by Jay Allan
“Pete, were there soldiers shooting people in the street?”
“No.” He pursed his lips. “But it is quite dark out.”
“We don’t know what’s going on,” I said. “That’s why I have to go find out.”
My impatience mounted as the rest of them went through the convoluted social negotiations involved whenever a group of three-plus people were split on whether to stay or go. I consoled myself with a salty, flaky algae patty.
Baxter volunteered to go with. As soon as she realized I was serious, so did Shelby. Hermalina begged off, claiming she was a housemouse. Concerned at the prospect of leaving our fugitive-harboring host alone, Pete offered to stay, which prompted Vance to stick around, too. That set off the last of the cascade, with Carrie and Isa, Shelby’s rosy-cheeked lawyer, finalizing the home team’s lineup.
We hit the street. It was past nine, but the people gathered at the tunnel were a mix of young and old, men and women, even a couple children, whose game of tag was constantly interrupted by somber parents leaning down with hushed admonishments about appropriate behavior. People laid handwritten notes at the tunnel’s mouth. The weirdies with candles planted them in clusters that threw unsteady shadows down the sloping path. The atmosphere, as Pete had put so well, was that of a social funeral: laughter shifted in a moment to low and worried talk; children were snagged mid-sprint by grim-faced parents; friends wondered aloud whether they could trust their lives to a company that had killed one of their own to keep him quiet.
“You will have to explain this to me,” Baxter said.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “You know what a martyr is?”
He stared down the dark eye of the tunnel. “I knew one once.”
Before I could attempt to explain the scene, pale light flared beside us. A woman held up her omni, projecting a three-inch washed-out hologram of Go. A moment later, the image sprung from the omni of the man next to her: the devices were amputated from the net, but they still had point-to-point connectivity. The hologram sprouted from one omni after another. I found a file request waiting on mine. I opened it and was lit by Go’s small dead face. Baxter was among the last to join, adding his blue-white light to the hundreds of dome locals brought together by a device that normally served to keep everyone at arm’s length.
In the spectral darkness, a woman sang an unfamiliar song. I didn’t know it, but others joined her, voices soaring through the bubble.
From the narrow road ringing the dome walls, a man screamed. Footsteps pounded from the alley. A man sprinted from the darkness. “The army’s coming!”
Baxter tugged my shirt. “If they catch us, they’ll dissect you and scrap me.”
“Right.” I touched Shelby’s elbow. She flinched, then moved as if to touch my hand. I scanned the path back to Hermalina’s. “Let’s go.”
Hard yellow lights bloomed from the alley. A line of green-coated guards jogged into the street, the lightning-on-mountain logo bright silver on their chests. They carried rifles. Two open-roofed carts purred behind them. The crowd buzzed as the carts swung to a stop thirty feet from the fringe of mourners and disgorged two dozen soldiers. Half crouched in a line, weapons trained down. A man with the three semicircles of lieutenancy on his sleeve spoke into an omni, his eyes bright against his dark face.
“We need you all to get home now,” he said in a soothing voice that carried over the myriad conversations sizzling around me. “We don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”
“‘We’?” a woman called out. “The same people who planned to declare martial law when we were halfway to Centauri?”
“That’s a false rumor,” the lieutenant said. “Continuing to spread it will only make things worse.”
“We’re here for Go,” an old man declared. “Chicago Hayes-Winston y Corrales. Have a little respect.”
The soldier patted the air with his hands. “I knew Go. Hell, he’s the one who talked me out to Titan. But there’ll be time to let him know we miss him once things settle down.”
The old man shook his head. “We’ll go once we’re done.”
The lieutenant gestured to a knot of four soldiers. As they crossed the open pavement, the men on either side of the old man linked their arms with his, encasing him in a human shield of tight-faced resisters. The soldiers glanced at their lieutenant.
“I don’t want to arrest anyone,” he said with a sadness I thought was genuine.
“Then turn around and tell management there was nothing to see,” the first woman replied.
The lieutenant pressed his palms together, then nodded to eight more soldiers. They flicked out batons and walked forward.
“Anyone who doesn’t clear that tunnel will be arrested,” the lieutenant said. “Make your choice: spend the night in your bed, or in jail.”
A clod of yellow dirt paffed into the pavement at the soldiers’ feet. They stopped, searching the crowd. The blue screen of an omni whirled through the air in a flat arc and shattered on the ground, pieces skidding for yards. The row of crouched soldiers leveled their rifles.
“Hold your fire!” The lieutenant held one palm behind him and one toward the crowd. “Who threw that?”
Two more omnis wheeled over the heads of the crowd. One sailed far beyond the armed men. The other caught a baton-wielding guard above the ear. He staggered, bleeding down his cheek.
A soldier’s rifle fired with a noise like a man saying “what.” The bullet whined off the bulletproof plass dome. Men and women screamed. I strained to see if someone had been shot, but most Titan-born citizens had a full head on me. Insanely, they pressed forward, forcing me a step closer to the soldiers. My nostrils choked with sweat. I leaned into the surging mass of bodies, pushed on by the bawling panic.
The crowd parted like a tearing sheet. An angular white vehicle rolled from the tunnel mouth behind me, thick with armor, its narrow windscreen tinted black in a face as sleek and predatory as a shark’s. A big fucking gun jutted from its roof.
A score of foot soldiers in the same green uniforms jogged after the battlewagon. It lurched to a stop in the deserted space and its infantry knelt beside it, rifles drawn.
“You call backup?” a guard with a baton in one hand called to his lieutenant. The lieutenant shook his head in exaggerated sweeps.
A hatch popped on the wagon’s roof. Jia emerged and grasped the swivel-mounted gun with both hands. “Stand down, Lieutenant Wilson.”
The lieutenant froze. “What in the nine worlds of Christ is going on here?”
“We don’t want to hurt you,” Jia said.
“Easy solution: don’t.”
“Lay down your weapons, step away from these people, and get back to base.”
Wilson smiled in disbelief. “Are you threatening a superior officer?”
Jia swung the massive gun to stare him down with eight barrels. “Am now.”
“Fuck this, Lieutenant,” a short-haired blond soldier said, rifle tight against her shoulder. “They’re traitors.”
Jia’s crew trained their weapons on the blond. I dug my fingers into Shelby’s shoulder. We had retreated with the others fifty feet back, which still felt absurdly close, but the mourners were packed so tight I couldn’t get further from the standoff.
“What do we do if they start shooting?” Shelby whispered.
“Five seconds, Private Bardez,” Wilson said. “Step out of that vehicle or I will arrest you for treason.”
“Wait!” I left the wall of people behind and moved into the open street. Rifles fixed on me from both sides. “If you start shooting, this whole thing moves beyond the point of no return.”
Wilson stared me down. “Step away, citizen.”
“I’ve been a soldier, too,” I said. “After a fight like this, the triumph drains away, leaving a sediment of pure guilt. When you shoot your own people, do you think you’ll feel good?”
Wilson gritted his teeth, lacing his fingers into his tight black curls.
The blond s
oldier squinted at me, lips parted. “That’s Rob Dunbar, Lieutenant.”
Wilson dropped his hand to his omni. Rifles clicked on both sides. He thumbed at its screen, glanced between it and me, and nodded at the blond soldier. “Arrest him.”
“Don’t fucking move!” Jia yelled. Rifle trained on Jia, the blond took a sideways step my way. I held my ground.
A rifle said “what,” spitting a bullet past my ear. No matter how many times I replayed it in my memory, I don’t know who shot first.
Olympian Atomics had armed their security force with caseless, low-recoil, minimal-earprint ammunition, and the noise of the two sides unloading on each other had the combined ferocity of a bag of popcorn. The screams and whirring ricochets were louder than the gunshots.
I sprinted toward the disintegrating crowd, which tripped and stumbled over each other in sheer panic. I reached them just as Jia’s rooftop multigun opened fire, thundering through the dome. People fell around me. A body dropped on my foot, pinning me. Others pushed me from behind. I was caught in the crush.
“Well, there goes my shoe!” I shouted stupidly as it was stripped from my foot.
The mob loosened and I ran toward a corner storefront, socked foot slapping the pavement. A bleeding body stretched in front of me. In the low gravity, I vaulted it easily, landing lightly on the faux cobbles ringing the store. I dove behind the corner, panting, pulse pounding in my head, eyes so wide I thought they’d tear like fresh dough.
Flames mushroomed from one of the soldiers’ carts. The other pulled away, trailing smoke. Ten troops crouched behind its rails, firing on Jia’s forces. The cart swung behind a yellowstone apartment and Jia tracked them with her juddering roof gun, perforating the building’s face with fist-sized holes.
The gun went silent. A lone rifle puffed twice more. The hum of the cart’s engine drew further and further away.
The evacuated grounds were scattered with bodies, shot or trampled. At least a dozen of Wilson’s soldiers writhed or lay still. At Jia’s battlewagon, six of her rebel crew bled onto the dark street. She climbed from the hatch and vaulted down the bullet-scratched side.
“Baxter?” I said into my throat mike. “Shelby?”
“Here,” Baxter said.
My shoe waited on the pavement a short distance from Jia’s frantic crew. I wandered toward it. A young woman crawled on hands and knees, coughing blood into the street. An oval-faced man lay on his back, one eye staring at the dark skies above the dome, the other eye obliterated, a raw and open mess.
Ten feet further, blood seeped from the stomach of a prone woman. Her blond hair was half-yanked from its ponytail. I screamed Shelby’s name and ran.
There in the security room, Arthur made his sighing noise. “We have to tell them. If we come clean, before they discover it on their own and start acting all crazy, there’s a chance they’ll be too surprised to get angry.”
Hope began to replace the fear in Baxter’s circuits. “Maybe they’ll help us get away from the company.”
“Maybe.”
Instead of the security guard, a tall, thin policeman came into the room a few minutes later. He seated himself and spread Baxter’s ticket, passport, and ID on the table, tapping them with a bony finger.
“First things first. What’s your real name?”
19
I untucked Shelby’s shirt. Blood smeared her stomach, streaming from a small dark hole below her ribs. I pressed my palm to the hot wound. Other members of the crowd ran or wandered back to the killing field, sobbing or wailing or silently focus. Fluid welled through the lines between my fingers.
“Fay, get Pete down here,” I said. “Tell him I need a first aid kit. Shelby’s been shot.”
“Shot?” Fay said. “Pete’s already on his way.”
Blood leaked from an exit wound beneath her back. Good sign—if she didn’t bleed to death in the meantime. “Get me a dome-level map of Shangri-la, too.” I glanced up. “Jia! Medic!”
Soldiers scurried around the battlewagon, crouching over their wounded. I wanted to take my hands from Shelby’s pumping wound and wrap them around Jia’s slender throat. A foot scuffed behind me and I pivoted, chambering a kick.
Baxter gazed at Shelby. “Oh no.”
“Get Jia over here. By force if you have to.”
“It’ll be a war now, you know.”
“Get Jia, goddamn it!”
He nodded and strode toward the soldiers. My omni buzzed, but I kept my hands pressed to Shelby’s gut. I swallowed against the stench of substances you’re never supposed to smell: a soup of blood, the ripe gag of organs exposed to the air. Shelby’s face was still and pale.
Jia jogged up, flanked by Baxter and a bleary-eyed man with blood streaking his brown forehead. He dropped beside me and swept blood from Shelby’s stomach, then leaned in with a fat-tipped syringe of Stikkit, a milky organic bonding solution used everywhere from university surgery to battlefield triage.
“Exit wound, too,” I said. The medic nodded absently. I bared my teeth at Jia. “Those shots? That’s what the start of a war sounds like.”
She blinked, hair hanging from her brow in sweaty strings. “They were about to open up on the civilians.”
“They did that anyway, didn’t they?”
“You wanted a rebellion,” she grimaced. “Well, here you go.”
The medic adjusted the syringe in Shelby’s wound and thumbed the plunger, gluing her up. Her topside bleeding slowed to a trickle.
“I wanted subtlety,” I said. “You just shot us naked out of a cannon. They’re going to come back and they are going to crush us.”
Jia jerked her chin at the dozen-odd soldiers at the wagon. “And we’ll fight back.”
“OA has what, four hundred troops in Shangri-la? A couple hundred more posted around Saturn?”
“Minus my crew and those casualties, closer to 360.”
“Against twenty?”
“And the colonists! We’ve got the whole city!”
“Yeah, OA will fold like a tent at our hard words and empty hands.” I gave her a long look. “We need more weapons. Now. While they’re confused.”
“Support her head,” the medic said. I cupped Shelby’s head and neck as he gently rolled her to her side. I touched her hair, snarling it with blood, then sat back, wiping and wiping my hands on my pants.
“There’s a cache in the next dome,” Jia said. “It’ll be guarded.”
“Figure it out.”
She nodded and loped off. I pulled out my omni, fingers tacky on its touchpad. I splayed Fay’s map out in a holo, then tripled its scale. The blue-white domes hung in the air like weightless marbles. Thirty-plus in all. Displayed as fine white lines, tunnels connected each dome to three to five neighbors. The network form a rough ovoid.
At a closer look, it wasn’t one big cluster, but two: a large web of a couple dozen domes connected to an annex of seven more. I pointed to the dome bridging the two webs.
“You see this?” I gestured at Baxter. “Dome 27.”
He leaned in. “My eyes work, yes. What in particular are they supposed to be looking at?”
“The city’s made of two constellations. If you want to get from the big constellation on the right to the small one on the left, you have to go through this dome here.” I tapped the holo, painting my fingertip in light. “We move all colonists and rebel citizens to the left constellation. We put our troops into the nexus tunnel. It’s a natural chokepoint.”
Baxter considered this. “Unless I am unexpectedly drunk, I see two tunnels leading into #27.”
“Fay, what happens if a tunnel gets compromised?” I said.
It replied after a brief pause. “The locks on both ends seal automatically. If the seals are compromised, the entire dome is evacuated and sealed.”
“So we collapse one tunnel. Fortify the other. Turn it into our Thermopylae.”
“Oh oh,” Fay said. “It’s mostly housing over there. What if they shut off your powe
r? Your ventilation?”
“We’ll tackle that when it happens,” I said. “Look, the omninet’s down. We’re scattered. OA will consolidate soon. We’ve got maybe two hours before they start rolling us up. Our only chance is to get as many of our people as we can behind Thermopylae before they come after us.”
Baxter nodded, glancing across Go’s mourners knotted around the battle’s aftermath. Many had left, but a couple hundred remained, tending to the wounded or talking in tight voices about what to do.
“We should start now,” he said. “Still a lot of colonists here.”
“No. That’s Pete’s job.” I reached for Shelby’s hand. “You stay with her. I’m going with Jia.”
Baxter frowned. “I think caring for her is the kind of thing a human would do better.”
“You don’t sleep. You don’t eat or piss or bleed when you get shot. There’s no reason for you to leave her side for a second.”
The medic sat back, panting between parted teeth. The wound on Shelby’s back was stoppered with a milky, rubbery seal. “Bleeding’s stopped inside and out. Just a patch job. She might need surgery.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He nodded, slicked sweat from his brow, and trudged back to the soldiers receiving orders from Jia.
“I’ll find her a doctor.” Baxter nodded over my shoulder. “There’s Pete.”
“Merciful Jesus.” Pete knelt beside Shelby, hand hovering over the welled red flesh of her glued wound. Quickly, I explained the plan. He stood, knuckled the tears from his eyes. “I’ll need more men.”
“Start rounding up the people here,” I said. “I’ll see if Jia can spare some troops. Get you a few rifles.”
Four of her twenty rebels had died in the firefight. Another three were too wounded to go on. She sent eight to Pete, along with the seven rifles of her casualties and eight more we collected from the downed OA troops. It was a start. Pete had a few dozen colonists and citizens gathered by the time we reconvened.
“We’ve got to go,” I said. “Tell them to bring nothing but food and medicine. And clothes. Warm ones.”