At least she knew I was alive. Once Greenwald spliced into the uBakai national data pipe, I’d been able to flash a single message to The’On’s residence there: “I am alive. Sasha.” No indication of where I was, of course, and no way for them to comm back—too dangerous to everyone else here if anyone figured out where I was in Sakkatto City.
I leaned against the street corner and yawned. I hadn’t slept in about two days, near as I could remember, but I’d gone a lot longer than that without sleep before. Of course, I’d been younger then, and the last two days I’d been on my feet almost the whole time. Too much standing around on foamstone pavement was starting to get to me in the joints, especially my knees. I ought to get a little rest, but first I had to get the ammo distribution points reorganized.
Ivanov had placed them where his ammo carriers could get to them, but too far from the perimeter. He was doing fine with fabrication so I let him concentrate on that and I took over ammo distribution myself until I could find some eager beaver to delegate it to. I’d half figured I’d have to step in there anyway so it wasn’t a big surprise. Better to get it squared away now than try to shift everything around when the fighting got heavy.
And I needed to get the soup kitchen better organized, with some volunteers to haul hot chow up close to the fighting line. And we still didn’t have enough dormitory space for the Sookagrad folks who’d been displaced, let alone for the Human refugees we’d been getting, a trickle at first but more in the last twelve hours.
And I had to convince the perimeter fighters to get a lot more serious about recovering and taking care of the spent magazines from their weapons. Almost every weapon we had was a gauss rifle or pistol of one sort or another. The gauss in their name meant they magnetically accelerated a composite metallic flechette faster than the speed of sound, but they needed electricity to do it. The batteries that provided the juice for the system were embedded in the magazines. We could fabricate all the flechettes in the world but if we didn’t have magazines to load them into, and recharge with power, we were out of business.
Where to start?
Ammunition distribution. Right. Make the pitch to the perimeter fighters about magazine recovery when I go around with word on the new ammo points. They’d like not having to go as far to get it, so they’d be more disposed to help us on the other thing. I stretched my left arm over my head, twisted from side to side to loosen up my back, and headed on to the clinic. Maybe Doc Mahajan could give me a shot or something for the joint pain.
I heard small arms fire in the distance. I’d gotten used to it lately, but suddenly I realized this sounded like a lot more than usual. The fog of my fatigue cleared and I started trotting. By the time I got to the clinic a couple sets of stretcher bearers were moving through the big double doorway to the trauma receiving station and Moshe Greenwald was yelling at a crowd of guys, trying to get them to do something.
“What’s going on?” I said as soon as I got to them. Moshe turned and his face showed relief.
“Boss! Boy, am I glad to see you! Big push at the southwest barricade. Don’t know what’s happening except our guys took some casualties and they need ammo and reinforcements.”
I looked at the half-dozen guys he had together. “You guys ammo haulers?”
“Yeah, but Zhang here is the runner for barricade four. We got our own guys to haul for, if they get in trouble.”
“If the mob breaks through the southwest, we’re all going to have a really bad night. Everyone grab one sack of magazines and follow me. Moshe, you stay here. Alert whoever’s running the perimeter—I think it’s Zdravkova. She might not be back at headquarters yet. We were at that studio you rigged up. But find her and get some reinforcements to barricade four. Then get a work party together and get ready to push ammo wherever it’s needed. These guys are now the first echelon reinforcements,” I said, pointing to the ammo party. I could see the whites of Moshe’s eyes in the flickering flare light. He was excited, keyed up, but his head was still screwed on straight.
“Got it, Boss. Good luck!” Then he was gone, running toward the HQ buildings.
“Saddle up, folks,” I said to the other six. “You’re all about to become heroes. Do what I tell you and you’ll stay live heroes.”
“How do we know which bags are which caliber?” the one called Zhang asked. “We need forty-four-thirty pistol, forty-five-forty carbine, and some forty-five-fifty RAG.”
“Just grab a bag and haul ass,” I answered. I did exactly that and hoped like hell they’d follow me.
Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty minutes later, after most of the excitement was over and I crouched beside a stalled ground car catching my breath, I heard Moshe call out to me.
“Hey, Boss. What are you doing this far forward?”
I turned and saw him emerge from the shadow of a building corner in a low crouch and stop. Four more reinforcements sprinted forward past him and then myself to thicken the firing line, although the Varoki seemed to have lost all their fight for now.
“Come on,” I said. “It’s pretty clear.”
“Fuck that. You come here.”
A single round zipped overhead and knocked foamstone chips from a wall. It wasn’t anywhere near either of us, but it did remind me that I was pretty far forward for an unarmed logistics chief with one broken wing. I used my good left arm to help duckwalk back to Moshe. We got around the corner and out of the line of fire. Moshe moved the worst of the trash out of the way with his foot and then we both sat with our backs to the metal wall of the shipping container building. Moshe lit a cigarette.
“Looks like the guys held,” he said. “How’d it go?”
“Like an Albanian town council meeting,” I answered. “Two of them, actually. Fortunately, the one on the other side was even more confused than the one on ours. Much more. But this so-called ammo distribution system we have just isn’t going to work. Jesus! Half the guys ended up back off the line rummaging through the bags, trying to find something they could shoot.”
I stopped and took a long, shuddering breath. I’d been really scared through the firefight. That wasn’t unusual; I’m always scared when there’s shooting, especially if I’m unarmed. I keep doing what I need to do, never freeze up, but that doesn’t make the experience any more fun. Moshe handed me a glass bottle, about a half-liter. The cap was off and I took a drink with trembling hand. Slivovitz—plum brandy—probably homemade, and pretty stiff.
“Moshe, you are a man of unexpected resourcefulness,” I said.
“Is that you, Naradnyo?” I recognized the voice as Zdravkova’s and saw her first as movement in the shadows, keeping to the side of the street near our wall. When she got closer I saw she was packing an old Mark 14 RAG.
“Hey, it’s the Dragon Lady! Thanks for getting the alert squad up here so quick. Your kids did real good up on the barricade, once they settled down. They had it mostly under control but the bad guys really packed it in when your reserves showed up.”
“What are you doing up here?”
I held up the bottle. “You know, having a nightcap, enjoying the evening. Think it’s going to rain some more?”
Without a word she stalked past us and dropped into a crouch as she went around the corner.
“If you were a little older and wiser,” Moshe said, “you’d appreciate mature women more.”
“I appreciate ’em fine,” I said and passed him the bottle, “especially when they’re packing military-grade firepower.” I thought about that for a moment. It was an odd thing to say, given my current elective nonviolent state, but old habits die hard.
“I’m married, though—and never had much of a wandering eye. Wish I was home right now.”
“Who doesn’t wish they were someplace other than here?” Moshe said. “I got an ex-wife on Bronstein’s World. Right now even I wish I was there. Your wife, she’s rich or something, ain’t she? Good looking, too?”
“Yup, and a lot smarter than me. Not a ba
d combination. But we never laugh anymore. We never go dancing, either. We’ve never danced, do you believe it? You know I can do a pretty mean samba.”
“That I’m having a hard time imagining,” he said and passed me back the bottle.
“It’s true. But all we do is plan and scheme and try to stay ahead of the bad guys, whoever they are today. Saving the galaxy, that’s us. Not always sure what we’re saving it from, or who for, but by God we’re savin’ the hell out of it.”
I took another drink.
“We’re so focused, so single-minded, day in, day out. Everyone needs a laugh once in a while. We used to laugh, until everything got so goddamned serious all the time. Someday some guy’s gonna come along and make her laugh again. Then what?”
I took another pull of brandy and handed it to Moshe. The evening had become so quiet I could hear Zdravkova talking to the perimeter guards, maybe a block away, but I couldn’t quite make out her words.
“Well, I remembered another physics joke,” Moshe said after a while. “This one’s great! Einstein, Newton, and Pascal are playing hide-and-seek. Einstein’s ‘it,’ so he closes his eyes and starts counting. Pascal runs off to hide but Newton just stands there and takes out a piece of chalk. He draws a line a meter long on the street, then another one at right angles to it, then another and another until he’s made a box. He stands in it and waits. Einstein gets done counting, opens his eyes, and says, ‘Newton, I found you!’ ‘No,’ Newton says, ‘I am a Newton over a meter squared. You found Pascal!’”
Moshe laughed.
“What the hell kind of joke it that?” I said. “It doesn’t even make sense.”
“It does if you know physics.”
But I obviously didn’t. Overhead I saw stars and one of Hazz’Akatu’s smaller moons. No clouds so maybe we were going to get some sunshine the next morning after all. We needed it.
What was keeping Zdravkova? I needed to talk to her before I turned in.
“Okay, you know physics,” I said. “This is the three hundredth anniversary of the invention of the jump drive. Did you know that? I went to a reception for it a few days ago in Katammu-Arc. I guess you could say we crashed the party.”
He offered the bottle but I shook my head. I was already about half-plowed.
“So what’s the deal with that?” I asked.
“With the slivovitz? A friend made it over…oh, you mean the jump drive. The deal is it’s the only way from star to star and the Varoki own it, nu?”
“Yeah, but how does it work? I mean, in general. No equations or my head will explode.”
Moshe laughed. “No danger of a head explosion tonight, Boss. I don’t have any idea how it works. Nobody outside the research departments of the big Varoki trading houses knows. It’s called a proprietary trade secret. It’s not even part of the patent description, is what I hear.”
“How do you maintain it on a starship if you don’t know how it works?”
“The components are black boxes: one jump cortex and from one to ten jump actuator units, depending on how big a ship. You fly with one duplicate of each component. If the component’s performance goes subnominal, you install the backup and replace the defective one at your next stop.”
“You never look inside?”
“Never, and I mean never. They’re factory sealed, and they better still be factory sealed when you turn them in. You know, you don’t own those components, you just lease them. Mess around with the seals, you violate the lease, get blackballed, and you’re done flying. Besides which, its antitamper device is listed as a level five biohazard, which is as bad as it gets.”
“Biohazard?”
“Yeah, you never heard the story of the Rawalpindi? This was about thirty years ago, before I was flying. A Newton tug coming in to dock at Boreandris Highstation had a malfunction. One of the lateral ACTs—that’s attitude control thruster—froze in the full thrust position, started yawing the tug. Before they could get it unfrozen, or the pilot thought to just fire the opposing thruster, they hit a maintenance gig and then plowed it right into the side of a Human star freighter, the Rawalpindi. Drove that gig through the hull of the freighter like a spike, right into the engineering spaces, and cracked open the jump cortex.
“Two of Rawalpindi’s engineering crew survived the initial impact, foamed the hull around the breach and got the pressure stabilized enough for the rest of the crew to crack the access hatch and get them out of there. Should have left them sealed in. Whatever was inside that cortex, some sort of neurotoxin they say, once it got out into the air it killed everyone else on the ship, something like twenty passengers and crew, including some rich Varoki who must have been out slumming. Couple of crew suited up but the bug ate through the seals, got ’em anyway.
“No rescue or recovery attempt once the bug was out—not allowed to board it or even take a remote sample afterwards. The Cottohazz ordered Rawalpindi hauled into a parking orbit nearby and waited ’til everyone died, then had a Newton tug give it a good hard shove toward the local sun. R.I.P.”
“Damn,” I said.
He nodded and took another sip.
“There was another accident like that, a freak meteor strike, I forget when. Bottom line: nobody outside their labs has looked inside a jump cortex and lived to tell about it.”
He screwed the cap on the bottle and stood up.
“I gotta get back to the clinic, look at the wiring on two of the autodocs. You coming?”
“Nah, I need to get this ammo thing worked out and, much as I hate to say it, the Dragon Lady and I need to put our heads together on it.”
“Why you call her that?” he said, hands on his hips. I got the idea he felt a little protective about her.
“I don’t know. It’s a nickname for a capable and dangerous woman.”
“Well, try her real one: Dezi Oobiyets. See you later.”
Now that was an interesting nickname. Dezi was obviously short for Desislava, her first name. Oobivtsya meant killer in Ukrainian. I was willing to bet oobiyets meant the same thing in Bulgarian.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I didn’t have to wait long for Zdravkova, although I was right on the verge of dozing off when she led a half-dozen people from her reserve squad back down the street.
“Hey, Killer. Got a minute?”
She waved the squad back toward the headquarters and stood facing me, assault rifle’s stock balanced on her hip.
“What?”
“Ammo,” I said. “This ain’t working.”
She shifted her weight impatiently. “You asked for the job. Make it work.”
“Well, it’s easy to make it work for me. Let me know how many rounds you want, and of which calibers and magazine styles. We’ll deliver them to you as soon as possible. The thing is that’s not going to work so well for your kids on the firing line. Once the shooting starts, it’s too late to screw around with that kind of bureaucratic bullshit. I want to push the ammo to your folks so it’s there when they need it, but I can’t.”
I got to my feet using the wall for support, feeling every stage of the move in my knees and back. I’d already been tired before the firefight, and nothing drains your reserves like a big shot of adrenaline followed by a crash. Also I was a little drunk. Zdravkova slung her rifle over her shoulder and looked at me.
“You okay?”
“Sure. I’m just tired, that’s all. Little out of shape, too. I gotta take these unused magazines and the empties back. Can’t just leave them lying around. Give me a hand?”
I picked up a couple of partially filled bags of magazines with my left hand and Zdravkova grabbed the others. We started walking back toward the clinic.
“Got any more in that bottle?” she asked.
I chuckled. “Sorry, Greenwald’s the man with the slivovitz. He was headed back this way to the clinic. So look, I want to push ammo forward to units but we can’t because we don’t know what they need. We got some different calibers and all, but the real head
ache with all these different civilian weapons is magazine compatibility. Since the magazine is also the power source, we can’t really get around that. Even after sorting out all the one-offs and oddballs, we still have fifteen different magazine styles with only very limited interchangeability.”
She looked at me—glared at me is more like—but after a couple seconds her scowl softened and she nodded. “Yes, that’s been worrying me, too.”
“The supply of magazines is already a bottleneck,” I said. “We’re trying to fabricate some more of them, but that’s harder than just making flechettes, and we’re short some of the raw materials we need for the battery components. Turns out it also takes a lot of power to fabricate stuff that complex. We’re bumping up against our wattage ceiling already; all this rain means the solar panels haven’t done us much good, so we’re pretty much tied to the LENR generators.
“As the fighting gets more intense, medical and ammo fabrication are both going to need more juice. Your folks have to get really serious about recovering spent magazines and getting them back to us in good shape.”
“Fair enough. I’ll make sure they do. But how do we solve the magazine compatibility problem?”
“Well, either reorganize your squads and platoons, or swap the weapons you have within your existing tables of organization. Ideally each squad should have one pistol magazine style and one long gun style. That way we can at least assemble squad packs and make sure they’re stockpiled close to where the squad’s supposed to fight.”
She shook her head impatiently. “I can’t limit a squad to one long gun type. I need to spread the RAGs around, put one or two in each squad with the veterans, who are also usually my squad leaders. Without two RAGs up on the barricade tonight, no telling what might have happened.”
Come the Revolution Page 16