Ninth City Burning

by J. Patrick Black

  FIFTY-FOUR

  TORRO

  Out here, you could see the whole thing happen. Well, not the whole thing. This battle’s so big, there’s no way to really keep track of it all at once, especially considering how there’s fighting all over the place, including both sides of the city, and we’ve got to pay attention to shooting old Romeo at least part of the time. But you really can see quite a bit from an assault platform. Like, you can see old IMEC-1, or most of it anyway, and the great big net of assault platforms around it, and the cohorts of equites and whatnot we’ve got chasing Romeo all over the place, though they’re mostly way out and just look like a bunch of whizzing, popping lights. So when those Zeros got onto old IMEC-1 and the whole battle started going pretty much to crap, I had about as good a view of it as anyone.

  We’d launched out from one of the battle spires on IMEC-1 with about a million other assault platforms and formed up into a wall just like we learned in training. Only this wall was pretty different from the ones we’d practiced because instead of making a big solid stack of platforms, we left several pretty large gaps. The whole thing looked more like a fishing net than a wall, actually, and in fact that’s sort of what it was. A net, I mean. The way all our platforms were laid out, the Valentines would be kind of funneled toward the gaps, but that put them right in the path of the big guns down on IMEC-1.

  We were all nervous as anything, of course, me and the rest of my platform. Everyone else in the Twelfth of the Third, too, I bet. We knew how to fly an assault platform, but this was our first real battle where someone was really intentionally trying to kill us. And if that weren’t bad enough, this was supposed to be like the most important battle ever. Like, if we lost, that was pretty much it for Earth and everyone. Old Romeo was just going to march in and kill whoever was left. Optio Sorril was pretty clear about that. As we were waiting to load up into our battle spire, she gathered our whole century around, the Twelfth Century, that is, and told us with that easygoing smile of hers that if there was anything we cared about, anything at all, we were fighting for it now.

  That got to me a bit. I mean, I’ve never been like ecstatic about the Legion and everything, and I’m not too fond of the Prips, but I do care about a few things. I really do. I kept thinking about that as we put on our helmets and climbed to our platforms, and I was still thinking about it when we launched. I watched old IMEC-1 get smaller and smaller behind us, and all the other platforms flying around all over the place. I felt pretty strange, but I had a hard time deciding why, and before I could, Mersh started calling me a lazy turd and yelling for me to get to my firing post.

  I was pretty sure we were all about to get blued right there, though I was planning on having a like pulmonary embolism first. Then I got my lazel up and saw no one was really coming at us. What was going on was this other part of the Legion, the vanguard, had already flown ahead to clear the way for everyone else, and now that old IMEC-1 had arrived in the thick of things, we were off to help them out.

  Those kiddos from the vanguard were really going at it. You could see them flying around like crazy, just slashing and blasting away. They were giving it to Romeo pretty good, but I think they were glad when we showed up. When the big guns down on IMEC-1 got going, whole chunks of Valentine fighters started to just disappear, like they’d been drawn there on a blackboard or something and someone came with an eraser and wiped them away. It didn’t take old Romeo long to figure out what was happening, though, and he kind of pulled back a bit so his fighters weren’t completely out in the open and everything.

  Anyway, at first there wasn’t all that much to do. We’d built our wall or net or whatever of assault platforms, and Romeo knew the minute he got close we’d just give him another round from the big guns, so he was trying to stay out of the way as much as possible. That wasn’t terribly easy for him, though. The guns were going pretty much nonstop, really rumbling away so much it felt like an avalanche inside your head. You could see all these huge swarms of Valentine fighters, just thousands and thousands of them way out ahead, and big flashes of light going off right in the middle of them, like when lightning strikes inside of a cloud. Meanwhile, whole cohorts of our guys were out there chasing Romeo’s fighters around, trying to bring them closer or trap them someplace where our guns could really chew them up.

  From our perspective, there wasn’t all that much to do, except every so often when one of those Valentine swarms made a run for our part of the net. They would sort of swirl around a ways out, and once in a while one little stream of fighters would break off and come at us. We’d fire our lazels and the pair of 13mm auto-ingens mounted on our platform, and eventually the Valentines would turn around and fly away. Usually, before they even got very near us, a few of the guns down on IMEC-1 would see them and let loose with a close-range attack. Anyone who’s watched a chain saw going to work on a tree can about picture what that looked like.

  Those big guns didn’t let up for a minute, but after a while I started to worry about the wall or net or whatever. Our platforms were all in pretty close, relative to everyone out there chasing Romeo around, but it still must’ve taken a crazy number of us to cover old IMEC-1 from like every conceivable angle. In between runs, I’d get a look around, and I started to notice the net sort of looked like it was thinning out in some places, and in others it’d been kind of bent out of shape. I pointed that out to Spammers and Hexi, and I think they were a bit concerned, but Spammers just said formations never last very long anyway, and Hexi agreed. Mersh told me to shut up and worry about my own area of operation. I still felt sort of nervous, though, like I was supposed to be doing something but didn’t know what.

  And then this one time, old Romeo really came in crashing at a bunch of platforms just above us, and while I was craning up to shoot them, I saw something big had changed. I didn’t even know what at first, until I looked more closely at the other end of our net, and there was nothing but a lot of empty space. Assault platforms can be hard to spot if they’re not grouped especially close together or lighting up the way they do when they’re shooting, and I’d thought there just wasn’t very much happening, but in fact someone’d torn a huge hole right through the net protecting old IMEC-1. I looked down at the city, and even though it was difficult to tell with the guns going nonstop, I thought I saw some fighting down there.

  I called up Mersh through my helmet. “Hey, Mersh,” I said. “I think there’s something going on down on the IMEC.”

  “Eyes forward, boyo,” he said. “Our orders are to make sure no one gets past. How’re you gonna do that if you’re looking the wrong way?”

  “Yeah, but, Mersh, you should probably just take a look. Maybe these guys’ll come our way if they need to make a run for it.”

  Mersh did take a look, too. He even seemed a little surprised, but all he said was “Command’ll know all about that. If they want us to do something, they’ll tell us.”

  And sure enough, about two seconds later, Mersh sort of cocked his head, like he was listening to something, and I knew he was getting orders from Optio Sorril or maybe someone even higher up. Mersh took another look below, and this time he really was worried, no question about it.

  He was looking at some fontani flying over the city—or sources, I should say. Fontani are ours and Zeros are Romeo’s. These starry things had to be both, I thought, because of the way they were moving, really tearing around the city but not going anywhere in particular.

  Pretty much our whole platform had turned around to see what Mersh and I were looking at, and when Mersh noticed, he started yelling again about getting back to our posts. But before anyone could move, there was this terrible ripping sound. I thought old IMEC-1 was about to split in half or something, that’s how loud it was. Half a second later, it came again, though this time it sounded more like breaking than ripping, to be precise. Nothing really happened to IMEC-1, though. Instead, all those sources just stopped their crashing
around and hung in the air awhile, kind of twirling a little bit. While that was going on, Mersh got another call from Sorril or whoever, but no one paid much attention to him.

  Then, suddenly, three things happened pretty much all at once. Mersh yelled, “Fall stations!” and at about the same moment those sources disappeared, and my D-87s went dead. I couldn’t really say which I noticed first.

  Only one thing could have happened. Some of Romeo’s Zeros must’ve gotten past our net and onto old IMEC-1, and wiped our fontani out almost before we knew what was going on. After that, the Zeros would have just taken off, because if we had no sources left, those great big guns that’d been giving Romeo such a monumental pain in the ass wouldn’t work anymore.

  Zeros move so fast they could’ve flown right by our platform, and we wouldn’t have known, but it was pretty obvious once they were out of range. My helmet just went black, then clear, the way it does when we’re all out of thelemity, and that was pretty much that.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  TORRO

  Fortunately, all us milites know how to act if we go dark. We’ve practiced so many times, it’s practically instinctual. “Fall stations” is the command to grab onto some secure part of the platform, and I think we’d have done that even if Mersh hadn’t given us any orders at all. Dis has hardly any gravity, so it isn’t like our platform is going to immediately drop out of the sky, either. We stay pretty much where we are, and so do all the platforms around us, hanging there out in space. That’s probably the best thing about our present situation, though. Even though I watched everything happen down on IMEC-1, I still can’t completely believe it’s all true. Like, unless I’m really, really wrong, the whole battle just turned over on us.

  Something crackles beside my ear, and I hear Spammers say, “Well, shit,” through my helmet radio.

  “Shut up, Miles,” Mersh says.

  “What do we do now?” Hexi asks.

  “You shut up and wait for orders,” Mersh answers.

  “Mersh is right,” Spammers says. “We’ll want to be in position in case some of our fontani make it back.”

  “Did you just say ‘Mersh is right’?” I ask. But it’s true. In fact, Mersh and Spammers are both right. Pretty soon someone’s going to notice the guns on old IMEC-1 have stopped, and they’ll come back to help us out.

  The trouble is, no one comes back. I think some of our cohorts out there try to swing around toward us, but there are all these big clouds of Valentines waiting to tangle them up, and I guess they don’t make it very far. I bet the Zeros that just finished with old IMEC-1 are in a pretty good position to get in the way of anyone trying to get back, too.

  “Yup, any minute now,” Spammers says. He’s doing his thing where he pretends something really awful is just like a minor inconvenience or whatever, but you can tell he’s as terrified as anyone else.

  “They must have us blocked off,” Hexi says. “That’s what they’d want to do, right?”

  Mersh looks like he’s about to tell us all to shut up and wait for orders again when he catches sight of something down below. He rushes to the edge of the platform, and the rest of us follow. At first it’s hard to tell exactly what’s happening down there. The air all over IMEC-1—or I guess it’s just empty space because the air’s all gone—anyway, suddenly there are all these chunks of rock and whatnot flying around over the city, and several of the buildings have sort of shifted, like the tops of them are facing a little in the wrong direction. This one very large gun has gone kind of crumbly in the middle, one half of it floating slowly away from the other. And then the bottom edge of another gun bursts up in a cloud of dust, and the whole thing tilts to the side like it’s going to fall, only it just sort of hangs there. It would fall, I bet, if there was any gravity to pull it down.

  Hexi says, “They’re shooting at us.”

  They definitely are. From the other side of our platform, we can see one of those big clouds of Valentines floating off ahead, all lit up and letting loose with everything they’ve got. Their sources must be just far enough back that their umbris won’t reach us, so they’ll be using weapons that can blast us without needing thelemity—bombs and bullets and whatnot. Some of the other assault platforms near ours have already been hit, either broken apart or sent spinning off into space, but old Romeo isn’t really aiming for us. He wants those big guns.

  The antibombardment arrays on old IMEC-1 have mostly started up by now, and that’s enough to intercept at least some of Romeo’s shots. The space over the city is filling with flashes and explosions and clouds of debris and so forth. But it’s pretty obvious they can’t sit through all that forever.

  All we can do is sit there and watch it happen. I start thinking about when Hexi’s number got called in the draft, and it was like she was choking or dying or something, and even though I wanted to help, I couldn’t think how, like there was this big gap between us, so big I could never get to her. It’s a real cruddy feeling. It makes you want to jump off a cliff, like even that would be better than doing nothing.

  “So how about those orders, dek?” Spammers says to Mersh. “We’re not going to just let Romeo wreck the city, are we?”

  I’ve about decided there isn’t much we can do, aside from sit here and hope some of our fontani make it back, but then Mersh says, “Command wants us to stay put until the Valentines have deployed their ratters.”

  I’d forgotten about the ratters. They’re the fighters Romeo sends in when we’ve all gone dark and can’t defend ourselves. They’ve got these big, long, nasty tails they can use to drink up thelemity, sort of like an electrical cord. They can’t use ingenic weapons, but they’ve still got ingenic armor, so as long as part of the tail is connected to an umbris somewhere, the ratters are pretty much invincible. No way our antibombardment guys will be able to stop them.

  Once I know they’re coming, I have an easy time picking out the ratters’ nests from the rest of the Valentines, the ones doing all the bombarding, I mean. The ratters are really kind of dull-looking compared to all those flashing lights and whatnot. They whip out from the nests, and for a while they don’t really seem to be going much of anywhere. It’s pretty uninteresting, in fact, until they start speeding up. Then they come straight at us.

  Mersh yells, “Fall stations!” again, and we all duck just as the first ratters come through, hitting our wall of assault platforms like they’re diving into a lake or something. Wherever they hit, platforms go spinning away into space or down toward IMEC-1 or just smashing into other platforms nearby. Even when the ratters have already gone past, their tails keep whipping around, and any platform that gets too close ends up about broken in half. If we could just cut those tails, the ratters would all shrivel up the way Valentines always do when they go dark, but right now we don’t stand a chance of getting through that armor.

  Two more waves of ratters come diving down, and all we can do is hold on to our platform and hope we don’t get hit. Finally, I hear Mersh on my radio. “Everyone all right?”

  It doesn’t seem possible, but we are. The cloud of Valentines out there seems to go on forever, and each nest must be sending out like twenty ratters at a time. When I raise my head to look around, though, it’s obvious most of our platforms haven’t gone anywhere. Compared to our whole wall, the ratters—even like a couple hundred or thousand of them—are really pretty small, and just like all the Valentines bombarding old IMEC-1, they’re after the guns, not us. If the Valentines wanted to take our platforms out, they’d have better ways to do it than throwing ratters at us.

  When everyone’s reported that we’re still alive and so forth, Mersh gets on his radio to check in with Optio Sorril. Over the side of the platform, I can see the ratters ripping up the city, tearing through bridges and buildings and leaving explosions everywhere, their tails slicing everything they touch from the ground on up. One tail just misses our platform, and takes two others wit
h it as it swings by, but Mersh doesn’t even look up. Finally, he kind of nods, and I can see his mouth forming the words “Yes, ma’am.” He looks around at us, and it’s almost like he’s forgotten where he is and who we all are.

  “Hey, Mersh, boyo,” I say, “what’s going on?”

  Mersh gives his head a little shake, like he’s clearing something out of there, then he stands up and tells Hexi to open up our platform’s auxiliary armament locker. It’s full of all sorts of special equipment for when you need more than just a lazel.

  “Here’s the plan,” Mersh says. He says it slowly, almost like he’s making it up as he goes along. “In 360 seconds, we’re going to launch from this platform toward the Valentine formation. Once we’re inside their umbris, we will either cut the tails on those ratters or destroy the nests with ingenic mines. In both cases, we should be able to breach their armor using the blades on our LL-40s.”

  I think we waste about a hundred of our 360 seconds just staring at him. Finally, I say, “Mersh, that’s completely nuts. I mean, I’d take forever to fly all the way over there, and we’ll be getting shot at the whole time. You know we will. And then what? We’re supposed to just walk up to those nests and start hacking away?”

  Everyone’s quiet a minute, then Mersh says, “Those are our orders. Unless we do something now, the ratters will destroy every gun on IMEC-1, and that will be the end of this battle. Anyone who doesn’t want to come can stay behind. I’m sure you’ll be useful if any of our fontani make it back.”