“Assault platoons, when you see our purple flares, or when it gets too hot out there, break off and fall back, passage of lines through the reserve platoons and to the old barricades. Once you make contact with the reserve platoons, you assault platoon leaders are senior, and in local command. Reserve platoons, if the chain of command is disrupted, wait ten minutes and then break off. Fall back and join the assault platoons. Don’t forget to set those remote mines.
“I’ll try to get runners to you assault platoon leaders when it’s time to collapse the sack and go, but things are going to get very crazy and you may just have to make your own call. Questions?”
One of the platoon sergeants raised her hand and Zdravkova nodded to her.
“Ammo. Can we get any more? We’re going to burn through our basic load very quickly.”
Zdravkova turned to me.
“You’ve got every single magazine we have,” I said, “loaded and charged. When that’s gone, we’re dry.”
I saw quite of few of them exchange worried looks at that.
“It works out to every one of your troopers having a magazine in the system and one backup magazine, and then you’ve got a platoon reserve of one more magazine per system. How you want to split that up is your call. But here’s what I’d emphasize to your people: there are a shitload of RAG mags out there where you’re going, all of them compatible with our systems. Snag as many as you can.”
Zdravkova bobbed her head. “Yes, live off the enemy. Take their ammunition. But also remember, we can’t get bogged down in protracted firefights. Most of the damage we do will come in the first minute or two of contact. Unless the enemy panics and runs, break off and find another spot to hit.”
“What about my reserve platoon?” one of them asked. “Almost every weapon we have is a sporting rifle. Assault rifle magazines aren’t going to do us much good.”
“If you find RAG magazines, you’ll find RAGs with them,” she said. “Upgrade. Anything else? All right, assault platoons jump off thirty minutes from my mark…now. We’ll meet again on the other side of this. Confusion to the enemy!”
“Confusion to the enemy!” they chorused, and then they were off, trotting in pairs, each in different directions. They didn’t have a lot of time to spare. I waved my department heads forward and with less precision the six of them moved over and sat or squatted on the ground.
“Doc, have you got our wounded ready to move?”
“Those who can move, yes,” Dr. Mahajan answered. “The critical cases will stay, and I’ll be staying along with a med tech and five volunteer orderlies.”
“I’d rather you came with us.”
“I know and I appreciate the sentiment, but we’ve been over this. No matter what happens, not everyone will get out. There will be wounded from the fighting as well. My work is here. We just have to hope they exempt the clinic from the no-prisoner order.” She clasped her shoulders with her hands, arms crossed, and shivered, although it was not at all cold.
“We have litter bearers for those who cannot walk but can be moved, with reliefs for each party, so they can keep moving. Both of my doctors and seven medtechs will move with the column and will be available to give first aid along the way. I do not know what else we can do.”
“No, I don’t either,” I said. “Dolores, what about traveling rations?”
“There’s not much we can do, given how little warning we had,” Dolores Wu answered, her voice betraying exasperation. “We have been cooking riceballs for the last hour, boiling pots of edamame, and we have some sacks with a piece of fruit or two, some pickled vegetable, and whatever else we can find, to pass out to whoever we can get them to. Also we’re filling as many people up with miso soup now as we can, but any liquid container we have we will need for potable water. We are passing out tomatoes and peapods to whoever wants them as well. At least there will be something.”
“Yeah, I know it was short notice. Tell your crew good work under some impossible time constraints.
“Everyone else, you and your team members all have your assignments—dormitories, shelters, residential blocks. Everyone recognizes these orange-painted LOG shirts. They think we actually know what we’re doing, so we’re the guides. Your folks will explain the breakout plan to the civilians, get everyone ready to go, but keep them in place until you see those purple flares. Section leaders, it’s your jobs to tell them when to start moving. Space the serials. Tell your guides to keep their people together and moving.
“Billy, your construction goons don’t have assigned groups to lead. You are the traffic cops along the breakout route. Keep them moving, but moving in the right direction.”
“Don’t worry about us,” he said.
“Okay. Remember, no equipment destroyed. Fabricators, generators, everything left in place and workable. Folks are going to need it later. Although Petar, make sure all the, uh…military software is scrubbed from the fabricators.”
I didn’t want to say “illegal software” with Aurora’s recorder running.
He glanced at Stal, his old boss, and then looked back to me. “Not problem.”
“Anyone else want to say anything?” I said to the three troika members.
“Yes,” Zdravkova said. “All of you people in logistics have done a wonderful job, I really mean it. The improvisations, the clever ideas, the long hours of work…I’m sorry this isn’t ending in a parade, because you earned it as much as anyone. Many of my fighters are still alive because of you. Thank you. Now I’ve got to go.”
She stood and trotted down the street into the lengthening shadows. I looked at Nikolai Stal and Bogo Katranjiev. Maybe Bogo realized there was a recorder running, because he cleared his throat before speaking and managed a hard-jawed look of steely determination.
“What Commander Zdravkova said is true. No one ever thanks the people behind the scene, the little people, but none of this would have been possible without you. My hat’s off to you.” He reached up but then remembered he wasn’t wearing a hat and tried to turn the gesture into an awkward salute. I saw some smiles, but more from gratitude rather than ridicule. Folks might not think of Katranjiev as a dynamo when it came to leadership, but they appreciated the effort. I did as well, insincere as it may have been.
Stal pointed at my crew. “When shit hits fan, stay low, keep moving. Most of you guys too ugly to die, but not you, Dolores, so don’t press luck, okay?”
She chirped like a bird and smiled. Dolores Wu was probably pushing seventy and thin as a stick, with graying black hair whacked off in an uneven line across the back of her head and then shorter above her eyes. Maybe she’d been pretty when she was younger. I hadn’t expected flattery from Stal.
“Okay folks,” I said, “get back to your teams and get ready to move. Our assault teams jump off in about twenty minutes, but if all goes well they’ll slip through the enemy lines and there won’t be any fighting for a little while. When it starts, sit tight and wait. We don’t even know that we will find an open road, but when and if we do, be ready to haul ass.
“Thanks for everything you’ve done—even you, Billy.”
“Eat me,” Conklin said, but he grinned past his fear.
As the group broke up, Stal paused next to me and said in a low voice, “You want one of my guys take care of CSJ agent before leave?”
“Already taken care of,” I said. He looked at me and his eyebrows went up, but then he just nodded and left.
* * *
“You get that last bulletin on the pipe?” I asked Aurora after the others had gone back to their teams.
“Yes,” she said. “I told about the refugees bringing us word of the Army’s orders, the fear it was causing, the feverish preparations for a last ditch defense. Nothing about our attack, of course.
“Our father wants to travel with us.”
She was taking it for granted that the two of us would be moving out together, and she was right. I couldn’t trust her survival to chance. I also couldn’t gua
rantee it myself, but what I could do I would. Not for her, for the bio-recorded record she carried of everything all these other people had done here. That story needed to get out. Maybe she was right about the politics. Maybe it wouldn’t change everything. But it might change something, and that was a start.
“What do you think,” I asked her, “about the old man traveling with us?”
She looked down and moved some trash around with her foot. “When there were only two seats, he had to choose between me and our mother. He chose me because of my singing voice. You don’t remember but—”
“Yes I do,” I said, and I was surprised, because I hadn’t remembered until she said that. But then I recalled her singing when our parents had friends over for dinner, a recital at her school, and even her singing me to sleep once when I was sick. Her voice had been like the tone fine crystal makes when it’s struck softly.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, there was a great deal of talk about me as a child prodigy and Father decided my career was more valuable than Mother’s companionship. He remarried here on Hazz’Akatu, once Mother’s death was confirmed. It didn’t last.”
“And your career as a child prodigy?”
She shrugged. “My voice changed when I got tits. I still have okay pipes, but not good enough for Father to retire on. Not in the style to which he always wanted to become accustomed, although the bioweapons career worked pretty well for him until recently.”
“He sounds like quite a guy,” I said. “I guess that explains where a lot of my personality comes from.”
Her head snapped up, eyes narrowed in anger. “Don’t say that! Don’t you dare say that. You were my little brother and there was nothing wrong with you. Nothing! Your only crime was…was not being marketable.
“What do I think of him coming with us? He’ll just slow us down and the first chance he gets he’ll try to sell us out. Leave him to die, like he did you.”
I had been her little brother, hadn’t I? I’d actually lived a fairly normal existence once, had even been loved by my parents, if only in a perfunctory sort of way. I had bits and pieces of memories, just flashes. Some of it was probably suppressed, but some was just gone, physiologically gone due to my traumatic brain injury. But so what? It was so long ago, so fragmentary, it was more like a half-remembered story I’d heard than something that actually happened to me.
But it was real to Aurora. I could tell how miserable she felt about that, and maybe about her whole life. For the first time I felt sorry for her. I thought it would make a big difference to her if I called her Avrochka again, like I had as a little boy, maybe let her start forgiving herself for a crime she had no real responsibility for.
But I did not call her Avrochka. It would not have been honest.
“This exotic neurotoxin thing,” I said. “He called it a protein, right?”
She nodded, brow furrowed in confusion at the change in topic. “All naturally occurring neurotoxins are proteins. That much I found out in my background research. That’s what makes them so deadly.”
“Okay. The thing is all six races have unique protein chains. That’s why we can’t ingest the same foods, except some simple sugars and starches, right? We can’t break their proteins down. So if neurotoxins are proteins, aren’t all neurotoxins species-specific? I don’t mean really species-specific, but specific to some or all the species from one of the six trees of life? Don’t they have to be?”
She thought for a moment. “I think…maybe so. What are you getting at?”
“If there are lots of neurotoxins around, and they’re all tree-of-life-specific, then why is one more such a big deal? Big enough to make CSJ want to rub out the old man?”
She looked at me intently, thinking hard. “You’re saying you don’t think he’s working on a bioweapon?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“What then?”
“I don’t know—yet. And that’s why he travels with us. Find him and meet me at the headquarters building. I’ve got one more thing to take care of.”
* * *
I found the CSJ agent bound and gagged, and under guard, in a metal locker in the back of Moshe’s equipment storage building. I sent the guard to join the rest of his breakout party, told him I’d finish up here. I cut the restraints on the agent’s legs and then helped him stand up. He had trouble at first, the restraints having cut off the circulation to his feet. I led him out of the building, talking as we went. His hands were still bound behind his back, which looked odd, but everyone we passed was in a hurry going somewhere else with a lot on their minds.
“The uBakai Army’s about to come roaring through here and kill every single Human they can find. Afterwards they’ll probably blame it on the mobs, round up a few Gaantist ringleaders and execute them, and express their regrets, but they’ll have made their point and no Human will ever feel safe in Sakkatto City again.
“Of course, when they come in here shooting, they aren’t going to stop to ask if you’re CSJ, and the way they feel about the Cottohazz right now I’m not sure it would do you much good anyway. Understand?”
He was still gagged but he nodded.
“Okay. So I can leave you here, in which case you’ll die. Or I can take you with me, in which case you’ll probably try to kill Dr. Naradnyo, and I want him alive, at least for a while. So what do I do about you?”
We walked on in silence, heading toward the underground shelters we’d never used for anything except overflow dormitory space.
“Something puzzled me at first, because I wasn’t using my head. I couldn’t figure out why none of you guys knew who I was, but it was because of the Army jamming, wasn’t it? You can’t access the float out here so your facial recognition software doesn’t work.”
We got to the first hole we’d blown down to the storm sewers, to pump water in case we needed it for fighting fires. The hole was still there, now with a warning sign and a rigid composite panel across it so folks wouldn’t fall in. The pump and hose had been moved somewhere else. People were moving around the shelters, forming up into breakout serials, but we were by ourselves by the hole. Off to the south I heard some single shots, then the stutter of automatic weapons fire. I waited for a moment, listened, but that was all. Maybe just random shooting, maybe the southern assault column running into trouble, hard to say.
I pushed the panel back. I could still hear water running down below, but not nearly as energetically as before. Prayzaat was right about that. I pulled the gag off of his mouth but he didn’t say anything. He just looked at me, waiting for what came next.
“Sit down here, legs in the hole with your hands back toward me.”
He did it and then just stared into the hole, into his personal abyss.
“In case you’re curious, I’m Sasha Naradnyo.”
He turned to me and his eyes got larger with surprise, but just for an instant and then his face was under control again. I grinned.
“Yeah, didn’t see that coming, did you? Well, you’re going to love the next bit. Follow this storm sewer south, which is the direction the water’s flowing. It should take you to Katammu-Arc. Not sure how you get out of it there, but you’re a resourceful guy. I’m going to cut your hands loose as I push you into the hole, because I still don’t trust you not to jump me. But first I’ve got a message I want delivered to Field Marshal Lieutenant e-Loyolaan. Listen carefully.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Tell me a physics joke I can understand or so help me God I’ll kill you.
Sure, Boss. What do you call it when Einstein jacks off? A stroke of genius! Get it?
Yeah. I mean, it’s not very funny, but I do understand it, so I guess you get to live.
Gee thanks! If every boss I worked for was as generous as you, maybe I’d still be alive.
“You are still alive, damnit! Don’t give up on me!” I said that out loud and I guess the other stuff was just in my head because even if Moshe were still conscious, he’d never have told t
hat joke.
I struggled pulling him through the low spots in the rubble with one arm, trying to keep my head down, away from the scattered shots that still zipped overhead. The collar of his overalls was slippery with his blood. My left hand slid off. I flexed it to get some circulation back, tried to wipe the palm clean on my jacket front, and got a tighter hold on him. I kept pulling. Then Borro was by my side, pulling on an arm, and we had him behind a low foamstone wall that used to be part of a building.
“Medtech!” I yelled, unsure there was one within hearing range, or even one still alive this side of the flying monster up ahead. Miraculously, one materialized at my elbow, and started pumping A-stop into the spurting chest wound.
“Is he going to make it?” I asked, probably yelled.
Without taking her eyes off of him, she said, “If the heart’s intact, I can deal with everything else. The entry wound is pretty far to the right, so unless there were some fragments flying around in there, I can at least get him stabilized.”
I hovered there, staring at Moshe’s face, pale beneath the spattered and smeared bright red arterial blood, until Borro pulled at my shoulder.
“Sasha, he will survive or he will not. We have work to do.”
I looked up and then back down the narrow street called Throat-cutter’s Way, illuminated in the overcast night only by fires burning here and there and the flickering light of overhead flares. Four or five of our fighters had shot the uBakai soldier at the end of the block, where the street opening into The Shadowed Way. It earned its name tonight—the overhead maglev tracks keeping the flare light from reaching down into the black velvet void underneath. Halfway to the Shadowed Way, with two bodies beside it, lay the salvo launcher Moshe had been trying to set up.
I looked at the long stretch of open ground between me and it, tasted bile and hot spit, but knew somebody had to do this and if not me, who?
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