by Alec Saracen
“Flashover,” Ceq said, to nobody in particular.
Grey Hawk pointed. “Military fighters.” Zhai followed her finger to see tiny dots of light zipping past just below cloud level, their engine noise swallowed by the storm.
“That's the Hactaurs into the fray, then,” Zhai said. Angry purple lightning glared behind the clouds for an instant, and Zhai caught sight of a handful of jets and VTOLs flash-frozen mid-flight. The tableau made him think of the painting in Chang’s office. He frowned at the streaks of light blazing slender white trails across the night. “Air to air missiles?”
Grey Hawk nodded.
“So Parys doesn't have all the air force on her side.”
“I doubt it.”
“Twins. How the hell can anyone tell what's going – shit!”
Zhai recoiled as a stricken jet screamed down out of the sky and smashed into the upper floors of a building no more than half a kilometre away, bursting into a furious orange fireball.
“They can't,” Grey Hawk said, with grim certainty. “Not reliably. This will be ugly.”
“It's ugly already,” Ceq muttered.
The exploding jet had set several floors of the building ablaze, visible as a glowing gouge. Flaming fragments poured down towards the street. Somewhere off in the distance, another jet made a bombing run, and a precise crescendo of explosions blossomed along a street – and even as he watched, another building erupted in flame, Everywhere Zhai looked, he saw fire.
“We couldn't even stop this,” he said disconsolately. “All that time here, and we didn't do a damn thing to help.”
“You tried,” Ceq said.
“And I made it worse! If I’d never set foot on Tor, Landing would still be standing..”
Ceq reached around Sam and clapped Zhai on the shoulder. “But you tried.”
Zhai watched the battle rage, powerless. He thought of the recorded massacre of the Alliance fleet that the Devvies had trumpeted all over Megereth Station, and the confab in his office. It seemed a lifetime ago now. He'd been separated from that battle by several days and a dimension, but the combat unfolding before him right now, mere hundreds of metres away, seemed just as immune to his intervention. Words had failed long ago.
Every one of those far-off explosions probably took at least one life. Dozens were surely dead already, probably hundreds. Every passing minute added more Torian dead to the charnel house of Landing. Zhai clenched his fists at his sides, digging his nails deep into his palms, if that microscopic penance could balance out all the death and destruction in the galaxy.
“I just wanted peace,” he said. His own words sounded pathetic to him.
Grey Hawk grunted. “Better a war for freedom than a tyrant’s peace.”
Zhai glanced at her. “Yustrid?”
“No,” Grey Hawk said, distorted fireballs reflecting from the gel packs on her face. “Me.”
The fighting gradually intensified for a while, then fell into a rhythm of lulls and furious flurries of action. Zhai couldn't look away. He felt obliged to stand there and watch it happen. It was all he could do, in truth. What else was there? There was no net communication. He was sealed off in the embassy, denied the only thing that he had ever been any good at. The time for talking had come and gone. The new language was metallic and lethal.
Jets were swatted from the sky, both by each other and by surface-to-air missiles. They gave as good as they got, lighting up huge swathes of the city in hissing flame. Looking down at the surrounding streets, Zhai could see the hulking dark shapes of armoured vehicles, lit by the burning shells of their dead brothers, rolling through intersections and filing down avenues, the crash of their heavy guns vibrating through the rain.
Throughout it all, he never saw a single person. The soldiers were too small for him to see in the darkness of the storm. He could almost pretend that the warring vehicles were unmanned, and that nobody was dying before his eyes.
Almost.
And then, just over an hour after the first shots were fired, as the four of them stood at the window, several things happened very quickly.
The first was, as usual, Ceq shouting. Zhai's brain registered tone before words, and he was already instinctively ducking when Ceq grabbed him and flung him towards the centre of the room. The words get down filtered through as he was in mid-air, and as he fell to the carpet he saw Ceq diving his way, her face contorted with effort, and Grey Hawk starting to leap away from the window, dragging an uncomprehending Sam with her. The diorama wrote itself straight into Zhai’s memory, every snapshot detail picture-perfect – Sam's shoe catching under the edge of the carpet, the shards of Zhai's dropped tumbler skittering across the floor, the way Ceq's teeth were bared.
Then it all vanished in a brilliant flash, and fire punched its way into the embassy, blowing the reinforced windows in and turning Ceq, Sam, and Grey Hawk into black silhouettes against a wall of flame. The shockwave sent Zhai skidding back across the floor to crash into a table, knocking half the wind from him; the other half left him when Ceq landed hard on his stomach. She bounced upright instantly, drawing her pistol before Zhai could even begin to move. A high whine filled his ears. The world moved in jerky flashes as he clambered to his feet, disoriented: Ceq shouldering past him – Grey Hawk following suit – the heavy door to the embassy exploding off its hinges and crashing through a wall – masked figures looming in a cloud of dust – snub-nosed guns spitting white fire – Grey Hawk's impossibly strong arm around his chest – the window – his feet kicking uselessly – his own shouts inaudible to him – and they were outside, rain smashing down all around them, and they were falling to the streets far below.
29
Zhai was almost too big for Grey Hawk to hold onto with one arm as they plummeted from the window. The ambassador's screams were choked off by her iron grip around his ribs, which suited her fine, but his squirming nearly caused him to slip from her grasp. Grunting, she activated the slowdown mechanism and wrestled their fall under control. They hit the ground no faster than if they'd jumped from a couple of metres up, though Zhai still crumpled to the floor. Grey Hawk had no time to worry about that. He was safe for the moment, but Ceq and Sam were still in danger. Leaving the ex-ambassador behind, she reeled in the microfibre at max speed and arrowed back up towards the embassy, where even through the deluge she could see the flicker of gunfire.
With a smoothness of motion that surprised even her, she burst back through the window, scooped up her fallen gun, and laid down suppressing fire. The attackers had ducked into cover, while Ceq and Sam had taken cover behind an overturned table, both armed with pistols. Ceq's was a hefty military model. Sam's was a tiny self-defence piece.
“To me!” she shouted between bursts of gunfire. Ceq was up in a flash, reacting before she even spoke, hauling a panicked Sam with her. “Hold on to me!”
Ceq darted behind her and grabbed her waist, with Sam hanging onto Ceq’s, and Grey Hawk launched herself back out of the window, taking the time to fire a parting shot from her rifle's underbarrel attachment. The grenade detonated on impact, belching fire and debris out of the window above them as they fell away. Grey Hawk activated the slowdown mechanism again.
It failed.
Oh, she thought.
Fuck you, Lake.
Plan B. This time, she dropped her gun, hoping it wouldn't land on Zhai, and released the microfibre altogether. She flattened her hands, locked her wrists, and smashed them through a window as she fell past. There was a momentary jerk before the toughened material shattered and they were falling again. Grey Hawk did the same on the next window, and the next, and the next, warning lights flashing in her vision with every moment of punishment her hands took, until at last a window held, leaving them hanging ten metres above the ground. Three more repetitions brought them safely to the street. Ceq and Sam staggered away from her as soon as they hit the ground.
“Where is he?” Ceq shouted, her words almost lost in the rain.
Grey Hawk
looked at her hands. Her left middle finger and right index finger were mangled, dangling uselessly. “I don't know!”
“Find him!”
Metres away, gunfire rattled.
*
The rain was apocalyptic. As Zhai lay wheezing on the street, he had to heave himself onto his side just to breathe. Every inch of him was already soaked. It was like lying under a waterfall; the rain was almost physically nailing him into the ground. Spluttering, he scrambled to his feet, wincing at the stab of pain in his ankle, and stared up at the embassy. Grey Hawk was already out of sight. He was alone.
He could barely see his own hands. The street lights were glimmers behind a curtain of water. Just breathing felt ominously close to drowning. Storm gales howled at him, funnelled into brutal waves of wind by the streets, tearing at his sodden clothes and leaving him constantly off-balance. Rain poured past his eyes
“Fuck,” he gasped, his voice just a suggestion of sound in the howl of the storm. “Fuck!”
A grinding noise made him whirl around, his heart hammering, and the blue glare of a spotlight swept across the street, transfixing him. The black mass of a full-sized battle tank rumbled his way.
His legs turned to stone. Something rushed past his ear and crashed into the ground next to him, making him instinctively recoil, and that involuntary movement spurred him to life. He looked down – and saw a heavy assault rifle at his feet. A Liberator model.
He stared at it.
Well, words had failed.
The rifle was unbelievably heavy when he picked it up, probably at least twenty kilos, and Zhai could barely hold it. He managed to heave it up to his shoulder, the unfamiliar metal digging into his neck. Armoured, helmeted soldiers emerged from the dark, flanking the advancing tank, and Zhai raised his own wavering gun, wondering what odds Gael would have given him that he’d die with a gun in his hands–
The soldiers opened fire, aiming not at him but down the street. Bullets snapped past feet away from both directions, and the dark wedge of a VTOL roared past overhead, its guns chattering. Several soldiers went down to invisible bullets, and Zhai heard gunfire ricochet off the tank's armour. One of the surviving soldiers whirled around, firing after the VTOL, then suddenly whipped their head back to where Zhai stood.
In slow motion, Zhai watched the soldier's gun swing towards him, and instinctively his finger found his own trigger.
It was the wrong trigger.
The rifle punched him in the shoulder and bucked straight out of his hands, and the grenade he had inadvertently fired exploded against the tank. The soldier went flying, and smoke and steam boiled up through the rain. Zhai staggered back as the firefight intensified, his legs still numb with shock and fear. The injured soldier clambered to their feet. A choking, paralysing sense of horror seized him. What was he doing here?
And, as the unlucky soldier found their feet, Grey Hawk flashed past Zhai, scooped up her fallen gun, and shot them twice, dropping them instantly.
“This way!” she shouted, pushing Zhai past the tank. He obeyed without thought, staggering into the dark, and ran right into a bedraggled Sam.
“Sam!” he called, relieved, then noticed the pistol in his assistant's hand. “You have a gun?”
“Protection!” Sam yelled back. Someone bumped into Zhai from the side, and he looked round to see Ceq there, her half-blind eyes hunting for him through the storm.
“Boss! Let's go!”
Together, the three of them forged ahead, the wind blasting a barrage rain into their eyes as they stumbled over bodies and debris. The heat and shock of an explosion kissed their backs, and Zhai would have fallen if not for Ceq's preventive arm. Glancing back, he saw the tank erupt in flames, and Grey Hawk's tall silhouette coming their way.
A jagged fork of lightning split the sky, illuminating the world for a millisecond in livid violet, and Zhai saw a VTOL lurching out of control, trailing sparks and smoke.
“Move!” Ceq screamed, bodily shoving Zhai and Sam into the middle of the road. Zhai stumbled forwards, just staying on his feet, and half a second later the stricken VTOL came screeching out of the air and slammed into the ground, sliding in flames straight through the space they had just escaped, its jet rotor whining with mechanical strain. Ceq pushed him again. “Go! Go!”
Zhai ran, already desperately short of breath, and the VTOL's engines exploded. Fire fountained up into the rain, and shrapnel whipped through the air around them. To his left, Ceq cried out, clutching at her flank. She’d cut back behind him to intercept the shrapnel, Zhai realised.
He grabbed her as she stumbled. “Ceq! You hurt?”
“Just a nick!” Ceq shouted back. Blood was already staining her soaked shirt. “Don't worry!”
Zhai nodded, and they moved on, putting as much distance as they could between themselves and the chaos behind them. Ceq and Grey Hawk were at Zhai and Sam's backs, Grey Hawk periodically firing into the dark at targets only she could see. Just as Zhai thought he could run no more, they came to an intersection.
Lights blazed in the darkness, and an armoured vehicle charged towards them. Grey Hawk raised her rifle, but Ceq knocked the barrel away. “No!”
Grey Hawk looked at her in confusion, but acquiesced. The armoured car pulled a hard handbrake turn, screeching way across the road and coming to a stop just metres away, its side door already sliding open.
Violet Hactaur was inside, surrounded by five troops in full body armour.
“Get in!” she called, waving them frantically towards the car. Ceq pushed Zhai forwards, and Violet helped him clamber up into the vehicle. As soon as all four of them were on board, the door was slammed shut.
The vehicle's interior was cramped, fluorescent-lit, full of military-looking hardware, stinking of oil and sweat and nervous human bodies. Zhai swayed on his feet as the armoured car jerked into life and rumbled off.
“Are you hurt?” Violet demanded.
Gasping for breath, Zhai shook his head but pointed to Ceq. Violet signalled to one of her people, and the man pushed his way towards Ceq, grabbing a medical bag from the storage netting strung overhead.
“Twins,” Violet said. “Sit down.” Zhai collapsed into a seat, his heart still hammering like a drum solo. Violet, hanging from a ceiling handhold, wearing combat gear and with a submachine gun slung around her neck, cut an imposing figure. She glanced at the bizarre figure of Grey Hawk. “Friend of yours?”
“It's complicated,” Zhai wheezed. Grey Hawk smiled through her layer of gel packs.
“No doubt.” Violet leaned through to talk to the driver. “Get us off the roads! Head for the park!”
The driver wrenched them around a couple of corners, throwing her passengers from side to side, and gunned it straight through a chain-link fence, across racquetball courts, and finally skidded to a halt beneath an enormous artificial tree.
“Contact the Marshal, tell her we've got the ambassador safe,” Violet said to another of her troops. In the corner, Ceq hissed in pain as the medic applied sealant to her wound. Violet turned back to Zhai, bright-eyed. “Sorry about that, Ambassador. And about the rest of your staff. We were watching the embassy, making sure you were safe, but we didn't expect a direct attack on you. Chang must have–”
Zhai shook his head. “Wasn't Chang. Peck. She tried to shoot me. Rival Coalition faction.”
Violet took a second to process the information. Zhai could see the computer behind her eyes fitting the data into her strategy. “You're sure it was her?”
“Definitely.” He paused, wondering whether to hold back his trump card, but there seemed little point in keeping secrets. “It was her, Violet. It was the Coalition.”
“What was?”
Zhai sighed. Water trickled steadily from his sodden hair. “Landing. Peck did it. We had the bomb in our ship, and we didn't ever realise it.”
Violet stared at him incredulously. “What?”
“There's no more staff left apart from us,” Zhai said. “I def
ected.”
“What?”
Zhai grimaced, trying to boil the complicated sequence of events down to a few words. “The Coalition bombed Landing to prop up Chang, keep Tor on the path to membership. I found out. I quit, sent the rest of the staff home.” His lips twitched into a half-smile. “Need a freelance diplomat?”
“Twins,” Violet spat. “We thought it was Cadmer or Chang.”
“It was us.”
“Well, that's just made my day even more fucking complicated.” Violet raised her eyes to the roof of the vehicle. “Let me think.”
“What's happening out there?” Grey Hawk asked.
“No clue. We're fighting Chang's loyalists and Cadmer's coup at the same time, trying to let them wear each other down while we hit them from the air, but we haven't got the whole air force. Mind you, they haven't got the whole army. Rose has almost a quarter of the armour on our side. We've got control of the propaganda screens, though. Lilac's sending through coded orders to our forces. The net's down, but we can still talk.” She stared off into the distance for a moment. “We should win. I think. We flattened Chang's headquarters. He's probably dead, we bombed the shit out of his bunkers to make sure. Cadmer's at large. If we could bring him down...”
“You've got the screens, you said,” Sam said suddenly.
“Yeah. They're all linked to a broadcast bunker. We spent years working on that. Not even Chang knows about it.”
Sam looked to Zhai, excitement burning in his eyes. “Boss, you could broadcast on those screens. You could tell the whole planet what Peck did.”
Violet opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. More calculations. “That – makes sense. Ambassador, if you do that, it'll be a huge help once we win. We can unify the planet against the Coalition, consolidate our government quickly before any major opposition builds. Hell, do that and we'll put you in charge of Foreign Affairs if you want. This could be invaluable.”
Zhai looked up at her with weary eyes. “You think so?”