Nasruddin/private, “Comm is quieter here. Not sure if we are close to a local repeater or whether the whole system is recovering. These people are recent recruits to what they call the Vallis Patriotic Force. They seem completely lost without their officers, who are all on the other side of this door. The scenes we saw in that corridor were so disturbing that they are probably better off without them.”
Dado hissed, “This equipment is definitely our stuff, especially the explosives and tools they are carrying. These scum have been stealing our supplies.”
I replied, more quietly, “Probably not these people personally. A more competent thief gave it to them. Let us hear what they say.”
Nasruddin asked, loudly enough to carry, “Wheels, what do you make of these people. This one seems to be their voice. What did you say your name was, Sir?”
“I’m Corporal Konstantine Mirza, Sir. I was only promoted twenty minutes ago when a TDF soldier shot Corporal Tsung. I don’t even know why we were fighting the TDF. We were told there was a rebellion, but I have not seen anyone rebelling against anything. We are a militia being raised by MI. How can we be fighting the TDF?
“After the TDF soldiers shot at us, Sergeant Ludovico said we needed to reinforce a squad in these halls, so we ran over here. Both our officers went through this door, but it closed before we could catch up. Now, the district is in lockdown and we don’t know what to do.”
I dialed back the darkness of my mask, but left a disguised face in place and modified my voice.
“I’m the ranking MI officer here, although not from your branch of the service. There is a rebellion but its nature is not yet clear so I would prefer to remain anonymous for the moment. Do any of you have comm implants?”
Corporal Mirza and two others raised their hands tentatively.
“Turn them off immediately. The one clear thing we know is that the rebellion is managed using false orders spread through the comm units. Commander Nasruddin and I have filters to deal with the false messages, but they are not generally available yet. You may call me Agent Wheels.”
I watched their eyes flick down to the wheelchair and back up. No points for guessing how I came up with the name.
“Unfortunately, given the events in progress, we cannot trust you with arms. We are moving towards a TDF force that is approaching this position. Come with us for now. When we join up with them, I will turn you over to the local commander. You will be debriefed, probably quite extensively since you were somehow trapped into a firefight with the TDF already. Do you have any questions?”
A tall, female soldier asked in a tiny voice, “Will they charge us with treason?”
Nasruddin replied, “We don’t know. If you had surrendered to a Public Officer, the answer would have been no, but having been captured by the TDF the answer might well be yes. I would counsel against any discussion of what you might say as a defence.”
We formed up, with the captured soldiers in the middle of our group. The Public Officers collected their guns, dividing the heavy bundle between Dado and Guy. I was pretty sure that Five was our rear guard, following everyone else and keeping a careful watch for anything that might emerge from the many doors along the corridor.
2357-03-28 14:00
Sodders
We followed the usual drill at the door on the north side of the junction but the only occupant of the next section was a very small boy, terrified at being alone. He was hiding ineffectively amongst a set of trash bins in the corridor, crying quietly.
With the skill of long practice in handling lost children, one of the public officers, an older woman who introduced herself as Officer Jan, gently wheedled his story out of the boy. His name was Bobo, his parents’ names were Mommy and Daddy, and he lived at Home. He had been with his Aunty Rowy buying a present for his little sister Anan. He had been playing hide and seek when the doors shut with a scary bang. He wanted to go back to Aunty but could not remember which door he had come through.
Whatever else was true, I did not want to take a toddler into combat, nor could we leave him by himself in the corridor. After a bit of discussion, the public officers and maintenance workers identified the doors for three shops that sold children’s clothes and toys. Keeping everyone well back and myself out of sight, Officers Jan and Yassim led the boy up to the first door. I unlocked the door so they could crack it open just wide enough to ask whether there was anyone inside who answered to Aunty Rowy. The people in the shop were suspicious, but when they saw the child, offered to keep him safe until the emergency was lifted. The officers thanked them but said they would keep looking. I relocked the door as we moved on to the second.
As we opened the second door, we were greeted by a shopkeeper with a handgun. Behind her, we heard hopeless weeping and murmured, ineffectual reassurances. Bobo slipped out of Officer Jan’s hands and ran into the store screaming, “AUNTY ROWY! YOU GOT LOST! I WAS SO SCARED.” The shopkeeper put her gun away and apologized for having an illegal weapon, something she had never needed before the last year. She was interrupted by, “BOBO, my love! Where have you been, you naughty boy?”
I could almost see the quivering lip as Bobo finally burst into toddler anguish, howling loudly to demonstrate just how scared he had been. Between the gales of distress, I heard Aunty Rowy trying to comfort him. “Little Love, I’m so glad you are back... it would break your mama’s heart if I lost you ... I would never forgive myself ... But you are all safe now ... Give me a kiss so I can stop crying too.”
When the misery had subsided into sniffles, Aunty Rowy came to the door, still crying quietly with great blobby tears rolling slowly down her face. She was carrying Bobo with his arms locked about her neck. “Oh, Sirs, how can I thank you? We should never have come out today.”
The shopkeeper apologized, “This was my fault for offering a sale to attract my customers back. Everyone should have stayed at home, including me.”
I waved Nasruddin forward, who explained that we were clearing the corridors of stray people when we had found her nephew. The officers took a very quick statement to confirm that Rowena Gundersdottir was the aunt of Bartholomew Craigsson. They were indeed shopping for a birthday present for his baby sister Annaleese Serenasdottir. He had been playing hide and seek amongst the racks of new clothes. She had glanced away for a minute and he was gone. Before they could find him, soldiers had started shooting out in the street, forcing the shop to close its doors. When they realized the child was missing, the shopkeeper had risked re-opening the back door to check the corridor but had not seen him hiding amongst the garbage bins. She had closed and locked the door to protect her other customers, who were now crowding behind Rowena and the shopkeeper, trying to hear what was happening.
The officers and guards assured Rowena that her nephew had been very brave and well behaved, as helpful as he could be. They did suggest gently that it would be a good idea if he learned his mommy and daddy’s real names and his home address, as soon as possible.
From the safety of his aunt’s arms, Bobo confided that he had run through the back door of the shop into the corridor looking for a good place to hide. He was waiting for Aunty to find him, but some scary sodders had run by shouting bad words. Then the doors closed. He did not recognize the shopkeeper and had been too scared to call when she had looked out, so he stayed hiding until the big white sodders came with the offices. The big, white sodders looked like pillows and said “Hello” when they found him. Office Jan was really nice. He had held her hand so she would not be scared. The sodders told him not to cry anymore, that they would help him find his aunty. He wanted to be a sodder just like them when he got big.
Officer Jan thanked him very gravely for such a good report. She was very glad he had held her hand and no longer felt scared at all.
The shopkeeper, however, was still quite nervous. “Are the locks on my doors broken? I am sure that I locked that door securely.”
Nasruddin assured her, “Your locks are fine. Even senior civic
authorities cannot open that door under normal circumstances. Bobo is lucky that our team includes someone with sufficient authority, due to the extraordinary events happening today.”
We withdrew, closed and relocked the door. Our captured soldiers jumped a little when the lock clicked shut, perhaps understanding the kind of authority that Agent Wheels needed to open and close random people’s doors. They should have realized that much the moment we entered the corridor, of course, but these were not TDF marines, just ordinary people recruited into a very dodgy, ground-based militia. I suspected that none of them could solve a multilingual crossword puzzle of the kind favoured by TDF marines.
The woman who had worried about being charged with treason stared at the floor as she walked and murmured, “We were the ones who cursed the poor little sodder when we ran past. I’m so completely ashamed of myself. I’m only glad he did not recognize us for the pirates we are.”
One of the other soldiers said quietly, “He will play at being a sodder for a week. Then it will pass and he will grow up wanting to join Lunar Recovery as a therapist, like everyone else. I wish it had passed for me before I signed up. I’m not even a sodder, am I?”
Corporal Mirza answered, “None of us are. We should not be here. We have barely finished basic training. Instead of helping to keep the peace we have been shooting at helpless civilians and TDF soldiers. I cannot excuse my behaviour as obedience to orders; what we did were atrocities. These people are real soldiers, skilled and responsible professionals with years of experience. Compared to them, I feel like a bad-tempered two-year-old. I only wish I could have been as good as little Bobo.”
2357-03-28 15:00
Dark Enchantment
As we approached the next door, Chief Rowald came up beside me. “I think we need to be careful at this door. I knew about these soldiers before we left the transformer room, but they seemed so disorganized I expected we would be able to bluff our way past them. There should be only three in the next section of corridor, but one was an officer and ze seemed angry. There were also civilians so we might have to consider the risk of civilian casualties. I hate to say it, but that is likely to be the case everywhere ahead. There will be more people in the businesses near the entrances to the base than elsewhere in the city since the rest of the economy is so slow. If they are attacking the base, that is also where we can expect most of the fighting.”
“Especially with the doors all closed,” I commented. “The force we are trying to meet wouldn’t have had time to advance very far into the city.”
He replied, “Our local emergency wouldn’t have closed doors around the base. They would have had to close the doors themselves.”
Which they would have done. But doors they close, they can also open. Where they could, they would clear a path between the base and our last known location. Thinking about it, they would most likely come east along Tchaikovsky Boulevard and turn south onto Gagarin Road, only entering the service corridors when it was necessary.
Unless the rebels they faced were better than the ones we had met, two squads of heavily armoured TDF soldiers could brush them aside and run the length of Tchaikovsky Boulevard, although in practice they would secure each section before proceeding. Coming along Gagarin, they would enter our district where doors would be an issue. They would have to ask either the city or district authorities to open each one. Or blow them open, if they were sufficiently desperate.
We, by contrast, were confined to the speed of my wheelchair, convoying civilians to what I hoped would be safety, wary of enemy soldiers. We had a speed advantage in that I could open in seconds any door that I had yet encountered and we were not even trying to secure the corridors. The Public Officers could open the doors they had closed but had to wait while an authorization request propagated to the security servers and back. My authority bypassed that step, giving me a critical advantage in a crisis.
Considering our respective advantages, I anticipated we would run into the TDF squads somewhere along Gagarin Road. The businesses we had been passing faced onto Gagarin Road. If there were soldiers shooting at people on the road, the TDF had not yet reached this part of Gagarin.
We approach the door carefully, with most of us plastered against the wall. As before, One peered through the gap when I unlocked and cracked the door open. Ze did not slip through the door, however, waving Nasruddin forward to look. We could hear what sounded like incoherent raving. He, in turn, waved for me to move forward.
Peeking through the crack, I could see an officer jerking around screaming in rage, a tirade of demented babble. Ze carried handguns in both hands. Two rebel soldiers were backed up against the walls on both sides of the corridor, which were chipped with bullet holes, covering the officer with their guns. I counted eight civilians huddled farther down the corridor, but two more lay at the feet of the demented officer, blood spilling from their heads and chests.
Nasruddin/private, “Comm is quiet here, but I still cannot raise anyone outside the local area. Must be a nearby repeater. We could paralyze them, maybe turn off their guns. I don’t recognize the model, but I expect the embedded comm units are standard.”
Me/converse, “No comm units in those guns. Too cheap and primitive. Ironic that they are more deadly to us because of that. Still, our armour should absorb a few shots without breaking. I’m afraid I cannot volunteer to rush them, nor can you. How close do we have to be to paralyze the armour?”
Nasruddin/converse, “Closer than this. Comm units in armour seem to be better protected than those in guns. With a full weapons rack, I would have had a transmitter strong enough to do it from here, but the rack would never have fit through the power tunnel. I don’t recognize the model of armour the officer is wearing so it might not work anyways.”
Me/converse, “I do. Also cheap and nasty, intended for mining and factory labour, where cost is a more important constraint than the safety of the worker. Environment and Law Enforcement have tried to shut down production a dozen times without success. The request was denied every time on the grounds that the people need some protection and cannot afford anything better. It has a comm unit. The officer does too, judging from the demented behaviour. Probably, both have updated software.”
We stepped back to continue the discussion, but One muttered, “Let us get this over.” Ze pushed the door open a bit wider and stepped through. The soldiers swung their guns around but swung back to the officer when she burst into enraged shrieking and began to fire one of her handguns randomly.
One of the soldiers called, “Sergeant Nguyen has gone mad. Keep away. She kills anyone who she thinks is an enemy. These poor civies tried to help and were murdered for their effort. The rest of our patrol has gone for help.”
I waved One back through the door and closed it. This could get messy and the members of our tiny army might need some legal defence for what I was about to do, so I turned on recording through my comm unit, saving it to the field station with Banshee encryption. Then I took a deep breath, told Three to turn my wheelchair around to look at our motley troops.
“Soldiers, do you want to earn the respect that title ought to command? I have a mission for you.”
They did not say anything but stood a little straighter.
Nasruddin/private, “What the hell are you doing?”
I continued, “We are going out there to try to rescue the sergeant from her madness. When you step through that door, you will recognize that she is under an attack through her comm system, probably because she refused an order to commit an atrocity. I know how to stop the attack but must get closer to do it. She will kill anyone she thinks is an enemy but you are her own troops. I need one of you to push this wheelchair. The others will stand between me and her, so she thinks you are protecting her. Since I have no weapons, she may consider me unimportant if I don’t get too close. You have much lighter armour than I do and may be injured or killed if she shoots you. Are you willing to take that risk to save her life? Step forward if you
wish to earn your position.”
Corporal Mirza stepped forward immediately, the others after a moment’s hesitation.
Nasruddin/private, “This is madness! I forbid you to try this!”
Me/converse, “Sorry. I outrank you and have perfectly capable armour. Have the guards shoot anyone who pulls a gun on me except these soldiers, who will do it at my command, and the sergeant, who will have to shoot through her own soldiers if she wants to take me down.”
I addressed the soldiers. “We will advance in formation. I want the corporal to lead, ahead of everyone else and directly between me and the sergeant. One of you will push the wheelchair, two others will guard our flanks, all facing forward. The other three will walk backwards in front of the wheelchair facing towards me. You will all carry your rifles and the three walking backwards will keep your rifles trained on my chest, as though I am the threat. Please do not shoot, even if surprising things happen.
“Officers, would you bring the soldiers their rifles again?”
Nasruddin sputtered over the comm, dumbfounded. The soldiers formed up as ordered. Everyone else pressed themselves back against the wall. Very reluctantly, the public officers brought the guns and gave them back to the soldiers.
“Guard One, please open the door slowly and step aside.”
We advanced slowly into the next section of corridor and I signalled a halt.
I called, “Please forgive my outlandish appearance, Sirs, but I’m crippled and need this armour just to stand upright. Today, it is more useful than normal. I have seen the kind of attack that afflicts your sergeant and know how to stop it. May we come closer? As you can see, these loyal soldiers are prepared to kill me if I do anything threatening.”
The two rebel soldier’s heads jerked back and forth between me and the sergeant. One of them finally said, “If you can save her, do it. Beware that she will shoot anyone she feels is attacking her. We don’t have the authority to stop her.”
Lord Banshee Lunatic (Nightmare Wars Book 3) Page 28
