by John Ringo
Kafari didn’t have to wonder what it was for, because the guards were hard at work, filling up the rest of it. A massive crowd of people had been herded to the edge of that ghastly trench, forced into position by the automatic guns on the fences, which were strafing the dirt in every direction except into the pit. Bolts of energy flew like horizontal rain, forcing the crowd to retreat. There was only one place for them to go: into the trench. The guards didn’t even have to shoot them. The ones on the bottom would be crushed and suffocated to death. The ones on the top might live long enough to be buried alive by the bulldozer that idled in the hot light, waiting its turn.
“Red Wolf,” she said through clenched teeth, “remind me to kill the commandant of this camp. Slowly.”
“Yes, sir.”
Then the aircars in the lead fired their missiles and the guns nearest the crowd exploded in towering gouts of flame. The fences came down. The guard in the nearest tower started shooting at the leading aircar. It jagged sideways, avoiding the hail of bullets, and cleared the way for the second aircar crew. A hyper-v missile shrieked into the tower, fired virtually point-blank. Tower, guard, and gun ceased to exist. People on the ground were screaming, trying to run. More fences came down. More guard towers exploded. Savage delight tore through Kafari as Red Wolf made a strafing run, taking down two towers. She was picking up reports from other crews at other camps. The battle was well underway and going better than—
“ARTILLERY!” Red Wolf yelled.
Kafari never saw the gout of flame or the shell. The aircar slammed her against the restraints as Red Wolf sent them screaming toward the sky. He fired air-to-air missiles in the same instant. The aircar rolled into a sickening move that sent the smoking sky and the hot, glaring stone spinning in wild and blurred confusion. Something detonated just below Kafari’s window. Flame and smoke engulfed them for a single, split second. Then they were in clear air again and gaining altitude fast.
Red Wolf, she realized belatedly, was blistering the air with curses.
“That was a genuinely fine maneuver,” she gasped, voice unsteady.
“The hell it was. Dinny Ghamal is going to rip ’em off and stuff ’em up my ass. They got way too close to you.”
“A miss,” she said, still breathless with reaction, “is as good as a mile.”
“Nobody has calculated in miles for a thousand years,” Red Wolf growled. He was circling back around, keeping his distance as the other aircars continued the attack. The artillery gun that had come so close to toasting them was, itself, toast, along with the building it had been hiding in. Less than three minutes later, Kafari’s team was in complete control of the camp.
Red Wolf kept them airborne until their own people had cleared the site, satisfying themselves that there were, in fact, no more P-Squadders anywhere. Several guards who’d tried to barricade themselves into the administrative building had been killed by the prisoners, themselves. Once the shooting had started, the prisoners had turned into a howling mob bent on vengeance. They had rushed the building and torn apart the guards, with their bare hands. By the time Kafari’s aircar landed, her people had brought a semblance of order to the chaos.
The people who’d already been forced into the trench were rescued, with a surprisingly high survival rate. Survivors were organizing themselves, triage style, with the ill and the injured helped into barracks by those still strong enough to render aid. When Kafari climbed out of her aircar, people stopped in the midst of whatever task they’d undertaken, and followed her with their eyes, electrically aware that she was in command. People whispered as she passed, thousands of voices hushed with a sound like wind rustling through ripened wheat. She wished she could have risked removing her battle helmet, with its necessary, concealing visor, because the pain and joy in these people’s faces deserved that small courtesy from her.
But she didn’t dare.
Not yet.
Somehow, they seemed to understand.
“Commodore,” Dinny saluted crisply, “the site is secured and we’re ready to start shipping people out. But there’s someone you need to see first, sir. We’ve asked him to wait in the commandant’s headquarters.”
“Is the commandant still in them?”
“In a manner of speaking, sir, yes, he is. There’s not much left to look at.”
“Ah, well. So much for a long tete-a-tete with him.”
Dinny’s eyes glinted, hard as flint. “It would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it? But I can’t blame these folks, if you catch my meaning.”
“Very clearly. Let’s get this out of the way. I want this place cleared out fast.”
Dinny nodded and led the way through the erstwhile camp.
Someone had cleared out the remains of the commandant. Judging by the pool of sticky blood that had filmed over like scalded milk, those remains had been scattered rather more widely than a human body normally would’ve occupied. There were two men waiting for her arrival. One was a boy, little more than seventeen or eighteen, at a rough guess. The other was older, tougher, with shrewd eyes and a nano-tatt that had cost him a bundle of money. They were both watching Kafari, the boy with wide-eyed wonder, the man with narrow-eyed speculation.
“You in charge?” the older one demanded.
“Who wants to know?”
“Somebody with information you could use.”
Kafari swept her gaze up and down and saw very little to commend him to anyone, let alone to her. He looked like a street tough who made his living preying on others, maybe not as vicious as a rat-ganger, but definitely on the greyer edge of lily-whiteness. She wondered coldly what he thought he could wheedle out of a deal with Commodore Oroton. She spoke into the vocorder, which deepened her voice into a masculine bark. “I don’t have time to deal with assholes who think they can sell me some priceless piece of crap I’ve no earthly use for.” She started to turn on her heel. Then paused when he grinned. His nano-tatt flared golden, in rippling patterns like flame.
“They said you was a hard-assed bastard. Okay, try this one out, Mr. Commodore: I’m the fuckin’ Bolo’s mechanic.”
She swung back sharply. “You’re what?”
His grin widened. “I’m the Bolo’s mechanic. For the last four years. ’Til this little nosewipe,” he nodded at the boy, who flushed crimson, “got himself mixed up in a food riot and was sent out here t’ this country club. Sonny told me what happened, when he disappeared so sudden, and I got so damn pissed off, I hadda say something, you know? I hadda tell folks, ’cause it wasn’t right. Giulio’s a damn-fool kid, gives my sister migraines, just dealin’ with him, but he’s a clean kid, you gotta give him credit for that, and he for damn sure didn’t deserve this.” He swept one disgusted gesture at their surroundings. “So I shot my mouth off, said enough to make the P-Squads mad as fire, and ended up out here, keepin’ him company.”
Kafari considered him for long moments, resting her hands on her hips and studying his eyes, his posture, everything she could notice, trying to read the nuances of what he was saying — and not saying. “All right, Mr. Mechanic, how would you go about repairing damage to an infinite repeater cluster?”
“You talkin’ about the internal guidance-control circuits or the semiexternal quantum processors that route fire-control signals? You shot a fuckin’ hole through one a’ them, a while back. I hadda steal half a dozen computers off campus, just t’ cobble together somethin’ t’ bypass it. And it still don’t work right, I bet. And what you done to his tracks outta be outlawed. The worst of it, though, was the rotational collar on his rear Hellbore. Did’ja know you cracked the mother? He can’t use it for nuthin’, not without a new collar, or he’ll rip that whole damn turret to shreds, first time he fires it.”
Kafari’s jaw had come adrift, mercifully hidden behind her battle helmet. “You do know a thing or two, don’t you?”
“Mister,” he said, narrowing his eyes as he stared at the featureless visor she wore, “you got no idea how hard I worked my ass
off, the last four years, tryin’ to learn enough to keep the Big Guy runnin’. Them assholes in charge of the schools never taught me jack shit. I hadda learn how to learn, before I could learn how t’ fix what was wrong.”
“That,” Kafari muttered, “doesn’t surprise me at all.”
“I’ll bet it don’t.” A sudden fierce grin appeared and the golden color of his nano-tatt flared orange around the edges. “You got a pretty low opinion of me, don’t you? And you’re right. I ain’t nothin’ or nobody, but what I got — what I had, before this,” he waved a hand at the camp, “I hadda work hard for, and I got to like knowin’ how to do things, for my own self.” His face went hard, then, with the cold, dangerous look of the street tough she’d taken him as, at first glance. “And I got a real big itch to pay back the hospitality they been dishin’ out to folks. What I know about the Bolo’s small peanuts, compared to what else I know that you could use. Like the folks I know, who know folks, if you catch my drift? I got a pretty good idea who hit Madison, today.”
“You know about that?” Kafari asked sharply.
The mechanic went motionless, looked for several seconds like a sculpture hacked out of mahogany with a chain saw. The look in his eyes sent chills down Kafari’s spine. “Oh, yeah,” he said softly. “The guards was nice enough to share it with us. Right before they dug that goddamned pit and started shovin’ people into it.”
The boy with him had a haunted look, with memory burning in eyes that had probably been young, a few short days ago. “What do you want from me?” Kafari asked.
A muscle jumped in the mechanic’s jaw. “A chance to even the damn score.”
“Fair enough.”
He looked surprised. “You ain’t gonna argue?”
“I don’t have time to waste, arguing over something that gives us both what we want. You say you have a good idea who detonated that bomb. They’ve thrown my timetables all to hell, but a potential ally is priceless. Particularly if we can push matters before they repair the Bolo.”
“I ain’t gonna fix him, that’s for damn sure. I like the Big Guy, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t wanna look up into them gun barrels knowin’ he’s got a good reason to shoot me. Time was, I was too stupid t’ be scared of him. That ain’t so, any more.”
“I’m told,” Kafari said softly, “that even his commander was afraid of him.” She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering the look in Simon’s eyes, that night, remembering the sound of his voice. Her husband loved Sonny. But only a fool didn’t feel at least some fear, when standing in the presence of that much flintsteel and death, with a mind of its own and unhuman thoughts sizzling through unhuman circuitry.
Simon was right. A sword with a mind of its own was a damned dangerous companion.
The mechanic muttered, “Somehow that don’t surprise me at all.” He held out a hand. “I’m Phil, by the way. Phil Fabrizio.”
Kafari shook his hand. “Commodore Oroton.”
He grinned. “A distinct pleasure, that’s what it is, a genuine, distinct pleasure. So how’s about you tell me what you need from me and we’ll get this show on the road?”
“All right, Mr. Fabrizio. Tell me about these friends of yours…”
III
Yalena felt strange, being on the Star of Mali, again. She had somehow expected the freighter to look different, to have gone through the same radical change she, herself, had made over the past four years. It seemed faintly obscene to find the exact same metal walls painted in the exact same shades recommended by long-haul jump psychologists — warm reds and golds in the mess hall, cool and soothing pastel blues and greens in the passenger and crew cabins — and the exact same shipboard schedules and routines. It was a surprise, since she, herself, had changed so dramatically.
Captain Aditi, who invited Yalena, her father, and both cousins to sit at the captain’s table for dinner, commented on it halfway through the meal.
“You’ve grown up, child. I was worried about you, after that last voyage you made with us, and that’s no lie. It’s good to see you’ve bounced back and decided to do something positive with all that hurt.”
Yalena set her fork down and swallowed a mouthful of salad before answering. “Thank you for thinking kindly of me at all, ma’am,” she said in a low voice. “I know what kind of person I was, then. I’ve worked very hard to be someone better than that.”
Captain Aditi exchanged glances with Yalena’s cousin Stefano, then said, “It shows, Miss Yalena. And that’s the best any of us can do, in this life. Try hard to be better than the person we were yesterday.”
It was, Yalena realized, a blueprint for the way to live, a simple yet powerful way that was foreign to everything she had known during the first decade and a half of her life. Vittori Santorini might have the power to blind people to reality, telling them what they wanted to hear, but he needed an army of thugs, a whole regiment of propagandists, a disarmed and helpless populace, and a cadre of political fanatics to stay in control. He didn’t understand power — real power — at all. The kind of power that came from within, unshakable and rooted in the most essential truth a human could learn: that caring about the welfare of others was the definition of humanity. Without the belief that others mattered, that their lives were of value, that their safety and happiness were important enough to defend, society ceased to be civilized — and those in charge of it ceased to be fully human.
That was the power that had put one hundred seventy-three people onto a freighter, on their way to fight for the liberation of a whole world and the people in it. And that was the power that had transformed a spoiled, selfish, unfit-for-polite-company toad into a soldier. Or, at least, the beginning of being a soldier. She had a lot to learn and miles to travel on the road to experience, before she could truly give herself that title. But she had made a start and with every passing hour, the Star of Mali carried her closer to the fields where she would try to redeem herself.
There was more than enough to do, getting ready for that moment. On the second day of their interstellar transit, the whole company met in the ship’s mess, where passengers and crew took their meals in shifts because of the sheer number of people crammed into the freighter’s limited passenger space. Her father called the meeting to hammer out details of their battle plan, which had been roughed out on Vishnu. With a hundred seventy soldiers and students, plus the official repair team, there wasn’t even sitting room left on the floor.
“We’ll need two teams,” he said, speaking with brisk authority, revealing a facet of his character that she’d never really seen, before. “One team goes in with the repair crew to fix my Bolo.” His sudden, evil grin startled Yalena, it was so unexpected and so seemingly out of place, given the subject at hand. Then, as the group caught the double entendre and started to chuckle, his purpose made abrupt sense. The brutal tension gripping the jam-packed room relaxed its grip, allowing everyone to focus on the battle plans, rather than the emotions that had brought them all together, in the first place.
“Shiva Weapons Labs has given us five highly qualified engineers to give that team the bona fides it needs to pass muster. Ordinarily, those engineers would bring their own team of support technicians, but we’ll be providing those, instead, from our own people. That team will play hob with Sonny’s innards, following the specs Captain Brisbane and I have provided. The cover story we’ve provided will, at least, allow you to have the Bolo’s schematics in your possession. Still, I’ll expect each of you to memorize the key systems to sabotage, since I won’t risk your lives or our cause with information proving that we intend to cripple their Bolo.
“The second team, consisting of our students and combat veterans, will deliver critical equipment, munitions, and supplies to rebel outposts. Those posts are running low on everything from ammunition to bandages and field rations. God knows, some of these people have been living on little more than shoe leather and beans for months, and no one can fight indefinitely on an empty stomach, no matter h
ow bitter the anger or how righteous the cause. Now, before we get into details—”
He paused, lifting his glance to something behind them. Yalena turned in her seat and found the freighter’s communications officer standing in the doorway.
“Sorry to interrupt, sir, but there’s an urgent message for you. It came in via SWIFT, just now.”
He was holding a printout. Whatever that message said, the commo officer hadn’t been willing to pipe an audio or video playback for the whole assembled strike force to hear. That was ominous. The room was too crowded for the commo officer to take the message to Yalena’s father, so it was passed forward, row by row. No one glanced at the printout, despite looks of burning curiosity. The discipline that took was impressive. When her father read the message, he turned white. Yalena’s heart thumped in a painful, ragged rhythm. She waited, terrified that he would tell them what was in the message and terrified that he wouldn’t and nearly ill with the stress of wondering if her mother had been killed.
Without warning — and without a single sound — he simply headed for the door, climbing over people to reach it. Students scrunched together, making way for him. He left with the communications officer, moving rapidly down the corridor that led from the mess to the communications station on the bridge. Yalena exchanged worried glances with Melissa Hardy and both of her mother’s cousins. Somebody cursed out loud, which broke the silence. Speculation ran wild until Estevao shouted for order.
“There’s no point in guesswork. Whatever’s happened, Colonel Khrustinov will brief us soon enough. Our time’s better spent going over the portions of our mission that aren’t likely to change. The damage to the Bolo has worked to our advantage in a number of ways, not least of which is how we’re getting down from orbit.
“Under ordinary conditions, we’d be docking at Ziva Two space station and we’d have to undergo spot checks by customs agents. But the bomb that damaged the Bolo also flipped it onto its side. They’ve tried to pull him over onto his treads again, with no luck. They don’t have anything strong enough to move him. They need a heavy lift sled, like the ones the Brigade uses for combat drops and recalls.