by John Ringo
The dome floated on Madison’s darkened skyline like a jewel plucked out of a diamond necklace and dropped onto ink-dark velvet. It glittered in the darkness, dazzling white from the floodlights that were still burning brightly. Simon craned his neck to keep the dome in view as they rushed through the stunned and standing traffic, flicking past dark buildings that blotted out his view. He counted out the seconds under his breath again. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine…
They careened their way into a broad intersection, giving Simon a straight-line view across Lendan Park to Darconi Street and the Palace, which was only six blocks away. The driver dug the heel of his hand into the horn, scattering pedestrians who’d climbed out of their cars. They reached the middle of the intersection—
—and a massive explosion ripped the sky.
The flash backlit the trees, casting stark shadows. The high dome of Vittori’s Palace blew apart. Flame boiled and belched outward. The roar shook the trees as it thundered across Lendan Park. Maria’s daughter screamed. The datascreen’s view of Vittori’s studio flickered wildly for a split second, then went black. They tore through the intersection and another building blocked their view.
Simon twisted around just in time to see the concussion slash through the intersection. People standing on the street were knocked down. Bass thunder rattled and bounced off the buildings. The ricochet of sound echoed down the stunned streets and shook windows, many of which shattered.
They shot through another intersection and caught another glimpse. The dome was gone. It had collapsed into rubble, leaving a gaping, blackened hole in the center of Vittori’s extravagant, sprawling “People’s Palace.” The wings were intact, but the windows had blown out and the power had gone down in the entire south wing. The north wing’s lights flickered erratically. Flames were already licking their way into both wings. POPPA’s colossal, ruinously expensive monument to self-interest and greed was about to suffer the same fate as Gifre Zeloc’s had, four years ago.
Civil war was hard on the architecture.
Not to mention the occupants.
“Do you think we got him?” Maria asked breathlessly as they whipped past another building, closing in on the P-News headquarters.
“His broadcast studio is in the south wing. My best guess? He probably survived that blast.”
Maria’s son cursed, bitterly. “Then why the hell didn’t they blow up the goddamned south wing, instead of the friggin’ dome?”
“Because the south wing is built like a fortress. And the broadcast studio is underground. You’d have to set off an octocellulose bomb the size of the one you crippled Sonny with, to take out that studio.”
“That stinks t’ hell and back, don’t it?”
Nobody bothered to answer. Whether Vittori had died or survived, their night’s work had just begun. “Speed up,” Simon growled. “We’ve got to reach the rendezvous fast.” The driver put his foot down. People scattered like frightened ducks, jumping back into their cars, leaping for doorways, scrambling up onto car hoods. More explosions shook Madison. Smaller ones, widely scattered. P-Squad stations, going down in flames under a massive onslaught of burning hatred. Simon’s wrist-comm began to crackle with reports.
Their groundcar skidded around the final corner just in time to see the main doors of P-Net’s corporate headquarters blow out. Flame belched into the street. Smoke bellied up from the ruined, gaping doorway. Armed men and women were running through the smoke, entering the building. Screaming bystanders were stampeding in every direction, trying to get out of the sudden war zone. Chattering gunfire reached their ears as the driver slid them around in a spinning screech of tires against pavement. As they rocked to a halt in a boiling cloud of black smoke, Simon shouted into his wrist-comm.
“This is Black Dog. My staff car just skidded into the P-Net doorway. I want guns and riot gear, stat!”
Somebody came running toward their car. Simon jumped out, caught the armored vest hurled his way, and buckled it on. He snatched a battle rifle on the fly, catching it midair, and headed for the door.
“Here’s a command helmet, sir!” somebody shouted.
Simon jammed it onto his head. “This is Black Dog! Report!”
Estevao’s voice came back, cool and crisp. “We’ve taken the main studio and the rooftop broadcast towers. There’s a team combing the executive offices now. Fire teams have reported seventeen P-Squad stations blown sky high. Reports are going out that Vittori survived. Pol Jankovitch is on his belly in front of me, pissing in his pants and begging us not to shoot him.” Estevao’s voice dripped disgust.
“Honor his request. I have a use for that groveling little worm. What about the assemblymen?”
“Being assembled,” Estevao responded, drily.
“Bring ’em here. Alive. And undamaged, if you please.”
“Roger.”
Three minutes later, Simon strode into the most famous news studio on Jefferson. Stunned technicians cowered at their consoles, ashen and silent. Pol Jankovitch literally was on his belly in front of Estevao Soteris. And his pants were, in fact, soaking wet. Simon eyed him coldly through the battle helmet, then swept it off and met the newsman’s gaze, face to face.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?” Simon asked softly.
P-Net’s star news anchor shook his head.
“I’m not Commodore Oroton,” he said gently. “But Pol, my friend, before this night is over you’re going to wish the commodore had walked through that door, not me. Oroton is a brilliant commander. But what I’m trained to do will make the commodore look like a Sunday preacher.” He crouched down and smiled coldly into the newsman’s eyes. “My name,” he said in a near whisper, “is Simon Khrustinov.”
A wild whimper broke from Pol’s throat.
“That’s right. The Butcher of Etaine is back, my friend. With a new face, courtesy of Vittori Santorini. And this time,” he smiled down at the shuddering newsman, “I’m not playing by the Brigade’s rules. Do you know why that is, you sorry piece of dogshit?”
Pol shook his head, wild-eyed with terror.
Simon grabbed a fistful of expensive silk shirt. Steel turned his voice into a weapon. “Because my wife and only child were in Klameth Canyon, tonight!”
“Oh, God…”
Simon snatched him to his feet, slammed him into the nearest wall. “Don’t you dare take that name in vain! Your master bought your black little soul years ago. And for what? A few pieces of silver? No. Something even more pathetic: network ratings.” The man hanging from Simon’s fists flinched. Disgust curled Simon’s lip. “How does it feel now, to be the world’s most popular propaganda mouth? How does it feel, knowing you helped put into power a man who just murdered five hundred thousand helpless men, women, and children?”
He wet his lips with his tongue. “But they’re criminals,” he whispered. “Terrorists!”
“Oh, no,” Simon told him in a hard, flat voice. “You don’t even know the meaning of the word terrorist. Not yet,” he promised in a grim tone. “Those people weren’t soldiers or terrorists or any of the other dehumanizing labels you like to throw around. They were just ordinary people, half-starved, with nowhere else to go. And now they’re dead, my friend. All of them. Do you have the slightest idea who you helped Vittori kill tonight?”
He shook his head. “Infants at their mothers’ breasts. Toddlers playing with a few pebbles. Little girls trying to boil potatoes and wash diapers and boys scrounging firewood from any tree they could find. That’s who you helped Vittori kill, you sanctimonious fraud.”
The man with the golden tongue had lost the use of it. He just hung there, shaking, staring into Simon’s eyes like a bird hypnotized by a spitting cobra.
“Nothing to say? No bleating excuses? Not even a plea for mercy?” Tears started leaking from the man’s eyes. His mouth quivered, wet and pathetic. “You’d better find something to say, my friend, because now it’s my turn to write your script. Let me tell you what the B
utcher of Etaine is going to do with that clever little tongue of yours…”
V
The guns atop the dam had fallen silent. Rachel and the other gunners up there were alive, but when Kafari started calling units on her command helmet, a massive, unbearable silence met her ears. She closed her eyes against clawing pain and nausea and kept calling her people, running down through the list in battle order.
“This is Red Dog, report. This is Red Dog to all units, report.”
Silence. Unbearable silence…
“Red Dog,” a sudden, faint crackle startled her so badly, she nearly jumped out of her skin, “we copy. There’s six of us, all suited. We’re above Alligator Deep. It’s…” The voice choked off. “It’s not good,” the soldier whispered. “Oh, Christ, it’s bad down there…” He sounded like he was crying.
“Steady, soldier,” Kafari said. “Report. What can you see?”
“I’m switching to video mode, transmitting from our surveillance cameras.”
Kafari’s battle helmet was abruptly full of dead refugees. Thousands and thousands of them. Dead livestock, too. Nothing but death, as far as the camera lens could see.
“There’s power in the farmhouses,” the team leader was saying, “but we can’t see anyone moving, down there. We can’t tell if anyone got to shelter. They hit us with that shit right in the middle of the artillery barrage. If we hadn’t got your warning… if we’d been at a lower altitude…” His voice was breaking apart, again.
“Can you see other gun positions?”
“Y-yes, sir.”
“Signal them. Can you see any sign of movement from those positions?”
There was a pause. “Yeah, there is. My God, we’re not alone, out here, there’s somebody else alive…” The strain in his voice set it to wobbling. “It’s the battery right across the canyon from us, sir, where the main canyon splits off into Seorsa Gorge. They’re not responding to radio signals, sir. Sam, try the heliograph.” Another pause ensued. “They’re signaling back, using light-flashes for a coded message. Stand by, sir… It’s Anish Balin, sir! The general’s alive! He says Red Wolf is with him.”
Kafari closed her eyes and sent a tiny prayer of thanks skyward.
“General Balin says his aircar was hit during the shelling. They landed at Seorsa. Their transmitters were shot to pieces. The gun battery’s comm-gear was knocked out, as well. They’ve lost half the guns and four of their crewmen were killed, but the rest of them got into suits in time.”
Hope kindled to life in Kafari’s heart. With Anish Balin and Red Wolf still at large, her command staff was mostly intact, if widely scattered. There might be other pockets of survivors, maybe even enough to keep the fight going. If Sonny didn’t just blow them all to hell in the next few minutes…
“Signal them back. Tell General Balin to lie low. Really low. The Bolo’s coming in, do you copy that? POPPA’s put the Bolo on a heavy-lifter and it’s on its way here. When it rolls into this canyon, do nothing! Don’t attack it. Don’t even switch your guns on. Power everything down and keep your heads down, as well. Do you copy?”
“Nothing, sir?” A spark of anger crackled through the horror.
Anger was good. Her people would need their anger.
“That’s right, soldier. Nothing. That Bolo will blow you to atoms if you try to engage it. Vittori’s impatience to finish us off just might save our butts, because the repair team didn’t finish the job. That machine is still blind in damn near every spectrum but infrared. Get your guns out of sight from the canyon floor. Pour water over the barrels to cool ’em off, if you have to, anything to make your fighting position invisible to IR scans. Signal the other fire team to do the same. If we can keep the Bolo from destroying all of us, if we can save enough of our guns, we can keep this rebellion going. We’ve already got teams tearing Madison apart. Do you copy that? This fight is far from over.”
“Yes, sir!” New hope rang through the soldier’s voice.
“Good. Get to work. Try to reach other units by signal flashes as well as radio. Report to me the instant you make other contacts. Let them know the commodore is still alive and still has a few tricks up his uniform sleeve. And when you see that damned Bolo, pull your head down and stay down. I’m not in the mood to lose even one more of my people tonight, do you copy that?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Get to work, then. And soldier—”
“Yes, sir?”
“Good work, getting into your suits. Tell the squads I said so.”
“Yes, sir!”
When Kafari looked up, Yalena was trembling.
“The Bolo’s coming?” Terror quavered through her voice.
“Yes.”
Her daughter swallowed hard, but she didn’t panic. Didn’t break and run. The courage it took not to gibber — after what she’d been through, the last time the Bolo had come toward her — made Kafari’s heart swell with pride. Somehow, despite all the pain and failures and the ghastly damage wrought by POPPA’s social engineers, she and Simon had managed to produce one hell of a daughter. One who stood there, waiting for her commanding officer to issue orders that she would carry out, despite the black terror in her soul. Kafari loved her so much in that moment, she couldn’t even speak.
Phil Fabrizio waited, as well, but the quality of his silence was altogether different from Yalena’s. His nano-tatt had writhed into a configuration that reminded Kafari of a Deng warrior — black, full of spiky legs, and ready to kill anything within reach. The big-city swagger and bravado had gone, burned away by the rage seething like a forest fire behind his eyes.
“When Sonny gets here, you want I should go out there and try to stop him?” His voice was harsh, full of hot coals and hatred. “We got enough octocellulose left, I could blow a damn ragged hole in somethin’ vital. Seein’ how it’s me and he knows me, I could probably get close enough t’ do all kinds a’ damage.”
“I do believe you would,” she murmured, more to herself than to him.
“Shit, yeah, I would.”
“And he’d mow you down with antipersonnel charges and keep coming. No, I don’t want anyone to go out there and confront that machine. I spoke the God’s honest truth, just now. I can’t afford to lose anybody else.”
“What’re we gonna do, then? I was s’posed to meet my sister, tonight, an’ somebody who came in on that freighter. An off-world officer, they said, t’ talk about guerilla warfare and a better way t’ make hits.”
Yalena spoke before Kafari could answer. “Sir? I think you should tell him who he was supposed to meet, tonight. Right now, we’re the only command staff you’ve got.”
“Point taken. All right, Mr. Fabrizio—”
“Hey, if you can’t call me Phil, ain’t no sense in sayin’ nuthin’ else. I ain’t been called Mr. Fabrizio by nobody in my life, except th’ damn P-Squads who threw my ass in a prison van an’ shipped it to th’ death camp.”
“All right, Phil. That officer you were supposed to meet tonight is Colonel Simon Khrustinov. The Bolo’s old commander is back in town, my friend, and there is going to be one hell of a hot time in that old town, tonight.”
“Holy — ! He’s back? To help us? Oh, man, that some kinda wonder—” Sudden dismay replaced the shock. “Aw, nuts… He’s gonna blow that bastard away b’fore I get a chance to fill his ass fulla holes, ain’t he?”
“That’s the general idea,” Kafari said, voice dry even through the voice-alteration filter. “Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of targets to go around for everybody.”
“Huh. If that ain’t the God’s honest truth, I dunno what is. We’re sittin’ here in th’ middle of the biggest damn disaster I ever heard of, we got almost no soldiers left, and a Bolo’s on its way t’ blow us t’ kingdom come. So how come I feel like we’re gonna win this thing, anyway?”
“Because we don’t have any other choice. And we’re running out of time.”
Kafari started walking toward her command center, whic
h they’d fled, trying to reach Yalena and Dinny with protective gear. She couldn’t think of Dinny, yet. Not without her heart breaking. So she focused on what they could do. What they must do. If there were enough people left to do it. When they reached Kafari’s office, they found fifteen other survivors. Suited and silent, they waited for her next orders. She paused for a moment, half blinded by tears of gratitude, then went to each one in turn and took their gloved hands in hers, offering a silent greeting. Through the biohoods, she saw scared faces, shell-shocked eyes. Through her grip on their gloves, she felt tremors of reaction shock.
“We have a great deal to do,” she said softly. “We have to find out what the gas was, how long it will remain effective, whether or not we have anything in our medical supplies to act as an antidote. We need to track down as many survivors as possible.
And I want someone to scan the news reports coming out of Madison, official broadcasts as well as datachat. I need someone to cover the surveillance boards, looking for signs of survivors, trying to come with a rough tally of equipment that’s survived. We need to finish running down the list of field units, out there, trying to make contact, but I’m afraid most of our crews are dead.
“And we need someone to coordinate with units in every one of our base camps. We have people and guns scattered along the whole length of the Damisi Mountains. The alarm we sounded went out to our whole network of camps, twenty-two of them. Unless POPPA shelled them with gas at the same time they hit us, that warning gave our other units time to suit up in what gear they’ve got, maybe even evacuate some of the civilians. Cimmero Canyon, in particular, could be evacuated, if the federals haven’t already hit them. Any questions before I start assigning tasks?”
No one had any.
“All right, people, let’s get to work.”
* * *
It took Sonny an hour to reach them.
Kafari put that hour to good use, organizing her survivors, putting them to work at critical tasks, and trying to hack into the government’s military database, looking for information about the gas that had hit them. The one thing she didn’t dare do was try to contact civilian households, searching for survivors. Sonny would’ve homed in on any broadcasts from farmhouses or shelters under barns and turned them into blackened cinders.
