you to make repairs. My most urgent need is track replacement."
"No shit," the spokeswoman responds, staring at my bare drive wheels and lacerated center track. "Okay, everybody, let's see what Santa brought us."
I find this phrasing odd. The team moves through my maintenance bay, spreading out and poking into every bin, storage room, and rack that Phil has filled with liberated tools, spare parts, and high-tech equipment. None of them bother to identify themselves by name, so I lock onto their wrist-comm ID signals and run a swift background probe, despite Sar Gremian's assertions that they are authorized to be here.
All six are recent graduates of the same trade school Phil Fabrizio attended. Their overall scores at graduation reveal a grade-point average twenty-three percent lower than Phil Fabrizio's final standing in his graduating class. The self-styled "stupid" one with the blazing nano-tatt managed to achieve a final standing that is truly stunning. His best scores are fifty-eight percent lower than Phil's worst performance in the same classes.
I do not find this encouraging.
Various members of the team exclaim in rough vernacular as they explore, expressing open delight over the treasure trove of high-tech tools and replacement parts they discover. My shaky confidence in their ability to handle even the simplest of repairs drops substantially when they start pulling down sophisticated processor modules and diagnostic equipment that has no use at all in repairing tread damage. I am about to point this out when they start dragging cart-loads of my equipment over to the doorway.
The woman in charge says, "Frank, go fire up your truck, willya? Pull it around and back it up to the door. Ain't no sense in haulin' this stuff all the way out to the street by hand when we can load 'er up from right here."
Frank grins and jogs toward the truck. Their intentions crystallize. They are planning to steal as much as they can haul off. I issue a formal objection. "You are not authorized to remove government property from this facility."
The spokeswoman responds with a bark of laughter, rough-edged and grating. "The government ain't here to protest, now is it? So how about you just sit there and let us do what we came here t'do."
I contact Sar Gremian again. "The technicians you provided are unsatisfactory."
"Those technicians are stellar graduates of their vocational school. Each one is a top-notch specialist. I personally reviewed each of their records."
"Did you interview them in person?"
"You think I have time to interview every tech-school graduate on Jefferson? I didn't need to interview them. Their test scores and loyalty are unimpeachable. They're the best we've got, so cope."
"That statement is demonstrably false."
"What?" Sar Gremian's bitter, pitted features grow pale with rage. "How dare you call me a liar?"
"I am stating simple fact. Phil Fabrizio's graduating scores from the same tech school were an average twenty-three percent higher than the cumulative scores of these six technicians. He has gained a great deal of practical experience since that time. He has spent most the past four years studying at a far higher comprehension level than he did while actually in school. Phil Fabrizio is demonstrably more capable than any of the six individuals you dispatched to my depot. Your statement is therefore inaccurate. How soon can Phil return to undertake urgent repairs?"
"He's unavailable!" the president's chief advisor snarls. "Don't you pay any goddamned attention? Phil Fabrizio is un-a-vail-a-ble. So stop harping on it. I don't give a shit whether you like the new mechanics or not."
"It is not a matter of my likes or dislikes. They are not capable of performing even the simplest routine repairs. Nor have they demonstrated any intention to try. We face a serious situation, which must be addressed immediately. I have sustained sufficient damage to knock me out of service until repairs have been made—"
"Don't feed me a lot of crap, machine! You made it all the way back to your barn without breaking down. Don't think you can slither your way out of doing your job. We're getting ready for a major campaign against rebel forces and you will be part of it. So shut up and let your new mechanics do their job."
"Is this the job you had in mind?" I flash real-time video footage of the looting underway. "They are too busy stealing everything they can haul away to bother with any repairs."
"Goddammit!"
I experience a surge of bitter satisfaction at the outrage on Sar Gremian's face. I take advantage of the situation to transmit graphic images of my battle damage, using my exterior video sensors. "Perhaps you were unaware of the serious level of my damage. I am not in battle-ready operational condition. I am barely mobile, with a maximum speed of zero point five kilometers per hour. In addition to a qualified technician," I stress the word deliberately, "you must obtain appropriate spare parts to fix the most serious damage, beginning with track plates and linkages and expanding from there to damaged weapons systems, ablative armor, and sensor arrays."
"You've got plenty of spare parts. Fabrizio restocked. I have the report from him."
I transmit schematics, pinpointing my damage. The image sparkles with malevolent red and amber warning lights. I also transmit the official inventory of replacement parts on hand, a list filled with gaping holes, particularly the sections for high-tech processor units and sensor arrays. "There are not enough parts to repair this damage. The most urgent need is for replacement tracks and there are not enough linkage assemblies to complete the work pending. The most serious need is the damage to the main rotational collar for my rear Hellbore. This collar has sustained a catastrophic crack that renders the gun inoperable, since I cannot fire the Hellbore without risk of a potentially fatal rupture from blow-back of the plasma."
"You got any more bad news?" Sar Gremian asks in a tight and scathing tone.
"Yes. The parts needed to fix this damage are not available. Phil Fabrizio has been forced to scrounge to keep me operational, repairing damage from Granger snipers and suicide bombers. He has done this by appropriating items wherever he can find them. Unfortunately, the parts needed to fix most of this damage are unavailable anywhere on Jefferson. Moreover, Phil Fabrizio is the only person on Jefferson with any familiarity with my systems, to include knowledge of jury-rigging that may or may not be compatible with new repairs. It is therefore urgent that he be located and returned here to begin work."
"Phil Fabrizio," Sar Gremian says in a cold, measured tone, "is unavailable. He will remain unavailable. And I don't have time to wade through those schematics and that inventory. You want to get fixed? Send me an itemized parts list."
He breaks the transmission.
I surmise that battle damage must be responsible for my slow comprehension rate, as it has taken this long to twig to Sar Gremian's meaning. Phil is "unavailable" because something untoward has happened to him. I scan law enforcement databases and find what I am looking for in a P-Squad arrest report logged approximately two hours after his abrupt exodus from my maintenance bay. The official charges are "negative public statements of a political nature" and "advocating the violent overthrow of the government."
I surmise that Phil's anger over his nephew's fate spilled over into a loud and public complaint to anyone who would listen. The wheels of justice spin rapidly on Jefferson. Phil has already been transported to Cathal Work Camp. At the very least, nephew and uncle will be together, although I suspect they find little enough consolation in that.
I find none at all. I have no replacement tracks and no technicians worthy of the name. I have no spare parts to repair damaged and destroyed guns. No help from any quarter—not even Sector Command—and my sole remaining "friend" has been shipped to a reeducation camp where dissidents are worked like animals on starvation rations until they collapse, at which point they are disposed of, usually in shallow graves.
I cannot help feeling responsible for Phil's incarceration, not only because I revealed the whereabouts of his nephew, but because my conversations with him contributed to his complete disaffection for the POPPA leadership and party machine. For all his faults, I like Phil Fabrizio. It was never my intention to destroy him. There is nothing I can do to make amends, which deepens my loneliness. I wish . . .
Wishing is for humans.
I discard the thought and focus on my immediate difficulties. Frank has maneuvered the truck around and is backing slowly and carefully toward my open maintenance bay. The other technicians are still carrying loot to the doorway, ready to load up the meager contents of my depot for sale to the nearest black marketeer. Frank nudges controls, sliding the long trailer neatly into position. He switches off the ignition and slides down to the ground.
"I'll be back in a minute," he says cheerfully. "My hat blew out the window."
The others shrug and finish shifting a last cartload that has hung up on an earlier load piled in the doorway. Frank moves smartly toward the street, disappearing around the corner of Phil's trailer. Seven seconds later, I catch another glimpse of Frank in the street. He is well beyond the far end of the trailer, running at top speed. I have just enough time to feel a trickle of alarm through my threat-assessment center. Then the larcenous technicians open the back doors of the cargo trailer.
The octocellulose bomb detonates literally in my face. The world burns. A shockwave equivalent to a nuclear bomb lifts me off my treads. I am hurled through the back wall, which simply ceases to exist. I am aware of falling, aware that antiquated, jury-rigged processors and cobbled-up connections have crumpled under the stress, tearing away pieces of my waking mind with them.
The pain of overloaded sensors shocks my psychotronics so deeply I retreat into my survival center. As I lose consciousness, I curse my own stupidity.
And Frank, who has just killed me.