Come the Revolution (18 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

Over the next day, Zdravkova led out four different “striker squads” to raid the Varoki observation posts around us. Near as we could tell, the mob had been working itself up to march on Sookagrad before that, but those quick, sharp blows put them back on their heels, made them rethink everything, wait for a while, see what we planned to do next. So the raids bought us at least another day of comparative security, and a fair haul of abandoned weapons, at the cost of two people wounded and no dead.

Humans had a reputation for aggression and violence that was overstated, but for a change was useful. Zdravkova’s raids reinforced that reputation, made the Varoki over there start thinking maybe every Human really was as good as two Varoki, or three, or ten. We didn’t know what the odds really were, but they were long and probably getting longer every day. Anything that kept the Varoki mentally on the defensive was money in the bank.

It also gave us time to start making reports to the outside world. Our vid tech with the camera had done some promotional work before the troubles—as we were all starting to think of them—and he did interviews with Katranjiev and Stal. Zdravkova begged off and everyone, including me, agreed it would be a terrible idea to let the world in general know that the infamous Sasha Naradnyo was hanging out here. I watched the two interviews and didn’t think much of them. Too much like heroic speeches from our fearless leaders. Then it hit me.

“You know, we actually have a semi-famous journalist here,” I told Stal. I approached him because he wasn’t that anxious to have his face plastered all over, besides which Katranjiev was still likely to call the sky red if I said it was blue.

“You mean long-lost sister? Did not think like each other.”

“I haven’t seen her since the day she got here, but so what? She’s got a following and seems to know her stuff. You ought to get her in on this. Ask Zdravkova, too. Dezi doesn’t want her face shown, but being a revolutionary and all she’s got to know more about agitprop than some guy who did promotional holovids for Varoki sex aids.”

“Leatherheads need love too,” he said, but then he nodded in agreement.

So my estranged sister Aurora became the voice of Sookagrad. She ditched the big-shot speeches and that afternoon started doing interviews with ordinary people, finding out their backgrounds, what they’d seen in the last few days. I watched them: good stuff. There wasn’t anything weepy about them, if you know what I mean. Just people telling what happened, how they got here, and what they were doing now.

The interviews had a lot of motion, following folks as they worked in the soup kitchen (our former
sous-chef
), swept out a new building for our dormitory expansion, helped mount an LENR generator to power a drug synthesizer. They were all upbeat, smiling at the end as they worked, even if they had a choked-up moment or two when telling their story. Put some of the horrible, frightening things they’d seen together with that energy and optimism at the end and you had a hell of a message without ever having to spell it out or draw pictures.

She didn’t mention any of the fighting yet, or what we were doing to defend the district. That would come later, but in the meantime it was nice to give the citizens of the
Cottohazz
a view of Humans doing a whole bunch of different things, none of them violent or illegal. It was a side of Humanity a lot of them had probably never seen.

Katranjiev didn’t much like it, whether because his interview had been cut or because Aurora was my sister I couldn’t tell.

“You have to show suffering,” he said when they held a troika meeting the next morning. I guess I was included because the whole communiqué thing had been my idea originally. “Who’s going to come to our rescue if it looks as if we’re all happy and healthy here?”

Aurora didn’t jump right in to defend her piece. Zdravkova argued with Katranjiev a bit and then asked Aurora what she thought. Waiting to be asked was smart.

“People don’t sympathize very much with pure victims, and the
Cottohazz
is tired of Humans complaining about how bad they have it. If we show them Humans taking care of themselves, building a peaceful community in all this chaos, we’ll get their attention and grudging respect. And it’s better to underplay everything. It must smack of reality, not invented drama, you understand?”

“But there is suffering here, much suffering,” Katranjiev countered.

“If what we all think is going to happen comes true,” Aurora said, “we will have ample opportunity to show that later. But if you
begin
with suffering now, then later it’s just more of the same, like a broken record, and the audience will tune it out. We show them order, community, work, and hope first. What comes later will be more powerful because of the contrast, and it will enrage our audience.”

Listening to her sort of gave me a chill. She was talking about a possible nightmare scenario as if it were a video play or an ad campaign instead of something which might engulf all of us. That’s how a professional had to think, I guess. A doctor facing vans full of casualties from a major fire thought triage and treatment, not what all those injuries and deaths meant to all those families. A squad leader outlining a mission and identifying where they were likely to take casualties couldn’t let himself dwell on how well or how long he’d known the men who were about to get killed or maimed.

Still, hearing it laid out so emotionlessly sent a shiver up my back, but it won the argument.

So the first report went out. It began with a camera shot of Aurora, the soup kitchen in the background with a line of giggling kids going in to get lunch. Her first line was, “This is Sookagrad, calling all the people of the
Cottohazz
. This is Sookagrad calling.”

We could send on the fiber cable, but we couldn’t receive because we couldn’t decode any of the flow in the data pipe, and of course anything broadcast was being jammed, so we had no way of knowing who, if anyone, was actually paying attention, or what anyone thought of it. All we could do was send it out and hope for the best.

I stopped her outside the headquarters building after the meeting, told her that, whatever else there was between us, I thought the vid report was top-notch, exactly what we needed. She looked down while I said it and then looked away while she answered me.

“Thank you. I know it must have cost you a great deal to say that.”

Actually it didn’t cost me a thing, or at least anything important. If she’d known me at all she’d have known that, but what was the point in saying so?

“Look, we’re strapped for fabricator time,” I said, “but I’m going to try to fit in a special job, some props for one of your upcoming reports.”

“Props?” she said. “I don’t know. I like to keep it as authentic as possible. What kind of props?”

“Munie badges. I can’t afford the time to run them off for everyone hauling a gun, but I can do a couple dozen and you make sure any fighter on camera has one.”

“Badges? Isn’t that illegal?”

It suddenly occurred to me that, in all the confusion, not everyone knew about the deal we’d cut with the Munies.

“Illegal? Oh, boy, you’ve got a little catching up to do, but you’re
really
going to like what I tell you next. It fits your narrative beautifully.”

* * *

Two hours later I stood in the cramped workshop Petar Ivanov, our head fabricator, used as his base of operations. The sound of humming fabricators and the smells of hot metal, blending chemicals, and unwashed body odor filled the air in the dimly lit room. Moshe took a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaled through his nose.

“Schrödinger’s walking down the street with a shoebox under his arm. A Munie stops him, looks inside the box, and says, ‘Hey, there’s a dead cat in here.’ Schrödinger says, ‘Well there is
now
!’”

He and Ivanov laughed. Billy Conklin, the remaining member of our quartet, made a sour expression and took a drink of his tea. I just looked at them.

“This guy Schroder didn’t know he had a dead cat?”

“Is Schrödinger,” Ivanov said, “and actually, cat not unambiguously dead until Munie look.”

I just shook my head. “Don’t physicists ever just tell dirty jokes?”

“Oh, sure,” Moshe said. “Here’s one: why are physicists lousy lovers?”

“I don’t know, why?”

“’Cause when they know the right position they can’t get the speed right, and when they know the right speed, they can’t get the position right.”

“I don’t get it. Wait…does it have something to do with that guy-on-the-highway joke, about speed and knowing where he is?”

“Amazing! Yes, it actually does.”

“Well, I still don’t get it.”

“No,” he said, “but you might not be a
total
shmendrick, much to my surprise.”

“Is there some reason I’m here, other than to be insulted?”

“Yeah,” Conklin said, “me too. I got some pretty full saddlebags, you know.”

Moshe grinned. “Not to worry, you’re both gonna love this, especially you, Billy.” He held his hand out to Ivanov, who carefully passed him a small opaque plastic box from the workbench.

“There better not be a dead cat in there,” I said.

He opened the lid and showed us. “Don’t touch.”

A dozen metallic cylinders, about a centimeter in diameter and ten centimeters long, rested on a bed of extruded soft foam with channels cut to hold them and keep them from rolling. They were dull grey but with a red stripe painted around the middle. One end was closed, the other partially open.

“Okay, I give up.”

“Blastin’ caps,” Billy Conklin said. “Right?”

“Mr. Greenwald say need blasting caps,” Ivanov said, “so I make.”

I looked at Moshe. “And we need blasting caps why?”

“Because I found an industrial storage unit where somebody stashed a bunch of bulk maintenance consumables, including about five hundred liters of a cleaning solvent: CH
₃
NO
₂
,” he said and then looked directly at me. “That’s nitromethane to the scientifically illiterate.”

“Gawd damn!”
Conklin said and nearly dropped his tea.

Given my previous line of work, I knew enough about causing trouble to know where this was going and I started smiling. “What you gonna cut it with? EDA?”

Ivanov shrugged, “Other amines work, but yes,
ethylenediamine
—EDA—is most common.”

“Five hundred liters of PLX binary explosive,” I said.

“Five twenty-five by the time we add the EDA and mix it,” Moshe said, his grin even wider.

I thought that over for a few seconds, and for a change my thoughts were not restricted solely to ways of causing mayhem.

“Billy, you got any people who can use explosives without blowing themselves up?”

“Yup, me for one. Also know a guy, Dhaliwa, been around construction blasting for years, knows his shit. I can probably rustle up a couple more. What you got in mind?”

“We need shelters, as in underground shelters, and we need a lot of them. All these lean-tos and tents—if they start lobbing even mortars in here, it’ll cause havoc. We don’t have the time or equipment to dig shelters, but what about explosive excavation?”

Conklin scratched his bald spot and nodded. “Sure. I mean, getting cover over the holes is going to be a bitch once we blow them, but even open holes are better than nothing.”

“We can maybe do better than that,” Moshe said. “The storm sewers run straight to the Wanu River, and they aren’t buried very deep. There are some drains from the surface to the storm system, but none here in Sookagrad.”

“Gimme a couple kilos of that PLX,” Billy Conklin said, “I’ll make a connection.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but with all this rain, won’t the storm sewers be full of water?”

Moshe and Conklin both got a little more serious.

“
Oy
, maybe so,” Moshe said. “We’ll just have to look, right?”

Storm sewers were usually pretty big, so they wouldn’t back up in a heavy rain, but if they were even half full of fast-flowing water, it would be somewhere between tough and impossible to use them for shelter. Maybe we were back to explosive excavation, but Billy was right: how were we going to put hard cover over all those holes?

This logistics stuff wasn’t as easy as it looked. You knew you had a real problem on your hands if a half ton of binary explosive couldn’t fix it.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The days were starting to run together so I sat down and worked out how long I’d been here. This was the afternoon of Sixteen-Day, Eight-Month Waning, the fourth day—fourth day since I’d arrived and also the fourth day since the military coup.

I found Zdravkova in the headquarters building, looking grim. She almost always looked grim so I didn’t attach much significance to it.

“Hey, Killer, remember how you told me your secret dream was to blow a bunch of stuff up? I got some good news.”

She didn’t just look grim, she looked worn down and filthy. I knew she’d gone out with three of the raids on the previous day and had been making the rounds of the perimeter posts since then—at least when she wasn’t helping with the training/orientation program she’d whipped up. Try putting an army together in less than a week sometime, see how much sleep you get.

I half expected her to snarl at me, but she just looked up, emotion overwhelmed by fatigue. “I could use some good news,” she said, and she nodded toward the back of the office. I saw two Varoki talking to Katranjiev, haranguing him more like. He didn’t look happy.

“What do they want?”

“I caught the start of it. They’re representatives of the Provisional Government. Seems the gangs around us have been incorporated into a Citizens’ Emergency Militia. The government’s gotten complaints about unprovoked attacks against them.”

“Your raids?” I said. “They must have an interesting understanding of ‘unprovoked.’”

“Not that interesting. So pending a complete investigation, they demand we turn over all firearms and that anyone involved in the fighting surrender themselves to custody of the militia.”

“Or else,” I added. “Is there a time limit on the ultimatum?”

“Twelve hours.”

“That means time runs out about dawn.” I thought about that for a moment. “You know, if I were a bunch of unscrupulous Human-hating Varoki pricks, I’d think we Humans figured we had twelve hours to get ready, maybe get a last good night’s sleep before sunup. I’d think real hard about jumping the gun and launching a predawn attack, catch us napping, maybe finish us off in one big push.”

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.”