Empire e-1

by Orson Scott Card

  “Who’s attacking!” She had some kind of foreign accent, maybe Spanish, but her English was nice and clear.

  No time to explain. “Aliens!” shouted Cole.

  The door swung open so fast it rebounded off the wall and almost shut again. Cole and Rube pushed through it. “We need to get out onto Murray Street,” said Rube. “We need to get to our weapons.”

  She ran ahead of them, praying in Spanish as she went.

  “Stay indoors,” said Cole.

  “No vafuera,” said Reuben. “No entra la rua! No mira la rua!”

  The woman nodded as she fumbled with the keys and finally got the front door open.

  Cole started looking for Mingo’s SUV. Only when Rube pushed the button on the remote did Cole realize that the SUV was directly in front of him.

  “I planned it this way when I chose our parking place,” said Rube.

  “It’s a miracle from God and you want to take credit?” said Cole.

  By now they were both inside the SUV with the doors closed.

  “Want to try to run for it in the car?” said Rube.

  “Did you see what it did to that parked car back there?” said Cole. “I want to see Mingo’s arsenal!”

  “He won’t have a grenade launcher, more’s the pity,” said Rube.

  “I’d be happy with a World War II bazooka.”

  Rube pulled out an M-16A2 rifle. “You want this? Or there’s an M-4.”

  “How the hell did Mingo get an M-4 for private use?” said Cole.

  “You want it or not?” said Rube.

  “Duh,” said Cole, reaching for the weapon he knew best, the M-4.

  “And maybe I’ll take the Minimi.”

  “You didn’t tell me there was a machine gun when you offered me my choice.”

  “Too late, no takebacks. Here’s an M-9 for you and an M-9 for me.”

  Cole took the offered pistol and then they started sharing out ammunition.

  “When did you learn Chinese?”

  “They were starting to train me for the next possible war.”

  “They guessed wrong,” said Rube. “This is the next possible war.”

  “Now you tell me. When did you learn Spanish? Special Ops is planning for a war with Colombia?”

  “That was high school Spanish. And some college Spanish. And look. An M-240. Forget the Minimi. I want the heavier bullets.”

  “Against tanks?”

  “I’m betting the mechs aren’t armored like a tank,” said Rube. “Too heavy for those legs to hold up.”

  “They’re big and new and maybe the people who made them have a new way to repel bullets, too.”

  “Here’s a belt of grenades for you,” said Rube, “and a belt for me. You take the Minimi if you want it so much. Just don’t load yourself down with too much weaponry.”

  “Yes sir,” said Cole. “Look who’s talking, sir. Yours is ten pounds heavier than mine.”

  “Where’s our friend?” asked Rube.

  “From the sound, still shooting at the Chinese restaurant.”

  “Or at something,” said Rube. “Us again in a minute.”

  “What’s our objective, sir?” asked Cole.

  Rube laughed. “Good point, Captain. No, we will not seek con-rontation. Our objective is to get the hell out of New York City befoore the tunnels are sealed off.”

  “My guess is that unless these guys are complete idiots, the tunnels were sealed off and emptied first thing.”

  “They’d seal off the bridges, too,” said Rube. “And the tunnels are closer.”

  “But there are buckets and buckets of water above them,” said Cole.

  “And just as much water way, way, way below the bridges. And most of the bridges lead to Long Island.”

  “On 24, Jack would find a helicopter he could commandeer.”

  “On Smallville, Clark would take a mighty leap and jump over the Hudson River.” Rube clicked a clip into place on his pistol. Ready to go?”

  “Holland Tunnel, sir?” asked Cole.

  “And we do stop and help local defense forces wherever it looks we we could make a difference,” said Rube. “My guess is that it’ll lostly be cops, and these things are going to tear them apart, igainst this, New York isn’t prepared to defend itself.”

  “Do you think it really is Americans attacking the city?”

  “Yes,” said Rube. “Because I can’t think of any foreign country lat would be dumb enough to try to attack the U.S. like this.”

  “So Mingo’s weapons—we’re going to be shooting at Americans.”

  “They’re shooting at uniforms,” said Rube. “That means they’re trying to destroy legal authority. And we’re sworn to defend it.”

  “Plus, they shot at us first,” said Cole.

  “So when you know you can’t win, you save your army,” said Rube. “Our proper course is to get as many fighters as possible out of this city to a place where they can fight again.”

  “I think we can do this and still get to church, don’t you?” said lole.

  They put their hands on opposite door handles. “Ready?” said Rube.

  “Mingo is going to be so pissed we left so much of his arsenal behind,” said Cole.

  “Mingo’s going to be happy he had what we needed. If this is what we needed.”

  “Let’s find out,” said Cole.

  They opened their doors and dashed for the buildings on the other side of the street. Even though no mech was in sight, they kept low as they moved along the sidewalk.

  Cole was surprised to realize that he was more excited than scared. He knew what to do. He’d done it before. So much better than trying to figure out politics. Even though mistakes in a street battle did kill you faster. At least you knew at the end of the day whether you were alive or not.

  Holland Tunnel

  There are hard wars and easy wars. It’s easy to conquer a country whose people hate their own government more than they hate the invaders. It’s hard to fight a war when your army knows that back home, their families are rooting for the other side.

  It made sense to dodge the mechs wherever possible. But the sound of shooting and explosions drew Reuben. It was a part of who he was. It’s not that he felt no fear of danger—quite the contrary. When he knew of danger, he had to approach it in order to weigh it, to see how much of a threat there was. And it was more than that—he had to eliminate it if he could. He knew what he could do, when it came to combat. He knew that few other people could do it. With Cole beside him, they might be able to do what any number of men with police training could not do.

  And there were the bodies. Riddled with bullets, they lay half in, half out of squad cars, all wearing uniforms. Most of them New York’s finest, but one was simply a doorman to an apartment building, lying out in the street because, apparently, he had not obeyed an order to stop.

  “Not one civilian,” said Cole.

  “Except the doorman.”

  “In uniform. Nobody in civilian clothes.”

  “It’s summer,” said Reuben. “We could do this in our underwear.”

  “They’re trying not to kill civilians,” said Cole. “Same rules of engagement as we use. They really are Americans.”

  “Using weapons that aren’t in the American arsenal. In anybody’s arsenal,” said Reuben.

  “You think these were developed by Iran? North Korea?”

  No need to answer. They both knew that Iran and North Korea might have nukes, but that they were copied from existing devices. These things required original work. “Russia?” asked Reuben. “China?”

  “Possible, but not practical. What could they hope to accomplish?”

  “But who could afford to develop this?” asked Reuben. “How many of them are there? Are other cities getting hit right now? And again, how do you occupy New York City? How do you defend this island against the Marines when the counterstrike comes?”

  “Best we can hope to find out right now,” said Cole, “is just
what these things are and how they work.”

  “Bring one down,” said Reuben, agreeing with him.

  “Open it up and drag out the guy.”

  “Or the computer chips.”

  “Or the trained squirrels,” said Cole.

  “That means we’ve got to go toward the noise,” said Reuben.

  “Weren’t we already?” asked Cole.

  They rounded a corner and found, not a mech, but three squad cars and about two dozen cops along with a couple of plainclothes guys who were clearly in charge. One of them spotted Reuben and Cole and at first signed for them to get off the street. Then, as Reuben and Cole began to jog toward them, the police officer realized that they were U.S. Army, not civilians.

  “Thank God!” the cop shouted. “The Army’s here.”

  “Sorry,” said Reuben. “It’s just us two. Major Malich. Captain Coleman.”

  “Sergeant Willis,” said the plainclothes guy, introducing himself.

  “We need to get one of these mechs down to ground level so we can open it up and see how it works,” said Reuben. “Unless you already know.”

  “Our bullets don’t even bounce off,” said Willis. “It’s like they eat them and spit them back at us.”

  “They can’t have an infinite supply of ammunition in there,” said Cole.

  “We’re planning to run squad cars at them and try to trip them up,” said Willis.

  “One at a time?” asked Reuben. “All from the same direction?”

  Willis looked a little crestfallen. “I guess that makes us the dumb movie cops who don’t know what we’re doing.”

  “You’re not trained for war,” said Reuben. “Leave one squad car here, but have the doors open and make it look abandoned. As soon as the mech passes, then the driver comes out of hiding and drives out behind the thing. Meanwhile we get the other two cars coming from cross streets. Maybe it can’t shoot all three at once.”

  “And maybe it can.”

  “Meanwhile,” said Reuben, “Cole and I will run up alongside it and try to get on top. Don’t waste bullets shooting at it. Just keep it busy. And if you have a way to keep the cars driverless, that’s fine with me. But with or without drivers inside, they’ve got to run right at the thing.”

  A cop at the corner was already shouting. “It’s coming!”

  “With me or not?” asked Reuben.

  “Better than my plan,” said Willis.

  Reuben and Cole rode in different cars, back around blocks to get into position for the ambush—if you can count a bunch of third-graders jumping a grown man as an ambush. In the car, the cop who was driving was clearly scared. “The announcement they run—it says they’re Americans, right?”

  “By birth, maybe,” said Reuben. “They’re criminals right now. Traitors. They’re aiming at cops. Trying to wipe out authority.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t have any weapons that’ll hurt these things.”

  “Maybe the car will.”

  “And maybe I’ll get my ass blown up.”

  “You could get it shot off on a drug bust, too,” said Reuben. “But there’s no point in all you guys dying to defend against an enemy you can’t beat.”

  “A couple of us are thinking, we should just give up.”

  “Do you see any way for that thing to take a prisoner?” asked Reuben.

  The guy didn’t say anything.

  “What I think,” said Reuben, “those things are here to kill cops. When the cops are dead, then they own the city. So once we get this sucker on the ground and take pictures and whatever piece we can carry, you guys come with us and get out of New York. Live to fight another day.”

  “I got family here,” said the cop. “Brooklyn, anyway.”

  “When the Army or the Marines come back in to retake the city,” said Reuben, “they’ll need people who know every street and every building. We need you guys in Jersey, not dead on the streets here.”

  The cop nodded. Reuben knew that having a purpose could make all the difference.

  The mech must have passed by the apparently-abandoned squad car, because when it was in midblock, the car pulled into the intersection behind it. Reuben had only just reached the corner, and he could already see the thing swiveling to shoot at the car.

  So he ran out into the street, pulling the pin on a grenade as he went, and threw it as close to between the mech’s feet as he could, without overshooting it. The idea was to get the mech to turn back around and face this way.

  It worked too well. The thing didn’t just turn, it began to run, big leaping clumping steps, straight toward Reuben, firing as it went.

  He ran toward the parked cars, though he knew they provided no shelter, and hit the ground. Meanwhile, he could hear the squad car behind the mech picking up speed. He also heard the cars hidden on the side street behind him gun their engines.

  The mech saw the trap at once but didn’t even try to dodge out of the way. It simply jumped onto the hood of one of the cars and stepped over it. The drivers braked and the collisions were minor.

  But from behind them, the mech started shooting at all three cars. The drivers had their doors open at once, but before they even emerged, Reuben was running at the thing. He could see Cole coming at it from the other side.

  If the mech saw them it gave no sign. Which might mean the operator knew there was nothing that two guys could do from the outside.

  Reuben didn’t need to say anything to Cole as each of them climbed up a leg. No vulnerabilities where the legs joined the body of the thing. How inconvenient that they hadn’t provided a nice place to put a grenade that would blow it apart.

  There also were no handholds to grip in order to climb around and get on top. The thing was designed for combat, and they’d anticipated the obvious moves.

  It was Cole who came up with an idea. He gripped the mechanical leg tightly and swung his over to brace his feet against the leg Reuben had climbed. Reuben understood at once, and did the same, so his feet were pushing against the mechanical leg Cole was holding.

  As soon as the mech started to take a step, Reuben and Cole both pushed the legs apart as hard as they could. That way its foot would come down in an unpredictable place. Everything depended on how well the software that controlled the walking process was able to respond.

  The answer was—pretty well. But not well enough. It staggered and lurched, and while it took all Reuben’s strength to hang on, they knew now that it was worth continuing. On the next step, they pushed again, and the machine staggered again.

  And now another car—a civilian car this time—came straight for them from the side street. The mech tried to swivel toward the car, but again Cole and Reuben pressed the legs apart and its shots missed.

  Since the mech was facing the car now, more or less, the car hit both legs just as Reuben and Cole were swinging down and away. They let go in time, though, hit the street and rolled.

  The mech was on the ground. But it was prepared for that and was already using a slender armlike projection from the center of the body to push itself up to its knees. Not fast enough, though. There was already a cop on top of it, and he held out an arm to Reuben to help him get up.

  The hatch on the back had to be the entry point, either for a living operator or for the mechanics who worked on the machinery inside. There was a keypad that allowed entry by combination. Instead, Reuben slapped an adhesive patch on the keypad, and then stuck a grenade to the patch and pulled the pin. “Jump!” he yelled to the cop.

  They both jumped.

  Another car hit the mech’s legs just as the grenade went off. Again it was down, and this time the entry door, which was facing straight up, had no keypad, just a hole with a bunch of broken wiring.

  Inside the hole, Reuben quickly discovered, was a button that looked to him like it ought to be an emergency release. He couldn’t get his finger down inside. But a pistol bullet went through the gap and into the button just fine.

  Now the entry panel could
be pried off, though it still wasn’t easy.

  One cop was standing directly over it when it came free. The explosion evaporated him.

  The inside of the mech was nothing now but a mass of debris.

  “Was it manned?” asked Cole.

  Reuben wasn’t sure he could tell. “No body parts inside,” he said. “But they might have been burnt up. Vaporized. It’s big enough for a man, but maybe they use the space for ammo. That’s what blew.”

  Willis was at the base of the thing looking up. “Did you learn anything?”

  “Something,” said Reuben. “As much as we’re going to learn. Sergeant Willis, I want to take your guys out of this city right now.”

  “Our duty is here.”

  “Your duty is to guide our guys or the Marines when they come to take this city back,” said Reuben. “And that means right now your job is to stay alive and get off this island.”

  Willis might have taken a long time making the decision, except that four mechs appeared at the ends of all four streets. “Shit,” he said. “They know we got their boy.”

  “This way!” shouted Cole. He had already done his duty, which was to look for avenues of escape.

  In this case, that meant running down the subway stairs at the corner.

  “Cover me!” shouted one of the cops, and a couple of them started shooting at the mech coming up the street toward the subway stairs.

  “There’s no ‘cover me’!” yelled Reuben. “They don’t care about our bullets! Just run and get down there!”

  Only one man was hit on his way to the subway—hit bad enough that Reuben dragged away the cop that was trying to go back to drag the body with him.

  “Are the subways running?” Reuben asked Willis.

  “All stopped,” said Willis. “And all entry points to the city closed from the other side.”

  “What about the third rail—powered or not?”

  “I don’t know,” said Willis.

  “Then let’s not touch it,” said Reuben. “We want to get to the Holland Tunnel,” he said. “Which way?”

  “The subway doesn’t go there.”

  “But do we go this way or that way to get to the next station? Or the one after that? Or is there some way up to the surface not at a station?”