by Steve Perry
The battle on Tembo was confined to Raion and most of the action, such that it was, to Leijona and the surrounding countryside. Tembo was a frontier world, sparsely populated, and the Confed presence consisted of a few companies, mostly conscripts and a few career officers. Even after the small infection of revolution grew into a killing plague, it came late to Tembo. The career men mostly saw which way the winds of change were blowing and stacked their weapons and commands. Confed policy wouldn’t allow any significant number of local boys and girls to person the garrisons, for fear they wouldn’t behave like soldiers when they knew or were related to the locals they might have to shoot at. Still, a lot of the troopers had been onplanet for years, and they had commerce and person connections with the natives. The trouble with an occupying army is that it will eventually be absorbed by the culture it resides within, and some of that had happened on Tembo. It was hard to point a carbine at the man who served you drinks with dinner every time you got liberty, or the woman you’d been sleeping with for a year, or the brother of the man married to your quad’s sub-loo.
So, when the voices grew louder, the local Confed troops mostly behaved like people and not soldiers, which was a failure for the military but a victory for humanity.
Not all of them put down their weapons, however.
Since the Confed frowned upon an armed populace, there weren’t a lot of folks with guns. Sure, there were permits available, but mostly those were for hand wands or stunners or sublethal dart guns, spetsdods and the like. And the few people who had those licenses tended to be fairly individualistic types who would protect themselves and their families if attacked, but not offer organized resistance to an army.
That left the cools.
That was why Tazzimi Bork found herself holding her service pistol in sweaty hands, her back against the rough permaplast exterior wall of a hitter repair shop on the southern edge of North Docktown, waiting to shoot it out with a military quad approaching her position. The magazine and loads in her pistol were reds. If she had to shoot, it would be to kill. Killing a Confederation soldier was a galactic crime, and depending on the circumstances, worth full brainstrain or lengthy incarceration.
“Yeek, Taz, you set?”
She glanced across the alleyway at Jerlu. If he looked as nervous as she did, they must be a pair to see.
He clutched his shotgun to his chest and his face was beaded with sweat, his tan uniform soaked through where his flesh touched it.
“Yeah. Set.”
Taz was a cool, she enforced the laws of the city and the country, and such laws did not normally come into conflict with Confed regulations. Being as how the Confed frowned with greatly wrinkled brow on any planet daring to naysay it in any way. They enforced the stuff that concerned them, left the rest of the local regs alone. Still, it was a dilemma. While she’d never considered herself political, what the Confed did and stood for was wrong. She’d seen the replay of the ‘cast where the black woman matador had called for a revolution. They’d never met, but she knew the name. Knew too her brother Saval would be right in the middle of it, and whichever side he had chosen, for whatever reason, she would not fight against him. Saval was sharp, he had an IQ that tested out far above the average, though he took pains to pretend it was otherwise. If he’d signed on with these folks, he had thought long and hard about it before he’d done so. Da was gone; the mining disaster had taken him with nine hundred others. That had crippled Ma; all that was left was a hollow, almost mindless shell, living with her only sister and well on her way to the final chill. Saval was what family she had, save for her mother and aunt, and if he thought this was a good idea, then that was good enough for Taz.
The quad jogged along, not expecting trouble. They weren’t wearing armor or electronic gear that she could see, but they carried their carbines unslung, held at port arms where they could bring them into play quickly. Taz took a deep breath, let it out, inhaled through her nose again. Shifted her grip on the pistol’s stickygrip, slipped her finger inside the trigger guard. Thumbed the safety print plate twice to toggle the weapon into firing mode. Glanced at Jerlu again, nodded.
Once she’d made the choice, she found there were a lot of other POs who were in agreement. Threequarters of the force, it turned out. She’d suspected the rebels had a lot of sympathy, but hadn’t guessed it to be quite so high. Or so high up. The Supe himself, nearly all of the WCs, most of the ranked officers.
And they were glad to have her declaration.
When it finally shook loose, maybe threequarters of the Confed troops said ‘Fuck it,’ and shucked their weapons. But there was a core of those who were loyal or venal or something, a couple of hundred soldiers altogether, who moved to take control of the planet Tembo. Not many, but they were better armed and knew tactics and strategy in a way most civilians did not. Fifty troopers with two hovertanks and medium-heavy weapons occupied the Rubani port, so offworld traffic was under their control-at least insofar as normal boxcar drops and lifts went.
The remaining troops moved to take classic objectivesbroadcast and com centers, food distribution points, local transportation plexes, river and highway access, seaport docks.
Taz and Jerlu and five others had been sent to North Docktown to keep the agroplex clear. It was not the most important spot in the city, but a lot of food was imported through the agroplex, and whoever controlled it would have an advantage. Regardless of who was in power, people had to eat.
Taz and Jerlu were the sentries. They had short-trans com sets, basically an ear button and mike, but they had to assume the military could monitor the standard opchans with their scanners, so any transmissions had to be short and fast, even with compscramblers working. Taz and Jerlu had to warn the five-person team heading for the harbormaster’s control office if trouble showed up, and they had to delay it long enough for the team to get in place. The HCO was fairly defensible from the inside, so whoever got there first would have a big advantage.
A quad had one less member but a lot better firepower than the five-person team of cools with sidearms and shotguns. In a stand-up, the Confed boys would most likely win.
“I got the two in front,” Taz said.
“Copy,” Jerlu said.
“I’ll call the team now,” she said.
He merely nodded. She could see he was afraid, could smell his fear. Or maybe that was her own nervous sweat she smelled.
“Team, company, one quad, flitter shop,” she said. She hoped somebody was paying attention, because if the quad got past her and Jerlu, it would be the team’s problem.
Taz could hear the quad’s boots thumping now. The sound grew louder. The four soldiers would pass right by the alleyway on the narrow street, moving from right to left across her field of vision. Any second.
“Heads up!” she called to Jerlu.
He brought the shotgun up, flicked the sighting laser on. Swallowed loudly enough so she could hear it.
She didn’t trigger her own built-in laser sight. The quad would come past at maybe ten meters away, max. She didn’t want to take the time to put the dot on the target; she would do better with a barrel index. She hoped.
The first trooper moved into view.
“Go!”
Taz pushed away from the wall, snapped her pistol up and pointed it like her finger at the trooper.
Pressed the trigger, as if she were at the range and had all the time in the world. But her nervousness told; she kept firing the gun even as the man fell, following him down, half a dozen shots.
The rest of it went both slow and fast. The other three troopers, two men, one woman, appeared as if thrust by rockets. Taz swung her pistol up from the still-falling man and toward the second man, but it was like moving a heavy weight through gel; she couldn’t believe how slow it was.
Jerlu’s shotgun went off. Some of the unburned propellant sprayed onto Taz’s neck and face, stinging where it touched bare skin. The sound was like a bomb, bounced and funneled from the walls over th
em in a hard wave. The woman trooper’s face disappeared, wiped clean by the heavy metal shot that sleeted into her.
Taz’s pistol thrummed and whumped, spewing deadly missiles at her second target. The trooper was trying to stop and turn, and he managed neither well, but he did point his carbine in her direction.
The tiny red dot of Jerlu’s laser sight danced in slow motion and came to a vibrating semistop on the carbine of Taz’s target. What was he doing-?
The little red spot was like an electron’s orbit. Taz had all the time in the galaxy to see it; it reminded her of nothing so much as a small child playing with a flickstick at night, waving it in a tight, squashed circle so fast that a human eye made it into a line and not dots. The persistence of vision, they called that, Taz remembered.
The shotgun spoke again, and the carbine shattered into plastic and spun fibers and crystal.
“Wrong one!” Taz heard herself yelling.
The last trooper in the quad had more time to work with, and he used it. A short burst from his carbine stitched up from Jerlu’s right hip to his sternum, ten or maybe a dozen rounds on full auto. Blew fist-sized holes through the cool’s back, shoved liquefied bone and globs of muscle and internal organs through the holes as the explosive rounds went off inside him.
Taz screamed something, she would never know what, and pulled her pistol toward the trooper, still firing. She wasn’t counting shots; the spring gun held eighteen rounds in the triple-stacked magazine and she was putting them into the air as fast as she could pull the trigger.
By the time she lined up on the trooper, he was almost lined up on her with his carbine. Her pistol fired a final time and ran dry just as she saw his startled face over the end of the barrel.
It was enough. The needle caught him somewhere unseen and he crumbled, his weapon firing, chipping craters in the wall behind her a meter over her head.
Jesu Christo!
She had fired all eighteen shots, pulled the trigger each time, in something under maybe three seconds.
Six shots a second. She’d never been that fast in practice before.
The troopers were all dead or dying. Jerlu was certainly dead.
Taz sagged against the wall. When she breathed in, it was a sigh, almost a sob.
“Hey, point?” came a voice from her earphone.
She took another breath, let it out raggedly. Forced herself to as much calmness as she could muster. She had never fired at a living person before, only lacs in practice. But she’d just killed three people and nearly been killed herself. She had to pee so bad she thought she was going to explode. She might just pull down her pants and squat right here. Piss on the walk. Nobody would care if she did, why not?
“Point?”
“Clear,” she said. But gods, she had to pee …
Her full bladder woke her from the dream, and Taz rolled out of bed and the dream, headed for the fresher. She could see how old people might start wetting the bed. She had been going to urinate in her dream and there must be a fine line between knowing you were asleep and dreaming and thinking you were in some appropriate place to spring a leak.
Saval’s being here must have triggered the memories of the revolution. She couldn’t really consider herself a heroine or anything, but she had drawn blood, been part of it. She and her brother had never talked about it before, not in any depth. Maybe this was a good time, during his visit here, to see how he’d handled being shot at and shooting back. To see if sometimes he dreamed about the things he had done.
She went back to bed, took a while to fall asleep again. If she dreamed again, she did not remember it when the morning came.
Chapter NINE
SNAKE ROAD BEGAN at the cutback edge of South Leijona and meandered to the southwest in a lazy S-curve through an old-growth forest spared by the treecutters and now a national park. The road could easily have been named for its shape as viewed from the air; could have been, but was not. In the early years of the colony on Tembo, more serpents lived in this region than did everywhere else on the planet combined. In those times there thrived Bloat Adders, green, orange and blue Neons, Black Tigers, Birdheads, Queen-and-Jacks, Water Rollers, Hilt Ring Asps-and scores of other legless reptiles from a few centimeters long and thin as spaghetti to ten meters and thick as a big man’s thigh. From harmless to dead-before-you-hit-the-ground toxicity if one bit you. Snake Road had been a herpetologist’s orgasmic dream, a place where an active scientist could spend years simply identifying and cataloguing new species.
Many of those species were gone now, killed out of fear or for their unique hides or simply by passing vehicles and the press of civilization, but hikers were still advised to carry repellors when walking along Snake Road and warned to be careful even with the electronic protectors. A man squatting to defecate in a stand of flametrees had been bitten on the buttock last month by a doubtlessly surprised Grassmaster and had died before his companions could com for aid. And a tourist heading for the ruins only last week stepped on a kitani, a variant of the local Linen Snake, and lost his foot from the poison despite immediate first aid and aggressive medical treatment begun within five minutes of the strike.
Civilization might be able to fling humans across the galaxy in ships that bent the fabric of space and time, but it still paid to watch where you put your feet when walking in snake-infested bush.
Kifo smiled at the thought as he walked along the edge of the plastcrete road. The morning sun was halfway to its midday perch, but the humid air was still considerably cooler than the body temperature it would achieve in the afternoon unless one of the local rain showers stymied it. Pollen and mold and other plant detritus hung fecund in the air and the smells were tropical and damp. He was far enough away so the airwash of passing vehicles didn’t bother him much, close enough to stay out of the chemically stunted brush that lined the pedestrian path. He carried a repellor, of course, the small device even now uttering silent but jangling and harsh electronic pulses that supposedly made the average reptile wish to hurry and seek its fortunes elsewhere. And his vouch rolled along behind him on its rugged and fat all-terrain silicone wheels. The vouch was Healy’s top-of-the-line model and could, so Kifo had been told, climb a wall or a tree with special grapples to reach its master should the need arise.
The little suitcase was also supposedly full of antitoxins proof against any known venom the local slitherers carried.
The repellor and the vouch were helpful, of course, as was the wide-beam hand wand secretly built into his walking stick, but Kifo did not really think any of them were necessary. The gods would hardly allow their Unique to be taken down by a common snake or passing cutpurse unless they were mightily displeased with him, and he didn’t think he had given them any reason for such displeasure.
It never hurt to check, though. Which was why he hiked the ten-kilometer stretch between the outskirts of South Leijona and the Zonn Ruins. He could have ridden, of course, but walking allowed a man the time to put himself in the proper mental and spiritual state before reaching his destination. The ruins were the reason that the Snake Road had been built, and rightly so. The stupidest tourist was impressed at the sight of the remains of the Zonn culture even when thinking of the vanished race as merely aliens.
To one who knew the truth, the ruins were much, much more. They were holy, for the Zonn had been and were more than simply a long-vanished race of strange beings who had gone from the galaxy before man had crawled out of the water on his homeworld. Gone where, no one knew. But a few men did know one thing of monumental importance:
The Zonn were gods.
The Zonn had attained heights men could not hope to reach; the Zonn had risen as far above humans as humans were above the snakes in this forest. Men were as nothing to them, which was why Kifo’s church was called the Temple of Despair, why he was named for death, his brothers and sisters given similar, less than joyous names. Because men were dogs to Them, and only through demonstrating loyalty could men gain even the sma
llest bit of reflected glory. It was sometimes not an easy thing to deal with, man’s relative status in the scheme of things, but at least there was the knowledge of where one stood. Better to know one’s place, even if it were low. Along that path lay security; a great strength lay buried under the trail-one did not have to be responsible. Somebody else was in charge, and that lifted a great deal of weight from mankind’s shoulders-provided one was lucky enough to be aware of it.
A passing hovertruck blew grit up from the hard surface in a fine spray; some of it stung the side of Kifo’s face, got into his eyes. He blinked the dust away, but even that small a discomfort was enough to hurry the vouch closer.
“No,” Kifo said. “Override. I don’t need medical attention.”
The vouch dropped back two meters.
Yes, men were as the dirt beneath the feet of the gods, but some men were less so. Those who gave the Zonn their proper due, those who respected and worshipped them, paid proper obeisance, those who formed a dedicated line behind the Unique, the believers who knew their place, they were better than the rest.
We are better.
Too, there were some men who were less even than the dirt. Those who impeded the will of the gods, those who blocked the path, knowingly or not, those who refused to bend the knee to a force that could, if it wished, smash them like the worthless rodents they were.
Of course, the gods would not sully their hands with such work; rat-killing was so far beneath them.
