Empire e-1

by Orson Scott Card

  At the same time, the longer they waited here, the better chance the rebels had of killing them. And what if Mingo and Benny couldn’t get to a phone? What if President Nielson decided not to send a strike force?

  The best chance of success here would come from moving forward. Pushing. But… carefully.

  There was a concrete road running from the huge doorway out toward the dam. It was under water the whole way till it got near the dam. There it looked like a paved marina ramp as it rose up to the usual waterline. Clever disguise. They could bring trucks in and out of here without anything looking like a highway.

  Cole jogged around to the back of the cabin. Sure enough, under the grass behind the chimney brick, there was a concrete projection. Totally enclosed. No easy way in.

  Cole pulled the pin on a grenade and laid it down in the corner where the brick joined the concrete. Then he threw himself to the other side of the concrete projection and rolled down the slope.

  Boom.

  Cole got up and ran back. Some damage to the concrete. Not a lot.

  He unpinned another grenade, set it right where the most damage was, and leapt and rolled. Another explosion. More damage.

  After the fourth grenade, he had a hole.

  He ran back to his pack, carried it up to the hole. He pulled out the crowbar and the flashlight. He could have used a sledgehammer, but that wasn’t something that he had wanted with his gear when he was hiking.

  With the flashlight, he could see the mechanism that pulled the trap door into the concrete sleeve. Not really a complicated machine. He didn’t want to damage the tracks where the trap door would slide. Just the lever that pushed the trap door closed.

  It was sweaty, frustrating work, because he didn’t have great leverage. He also had to make sure he didn’t drop the crowbar, because there’d be no getting it back, and he was the only one who had brought one.

  Eventually, though, he popped the lever out of its socket. Now it was dangling free.

  Taking the crowbar, the flashlight, and his pack, he ran back around the cabin and went inside. Cat had poured himself some coffee from the percolator. “Good stuff,” he said. “Lots of caffeine.”

  “No thanks,” said Cole. “You can go out and get your pack now.”

  Cat jogged out. The broken-armed rebel glared at Cole. He was sweating with pain and looked so miserable Cole almost felt sorry for him. “I notice nobody came out to see if you’re all right,” he said.

  The guy didn’t say anything.

  “I guess they knew we were going to beat the shit out of you,” said Cole. “You know, before people start wars, they ought to make sure they know how to win.”

  “We don’t have to win the war,” said the rebel. “We just have to keep you guys killing people till public opinion turns completely against you.”

  “Same strategy as Al Qaeda,” said Cole.

  “We’re not terrorists, you are.”

  “Since you’re terrified and I’m not, I suppose you’re right,” said Cole. He worked his knife into one of the spaces between floor planks, slicing away bits of wood to make a gap wide enough for the crowbar. “You’re guilty of treason, but maybe they’ll let you off because we broke your arms. Military brutality and all that.”

  “I’m not the traitor, you are.”

  “I’m a sworn soldier of the United States of America, performing my duties according to orders,” said Cole. “You’re a hired goon of Aldo Verus, functioning as his private army in order to subvert the United States. Besides, you guys are the ones who killed the President.”

  “Not my President,” said the rebel.

  “That’s my point,” said Cole. “He was President of the United States, but he wasn’t your President. What does that make you?”

  “We didn’t have anything to do with killing him. Terrorists did that.”

  “It was your guys who stole the plans the terrorists used.”

  “No way,” said the rebel. “It was your guys who wrote those plans.”

  Cole couldn’t deny that. “Only so we could plan to counter them.”

  “And yet,” said the rebel, “you hadn’t gotten around to countering them, had you?”

  “And when the President died, you guys were right ready to move.”

  “We’ve been ready for months,” said the rebel.

  “Waiting for Friday the Thirteenth.”

  “Waiting for a right-wing coup to give us an excuse,” said the rebel. “We never thought that asshole in the White House would be dead.”

  Cole set his anger aside and thought about what he’d said. Was this just the line they fed their own troops? Or was it possible that Aldo Verus hadn’t arranged the assassinations? Could it be that he was waiting for General Alton to get his phony coup under way, and they only seized on Friday the Thirteenth as an opportunity after the fact?

  The evidence in Rube’s PDA only dealt with his clandestine work for Phillips in the White House, helping move Verus’s ordnance around the country. It had nothing to do with the plans that were leaked to the terrorists.

  DeeNee, though. Wasn’t she the link proving that they were all working together?

  “Got to you, didn’t I?” said the rebel.

  Cole ignored him. DeeNee was dead. She assassinated Rube and then she died. So nobody could ever ask her who she worked for. The guys who chased him were after Rube’s PDA. But was it possible that they weren’t in league with DeeNee? That they had simply staked out the Pentagon parking lot, waiting for Rube to show up?

  Cole remembered back to that Monday morning, June sixteenth. There was shooting inside the building, but nobody shot at him out in the parking lot. The security forces inside the Pentagon had killed three bad guys inside. Was it possible that that was all of the guys who were with DeeNee? That the guys who followed him out in the parking lot were a different team, and that’s why they didn’t shoot as soon as they saw him? It took the guys outside a while to realize that Cole, not Rube, had the PDA now. That’s why they didn’t shoot him down, or even follow him immediately.

  Absurd. Too complicated. They simply lied to their soldiers. They couldn’t very well announce, “We’re going to kill that evil right-wing madman in the White House and then take over America.” You get a whole different kind of recruit when you announce that as your purpose.

  “What were you blowing up out there?” asked the rebel.

  “You know, for a guy who was afraid to die, you sure do test our patience.”

  “If you were going to kill me, I’d be dead,” said the rebel.

  “That’s right,” said Cole. “We chose not to kill you. We put up with your shit. And yet you still believe we’re murderers and torturers.”

  “You broke my arms.”

  “So you couldn’t shoot us in the back, idiot. Use your brain. Or have you turned that over to Aldo Verus, too?”

  “I think for myself.”

  That was twice that Cole had mentioned Aldo Verus’s name, and neither time had the rebel denied knowing anything about him. But he had denied having anything to do with the assassination. So Verus was his boss of this army and the soldiers knew it.

  “Guys like you are so angry that they can lie to you about guys like me and you believe it,” said Cole. “You can’t even conceive of the idea that maybe a guy becomes a soldier because he loves his country and is willing to die to keep it safe. No, you have to believe that guys like me are murderers looking for an excuse to kill. And yet you put on a uniform and you took up arms.”

  “I’m nothing like you,” said the rebel.

  “Right,” said Cole. “Because I trained to do my job right. And because I recognize that even my enemies are still human beings. Assholes, but human ones.”

  Cat came back into the cabin. “Nothing else on this island. Nobody even bothered to shoot at me. I think they think we can’t get through their door.”

  “Maybe we can’t,” said Cole.

  “You can’t,” said the rebel. />
  Cole pushed on the crowbar. The wood splintered a little, but it also moved. The trap door had slid about a half inch.

  Which meant it would probably slide farther. Far enough for the door to open.

  “The question,” said Cole, “is this. Do we open it enough to toss a grenade down and kill anybody waiting for us? Or do we hope they trusted their mechanism here so much that they aren’t even bothering to defend it?”

  “We throw a grenade and they aren’t there,” said Cat, “the grenade tells them we made it through and they come running.”

  “On the other hand, we open this and they are there, they just toss a grenade up here and we’re dead.”

  Cat pointed his thumb at the rebel. “One consolation is, he’s dead, too.”

  “Collateral damage,” said Cole. To the rebel he said, “But your team doesn’t believe armies should ever cause collateral damage, don’t you?”

  The rebel just glared at him.

  “Safety first,” said Cole. “I’ll shove, you toss.”

  Cat got out a grenade.

  “Of course, I’ll be right here where the blast will still hit me,” said Cole.

  “Well, don’t be there,” said Cat.

  “I can’t open the trap door if I’m standing on it,” said Cole.

  “You could try,” said Cat.

  Cole went over to one of the dead rebels and dragged his body over to the set of slight gaps marking the end of the trap door. Cole shoved the crowbar under the body and lodged the angled end of the crowbar into the gap. Then he stepped over the body and started pushing on the other end of the crowbar. “Is it moving?” he asked.

  “Are you pushing?” asked Cat.

  Cole pushed hard enough that his feet slid on the floor.

  So he tipped over a table and ran it up against the far wall. By bracing his feet against the end of the table, he kept himself from sliding. And now the trap door started to move.

  “Anytime you feel like it,” said Cole.

  He pushed farther. The trap door began to move smoothly.

  A burst of machine-gun fire from inside the trap door shuddered the dead body in front of him and shoved it back into Cole’s face.

  Cat flipped a grenade down the gap.

  It exploded. There was no more firing.

  Now the two of them opened the door the rest of the way. It went rather easily.

  Steep stairs led down into a small concrete room with an elevator door on one side and the top of a spiral staircase on the other. There were pieces of body armor scattered on the floor, some still containing fragments of flesh and bone. The pieces didn’t come out even, so some of them must have blown off the edge and down the spiral stairway.

  They went back up into the cabin and put on their packs. Cat quickly finished his coffee. “Shouldn’t drink this,” he said. “I’ll just have to pee later.”

  “You didn’t put on your catheter?” said Cole with mock surprise.

  “Can’t find any that fit me,” said Cat.

  Cole turned to the miserable-looking rebel. “We probably won’t come out this way, so… I’ll see you at your treason trial.”

  No smart remarks. The guy just looked away.

  Down on the elevator landing, Cat pushed the button for the elevator.

  “Oh, come on,” said Cole.

  “Ain’t gonna ride it, man,” said Cat. “Just want to see if it comes when I call.”

  They waited, weapons trained on the door. It opened. The elevator was empty.

  “We could put that guy inside and send it down,” said Cat. “Then it’s friendly fire that’ll kill him.”

  “Being an ignorant jerk who believed a lot of lies shouldn’t get you the death penalty,” said Cole.

  “Not even sometimes?” Cat was holding the elevator door open.

  Cole leaned close to him and whispered. “Push the button for the bottom floor and let’s go down the stairs.”

  Cat pushed the button and scrambled back out of the elevator before the doors closed.

  Then, as quietly as they could, they started down the stairs.

  Command and control

  Anybody who thinks that the dread of shame isn’t stronger than the fear of death has only to consider how many Roman senators, generals, and traitors preferred to fall on their swords or open their veins rather than live through humiliation. But it’s not just humans. Wounded animals try to hide till they’re dead, rather than let their predators eat them alive.

  They were about halfway to the bottom when the rebel in the cabin shouted, “They’re coming down the stairs!”

  Should have killed him, thought Cole.

  No. We should have closed the trap door from the inside.

  Fortunately, there was a good chance nobody at the bottom could understand what he was yelling.

  They heard gunfire below them.

  The elevator door must have opened. But the sound was muffled. They must have built a heavy door between the stairway and the elevator landing at the bottom.

  But now that they knew Cole and Cat hadn’t come down the elevator, they were bound to think of the stairway. If it was a grenade they tossed, Cole and Cat should stay high on the stairs. But if they opened the door and fired, they should be down there to shoot back.

  Cole didn’t remember seeing any of the rebels armed with grenades.

  He sat on the railing, leaned a hand on the center pole, and slid down. As he neared the bottom, he tipped himself off the railing and out of Cat’s way. He landed on the floor, and flung himself into the corner, his rifle pointing at the door just as it opened. He shot once, lining the door and knocking it farther open.

  Cat hit the bottom of the stairs with the pin already pulled on a grenade, rolled it on the floor through the gap in the door, then pulled the door shut. It went off.

  A moment later they had the door open, and this time there was no attempt at conversation—everybody they saw in that space, alive or dead, they fired at quickly. There started down a bare concrete tunnel—which, from its placement, could only be a tunnel leading under the lakebed toward the mountain where Verus’s arsenal was.

  “I hope that grenade didn’t weaken the concrete of this tunnel,” said Cat. “Don’t want all that water coming in.”

  “Too bad,” said Cole. Because at that moment water did start coming in. But not from any damage caused by the grenade. The rebels were flooding the corridor themselves, water gushing through a two-foot-diameter tube at the other end.

  They could either go back and climb the stairs to the cabin and wait for reinforcements, or charge straight into the gushing water and try to get above the level of the tunnel before it completely flooded.

  Cat didn’t hesitate, so Cole followed him.

  They stayed to the edge of the tunnel where the force of the thick stream water wasn’t so strong. But the tunnel was filling rapidly—knee level, then hip level by the time they forced their way past the stream and realized they were on the wrong side—there was no door here. Cole could just make out the door shape on the other side through the thick gush of water.

  “Swim under?” said Cat.

  “No time to go back,” said Cole.

  “Get my weapon all wet,” said Cat.

  Cole took the Minimi out of his hand as Cat shrugged off his pack. Cat swam under the stream. Cole threw his pack over the rush of water, then his weapon. Cat caught them both.

  Now Cole threw his own weapon and his own pack. But the water was shoulder height. Harder to dive low enough to get under the stream. He felt it sucking at him, churning him out away from the door.

  Then he felt Cat’s hand catch him under the arm, drag him back.

  Their packs were floating on top of the water; their weapons were on top of the packs.

  “Door’s locked,” said Cat.

  Cole grabbed Cat’s Minimi, leaned his back against Cat, and walked his legs up the door. When Cat was holding him above the level of the water, he fired a burst down betwe
en his legs at the thick glass of the window in the door. It took two bursts before the glass crazed and broke.

  It wasn’t a very big window. Cole kicked out a few shards of glass, pulled out his pistol, and went through first, because his feet were already high enough. It was the base of a spiral staircase, just like on the other side, and there was nobody there.

  He looked up. Still nobody.

  Cat was pushing through the weapons. Cole picked them up and set them on the stairs, out of the water.

  The packs wouldn’t fit through the window in the door. Cat, who was floating now, kept pulling watertight ammunition packages out of packs and pushing them down through the broken window. Cole put them on higher stairs, out of the water. Then Cat’s feet came through. Cole pulled. Cat was bigger in the shoulders than Cole was, and he got stuck.

  At that moment, something dropped down from the top of the stairs. Grenade, thought Cole. They’ve got grenades after all.

  But he kept his concentration, marking where the grenade had fallen into the water without letting up on pulling Cat.

  Cat slid through. Cole dived for the grenade. Fumbled. Found it. Pushed it into the torrent coming through the window and pushed it down, knowing it would go off any second and take his hand off.

  He let go of it and yanked his hand back.

  It exploded, making the door tremble and allowing water to spray in around the edges. Cat had already gathered up all the ammunition for his weapon and some of Cole’s. He handed it to Cole and started up the stairs as Cole got his weapon and stuffed ammunition into his pockets.

  Another grenade dropped. Another. Cole grabbed one of their grenades and, knowing it was insanely dangerous, threw it spiraling almost straight back up, like the highest forward pass he ever threw in his life. If it went off when it was passing Cat, he would be killing his own man. But if Cat got to the top with a bunch of guys there training automatic weapons on him, he’d be dead anyway.

  Meanwhile, there was a second grenade in the water near him. Cole raced up the stairs. Both grenades went off almost at once. The one below him splashed water all over the inside of the stairwell, like the first spurt when you turn on a blender. But the stairs themselves, being steel, shielded Cole from most of the blast. He stumbled, but he kept going.