Come the Revolution

by Frank Chadwick

  She looked at me. “You are a devious son of a bitch, you know that? I must be too, because I was thinking the same thing. Those negotiators aren’t making any bones about the consequences of us turning them down, either. Laying it on real thick, lots of bloodthirsty promises.”

  “They probably mean every word,” I said. “They look plenty pissed.”

  “Yes,” she said, “and that’s before they find out we have a hidden camera in the room recording every gruesome and illegal threat, for whatever that’s worth.”

  What was that worth? I didn’t know exactly, but I knew it was worth something.

  * * *

  After nightfall Zdravkova started moving squads up to the perimeter to reinforce the main accessways. She moved them into civilian-occupied buildings and sent the civilians back to the dormitories. Since there were more civilians out there than reinforcements, the net movement of heat sources would be into the center of the district, assuming the uBakai military was watching us with a recon hoverplat or two and passing the intel to the Militia. We didn’t know they were, but it was stupid not to assume that. But if they were, the perimeter would actually look thinner on thermals. If they wanted to screw us, we were bending over for them, or at least it would look that way to them.

  Aurora wanted to interview some of the fighters before they moved up to the line so I took her and the recorder guy to one of the assembly areas, and who did I find there but my old pal Bela, now packing a RAG-19 assault rifle. Remembering how he’d carried on once back at my apartment when Aurora came on the vid screen, I pointed him out and suggested she talk to him.

  “What did you do before all this?” she asked.

  Bela rubbed his deformed right ear before answering.

  “Made money here and there. Had trouble with law—nothing serious. But is different to be on side of law. Is good, yes? I think so.”

  “Why is it good, Bela?” she asked.

  He looked up at the stars in the night sky and squinted, thinking.

  “When I have no money, nothing to eat, some people help. They don’t say, ‘Bela, this is what you owe. Pay now!’ They just do. Now militia out there, want kill us. Why? We do nothing to them.”

  He patted the top of his head. “Because have hair? Have little ears? Law says they are wrong.” He touched the replica Munie badge on his chest and smiled. “So now help law protect these people. I don’t go them, say, ‘You owe me. Pay now!’” He shook his head. “Just do.” He sniffed and wiped his nose. “Pardon. Have cold.”

  Behind him his squad started moving toward the perimeter. He slung his RAG over his shoulder and shrugged. “Time for going. Very nice meeting you, Miss Aurora. I watch you much on feed. Be safe.” He turned and trotted to the head of the column and fell in beside the squad leader.

  Aurora turned toward the vid recorder. “That was Lance Constable Bela Ripnick of the Sakkatto Municipal Police, one of nearly two hundred emergency deputies deployed here to protect Sookagrad’s population. As I reported earlier, the Citizen Emergency Militia, or CEM, the paramilitary arm of Elaamu Gaant’s Varoki New Dawn Leadership movement, surrounds Sookagrad. It has demanded the Municipal Police in this district turn in their weapons and surrender themselves to the CEM. Of course the police have refused.

  “Men and women like Constable Ripnick stand ready tonight to repel any attempt to cleanse the Sookagrad district. This is Sookagrad calling. Good night.”

  The bit about Ripnick being one of “nearly two hundred” fighters was deliberate deception, a bit of psychological warfare. We actually had four hundred and seventeen fighters, near as we could tell. Record-keeping was tough with every wireless data device being jammed, but we did have hard-copy muster rolls. Over a hundred of the fighters were purely rear-area security, armed only with an odd assortment of pistols for which we had a limited number of magazines. But we had three hundred front-line combatants.

  Assuming we did as much damage to the attacking Militia as we expected to, thinking less than two hundred fighters did it should be an additional blow to their confidence. The people over there already feared Humans. We wanted to stoke that furnace.

  I was glad I’d been there for the interview. I’d seen Bela’s eyes when he touched that deputy’s badge. It was just a symbol, but sometimes a symbol will keep people going when normally they’d pack it in, and this symbol really did sum up what we were becoming as a community. We weren’t the rebels, the radicals, the criminals, they were. We were…well, whatever we were, somehow it was all tied up with that badge.

  So I needed to talk with Ivanov, figure out some way to juggle the fabricator priorities so we could crank out another four hundred badges. They weren’t that big or elaborate, and we could use whatever material we weren’t short of, provided it was hard and semi-shiny. Didn’t want it too shiny.

  “I wish you’d let me do a piece on the improvised explosives,” Aurora said once the troops had left. “I know we don’t want to tip our hand about the implanted minefields Mr. Conklin set up, but we can hold the broadcast until later.”

  “Too late now. Attack could come in any time and those minefields are right on all the most likely avenues of approach. Besides, do you think something as sneaky as booby traps, especially when we’ve rigged them to cause maximum mayhem, is the story we want to tell?”

  She looked down the street, thinking it over, and then shook her head. “I suppose not. Too bad, though. It’s just all so ingenious, and improvised.”

  It was ingenious. Billy Conklin and part of his crew spent all afternoon and early evening getting the five minefields ready. We had a supply of six-centimeter-diameter composite pipe, about a thirty-five centimeter length of which would hold a liter of PLX. We only had twelve detonators—we’d have more but not until tomorrow—so we couldn’t do a lot of individual mines. Instead we made Bangalore torpedoes, although I have no idea why they’re called that since I don’t know what Bangalore means and they aren’t really torpedoes. They’re basically really long pipe bombs. We made ours two meters long and assembled ten of them, each with a detonator and about six liters of PLX.

  The five main avenues of approach each got two of them, one on each side of the street about thirty or so meters past the perimeter barricades. They were laid parallel to the street, one on either side, and offset with a couple meters between them, so they covered a six-meter path. The work crew scrounged as many small rocks, chunks of metal, and pieces of hard composites as they could find and piled then on top of the pipes, then covered the whole thing with trash. There was plenty of that around and it made it easier to camouflage traps like this.

  The perimeter barricades would hold unless they got hit with overwhelming force. If so the troops guarding them would withdraw laterally into the buildings to either side of the street and bunker up. Each route had a reserve force back behind the minefields. When the attackers surged down the street into the killing zone of the mines, the local commander would blow an air horn—the signal for his men to duck behind whatever cover they had, then blow the mines using battery-operated detonators Moshe Greenwald lashed together. When the pieces stopped falling, everyone in the reserve force would open fire on whoever was left standing.

  I had no idea if it would work that well in practice, but even if it just went Bang real loud, it should scare hell out of anyone nearby. Scaring the bad guys in the middle of a firefight is always a good policy.

  Aurora looked around the trash-cluttered streets and pursed her lips in thought. “Is there some place I can get a better view of the district? I keep talking about it in general terms, but I don’t really understand its layout.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but we better move fast. No telling when the curtain’s going up.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I took Aurora up to the roof of Nikolai Stal’s building, since two stories was about as high as anything down here got. I didn’t know the district that well so I snagged a local from the soup kitchen, a dark-haired girl, maybe
thirteen or fourteen Earth years old, about Tweezaa’s size, who had grown up in the district. She’d been washing dishes so she was thrilled to leave that and guide the glamorous feed head Aurora.

  None of us looked or smelled particularly glamorous by then, but my sister managed to handle it better than most. Her face was dirty, but almost artfully so. I found out later that before she shot the interviews the day before, she’d used a quarter of her drinking water ration to wash her face, and then had reapplied dirt, almost like makeup I guess. She’d drawn her hair back in a tight ponytail which masked its oiliness. She was a few years older than I was and managed to look at least as many years younger, but I suspected that up until recently my mileage had been a little rougher than hers.

  “Ted, we won’t be shooting anything from the roof tonight,” she said to her vid recorder tech. “I just want to look around. Why don’t you get a start on editing the vid from today and then get a little sleep? If there’s an attack later, we’ll want to shoot some footage and maybe do an interview.”

  Ted, who had grown a lot quieter since being demoted from producer of the news to Aurora’s tag-along recorder tech, left us without a word.

  “So what’s your name?” Aurora asked.

  “Divya, Miss. Divya Jayaraman.”

  “Call me Aurora. Everyone does. What did you do before all this started?”

  “Oh, I was in school. My father got me a position in the Enlightened Technical Preparatory Academy in e-Kruaan-Arc. I am going to be a design engineer like him.”

  “Enlightened Prep?” Aurora said. “I didn’t know they take Human students.”

  “I am the first one! An experiment, they say.” She giggled. “They frown and study me, ask me questions all the time.”

  “How do the other students treat you?”

  Divya shrugged. “At first some of them were mean, but the teachers made them stop. They did not want the experiment ruined, you see. Now they are used to me.”

  “Your father is a design engineer, you said?”

  “Oh, yes, he works at AZ Trimtaax, also in e-Kruaan. He hasn’t come home since the trouble started, so he must be staying there.”

  Aurora and I exchanged a glance and Divya saw it.

  “Oh, no, nothing has happened to him, I am sure. My father is very strong.”

  She said it with such cheerful assurance I almost believed it. And it was possible he was alive but hadn’t been able to get back here, was holed up in another enclave or in some sort of protective custody. Maybe his employers had even sheltered him, who knew? I sure wasn’t going to be the one to rain on this girl’s parade.

  Stal’s building was pretty much a cast foamstone box, two stories tall, with no holes in the roof except for power lines to the roof-mounted solar skins, ventilator, and a couple clusters of video units which fed the smart walls when they were in window mode. Roof access was by way of a metal stairway bolted to the outside of the building. We clanged up and then had a pretty good panoramic view of the north side of Sakkatto City and the Sookagrad district. Divya began pointing out the landmarks.

  “That’s e-Kruaan-Arc to the north and see, there’s Katammu-Arc almost directly south but farther away. Mmmm, two kilometers, maybe more.”

  They seemed much closer, but that was because of their enormous size. Katammu-Arc was three kilometers broad at the base and about two kilometers tall. When something is as tall as it is away from you, you feel as if you’re in its shadow. E-Kruaan-Arc was closer and taller, I’d say maybe three kilometers high, and it looked even taller because it was so slender by comparison, less than a kilometer at its base and then tapering as it rose.

  “You see the broad east-west road between us and e-Kruaan? That’s the Avenue of Peace. It is an official thoroughfare, one of the boundary boulevards of the old park district, and the Munies always made sure it was kept clean—no structures and no trash. They would plow the shacks and buildings away once a month, my father told me, although I don’t remember anyone trying to live there. That’s the northern boundary of Sookagrad.

  “You see the other thoroughfares? The broad one cutting straight from e-Kruaan to Katammu, right under the maglev tracks, is The Shadowed Way North. It cuts almost through the center of north Sookagrad. The southern boundary of the district is Grand Vision Way, running almost east-west between Bannaz Arcology and Arc-Jannu. Father says there used to be a maglev line running there before e-Kruaan was built, but that was almost one hundred years ago, before Humans lived here.”

  She sketched out the less-well-defined eastern and western perimeters, pointed out the important buildings such as they were: the broad metal dormitory, the white clinic building which had acquired two large metal shipping containers attached by composite sheeting walkways as overflow trauma care, the Citizen League headquarters building which now flew a Municipal Police flag provided by Captain Prayzaat. All of those buildings huddled almost in the shadow of the maglev tracks and were close to the Shadowed Way.

  The smaller streets wound seemingly randomly, having more to do with where large cargo containers had been abandoned than anything else. Most were little more than pedestrian alleys, but two larger streets, wide enough for vehicles, came into the district from the west and one from the east, in addition to the Shadowed Way which bisected the district north-south.

  Divya’s act of giving the alleys and buildings names and functions almost elevated them from the squalid shacks and discarded storage units they were to something substantial, something with utility and, by implication, a future. But that was an illusion. Sookagrad was simply the place where a desperate group of Humans had gathered and tried to survive, and that was before everything really started going to hell.

  As she talked, I looked at the mountains of trash, the collapsing hovels built on the broken rubble of the previous generation of dwellings, and I knew Sookagrad was finished, no matter what else happened. The idea of Humans, or any race, living like this in the heart of the Varoki home world was insane, and the times which produced the bizarre chain of circumstances and decisions which brought all this about were coming to an end. What was coming next might be a little better, or it might be much, much worse, but in either case there would be no place for Sookagrad. About the best we could hope for was that it not end up a mass grave.

  Divya had just begun naming the lesser streets when a flare burst in the sky to the north, over the maglev tracks, and then three more burst in rapid succession. In the flickering light I saw people moving south in the Shadowed Way, lots of them. We all heard the distinctive sound of small arms fire from the north.

  “Divya,” I said, “get down the stairs and run back to the kitchen. Hurry!” She scampered back to the stairway and then down.

  “Come on, Aurora, let’s go. There’s no cover up here and there will be stray rounds. Not many of those guys can shoot straight.”

  More aerial flares exploded over the east and west sides as well and a grenade crumped down near the maglev tracks barricade. Aurora began walking around the edge of the building, looking at the unfolding panorama of a massed assault.

  “Come on, let’s go! I’ve got to start pushing ammo.”

  “Just a moment,” she said, still walking steadily around the edge of the building, looking at the flickering light of flares and burning shacks, the darting shapes of men seen between blowing columns of smoke. Then a thunderous explosion echoed from the Shadowed Way, accompanied by two rising fireballs. She turned and faced it, holding her head steady the whole time. Then she turned to me and blinked.

  “Tell me, Sasha, how do you think the fight is going?” She held her eyes open just a little wider than she had before.

  I turned my back on her and headed for my main ammo dump, taking the stairs down the side of the building two at a time.

  My sister wanted me to like her. I might have liked her a little more if she’d come clean with me about being fitted with a bio-recorder, but not necessarily. You never know.

  * *
*

  By the time I got to the main ammo dump, I could hear small arms fire and grenades from the south, which meant they were hitting us from all four compass points. A second minefield detonation made the ground shake and I saw a fireball rise up to the east, which meant there were two places they’d broken through the perimeter. At least two.

  My ten ammo runners and my new ammo assistant, Yash Zaradavana, were waiting for me. The runners were armed for self defense, but only with small caliber gauss pistols, and for the most part pistols spared from frontline service by virtue of their poor performance or unusual ammunition or feed system which made supplying them awkward. The men and women detailed as runners were fit enough to haul ammo, and so to fight, but for one reason or another they hadn’t found a place in a combat unit. Most of them were happy with that. My point is, their job was to haul ammo, not fight, and that was just as well.

  Zaradavana had them organized and settled down, but as soon as I showed up voices rose again. I held my left hand up to quiet them.

  “I saw about five minutes of the fight from a rooftop, but I don’t know any more than you do. They’re pushing all along the perimeter, from all four directions, which means this is a serious and coordinated effort to plow us under. We can’t slack off tonight, or there won’t be a tomorrow. Everyone clear on that? Good. That said, no heroes tonight, okay? Just do your jobs. People are counting on you, a lot of lives depend on you doing your job, not getting distracted and going off to fight, no matter how much you want to.”

  I didn’t think many of them actually wanted to, but I said it anyway. We did need them to hump ammo, people’s lives did depend on it, and they may as well take some pride in it instead of feeling ashamed they weren’t doing something more directly violent.

  “Near as I can tell, we’re engaged on all main axes, so what’s our first priority?”

  “Feed the RAGs,” about a half dozen said at once.

  “Right. First runners, one sack of RAG bandoliers each. Push it to your assigned ammo point, make an assessment of what they’ll run short of next, and hustle back here. Move now!”