Kit looked up at me. “Then the most important thing we can do right now is get the word back about this, Parker. The Yavi without starships are pains in the ass. The Yavi with them, and allied with the Tressens? That’s an interplanetary war waiting to happen.”
“Neither of us has an uplink. There’s no commercial transmission off Tressel. We have to get out of here aboard the next shuttle.”
“That may not be easy.”
We resumed listening. Then we got to a three-way conversation among Polian, his boss, General Gill, and what appeared to be a Tressen infantry major. They were talking about the shuttle landing strip. I leaned out of the bell tower, maxed my snoops, and studied the spaceport. “Crap.”
Kit looked up at me. “Why crap?”
I tugged off the snoops and handed them down to her. “Stand up here and take a look. It’s really not going to be easy to get on to the next shuttle.”
Kit studied the distant perimeter, then whistled. “That’s a battalion-sized unit. And the strongpoints are manned by Yavi with crew-served needlers.”
“We could send out a physical message with a clean courier.”
“Pass a note in study hall?” Kit shook her head. “No Earth diplomats, no Earth diplomatic pouch. The only people who upshuttle from Tressel are Yavi, and Tressen diplomats.”
“Maybe—”
“The shuttle crews?” She shook her head. “They’re all Rand.”
Rand was a major hub, like Mousetrap, but famous for tight-ass neutrality instead of sex, drugs, and vomit. The Trueborns called Rand the “Switzerland of Space,” and we were as likely to bribe a Rand contract pilot as we were to hack a Rand numbered account.
Kit sighed. “Besides, we can’t trust even an honest novice courier to deliver a message this important.”
Kit wasn’t just a nose breaker. She could fly a shuttle. I’d seen her do it. However. “We can’t fight our way in and hijack the flight. Not through what we just saw out there. This is lousy.”
Kit leaned forward as she stared into the darkness. Then she whispered, “No. It’s worse.”
I turned and peered out of the bell tower. Two Tressen canvas-backed troop trucks were now parked sideways, nose to nose, at the base of the hill, blocking the street that dead-ended in the square that fronted the church.
Kit said, “How the hell did they find us?”
I closed my eyes and swore. “When we were here last time, who put the clothes back in the poor box?”
“Alia. Why?”
“She left Weichselan diamonds in the poor box. To pay for the stuff we took.”
“She told you that?”
“Do women ever tell me anything? But it’s obvious now. If somebody told the ferrents, and here somebody tells the ferrents everything, diamonds would attract attention. Even if the Tressens didn’t recognize the diamonds as a Trueborn calling card, their new friends the Yavi sure did. They might not have guessed why we came here. But they probably staked the place out for days, just in case we came back.” The drunk asleep in the doorway. I swore.
Bam. Bam.
The two trucks’ back gates slammed against the trucks’ rear bumpers as they swung down. A helmeted Tressen infantry platoon piled out into the street at the base of the hill, then fell in alongside the trucks.
Seventy-one
Polian leaned forward and tapped the car’s driver on the shoulder. “Faster!”
The staff car rounded a bend, then squealed to a halt in front of two Tressen troop trucks parked nose to nose across a narrow street walled on both sides by stone row houses.
Polian leapt from the car, ran around the trucks and up the street as it climbed uphill. He was panting by the time he caught up with the Tressen major, Vendl, who walked behind an advancing phalanx of troops, his sidearm drawn.
Polian drew alongside the other officer and touched his arm.
Vendl smiled at him, panting too. “Such a nice night for a walk, I came myself. Glad you asked us out, Major.” His smile disappeared. “Major Polian, we staked this place out like you asked. And the stakeout saw two people enter the church, at different times, earlier tonight. But it’s just as likely to have been a couple tramps as a pair of spies. It’s gonna be a cold night.”
Polian shook his head. “It’s them.” Why they would have left coated diamonds mystified him. A dead-drop payment to a local asset, perhaps. But the undercurrent he felt was strong. “There’s no other way out of the building?”
The Tressen major shook his head. “Or in. We’re dealing with two people inside, tops. In the Old Quarter the buildings were built with one stone back against another stone back. Especially on hilltops with views and a summer breeze. Space was at a premium.”
Polian nodded. Yavi didn’t understand views or breezes. But every Yavi understood the concept of too little space. Ruberd Polian was on the verge of changing that for Yavet. And he wasn’t about to let two Trueborn spies stand in his way.
The advancing phalanx that had dismounted the trucks crested the hill and spread out as it moved into a small, open square in front of a church, which had to be the one where the diamonds had been found. It was a narrow, spartan stone building, and a short stone staircase rose from the street to the church’s arched wooden double doors. They were closed.
As he and the major strode across the square’s center, Polian frowned. “Major Vendl, don’t leave these men in the open. Don’t underestimate these people. They—”
Bam.
The formation began taking fire from a gunpowder weapon.
Polian dove for the curb, rolled up against a building, drew his needler, and looked around. A Tressen writhed on his back in the square’s center. The man clutched his thigh with two hands, immobile and screaming. The rest of the troops had scattered into the shadows, as Polian had.
He peered up into the dimness. A bell tower rose from the church’s facade, perhaps sixty feet above the square. The belfry, open on four sides, made a perfect sniper’s perch. One round, one hit. The woman probably had night-vision equipment, and the Tressens didn’t. As long as they all cowered out here, she would pick them off one by one. But inside, in close quarters, sheer numbers would work to their advantage and against her marksmanship.
The obvious course of action was to withdraw to defensible, covered positions, then await reinforcements. The Trueborns weren’t going anywhere. But one of the people in that church was responsible for Sandr’s death, and the other, the woman, had humiliated Polian. And both threatened his mission.
Ruberd Polian, the staff officer, the bookish boy, got to his knees in the shadows, gripped his pistol tighter, and prepared to lead the first, and perhaps last, charge of his military career.
Seventy-two
Kit leaned out of the bell tower as she tapped a fresh magazine into her machine pistol to seat it: then she pitched the removed magazine, which was down a round, to me to reload. I peered down into the dark stairwell while I pressed another round down against the magazine’s spring-loading. Outside, the only sound was someone screaming.
I said, “Why do you get the snoopers?”
“Because I’m a better shot. The screamer’s their C.O., I think.”
“Where’d you hit him?”
“Left thigh. So he’d be conscious and vocal.”
She meant so he’d be bait. Not only had Kit decapitated the organization below us with one stroke, she had left its commander bleeding his life out through a severed femoral artery in the middle of a pan-flat open space.
In a minute or two, the most courageous and daring among the wounded man’s troops would crawl out and try to drag him to safety, and she would plink the poor hero. One of the new casualty’s braver buddies would crawl to his rescue, and she would plink him. And so on. It was a very effective tactic to winnow out an outfit’s designated as well as latent leaders, and thus paralyze it as a fighting force.
It was cruel. But as the Trueborn general Sherman said, war is cruelty. The crueler you ma
ke it, the quicker you replace it with peace.
The trouble with this tactic in this situation wasn’t its ruthlessness but its math. We would run out of bullets before the Tressen army ran out of replacements. We had to break out of this trap now, before the Tressens could reorganize and reinforce.
A force of two case officers was equipped to multiply itself and defeat a numerically superior force in a pinch like this. But the force-multiplying equipment of Kit’s team lay entombed in an icy crevasse with her junior. My team’s mines, grenades, and microdrones lay scattered across the land and sea of northern Iridia like sneezed-out snot.
We remained handsomely outfitted for eavesdropping and for burning holes in locked steel doors, which helped us here and now like pants helped pigs. What we needed, it seemed to an old tanker like me, was a dose of shock power and mobility. A tank didn’t really have to kill infantry. It just had to come rolling toward them, and its appearance would clear them from a battlefield like an overhead light cleared roaches from a kitchen floor.
Pop-pop-pop.
A needle pistol. There was at least one Yavi down there.
Somebody was yelling down below, loud enough that he almost drowned out the wounded screamer.
Bam-bam-bam. Kit’s machine pistol spit yellow flame in the darkness.
“Dammit!” Kit hissed.
Bam-bam-bam.
This time, somebody else below started screaming. Several somebodies.
Then the crackle of Tressen gunpowder rifles began, slow at first, like rain pattering on a roof. Then it grew into a deluge. Rounds splintered the beams above Kit and me, and ricochets bonged off the tower bell itself.
Kit and I ducked, covered, as a debris storm pelted us.
In seconds, the shooting stopped. But below us, now inside the church, running feet thundered.
Kit brushed plaster and wood off her sleeves. “Some hero got half of them up and moving. And the other half laying down a base of fire. I got a few, but—”
“I hear ’em down there.” But I couldn’t see them, and neither could Kit, snoops or not.
Outside, the screams of the wounded faded as shock and blood loss drained them.
Below, I heard a creak, barely louder than the thumping of my heart, then more of them, as the Tressens started climbing the stairs toward us.
Seventy-three
Polian knelt behind a pew, staring at the staircase that spiraled up through the church’s arched ceiling and into the bell tower. His breath came in ragged gasps, not so much from exertion as from a combination of terror and exhilaration. He had led and men had followed.
He nodded at four of the Tressen riflemen among the thirty who knelt behind him in the church and waved his needler toward the staircase. In single file, the four crept forward, rifles at the ready and eyes upturned, and began to climb.
Seventy-four
I lay on the belfry’s plank floor, extended my machine pistol over the floor’s edge into the stairwell, and sprayed two unaimed, three-round bursts down into the dark. For my trouble, I got twenty rounds of returned Tressen rifle fire that splintered beams and spalled clanging splinters off the great bell, one of which laid my cheek open like a split pomegranate.
Kit, lying on the opposite side of the stairwell, looked across at me and shook her head. She didn’t need to speak. Tight spot. Maybe, finally, too tight.
How many steps had I climbed from the church floor to the belfry floor? I guessed fifty. Forty-five feet? Fifty? How many riflemen could they pack onto the staircase at one time? Too many of them. Too few of us. And not a tank in sight.
I rolled over on my back to reload and stared at the bell. Then I rolled back, tugged my rucksack toward me, and dug out two door bores.
I pointed out bolts above us that secured the iron supports for the axles upon which the great bell pivoted. Kit nodded.
A rifle barrel poked up in sight, and she sprayed a burst down the stairwell.
There was a scream, then a thud.
Then more creaks as more Tressens climbed toward us.
Kit sprayed another burst, and under its cover I scrambled to the bell, leaned out, and slapped the two door bores on the bell supports’ bolts. Then I ducked back before the return fire gouted up into the belfry.
I nodded to Kit again. She pulled back from the bell and dialed down her snoops against the impending glare. Then I triggered the charges with the remote in my hand.
The smell and smoke of molten steel and charred timber filled the belfry. Kit coughed. The bell creaked.
But it just hung there.
A dozen shots whizzed up from below.
Our adversaries were getting more aggressive, if no more accurate.
I wedged myself between the belfry wall and the bell and shoved with my feet.
Nothing, except a burst from below.
I looked across at Kit.
Her sleeve was shredded, and a red stain spread across it. She waved her other hand and mouthed, “Scratch.”
The next one might not be.
I stared at her again. Then I backed up two steps, jumped across the gap between the belfry floor and the bell, and my chest thudded against the curved iron. I hugged the bell like it was an overweight prom date, while my split cheek bled against the iron. But still nothing budged.
Bwee.
A round zipped past my ear. I shinnied up the bell and threw a leg across the inverted yoke of timber from which the bell’s axles protruded into the charred pivot points. Seconds later I sat atop the bell like a Trueborn cowboy on a rodeo bull.
I threw myself forward, back, and side to side. The bell creaked, then swung so hard that the clapper thudded against the bell’s wall, muffled by the human wart that clung to it.
The overbalanced bell swung back, wood splintered, and the bell tore free.
In a blink, it plummeted down into the stairwell. And so did I.
Seventy-five
Bong!
At the base of the spiral staircase, Polian squinted up into the deeper darkness when he heard the thunderous peal overhead, so loud that he reflexively covered his ears.
Next came a rumble, a human shriek, and then a rifle clattered down and struck one of the soldiers creeping up the staircase on the man’s shoulder. The stricken soldier’s rifle discharged, and a man above him screamed.
The repeated peals of the bell crescendoed and alternated with great crashes. A limp human body thudded to the floor at Polian’s feet; then the great bell tumbled into view thirty feet above him. It crashed into the tower’s stone wall, then caromed back as it rolled toward him like a runaway train.
Polian’s exhilaration of moments before turned to terror as his eyes widened. He screamed, then turned and dashed toward the church doors.
As he slammed his shoulder against the thick doors he looked back and saw that the bell was gaining on him. The doors parted before him, and he sprinted for his life.
Seventy-six
Each time the bell struck and was redirected by the bell-tower walls, its gong deafened me. As I tumbled, I saw back up the bell tower’s dim shaft. The bell had ripped out the belfry floor as it fell, and a hail of snapped floorboards followed behind me. So did Kit, arms and legs flailing as she fought for balance or a handhold.
The bell rebounded off one wall and caught a Tressen infantryman between itself and the opposite wall. His face was a foot from mine as his eyes bulged, and I smelled his last, sour breath as his chest collapsed with an audible crunch of rib bones.
Then the bell and I were past him. The iron mass, then my body, fell on in nose-to-tail formation, bouncing and deflecting off shattered stair treads and supports that protruded from the stone walls.
The bell spiraled down to the church floor, and the impact of iron lip against marble exploded tile fragments like shrapnel. The bell bounced, deflected off a pew as it crushed the bench, and, redirected, rolled toward the now-open front doors.
Shouting Tressen soldiers flattened themselves against w
alls to let the bell rumble past, or dashed ahead of it, then tripped and tumbled down the outer stairway and into the square.
I landed facedown on my machine pistol, which knocked the wind out of me. Stunned, I gulped for a breath.
Whump.
Something as soft and heavy as three flour sacks struck me between the shoulder blades and drove the breath back out of me before I could enjoy the oxygen.
Kit lay on top of me, wheezing into my ear. She got to her feet before me, scooped up her own gun, and dragged me to my feet.
The two of us dashed after the bell as it toppled over the church threshold, bong-bonged down the steps, and rumbled, rolling on its side, across the cobbled square.
By the time the rolling bell began to accelerate down the hill, we were sprinting, crouched and sheltered behind it as Tressen infantry fired. Maybe at the careening bell, maybe at us.
Kit panted, “That was sentimental crap!”
“Huh?” I stumbled over a cobble, then righted myself as a round spanged off the rolling bell.
“You jumped on this bell because you saw me get hit.”
“What?”
“I saw it in your eyes!” Kit ripped off a full auto burst in the general direction of a Tressen who aimed at us while kneeling in a doorway. A halo of orange sparks flashed around the man as bullets caromed off the doorway surround, while our personal steamroller led us past him in the darkness.
We were three-fourths of the way down the hill now, and the bell rumbled straight toward the midsection of the right-hand Tressen truck. Three Tressens between the bell and the truck scattered.
Kit ejected her spent magazine. It clattered to the street; then she wiggled her fingers at me. “Magazine?”
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