by John Scalzi
"So we program it to stop bullets or grenades, and it will do it," I said.
"Yes," Hickory said. "Although it works better with physical objects than with energetic ones."
"Works better with bullets than with beams," I said.
"Yes," Hickory said.
"When we define the power levels, anything under that power level retains its energy," Jane said. "We could tune it to stop a bullet but let an arrow fly."
"If the energy of the arrow is below the threshold you define, yes," Hickory said.
"This has possibilities," I said.
"I told you you would like it," Zoe said.
"This is the best present you ever got me, sweetheart," I said. Zoe grinned.
"You should know that this field is of very limited duration," Hickory said. "The power source here is small and will only last a few minutes, depending on the size of the field you generate."
"If we use it to cover Croatoan, how long would it last?" I asked.
"About seven minutes," Jane said. She had figured out the control panel.
"Real possibilities," I said. I turned back to Zoe. "So how did you manage to get the Obin to give us this?" I asked.
"First I reasoned, then I bargained, then I pleaded," Zoe said. "And then I threw a tantrum."
"A tantrum, you say," I said.
"Don't look at me like that," Zoe' said. "The Obin are incredibly sensitive to my emotions. You know that. And the idea of every person I love and care about being killed is something I could get emotional about pretty easily. And on top of every other argument I made, it worked. So don't give me grief for it, ninety-year-old dad. While Hickory and Dickory and I were with General Gau, other Obin got this for us."
I glanced back at Hickory. "I thought you said you weren't allowed to help us, because of your treaty with the Colonial Union."
"I regret to say that Zoe has made a small error in her explanation," Hickory said. "The sapper field is not our technology. It is far too advanced for that. It is Consu."
Jane and I looked at each other. Consu technology was generally breathtakingly advanced over the technology of other species, including our own, and the Consu never parted lightly with any technology they possessed.
"The Consu gave this to you?" I asked.
"They gave it to you, in point of fact," Hickory said.
"And how did they know about us?" I asked.
"In an encounter with some of our fellow Obin, the topic came up in conversation, and the Consu were moved to spontaneously offer you this gift," Hickory said.
I remembered once, not long after I met Jane, that she and I needed to ask the Consu some questions. The cost of answering those questions was one dead Special Forces soldier and three mutilated ones. I had a hard time imagining the "conversation" that resulted in the Consu parting with a piece of technology like this one.
"So the Obin have nothing to do with this gift," I said.
"Other than transporting it here at the request of your daughter, no," Hickory said.
"We must thank the Consu at some point," I said. "I don't believe that they expect to be thanked," Hickory said. "Hickory, have you ever lied to me?" I asked. "I do not believe you are aware of me or any Obin ever lying to you," Hickory said.
"No," I said. "I don't believe I am."
At the rear of the Arrisian column, soldiers scrambled in retreat, back toward the gate of the colony, where Manfred Trujillo waited, sitting at the controls of a cargo lorry we'd stripped down and tinkered with for the purposes of acceleration. The lorry had sat at the side of a close field, quiet and with Trujillo hunkered down until the soldiers had completely entered into Croatoan. Then he powered the lorry's battery packs and slowly crept it along the road, waiting for the screams that would be his signal to put the pedal to the metal.
When Trujillo saw the plumes of Jane's flamethrower, he accelerated hard toward the gate opening of Croatoan. As he passed through the gates he threw on the lorry's floodlights, stunning a trio of fleeing Arrisian soldiers into immobility. These soldiers were the first to be knocked out of their mortality by the massive hurtling truck; more than a dozen others followed as Trujillo plowed through the ranks. Trujillo turned left at the road in front of the town square, sideswiping two more Arrisian soldiers, and prepared to make another run.
As Trujillo's lorry passed through Croatoan's gates, Hickory hit the button to close the gates shut and then it and Dickory both unsheathed a pair of wickedly long knives and prepared to meet the Arrisian soldiers who had the misfortune to run into them. The Arrisian soldiers were out of their wits with confusion as to how a milk run of a military mission could have turned into a massacre—of them—but unfortunately for them both Hickory and Dickory were in full possession of their wits, were good with knives and had turned off their emotional implants so that they could slaughter with efficiency.
By this time Jane had also started in with knives, having burned through her flamethrower fuel at the expense of nearly a platoon's worth of Arrisian soldiers. Jane dispatched some of the more grievously burnt soldiers and then turned her attention to those that were still standing, or, actually, running. They ran fast but Jane, modified as she was, ran faster. Jane had researched the Ar-risians, their armaments, their armor and their weaknesses. It happened that Arrisian military body armor was vulnerable at the side joins; a sufficiently thin knife could slip in and sever one of the major arteries that ran bilaterally down the Arrisian body. As I watched I saw Jane exploit that knowledge, reaching out to grab a fleeing Arrisian soldier, yanking him back, sinking her knife into his side armor and leaving him to sag away his life, and then reaching out to the next fleeing soldier, without breaking stride.
I was in awe of my wife. And I understood now why General Szilard didn't apologize for what he had done for her. Her strength and speed and pitilessness was going to save us as a colony.
Behind Jane a quartet of Arrisian soldiers had sufficiently calmed themselves to begin to think tactically once more and had begun to slink toward her, guns abandoned, knives out. This is where I, stationed on top of the inside track of the cargo containers, came in handy: I was air support. I took my compound bow, nocked an arrow and shot it into the neck of the forward-most of the soldiers; not a good thing as I was aiming for the one behind him. The solider pawed at the arrow before falling forward; the other three broke into a sprint but not before I shot another one in the foot, once more not good because I was aiming for its head.
He went down with a screee; Jane turned at the sound, and then headed toward him to deal with him.
I looked for the other two among the buildings but didn't see them, and then heard a clang. I looked down to see that one of the soldiers was climbing up on the cargo container, the trash bin he had jumped on to get up to where I was clattering away on the ground. I nocked another arrow and shot at him; the arrow struck right in front of him. Clearly the bow was not meant to be my weapon. There was no time to string another arrow; the soldier was up on the cargo container and headed toward me, knife out, screaming something. I had the sinking suspicion I killed someone he really cared about. I grabbed for my own knife and as I did so, the Arrisian attacked, covering the distance between us in an astoundingly short time. I went down; my knife flew off the side of the cargo container.
I rolled with the Arrisian's attack and kicked him off me, scrambling to the side and out of his way. He was on me again instantly, stabbing me in the shoulder and meeting the police armor there. He readied to stab me again; I grabbed an eyestalk and yanked it hard. He scrambled away, squealing and grabbing at the eyestalk, backing up toward the edge. Both my knife and bow were too far away to get to. Fuck it, I thought, and launched myself at the Arrisian. We both flew off the side of the cargo container; as we fell I jammed my arm into his neck. We landed, me on top of him, my arm crushing his windpipe or whatever the equivalent was for him. My arm throbbed in pain; I doubted I would be using that arm productively for a while.
I ro
lled off the dead Arrisian and looked up; a shadow was hovering up on the cargo container. It was Kranjic; he and Beata were using their cameras to record the battle.
"You alive?" he asked.
"Apparently," I said.
"Look, could you do that again?" he said. I missed most of it."
I flipped him the middle finger; I couldn't see his face but I suspected he was grinning. 'Throw me down my knife and bow," I said. I glanced at my watch. We had another minute and a half to go before we dropped the shield. Kranjic handed down my weapons, and I stalked through the streets, trying to pick off soldiers until I ran out of arrows, and then kept out of their way until time ran out.
Thirty seconds before the shield dropped. Hickory opened the gates of the village and he and Dickory stepped away to let the survivors of the attack flood out in retreat. The couple dozen or so remaining soldiers didn't stop to wonder how the gate had opened; they got the hell out and hroke toward their transports stationed a klick in the distance. The last of these soldiers cleared the gate as we dropped the field. Eser and his remaining guard were midway in this pack, the guard rudely pushing his charge along. He still had his rifle; most left their rifles behind, having seen what happened to those who had used them in the village, and assuming they were now entirely useless. I picked up one, as I followed them out; Jane picked up one of the missile launchers. Kranjic and Beata hopped down from the cargo containers and followed; Kranjic bounding ahead and disappearing in the darkness, Beata keeping time with Jane and I.
The retreating Arrisian soldiers were making two assumptions as they retreated. The first was that bullets had no currency on Roanoke. The second was that the terrain they were retreating across was the same as the terrain they had marched in on. Both of these assumptions were wrong, as the Arrisians discovered when the automatic turret defenses along the retreat path opened fire on them, cutting them down in precise bursts controlled by Jane, who electronically signed off on each target with her BrainPal before they opened fire. Jane didn't want to shoot Eser by accident. The portable turrets had been placed by the colonists after the Arrisians had been shut in Croatoan; they had pulled them out of holes they had dug and covered. Jane had mercilessly drilled the colonists who placed the turrets so they could move them and placed them in the space of just a few minutes. It worked; only one turret was unusable because it was pointing in the wrong direction.
By this time those few remaining Arrisian soldiers with their rifles began to fire them out of desperation and seemed surprised when they worked. Two of them dropped to the ground and began to fire in our direction, to give their compatriots time to get to the transports. I felt a round whistle past before I heard it; I likewise dropped to the ground. Jane turned the turrets on these two Arrisians and made short work of them.
Shortly only Eser and his guard remained, save for the pilots of the two transports, both of whom had fired up their engines and were preparing to get the hell out of Dodge. Jane steadied the shoulder-mounted missile, warned us to hit the deck (I was still there) and fired her missile at the closest transport. The missile blasted past Eser and his guard, causing both to dive to the ground, and slammed into the transport's bay, bathing the interior of the shuttle in explosive flame. The second pilot decided he'd had enough and launched; he got fifty meters up before his transport was struck by not one but two missiles, launched by Hickory and Dickory, respectively. The impacts crushed the transport's engines and sent it careening downward into the woods, tearing trees from the ground with a wrenching, woody sound before crashing with a shattering roar somewhere out of sight.
Eser's guard kept his charge down and stayed low himself, firing in an attempt to take some of us with him when he went.
Jane looked down at me. "That rifle have ammunition?" she asked.
"I hope so," I said.
She dropped the shoulder rocket. "Make enough noise to keep him down," she said. "Don't actually shoot at him.''
"What are you doing?" I asked.
She stripped out of her police gear, revealing the skintight, matte black nanomesh underneath. "Getting close,'' she said, and moved away. She quickly became next to invisible in the dark. I fired at random intervals and stayed low; the guard wasn't hitting me, but it was a matter of centimeters.
There was a surprised grunt in the distance, and then a rather louder scree, which stopped soon enough.
"All clear," Jane said. I popped up and headed toward her. She was standing over the body of the guard, the guard's former weapon in her hand, trained on Eser, who lay cowering on the ground.
"He's weaponless," Jane said, and handed me the translation device she apparently took off him. "Here. You get to talk to him."
I took the device and bent down. "Hi there," I said. You're all going to die," Eser said. "I have a ship above you right now. It has more soldiers in it. They will come down and hunt all of you. And then my ship will blast every bit of this colony to dust."
"Is that so," I said.
"Yes," said Eser.
"I see I have to be the one to break this to you, then," I said. "Your ship's not there anymore."
"You're lying," Eser said.
"Not really," I said. "The thing is, when you took out our satellite with your ship, that meant the satellite couldn't signal a skip drone we had out there. That drone was programmed to skip only if it didn't receive a signal. Where it went, there were some skip-capable missiles waiting. Those missiles popped into Roanoke space, found your ship and killed it."
"Where did the missiles come from?" Eser demanded.
"It's difficult to say," I said. "The missiles were of Nouri manufacture. And you know the Nouri. They'll sell to just about anyone."
Eser sat there and glowered. "I don't believe you," he finally said.
I turned to Jane. "He doesn't believe me," I said.
Jane flipped me something. "It's his communicator," she said.
I handed it to him. "Call your ship," I said.
Several minutes and some very angry screees later, Eser flung his communicator into the dirt. "Why haven't you just killed me?" he asked. "You've killed everyone else."
"You were told that if you left all of your soldiers would live," I said.
"By your secretary," Eser spat.
"Actually, she's not my secretary anymore," I said.
"Answer my question," Eser said.
"You're worth more to us alive than dead," I said. "We have someone who is quite interested in keeping you alive. And we were led to believe that turning you over to him in that condition would be useful to us."
"General Gau," Eser said.
"Right you are," I said. "I don't know what Gau has planned for you, but after an assassination attempt and a play to take over the Conclave, I can't imagine it will be very pleasant."
"Perhaps we—" Eser began.
"Let's not even pretend we are going to have that conversation," I said. "You don't get to go from planning to kill everyone on the planet to cutting a deal with me."
"General Gau has," Eser said.
"Very nice," I said. "The difference is that I don't believe you ever planned to spare any of my colonists, while Gau went out of his way to assure that they could be spared. It matters. Now. What's going to happen is that I'm going to hand this translation device over to my wife here, and she's going to tell you what to do. You're going to listen tc her, because if you don't, she won't kill you but you'll probably wish she had. Do you understand?"
"I understand," Eser said
"Good," I said, and stood up to hand the translation to Jane. "Jam him into that cargo hold we use for a jail."
"Way ahead of you," Jane said.
"We still have the skip drone set up to deliver a message to General Gau?" I asked.
"We do," Jane said. "I'll send it once I get Eser squared away. What do we want to tell the Colonial Union?'
"I haven't the slightest idea," I said. "I suppose when they haven't gotten any skip drones for a couple of days th
at they'll realize something has happened. And then they'll be pissed off we're still here. I'm inclined at the moment to say 'screw them.'"
"That's not a real plan," Jane said.
"I know, but that's what I've got at the moment," I said. "In other news, holy shit. We pulled this off."
"We pulled it off because our enemy was arrogant and incompetent," Jane said.
"We pulled it off because we had you," I said. "You planned it. You pulled it off. You made it work. And as much as I hate to say this to you, your being a fully-functional Special Forces soldier made a difference."
"I know it has," Jane said. "I'm not ready to think about that yet."
In the distance we heard someone crying.
"That sounds like Beata," Jane said. I took off toward the sound of the crying, leaving Jane to deal with Eser. I found Beata a couple hundred meters later, hunched over someone.
It was Kranjic. Two of the Arrisians' bullets had hit him, in the collarbone and in the chest. Blood had soaked out into the ground beneath him.
"You dumb son of a bitch," Beata said, holding Kranjic's hand. "You always had to chase a story."
She leaned over to kiss his forehead, and to close his eyes.
FIFTEEN
"You know you can't stay on Roanoke," General Gau said.
I smiled and looked across at him in the tiny conference room of his flagship, the Gentle Star. ''Why on earth not?" I said.
Gau paused for a moment; the expression was new to him. "Because you survived," he said, eventually. "Because your colony survived, no doubt to the surprise and irritation of the Colonial Union. Because you gave the enemy information vital to his survival, and because you accepted information from him vital to yours. Because you allowed me to come here to retrieve Nerbros Eser. Because you're here on this ship now, talking to me."
"I'm a traitor," I said.
"I didn't say that," Gau said.
"You wouldn't say that," I said. "You're alive because of me."
"Fair point," Gau said. "But that's not what I meant. I meant you're net a traitor because your allegiance was to your colony. To your peoole. You've never betrayed them."
