The limo drove slowly past one of the red gun trucks pulled over to the side of the road. All hands were out, two kicking four flat tires on one side while the soldiers looked around cautiously.
The rest of the escort turned onto a wide boulevard and the convoy shook out into a series of cordons around her and Ron’s vehicle.
Admiral, you know that way I have with nets, Meg said, on Nelly Net.
You’ve mentioned it once or twice, Lieutenant.
Well, I seem to be tracking the Iteeche comm net.
Can you make anything of it?
My computer is translating it as fast as she can.
Nelly?
My daughter is passing it along to all of us, Kris. We’re tracking most of it, I think.
And I should know this why? Kris thought dryly.
There seems to be some serious action on the streets around us, admiral. It started when that vanguard rig blew out four tires. Not your usual coincidence.
No, not really.
It’s escalating. Someone bent some serious metal crunching their rig against one of our gun trucks as it made the turn onto this road. Now shots have been exchanged.
Kris listened for small arms fire, but there were soft chimes playing in the background inside the limo and she heard nothing else at the moment. Outside, her limo moved along at a reasonable speed surrounded by gun trucks two deep.
A third layer was in the process of being added.
Kris eyed Ron, but he seemed intent on studying the ceiling.
Kris chose to meditate on the ceiling as well.
Her reflections came to an abrupt halt when one of the red trucks ahead took a rocket hit to its middle and rolled over several times before coming to a stop up against a tall, thick tree shading the boulevard. Quickly a dozen Iteeche Marines tumbled out, guns at the ready.
As if it hadn’t happened, the convoy rolled right on by them.
Kris gave Ron a mental count to five, then blurted out. “Why are we not getting off this street?”
“It is the most propitious boulevard to take us to the Imperial Presence,” Ron said, as if that settled everything.
“It’s a predictable path that will get us killed before we get there. Get off it.”
Ron looked dumbfounded.
“Marine,” Kris snapped and Nelly translated into Iteeche, “tell your convoy to follow our movements.”
The Iteeche Marine looked at Kris, then back at Ron and finally at Kris again.
“Do as she says,” Ron snapped.
“Megan, get in the front seat and have the driver get off this road,” Kris ordered, then added as explanation to Ron. “This has worked for us when someone started shooting at us. Go where they aren’t expecting us.”
In the front seat, Megan was issuing orders for a right turn. In front of Kris, the Iteeche Marine was barking orders into a very human looking wrist unit. Kris held on tight as the limo took a hard right, barely missing the escort that had only started to open up space for them to swerve. They sped off the wide boulevard and into a neighborhood crammed with ramshackle buildings of four or five stories that overhung the narrow side street.
One of the trucks with US Marines on board sped past Kris’s rig, taking the lead. More fell in behind her. They did two more hard turns and came to a dead halt.
They’d zoomed out of the shaded narrow lane and onto another broad boulevard. On a grassy knoll across from then, beside a spiraling high rise hulked four track-laying, tank-like vehicles. Their huge guns looked to be aimed right down Kris’s throat.
“Does it work like this for you often?” Ron asked, and if a creature of the ocean could say something dryly, his words were pure salt and sand. “Those green and blue flags they fly tell me they are from my Eminent Choosers worst enemy.”
Chapter 37
For a moment, Kris just gawked at the tanks.
The gawking was returned; the tankers looked just as surprised as she was. Some were out of their vehicles, a few lounged on the ground. Others sat or stood on their behemoth.
For a long moment, no one gave an order.
“Turn right. Turn right,” Megan shouted from the front seat. Her computer shouted the same in Iteeche.
After an eternity of hesitation, the driver did, then gunned the limo.
“Zig Zag,” Kris shouted. Nelly translated just as loud.
The driver began to whip the steering wheel right, then a few seconds later left.
One of the tanks must have been more alert than the others. The turret turned out of train, its long barrel depressed. It fired.
A huge hole appeared in the pavement to the left of Kris’s rig. They would have been there if her driver hadn’t zigged right a second earlier.
Behind Kris, her Marines went into action. Those in rented and dilapidated trucks cut the canvas covering off the truck beds. Others got windows down and leaned out of them with grenade launchers at the ready.
“Pop smoke,” Kris ordered. Major Puller passed the order along before Kris finished saying it. The soft wompf of grenades being fired was music to Kris’s ears.
Some grenades were wisely aimed short. They hit the deck, exploded and began to fill the boulevard with clouds of many colored smokes. Other grenades were lobbed further out, closer to the tanks. Others grenadiers shot flares at the deck. They slid along the street, hissing and sparking. A few were aimed high and popped parachute flares into the air above them which sent showers of many colored sparks cascading down.
The hostile tanks disappeared behind the swirling smoke. The flares made thermal vision worthless.
“Get us out of here,” Kris ordered. “Nelly, get us some eyes in the sky.”
“I’m peeling them off the sedan chairs. Good thing I provided you with a communications relay station in each one.”
Kris didn’t bother asking Ron if nano scouts were allowed in the Imperial Precincts and moments later a vision from above was forming in her head.
“Megan, you getting this?”
“I got it. Go right,” the lieutenant ordered the driver.
A few blocks ahead of them, a trio of vehicles suddenly coalesced into a road block.
“Left now and step on it,” Megan ordered.
Kris worked to get a handle on her situation. Behind her, the beanstalk rose high. Around her, buildings of silver and glass shot up into twisting spires. Most were surrounded by broad promenades and wide boulevards. Other streets showed many-storied buildings of red brick with narrow roads between them.
As more trucks roared into the streets, many showing weapons at the window or top gunner’s position. Quite a few of them were not on Kris’s side. The smaller two- and three-wheeled scooters she’d seen before scurried off to disappear down the ramps into the basement of the closest high rise.
When elephants dance and stomp, mice best run and hide.
“We’re under observation from those tall buildings,” Jack concluded. “We need more smoke and we need it out farther.”
“Major Puller, do your Marines have Iteeche translators?”
“About half of them.”
“Ron, I want to pair some of your Marines or household troops with some of my Marine grenadiers to lay down a serious fog blanket.”
“Some of our troops can fire smoke grenades too.”
“Here’s what I want to do.”
A minute later, trucks loaded with US and Imperial Marines peeled off to the left even as the main convoy took a hard right. The detachments disappeared into several basement garages.
Quickly, a wave of small scooters rolled out of those high rises. Since the driver usually owned the scooter, a civilian Iteeche drove. A human and an Iteeche trooper rode behind him, rifles and grenade launchers at the ready.
While the main convoy zigged and zagged, the scooters headed in every possible direction, popping smoke and sending up flares.
Beside Kris, Jack shook his head. “I don’t think they’re going to be able to see us, honey, but ou
r sky spies aren’t all that effective, either. You’ve created a game of Blind Man’s Bluff.”
“So I have, Dear, but they’re the ones with the big, honking, long guns. Our anti-tank grenades are short-ranged and can likely only damage one of them. Take out a road wheel, maybe, but not a turret. No, I like a game where everybody’s blind and I can bluff to my heart’s content.”
While Kris still had eyes in the sky, she dogged across one wide boulevard and disappeared into a wren of older, shorter buildings that half overhung the street.
“Nelly, pick six routes out of the smoke that will take us to the Imperial Precincts and get scooters out, smoking those streets. Have them put some automatic weapons fire into the air.”
“Not that close to the Imperial Presence,” Ron snapped.
“Okay, fire into the deck. Low power, but make noise.”
“I’ve sent the orders.”
“Now, Nelly, find us a seventh route.”
“You humans are so sneaky,” Nelly muttered, but a seventh route appeared in Kris’s head.
“Send it to Megan, Nelly. Lieutenant, feel free to zig and zag, but head us there.”
The map in Kris’s head showed the streets with a fine grid laid over it. Within each grid square, scooters made noise, laid down smoke and popped flares. There were occasional clashes when a scooter rounded a corner and discovered a tank sharing the street with it a thousand meters away. Most of the time, the scooter skedaddled before things got lethal.
A tank and a gun truck crossed paths; the US Marines in the gun truck were only too happy to let the tank have the street. The tank, however, decided to hunt down the offending gun truck.
Bad call.
When the human Marines discovered someone was stupid enough to consider them game, they turned the tables on the tank.
As soon as the gun truck rounded the next corner and was out of the tank’s line of sight, the US and Iteeche Marines bailed out and sent the mounts on their way with their best wishes. The Marines of both flavor then went to ground in and around the crumbling buildings.
When the tank rounded the corner in hot pursuit of the fleeing gun truck, the Marines showered it with short ranged rockets that could hardly put a dent in the tank’s main armor.
Its road wheels and tracks were a different matter.
The tank ran right off its shattered tracks and ended up, like a beached whale, rapidly going nowhere.
It wasn’t over that quickly. The tank had two machine guns in the turret, one forward, one aft. The turret continued to whirl around, spraying fire at anything that moved.
The Marines smoked it bad, then cautiously approached it, settling in beside it, well out of reach of the machine guns and waiting for the chatter of the guns to calm down.
Once peace and quiet broke out, the Marines offered the tank crews two choices: they could come out nicely, or the Marines could ignite the engine compartment and burn the tank.
Kris watched the battle develop out of the corner of her eye. She was not at all surprised when the abashed tankers climbed out. She was even less surprised when the US Marines suggested that all of them, tankers and both flavors of Marines adjourn to the nearest bar.
Kris dismissed their departure with a shrug. They’d earned their brew.
She, however, had a date with the Emperor and time was running out.
Her convoy was zigging and zagging its way laterally across the map, heading for another boulevard that would take her in the back gate. She had scouts out to smoke her path and protect her from observation, but not so far that she couldn’t get a good view of what was on the roads ahead of her. She was doing a pretty good job; they were now on streets where traffic still moved. The look of dismay on drivers as the armed convoy gunned through them told Kris a lot about what life must normally be like in the capital.
They were picking up speed, shooting down a boulevard, heading for a turn-off.
Four honking big tanks in hostile colors rolled up the ramp from a garage under two buildings on opposite sides of the street and not a thousand meters from Kris’s limo.
“Get out of here,” Kris yelled.
“I can’t,” Meg shouted back. “No streets.
“Go cross country. Everyone, lay smoke.”
Smoke grenades were popping everywhere, but the tanks already had them in their sights.
The pavement ahead of Kris’s limo exploded. The driver tried to avoid it, but the passenger side of the rig went into the gaping hole in the road. The limo listed, but then hit the other side of the hole and flipped over, tail over nose.
Thank God I didn’t bring the kids, was Kris’s last thought.
Chapter 38
Kris regained consciousness to the harsh rubbing of her cheek against the rough wool of Jack’s dress Red and Blues. She was slung over his back as he ran low.
She coughed; the air was thick with smoke and cordite as well as burning rubber. One quick glance, even from the bouncing viewpoint of Jack’s back, showed her burning limo a good twenty meters away. There were a few shot-up trucks nearby, but the smoke limited her world to nearly nothing as it swirled in multicolored tendrils.
The smoke was thick, choking thick.
Lieutenant Longknife was only a pace behind her, covering their withdrawal with the occasional smoke grenade she pulled from a shoulder bag.
Where did that come from? She’d have to ask the surprising Longknife later.
“Let me down,” Kris ordered.
Jack tumbled to the ground and gently spreading her out. Then he rolled away from Kris, but kept his body between her and the thickest of the smoke. The occasional rattle of machine gun fire told her a tank lurked deep within that smog bank.
Marines, both US and Iteeche were down. Some screamed in agony; others struggled to minister to these in worse need no matter their species. Kris forced herself to not count their numbers.
Not now.
“We need to kill that tank,” she concluded.
A loud explosion from that direction told her someone had just taken a swing at doing that. The immediate chatter of machine gun fire verified the failure of the effort.
There were other explosions, some close, others more distant.
“Nelly, what’s happening?”
“Our eyes in the sky are useless at the moment. There’s smoke everywhere. What I can tell you is that there’s a lot of shooting. Sometimes our light infantry catches a tank before it knows we’re out there. Then things go badly for the tank. Other times, like just happened to you, the tanks catch us by surprise. Then it doesn’t go well with us. The fighting seems to be even, but you’re not getting any closer to the Emperor just lying here.”
“No, I’m not,” Kris said, spotting several Marines huddled beside an overturned truck. “Let’s get ourselves some real weapons,” she said and pointed Jack that way.
She and Jack crawled to them on elbows and knees. Meg took the lead, keeping herself between them and the tank.
All the Marines were injured. The Iteeche were hurt bad; the twenty-two millimeter slugs had stitched them badly and they had no body armor to speak of. The US Marines, thanks to Kris’s spidersilk armor were better off, but not by much. The heavy rounds might not have sliced through to flesh and blood, but the energy smashed bone; arms and legs lay twisted. One Marine was coughing up blood, his chest flailed badly.
Beside the truck, one Marine, her left arm in a sling, fired smoke grenades when the smog seemed to thin. Another crawled, his shattered right leg dragging, between the wounded, doing his best to care for them, be they human or Iteeche.
“Does the tank always fire high?” Kris asked the Marine grenadier.
She shook her head. “No ma’am. Sometimes she’s high. Then she sweeps us low. I think she’s trying to play games with us. Bloody four-eyed bastards.”
Kris allowed the less than diplomatic comment, and turned to look for something of use. A plan was forming in her mind.
Two human M-6 rifles
leaned up against the bed of the truck, but it didn’t look like the weapon to take to a tank fight. The Iteeche weapons were more interesting.
Several of them had been bounced around when the truck flipped. One looked like a longer version of our rifle, with a long, permanently attached, bayonet. Kris scowled at that bit of psychology. It was the other type that got her attention. It was a bit longer than the rifle and its pig sticker. Its tube was a gaping maw, nearly a hand wide, say 100 millimeters. The sights were pretty basic; line up a front sight located on the side of the barrel mouth with the circular rear sight and fire. The handle looked to function also as the magazine holder.
One depressed button on the hand hold and a magazine dropped into Kris’s palm. From a clear strip running down the back of the affair, she could easily see that two rounds had been fired but five more were ready. She popped one out and studied it.
It looked like a rocket. It had markings in Iteeche on it that said nothing to Kris. She scowled at the rocket and her general situation.
An Iteeche with his back up against the truck bed said something.
“Kris, I think you just got told girls shouldn’t play with boys’ toys,” Nelly told her.
Kris weighted her options, but since an Iteeche Marine had risked what little air he had to say something, Kris chose her words diplomatically.
“But this girl likes playing with boy toys. It’s fun blowing shit up.”
Her translated words drew something like laughs from all the wounded Iteeche. It caused several to be swept by spasms of coughing. Coughing that sent blood spewing from their mouths.
One wounded Iteeche struggled to loosen a pouch in his web gear. Kris went to help him.
“I think he says the grenades that the launcher has now are smoke. These are the real shit,” Nelly said.
“You aren’t about to do what I think you’re about to do,” Jack said, coming back from where he’d been studying the situation over the Marine grenadier’s shoulder.
“You’ve known me long enough to know damn well what I’m about to do, Jack . . . and forget it. There’s no place for you to lock me up.”
Kris Longknife - Emissary Page 24