Each team member carried a pistol that fired silent, subsonic ammunition, a rifle, three grenades, and a combat knife. Each carried a gas mask in case the Naxids threw gas at them, and Macnamara assembled a large, tripod-mounted machine gun on the dining table that had been shoved under the apartment’s main window, one that would blast vehicles below with a torrent of fire from the quaint gable that slightly overhung the walk below. Macnamara didn’t even have to expose himself to accomplish this: he could control the gun with a remote pad, or even command it to shoot at anything that moved in a given area.
Below, as the eastern horizon began to glow with a pale jasper light, Sula looked over the ammat trees and watched the traffic move up and down the parkway, mostly heavy trucks bringing goods to the predawn city. The bridge over Highway 16 had sculpted iron railings ornamented in a bright alloy with a lobed, scalloped design that Sula recognized as Torminel in origin. The eleven Action Teams of Group Blanche were hidden in four of the buildings overlooking the ambush site, ready to pump death down on the stunned survivors of the bombing.
Sula’s nerves gave a warning tingle as she saw a truck come into view directly across the parkway from her on Highway 16, a twelve-wheeler that crept slowly down the road as it dipped beneath the broad bridge, and then didn’t come out the other side.
Across Highway 16 from her position, Sula knew, Lieutenant Captain Hong was standing over a command detonator. A drop of sweat trickled slowly down her face. Suddenly she wanted to tear the helmet off her head and take several long, cool breaths.
Sula saw signal lights flashing out of the corner of her eye, and she turned to see several trucks lined up by one of the parkway’s exits. She looked left and right, and saw that the parkway was nearly empty, the few remaining vehicles pulling off. The traffic control computers were clearing the road.
This was worth a message to Hong, Sula thought. She triggered her helmet mic and said, “Comm: to Blanche. Blanche, they’re clearing the parkway. I think we’ll have company soon. Comm: send.” As soon as the last word left her lips, her communicator coded the signal, compressed it, and sent it in a burst transmission to Hong across the parkway.
The response was just a click, no words to be overheard or decoded.
More lights flashed on the parkway, toward the city center, multicolored emergency flashers. Sula pressed her helmet to the window to see a swarm of police vehicles coming in a dense swarm down the parkway, moving in a compact mass in all six lanes. She thought about making another transmission but decided that Hong couldn’t help but see this for himself.
Sula drew back from the window as a river of black-and-yellow police cars poured past, some of them falling out, parking every few hundred paces on either side of the parkway. Sula’s nerves began an unpleasant little crawl as Naxid police emerged from the parked vehicles, their scuttling, centauroid bodies unmistakable in the growing light. They wore helmets and body armor covered with chameleon-weave that duplicated their flash-patterns, the red flashes of their beaded black scales that served as a silent, auxiliary form of language. Each carried a rifle in its forelimbs. They were flashing continually at each other, one pattern after another displayed on their chests and backs, and Sula wished she could read their patterns.
Well, she thought, that’s it. The truck bomb might still work, but surely the rest of the operation couldn’t continue. She could count more police directly below than there were members of Group Blanche, and within minutes many more could arrive, racing down the parkway from right and left. Any second now, she should hear the order for everyone but the team with the detonator to withdraw while they still could.
The order didn’t come. Sula pulled off her helmet and ran a gloved hand through her hair to comb out the sweat.
She wondered if she should transmit to Hong suggesting withdrawal, and then a picture rose in her mind, Hong’s expression of deep concern, his question, Are you all right about this?
Sula would wait. She took several deep breaths, and then she waited some more.
She turned to scan the room. Macnamara was silent and stoic, his hands flexing as if eager to grasp his machine gun; and Spence was pale, looking as if she wished she were in one of those romantic videos of hers, the ones that guaranteed a happy ending.
It occurred to Sula that she had never led other people in combat. Everything she had done against the Naxids had been done entirely on her own, strapped in her pinnace while it shepherded a volley of missiles toward the enemy. The missiles had not possessed beating hearts or bodies of flesh, not like Spence or Macnamara or the Gueis, whose daughter was still gazing at her video game with intent eyes that might soon be called on to witness a massacre…
Sula realized that she would much rather be alone in this. Her own life was nothing, a breath in the wind, of no value to anyone. Responsibility for others was by far the greater burden.
More flashing lights. Sula peered out of the window and saw a pair of police vehicles moving slowly down Highway 16, then disappearing beneath the bridge where the bomb truck waited. The driver of the truck, code name 257, was still in the truck, having feigned a breakdown. He might be arrested, or decide to do something dramatic.
Shit-shit-shit…The word drummed its way through Sula’s brain. She picked up her rifle from where it waited against the wall, and held it in her gloved hands. Taking this as a signal, Macnamara stepped to where the machine gun waited and put a hand on its stock. Sula waved him back.
“Use the control pad,” she said. “Mark out everything in the street or on the sidewalk as a target.”
Macnamara nodded to himself, then stepped back to perform this task. Once he triggered the gun, it would fire automatically at anything in the target area until told to stop or until its considerable ammunition reserve was exhausted. It was ideal for covering a withdrawal by the rest of the team.
The rifles held by Sula and Spence were less convenient, insofar as they needed a person to point them at the enemy and squeeze the trigger. But the view through their sights could be projected on the helmet faceplates of the operators, which meant that neither Sula nor Spence actually had to flaunt their heads in the way of enemy fire. Only their hands and forearms need be exposed, with the trigger permanently depressed so that the gun would fire automatically at anything designated a target.
She could feel her pulse beating high in her throat. She wondered if she should step back from the window if everything was about to blow up right this instant.
Sula gave an involuntary start as her hand comm chirped. She reached for it, encountered instead her camouflage shroud, and then groped inside its folds, all the while wondering why someone had called her hand comm instead of using the far safer burst transmissions of the radio.
By the time she opened the comm and pressed it to her ear, it had stopped chirping. Voices were already engaged in a dialogue.
“What’s the situation, then?” Hong’s voice.
“The police tell me I’ve got to move the truck or get myself arrested.” The other voice was two-five-seven’s. “I a-told them we’ve got a tow on the way. I a-told them this here is a valuable piece of property and that I ain’t a-going ta take the responsibility of running a twelve-wheeler on just one fuel cell, but they sez I got ta. So I told a-them what I’d do, I’d like call my supervisor like.”
Sula winced. Two-five-seven was a team leader and a Peer—a highly educated and cultivated young man—and he was doing his best to speak in some manner of working-class accent, and failing miserably.
If the Naxids didn’t hear something wrong in this, then they were deaf to all nuance.
Two-five-seven had done something reasonably clever, though. He’d rung a number that would contact all the teams at once, so that all would know what was going on and none would panic and try something desperate.
“Right,” Hong said. “You might as well pull out, the people we want won’t be here for a while. Take the first left on top of the ramp, and I’ll meet you there. Four
-nine-nine, are you there?”
“Yes, Blanche.” Another voice.
“I need you to send me your car with a driver. Have him meet me at the truck, and have him bring all his gear.”
Meaning his weapons, presumably.
“The rest of you,” Hong said, “sit tight, and stick with the plan.”
Sula returned her hand comm to her trouser pocket, her mind spinning with the effort of trying to work out what Hong now intended. Surely he couldn’t retrieve the ambush now.
Surely the only sensible thing to do was to order his teams to leave as quietly as they had come.
Sula watched as the truck slowly pulled out from beneath the bridge and disappeared from sight around the corner of the building. The Naxid police drew their vehicles across the road on either end of the underpass as roadblocks.
Hong’s voice came over Sula’s helmet phones, and Sula hastily put on her helmet to better hear him.
“Someone has to signal me when the convoy passes.”
Others hastened to assure Hong they would do this. Sula remained silent.
She looked over the room again, saw the Gueis with their taut faces, the daughter still fierce in her determination to win her video game. Plopping sounds came from the video wall, and odd little cries. Apparently the game had to do with animals jumping over one another in a rather complicated arboreal environment.
More police flashers to the right, far down the parkway, away from the city center. Now that Sula had her helmet on, she turned up the magnification on the faceplate to see a wedge of police vehicles coming toward her, and behind them larger transport, visible only as they passed through the brilliant slices of dawn that fell between the buildings.
“Comm: to Blanche,” Sula said. “I think they’re coming. Comm: send.”
“All teams,” came Hong’s response. “Let me know when they begin to cross the bridge.”
Sula turned to the Gueis. “I want all of you down flat on the floor,” she said. “When things start, I want you to crawl out of here. Crawl, understand?” She swiped her hand parallel to the floor in a gesture that meant, flat on the floor. “Take shelter in the hallway, or with a neighbor on the far side of the building.”
“Yes, my lady,” said Mister Guei. Sula felt a spasm of amusement: she must be good at being a Peer for Guei to call her “my lady” when no one else had. Guei and his wife looked at each other, then lowered themselves and their infant son to their creamy carpet. The daughter was reluctant to leave her game, but her mother snapped at her and dragged her to the floor by one wrist. The daughter looked as if she might cry, but then decided against it.
Sula turned back to the window. The Naxids were coming on quickly and it was less than half a minute before the first wave of police vehicles came by. They moved at moderate speed, unhurried. Behind them were sedans, then trucks and buses, all moving widely spaced in a long column. Sula couldn’t see the column’s tail even with her faceplate on full magnification.
“Comm: to Blanche. They’re on the bridge. Comm: send.” No doubt every other team leader was shooting Hong the same message.
All the vehicles were dark with Naxids. Some of the trucks were open and carried long weapons, machine guns or grenade launchers, operated by alert crews that scanned the buildings as they passed by. Sula drew farther back into the room and hoped that the grenade launchers weren’t loaded with antimatter grenades.
That would be very, very messy.
“Comm: to Blanche. They’re heavily armed, and there are a lot of them. I don’t think we should engage…”
Her words trailed away as the bomb truck reappeared, booming down the Highway 16 ramp at high speed, the silent electric motors pushing each of its twelve huge wheels at maximum acceleration. Following the truck came a blue Victory sedan, presumably the car that belonged to Team 499.
At Hong’s wild audacity a frenzied admiration sang through Sula’s heart. The group leader was attempting to repair the flaws in his plan with sheer courage.
Sula’s nerves gave a leap as the truck hit the Naxid police roadblock and flung the vehicle aside like a man waving off an insect. A piece of the police car, curved yellow metal, flew high into the air and hit the pavement with a clang that Sula could hear even through the window. A Naxid lay sprawled where his own car had hit him. Another danced aside with surprising speed and then was clawing on the pavement for the rifle that had fallen off his shoulder.
The truck disappeared under the bridge with a series of distant booming noises as its tires vaulted expansion joints in the pavement. The Victory followed. The Naxid grabbed his rifle and raised it to his shoulder, then seemed to dissolve in a shower of sparks.
Each of Group Blanche’s rifles held a box magazine with four hundred and one rounds of caseless ammunition, all of which could be discharged in something less than three seconds. It looked as if the Naxid had just absorbed about half a magazine.
Then the weapon was turned on the police car, and the vehicle leaped and juddered and sparked, then sagged on its suspension as a baleful white mist rose from its punctured frame.
A few seconds later the Victory sedan reappeared, driving in reverse up the ramp at full speed. The Naxid procession continued to roll by, and seemed not to have noticed the fight or to be slow in reacting to it.
“All teams, stand by.” Hong’s voice, ringing with fine triumph, came over Sula’s headset. “Prepare to detonate on my order.”
Sula turned to her team. “Flat!” she said. “Now!”
Rather than dropping on her belly Sula squatted with her back to the outside wall, taking comfort in its solidity.
The explosion seemed to come in several rapid stages, first a great crack that made the glassware in the Gueis’ sideboard rattle, then a huge boom that Sula felt pass through her like a wave, stirring each soft organ in passing, and lastly a massive crash that felt like a kick in the spine, a bass thunder that seemed to lift the apartment building off its foundations, then drop it down again with a bone-stirring impact.
Her head happened to be turned to the left, to the gable window, and she actually saw it bow inward like a bubble about to pop; but the window material was tough, and to Sula’s surprise it rebounded back into the frame.
Oh well. Now they’d have to shoot it out.
She sprang to her feet as debris rattled against the side of the building. The bridge had gone up beautifully, leaving behind vast hole surrounded by a tangle of writhing girders and rebar. Above the destruction a tower of dust and smoke flickered in the dawn light. Debris was still falling onto the roadway. A sinister lick of flame rose lazily from the dark pit below.
It was difficult to tell how much damage had actually been done to the Naxids. Their convoy was widely spaced, and probably no more than one or two vehicles had actually been on the bridge when it was destroyed. If they’d ever been there, there was no sign of them now. One bus lay on the far side of the bridge more or less where the explosion had caught it, intact but capsized, its windows broken and sightless. The rest of the convoy had come to a stop. Naxids boiled off the vehicles like a swarm of dark insects.
“All teams, open fire!” Hong’s sunny, encouraging voice sang in her ears. “Fire, fire, fire!”
Sula looked at her team as if through a light fog: there seemed to be a lot of suspended particles in the air. Spence was pressed flat on the floor, hands over her helmet, and Macnamara was sitting up with a stunned expression on his face.
“Up!” Sula urged, her blood suddenly alight. “Get firing!”
Fire one magazine from each weapon, she thought, then get the hell out. Even given surprise and superior position, the thirty-odd members of Group Blanche couldn’t expect to hold out for long against the hundreds of Naxids in the street below.
At that instant all the windows facing the Axtattle Parkway burst inward, the material that had resisted the explosion now shattering before a torrent of Naxid fire. Sula flung herself to the floor as window shards rattled off her b
ody armor and a sleet of laths and plaster came down from the ceiling. Over her head the machine gun spun on its tripod as rounds hit the long barrel. Macnamara rose to his feet and reached up to take control of the weapon, but Sula shouted “Get down!” and Macnamara, his expression startled, joined her on the floor.
“Set the gun to automatic and get out!” Sula said. Through her hard body armor she felt sharp impacts on the floor as bullets came through the windows of the floor below and drove through that story’s ceiling to hit the floor on which she was lying. Holes appeared in the carpet, with little bits of pad and fluff flying up. The building shook as, somewhere, a grenade went off.
The rain of laths and plaster did not cease. Sula scurried to the door, moving in a kind of four-legged crouch, opened the door, and half-rolled into the corridor beyond. Spence was right behind her.
Sula glanced back through the door. Macnamara still knelt behind the machine gun, madly punching the pad that controlled it. His shoulders and helmet were white with the plaster coming down. “Come on,” Sula urged him, and then her heart gave a despairing leap as he threw both arms out and fell back as a bullet took him full in the chest. Sula gave a cry and half-launched herself back into the apartment, and then she saw the scar on Macnamara’s body armor, and saw that his hands were moving. She realized his body armor had repelled the attack.
“Fuck that!” she called to him. “Clear out!”
With some effort Macnamara rolled himself to a seated position and with fixed determination reached for the pad again. Sula backed out of the door as the Guei family came scurrying out on hands and knees. Blood poured from Mr. Guei’s left eye socket—he’d lost the eye to a bullet, or maybe to a splinter. His wife shrieked out one hysterical wail after another, and it was the daughter who cradled the infant as she carried him into the hallway’s relative safety, her face fixed with the same single-minded determination that she had displayed when engaged in her video game.
The Sundering Page 41