The Battle for Terra Two

by Stephen Ames Berry

  Heads turned toward the two soldiers.

  “He just stands there at the parapet, watching wave after wave of gangers surging up the hill in the glare of the arc flares. Finally he says, wonderingly, ‘Now I know how Camus must have felt, seeing those ants swarming up from the graves in Algiers.’ I always wake up then, soaked, stinking of sweat.”

  The German’s breast pocket beeped. Annoyed, he pulled out a small phone, inserting the privacy jack. “Zur Linde,” he said. The tiny crypto light glowed amber.

  He nodded after a moment. “Understood. On my way.” Rising, he tucked the device away. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to go. No, no,” he waved John back down. “Finish your drink, have something to eat—the prime rib’s very good—order an end cut. You might want to do some shopping over on Newbury. When you’re ready, just go across to our Copley substation and requisition a ride back to HQ. They’re always choppers on standby. Ciao.”

  “Ciao.” He stepped past the planters walling the red-awninged café and was gone.

  John ordered the prime rib and sat nursing his drink, wondering when the resistance would contact him.

  “Hey, Wenschel,” said John as the chemist stopped by his table. “All settled in?”

  “Sure am—big Beacon Hill townhouse for free, free maid, free car. God bless America.”

  “Amen.”

  “My lunch just came,” said Wenschel, pointing three tables away, where a big plate of steaming clam linguine sat. “Care to join me?”

  “Thanks, but no. I’m expecting someone.” John smiled apologetically. “Take a rain check?”

  “A what?”

  “Another time?”

  “Any time. Good to see you.”

  Sighing, John lifted his drink, draining the last of the vodka-and-tomato-juice.

  A shadow fell across the table. Two UC troopers, corporal and sergeant, stood there, lean, pale kids with hard faces. The corporal had bad acne. John returned their salute.

  “Sorry to bother the Major, sir,” said the sergeant. “May we see your ID?”

  John looked around. A second set of troopers was checking the other side of the café. All carried those deadly little machinepistols he’d first seen at the airport. Shmeisser minimacs, he’d learned.

  The diners presented their orange IDs with practiced boredom, hardly noticing the soldiers.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  John put his green card away.

  The troopers moved on to the next table as John’s food arrived. Chewing, he watched the black woman at the corner table smile, open her lavender purse, take out a large-bore derringer and shoot both troopers in the face. The gunshots were still ringing as she leaped the low wall, turning to hurl back a small round something. It rolled clattering beneath a table.

  “Grenade!” shouted Wenschel, trying to squeeze under the table.

  Taking two quick steps, John dived over the concrete planters as a minimac burped and the grenade exploded.

  He rose to pandemonium—dead and dying littered the shattered café, moans and screams mingling with hoarse shouts. Eyes glazed, Walt Wenschel sat with his thick legs splayed in a growing pool of blood. Ignoring the intestines spilling over his cordovans, he daubed with crimson-soaked napkin at the clam sauce and blood ruining his suit.

  Sirens rose, drawing near. The woman who’d thrown the grenade lay on the sidewalk, right leg shattered. The gathering crowd watched silently as she began crawling the pavement, blood trailing her, face twisted in agony. One small, well-formed breast hung from her chic lavender evening dress.

  On the crowd’s edge, a dapper young man in khaki boating togs pointed to the girl, saying something to the slim, tanned brunette at his side. They chuckled.

  Oblivious to all else, bleeding in a dozen places, the UC sergeant walked slowly, painfully to the woman. As he reached her, she sat up and spat, white spittle smearing his crotch.

  John saw it before it happened. “Sergeant!” he snapped, voice ringing across the plaza. “Take her into custody!” He scooped up the dead corporal’s minimac.

  Gleaming black, the NCO’s steel-toed boot broke the woman’s jaw with a loud snap, slamming her head onto the paving. “Nigger whore,” he said, the long burst from his minimac smearing the cobblestones with blood and brain.

  John put three bursts into the sergeant, toppling his body across the woman’s.

  “God bless America,” he said, letting the minimac slip to the ground.

  Black uniforms filled the plaza. After a while, they took him away.

  Chapter 4

  Surely one of history’s great ironies: The same day Roosevelt heeded Einstein’s admonition to scrap the atomic bomb proposal as “. . . the beginning of the end for humanity,” Hitler directed Heisenberg to “Proceed with all dispatch on Prometheus!”—Harrison, ibid., p. 38

  It was very hot in the small interrogation room. Stinking of sweat, eyes burning, John dropped his head, trying to avoid the burning track lights and the water carafe, just beyond reach on the table.

  They’d searched him on the plaza. Taking his ID, a graying captain had put him aboard a helicopter, escorted by two senior NCOs. “You’ll have to see the colonel,” he said.

  As the chopper lifted, John saw them zipping Wenschel into an olive-drab body bag.

  A silent lieutenant had escorted him from the heliport to Interrogation, deep within the Hospital. Shackling arms and legs to the metal chair, he’d mumbled “SOP” and left. A moment later, the lights had blazed high.

  He waited a long time, counting slowly to five thousand and thirty-eight before Aldridge came, squinting through his bifocals in the blazing light. “Erich,” he called. “Dim those lights, please.”

  In the subdued glow, Aldridge took out a key, unfastening the fetters. As John stretched and rubbed his limbs, the colonel poured him a glass of tepid water. He tossed it down. “Thank you, sir,” he said hoarsely.

  “Send you into town and you kill one of my men, Major.” The colonel’s voice was mild as he pulled up the other chair and sat facing John. “Why?”

  “Because he disobeyed my direct order, sir.”

  “Not because he brutalized and killed a desperate, beautiful young woman, Major?” His tone was all gentle rebuke.

  “She was a beautiful killer, sir. She murdered a lot . . .”

  “Eleven.”

  “Eleven innocent people. She certainly wasn’t deserving of mercy.”

  Aldridge nodded, smiling his wistful scholar’s smile. “True. And I’ve found that summary execution has a soothing effect on the genteel classes, far beyond the value of the intelligence we usually extract—it’s policy for such incidents.”

  He rose, pacing for a moment, then turned, big hands gripping the back of his chair. “Your action was ill-advised, Harrison, but I’ll support it. Sergeant Hallam disobeyed a direct order. You were within your rights, especially not knowing my policies.” He wagged a bony, admonitory finger. “Don’t do it again.”

  “No, sir. Sorry for the trouble. Who was the terrorist, Colonel?”

  “Some nameless ganger on courier run. They have friends among our technoaristocracy, Major. Revolution may be fueled by peasant hatred, but it’s always directed by middle-class malcontents. Mao, Lenin, Trotsky, Marx, Engels, General Giap, all come to mind.

  “Did you know that Giap was briefly a busboy here in Boston, at the old Parker House?”

  “No, Colonel, I didn’t,” said John dully.

  “Yes. Trained at Carlton House, London, as a chef de cuisine. Imagine eating a five-star French dinner prepared by the scourge of French colonialism.”

  He stood.

  “I’m assigning you as patrol officer for the next week—good way to learn procedure. You’ll be working with Erich’s special troops. Better get some rest.”

  John rose, limping painfully as the blood surged back into his feet.

  Aldridge helped him to the door, where a barrel-chested sergeant major waited impassively. “Er
ich’s first-rate, Harrison. Watch him and learn.”

  John and the NCO gone, Aldridge spoke. “What do you think?”

  “Maybe,” replied zur Linde, voice hollow over the monitor. “Certainly he bears watching. His retina scan came back during your chat, sir.”

  “Positive, of course,” said Aldridge.

  “Of course.”

  “Keep on him, Erich, keep on him. If he’s Opposition, we’ll want to know everything before he’s killed. Klar?”

  “Klar, Herr Oberst.”

  Turning the field jacket collar against the biting wind, John adjusted his starhelm and stepped cautiously into what had been a street.

  This part of the city was utterly destroyed, worked by howitzer fire into story-high mounds of masonry that choked the once broad avenues, ruins the starhelm showed in green-white-red phosphors.

  Alone with the night and the northeast wind, John moved through the desolation like a wraith. Overhead, the stars shone cold and hard, undimmed by urban albedo. Here and there the rotting vestiges of shattered elms jutted through.

  The gargoyle was an impish green through John’s starhelm, grinning evilly atop a great tumble of hand-dressed granite. Further back, a mountain of broken stone towered—marble angels, gargoyles, saintly visages poking out of the wreckage. He halted by a half-buried brass cross and waited.

  Sensing a presence, John whirled, finger curling around the minimac’s trigger.

  A boy stood there. A small, thin boy in worn corduroys, rag wool sweater, sneakers and a pair of nitespecs. John’s weapon didn’t waver. “You have something for me?” he asked softly.

  The boy extended a torn piece of cloth. Fishing in his jacket pocket with his free hand, John withdrew an equally torn patch. Together they formed a compass rose with bayonet-fixed rifles, rampant. “OK,” John repocketed his half. “What’s your name?” he asked, lowering the minimac.

  Turning noiselessly, the boy disappeared behind the gargoyle-topped mound. Following, John saw the hole yawning amid the rubble, a great slab of stone looming to one side of it. Monkey-agile, the boy scuttled down metal rungs set in the shaft’s concrete. With a wary glance at the thick slab, John followed.

  The shaft dropped a hundred yards, opening onto a large tunnel. The rungs ended in a tiled wall, just above one of a set of railway tracks. The only illumination was in infrared.

  The boy did something to one of the cracked wall tiles. High above, the slab swung silently down, sealing the shaft with a faint hiss. Without a backward glance, John’s guide set off down the tunnel.

  They walked a long time, the crunch of their feet in the gravel sending the big sewer rats scampering, squealing in protest. Once they forded a rushing stream where it’d washed out the railbed, collapsing a section of wall. A graceful frail gazelle, the boy leaped nimbly along a row of eroded, half-submerged cinder blocks, gaining the opposite bank with dry feet. Burdened by uniform, starhelm, equipment belt and weapon, John plowed through the cold, tugging water.

  His guide led on through a final series of cross tunnels, then up a ladder identical to the first, emerging from behind a false bookcase into a library: deep burgundy carpet, mahogany paneling that reached up to the high ceiling, ornate kerosene lamps, red-leather sofa with matching armchairs and a crackling fire in the fieldstone hearth. A balcony with more books girdled the room, breached by a spiral metal staircase.

  The ganger came from the other side of the fireplace, silken red hair cascading over the shoulders of her black UC battlejacket, a chunky, stainless-steel magnum holstered at her slender waist. Extending John a crisp, dry hand, she sized him up with cool, green eyes. “Welcome to Viper Command, Major Harrison. I’m Heather MacKenzie, Ian’s sister.”

  The Heather MacKenzie in his briefing should have been in a physics lab on the West Coast.

  “Heather,” he smiled, taking her hand. His eyes flicked to her coiled-rattlesnake shoulder badge. “Where’s Ian?”

  Ignoring his questions, she turned to the boy. “Jorge, Tomas left your supper upstairs.” She pointed to the balcony. “We got some chocolate bars in today.”

  Face brightening, Jorge bounded up the stairs.

  Heather watched him go and then turned back to John. “He hasn’t spoken since his mother was killed in a skirmish, three years ago,” she said quietly, shaking her head. “If we only had somewhere decent to send him. Sit down, John, please,” she said, indicating one of the chesterfield chairs flanking the hearth. They sat.

  “Any trouble getting to St. Mark’s?”

  “No,” he said. “I found your note and half a CIB shoulder badge yesterday, in my boot.” The note, disintegrating after he’d read it, gave only a time and place. “I checked out a recon chopper, landed it near St. Mark’s and met Jorge.”

  “And how are you going to explain all that to Aldridge?”

  He shrugged. “A G2 has to have some autonomy. Engine trouble forced me down near turf. I repaired it and returned. I’ve arranged for engine trouble if they look.”

  “They’ll look,” she said.

  “Where is Ian, Heather? And why aren’t you back at Berkeley?”

  “My brother’s dead,” she said.

  John shook his head. “How?”

  “We were scouting Maximus, as requested. We landed in a small valley about a mile from its outer perimeter . . .”

  They’d left their machines—salvaged UC choppers—and moved out on foot; Ian, Heather and a few Vipers. The gangers were in their late teens, early twenties, a mixed group of blacks, Hispanics, Asians and white ethnics. All were platoon leaders, picked and trained by Ian over the past two years, bloodied in skirmishes with Aldridge’s troopers. They were the nucleus of the guerrilla army Ian had molded from a thousand turf-seasoned gangers, part of the “dusky horde” troubling zur Linde’s sleep.

  Seen through binoculars from the brush, Maximus conveyed a seedy air of neglect: a weathered chain-link fence and a gate, the fence sagging away into the forest, rusty chain and padlock securing the gate. There was no guard, just a peeling sign: “U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY—KEEP OUT.” Rising from behind the gate, a narrow dirt road snaked up the mountain, twisting from sight around a bend. Weeds flourished between the road’s shallow ruts.

  Ian passed the big Zeiss 12x50s to his sister. She looked, shook her head and handed them back. “You’re thinking of attacking that? Why not just wait for a storm to blow it over?”

  Ian laughed, looking back at Maximus. He was a big, lantern-jawed man, with his sister’s red hair and their mother’s green eyes. “Watch,” he said, pointing to a sparrow alighting on the fence. Zap! Heather gasped as the bird vanished in a blue flash. Gray smoke rose from a misshapen lump beneath the wire.

  “Can’t that be shorted?” she asked uncertainly.

  “Sure,” he nodded. “Once you get through the mines. Then there’s the minefield on the other side. And the road’s mined too, probably rigged for command detonation. Surviving all that—and we could, because the Outfit’s provided maps—at the top there’s a battalion of rent-a-Brits: Scots Guards under a brigadier. They’re in a heavily fortified position with light artillery. Only after getting past them would we reach the research facility, a brutish agglomeration of concrete and glass—all sharp edges—with staff quarters, labs, power plant, barracks, Admin building. And lots of machine-gun positions.”

  “I see,” she said. “But you still haven’t told me the reason for all this. Or why you dragged me all the way across the country.”

  “Two reasons. The people I work for asked for my evaluation of Maximus’s defenses. As these same people also provide the Vipers with weapons, materials and training,” he pointed to himself, “I agreed.” Leaning closer, he dropped his voice. “I’ve never heard Angel, my controller, sound scared. But he’s scared about Maximus. Something up there’s frightened the bejesus out of him.”

  “As for the other reason . . . Julio!”

  The young platoon leader scampered over. “Tell my sis
ter what you told me, please.”

  During the War, the government had brought levies of workers from Puerto Rico to man the vital mainland factories. With thousands of Americans dying every week on the Russian steppes, the draft had stripped the cities of all but the youngest, the oldest and the sickest. It was hoped that the Hispanics would prove docile, tolerating the substandard wages and deteriorating living conditions, the 108-hour work weeks. Many had. But their children, those who survived ’68, hadn’t.

  “Until last year,” said Julio in careful, faintly accented English, “Maximus used laborers and cooks from fringe burbs near turf, rotating them every three months. My cousin Raoul was part of a construction crew. At least, that’s what they told him when he was hired.” The dead UC trooper’s field jacket was too large for Julio’s small frame. Rocking slightly on his heels, he hugged himself for warmth. “He came home a month overdue. He was old. Old.” He shook his head, awed by the memory. “My age, but he looked eighty. Shaking, gnarled hands, wrinkled face. And his mind . . .”

  “Senile?” prompted Heather.

  “He could barely sign the monthly disability check.”

  “Disability check?” Social insurance in America had died young. Social security had been converted to a war tax in the dark months of ’48 and never restored after the fighting died in ’53.

  Julio nodded. “Two hundred a month. We moved to West Roxbury, bought a trailer.” Cleared of rubble, West Roxbury had no gangers and enjoyed nominal social services. Trees and playgrounds dotted the miles of trailer “parks” —refurbished war surplus units sold and financed for a handsome profit by government licensed brokers to the minorities and ethnics working the industrialized inner burbs.

  “How is Raoul?” asked Heather.

  “Dead,” he said flatly. “Heart failure, arteriosclerosis.”