by John Varley
And what about the soldiers? It had looked to me as if the Heinleiners had fired the first shot. All sane reasoning would lead me to think that, if that first soldier hadn't been hit, this could all have ended peacefully at the jailhouse with a lot of lawyers arguing, charges brought, countersuits filed. I'd have been out on bail within a few hours.
Which was still what I'd have liked to have done, and would have, but any fool could see things had gone too far for that. If I stepped out waving a white flag I was pretty sure I'd be killed, apologies sent to the next of kin. So Hildy, I told myself, your first priority is to get out of here without getting shot. Let the lawyers sort it out later, when the bullets aren't flying.
With that end in mind, I started crawling toward the door. My intent was to stick my head out, low, and see what stood between me and the nearest exit. Which turned out to be a black boot planted solidly in the doorway, almost under my nose by the time I got there. I looked up the black-clad leg and into the menacing face of a soldier. He was pointing a weapon at me, some great bulky thing I thought might be a machine gun, whose muzzle looked wide enough to spit baseballs.
"I'm unarmed," I said.
"That's the way I like 'em," he said, and flipped up his visor with his thumb. There was something in his eyes I didn't like. I mean, beyond everything else I didn't like about the situation. Just a little touch of madness, I think.
He was a big man with a broad face entirely innocent of any evidence of thought. But now a thought did flicker behind those eyes, and his brow wrinkled.
"What's your name?"
"H… Helga Smith."
"Nah," he said, and dug into a pocket for a datapad, which he scanned with a thumb control until my lovely phiz smiled back at us. He returned the smile, but I didn't, because his smile was the worst news I'd had so far in a day filled with bad news. "You're Hildy Johnson," he said, "and you're on the death list so it don't matter what happens here, see?" And he started working on his belt, one-handed, the other hand keeping the gun pointed at my forehead.
I found myself getting detached from events. Maybe it was a reflex action, something to distance oneself from an abomination about to happen. Or maybe it was just too many things that couldn't be happening. This can't be happening. I'd silently shrieked it one too many times and now a mental numbness was setting in. I ought to be thinking of something to do. I ought to be talking to him, asking questions. Anything. Instead, I just sat there, squatting on my heels, and felt as if I'd like to go to sleep.
But my senses were heightened. They must have been, because with all the shooting going on outside (how could he do this in the middle of a war?), and over the scream of a dying compressor motor in the overturned freezer I was able to hear a voice from the grave. A growl.
The soldier didn't hear it, or maybe he was too busy. He had his pants down around his heels and he knelt in front of me and that's when I saw Winston, dragging his hind leg, bleeding from his gut, eyes filled with murder.
The man lowered himself over me.
I wanted Winston to bite him… well, you know where I wanted Winston to bite him. I got second best. The bulldog fastened on the soft flesh of the soldier's inner thigh. The man's leg jerked in pain, and he was flying over me. I grabbed the strap of his rifle as he went by.
He had strength and mass on his side, but there was the little matter of Winston. The dog had cut an artery. The soldier tried to wrestle his rifle away from me with one hand and pry Winston loose with the other and ended up doing both things badly. Blood was spraying everywhere. I was screaming. Not the big full scream you hear at the movies, and not a scream of rage, but a high-pitched scary thing I was powerless to stop.
Then I got one hand on the barrel of the rifle, and one hand on the stock, and fumbled for the trigger as he realized what was happening and gave up his struggle with Winston, concentrating on me. He got his hand over the barrel. Sadly for him, it was over the end of the barrel, and when I squeezed the trigger his hand wasn't there anymore. It wasn't anywhere anymore, but the air was full of a red mist.
The soldier never did stop fighting. I guess that's why they're soldiers. With Winston hanging from his leg, his pants around his ankles, missing a hand, he still came at me and I swung the rifle up and held the trigger down and didn't really see what happened next because on full auto-fire the weapon packed such a kick that I was knocked on my ass again, and when I opened my eyes he was mostly on the walls, except for bits here and there on the floor, and the one big piece still in Winston's mouth.
I could say I paused and reflected on the enormity of taking a human life, or how nauseated I was at the sight of his dismembered body. I did think of those things, and many others. But later. Much later. At that time my mind had collapsed on itself and was only large enough to hold a few thoughts, and only one of those at a time. First, I was going to get out of there. Second, anybody between me and getting out of there was going to have a Hildy-sized hole drilled right through his or her stinking carcass. I had killed, and by god I meant to keep on killing if that's what I had to do to get to safety.
"Winston. Here, boy." I got up on one knee and talked to him. I didn't know what to expect. Would he recognize me? Was he too far gone in bloodlust?
But after a final shake of the soldier's leg, he let go and came to me. He was dragging his hind leg and he was gut-shot, but still walking.
I will admit I don't know why I took him. I mean, I really don't. My holocam recorded the scene, but it doesn't tape thoughts. Mine weren't very organized just then. I remember thinking I sure as hell owed him. It also crossed my mind that I was probably safer with him than without him; he was one hell of a weapon. I prefer to think I thought those things in that order. I won't swear to it.
I scooped him up in one arm, holding the rifle in the other, and stuck my head around the corner. Nobody blew it off. Nobody seemed to be moving at all. The square was a lot smokier and there was still a lot of gunfire, but everyone seemed to have taken cover. I could do that, too, and wait for somebody to find me, or I could use the smoke to hide in, knowing I could easily stumble on someone else who was doing the same thing, and was a better shot than I was.
I don't know how you make a decision like that. I mean, I made it, but I don't recall weighing the pro's and con's. I just looked around the corner, didn't see anybody, and then I was running.
Actually, running is a very generous word for what I did, with a dying dog tucked under one arm and a heavy weapon dangling from the other. And don't forget a belly the size of Phobos. Thank god holocams record only what you see, and not what you look like. That couldn't have been an image I'd like preserved for posterity.
My goal was the entrance to a corridor that led back toward the Heinlein, and I was about halfway there when someone behind me yelled "Halt!" in a firm and not-at-all-friendly voice, and things happened very fast… and I did everything right, even with all the things that went wrong.
I turned and kept back-pedaling, slowly, and I dropped Winston (who uttered the only yelp of pain he made through his entire heroic ordeal-and I'm sorry, Winston, wherever you are). I saw it was a King City cop, and he was young, and he looked as scared as I was, and he carried a huge drilling laser, which was pointed at me.
"Drop your weapon," he said, and I said Sorry, chum, this isn't personal, only not out loud, and I pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, and it was then I noticed the blinking red light on this curved metal thingy that must have been the ammo clip, and which must have been saying feed me!, or words to that effect in gun-language, and understood why what I'd thought was a short burst had had such a cataclysmic effect on my would-be rapist. So I dropped the gun and I held up my hands, and I saw Winston making his last dash, hobbling across the ten meters or so that separated us, and I put my hands out, palms up, and I shouted No!, and I will swear in any court in the world that I saw the man's finger tightening on the trigger from ten meters away, with the muzzle wavering between me and Winston as if he could
n't decide which to shoot first. And I know this is flatly impossible, but I even thought I saw the light start to come out the end of the weapon in the same fraction of a second that I grabbed my null-suit control and twisted it hard.
I was dazzled by green light. For a few moments I was blind. When vision returned the world was full of multi-colored incandescent balloons that drifted here and there, obscuring the world, popping like cartoon soap bubbles. I was sweating horribly inside my suit-field. It could have been worse. Outside the field, most everything seemed to be on fire.
About the only way you can go wrong with a laser is to shoot it at a mirror. You couldn't blame the cop for that. I hadn't been a mirror when he pulled the trigger; it was that close.
But he really should have let go a lot sooner.
Everywhere the beam hit me, it was reflected back, but because the human body is much a complex shape the reflected beam went all over the place. The resulting scorch line hit the walls in many places, melting plastic panels and starting fires behind them. It hit the cop at least three times. I think any of them would have been fatal without quick treatment. He was lying still, with flames engulfing his clothing in three deep, black slashes.
Somewhere in its wild gyrations the beam had hit Winston. His fur was on fire and he wasn't moving, either.
I was trying to think of what to do when a high wind rose. It briefly whipped the flames into a white-hot frenzy, but then it snuffed them out. All the smoke cleared in an instant and the scene took on that crisp clarity you find only in vacuum.
I turned, and ran for cover.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I crouched in a pile of chrome-plated pipes not twenty meters from two patrolling figures in spacesuits, trying to pretend I was just another piece of bent pipe. I wasn't quite sure how to go about this. Don't move, and think tubular thoughts, I finally decided, and it had worked so far.
I was keeping one eye on the clock, one eye on the soldiers, and one eye on the blinking red light in my head-up display. Since this adds up to three eyes, you can imagine how busy I was. I was the busiest motionless person you ever saw. Or didn't see.
As if that weren't enough, I was calling every telephone number in my vast mental card file.
Forget those trivial inventions like fire, the wheel, the bow and arrow, the plow. Man didn't become truly civilized until Alex Bell uttered those immortal words, "Shit, Watson, I spilled acid all over my balls." Hiding there with my oxygen running out, my only hope of staying alive lay in getting some help over the telephone, and if it worked I resolved to light a candle every year on Mr. Bell's birthday.
My situation was dire, but it could have been worse. I could have been a member of the King City police dragooned (I later learned) into the first wave of the assault on Virginia City. In addition to the hazards of an armed populace, not to mention the meanest, gamest dog who ever lived, they had the added problem of not having pressure suits when the second wave, which attacked from the surface, began cutting the cables which brought power from the solar panels topside, which powered the null-fields which kept the air in.
That's what had happened just after I was lasered by the last cop. It was the air rushing out of the public square that had first fanned, then extinguished the flames on Winston's corpse.
It wasn't a blow-out like the one at Nirvana, or I wouldn't be here to tell you about it. What we're used to in a blow-out is a lot of air rushing through a relatively small hole. You get picked up and battered, then you get squeezed, and even in a null-suit your chances of survival are slim. But when a null-field goes, it goes all at once, and the air just expands. You get a gentle wind, then poof! Like a soap bubble. And then you get a lot of cops and soldiers grabbing their throats, spitting blood, and falling quietly to the ground. I saw two people die like this. I guess it's a fairly quick, peaceful way to go, but I still get nauseous just thinking about it.
At the time I thought the Heinleiners had done it. It was a logical tactic. It was the way they customarily fought fires, and god knows there were plenty of fires by the time the air went. And it just didn't make sense that their own people would cut the power, knowing the first group didn't have suits.
Well, it was their own people who did it, and it wasn't the only thing about the assault that didn't make sense. But I learned about that much later. Hiding there in the pipes all I knew is that a lot of people had tried to kill me, and a lot more were still trying. It had been a game of cat and mouse for about three hours since the null-field power went down.
The power loss had immediately turned the corridor I meant to travel to the Heinlein from a silvery cylinder into a borehole through eons of trash, just like the one I had traveled to lo those many weeks ago to enter this crazy funhouse in the first place. That was a damn good thing, because not long after the blowout I met the first of many pressure-suited people coming down the path in the other direction.
We didn't actually meet, which was another good thing, because he or she was carrying a laser just like the one that had almost fried me. I saw him (I'm going to say him, because all the soldiers were male and there was something in the way he moved) while he was still some distance from me, and I quickly melted into the wall. Or into where the wall had been, you see. There were thousands of gaps along the corridor large enough for even a pregnant woman to squeeze through.
Once into one of the gaps, however, you never knew what lay beyond. You had entered a world with no rational order to it, a three-dimensional random maze made of random materials, some of it locked in place by the pressure of other junk above it, some of it alarmingly unstable. In some of these hidey-holes you could slip through here and squeeze through there and swing across a gap in another place, like in a collapsed jungle gym. In others, two meters in and you found a cul-de-sac a rat would have found impassable. You never knew. There was simply no way to tell from the outside.
That first refuge was one of the shallow ones, so I had pressed myself against a flat surface and began learning the Zen of immobility. I had several things going for me. No need to hold my breath, since I was already doing that because of the null-suit. No need to be very quiet, because of the vacuum. And in the suit he might not have seen me if I'd been lying right in his path.
I told myself all those things, but I still aged twenty years as he crept by, swinging his laser left and right, close enough that I could have reached out and touched him.
Then he had passed, and it started getting very dark again. (Did I mention all the lights went out when the power failed? They did. I'd never have seen him if he hadn't been carrying a flashlight.)
I wanted that flashlight. I wanted it more than anything in the world. Without it, I didn't see how I'd ever make it to safety. It had already gotten dark enough that I could barely see the useless rifle I'd carried with me, and wouldn't see anything at all when he'd moved a little farther along.
I almost jumped out of my skin when I realized he could have seen the flashing red light on the empty clip as he passed; I'd forgotten to cover it up. If only I had another… then I looked more closely at the clip. It had an opening at the end, and a brass shell casing gleamed in there. I realized it was two clips taped together. The idea was to reverse it when you'd used up the first. God, soldiers are tricky bastards.
So I reversed it, almost dropping first the clip, then the rifle, and I leaned out into the corridor and squeeze off a shot in the direction the soldier had come from to see if the damn thing worked. From the recoil I felt, I knew it did. I hadn't counted on the muzzle flash, but apparently the man didn't see it.
Stepping out into the corridor, I fired a short burst into the soldier's back. Hey, even if I could have shouted a warning to him in vacuum, I really don't think I would have. You don't know the depths you can sink to when all you're thinking about is survival.
His suit was tough, and my aim was not the best. One round hit him and it didn't puncture his suit, just sent him stumbling down the path, turning, bringing his wea
pon up, so I fired again, a lot longer this time, and it did the trick.
I won't describe the mess I had to sort through to find his light.
***
My fusillade had destroyed his laser and used up my last ammo clip, so encumbered with only the flashlight and what remained of my wits I set out looking for air.
That was the trick, of course. The null-suit was a great invention, no doubt about it. It had saved my life. But it left something to be desired in the area of endurance. If a Heinleiner wanted to spend much time in vacuum he'd strap a tank onto his back, just like everyone else, and attach a hose to the breast fitting in front. Without a strap-on, the internal tank was good for twenty to thirty-five minutes, depending on exertion. Forty minutes at the outside. Like, for instance, if you were asleep.
I hadn't done much sleeping and didn't plan on any soon, but I hadn't thought it would be a problem at first. All or the corridors were provided with an ALU every half-kilometer or so. The power to these had been cut, but they still had big air tanks which should still be full. Re-charging my internal tank should be just a matter of hooking the little adapter hose to my air fitting, twisting a valve, and watching the little needle in my head-up swing over to the FULL position.
The first time, it was that easy. But I could see even then that having to search out an ALU every half hour was the weakest point in my not-very-strong survival strategy. I couldn't keep it up endlessly. I had to either get out of there on my own or call for help.
Calling seemed to make the most sense. I still had no idea what was happening beyond the limits of Heinlein Town, but had no reason to suspect that if I could get through to a lawyer, or to the pad, my problems would not be over. But I couldn't call from the corridor. There was too much junk over my head; the signal would not get through. However, through sheer luck or divine providence I was in one of the corridors I was fairly familiar with. A branch up to the left should take me right out onto the surface.