“That sounds bad!” Bruce said, his mouth hanging open. Stein gritted her teeth. This wasn’t the right time to mock their help.
Croutl glared at Bruce. “I don’t suppose you have any bright ideas for getting across there without getting shot?”
“Human shields?”
Croutl seemed to consider that. “You say it takes three seconds to blow through the lock once you’re there?”
Bruce nodded. “That’s right. Not that I’m admitting I’ve done it before.”
Croutl ignored him and stepped away from the group, taking a couple of his soldiers with him. They pushed their way through the crowd of Loyalist troops to the building’s corner, to peek at the security forces down the street.
“Think he bought it?” Bruce asked.
“Definitely,” Stein replied. Her terminal vibrated, a message from Ellen, wishing them luck. When they had heard about what Bruce and Stein were doing, Griese and Ellen had immediately offered to come along. Stein hadn’t even mentioned it to Hogg — neither had any skills that could justify a place on the team — and told them their moral support was more than enough. Bruce also appreciated their moral support, but indicated the financial type would be appreciated, as well.
Croutl returned from his scouting and started whispering orders to his team, which soon dispersed into the crowd. “Okay,” he said, turning to Stein and Bruce. “We’re going to try that human shield thing…”
“Yes!” Bruce was excited.
“What?” Stein was not.
“It’s fine,” Croutl said. “But, you know. We’re not going to tell them. They think we have a secret weapon that will protect them.”
Bruce nodded emphatically. “Is the secret weapon treachery?”
Croutl was getting good at ignoring Bruce, and continued explaining his plan. “Us three charge out there with some…help. You blow the lock.” He pointed at Bruce. “We run inside. Everyone else joins us.”
“And the human shields?” Stein asked.
“What the fuck do you think?” Croutl snapped. “Shit, they’ll be fine.” With a jerk of his head, he summoned them over to the corner of the building, and slowly edged towards the intersection. Standing on his tip–toes, he looked over the crowd to his soldiers dispersed within, looking for some sign they were ready.
“Now!” Croutl yelled. With a roar, a surge of maniacs dashed into the street, shooting wildly. Croutl waited a beat before dragging Stein and Bruce out of cover, trailing slightly behind the mob. They made it across the intersection easily, Stein and Croutl sliding to a halt beside the door, Bruce thumping right into it, a plasma torch already in his right hand. He pressed the tool against the threshold of the door, sending a tongue of flame into the doorframe.
Down the street, flashing muzzles lined the doorways and windows of the street, marking the locations of security officers. It was a unique sight, Stein thought, seeing so many guns shooting in her direction. Really, it was impossible that she wasn’t getting shot. But the security officers seemed to mainly be shooting at whoever was shooting back at them, a group that for the moment consisted entirely of duped Loyalist troops, scattered across the street in front of Stein. One of the dupes closest to Croutl groaned, catching a shot in the chest. His legs folded under him, Croutl rushing up to catch him under the arms and drag him back to the door, now literally using him as a shield.
A soft clank from the doorframe as the locking mechanism gave way. Bruce placed a meaty paw on the door and shoved it out of the way before stepping through. Stein following close behind, shouting for Croutl as she did. A second later, the security officer appeared, backing in through the door, stumbling on the threshold. He collapsed, his poor stupid shield falling on top of him, the pair falling backwards, crashing into Stein’s legs.
A massive increase in the volume of fire caught their attention. Four slumped bodies in the middle of the road were new, belonging to members of the assault team. The rest of the team remained behind cover on the other side, out of sight of the security reinforcements that had obviously just arrived. Croutl got up and stepped to the threshold of the door. He took a peek down the street and immediately ducked back inside, another volley of fire stitching the street around him. He waved the rest of the team back, then tugged at the edge of the door, sliding it back into place. He turned back to face them. “Just the three of us now.”
“Can we do this with just us three?” she asked.
Croutl checked his tool webbing, where five small explosive charges were securely fastened. “Five bangers. You tell me?”
She did some math in her head. “To cripple the pressure regulator, any spares they have, and a big chunk of the fuel lines…yeah, five charges will probably do. Worth a try, I guess.”
“Then, let’s go.” Croutl turned to Bruce. “Lead the way, Magellan.” Bruce grinned and beckoned them deeper into the apartment that he had been so insistent they get to.
The place was big, and although not obviously dusty, it had the feeling of being underused. A space that someone had stopped caring about. Odd, mismatched furniture in the main room, a stack of broken sporting equipment by the wall, a single sex swing hanging lamely in the corner. It was also, as expected, completely empty, the owner having obviously not been spared the same eviction that every other aft dweller had received.
In the back, Bruce led Stein and Croutl up a set of compact stairs, winding their way up the second level, and then the third. It was these stairs that made the apartment so unique, a destination worth a few bruises on some human shields. Knocking holes in walls had always been a popular and greyly–legal way to expand one’s living space on board the Argos. This was normally seen in the form of double–wide suites on the lower decks, but in a few cases there were people who had done the same with vertically contiguous rooms, making taller suites.
“Who owns this place?” Croutl asked, voicing the same question that Stein was thinking.
“Some government guy. From a long family of government guys,” Bruce said. He opened another door, revealing another set of stairs up to the fourth level. “From a long family of stair fetishists, also maybe.” He led them upstairs.
The fourth level was obviously the most lived–in floor, but even here, Stein wasn’t impressed with what she saw. It was the wastefulness of it all that irritated her. Someone hoarding space and not using it. And she knew there was still more space to come.
There had always been rumors of extremely well–connected people with suites that extended above the fourth level into the normally off–limits floors above. Stein had never cared enough about the rumors to wonder whether they were true or not. Even Bruce, with his healthy passion for prowling around secret places, never gave the stories of these illegal suites much credence.
An opinion he was forced to change when he was bribed to fix the heating in one. As Bruce explained the story — and Stein knew to never completely believe these — an extremely nervous–looking man had pulled up to Bruce at the bar a few years ago and asked him if he wanted some work under the table. Bruce, with a lukewarm attitude to work independent of its position relevant to tables, had humored the man only out of a sense of curiosity.
His curiosity did not go unrewarded. The man explained that the suite, which had been passed down in his family for generations, both contained and stood testament to his family’s greatest secret: that they were fucking morons. At one point they had turned their beautiful, palatial, entirely legal nest into a beautiful, palatial, wildly illegal nest by expanding it into the fifth floor above. So illegal that it actually limited the amount of usable space they had, guests restricted from the upper–levels of their home, lest the secret attic be uncovered. Cocktail parties became tense and uncomfortable affairs, velvet ropes guarded with unusual diligence. The family gained a reputation.
Eventually, the suite passed into the hands of the current owner, who had managed to shed his family’s reputation of being weird and was now simply unpopular. With no guests w
anting to spend any length of time around him, the illegal suite no longer posed him any trouble, at least until something went wrong with the heat. Something happened upstairs, something which turned the entire apartment, top to bottom, into a sauna. Months of sweaty, sleepless nights passed for the sticky, unpopular owner before he had heard about a fellow who might be capable of both fixing such a problem and keeping his mouth shut about it.
“I was that fellow,” Bruce had explained.
“Yeah, I got that, Stein had replied.
Bruce arrived with his tools the next evening, where the man, stripped to the waist, quickly hustled him through the front door. The hidden space above, originally a hydroponics farm, had been converted into a wholly unremarkable fifth bedroom, furnished quite haphazardly in comparison with the main floors below. Bruce deduced that they had been reluctant to be seen carrying too much furniture in and out of the space. Amongst the haphazard decorations was a dingy wall hanging, which Bruce decided probably concealed a door connected to the rest of the fifth level. Bruce finished the job at a leisurely pace, checking carefully for anything worth stealing via the great back door he had found. But not finding anything immediately interesting, he had finished the job and filed the information away to be used at a later date.
“It is now a later date,” Bruce said, opening the door of a suspiciously large wardrobe. “Welcome to the future, everyone.”
Inside the wardrobe, a cramped set of ladder stairs led up to the secret level above. The three of them climbed the stairs, Bruce fumbling for the lights on the floor above. The ugliest floor yet, dingy and haphazard, just as described. “He hasn’t changed a thing in three years,” Bruce said.
Croutl looked around, a distasteful look on his face. “The fucking thing is so illegal, he was afraid to even use it.”
“Nice temperature, though,” Stein observed, finger extended at her friend.
“Thank you for noticing,” Bruce said, beaming at her.
Bruce walked to the side of the room, where the aforementioned deeply unattractive wall hanging lay. With a swipe of his hand, Bruce tugged it to the ground, revealing a door. He pressed his ear against it, then shook his head — no sounds from the other side. “Well, I got you this far,” he said. “Which is the point where I’m officially out of ideas.”
Stein opened the map on her terminal, double–checking the route they had already planned. “It’s all supposed to be mothballed hydroponics past there,” she said. “Shouldn’t be anyone around for blocks. Or halls. Whatever. And the staircase heading up is just down the hall.”
Croutl moved to the door, readying his pistol. “All right. You guys ready?”
“Wait. Moving stairs or the bad type?” Bruce asked.
“The bad type.”
“This plan sucks.”
§
“They’re pretty dug in along here,” Hogg said, pointing at an intersection on the map. “They recovered really quickly.” He straightened up as Linze crouched over the display set into the coffee table. They were in the living room of a largish apartment, just south of the shattered barricade. A double–wide unit, one of the nicer apartments in this part of the ship, it had been repurposed as the forward command center for the Loyalist army.
“Yeah, well, we knew that would happen. Okay, let’s not bang our head against a wall. So, we tell everyone to go the other way,” Linze said.
When Hogg arrived, he had seen them carting away the injured officers who had been by the barricade when it exploded. They were pretty messed up. And he had known every one of them. The explosion was way larger than what he had imagined. Way larger than what he had asked Kinsella for. “I don’t know,” he said, hearing his voice tremble, feeling ashamed. “We could stop here. Regroup. We were lucky to get this far. If our guys are attacked with any kind of intensity, they’ll crumble.”
Linze’s eyes widened. “Come on, Hogg. Our only advantage is numbers. We throw as many of us at as few of them as possible. Just keep moving and shooting. Don’t give them time to set up. Look here…we tell squads…Tiger, Monkey, Laser, and Potato to push south, then west around here.”
Hogg’s face twitched. Too much, too fast. Intellectually, he knew Linze was right: their only advantage was numbers, and the longer this went on, the more likely his side was to get scared and run away. Or bored and walk away. But the intellectual part of him was drowned out by the part that had seen three of his former colleagues with blood streaming out of their ears, a part of him that was screaming, Slow Down. “Let me think about it.” Linze balled her hands into fists, but retreated to the dining room, where a group of volunteers were coordinating the communications.
Hogg sat down heavily on the couch of the apartment. The last four weeks had taught him that he liked following orders more than giving them. He had a modest talent for leadership — he had had to, to make it as far as he had in his career. But that was small scale stuff. Stuff that didn’t result in blood streaming from ears. He closed his eyes and rubbed his knuckles into them, trying to see anything else.
He took a deep breath and opened his eyes, examining the map on his terminal. He tapped around a bit, watching the battle unfold, the good guys marked by red dots. The red dots had simple orders: if they see a bad guy, take cover and start shooting. If they don’t see a bad guy, move around until they do. The plan was messy by design — his soldiers couldn’t handle anything more complicated. And once they had breached Helot’s static defenses, numbers and messiness should work for them. That was what he had told Kinsella, and what he had told himself.
His terminal beeped. He examined it, an incoming call from Kinsella.
“Have we won yet?” the mayor asked.
“Uh, not yet, sir. Might take awhile,” Hogg said. Linze returned to the room, looking at him impatiently. He turned away from her. “We’re actually thinking of slowing down for a bit and consolidating our gains.”
“Yeah? Okay. Why?”
Hogg licked his lips. “Just so…we can…have them consolidated.”
A long pause while Kinsella considered that. “Yeah, I don’t know what that means. You keep going, Hogg. You win this war immediately.”
“Yes, sir,” he said into a blank screen, Kinsella having already ended the call. Hogg looked up to see Linze staring back at him, a faint hint of mockery in her eyes. “Okay, do it,” he said. “We keep going.”
§
Helot slumped forward in his chair, chin resting on the tactical table. He watched from this low angle at the dots and blips moving around. There were an awful lot of red dots. Thorias manipulated the table controls like a dervish, shouting orders into his commlink, ordering his units to stop getting shot. Two other officers assisted with the display, drawing lines and moving icons around, indicating tactical items of interest, places where people weren’t getting shot fast enough, presumably. An enormous chunk had been carved out of the lines they had held for the past month. It had been so easy for them.
They had known an attack was coming — couldn’t not see the mass of armed morons slowly gathering all day. But Thorias’ careful schemes of staggered retreats and fall back positions had been shattered by the explosion on Africa Street. There had been some feint attacks prior to that, which Thorias had overcommitted to, rushing support away from where it was actually needed. By the time they knew what was happening, thousands of Othersiders had poured through the gap.
The fighting was dying down a bit now, the Othersiders stopping and consolidating their gains. No tactical expert, that still seemed like a mistake to Helot. They had us on the ropes. They just had to keep spreading out, and it would be over.
“Captain?” Thorias asked from across the table. It was the most deferential Helot had ever heard the chief. “I think it’s time to stop playing nice.” The room didn’t go quiet — too many people doing too much work for that to happen — but it seemed quieter to Helot. Without needing to be told, Helot knew what Thorias was referring to — the small cache of lethal
weapons they had. To his credit, Thorias hadn’t discussed these at all during his defensive preparations. There probably were secret plans, with larger, angrier arrows on his terminal that took the bigger guns into account. But Thorias hadn’t even hinted at them until now.
Helot looked down at a corner of the tactical table, where a loop of footage from the feed on Africa–1 was playing. He watched in slow motion as the stolen van accelerated at the barricade, the officers there scrambling out of the way of the driverless vehicle. Then the explosion — a sure sign the Othersiders had gotten around the safeguards preventing the manufacture of volatiles. Kinsella tried to kill them. If those officers survived, it was by luck, not design. That was real blood on the streets, real screams of pain.
“Yeah. I think so, too,” he said, looking up at Thorias. Just be careful, he thought, but didn’t say, while Thorias turned away to make a quick call. I really should offer some words of restraint. He watched Thorias hurriedly leave the room, finally off the leash.
“Go get ’em, Chief,” he said softly instead.
§
From the fifth floor, they went straight up, using one of the emergency staircases. At this latitude, they were still outside the core, though paralleling its border as they rose up to the 20th floor, where a connecting passage would allow them to pass through.
The climbing got easier as they rose, but they nevertheless paced themselves, taking breaks at regular intervals. “I guess they’re not chasing us,” Stein noted during one of these stops, sitting on the landing of the 17th floor.
“Seems that way,” Croutl said. He stretched up, bent his knees slightly, and sprang upward, bouncing off the ceiling before coming back to rest.
“You coming, Bruce?” Stein asked down the stairs. Heavy, labored cursing answered her. A few seconds later, Bruce appeared, wheezing. He sat down heavily — no easy trick in low–gravity — and leaned against the wall.
“No taking off this time. You guys keep taking off as soon as I catch up.” A hoarse, lispy wheeze. “It’s bullshit is what it is.”
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