Outland Exile: Book One of Old Men and Infidels
Page 32
The faction was moving and he along with it. The comm’nets were back to normal with none of the stories and silences that meant something more was up. Just that morning he had seen the flag was set as he’d gone by RockCent.
He’d picked up the order from the new drop. The order was lousy; Ciszek deserved better. They thought they were giving Iain a real award or something, being the guy to finger Jasun for the Blue’s enforcers. He admitted to himself that it had felt like a big deal at first, but he had since decided to tell Jasun to beat it, find a new faction … do something.
He got to the bar where they’d agreed to meet and walked in past the bed warmers to the back. Jasun wasn’t there, but Billy, the guy who usually sat at the till, pointed with his eyes to the back room.
For the few seconds, while he could still think, after his arms were seized, after the garrote began crushing his windpipe, Iain wondered whether his death had been ordered by Jasun’s faction or his own gray smudge of a man, Smith.
CHAPTER 58
ALPHA_DROVER
Nyork, Unity
05.39.27.local_30_06_AU77
For over a month Malila had seen no trace of Jourdaine, in person or through his Presence. The faction struggle subsided. She heard of a handful of suicides and assassinations. In the former were Suarez and Khama. Miramundo Morales was in the latter. Most of the Unity population were unaware of the change in DUFS leadership. Jourdaine was fast-tracked to a lieutenant general.
Except as necessary, no one spoke with her. Malila went to work and came home expecting a provost guard around every corner. She slept in uniform. She did not go to any of the phantom shops, convinced she was being followed and unwilling to let them suffer on her account. After a grim remembrance dinner for Hecate, the four remaining friends had scattered. Alexandra would not return her calls. From Marta’s Vinyerd, where a patron had allowed her to hide during her time of mourning, Luscena called. It did not help.
Tiffany called her, but she could not bring herself to answer. Tiffany had been there when Hecate had died; Tiffany had not been able to call her back to life. At the devil’s bridge, Malila had sensed the same overwhelming claim of oblivion, its promise of easy passage a step away. The old man had called her back to life. That was what friends did.
For all practical purposes, Edie ran her life, answering her messages, attending O-A meetings, and reminding her to eat and sleep.
She was back in the shallow lake. Thick blood streamed along her thighs as she pushed herself along under the featureless yellow sky. She turned and found the same old temple steps. As she tried to climb, her feet slipped away painfully with every step. She wept, placing her face onto the warm ancient stone, made wet by the blood and her own tears.
Then something happened; the stones were the same, but she could tell they lived. Trying again, she found the climb easy and exhilarating, the sky blue, with high, wispy clouds. She did not look back. At the top, she found a small platform with soft pillows. It smelled of the old man. She slept and dreamed no more.
At 0330, thirty-one days after Jourdaine’s triumph, Malila woke to a siren.
“Sir, yes, sir.”
She heard the echo of dozens of similar acknowledgments through her O-A.
Did he just say the situation was critical, Malila?
That’s what it sounded like to me, and …
Of course, Lieutenant!
Malila was out the door within twenty minutes. That did not give her a sense of satisfaction. Sometime during that period they gave her a new platoon of CRNAs and took away her old one.
A new platoon? What is that all about? There goes Sergeant Grauer, and I was just getting used to him. I guess that means that they are not expecting any action.
You might be right. Looked at another way, some green-as-grass second looie has my platoon. I don’t like it.
“Ours is not to wonder why …”
Stuff it, Edie!
Malila spent the morning collating data and generating a summary for General Magness. There was a generalized outbreak of vandalism in Bahston, Artfurd, Washenton, and Filadelfya. A busy taut hum of activity pervaded division headquarters. She had a feeling of uneasiness. There was nothing on the news about it.
The crisis was some unrest among the unguilded masses. The DUFS response would be sudden, complete, and devastating. This happened every once in a while, and Malila knew the routine, despite never having been picked to participate before.
Lunch was cold tea and a selection from a heap of sandwiches dumped in the break room. By 1600, her O-A informed her that the command structure had changed once again. She had a new company commander as well as a new commanding general. She was now part of Recon Twenty-One. She had never heard of the new commander, General Winston.
Despite having never seen them, she would indeed command her new platoon for the action that night. That was another surprise. After a hurried dinner, a sandwich that no one had wanted for lunch, she made her way to the briefing room. It was mostly full by the time she entered.
I count thirty-six lieutenants, one major, and five captains … over 1,500 CRNA combat troopers. Say twice more for support/logistics, and this is quite a force.
I don’t feel like talking now, Edie.
For the ‘very edge of the Unity’s saber,’ you get queasy a lot, Malila. Why is that, I wonder?
She felt better after yelling at Edie.
Malila had been educated and indoctrinated by the Unity’s best trainers. She had served with all the officers in the room, all as well trained. It was a close-knit, if contentious, group of officers. The platoon leaders, all first or second lieutenants, talked in low whispers, the usual jokes, flirtations, and innuendo now absent.
No land avatars had been requisitioned. This operation would be different. In harm’s way, platoon leaders would be fighting alongside their troopers. Malila remembered the fight when she’d been recaptured. It was odd, but that had been her first taste of real combat, combat not filtered through the CORE.
That day she had lost to the Unity.
By some subliminal signal, all speech ceased a tenth of a second before the first shout: “General officer present!”
There was a sharp crunch as thirty-six lieutenants, five captains, and one major snapped to attention. Near the front of the room, a tall, robust man with his retinue of staff officers entered.
“As you were!” barked an adjutant a moment later.
Forty-two bodies sat or went to parade rest with barely a change in the taut level of attention. By the looks Malila intercepted from a few of the other officers, the man was as unknown to them as he was to her.
“I’m Major General Bradlee Winston. It is a pleasure to meet so many of my aggressive new officers. I hope we will have long and successful careers together. The cause for this meeting is, however, not as congenial. You and your troopers are all that stand for progress, law, and order against chaos, anarchy, and a return to the dark days after the Meltdown. Your country expects each one of you to do your duty and to show us that you deserve those bars we have placed on your shoulders. Alpha_Drover is going to test the loyalty of everyone here today! Traitors have taken possession of the streets, and the stability of our way of life is in the balance. Do your duty, and the Unity will do well by you!”
He briskly wiped the corners of his mouth with a small handkerchief and motioned to one of his retinue to continue.
“Men, I’m Major Williams, General Winston’s adjutant. Tonight each of you will have an assignment on the streets
of the Unity.” He motioned, and a vision of the tactical situation swam before her eyes. Malila’s hands grew cold. Thirty-five other lieutenants, five captains, and a major were quiet as they each studied their own maps.
“Agents, no doubt in the employ of traitors to the homeland, have led mobs to capture food supplies here and here.”
Red squares flared in the map of the megalopolis that appeared to hang in the air before Malila. Sector Filadelfya was just a short flight south from where they were now, an old and crowded slum, not unlike parts of Nyork, a port city with bridges across great rivers.
“Water distribution centers at quadrants A12, C21, F45, and J3 on your maps are occupied.” Green squares flared in Malila’s vision.
“Data distribution centers at B12, D22, G47, and M9 have been protected and should not be targeted. Under no circumstances are they to be damaged by collateral fire or chosen as a line of retreat for yourselves or the enemy.” Orange outlines blossomed on her display.
“A curfew has been called for sundown. Anyone not in Unity-approved shelters is to be considered an enemy combatant.
“You are to enter at the points marked in blue. You are then to sweep your troops to the objectives for each officer as marked. You are to conserve your CRNA resources as appropriate, but given the urban nature of the action, losses are expected. Under no circumstances are losses to prevent you from gaining your objectives. Repeat, your troopers are expendable if your objective can be obtained.”
The import of the major’s words flared in Malila’s mind as the blue markings on her map blazed and set. The area of her assignment enlarged on her O-A, and she was treated to a three-dimensional survey of the region. It was one of the older parts of the Filadelfya District, a warren of narrow streets and alleys opening onto a crowded public area. The names meant little to her: Newmarket, Lombard, Sainjorg, Arch Street, Indiplaza, and Two Street.
“Questions?” For a heartbeat or two, the major gazed across to the back of the room, above the faces of the young officers, before he turned to follow the general out of the room. The portal closed and sealed with a liquid whoosh.
At once, the officers stood and filed out. The operation was to commence at 2345. That left no time for idle talk. Malila jogged to rendezvous with her platoon.
It was now 2115.
CHAPTER 59
ALICE
Nyork, Unity
21.24.07.local_30_06_AU77
In levels deep within the fabric of the city, a portal opened, revealing, motionless within an immense cavern in the bedrock, an ordered sea of black-helmeted troopers. It was not often that Malila had seen so many CRNAs on one parade ground. It stank. Her fellow field officers peeled off as the group moved along one face of the assembled mass.
She barked a brief, cryptic order into her headset. A section of black-helmeted troops lurched, moved, stopped with a crisp crunch of boots, and presented arms to her in file order. She turned and, with another barked order, had them follow her along a tunnel to their transports. Ordering her troopers to board, Malila watched as the two squads walked into the holds of the flyers and packed themselves into the smallest space possible. It reminded her of a box of children’s blocks being turned out onto a floor … in reverse. Each CRNA knew its place and assumed it with speed, economy, and silence.
Malila jumped in just as the skimmer door was closing. Off balance as the skimmer rose, Malila steadied herself, grabbing the bony shoulder of her new platoon sergeant. DUBSZEK, Cecil B. was stenciled on his dark helmet. She remembered the helmet of NELSON, James P., which she had held in her hands with its dead contents so many months before.
Swooping down the canyon of the East River, the skimmers took a heading over the cauldron of factories that spread from Sandiook to EasFiladelfya and settled into the strained expectancy of steady flight.
The rattle and jitter of the darkened transport discouraging conversation, Malila reviewed her own emotions and, in the end, chose martial enthusiasm. Whatever the outcome of this exercise, it gave her a chance to place a solid performance on the high side of the vast balance beam on which she had been placed last October. If the ascendant Blues … if the now-all-powerful Jourdaine had wanted her death, denunciation, or humiliation, he could have had it by now.
She was alone, with no friends or patrons, for the first time since she’d joined the DUFS. She could not afford to let any inadvertent error creep into this exercise. It was simple … grimly simple. Even Edie was quiet. The land below them now was dark except for the inspection lights of a few pipelines. After the Freehold disaster in 65, people no longer lived in central Jersy.
As a squad leader, Malila had executed many simulations in an urban environment. They had been distasteful. The city streets had chewed up her troopers. Men, lost and separated, had been easy targets for a single terrorist, emerging from hiding and eliminating two or three of her soldiers before being neutralized in turn.
The vandals had taken water trucks and food but had left the communication facilities untouched. DUFS doctrine had always stressed that rebel forces would capture munitions sites and then comm stations. A rebellion could count on the populace to water and feed them. It was unusual, and it made her uneasy. Malila steeled herself to the loss of her men, anonymous though they might be. If she were not completely committed to the task at hand, her fellow DUFS might die.
Malila began evaluating the population and statistics for the area she was ordered to clear, the Nordenliberdys. Government regulatory offices covered the surface as a maze of small shops, a crèche, tenements, and “irregular commercial ventures” coexisted unseen underground.
There was nothing as conventional as a ThiZ house or an unlicensed hotel, dug out by hand among the entrails of the city. “Irregular” they were, but she had been a police officer long enough to know that all such businesspeople were, at heart, conservative. The free and unrestricted flow of money from other citizens’ pockets into their own was the basis of their business plans. Political intrigue and destruction of government services brought governmental scrutiny, a luxury these entrepreneurs did not embrace. The violent crime rate in the ’Liberdys was next to the lowest in the whole sector.
Her platoon, forty CRNAs with pulse rifles and mortars, were to emerge from their sally port and roust the entire population, kill any who opposed them, torch unlicensed residential buildings, and drive the inhabitants toward a small park in the center of the district. Thirty-five other platoons, 1,500 troopers, emerging from other sally ports, would drive eight thousand citizens toward the same objective, a space of about three thousand square meters. The orders eliminated all lines of retreat. It was a brilliant plan. It would be a massacre.
She found nothing about the ’Liberdys that justified this genocide. Theft of a water truck or two hardly justified emptying a whole neighborhood of its people. She and her fellow officers were going to execute these citizens with no more authority than a loaded rifle. Thousands of the people would be shot or Sapped by the time the sun rose tomorrow. She frowned. The sun never rose in the tenement districts. These people would die in their burrows and dens. “The people’s army” would consume the people, a snake eating its own tail.
The skimmer landed, and on command, the troopers emptied out of their toy boxes to stand before her. Malila led them, following her O-A map, to the assigned location, feeling as if she were a CRNA herself, helpless to alter her actions. Her platoon, by her command, would well up like a black tide into the warrens of the tenements from the hidden doors of the sally port.
Of course, they were not actually hidden, she knew. How many times a day did the average citizen pass a door declaring “No Entry Except by Authorized Persons,” “Danger—Peligroso,” or “Museum Exit”? In minutes, these doors would belch forth relentless CRNA troopers to consume the people who lived here.
The great stolid mass of people would die as Malila wielded the sledge tha
t would stun the beast to its knees. Somehow, she knew the deed would change her. Jesse had said that killing changed you, even if it was righteous.
This would not be righteous.
Malila passed the inner security door of her sally port and experienced a momentary disorientation as she was overwhelmed by the stench of an open sewer. Passing through the outer security door, she saw the cream-and-green tiled decor of a subway. The smell was the last convincing factor that the public toilet was indeed Not in Service, as the sign declared. The outer security door opened inside one of the stalls, and Malila moved aside to let the queue of troopers enter before contacting her sergeants via her headset.
She finished her instructions, and caught movement out of the corner of her eye. Looking up, she saw a slim, somber shape. Malila was startled to find her own face staring back at her from the warped mirror on the opposite wall.
She did not recognize the girl who had smiled at the thoughtless grip of Ethan’s hand or wept at Delarosa’s stories. This genderless figure before her reflected no mirth or humanity. She could not see this grim specter holding the old man’s hand, inspecting it for the secrets of the outlands.
On an impulse, Malila stepped back into another stall, out of sight of her troopers, and ripped at her clothes. She pulled up her tunic and pushed aside her skivvies, revealing her pale skin, a contrast to her flat black uniform even in the unnatural fluorescent-green light of the room. She remembered the pain of her first ink. The tattoo had been a delicate filigree of blue around the border of her right nipple. Her reflection bore a filigree of blue around the pink raised flesh.
Her disquiet failed to subside, growing, instant by instant, as if she were shrinking and all around her expanding into a weird alien landscape, like Delarosa’s story about Alice in Wonderland. She looked again at her tattoo.
The elements were all there: the crescent moons, the daisy, the vine … But the pattern was no longer graceful, no longer elegant. Now she understood Hecate’s comment. The whales did not really exist, not in the real world … and not this body of hers now.