by P. J. Fox
“We’re evening the odds,” the doctor said hopefully.
Kisten shook his head. “Not yet.”
SIX
A little while later, Kisten sent out the next messenger: a native of Haldon who’d joined the civil service as a file clerk. The others had disappeared, melting silently into nothing. This man was not so lucky. Hewson tried to cover him, but the alley was too narrow and the strength of the opposing force too overwhelming. The man was literally torn apart.
The ravening, howling mob threw itself at the still open door just as a pale-faced infantryman slammed it shut. He drove home the bolt even as the reinforced door bowed inward. From some dark corner, someone cursed.
Kisten ordered another sortie. They’d avenge the man, even if they couldn’t bring him back. And then he heard the rumbling. He knew that noise, and it was coming from the room he’d just vacated moments before.
“Quickly,” he hissed, “they’re sapping the wall.”
Having failed to gain access through the door, the mutineers were attempting to bring down the wall. They’d dig a series of trenches, each leg at right angles to the last, until they reached the wall. And then, protected from enemy fire, they’d blow a hole in the cinderblocks with whatever explosives they’d managed to cadge. The trenches would protect them, was the devilry; there was simply no way for the defenders to fire on them without exposing themselves, in turn, to fire. The only way to counter that threat, Kisten realized, was to let them come.
Hurriedly, he explained his plan.
A young private broke down weeping. “We’re going to die!” he wailed.
Kisten slapped him. Hard. “Crying won’t save you, but hard work might.”
The men grabbed everything they could find and, working frantically, assembled them into makeshift shooting breaks. Solid fortifications they weren’t, but even bureaus and overturned coffee tables were better than nothing. Any passage into the building that the sappers created would, of necessity, have to be small; they’d have to come through in single file. The defenders could then take each man as he clambered through the breach. Just like shooting fish in a barrel—or so he hoped.
If they lost the bungalow, they’d lose everything. A few of them might reach the barracks, but so what? That would only be delaying the inevitable. The barracks were a single story tall, all of them; penned in like that, the remaining defenders would have no way to see across the parade ground. Access to the munitions depot would be wide open.
Kisten sent out another sortie, their fourth. This one was bloodier than the others, and more effective. As the ragtag band flung itself onto the mob, flanking bands joined in from the barracks. They shot and hacked and screamed. The dust beneath their feet had by now been churned into a foul-smelling, copper mud that stank of death. Men on both sides slipped and slid in the blood and offal. Most never got up. The defenders paid a heavy price for their victory, though: of the twenty-five who’d gone out, only sixteen returned.
A lone man struggled toward the bungalow, his uniform hanging off him in strips. He was from the barracks, and had been separated from his group. He wouldn’t make it unless he had help. Stepping to the window, Kisten drew his sidearm. A few hundred yards, if that. He had to make it. He had to. He was just one man but he somehow represented…something more.
One of the mutineers drew a bead on the luckless Blue and Kisten shot him between the eyes before he could pull the trigger. His arms jerked up in what Kisten knew was an involuntary muscle spasm but looked almost like a gesture of surprise. He collapsed in the mud.
The door opened as hands reached out to pull the man inside. Seconds later, fists pounded against the wood. It sounded like all the devils of hell were out there, demanding to be let in.
They called out imprecations to join them, to hand over the infidels and fight for their own kind. “Give us the Governor!” a voice called. “Our quarrel isn’t with you!”
Hewson looked up and smiled weakly. There was strain around his eyes.
The doctor brought him water, and Hewson drank thirstily. “You should rest,” the doctor said.
“I’ll rest when I’m dead,” the Sergeant-Major replied.
Which, Kisten reflected, might be soon enough. He turned wordlessly toward the stairs. He’d left Hanafi in the front bedroom what seemed like hours ago. He felt like he’d been fighting his whole life, like nothing truly existed except this bungalow that smelled like a crypt.
He didn’t know how much longer they could hold out.
Each defender had accounted for twenty of the rabble outside—or more—but the thought brought him no comfort. There were a finite number of defenders, and it was dwindling all the time. The sea of men outside seemed endless. Black despair threatened to overwhelm him; he had to fight, harder and harder, not to give in. He’d seen worse—Charon II was worse—but at least then he hadn’t been alone. There had been other ships, other commanders, the entire Alliance behind him. But this blasted rock was on the edge of nowhere.
He wished he hadn’t said what he’d said to Aria, and wondered now if he’d ever get a chance to tell her so.
Everything had seemed so feasible, once: assume governorship of Tarsonis, set to work on the slow, thankless task of rooting out the rot pervading its civil service, build it up again into a network that they could all be proud of—native and foreigner alike. Try out all the theories he’d developed while lying under the stars in the prison camp. Show the rest of the Alliance what it was doing wrong. Marry the woman of his dreams, create a home with her.
Kisten pushed open the door to the bedroom and stopped.
The room lay in shadow, pinpricks of too-bright light streaming through the neat laser holes in the shuttered window. Up here, the smell of death was a little less, but the cool of the morning had long ago dissipated and the air was stifling. Kisten felt like he was breathing through a pillowcase, all the more because he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.
He reached the bed without being aware that he’d moved, and sat down next to the major.
Isha had managed, somehow, to crawl across the floor and pull himself up onto the cheap, army issue coverlet. He lay there now, curled up into a fetal ball with his arms around his stomach. Seeing Kisten, he smiled. It was the grateful expression of a small child who’d gotten lost in the woods and given up hope of being found, and it struck Kisten as inexpressibly sad. Isha was in his forties, but right now he looked no more than nine or ten.
He held out his hand, and Kisten took it. Neither of them spoke. A sweep of red marred the floor between the window and the bed, like the careless stroke of a paintbrush. The blood was already drying to maroon, and told its own tale: Isha had been shot while manning the window.
“How long?” Kisten asked.
“I don’t know.” Isha’s whisper was barely audible. “One…can go seven or eight hours with a gut wound, or so…I’m told. So not that long.” His laugh was the dry rustle of leaves on concrete. He grimaced in pain, and was silent. The small, enclosed space already stank of curdled blood. It was the heat, the goddamned relentless heat.
Someone appeared in the door, took in the situation, and disappeared. A moment later, the doctor stepped in. He didn’t bother to examine the patient. Moving him could only harm him.
“Why are you here?” Isha scowled. “You can’t…do squat.”
If they could only get him to an operating theatre…but Kisten didn’t complete the thought.
“I can make you comfortable,” the other man replied quietly.
“Fuck…you.” Isha glared.
Kisten took heart from that statement; if Isha could still swear, things couldn’t be so bad. At that moment, Kisten would have given anything to know what was happening out there in the real world. Would help ever come? Should he lie to his friend, and tell him that it had?
Isha winced. “If I’m going to die,” he said, “I’d prefer to know I’m doing it. But thanks…all the same.”
“You�
��re not going to die.” Kisten spoke with more certainty than he felt.
For a long time, there was only the roar of the crowd.
“Tell Deliah,” he began, and then stopped.
“Tell her, yourself,” Kisten said. Isha’s hand was cold and clammy with sweat. “I’m not in the habit of playing errand boy, despite what you might think. Besides,” he added, “I told you: you’re not going to die. You can’t; you’re the only decent officer I have.”
“Always…so selfish.” Isha flashed him the ghost of a smile.
And that was when the storm broke.
SEVEN
Sheets of rain beat against the windows, rattling them in their panes.
“This can only help us,” one of the guards commented.
Aria didn’t know his name. Nor did she care to. Her world had shrunk down until there was only the task in front of her: boil water, rip shirts up into bandages, brace herself every time another shell rocked the house. She didn’t know how long she’d been here, or things had been like this; she couldn’t think. Tendrils of hair had escaped from her bun. There was a smudge of blood across her nose. Her shirt was soaked with the stuff.
Crazily, she hoped Deliah wouldn’t mind. Deliah, who was on the other side of the small hall, doing exactly what she was doing. How she’d fought her way through the compound to reach the residence, no one knew. She wouldn’t discuss it. Her son was wounded, but in the leg. He was sterilizing makeshift bandages, and was largely being ignored.
The world shook again, and Aria braced herself. She followed their one doctor, a plastic surgeon from Brontes who’d come to visit his daughter and grandchildren and who’d volunteered his skills almost immediately, down the line of injured men.
The residence had been pressed into service as a makeshift aid station, and never had there been a structure less suited to its purpose. Delicate embroidered draperies had been ripped from the windows to bundle up men suffering from shock; the tesserated tile was slick with mud and human waste. The smell was appalling. The cries of the patients were worse.
What Aria hadn’t expected was that it would be so loud.
They stopped beside one man, whose leg had been badly mangled in a mortar blast. Aria had never seen him before, and didn’t know his name. Doctor Shah held out his hand for the belt and, kneeling, cinched it around the man’s leg. Realizing what was coming, he began to scream in earnest. “Bite down on this,” the doctor advised, pushing a stick onto the man’s mouth. He ignored the man’s cries.
Aria stared, poleaxed. A stick? A stick? What was this, the dark ages?
Three guards, lightly wounded themselves, held him down while the doctor worked. The saw ripped back and forth, like he was carving a roast. Aria squeezed her eyes shut and tried to be elsewhere. When the leg was off, he’d seal the wound with a crude tar they’d made from canvas sealer. Distilled bitumen, according to Shah, had antibacterial properties.
We can reach the stars, Aria thought, but we have no antibiotics.
All the medical advances in the universe wouldn’t matter if no one could reach them. There were hospitals in the city, of course—there was a well-stocked infirmary in the cantonment!—but their diagnostic equipment, and supplies, and operating theaters might as well have been on the moon. Five miles away—less!—and there was no way to reach them.
The world had gone mad.
There was a sizzling sound, accompanied by a not unpleasant aroma of cooking meat that reminded Aria of barbecues she’d attended as a child in Cabot Lake Township. And she knew, quite suddenly, that she was going to be sick.
She turned hurriedly, one hand pressed to her stomach.
She didn’t even know how this nightmare had begun. She couldn’t remember. In the span of seconds, she’d gone from sitting outside with Zerus to shepherding women and children into the Residence while a roar began slowly growing in the background. Some of them were so stupid that they’d treated their evacuation like some kind of indoor picnic, chatting and laughing. She’d wanted to hit them. And then…this. She’d been doing this forever. Her muscles ached abominably and sweat ran into her eyes and the world swam before her eyes but she forced herself back to work.
Her hands, by this point, knew their own job.
Somewhere in the background, Zerus was ranting again. She ignored him. He’d been doing this off and on all afternoon. She swabbed iodine onto a scalp laceration, murmuring encouragement as she did so. The man, another stranger, smiled gratefully.
“We have to do something!” Zerus bellowed.
This time, Aria looked around for the source of the voice. She was worried he might disturb her patients. Zerus was standing in the corner, by the service door that led through the pantry and into the kitchen. “We have to do something,” he repeated, “or they’re going to kill us all!”
“I’m going to kill him,” Shah murmured under his breath, “if he doesn’t shut up.”
Aria felt—when she allowed herself to feel—conflicted about the old man. She admired much about him, including his interest in diplomacy. Had actually liked him, until about an hour ago. But this…this was lunacy. Zerus had convinced himself, and was trying to convince everyone else, that peace lay in opening up a channel of communication. Which, the ranking officer on the scene had pointed out, the governor had undoubtedly already tried. But Zerus refused to be put off—or, indeed, to help out around the Residence. And that was what bothered Aria the most.
Perhaps he thought he was helping, she reminded herself. She wished that she could feel more charitable, but she was with Dr. Shah. She wanted to kill Zerus, too.
“Just tie one of those bandages on,” her patient said, a young private with a shock of black hair. “I’m going back out.”
Aria nodded.
“From a pretty girl like you, I’ll wear it as a good luck charm.” He grinned.
Her lips curved into a small smile. “Be careful,” she told him.
It was a simple procedure, at least in theory: a man was wounded on the line, and a medic rushed in to deliver first aid. Which, Aria gathered, usually consisted of stopping the bleeding with sulfanilamide powder. Meanwhile, a telephone message was sent back to the nearest evacuation station and, within minutes, bearers rushed up with a litter and spirited the man away.
But communications were down, so the poor bastards were on their own. They’d drag each other to safety as best they could, desperate to clear the line of fire before they got gunned down like stool pigeons. In the shimmering humidity, things had been bad enough; in the rain, they were worse. Visibility was down to a few feet, which gave them some scant protection from the enemy but also made it nigh on impossible to clear the field.
Men staggered up to the door in two’s and three’s, some supporting each other as they limped. Others dragged themselves along with no help from anybody. Some got lost in the confusion, only to curl up and die under the trees. Aria had watched one man worming through the mud in a desperate bid for safety, crying all the while. She hadn’t known which side he was on. He hadn’t made it.
The door opened in a rush of wind, spattering Aria’s face with rain. Climbing to her feet, she moved mechanically. Another patient. How could there be this many men in all the world?
“We had to step on our own men,” the man was saying, “to keep from going in the water. It’s flooding, and….”
Aria took charge of the stretcher, directing his friends to put it down in the sliver of open space she’d found between two wounded men. One was sipping coffee that someone had brought to him; the other was, mercifully, asleep. Aria smiled weakly at him and wondered what she was doing. Surely there was someone more qualified, someone who had the faintest notion of what he was doing and could actually help these people?
The man with the coffee—a lieutenant, by his bars—smiled back. “This coffee is terrible.”
“Don’t tell Pasha.”
He laughed, and then winced. “The doctor says I can’t go out, that I might
have cracked my skull. But I feel fine.”
He felt fine, Aria knew, because he was on opium. He’d live, though; just not if he got hit on the head again. “We don’t have enough guns,” she said tartly, “to give them out to men who can’t shoot straight.” That, at least, was an argument that even the silliest man could understand.
“You sound just like my sister,” he complained, leaning back against the column behind him.
Aria turned back to the men with the stretcher.
The man who’d first spoken, a Caiphi with blond hair and blue eyes like her own, just stared. He was in shock, Aria realized uncomfortably. She didn’t want to imagine what he’d—what any of them—had seen out there. She’d heard the term war zone all her life, but she’d never conceived of what the term truly meant until this afternoon. In the space of a few hours, their once lovely compound had transformed into Hell. A screaming, whirling wind of destruction beat down on them. There was nothing orderly about the fighting, nothing patriotic or noble. It was a force of nature, one that had long since passed beyond their control, and no more sentient than an earthquake or a tornado.
There was no selectiveness here, no higher ideal. Just death.
Aria should have been scared, but she wasn’t. She was just numb, like the man in front of her. Like everyone in this room. Polishing the brass on a sinking ship while they waited for help that might never come. They told themselves, hold out, hold out, but for what?
His gaze was imploring. “We had to….” He trailed off.
She laid her hand briefly on his shoulder. “Where they are,” she said gently, “they won’t mind.” The man on the stretcher wouldn’t mind either, she realized. But she didn’t say anything. They’d risked so much to bring him here, and the knowledge would only discourage them.
