The Sundering def-2

by Walter Jon Williams

  The response came within seconds, crisp over the sound of sprinkler water pattering on her helmet. “Four-nine-one, permission to withdraw granted.”

  I don’t remember askingpermission, Sula thought. The thump of a grenade echoed through the building. Sula could smell smoke despite the gush of the sprinklers.

  A chunk of plaster banged off Sula’s helmet, and she brushed wet plaster dust off her shoulder. Her team was making good time despite the water that was now beginning to spill down the stairs in little waterfalls.

  The lobby was full of bewildered civilians, many partly dressed or in their night clothes. Some were wounded. The sound of wailing children echoed off the tile walls, and people sloshed in water in bare feet or slippers. There was no sign of Team 211.

  “All of you clear out!” Sula shouted. She waved an arm to indicate direction. “Head back two or three streets and wait for the all-clear. If you’re hurt, you can call for help there.”

  “What’s going on?” someone demanded.

  “It’s the war!” shouted an angry bass voice. “The damn war!”

  “But isn’t the war over?” asked the first.

  “Get moving!” Sula shouted. “Move back before you get caught in the crossfire!”You idiots, she added to herself.

  She turned to her team. “Ardelion, how badly are you hurt?” Using Spence’s code name.

  Spence looked down at the boot that left red trails in the water. “I’m not sure. I think it’s minor, but it hurts like a bitch.”

  “Do you need to be carried?”

  Spence shook her head. “I can keep my feet. I just hope I don’t have to run.”

  “All right, then. You and Starling pull your hoods over your heads. Rifles completely under the capes. Brush that crap off your shoulders. Move with these people till you get to the car.”

  She tucked her rifle under her arm, barrel downward, knocked as much plaster dust off her shoulders as she could, and pulled the hood over her helmet. A pinch sealed the hood in front, over her faceplate, but her faceplate displayed the image transmitted by the hood sensors so that she had a perfectly workable picture of where she was going.

  Macnamara in the lead, the team moved with the civilians till they got outside. Suddenly the sounds of firing were much louder, and echoed off the buildings. Vertigo eddied in Sula’s skull at the slight distortion in her vision, and the stuffy air inside her suit sent warning signs of claustrophobia tingling up her nerves. She had to marvel at how well the camouflage capes worked—she couldn’t see anything of Spence or Macnamara except their boots and the wet footprints they left on the pavement.

  Once outside the civilians dispersed, and encountered groups of other civilians. They had heard the explosion that destroyed the bridge, apparently, and come either like fools to gawk or like good citizens to help anyone injured by the blast. But the shooting and the continued explosions had made them pause, and now they just hovered in the street, uncertain, all gawkers now.

  Sula moved among them and tore open her hood. “Move back!” she called. “This is the war! We’re fighting Naxids! Pull back or you could get hurt!”

  “Police!” someone shouted, and the whole crowd began surging back. Sula chanced a look over her shoulder, and saw Naxids in black-and-yellow uniforms scurrying around the corner of the building, having run from the parkway to cut off the retreat of anyone in the building.

  “Hurry!” Sula shouted, terrified that the Naxids might decide to fire into the crowd. She and her team were sprinting when they arrived at their car; Spence’s wound barely slowed her down. Sula opened a rear door and flung herself sprawling across the backseat. Macnamara, the best driver, took the driver’s seat, and Spence the front seat opposite.

  “Take us out slowly and as quietly as you can,” Sula said. The crowd was still falling back past them, and Sula was amazed the Naxids weren’t shooting at everything that moved.

  “Comm,” Sula said, “to Team Two-one-one. Are you out of the building? The building is being surrounded by the enemy. Comm: send.”

  Her mind filled with a hopeless plan for driving back toward the building and gunning down the Naxids to break Team 211 free. She’d do her best, but it would just get them all killed.

  Two-one-one’s voice, when it came, was breathless. “We’re out, Four-nine-one! We’re running like hell for our car!”

  Good for you, Sula thought. The Hunhao swung into the street, its four electric motors driving the wheels in silence. Sula bit her lip: if the Naxids saw them and opened fire now…she remembered the Naxid police vehicle that Hong had wrecked with just his rifle.

  “Ardelion,” she said, “how’s that leg?”

  Spence was bent over examining the injury. “I can’t bend over far enough in this damn armor to get a good look,” she said. “But I think the bullet went right through the calf. I’ll slap an aid pack on it and we’ll take a closer look at it later.”

  Sula sat up and peered out of the back window as the car pulled away. The Naxid police were concentrating on the building, fortunately, not on any onlookers. Those yellow-and-black uniforms were now being reinforced by others in viridian Fleet body armor. She could still hear gunfire rattling away, but none of these Naxids were firing.

  Suddenly there was a cry in her ears, and Sula’s blood ran chill as she heard a voice crying over the rattle of gunfire. “All teams! This is Three-six-nine! We’re with Team Three-one-seven! The Naxids have cut us off! We have one dead out in the street and the rest of us are wounded! We need help!”

  Hong’s voice came next. “All teams, this is Blanche. Assist Three-six-nine if possible! Three-six-nine, give us your location please.”

  Sula called up a street map onto her visor display, and her heart sank as she realized the weakness of the escape plan. She had considered it an advantage that the district was cut into quarters by the intersection of two major roads—all the teams and their vehicles could escape the scene on quiet local roads while the Naxid convoy would be on Axtattle Parkway, with only limited access to the area.

  While that was all true, what Sula now realized was that the two major roads cut Action Group Blanche into four pieces, and made it virtually impossible for any of these divisions to help one another. Sula’s team would have to cross both Highway 16 and Axtattle Parkway in order to get into the area where Teams 317 and 369 were pinned down, and that was going to take luck and a fair amount of maneuvering.

  “Starling!” she called to Macnamara. “Drive as fast as you can! Prepare to turn left on the second street following this intersection!”

  She put the sedan through a series of maneuvers that got it across Highway 16 at a dead run, but by the time she had worked out a route that crossed Axtattle Parkway the two beleaguered teams had ceased to call for help. Either they were all dead or in the hands of the enemy.

  By that point, however, Team 151, who had started in the building across the parkway from Sula, was in its own firefight, having been caught dragging a wounded comrade toward their escape vehicle. Team 167 tried to help them but both teams were overwhelmed before Sula could get her own car back across Highway 16 to their aid. Two members of Team 499 were caught in the open, on foot, and forced to surrender—and at that point Sula remembered that Lieutenant Captain Hong had taken 499’s car and driver in order to carry out his improvised plan for demolishing the bridge.

  Everything was crumbling away. Almost half of Action Group Blanche had been killed or taken, and all in a matter of minutes. Through it all Hong’s cheerful voice continued to call into Sula’s ears, giving orders, trying to coordinate a response that would rescue his doomed teams.

  There was nothing Sula could do to help any of those in trouble. She tried to keep her voice calm as she told Macnamara to slow down and drive out of the area following one of the prearranged escape routes.

  Perhaps Team 491 escaped only because Team 211, who had been in Sula’s building at the start, got involved in a high-speed chase with a swarm of police and
drew all Naxid reinforcements away. Team 211 eventually crashed their car, and the team leader called that they would try to get away on foot. By that point they were far enough away that their radio transmissions were breaking up, and Sula, driving in another direction, heard no more from them.

  Hong made a last transmission telling the remaining teams to go to ground, and then he, too, fell silent.

  Sula stripped back her camouflage hood, took off her helmet, and turned off her radio comm. She took out the hand comm that had been dedicated to this mission, stripped the batteries, flung it from the car with enough force to shatter it on the curb, and then lay back on the seat and gave herself up to weariness and the sense of bitter defeat.

  We’re going to have to get better at this,she thought.

  If we live.

  EIGHTEEN

  By the time they arrived in their own home area Spence’s leg was too stiff and painful to permit her to walk, so Sula had Macnamara drive to the Riverside apartment they all shared. The car was parked in the alley behind the building, and Sula opened the door to the back stair, the one with the door that led from the second floor landing to their kitchen. As the laughter of children echoed down the stair, Sula helped the bandaged Spence get on Macnamara’s back, and then stayed with the car and its military gear as Macnamara carried her up the stairs to her bed.

  “Some kids in the stair saw us,” Macnamara said when he returned. “I told them it was a boating accident, that she got her leg caught between a boat and the quay.”

  “What made you think of that?” Sula asked in amazement, but Macnamara only shrugged. She stuffed a pistol down the waistband of her trousers in back, made sure the weapon was covered by her civilian jacket, and left the car to Macnamara.

  “Go to your private lodgings,” she told him. “I’ll look after Spence. Make your rounds normally tomorrow morning, but make sure you check the position of the flowerpot before coming into the aparrment.” She hesitated. “If you get a signal that there’s something waiting for us at a mail drop,” she said, “don’t pick it up yourself. Pay someone else to do it, and make sure he’s not followed when he gives it to you.”

  Macnamara was startled. “That’ll give away the location of the drop,” he said.

  “There are plenty of mail drops,” she said. “There’s only one you.”

  She left Macnamara to contemplate this and bounced up the stairs, past the small children who had laid out a toy tea set on the landing, and slipped into the apartment. She moved the flowerpot in the front window fromNo one’s here toSomeone is here and it’s safe, and then went in to check on Spence.

  Sula unbound the field dressing and inspected the wound. As Spence had suspected, the bullet had driven clean through the right calf. There was very little bleeding. The calf was swollen, the skin smooth and taut as the skin of a grape and beginning to turn blue, but the wounds seemed relatively clean, with no great amount of tearing, and Sula found no foreign matter in the wound after she cleaned it, no splinters or bits of cloth. She sprayed on antibiotics and fast-healer hormones, put another field dressing on, a dressing that contained even more antibiotics and fast-healer hormones, and then loaded a med injector with a standard painkiller, Phenyldorphin-Zed.

  Spence tilted her head back, brushing the hair back from her neck, and Sula pressed the injector to Spence’s carotid. Sula’s heart gave a sickly throb in her chest. Blackness rimmed her vision. She realized her hand was trembling.

  “Maybe you’d better do this yourself,” she said.

  Sula had to leave the room before the hiss of the injector came to her ears. From the front room she stared down into the busy street, seeing the vendors with their racks and carts, the people who moved along the street in thick crowds but who never seemed to be in a hurry.

  Frustration scorched Sula’s nerves. None of these people knew that a battle for Zanshaa had been fought and lost that day. It was very possible that none of them would ever know unless the Naxids chose to tell them.

  Sula thought of Guei crawling down the hall with his eye socket pouring blood. The voices of Team 317 calling for help as bullets tore the air around them. Caro Sula, her face slack with narcotics, lying with her golden hair spread on a pillow as her best friend fired dose after dose of Phenyldorphin-Zed into her neck…

  Sula slammed her fists down on the windowsill and marched back into the room she shared with Spence. Spence looked back at her past half-lowered, drugged eyelids, the injector still in her hands. The room smelled of disinfectant.

  “Can I get you anything?” Sula asked. “Would you like something to eat?”

  “Can’t eat.” Spence made a vague gesture at the wall. “Video, maybe?”

  Sula told the video wall to turn on, and settled on her bed to help Spence watch one of her romantic dramas. The hero was an older man, a Peer, handsome and cynical; the heroine was young and astoundingly beautiful. Her beauty seemed to unlock the hero’s personality, if not unhinge his sanity altogether: he disgorged a perfectly stupendous amount of jewelry, clothing, and trips to exotic climes before dismissing a long-time mistress and installing the heroine in his High City palace. The heroine seemed bewildered and faintly distressed by much of this, but she understood the meaning of the palace at least, and consented to the Peer’s offer of marriage.

  Sula, who had more experience with older, cynical Peers than Spence, watched the ludicrous goings-on with growing impatience. Her mother, she knew, would have loved this story, had in fact done her best tolive it—she had spent most of her life in service to some man or other, her chief problems being that her beauty tended to attract admirers from another end of the social scale than the Peerage, and that most of these were married already.

  Her mother, who she had not seen in years.

  Claustrophobia began to press on Sula’s mind with cotton-wool fingers. She was in the apartment waiting, and for what? A handsome Peer with a fistful of jewelry? A horde of Naxids with guns? For Martinez, to carry her off to his palace in the sky, the palace that Maurice Chen had bought for him?

  Sula made sure Spence was comfortable and then went out into the streets. Laughter and chatter rose around her while gunfire echoed in her skull. The first action against the Naxids had been a catastrophe. Action Group Blanche was in ruins, and the survivors in hiding. The Naxids were doubtless installing their government in the High City at this exact moment.

  Simply for a place to go, Sula went to the Grandview apartment, a walk that took her over the better part of an hour. She studied the building for a while, then decided that it was unlikely the Naxids were waiting for her as yet. There were belongings she might as well fetch out, and some preparations it might be worth her while to make.

  She saw a light on in the apartment of the toothless old concierge, and an idea occurred to her. She bought a newssheet from the vendor on the corner, walked to the apartment, and stuck a head in the concierge’s door.

  “Mr. Greyjean?”

  “Yes, miss?” The old man shuffled toward her from the kitchen, carrying in one gnarled hand a plate with a piece of toast.

  “I wonder if I might ask a favor of you.”

  “Of course.”

  Sula eased the door shut behind her. “Mr. Greyjean, do you remember that when I first moved in, you thought I was a Fleet officer?”

  “Oh yes, of course. Do you mind if I eat my toast while it’s hot?”

  “No I don’t,” she said, “and Iam a Fleet officer.”

  “Ah.” Greyjean munched toast, which caused more of his consonants to disappear than usual. “Well, I always thought so.” He gave a watery glance around his room. “Would you like to sit down, my lady?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  She perched on the edge of an elderly, overstuffed chair; Greyjean sat on a small sofa. “I’m here to fight the Naxids, you see,” Sula said. He nodded. “So,” she continued, “the Naxids might well come looking for me.”

  Greyjean nodded. “Well yes, that makes sense
.”

  “And if they do…” Sula handed him the newssheet, neatly folded into quarters. “Could you put this in your kitchen window, so that I could see it from the outside?”

  Greyjean contemplated the thin plastic rectangle. “In the window, you say?”

  “Yes. You could keep it by the window, you know, and then just prop it up if the Naxids come.”

  Light colors were recommended for these sorts of signals: the white plastic sheet would stand out well against practically any background.

  Greyjean rose from his sofa and shuffled toward the kitchen, his plate in one hand and the newssheet in the other. Sula followed. Greyjean put the sheet in the window, pinning it in place with a terra-cotta pot that held a ficus.

  “Will this do, my lady?” he asked.

  “Yes, but only if the Naxids come.”

  “Of course, yes.” He took the white rectangle out of the window and placed it under the potted plant. “I’ll just keep it there,” he said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Greyjean.”

  Greyjean shrugged and took another bite of his toast. “My pleasure, my lady.”

  Sula reached into her pocket, took out a twenty-zenith coin, and put it on his plate. His eyes widened.

  “Twentyzeniths?” he said. “Are you sure, my lady?”

  He might never have held twenty zeniths in his hand in his life.

  “Of course,” Sula said. “You’re entitled. You’re working for the government now.” She winked. “Thereal government.”

  For a long moment Greyjean considered the apparition on his plate, and then took the coin and slipped it into his pocket. “I always wanted government service,” he said, “but I never had the right schooling.”

  Chenforce sped from Aspa Darla Wormhole 2 into Bai-do, the ships coming in hot, their radars pounding away as they began maneuvering the instant they passed the wormhole. Martinez had his eyes fixed on the displays, and in the radio spectrum found, as he suspected, a black, dead system, with the only radio sources being the system’s star and its single inhabited planet. He switched to optical and infrared censors, and found rather more. Large numbers of merchant ships burned at high accelerations for wormholes leading out of the system.