by David Gunn
Shooting him is like shooting myself.
The soldier behind grabs the launcher and swears as red-hot steel burns his hands, but he still has time to fire off a rocket before shrapnel opens his stomach and he stumbles, torn between reloading and the need to repack his own guts.
As the five landing craft empty, another five take their place. The ramp releases are better coordinated this time, steel sides hitting the riverbank in unison.
I take a major; at least I think he’s a major. The man behind him dies, and the man behind that, and my next shot rips open the face of a corporal who steps into the gap. She goes down, ground to pulp as those behind her scrabble to reach solid ground.
Vals 9 and 11 have their rocket launcher cranked as low as it will go, which is still not low enough. In desperation they spin the handle in the other direction, raising the barrels until it points almost vertically. Eight rockets hit the sky together, arc high, and fall toward the next wave of Hex-Sevens. Unfortunately the ramps go down seconds before the rockets can hit.
And most of the rockets miss anyway.
Mortars are being lobbed from inside the city. And the Silver Fist are retaliating with rockets from batteries on the far side of the river. There’s a whole other battle going on above our heads, but one thing I know for sure: Both sides are extracting a heavy cost in enemy lives.
“Fall back,” orders Ion.
“Not yet…” My words are drowned under gunfire, and it’s too late anyway: The mercenaries are abandoning their foxholes and moving toward the trench behind us. Crouched over their weapons, they walk backward, never once taking their eyes off Silver Fist.
Both Vals die, and a woman darts forward, drops to a crouch behind them, and slices into the backs of their necks with her dagger. The implants are still twitching as she stuffs wires, broken nerves, and core into her pocket. At least their memories will be going home.
“We need to hold,” I scream at Neen.
“Zero minus ten,” says my gun. “Timing’s okay.”
Seventy minutes have gone, ten longer than we needed to hold. It seems impossible, but then I realize fifteen Hex-Sevens have disgorged their troops, the floodplain in front of us is slick with blood, and I’m almost out of ammunition. I have to retreat, if only because the trench is where my next arms cache is waiting.
“Sir,” says Neen. “Please.” He looks worried that I might want the Aux to stick it out on their own.
“Fall back,” I tell him.
The next few hours take our numbers below a hundred. Anyone who makes it through to the end of the battle is guaranteed a way out of here. Apart from us, obviously…
It shows in a change of tactics. Driven by his determination not to be overrun, Ion sets up a row of belt-fed machine guns and fills the gaps with snipers, half a dozen marksmen he’s been holding in reserve. Most are female, which is interesting. I’m not sure I knew women made the best shots. At my suggestion, the Aux join them.
Occasionally suicide squads set out from the Silver Fist side, and that’s when we really come into our own, picking off the teams one by one and leaving the last out in the mud, badly wounded and usually screaming.
We’ve hit them hard, certainly hard enough to ensure that the final run of Hex-Sevens begins to unload its cargo on the far side of the river where Silver Fist sappers are busy constructing a camp.
Night is creeping across this world, and a cold wind is rising from the marshes around us. An alligator booms its challenge, unless it’s something else. I used to know the sound of every animal in the desert. Where I am now, its animals and plants are strange, its winds unexpected, and its weather patterns unclear.
We can fight in the dark, of course, and so can they. Night goggles are piled in boxes behind me. Ion wears a helmet with a visor that achieves daylight clarity with minimal weight. My own helmet does much the same. At this point I’m wishing I insisted on similar helmets for the Aux.
“You okay?” Ion asks.
Turning, I find him beside me. “Yeah.”
He nods. “Good. I’m pulling back to the gates. You guys intend to stay?”
Neen is watching me, his glance nervous, then resigned. A couple of seconds and he’s already adjusted to the idea-pretty impressive, if unnecessary.
“No,” I say. “We’ll be coming with you.”
Sixty-eight people out of 505 make it back to the city. When you knock me, Neen, Haze, Shil, and Franc out of that figure, you get sixty-three and that’s not even going to fill the available seats on the last ship out of here.
But the colonel’s rules are clear. If you weren’t beyond the gate when the Silver Fist attacked you’re not eligible for one of those places. They’ll go begging and the ship will take off with thirty-seven seats still empty.
CHAPTER 39
Maybe it’s their backstory, but Franc, the shaven-headed woman with the evil grin and a belt full of knives, turns anxious every time Haze speaks to her.
It would be funny, if it wasn’t sad.
We’re sitting in the kitchen of our house. Maria is boiling water for coffee, for washing, and to dress the wounds we didn’t even realize we had until we made it back to warmth and safety.
Neen has taken a slug through his shoulder, just below his left arm. It’s a clean shot that shows daylight on both sides. I’m not sure he realizes how lucky he is. Maria’s fussing, Shil’s doing her best not to be jealous, and Haze has just told Franc that he’ll protect her.
“From what?” I ask. “What are you expecting to happen?”
“Nightmares.”
Maria and Shil both flash the sign against the evil eye. Maria, I can understand, but Shil…
“What, sir?” she demands, seeing me look at her.
“How can you believe that stuff?”
“Sir, how can you not?”
She’s got using sir as an insult down to a fine art. It doesn’t help my temper that she probably learned it from me.
“Tonight,” says Haze, “is going to be grim.”
“You know what they’re planning?” asks Neen. The speed with which he asks this reveals his desire for a rapid change of subject.
“Yes,” says Haze. “I believe so.”
“A psychic attack?” asks Maria.
He shakes his head, not bothering to hide his smile. “That’s a myth,” he says. “They’ll use gas. The wind is from the marshes. The Enlightened won’t want to waste that.”
“I should tell the colonel.”
“Tell him now,” says Haze, glancing at his slab.
Colonel Nuevo is drunk. One of the great advantages of being the most senior officer in an occupied city is that no one is going to point this out, at least not to your face. The other is that when you decide to go walkabout, because you’re bored and have nothing better to do, half a dozen officers and bodyguards are going to ride shotgun like fancy shadows behind you.
“Thought I’d find you here,” he says when I open the door. “Was going to send for you, but…”
But what never materializes. Instead Colonel Nuevo wanders into my house and hesitates in the hall. “Where is everybody?”
“We’re in the kitchen.”
He follows me down a corridor, the sound of his cavalry boots echoing off the walls, his posse of silver braid following along behind.
“Bread,” he exclaims, and Franc freezes, a freshly baked loaf in her hands. Everyone else jumps to their feet, although Neen is marginally slower than the rest of us.
“You’re wounded.”
Neen shrugs, realizes this isn’t polite, and says, “Minor, sir. Pretty clean, went straight through.”
It’s the right answer.
Without being asked, Maria puts a fat slice of freshly baked bread in front of the colonel, then adds a saucer of oil and watches him demolish the lot.
“How did it go?” asks the colonel. He’s talking to me. A major and two captains are waiting to see what I’ll reply.
“No worse than I’d
expect.”
He smiles. “I’m letting the mercenaries go.”
“So I would imagine, sir.”
“You want to go with them?”
I shake my head.
Something ghostly crosses his face. “Sleep well,” he says. “Come and see me in the morning…”
The ship carrying Ion and his crew explodes when it passes the first ball buster. Haze, my gun, and I see this as a fireball high in the night sky, like a new star burning over Ilseville. As ash and metal fragments rain down on the city, the SIG says, “Glad we’re not on that.”
I can only agree. “Silver Fist?”
“No,” says Haze. “Us.”
We’re both wearing full combat armor and breathing a mix from canisters fixed to our belts. The city is spread out beneath us, a jumble of streets and squares, all poisoned by the psychotropic gas that has been carried in on the night wind.
People howl like animals, and marsh foxes scream like murdered children. I’ve got the Aux locked indoors, in the house below. All have injected themselves with battlefield opiates in an attempt to hold their nightmares at bay.
Except for Haze, obviously. He’s on the roof with me, and we’re talking about how to handle what comes next. He’s going to be an even, a thinker. Two buds have already broken through his scalp and most of his hair is gone, probably still tangled into the drain of the shower where I found him an hour ago.
Somehow I’m going to have to find a way to tell Colonel Nuevo about this that makes it sound good. And I’m worried about the colonel’s own capacity to deal with the dreams.
Although, as it turns out, I needn’t have bothered.
When I reach his HQ next morning Colonel Nuevo is washing vomit from his naked chest and shouting at his orderly for a clean uniform. The orderly looks the way his superior deserves to feel, but obviously doesn’t. It seems Colonel Nuevo drank himself into such a stupor that no dreams had the strength to infest his sleep.
“Bloody useless man,” the colonel tells me. So I repeat what I originally told him about the gas.
“Jacket,” shouts the colonel, ignoring me.
Bringing him a dress jacket, the orderly lays it out on the bed. Before the colonel can object, he says, “It’s all you have left.”
This is a Colonel Nuevo I haven’t seen before.
“You know what’s going to happen today?” asks the colonel when his sleeves are straight and he’s managed the braid fastenings on his own.
I shake my head.
“Probably just as well. Take your auxiliaries and establish a new base by the cathedral. Inside the second wall…” He hesitates. “Who was that girl who gave me the bread?”
“Maria,” I tell him. “Our maid.”
He snorts. “Take Maria with you,” he says, and then he tells me why.
Maria and Neen are in bed, their faces hollow and eyes unable to meet mine. Enough of the nightmares crept past the opiates to ruin their sleep, though ruined sleep is cheap compared with the price the gas extracted from some in this city.
Walking back from the colonel’s HQ produced open windows and broken bodies on the streets below.
“Get up,” I tell Neen. “Pack only what you need, plus your weapons, and be downstairs in two minutes. That goes for Maria as well.”
I give Franc the same message and go looking for Shil. She’s in the bathroom half naked, washing under her arms with cold water from a basin.
Her body is as good as I remember.
“Get out,” she says. When I don’t, she hurls a glass mug.
“We leave in two minutes,” I tell her. “If you’re not ready, we go without you.”
“What?”
“Two minutes. Get your weapons, get dressed, carry some food.”
“Wait,” she demands. “Are you okay?”
Punching a hole through her door is probably the wrong answer, and I don’t mean to do it. Well, maybe I do…
“No,” I say. “I’m not fucking okay. The ship carrying Ion and his friends exploded last night.”
Shil gets it instantly, her brain as quick as her tongue. If Ion’s ship was taken out by Uplifted guns I’d be upset, but not like this. And since it probably wasn’t an accident, that leaves only one other option. No code was carried to unlock the ball busters. The mercenaries were betrayed.
“Colonel Nuevo?”
“More like General Jaxx. Probably planned it before we even landed…And now we’re falling back to the inner city.”
“All of us?”
“Very much doubt it.”
I pack my weapons in a cold anger that blows through the house like an arctic wind. Even Neen stays out of my way. They’re waiting in line when I hit the hall a minute or so later.
“Move out,” I tell them.
Shil has packed all the food in the kitchen. When she tells Maria to carry it, Maria adds the bag to her own without complaint. Two rifles are slung across Shil’s back, another three rest against her hip; she’s tucked pistols into her belt, five of them that I can see.
No one needs that many weapons, not even me.
Only Shil is giving them away the moment we leave the house. “Take this,” she says, and such is the determination on her face that the boy does what he’s told. “You’ll need it,” Shil tells him.
He looks puzzled.
A couple of minutes from our door and she’s down to one pulse rifle and a knife tucked into the side of her boot. She keeps these two weapons and her silence for the rest of the journey.
“What’s going on, sir?” asks Neen. He’s carrying the bag his sister gave to Maria.
I shrug, not daring to put it into words.
CHAPTER 40
The battle for Ilseville’s outer ring lasts thirteen days. This is how long it takes the Silver Fist to destroy the river gates, swamp the outer city with their soldiers, and fight street to street and house to house until a circle of flame swallows the entire area. Sixty thousand of OctoV’s troops remain outside the inner walls when those gates get locked.
Mostly they’re militia.
All will die.
We know that, the enemy knows that, it takes those trapped a while to catch up. Group after group falls back toward the inner gates expecting to be let in. Some swear and others just accept their fate. Mainly it’s the mercenaries who go down fighting. Given how the Enlightened feel about those who fight for money rather than belief, it’s not a surprising choice.
Their slaughter is viewed by neutral observers and watched with horrified fascination across the known galaxy. Haze patches us between Uplift and U/Free but there’s small difference between their data feeds. Our troops are killed in running fights and bitter last stands; little is added by way of commentary because little is needed.
And the Enlightened are clever. They wait until the afternoon of the second day, when a group of our militia captures and beheads two Silver Fist officers, before launching their most vicious attack.
Over the course of three and a half hours, a single high flier seeds and reseeds the offending section of ghetto with flamefire until the buildings eat themselves and those inside become fragments and ash.
“Do something,” Franc begs Haze.
We have rockets targeting the high fighter, but most of our batteries are busy protecting the inner city, and anyway nothing we own can eat its way past the fighter’s defenses. As if to prove this, a rocket explodes impotently, and the high fighter casually flies through the explosion, fire dripping from the rear edge of each wing.
“Please,” she begs.
Hunched over his slab, Haze shakes his head. Tears are rolling down his face, which is thinner and older than when the slaughter started. “I can’t,” he says. “I don’t have that level of power.”
“Power?” says Neen.
“Control,” he says, amending his words hastily. I leave them to it.
Have you ever stayed drunk for six weeks? Believe me, it takes real effort. Hot Bar Wild is gone, obviously en
ough. It’s that black patch of ash down near the river’s edge, between those two patches of ash that used to be warehouses.
I can go down there if I want, in theory at least, because a new truce has just been announced, and it’s going to last just long enough to take us all to the edge of deep winter.
That’s probably called strategy by the U/Free.
As I said, there’s a Hot Bar Wild in every city, and if you get really lucky or the city is really scuzzy, you’ll probably find two, or three, or four…
The SIG and I go hunting for alcohol.
We find it first at a cellar bar behind the cathedral, inhabited by Ilseville’s lowlife. They glower and glare, but once I put my gun on the table and my gold behind the bar they decide it would be simpler to leave me alone. And I’m impressed: No one even gets hurt while we’re reaching this decision.
I’d share the colonel’s supplies, but that offer he made me of a place on Ion’s ship nags at the back of my mind. So much so that I waste some days in the bar just wondering whether or not to kill him.
His offer and the explosion could have been a coincidence. But then as the gun reminds me, I could have been a career sergeant in the legion with a long and impressive record behind me, Franc could have kept her knife use for the kitchen, Haze could have been born virus-free, and Shil could have fallen for my sophisticated charms.
We leave Maria out of it, because she’s normal. In fact, we can’t really work out what she’s doing with us in the first place.
“She opened the door,” says the SIG. “Remember?”
Thinking about it, I do…
On the third day Neen tracks me down.
“Sir?”
If I really concentrate, I can see only one of him. “Sergeant.”
He wants me to return to the house. I tell him it got burned and he tells me he means the new one. I send him away anyhow.
The gun and I move bars. Frederico’s is above a machine shop, backs onto a laundry, and is approached through a particularly unsavory railway arch. It takes Neen five days to find me and he comes back every day for weeks. He even tries staying to drink with me, but I tell him drunks are boring and he’d be better off staying at home to fuck Maria.