Kali turned for the Vertel and started walking. “Dispersal or Command?” she asked.
It was a few seconds before she realized Setona wasn’t following. Kali turned to see her walking toward the waiting line of cargo. She watched as Setona approached one of the boxes with a flag over it, then hurried to catch up.
Setona held her hand over the center of the map in the middle of the Athenian flag. Her fingers hovered over the empty space where the chain of islands of Haffay should have been; the map in the official emblems never showed the islands, only the two continents.
“This one’s going back,” Kali said.
“Too soon.”
“Special took some losses trying to get Chon. He made them first.”
Setona’s hand still hovered above the flag. “Chon’s ahead of us. He knows what we’re doing.”
Kali leaned in and asked in a low voice, “What about Lieli?”
Lieli—Setona’s daughter—had slipped into the ice on a lake near Sagan on the sub-arctic coast of North Athena. Automated rescue pods had reached her in time to save her body, but not necessarily her mind. Ten days ago, that hadn’t been clear.
Setona replied quietly, “I can’t help her.” She let her finger drop on the center of the map and turned to look up at Kali, her eyes suddenly flashing with anger. “How many mothers have lost their children here already?” She turned for the Vertel.
Kali hurried to catch up with her. The Vertel was parked on a pad beside the strip. It was boxy, with enclosed fans on each corner, sliding doors on the sides, and active camouflage that cycled through the browns and grays of the hills behind. Kali slid open the nearest door.
“Dispersal or command?” she asked again, but Setona didn’t answer, silently dropping her bag in the cabin and securing her weapon behind the co-pilot’s seat.
Strapped into the pilot’s seat, Kali pushed the throttles forward. The engines of the Vertel were electric and quiet, but the ducted fans on each corner projected narrow and intense down-blasts, and weren’t. The Vertel climbed away from the pad on four shimmering columns of air, turning slowly as it rose. Kali glanced out the window to her left to see the ekranoplane one last time; the line of coffins had disappeared into the mouth of the beast. She pushed the joystick forward and let the Vertel pick up speed, its fans rotating to add forward thrust. Out the right window, beyond Setona, Kali could see stratified hills rising to the distant mountain, and scattered missile emplacements and sensor arrays. Setona hadn’t given her a destination, but both the Vertel dispersal area and the command site were along the coast. Kali steered that way.
∞
The cockpit of the Vertel hummed with the sound of its fans, and it bucked slightly in turbulent air over the cliffs. Kali let the silence on the intercom go on, flying manually and enjoying the feel of the throttle and stick in her hands. The sensation of pushing off into the air made up for a good deal of life, and flying concentrated her mind, letting her forget a lot of crap for an hour or two. The start of a flight was full of possibility—she could imagine flying anywhere she wanted, even if she had somewhere else to go.
“It’s not like fighting fires, is it?” Setona said. Before Haffay, the Vertels had been deployed several times to fight forest fires in the dry southwest of North Athena.
“More waiting, less fighting,” Kali replied.
Beneath the Vertel, the cliffs gave away to another sandy but cold and empty beach. Gray clouds hovered overhead and raindrops spattered the windshield from time to time. Far ahead the sun was breaking out, sending rays of light out to sea. On another day, Kali thought, she would fly that way.
“The Old Service has another plan,” Setona said. “They’ve re-activated their most experienced operator. He wrote the manual and trained their teams—or the ones that trained them.”
Kali snorted; the sound crackled on the intercom. “And he knows something they don’t?”
“That’s the hope, isn’t it?”
“They won’t ever solve this.” Kali couldn’t bring herself to call the Shinigami the “Old Service.” That was garbage—they were the newest branch of the Ministry of Unification and every other branch was older. Let them tell their own lies. “They created him,” she said. “They own Chon—they won’t ever take him down.”
“They’ve lost several teams trying.”
“What they don’t know at the bottom hasn’t been forgotten at the top.”
Setona turned to look at Kali. “Is there something you know the rest of us don’t?”
“No, there’s nothing I know,” Kali snapped. “Do I have to know? Or can I just see what’s happening for myself? We’re sitting here when we could take Chon out; they won’t do it. If they were ever going to do it, they would have done it.”
“There’s nothing more coming from Einstein; the government’s committed all they ever will.”
Kali groaned into the microphone. Somewhere in the chain of command, the plan had been to draw the political leadership into a larger commitment—betting they’d activate reserves rather than have the campaign fail. That plan wasn’t working. “We can still do it,” she said.
“The government won’t order us forward and won’t order us back,” Setona replied. “The political support isn’t there for either. Circumstances on the ground will decide what happens; we interpret the circumstances.”
“That’s better. No one in Einstein can leak the orders if no one gives them.” They would be like a bullet in the chamber of a gun, not knowing the exact moment the hammer would fall, but knowing the moment would come.
“Chon will know,” Setona said. “His people might not, but he will.”
“He’ll burn the city then, if we’re not fast enough.”
“Perhaps.”
Kali was silent. That was the risk of moving with a lighter force—it gave Chon the time to scorch the earth in Bruno and attempt to escape by sea. He’d threatened to burn the city at the first sight of a dust trail on the saddle road. Probably the fast-boats off the coast couldn’t stop his fleet entirely. He would disappear again.
Kali glanced at Setona. Setona leaned toward the window on her side, studying the disheveled bushes and scattered grass on the cliff-tops below. Before she’d gotten the call to return to North Athena, Setona had been busy—tearing through an endless task list, micromanaging the unit, skipping meals, burning up her sleep. Now she was calmer—no longer caught up in the details.
“Lieli? What about her?” Kali asked, with a worried look.
“She’s in stasis.”
“Then, when this is done…?”
“She’s gone, Kali. Her body is there, but she’s not.”
Lieli was brain damaged, then? The pods hadn’t gotten there in time.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Setona added.
Kali knew that wasn’t true. Lieli’s brain could be re-grown in her body from stem cells. It was medically possible. She would still have most of her life ahead of her, and essentially the same personality—as alike as a twin grown in a slightly different time.
Kali hesitated to say it aloud. “Anastasis…?”
“What would it be like, Kali?” Setona replied. “To be a child in a teenager’s body? I can’t do that to her. It’s a dream—she would never be same Lieli. Just because they can do it, doesn’t mean it’s right.”
Then, when this was all over, Kali realized, it would be Setona who turned off the stasis machine. Setona would go home to watch Lieli die for the last time.
Setona looked back at Kali, her expression lost in the shadow of the helmet framing her face. “How many mothers have lost their children here already? I’m not the only one. If I can’t help Lieli, can I do something here? What’s the right thing to do, Kali?”
Kali realized this was her chance. She’d never imagined Lieli would be a casualty of the mission to Haffay, and it made her sad, but Lieli didn’t have to die for nothing. Setona had considerable influence with General Nagoshi; if Setona was rig
ht about the situation in Einstein, Nagoshi could trigger the invasion on his own command. Taking Haffay would lay the ground for taking Senta. On the other hand, if the North couldn’t take Haffay, when would it ever take Senta? With the only geographic stepping stone to Senta in Chon’s hands, an invasion of Senta would be impossible, even if the ekranos of the One Hundred were re-activated. Kali felt terrible about taking advantage of it, but if Lieli’s pending death gave her a moment’s influence over Setona, she could change the future of Athena. Give me a lever long enough…
“Bring the Islands back to the North,” she said. “Take them away from Chon.”
“Given the cost?”
“Weigh it on a larger timescale, not on three-cycles like an accountant. Think of how long it will make a difference. Deci-cycles, centicycles—as long as anyone’s here. Then it’s worth it.”
Taking Haffay was the first step in the Unification of Athena. It was only the beginning, but the islands were the key to Senta. What example did Athena show to the Network by allowing poverty and ignorance to continue in Senta? And how much suffering had the North’s lack of will already caused?
“It has to be done,” Kali said. “Whoever controls Haffay controls Athena.”
“You think like Chon,” Setona replied. “But you won’t care about Unification when we go over the saddle road.”
“Then what?”
“Getting out alive, with your crew.”
“This is bigger than any of us; none of us matter in the long run.”
“First we’re going to hurt the people we want to help. They don’t care about the Principles of Conversion; they don’t want us here.”
Kali leaned the Vertel toward the hills. The brown and yellow layers of the slope were scattered with scrappy trees shooting roots through the thin soil and into the cracked stone below. “You see that?” she said. “Everything down there is there because we put it there. I could shove a stick into that dirt and tell you the hour of the next famine. What have they done here other than strip off the soil?”
“Eventually, they’ll learn.”
“When the soil’s gone, they better learn to eat rocks. The same thing will happen here as in Senta. You can go home and watch children starve on wallvids while you eat breakfast.”
“What gives us the right to control the world?” Setona asked.
“Because we know the truth. And we know that we know the truth. And we know that they don’t.”
Kali looked ahead, up the coastline. Cold, intermittent sweeps of sand lay between cliffs footed by rocks. The waves rolled up the sand in a long series of white lines, the surf brushing over the chalky surface and then falling back. The wind swept the bent shapes of stunted trees on top of the cliffs; the trees guarded the coast like an army of hunched old men.
The dispersal area was inland; the command post farther along the coast. Setona needed to decide soon. Kali slipped the throttle back and let the Vertel hang in slow flight, floating into the wind, almost hovering over the rocks below. “We do this or we don’t, and there’s no end to it if we don’t,” she said. “Command or dispersal?”
Setona leaned forward, looking out the front of the Vertel and tapping her chin with one finger. She was silent. For a moment, the clouds opened, and a beam of sunlight struck out over the cliffs into the gray water, turning it luminous blue. Then the sky closed again, choking the light off.
“Command,” she said finally.
Kali pushed the throttle forward; the nose of the Vertel dropped as it picked up speed, and it skimmed the coast at five hundred meters.
She thought of flying to Bruno over the saddle road between the snow-capped mountains on the main island of Haffay. She felt good—their work would be done, and then they would go home.
There was only one more stop on the way.
The Spiral
S-Second Plus Two Hours
“Kali, evac on top of the Spiral!” Setona ordered over the radio. She circled somewhere overhead in a specially equipped command Vertel. “Special Op—he needs it now.”
What the hell is he doing up there? Kali wondered.
She let the Vertel rise in a turn above the edge of the city of Bruno. The shore arced away south of her, and the sea glittered in the light of the morning sun rising between the twin peaks to the east. The city was lost in its own shadows and smoke from the airstrikes at dawn. Streams of tracer rained up into the sky from the roads and parks as Chon’s gunners hammered away at every hint of an invisible Vertel.
Her first trip downtown had started in darkness, but on the second she could see Bruno the moment she crested the top of the Saddle. Oily smoke poured from fires all over the city, rising in dark columns as high as the Spiral Hotel. On the first run, Chon’s acoustic missiles had almost shot her down. Her co-pilot had gone home with a face-full of shattered diamond—the medics were still pulling the pieces out when she took off on the second run.
Kali glanced over at Maki, her medic for the evac run. He’d taken the co-pilot’s seat, nervously wiping blood off the console before take-off. He looked out of the hastily patched front-window, stroking some soft toy hanging off his utility vest. That thing was a disgrace, Kali thought; it didn’t matter if it was a family gift or a superstitious little charm. A children’s cartoon character stuffed with aero-foam wouldn’t save them if the Vertel took a direct hit on a critical system.
“It’s too hot!” Kali radioed to Setona.
She looked east. On the saddle road, the North Athenian armor streamed toward the city, guns out. At a fork in the road outside the city, the line of vehicles broke both ways to encircle the city center. The vehicles disappeared as they clicked on their active-camo, but the dirt they kicked up from the unfinished road gave them away. The ants were on the march to the nuke, the capitol, the port, and the gun positions in between.
“Tell him to hold on—we’ll take down the anti-air and then get him.” The problem would solve itself soon enough.
“Kali, we need him now. Talk to him.”
A new secure connection appeared on the comm list as Setona forwarded the special operator’s channel.
“Identify yourself,” Kali said.
“Hades,” came the reply, in a mechanical voice with an insidious low rumble. It seemed to drum on her ears through her helmet. Kali shivered.
“I’m getting soft-suit stats,” Maki said. “He’s got no audio inputs. We’re on voice-to-text.”
“He can’t hear?”
“He’s in bad shape. Suit’s keeping him together. Blood and mobility loss. Pain meds. Coagulant. He’ll bleed out soon if we don’t get him.”
The Vertel climbed over the sea in a turn. Below, Chon’s rag-tag fleet of illegal corsairs and derelict ekranoplanes bobbed in the water or rested on the beach. A crowd of gnat-sized Provies ran down the shore toward the ships. The rats were scurrying out of the fight already—it wouldn’t be long.
An anti-air gun sprayed down the fluted side of the Spiral Hotel with red tracer like a firehose loaded with depleted uranium shells. Entire slabs of the tower’s diamond skin fell gracefully away to the street below. Kali could see black smoke pouring out of the top of the Spiral at an increasing pace as orange flames spread across one side of its roof.
Maki stared at the Spiral and looked like he would shit his seat. “You’re not going there?” he begged.
“ICE, permission to target ekranos in the port.”
“Denied, Kali,” Setona replied. “That’s not the mission.”
Kali clicked transmit on comm two. “Hades, how long can you hold on?”
There was an agonizing delay. She was about to hit the button again when the reply came in the same reverberating voice.
“I know where Chon is.”
Kali sat up in shock. That was the mission, and she knew it. Setona was right—wiping out Chon’s fighters and sinking his fleet wasn’t the mission. Kali could blow Chon off the island if she knew what half-kilometer he was in. If Hades was tell
ing the truth and could give her Chon’s location, it would end the war all that much sooner.
That and it would look good. Yeah—it would look good.
“ICE, I’m in on the Spiral,” she transmitted to Setona.
“Fuck, you’re not—” Maki said.
Bury me with Lieli, Kali thought, and pulled the Vertel into a hard turn toward the Spiral.
The rooftop grew in the windshield. Kali could see smoke pouring from a trash-filled pit that looked like it had been a swimming pool a century or two ago. The fire had broken out of the pool at the diving end and was consuming a line of broken equipment sheds. North of the sheds was the figure of a man low-crawling on one arm, his legs dragging a smear of bright red across the roof. A dozen of Chon’s men in ratty patchwork sunshalls were closing in on the figure, circling the fire and stabbing Type-Ks in the air as if they were bayonetting a legion of ghosts. Hades was almost done for—it was a toss-up whether the fire or the Provies would get him first.
The Vertel was approaching the roof quickly.
“Nowhere to land!” Kali transmitted. “Where’s Chon?”
The pause was shorter this time. “Tell you inside.”
Zero-range: The roof of the Spiral filled the window and she could see the faces of Chon’s men turn toward the Vertel as the sound of its fans caught their attention. They couldn’t see the Vertel but they could sure as hell hear it and blast away at it. The pings and twangs of small caliber hits echoed in the cockpit. A crystalline dent the size of Kali’s fist smashed into the windshield near her face.
She fingered the trigger on the twenty millimeter cannon. One of Chon’s fighters blew apart in a splat of red as a DU round nailed him in the chest. Another round ripped the legs off a fighter and sent his torso spinning down the roof. The cannon found the sidewall of the pool and it erupted in a cloud of diamond shards that swallowed another half-dozen men. The line of cannon hits marched along the edge of the building until it tore off the corner and sent a couple of rearguards spinning out into the air. The end of the roof shot out of sight beneath the Vertel as Kali watched one of the men flail his arms and legs and arc into a thirty second fall to the street below.
White Seed Page 8