The scruffy cousin answered. “I think she’s best right where she is for awhile.” Suddenly, his grin did not look disarming. He looked very armed.
LaGrange’s cramped voice mumbled up from the floorboards. “Guys, what’s going on?”
The Lads looked at each other, then looked at Barthes in the rear-seat monitor. Barthes stayed mum as they careened through the downhill hairpins.
“Guys, just tell me. If there’s a problem, we can sort it out later. I’m gunna puke.” She sat up, but stayed on the floor.
Majlid nodded. The little one spoke, but his eyes stayed fixed on Barthes. “When the Temple blew up, the MPs went crazy. They turfed us out of all the Zone posts, took control of the command center, killed the gate guards and anybody else who objected, and then a bunch of them wearing civilian clothes went on a rampage in Moorstown. They smashed up half of Ara_t1rmak Kadesi before our guys in the Storefronts Guild managed to stop them. We caught a couple of ‘em alive, but”—he shook his head—“so far nothing. Wait. Get down.”
Ahead on the valley floor, vehicles clogged the roadway, held up at a checkpoint. They could see the bright sashes of the Maxroy’s Purchase Mormon Battalion reflected in distant headlights.
“Shit,” said Majlid. Without slowing, he killed all running lights. They hurtled through darkness. Barthes was acutely aware of the hum of their passage reflected off guardrails, the precipitous drop beyond, the lashing of trees whipped by the wind of their passage, and then sudden silence, all sound swallowed by blackness. He heard Majlid counting, calmly, slowly, under his breath, and then his stomach lurched as they jerked right, straight off the roadway.
Barthes expected a slow fall, followed by sudden death. Instead, he felt a ca-clunk and slither, then heard the crunch of gravel, then started as his window was whipped by overhanging brush. They hurtled on, banging and bouncing. LaGrange grunted as she bumped about against various bits of floorboard. Finally, the ground leveled, and as Barthes’ eyes adjusted to the dark, he realized that they were heading west, circling north of the city on farm tracks that cut across the fields.
“Your call, Jeri, but I can’t do too much of this. I’m low on fuel.”
LaGrange untangled herself and rolled onto her back, speaking at the roof as she gazed upside down at Barthes.
“They can’t guard everything. There aren’t enough of them.”
Majlid said nothing, but turned left at the first crossroad. Barthes shuddered involuntarily as he saw the Temple spires looming over the city, illuminated by the fires below. As they drew nearer, distant gunfire and wailing sirens seeped like dreams through the deathly quiet. He started when LaGrange spoke again. “Sir, I may need your help to get in.”
“Excuse me?” Barthes tried to make sense of her upside-down lips and chin. It was bizarrely fascinating. They seemed to bear no relation to the spoken words.
“Your Imperial credentials. These guys are your formal escort, right? Assigned by TCM?”
Barthes nodded.
“Well, your credentials and escort pass will—probably—get you to wherever you need to go. If the MPs capture me, they’ll probably kill me. If they find me with you, they may kill us both. If you have a problem with that, I need to get out here and take my chances.”
Barthes thought this over, slowly. Then, with great deliberation, he straightened his heavy overcoat, lumped on the seat beside him. “It cannot be comfortable there,” he said. “You must be cold.” He draped it neatly over LaGrange, covering her head to toe, assessed the effect, tugged it into several casual folds, pulled his neck scarf through a sleeve, and half-draped them up onto the seat. He then slumped back, clasped his hands in his lap, and closed his eyes.
The effect was remarkable, and his timing was impeccable. As they coasted into the glaring lights of a desolate checkpoint hastily erected across the road, the peering sentry saw only an elderly, dozing gentleman who had not noticed that his coat had slid to the floor. The boy spoke briefly to Majlid, then rapped on the glass. Barthes started awake, looking groggily into his stern, expectant face as Majlid lowered the window.
“Credentials, sir?”
“Ah, yes.” Barthes bent down, his body blocking the sentry’s view of the floor, deftly twitched fabric, then righted himself, the brilliant flash of the Imperial Seal drawing the boy’s attention as Barthes flipped open the case and handed them over. The private proudly scanned the identity page, read the result, looked Barthes full in the eyes, then rendered a sharp salute as he handed them back.
“Travel safely, sir. It’s crazy in there!”
Barthes smiled, warmly. “I’m sure we shall, thanks to your efforts. Please, carry on!”
The lads bobbled and grinned. The sentry looked at them fiercely and barked “Move along!” as he saluted again and waved them through.
Barthes exhaled. He fumbled in his pockets, searching for the ‘fone that talked to his rooftop dish. He cursed under his breath as he realized that he’d turned it off for the reception and left it that way. He fumbled and muttered at it, unable to figure out how to stop the auto-download so that he could start to compose a message to Renner—and then stopped trying, when he realized that a FLASH from Asach had come in. Waiting for it to scroll, without looking up, he said “I need to find Ollie Azhad. Can you get me to him?”
LaGrange sat up. “Why do you need Ollie Azhad?”
Barthes stared fixedly at the tiny screen, flicking text past with his finger. “I have my own reasons. Among them, at the moment, I need to inform him that my colleague appears to have located his children.”
The Lads shouted in unison. “Deela?”
“Yes,” nodded Barthes, “and two small boys. They appear to be unharmed.”
After the adventures thus far, Barthes expected some dramatic response: a lurch of acceleration; careening around corners. Instead, Majlid meandered through the city with intense concentration and caution, pulling up in a shuttered alley lined with low warehouses that backed up to the stall fronts facing outward into the public street. It was heavily patrolled by grim-faced farm boys, who nodded at the lads in silent greeting.
Inside steamed with body heat. Men with weapons sprawled across their laps slouched in chairs lined up along the walls, silently, unquestioningly, waiting. Ollie was slumped over a battered desk, head in his hands, listening carefully to Linda Libiziewsky, but barely responding. A cluster of town luminaries, still wrapped in evening finery, gestured and pleaded with Ollie in low tones. At Barthes’ entry, the low tones died to a murmur, then died away completely as the plaintiffs stood and stared. LaGrange stood aside to let him speak.
“Mr. Azhad?”
Ollie looked up.
“I have some news which may not be relevant to the present difficulties, though I suspect that it may well be. If I might speak to you privately?”
Azhad’s eyes narrowed.
“I am a colleague of Asach Quinn.”
Azhad nodded curtly, and several chair occupants detached themselves from the wall. They politely but firmly escorted the luminaries to an adjacent room. LaGrange and Libiziewsky huddled to one side.
Barthes leaned forward, spoke to Ollie in low tones, then handed him the ‘fone, queued to Asach’s message. Ollie’s eyes went wide, then narrowed. One way or another, he currently had twelve thousand men and women under arms, patrolling every VIP residence, office block, parking lot, and hotel in the city. Until that moment, they’d been acting in fractured discord, each doing the best they could to guard their assigned bits of pavement and street.
Now, stripped of the threat to his remaining children, the broken man rose up from his chair suffused with righteous indignation, a general in command of an army. The transformation was terrible to see. Things moved very quickly. They pooled their knowledge.
There had been at least three explosions in and around the Temple. Two were superficial and external, and burned with low intensity, but very brightly. They were clearly meant to be seen. The third was
caused by a vehicle exploding in the loading bays on the public side of the facility near the archives. It was burning fiercely. When it went off, so did numerous smaller fires, scattered throughout the city. Saint George Casualty Suppression was stretched beyond breaking.
The Zone Security Duty Officer that evening was from Maxroy’s Purchase. He’d rotated on just before the explosions. He declared Zone Emergency immediately, sealed the post, and announced a general curfew. Civil personnel were ordered to leave. Linda stayed. Then, an MP platoon made the rounds, replacing TCM Zone and Contract Security guards with their own. They simply shot anyone who objected. As word spread, some joined the MPs; some fled the post; the rest were locked up “pending investigation.” Finally, all non-MPs were ejected from the command post, to join their incarcerated brethren. They worked out the timeline: all of this had happened before Captain LaGrange was formally relieved. Which meant that Colonel Slam Dunk must have known about it. Then the comms tower went up. Linda hid until she could slip out a back gate into Moorstown.
The motive for the rampage in Moorstown was pretty clear to everybody as well. It was happening all over the city. It was supposed to look like spontaneous looting and rioting—but Spontaneous Looting and Rioting didn’t fit in very well with the local mentality, which was far more inclined toward Maintaining Peaceful and Orderly Communities. Saint George citizens were veterans of this particular tactic. On a low level, it had been going on for months. On this scale, it had been done before, around the time of the first Jackson Delegation visit in 3035. Back then, irate residents had taken to the streets, made citizen arrests, forced the perpetrators with funny offworld accents to clean up the mess, marched them sixty miles in the general direction of Bonneville, and released them without shoes, food or water.
Unbeknownst to the good citizens of Saint George, shortly thereafter the Looters and Rioters had piled into cargo trucks headed toward an Undisclosed Location, and the now-peaceful city awoke the next morning to find Friedlander urban assault vehicles patrolling the streets, sent in by the True Church Militant to “restore order.” Citizen resistance was fierce for awhile, but collapsed when it realized that Maxroy’s Purchase fanatics were willing to destroy the city in order to save it. So, they went home quietly, and enrolled their sons as drivers for TC Contract Security. This time, when Spontaneous Looting and Rioting broke out, they were ready. They had become masters at playing the cat-and-mouse game of keeping their heads low while serving as eyes and ears for the civil police. Tonight, no Looter or Rioter made it more than a block or two down any street. They were all arrested, or killed while resisting same.
On their own initiative, TCM Contract Security were reporting in as best they could which regular TCM units remained loyal to the city. It was a patchwork out there. It looked like those who had received LaGrange’s whispered “local orders only” directive had slipped off to join their own and were holding fast; others were taking their orders from MPs. Ollie’s people were cautiously backing up Saint George Casualty.
There was no holding back any more.
Barthes now remembered his first flight in and all the subsequent nights of dread with crystal clarity: the burned-out junk, the threadbare corners of the city. He understood now: for the second time in as many decades, New Utah—or, at least, Saint George—veered on the brink of civil war. He looked around him; felt the depth of commitment, and community, and, overarching that, the feeling of anger fueled by the toxic allegation of illegitimacy. How could Maxroy’s Purchase make such outrageous claims? How could the True Church there declare New Utahans outsiders on their own planet? That much hubris was difficult to conceive. He sat awake, waiting for anything from Asach, while Ollie tried again and again to get through to Zia in Bonneville, and more experienced hands curled up in corners and nodded off around him.
North Badlands, Borrego (Swenson’s) Valley, New Utah
The Operations Officer snarled as another light winked out. “What the fuck is going on?”
The command post was filled with chatter. A left-chevron of position indicators swept forward, paused, flashed green to indicate battery fire—and then, one by one, went blank. He heard agitated communications chatter.
“Pull back! Pull back! Retrograde, Route Alpha!” This was ridiculous. It wasn’t in the mission plan. What were they doing out there: playing Outies and Imperials?
“Lieutenant, Report! Why aren’t you executing the training plan?”
The Fire Control officer stayed focused on the board as he shouted his response, watching lights change colors and wink out. “Sir! Star Dawg’s down. Phud Pucker’s down. Killjoy, Backscratcher, Harm’s Way—down, down down. Two total kills, two weapons kills, one mobility kill.”
“Well, tell ‘em to quit fucking around. We will blow our contract if we don’t finish Phase Three Weaponization Tests on schedule.”
“No! Sir! I mean they’re really down!” As the board went dark, the lieutenant frantically sifted comms chatter.
“What do you mean ‘really down’?!” This was ridiculous, and nonsensical. They were doing practice gunnery tests on a live-fire range. The ‘enemy’ were fixed targets. There wasn’t even anybody out their role-playing an opponent.
“The w-kills and m-kill were reflected fire. The other two—Sir, somebody dropped a rock on ‘em.”
“A what?’
“Rocks, sir. Great, big, fucking rocks.”
“How?”
“Flingers, I guess. We can’t acquire.”
“Well, duh, but how?”
The Fire Control Officer shook his head. “We’re just getting scattered intel now. It looks like—” the lieutenant stopped to listen for a second. “Sir, they’re opening sinkholes somehow.”
“Sinkholes?”
“More like sink trenches. The vanguard moved out max overland, and then—poof—the ground just dropped in front of ‘em. They fell into defilade, and before they could engineer out, a bunch of rocks just—dropped out of the sky. Along the whole trench. Like they’d pre-registered. We’re running ground-penetrating radar now. It’s like Swiss cheese under there.”
“Show me.”
The lieutenant pulled up the last-known positions for the killed amour, and pointed. “Here, here, reflected fire. BFR’s here. Sorry. Big Flung Rocks. Open trenches here. Swiss cheese rendering now.”
The image angled to its plane, showing a subsurface maze of threads transecting their line of travel.
“What were they firing at?”
“Nothing, really sir. Just dusting the path. They’d done their fixed targets, and were lasing lines to assess the scatter.”
“And what shot back?”
“Nothing, sir, apart from their own EeRWigs.”
The Major didn’t like this at all. Enhanced Eradiation Weapons did not just bounce off shiny rocks to return their own fire.
“S-TWO!”
The intelligence officer also had both hands flying, ‘teeth in both ears. “SIR!”
“What the HELL is going on! We are supposed to be shooting sunbeams into a sand pit a hundred clicks from the nearest farmer!”
“Nothing, Sir! I find nothing! No ground surveillance radar signatures, no infra-red trace, no counter-fire trace—nothing.”
“Show me!”
The lieutenant put the remote sensing array results on screen. Auto-classification showed nothing. No armor, no artillery, no weapons masses, no blurry red dots indicating infantry radiating heat.
“Look forward.”
The lieutenant changed scan range and repainted. The Commander pointed at an aquamarine splash, punctuated by grey-brown dots.
“What’s that?”
“River delta, sir. Marshes.”
“What about the dots?”
The lieutenant shrugged. “Doesn’t tag anthropogenic, sir. Geology of some sort.”
“Gimme a side scan.” The lieutenant drew a box to shift the sensors again. The commander stopped him. “No, opposite those trenches.”
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The S-2 reoriented and punched. “On screen, sir.”
There was nothing. The commander squinted. “What’s that?” He pointed at aquamarine streaks arrayed along what might have been washes and gullies.
“More plant life, sir. The local stuff shows up this weird color. The invasives around Saint George show up pretty normal, but out here—”
The commander cut him off. “Plant life, you say?”
“Sir.”
“Then, why is it moving?!”
The lieutenant peered. It wasn’t fast. It was—walking pace. Not even. Low-crawl pace. But moving on line, inexorably forward. And the tank battalion, diverted by the collapsing trench system, was already turning directly toward it.
“Holy crap!”
They both started shouting orders.
The tank commander threw the hatch, muttering about what-the-fuck was wrong with his track, and what-the-fuck was wrong with his comms and—What the fuck?
He couldn’t see much.
And then he couldn’t see at all.
He fell back inside, screaming and clutching his eyes.
His gunner couldn’t see anything to acquire. Then his viewfinder fried white, dazzling him.
It was just as well. They would not have liked at all to see what came next.
It took the Warriors a minute to clear the tank. It took the War Rats another fifteen to strip it. They weren’t as efficient as Miner’s Helpers.
They flashed clear. The Side leader sent in a Mining and Accounts team. There was a lot that the Miners did not understand, but they understood the laser weapons components in principle. They were like cutting beacons. There was the collector, and there was the charger, and there was the pump, and there was the fuser-cutter generator. It was odd that they had modified the assembly to serve as a weapon. This would not enhance ar.
They extracted the crystal. Judging from its affect when reflected back onto its source, this was quite valuable. This was what the vermin produced in the dirty smelters that reduced ar. Their own vitrifying fusers worked just as well, but not in so small a space. They required a team of three, but this seemed to require only one operator. The miner assessed a temporary bowl value. The Accountant issued orders to the Warriors. The Miner began calculating net ar required for production, but had to stop until they could consult a Farmer. A Runner streaked past, carrying a crystal sample to Enheduanna. Porters departed. Work finished, Warriors exterminated War Rats, except for a few personal pets. It was kinder. They could not survive out here. There was no ar.
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