The Armies of Memory

by John Barnes

  “Team One is crossing the street,” Margaret’s voice said in my headphones. “Team Two is at failsafe and ready to move up.” Team Two was the follow-on wave to One; their job was to occupy Team One’s place as soon as Team One advanced.

  “Team One is at fail-go,” their team leader said.

  “Go Team One, go Team Two, go Team Three.”

  Before she had finished the final long e, Raimbaut had tripped the door. It flew upward and Laprada raised her weapon. I rolled through, low, so that she could shoot over me if she had to; gravel and dirt crunched under my back as I came up beside the trash springer. I flipped it onto its side and activated it; as long as it kept running, any bullets fired into it would rematerialize at the dump, and I was behind it.

  “Clear,” I said, softly, into my mouthpiece, but of course Raimbaut hadn’t waited. He was across the alley in two steps and pushed the claphammer up against the place where the bolt went into the jamb.

  “Heads,” he said. We crouched, and there was a loud thudclang followed by several crashes around the alley; a claphammer bolt slams forward at about Mach 4, and though the claphammer itself has molecular-bonding feet to maximize the force delivered, normally they tear out and the claphammer itself goes flying.

  Laprada passed over me in a blur and was at her position, right of the warehouse door, while it was still falling inward. I charged forward into the dark opening, let my shoulder slam the wall to turn quicker, and sprinted left into the building.

  I was very, very lucky. Their rear guard had been paying too much attention forward; it took the three soldiers in front of me just an instant longer to turn than it otherwise might, and I had been through enough of these so that it was instinct to always go through a door with your weapon leveled at personheight. When I saw moving shapes, I didn’t have to think whether they were Raimbaut, who was rolling onto the floor at my feet, or Laprada, who wasn’t due in yet. The silhouettes were in my target frame and I squeezed the trigger. Neuroducer darts flicked out, trailing their microfiber lines, and caught all three of them before they could quite get their masers around.

  The instant the neuroducers found body armor in front of them, they accelerated to punch their needles through to the flesh beneath. I’ve been hit by those; it feels like a bee sting, but only for a fraction of a second, because as soon as they have a connection to the nervous system, they activate. These neuroducers disconnected their brains from running the show while leaving them up to fool the monitoring. The three men ragdolled to the floor, and Raimbaut leapt down the hall to throw his suppressor net over them.

  A sheet of flame and a mighty thunder came around the corner and slammed him into the wall, setting the carpet and his clothes on fire. I said “Medic” into my mike without pausing, raced forward, and sprayed him all over with one of the little disposable fire extinguishers that look like a child’s water gun. I took a second with the little air gun of sedative to sting our three prisoners through the suppressor net; I didn’t want anything to happen behind me.

  Laprada, at my side, helped me drag Raimbaut back from the bend in the corridor. As soon as he was half a meter back he sat up and said, “I’m all right, just playing possum, lots of shooting up that way—”

  “All right, I’ve got your station, you guys get those doors open.” Laprada handed him her string of claphammers and lay down on the floor, looking oddly like a little girl playing army in her helmet with a blonde braid hanging out the back. I’d have to remember to pester her for not pinning that up well enough—

  There was a hiss-bang and part of the wall opposite me flared welding-arc white, and began to smolder. With a cry, Laprada pulled her head back. A maser had reflected off the top of her helmet, diffusing as it went so that it set a large area of the wall on fire; it was good to know that the microwave diffraction surfaces under the paint were still doing their job.

  “Heads,” Raimbaut said.

  She made a fart noise at him and tossed a grenade around the corner.

  We crouched. The flash-bang made the dusty air in the corridor shimmer. Laprada crawled forward to the corner. “Get those doors,” she repeated, insistently.

  We ran down the corridor; two doors. We slapped claphammers onto them just below their knobs. “Clear,” Raimbaut barked, and we crouched, him up by Laprada, me back at the start of the corridor, our unconscious prisoners under the net stretched on the ground between us.

  At the krang-bing-bing-tunk of the two ricocheting claphammers, I ducked back to take one door while Raimbaut took the other. One quick step brought me, weapon leveled, face-to-face with a vacuum cleaner and stacked boxes of toilet tissue.

  Raimbaut’s cry of rage told me he’d found more action. As I turned, Raimbaut was backing away to the wall, his hands up. In my peripheral vision I saw that, beside the man covering Raimbaut, there was now another one covering me.

  I raised my hands; that’s what they want you to do. Then I looked frightened and sick—or did my best, there being no drama critics in the room, but anyway it worked on this toszet—and went limp, falling sideways and letting my weapon drop. That got their attention all the way toward me, and me down on the nice safe floor. Laprada hit them from behind with neuroducer darts.

  I tossed my suppressor net over them as Raimbaut rolled to the side of the open doorway. Two maser blasts, unscattered by anything, punched thumb-diameter holes in the wall across from the door; Raimbaut and I looked at each other across the gap. It would be death for either of us to lean into that doorway. Experimentally, I tossed in an unsecured claphammer on a halfsecond delay; it clanged once before it blew apart under maser fire, like a clay pigeon facing twenty shooters.

  It was hard to see where we were going to go from here. “Margaret, Team Three here,” I said. “You can scratch the medic, we’re all up and moving. We’re in the back corridor, not able to advance to any forward position. We have five prisoners but nothing else of any value. Got a change of plan?”

  “We’re forming up some CSPs to extract you. So far you’re the most successful part of the operation. Try to sit tight.”

  There was a deep bass rumble from far inside the building, and then a series of crashes and bangs and a lot of confused shouting. I heard the hisses and whuffs of maser fire everywhere, and the soft whumping of neuroducer grenades.

  “I’ll try,” I said, “but we may not be able to hold. We can hear the main force. Sounds like they’re giving them a hell of a fight.”

  “Giraut, the main force was wiped out trying to get in the front door, and apart from you we have no one in the building.”

  “Well, somebody’s fighting,” I said, crossly. It was just like Margaret, in a crisis, to insist that she knew everything. “In fact there’s more firing and noise every second.”

  As if to belie me, the shooting stopped and someone began yelling at other someones to “Throw down your weapons! We mean it! Throw them down!”

  “Not only that,” I added, “somebody won.”

  “I can hear through your audio pickup, Giraut. Sorry. I have no idea who that is or what’s going on. I’d suggest that your team extract itself, right now, if you can.”

  I glanced and saw that she’d been copying Raimbaut and Laprada; the two of them, across that deadly doorway from me, nodded. Since we couldn’t cross the open doorway, Raimbaut on his side, and I on mine, simply drew our masers, held the beam on sustain, and drew big circles on the opposite wall, leaving door-sized openings.

  Laprada and Raimbaut rolled through the hole on their side, and I dove through mine. We rolled to our feet and formed up in what I’d have to say was a very professional manner.

  But style only counts for so much.

  We were surrounded by ten men in the uniforms of the old Occitan Legion, uniforms that had been illegal ever since the massacre in Caledony twenty-eight years ago. And though their uniforms might be an obscure part of history, the weapons they held were completely up-to-date.

  “Hands up very ve
ry slowly, si’ilh gratz-a-vos fai,” Ebles Ribaterra said. He was wearing knee-high boots and a vivid red tabard as well as the purple tapi, and all the funny bits of metal on him probably meant he was an officer. “Is one of you in touch with your commander?”

  “We all are,” I said.

  “Can your commander hear me?”

  “Tell him I can,” Margaret said, quietly, in my ear.

  “She can hear you.”

  Ebles swept a low bow, doffing his peaked, folded, plumed cap (it looked a bit as if it had been stolen from a road company of Robin Hood.) “Officially, then, I am instructed to make contact and secure cooperation with representatives of the Council of Humanity. The operation you attacked here was not only illegal under your laws, but under the laws of the Kingdom of Noucatharia as well. Do you accept a truce for negotiation?”

  “Tell him we do,” Margaret said, in my ear.

  “My commander advises me that we accept.”

  Every one of the men around me holstered his weapon, extended his right leg, held his hands palm up, and bent his left knee, bowing over the extended leg in the traditional Occitan gesture of deep respect.

  “Margaret,” I said, very softly, “if you’re still getting signal from my helmet camera, I think we are very far off the plan.”

  “Yap,” she said, just about the only word she still used of Reason, the language of her home culture. “Yap,” again.

  It meant yes-but-more-than-yes; hell-yes, yes-without-reservations, absolutely totally god-damn-it-to-hell I-really-mean-it yes. And at the moment it was inadequate to the situation.

  3

  “Well, no,” Margaret said. “It’s really not all that odd that we should get along. It is true that my agency would rather that his people didn’t exist, and in fact put some effort into preventing them from existing. And it is true that they consider us to be monsters of tyranny from whom they very sensibly fled. But setting all that aside, when you come down to the hard cold core of things, he’s a cop and I’m a cop. And that means we have more in common than not.” She leaned back in her chair, and the camera on her desk tracked her; for the millionth time in my life, at least, I was reminded that whatever anyone else thought of Margaret’s appearance, I adored it, and however much trouble I might have getting along with her in person, I would miss her forever.

  “So far,” she said, “Ebles has answered every question I could reasonably expect him to answer. Apparently the ultratraditional faction was particularly upset with your work on the Ix Cycle because you were using such extremely non-Occitan material, as they saw it, and further upset because a new, un-Occitan cult was so interested in your work, and even more upset because you were taking Occitan culture out to the wider world and diluting it. And it was especially offensive because your career started out recording very traditional material, so the whole thing was a betrayal by a cultural hero. And for reasons he does not want to discuss in detail, creating a fast-grown chimera in Union is simply not as difficult as it is here—might not even be illegal. The process is inherently cheap if you don’t have to watch out for cops. Even though there is something that makes me want to throw up when I think about weaponized human beings, I can believe that if there were no laws against creating these single-purpose miserable dying monsters, even a small terrorist faction could afford them—they’re no more expensive than an atom bomb or a strain of pneumonic plague. I have to admit that the story makes sense. You see what a nice simple story it is?”

  “You don’t believe it.”

  “I don’t.” She drummed her fingers on the desk, staring down at the surface in front of her, not looking at me. Something she didn’t want to say, but no way around it—“Just start with the fact that they were awfully well prepared for us at the warehouse in Nou Occitan, and Ebles turned up with the cavalry far too perfectly on time. He even showed up on your side of the building—how perfect is that?”

  “Then why don’t we just play footsies a little longer and see if he lets more slip, or we learn more from other sources?”

  “Because events are pushing me a lot faster than I want to go. We now have a contact channel with a real extraterritorial colony, instead of a welter of rumors and best guesses. Even better, Ebles is dropping hints like mad that what they want to do is apply to be a constituent state in the Council of Humanity—basically they’re asking for a seat on the Council, charter recognition and annexation. That means the Council won’t have to set a precedent of conquering an extraterritorial, which they’d rather not do, but they also won’t have to have an extraterritorial, which is something they want even less. The precedent couldn’t be more beautiful—the unauthorized colony is located on Aurenga, wherever that may be, which doesn’t have enough qualifying dry land to make a culture space, so there’s not even an issue of their having taken space that should have gone to someone else. So if this is done right, it will be a major coup for the OSP.”

  “And the doing it right is the hard part?”

  “Yap. Yap. Yap.” She was nodding like she was trying to flick her head off the end of her neck. “Right now our major advantage is that only the Board of the OSP even knows it’s a possibility, and we can’t know how long that happy state of affairs will persist. Since we’ve never had an illegal colony try to regularize its status, the Council of Humanity, as soon as they get involved, will be running in circles and screaming and shouting for an indefinite period of time. It’s what they do every time they realize that there’s some work to be done and that people are watching them again. Once the formal, public diplomacy begins, every possible embarrassment, pointless delay, and somebody-sticking-an-oar-in will happen.

  “So you, Raimbaut, and Laprada will be going to Noucatharia. They’re going to present you in the guise of being humanity’s most popular Occitan artist.” Margaret sighed. “Giraut, you do know I’m still fond of you? Forgetting all about being a trusted agent, or my ex-husband, or my partner for so long—you’re the best friend I’ve got, in a field where we don’t get to keep many friends.”

  “This is an extremely ominous way to begin the serious, secret part of the conversation.”

  “It is,” she admitted, “and how did you know I was about to?”

  “Because in twenty-eight years of being my friend, and fifteen years of being my boss, Margaret, you’ve always saved the superserious secret section for last. Also because I happened to notice that you’ve been as nervous as a rat in a room full of boa constrictors.”

  She smiled a not-convincing smile at my bantering, but at least she got down to business. “I’m sending you into a trap, Giraut. And I don’t know whose trap it is or what they want to trap you for. The time has run out for just waiting and seeing, and whatever opportunity there might be, it’s now or never—the Council will be receiving a petition from Noucatharia in just about nine stanweeks.” She held up one outstretched hand, palm toward her, and, with her other hand, began pressing the fingers down. “Five facts that bother me. Fact One: Ebles isn’t telling us the whole truth.

  “Fact Two: Noucatharia is impossible and Aurenga shouldn’t be where it evidently is. Do the math. The Lost Legion settled Noucatharia within five months of getting off parole. And Ebles tells us that Aurenga is somewhere tens of light-years beyond Wilson, the farthest planet out in its direction, which built its first springer less than eight stanyears before the Lost Legion moved to Noucatharia. The strange thing is he seems to be telling the truth. From pictures and artifacts we have from Aurenga, we know that there’s no planet like Aurenga within that old roughly fifty-light-years-from-Earth frontier. So the directions broadcast from Earth, about how to build a springer, could only be reaching Aurenga about now, or shouldn’t quite have gotten there yet. So how could there have been people, or a springer, on Aurenga, to create Noucatharia, twenty years ago?

  “That led me to Fact Three.” She punched her middle finger down as if she were forcing it into her hand. “Noucatharia has three thousand people, half of them chil
dren. Start with about a hundred Lost Legionnaires, almost all of whom found a fertile spouse somewhere … two hundred people. Suppose they follow Nou Occitan custom and count everyone over sixteen as adults. They started settling twenty-six years ago, so to have thirteen hundred more adults than they started with, in the first ten stanyears of the colony, one hundred women had thirteen hundred babies. Barely credible if everyone’s taking drugs to have multiple births. Then we have fifteen hundred children born in the last sixteen years, which is at least less preposterous since they’ve been adding eighty mothers a year. But still Aurenga has to have been Planet of the Pregnant for two decades.”

  “Couldn’t they have been producing them all in vitro?”

  “Who raises them? You’re still looking at families with ten to fifteen young kids at home making up almost all households. Nothing impossible about it, just not terribly plausible. Especially since Ebles admitted he had no children himself. And still their population is only possible as long as nobody ever dies. Which brings us to Fact Four. Aintellect, picture up—”

  The picture popped up on the com screen, replacing Margaret’s image. Over it, her voice said, “Our sources say this was taken in Noucatharia earlier this year.”

  It was unmistakably a cemetery—a large one, in the middle of a sizable city. “And this one … and this one …” Two more shots of the same place established its size, and the size of the city around it.

  “Margaret, that’s got to be at least a thousand graves.”

  “Right. And the city beyond, just counting apartment buildings, should house ten thousand people, just in the part we can see. So they are lying to conceal something very big—Noucatharia is many times the size they told us, which happens to be the barely-believable maximum size in the first place. And notice too that there are no fresh graves and no weathered headstones, as you’d expect in a cemetery that had been open long enough to accumulate so many graves.