By the time I could look over the wall, most of the fireball from the exploded launcher had burned out and the smoke had drifted up, so I could see the end of the street. I’d actually hit the son of a bitch! I couldn’t tell all the damage the launcher did, but it had at least taken out the right rear ducted fan. That side of the gunsled dipped down and the twisted frame of the fan housing dragged along the ground as the other right-side fan whined to high speed to get the sled stable again. Then it slid forward against one of the support columns for the overhead maglev tracks and must have knocked something loose, because the other fan on the near side just disintegrated, sent pieces of blade flashing and sparking off the track support girders, and the sled came down on its belly hard.
It was still dangerous, just sitting there, or it would have been if its weaponry was still operational. The turret wasn’t moving and neither the main pulse laser nor the coaxial VRF autogun were firing. I saw evidence of a couple other strikes on the chassis of the vehicle, but couldn’t tell if the penetrators had punched the hull or glanced off.
Then one of our fighters was running toward it, lugging one of those portable mines the reserve squads were supposed to seed the perimeter with.
“Covering fire!” someone yelled from behind me and I heard flechettes snap down the street and start taking chips off of buildings, I guess in case the sled’s supporting infantry got that close. The guy made it to the crippled sled, but enemy flechette fire started hitting the hull near him. He got the mine up onto the hull of the sled and slid it under the combined weapons mount on the front of the turret before he got hit and knocked down. He got back up, set the timer on the mine, and started running back. More small arms fire from up the street took him down. Then the mine went off and blew the weapons mount right off the front of the turret, and a lot of the unburned PLX must have gotten in the hull breach, because pretty soon the whole vehicle was burning.
I heard the whine of more turbines and a second gunsled came forward, floating over the burning wreck of the first one, its downdraft laying the flames flat against the ground and shooting smoke and burning trash off in every direction. This one started hosing down the alleyway with its autogun right away. The rounds all went over my head but I heard screams of fear and pain behind me, and the sounds of metal and stone structures coming apart. Someone back there was yelling to fall back before the voice was chopped off in midcommand.
I rolled to the right until I couldn’t see the sled anymore, then ran back toward the headquarters building through a narrow twisting alleyway that turned to the left and then right a little, hard left, and then I wasn’t sure where I was going. I stopped for a minute and tried to get my bearings, but everything looked unfamiliar in the darkness. Finally I got a look at the maglev tracks and oriented myself, started down the alley again and soon found people running in panic the other way.
“Wrong way!” I shouted and tried to stop them, but most of them were beyond listening. Four of them stopped by me, looking nervously back, eyes wide and whites showing in the faint light.
“What’s up there?”
“That rapid-firing gun,” an old man said. “It’s churning the ground, cutting through buildings!”
I could still hear it, firing short bursts now, maybe starting to conserve ammunition. Those VRF autoguns just burned through the ammo. Flechettes weren’t that heavy and a sled could carry a shitload of them, since its power plant produced the juice to run the gun system, but there were still limits on how long they could keep shooting. The autogun stopped and I heard a loud sizzling crack, the sled firing its pulse laser.
“Come on. It’s doing grazing fire, interdicting north-south movement. We just need to keep to the left.”
I got them moving again and a little ways farther we found a larger clump of people, maybe a hundred of them, some wounded or injured by flying debris. There were some fighters with them but nobody seemed in charge.
“Sasha?” I heard Aurora call from the other side of the crowd. “Sasha! Are you here?” Her voice had a frantic edge to it. I hadn’t seen her and the old man since the uBakai Army cut the breakout corridor at the Shadowed Way.
“Aurora, I’m over here! Stay where you are, I’m coming to you.”
I pushed through the crowd and I asked the fighters I saw who was in charge, where their squad leader was. “Dead,” one of them said, the rest just shrugged or looked blank. In the middle of the crowd I found the medtech with a two-man stretcher detail and Moshe.
“How’s he doing?”
The medtech nodded and patted him on the shoulder. “He’s weak from loss of blood, but I kept most of the blood out of his lungs and did some quick suction. We need a long-term fix to the lacerated artery, but the A-stop will hold it for now. Get us to a med center and he’ll make it.”
A med center. Yeah, that was going to be a good trick.
By the time I pushed through to Aurora and our father, another party of soldiers emerged from an alleyway behind her. They looked like they were still together as a unit, not just a random bunch of stragglers.
“Who’s in charge?” I asked, and the trooper in the lead stepped forward.
“Squad leader dead. Was assistant, so now in charge. What is hold-up?”
“The uBakai cut the corridor. Mech infantry with gunsled support. Hear that firing? They have a solid hold on the Shadowed Way and I don’t think we can move them.”
“How hard try?” he said, a note of derision in his voice.
I remembered Moshe in a stretcher just hanging on to life, the two guys with him at the launcher who died right there, Borro who died aiming it, the soldier who put the demo charge on the gunsled and didn’t make it back. I almost punched the guy standing in front of me, but instead I took a couple slow breaths to calm myself.
“A squad from one-three and parts of two other squads from one-two took a bite out of them and brought down a gunsled, but then got blown to pieces by its wingman. But you want to try, wise guy, go knock yourself out.”
“Okay, okay,” he said and pushed his cap back on his head. “Be easy. Is just…we did job, paid plenty for it, now everything fucked up.”
“Yeah, everything is. We’re not getting out to the east with the main breakout, and we can’t get north past that grazing fire. Pretty soon they’ll move in and cut off the south and west and that mech infantry is going to be on our ass as soon as they sort themselves out. Weren’t there some yellow flares fired to the southwest?”
“Sure, road open then. But purple flares come, we fall back.”
“You guys found the open road? Can you find it again?”
He scratched his chest through his shirt front and frowned. “Maybe closed now.”
“Well it’s sure as hell closed here. Come on, corporal, get your guys off their asses.” I turned around, not giving him a chance to argue, and I started yelling. “Listen everyone! We can’t go north or east. We’re walking out to the southwest. Any fighter without a unit, report here to Corporal…”
I turned around. “What’s your name?”
“Chernagorov.”
“Report up here to Corporal Chernagorov, on the double.”
There’s nothing like a plan and some clear, simple orders to get people’s heads together after a funk. Six fighters made their way to the front and joined Chernagorov’s five, so we had about a full squad. He moved some ammo around so the three men who were completely out at least had some, and assigned them as our rearguard. Chernagorov picked one of his own men as lead scout and got him started, then turned to me.
“Ready?”
“Corporal Chernagorov,” I said, “lead these people across the River Jordan.”
He frowned and shook his head. “Be lucky get to Wanu River tonight.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
There were still a lot of people in Sookagrad, stragglers from the column, people who didn’t believe the Army would really kill them, some who had lived here secretly all along and didn’t know w
hy everyone else had left. It sounds strange, but even in Sookagrad there were people living below the radar. Pushing through them sometimes was our main delay, trying to answer their questions, explain. Some of them joined us, so the group grew as we went. Just seeing purposeful action, armed men at the front and rear, was pretty persuasive to desperate people.
Some wanted to argue. One old guy, with about a dozen others with him, mostly women and children, had a petition. He wanted us to turn due south, march along the Shadowed Way to Katammu-Arc, so we could petition the uBakai Wat. I just ignored him and we kept marching. He tried to talk some of the others into joining him, but in the end most of his people followed us. I never saw him again.
The fighting to the north grew heavier as the Army closed in on the perimeter. I heard the thud of mines up there, saw more fires starting. There were already plenty of fires and they had started to spread, join together in larger conflagrations, and the flickering light and stark dancing shadows they cast turned Sookagrad’s final night into Dante’s nightmare.
We came out into the semi-open ground where the shelters were and found our lead scout crouching behind a metal building, waving us to stop. He laid his right arm across his chest, hand on his shoulder, two fingers extended like a pistol barrel—the Cottohazz tactical hand signal for armed soldiers, and then pointed around the corner of the building.
“Stay here,” I told Aurora and she nodded wordlessly, eyes wide with fear.
Chernagorov moved forward to the scout and I joined him. He looked around the edge of the building, looked for several seconds without moving, then came back, face twisted with horror and rage. I looked.
I saw uBakai troopers, over a dozen of them, executing people, lots of them, all civilians who had taken cover in the shelters.
I turned and waved Aurora forward. “Record this,” I hissed, “but don’t let them see you.” Then I turned to Chernagorov. “Get all your people up here, everyone with a gun.”
“What if are more soldiers than just those?”
“Then we die, but those guys go first.”
“Da!”
* * *
It won’t go down in history as the best-executed charge ever, but what we lacked in skill we made up for in earnestness. We charged in earnest, and we killed in earnest, and we took them by surprise, still drunk from their orgy of murder, and some of them died without firing a shot at us, staring stupidly at their oncoming doom. One even looked ashamed to have been caught in the midst of this unspeakable act. He dropped his gun and stepped back, as if to distance himself from what he had done.
I killed him.
The first man I ever killed I killed for vengeance, executed for what he had done, but every man I had killed after that I had done only to keep them from doing something else, killing me or someone important to me, never as revenge or punishment. Now I had come full circle, and for this execution I felt no remorse. I stood there in the sudden silence, my nose filled with the odor of ozone from the gauss weapons and then the rising coppery smell of blood, lots and lots of blood. I looked at the silent Human bodies, the hundreds of bodies, the carpet of bodies, and I threw up.
I felt a hand on my arm and I turned suddenly, pistol up, but it was only Aurora. She recoiled in alarm, in fear, and she was right to. I gestured to the killing ground.
“Record this!” I ordered, my voice hoarse. She nodded mutely, and I could see she already was.
There were still people alive, clumps of them, rising from the ground, emerging from two of the shelters, sobbing with horror or relief or emotions they would never be able to put a name to. At my feet I saw a blood-spattered soccer ball. Were those kids I saw earlier here? Who could tell? That wasn’t the only soccer ball in Sookagrad, but it belonged to someone, and I couldn’t stand to look at the ground anymore.
“Chernagorov!” I shouted. “Where are you?”
“Here!” he answered and held up his arm, maybe twenty meters away.
“Get your shit together. Pull every weapon, every grenade, every round of ammunition off these guys. Reorganize your squad, arm whoever looks like they can use it, and let’s get moving.”
He gestured to the ground, where many of the people shot now moved, twitched. “Some still alive.”
“Medtech!” I shouted, but she’d already come forward, was kneeling by one of the wounded. Behind her the rest of our people were straggling out onto the open ground to see what had happened.
“Medtech, look at me!”
She looked up, face twisted with emotion.
“You have ten minutes to identify people we can take with us who are likely to survive.”
“I can’t—”
“People are coming who will kill everyone here. Ten minutes!”
She looked overwhelmed. Everyone did. Everyone was. I picked up the RAG the Varoki I shot had dropped and then I knelt and stripped his ammunition harness and helmet. The helmet was a little big, but it had a night vision visor and projected a sight picture from his RAG onto it. I adjusted the chin strap so it wouldn’t move around too much. Others were starting to strip weapons and ammo as well.
A female fighter walked up to me, looking bewildered.
“uBakai throw grenades into shelter,” she said. “Incendiary grenades. Was full of people, uBakai shot as tried coming out.”
“Weapons and ammo,” I said. “These guys aren’t just going to stop on their own, and you can’t stop them with an empty rifle.”
She nodded and moved off toward Chernagorov.
Aurora walked back to me, her face no longer blank with shock, but determined.
“I can’t go yet,” she said.
“There’s no choice. We need to get out of here. We need to get the story you’re carrying to the Cottohazz, especially after this.”
She nodded. “We need to get it to them, but we need to get it to them right now. They need to see it as it’s happening, not a couple months from now in a documentary. The access to the data pipe is right over there, not fifty meters south of here. I need a knife, though.”
I looked south toward where Moshe had tapped into the data pipe. “What do you need a knife for?”
“I can edit internally, but my bio-recorder normally downloads wirelessly. With the jamming I can’t. But there’s a subdermal backup link. It’s compatible with Moshe’s input socket; I saw it before. I’ve never used it, but I have a tattoo that shows where it is. I have to cut my arm open to get to it.”
* * *
I told Chernagorov what we were going to do. He wanted to wait for us, but that was stupid. He had wounded to carry, a mob of over two hundred people to keep moving, and he needed to get started. The three of us could move a lot faster, would catch up with him when we were done with our business, and he ended up agreeing. We shook hands and Aurora, our father, and I headed off to find the data pipe. The old man said he would rather go with the column, but his rathers didn’t carry much weight anymore.
We found the maintenance shaft without any trouble. The medtech had given me what was left of a roll of surgical tape and a mostly empty bottle of spray bandage, because we were going to have to patch up Aurora’s arm when we were done. I used part of the surgical tape roll to secure the old man’s hands behind his back, around the base of the stanchion above the maintenance shaft. It wouldn’t hold forever, but long enough.
“You don’t need to tie me up,” he protested.
“Of course not. You’d never go off and leave me in the lurch, would you? Now don’t go twisting this tape all up. I may need to use it later on Aurora’s arm. I’m going to climb down there and help her get started. Then I’ll be back up. If you wander off, I’ll find you and shoot you in the knee so you can’t wander again.”
“How will I keep up if you do?”
I didn’t bother to answer him.
I climbed down into the shaft first, my night vision helmet letting me see well enough to find the switch for the work light. Once it was on, Aurora climbed down. It
was a close fit. She found the download socket and then pulled out the knife I’d given her, rolled up her left sleeve, and held her arm up in the light to see the tattoo. She had to wet her fingers with spit and rub some of the dirt around until she found the mark, just a short blue-black line less than a centimeter long. “Cut here” it might as well have said.
“Where’s Ted?” I asked. “Your vid tech guy? He should be helping with this.”
“He took the hard recorder and ran off on his own after the last bulletin. I think he wants to make his own documentary.”
“Afraid of the completion?” I asked, more teasing than serious.
She pushed the point of the knife deep into her arm and sucked in her breath with pain. Then she shook her head, lips pursed tight.
“No,” she said, voice trembling. Blood oozed around the cut, a fair amount of blood. She handed the knife to me and held her arm in her right hand, knuckles white. “That hurt,” she whispered.
“No shit. That’s too much blood. You must have nicked the vein. The medtech told me what to do if you did. Here, let me hold your arm.”
I steadied her arm with my left hand and with my right hand pressed the pressure point near her elbow to slow the blood flow to the cut. “Can you get the jack out?”
“I think so.” She bit her lower lip and then probed into the cut with her little finger. I could feel her arm start to tremble in my hand and she closed her eyes and bent her head back, but she didn’t make a sound. After what seemed like a long time to me, and which must have been an eternity to her, she pulled the small composite socket and fiber data link slowly out of the wound. Then she slowly exhaled and I realized I’d been holding my breath too. Her head lolled back a bit and then came forward.
“Feeling little woozy,” she said, the words slurred. I lowered her back so she was lying in the tunnel and tried to get her knees elevated with one hand, keeping my other on the pressure point in her arm.
“You’ll be okay. Just give yourself a minute. I’m going to use a little of the spray bandage on your arm. It’s got an anticoagulant that should help. We may have to do it again later. I don’t know if you put that thing back or what.”
Come the Revolution - eARC Page 26
