by David Bowles
“Well, I’m on my way right now. Be there in about twenty-five.”
“I wish you wouldn’t. There might be yak transports nearby that could shoot at you.”
He shook his head roughly. “No, no way. I’ll be there soon. Not staying away, Tenshi. Don’t ask me to.”
“Hey, wait. Tana wants to say hi.”
His daughter’s smiling cherubic face morphed Tenshi’s off of the comtable. “Jambo, apa. You coming home?”
“Yeah, I’m gonna be there in a couple of minutes, Tana-yi. You stick close to umma, okay?”
“Course. You bring me something?”
Brando felt his shirt pocket. “Yup. Your favorite candy. I’ll give it to you as soon as I get home, okay?”
“Okay, papà. I love you.”
“I love you too, baby.”
Brando clicked the connection closed and cried silent tears of tension.
Nicker platoon was being decimated. Ben Wu ordered half of Carpet platoon, on whose dune he’d established himself, to schuss down to the trench and come up behind the shells, which had skimmed over their mine field minutes before, shrugging off plasma blasts like mosquito bites. They seemed bent on bursting through the line, as they’d all headed directly toward a single dune and had begun trying to blast their way over its top. Eight of his men were down, three from Nicker and the five from Bottle he’d commanded to back the embattled platoon up.
“Come on, boys, move your khybers!” he shouted into his cascom. As his men rushed up behind the hulking machines, several explosions came from the minefield. Ben was horrified to see members of Kinguyama’s security detail retreating from the south west directly into the booby-trapped plain.
“Goddamn it, who’s on sensors? Why didn’t you tell me these men were approaching?”
“It was Mphahlele… shells got him and buggered up the punking equipment!”
“Someone get the fucking back-up running then! Rouf platoon, get on it!”
As his men began clambering up Nicker’s dune, the shells turned to attack. The men atop the dune popped out from behind the ablative shield they’d set up and pounded the machines with mortar fire.
“Ben, oh, shite…” It was Nehru, the second of Rouf platoon.
“What, damnit? Save the fucking exclamations and bring me up to speed!” He was watching as the security detail tried to organize itself at the edge of the minefield.
“There’s a group of twenty-some yaks coming from the west, and our buddies to the south are heading this way too. That’s sixty-some-odd bastards and these shells.”
“Any word from Gamma?”
“Nah. I keep trying to raise ‘em.”
Ben switched to the security detail’s com frequency.
“Oy, mates. This is Captain Ben Wu of Alpha Squad. What’s the sitrep?”
Ben could make out one of the men turning about to face the dunes. “They got air support, sir. Pops in and out like a freaking ghost, strafing us with projectiles and such.”
“But they can’t go near to the town with that, right? Anti-air missiles would knock them down.”
“Sir. But they can pick us off till there’s a nice path straight into Kinguyama.”
Ben sighed. “Why don’t you bring your men down into the trench and up into the dunes with us, so we can combine to keep ‘em out? “
He ordered a couple of men down to guide them. The shells were now being pounded by the remaining men of Bottle from the top of their dune, from Nicker, and from the five he’d sent from Carpet. A continuous blaze of weapons fire had superheated the sand and the shells were mired in silicon sludge. Ben smiled.
Then the assault really began. Over the horizon west and south yaks came speeding on sand sleds. The soldiers of Rouf began to sling mortar pulses at them, but their velocity and zigzagging made them difficult targets. As they sclaffed over the mine field, several triggered explosions that sent dead yaks flying, but the sleds kept coming.
“Nehru, tell me Gamma’s on its way, mate.”
“Aye. ETA fifteen minutes.”
Ben shuddered at the odds. He suddenly despaired at his lack of ground experience. He’d been a major in the Consortium Army, but his battalion had been responsible for fighting ship-to-ship battles and occasional platform occupations. No huge open spaces on platforms. Narrow corridors were more his style. He thought of the gorge behind them.
The sleds slammed to a stop at the southern bases of the dunes one by one, yaks spilling from them in a rush to gain the tops. If he had his men stand and fire, they’d be presenting too easy a target, he realized.
“Let ‘em come, mates. We got a better chance hand to hand.” He noticed his men still blasting away at the now fully mired shells.
“Leave the fucking shells alone, boyos! Yall got yaks sprackling up yall’s arses!”
The four surviving soldiers that’d been sent from Carpet turned to confront the terrorists ascending the southern face. Three of them went prone, but Ken Muriyo, a young, cocky AF deserter, began to fire from an erect position. The yaks soon ripped him in half with konk blasts.
Ben didn’t see what else befell his soldiers on the farthermost dune, because yegsters began swarming up his own. The first one or two over the top were easiest to dispatch, but soon about a dozen crested at the same time, and before Ben knew it, he was in the midst of a close-up brawl. He variously shot at, elbowed and viciously kicked the Brotherhood sikaritos who neared him. His men whirled about, smashing their armored limbs into the armored bodies of the yaks with varying results.
From above, small missiles began to pound the squadmen, avoiding the enemy as if programmed to lock in on Alpha Squad’s com frequency or EM signature or some such detail that should have been absolutely unknown to the Brotherhood. Ben glanced skyward and saw a transport hovering some five meters above him. A door in its belly opened, and more yaks began to leap down onto the dune. It was time to beat a retreat.
“Okay, everybody disengage: fall back to the ridge! Point men watch our sixes!”
In moments, Alpha Squad and their security allies were ensconced on the north side of the troop transport. The approach to the ridge was a narrow defile, and Ben hoped that this would improve their chances of dealing with the large number of yaks. The shattered dunes sloped to a series of low rocky hills on other side. The only way up the escarpment was behind them and slightly to the west where the land sloped upward steeply, but not so much as to impede a climb. Ben had fortunately set the transport down in front of a thick overhanging lip of rock so as to block attacks from above, in the unlikely event that the municipal defense grid went down. It would take many missile attacks to blast through the ten meters of solid rock, he hoped
As they exchanged fire with the yaks who began to pour into the gorge, Ben heard the hum of a transport above them, then the soft hiss of a missile being fired.
So much for the grid. Bloody yaks must be inside the city and shut it down already.
He held his breath: would the over-cropping hold? An explosion rocked the ridge, and stones rained down on his men. It didn’t look as if his back-up plan would work: the ridge wasn’t as sturdy as he’d imagined. Again he cursed his inexperience with natural landscapes.
“Damn, Ben!” Schlomo muttered. “Couple more of those and that jutting rock’s gonna fall and crush us.
Ben regarded the transport. He weighed his fear of the access code’s having been compromised with the probability of his men’s being ground to nothing beneath tons of rubble. He also considered a retreat up the ridge, but realized how vulnerable that would leave his men to the yak transport.
“Okay. Everyone in the transport, now! Schlomo, bring weapons on line and drive a couple of missiles down their gullet!”
While the men boarded the bulky black vehicle, Ben held back and helped the stragglers with their equipment. As a wounded security was leaning on his shoulder and limping toward the hatch, another explosion came from above and a hail of boulders crashed into them bo
th. Ben was thrown to the ground and held on to bleary consciousness for a few seconds as the yaks converged on his transport and the outcropping of rock began to collapse. Darkness fell before he could see more.
Tenshi heard sounds of struggle in the garden and peered out just in time to see a pair of terrorists cut the security detail down, their blood spraying across a pair of rose bushes like exploding buds.
“Jun, Rani!” Her bodyguards came running in. “A couple broke through. They’re in the garden. Stop them. I’ll take Tana into the great room and call for some help.”
The hulking twins nodded wordlessly and drew their sidearms. Tenshi rushed Tana in front of her down a twisting hallway to the eastern end of the house. Gunfire and screams echoed behind them, then an explosion rocked the house. Once in the great room, Tenshi tried to raise Chakrapong on the com, but it had apparently been disabled. The front door wouldn’t cycle open, either.
“Umma, I’m scared,” Tana whimpered.
Tenshi crouched next to her. “Tana-yi, I want you to hide in the space there behind the sofa, you know, where Fata always used to curl up?” Tana nodded, biting her lip. “Don’t you come out for any reason, not till I tell you to. Got it? Okay, go.”
As Tana slid into her hiding place, Tenshi slapped her palm against the wall near the door. A panel slid open, and she pulled out a chrome that she had hidden there years ago as a precautionary measure.
Spinning about just as the yaks came barreling into the room, Tenshi squeezed off several blasts that impacted ineffectively against their battle suits before she dove to the side. They pounded great dents into the wall with their konk rifles, but she’d built the house to withstand nearly all hand-held weapons fire, so it resisted.
Tenshi’s momentum sent her sliding across the hardwood floor toward a large steel plant stand that occupied a corner of the room. She clambered up as the invaders turned their weapons in her direction. All she wanted was a good shot at a structural weak point in the ceiling, just enough to loosen one of the exposed roughhewn crossbeams and send it swinging toward them…
They blasted the steel structure from beneath her, and she went flying through the air toward them. Eyes fixed on the ceiling despite the nausea in her stomach and flames on her clothes, she extended her arm and fired. Milliseconds later, she crashed into the floor with a bone-crunching thud that sent hammers of pain through every inch of her body, wrenching a scream from some unplumbed depth of her being.
The yaks again turned toward her, oblivious of the falling piece of timber. The shorter of the two was bodily thrown forward as one end of the beam came swinging down. The other end hammered down in an arc and crushed his casque into a bloody mess.
His partner didn’t hesitate a second. With five rapid strides he reached Tenshi’s side, grabbed her by the throat, and hefted her into the air. The constriction of her throat in his grip was nothing beside the agony flowing from her many shattered bones.
“At least,” she gasped, “let me see your face, coward.”
With his free hand, the yak tapped his casque back into the collar of the suit. One side of his face was covered with a tattoo, a swirl of unidentifiable hieroglyphics. His hair was raven black, as were his eyes.
“Message from your uncle, bitch. Should’ve stayed on the southern continent.”
There was a click as he unholstered his pistol. She brought up her good arm and tried to punch him, but he head-butted her, and the explosion of pain in her nose wiped all thought from her mind.
“Time to shed the flesh, Tenshi.” He brought his gun up slowly.
“No! Not my umma! Don’t hurt my umma no more, you ugly man!”
Tana ran out from behind the sofa. Tenshi opened her mouth to scream a warning. The yak whirled about, his gun arm extended.
Darkness was encroaching on the edges of her vision.
But in the swirling black, there was a flicker of blue.
Close your eyes for a moment. You can’t stop him, Tenshi.
Her spark. Speaking to her.
There’s not much time.
A gunshot. Another.
A dull ache in her gut.
The feel of the concrete as she was dropped.
Look at me, Tenshi.
Though she felt her self ebbing away, she focused on her soul.
It was still there, a bright web spinning around her spark.
The spark had her face. Sad. Tears on its cheeks.
It lifted a ball of blue fire.
“Umma,” Tana whispered somewhere, gurgling. “Kunabuji. Zio. Uncle.”
The blue fire enveloped Tenshi’s soul.
Come. I can only save you. Translate you.
“No.”
Yes.
“How—"
The ring, Tenshi. Your ring.
Brando didn’t even bother landing on the tarmac when he saw the smoke curling from the garden. He just set the transport down in the middle of it all. Two dead security guards were the first things he noticed as he got out, that and a huge hole where the back entrance to his house had been.
Inside, Tenshi’s twin bodyguards lay sprawled on the kitchen floor, burned and maimed and dead. A horrible silence filled his ears then, a dark certainty on the periphery of awareness that he tried to ignore. He sprinted down the hall, only partly noting the reddish-brown streaks along its length. A beam partly blocked his way at the end. He clambered over it.
At first, all Brando could distinguish was the blood. Everywhere. Smeared on the walls. In long trails across the floortiles.
Then he saw them. Near the door.
An animal howl bubbled up from inside him as he began to run. He slipped in the blood and slid toward them, then crawled and scrabbled on all fours the rest of the way, sobs wracking his body, the primal scream building. As he slammed into the door and reached for them, he opened his mouth and let out a horrible sound, a flood of bereavement and grief that pierced the failing evening light like a beacon from hell.
Tenshi’s lifeless eyes stared at him sadly as he crushed her to him, gibbering incoherently. He pulled her with him as he scooted like a wounded beast toward his daughter’s broken form.
Tana’s outflung hand rested in a pool of blood in which her little fingers had scribbled what seemed to be the number 7 and the letter U. Groping at her shredded blouse, he pulled her toward him and gave her forehead a trembling kiss.
With both their heads resting against his chest, he began to wail a bereaved, timeless, placeless neume ripped from the innermost depths of his soul. The darkness descended then, thick like prehistoric sludge, filling his nose and mouth and ears and mind, pouring into every crack in his being, drowning him in utter, complete and irrevocable despair.
INTERCHAPTER F
Excerpt from the last will and testament of Tenshi Koroma D’Angelo:
In the event that I die young, as the vision of my spark foretold, these are my wishes.
To my wonderful and loving husband, Brando, I leave our house. Take care of it, because it’s the work of our hands and there are few things more precious. Into it I poured my soul, and I want the flesh of my flesh to live there, too. When Tana is old enough, turn the house over to her and teach her this truth: the things we build are holy in a way that few people understand, holier than grass and stone and river, and we must treat them with reverence. Never let the house fall into ruin.
To Tana I leave my shares in Izakiwo, Inc. Brando is to keep track of how my broker handles them and then transfer them to our daughter when she reaches the age of twenty-one. He can instruct the broker to transfer the shares to some other company if Izakiwo were to go under.
I also leave my diary to my daughter, and I am locking it with a time-key that will open on Tana’s fifteenth birthday. I stopped writing in it the day I married Brando, because he became my confidant at that moment. But before, starting when I was sent to the clean-up crews, I dictated my thoughts and dreams and troubles into it so that I would never forget what it took me to b
ecome the woman I am. These are the experiences and knowledge I hope to share with my daughter while she grows up, but if I die young, my diary must serve as a roadmap to real womanhood. This is not arrogance: it is truth.
To Brando I say this: though I am not leaving you many things in this will, you are receiving the most precious items of all. First off, I leave you my friendship, you who you never left my side, who you gave me the warmth and understanding I had been hungering for all my life. I leave you my love, love that began small and then grew into something so beautiful and immense that if the world could behold it in all its extension and glory, they’d fall to their knees in tears at its majesty.
And I leave you my self, which will always be part of you, always whispered in your dreams, your conscience, your private musings. I am in you, Brando D’Angelo. I am yours, even beyond death, and you are mine. I know that we will be reunited in ra-Yindawo one day. Part of a new whole. Together forever. Inseparable.
* * *
Excerpt: XID Interrogation File 89-345A-26//0B9UI2
(The following was elicited after an hour and thirteen minutes of negative neural stimulus in an interrogation session conducted via kewbox by Agent Askar Akayev. SUBJECT is Nicho Arevalo, captain in Jimi Andrade’s Meros Matones personal guard.)
SUBJECT: Alright, I’ll tell you, just fucking shut that off, you mother-punking puto!
AGENT: There. Now, Nicho, I want you to talk to me about these meetings Jimi keeps having. We already know that Ned Han goes, but who’s the other guy?
SUBJECT: Bloke name of Yen Bandera.
AGENT: Yen Bandera? The free agent spy?
SUBJECT: Yeah. That’s the fucker. Tall, scars on his cheeks, hair thinning on top, ponytail. Old as shite.
AGENT: And what did they talk about, Nicho?