Come the Revolution (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

I took Aurora up to the roof of Nikolai Stal’s building, since two stories was about as high as anything down here got. I didn’t know the district that well so I snagged a local from the soup kitchen, a dark-haired girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen Earth years old, about Tweezaa’s size, who had grown up in the district. She’d been washing dishes so she was thrilled to leave that and guide the glamorous feed head Aurora.

None of us looked or smelled particularly glamorous by then, but my sister managed to handle it better than most. Her face was dirty, but almost artfully so. I found out later that before she shot the interviews the day before, she’d used a quarter of her drinking water ration to wash her face, and then had reapplied dirt, almost like makeup I guess. She’d drawn her hair back in a tight ponytail which masked its oiliness. She was a few years older than I was and managed to look at least as many years younger, but I suspected that up until recently my mileage had been a little rougher than hers.

“Ted, we won’t be shooting anything from the roof tonight,” she said to her vid recorder tech. “I just want to look around. Why don’t you get a start on editing the vid from today and then get a little sleep? If there’s an attack later, we’ll want to shoot some footage and maybe do an interview.”

Ted, who had grown a lot quieter since being demoted from producer of the news to Aurora’s tag-along recorder tech, left us without a word.

“So what’s your name?” Aurora asked.

“Divya, Miss. Divya Jayaraman.”

“Call me Aurora. Everyone does. What did you do before all this started?”

“Oh, I was in school. My father got me a position in the Enlightened Technical Preparatory Academy in e-Kruaan-Arc. I am going to be a design engineer like him.”

“Enlightened Prep?” Aurora said. “I didn’t know they take Human students.”

“I am the first one! An experiment, they say.” She giggled. “They frown and study me, ask me questions all the time.”

“How do the other students treat you?”

Divya shrugged. “At first some of them were mean, but the teachers made them stop. They did not want the experiment ruined, you see. Now they are used to me.”

“Your father is a design engineer, you said?”

“Oh, yes, he works at AZ Trimtaax, also in e-Kruaan. He hasn’t come home since the trouble started, so he must be staying there.”

Aurora and I exchanged a glance and Divya saw it.

“Oh, no, nothing has happened to him, I am sure. My father is very strong.”

She said it with such cheerful assurance I almost believed it. And it was possible he was alive but hadn’t been able to get back here, was holed up in another enclave or in some sort of protective custody. Maybe his employers had even sheltered him, who knew? I sure wasn’t going to be the one to rain on this girl’s parade.

Stal’s building was pretty much a cast foamstone box, two stories tall, with no holes in the roof except for power lines to the roof-mounted solar skins, ventilator, and a couple clusters of video units which fed the smart walls when they were in window mode. Roof access was by way of a metal stairway bolted to the outside of the building. We clanged up and then had a pretty good panoramic view of the north side of Sakkatto City and the Sookagrad district. Divya began pointing out the landmarks.

“That’s e-Kruaan-Arc to the north and see, there’s Katammu-Arc almost directly south but farther away. Mmmm, two kilometers, maybe more.”

They seemed much closer, but that was because of their enormous size. Katammu-Arc was three kilometers broad at the base and about two kilometers tall. When something is as tall as it is away from you, you feel as if you’re in its shadow. E-Kruaan-Arc was closer and taller, I’d say maybe three kilometers high, and it looked even taller because it was so slender by comparison, less than a kilometer at its base and then tapering as it rose.

“You see the broad east-west road between us and e-Kruaan? That’s the Avenue of Peace. It is an official thoroughfare, one of the boundary boulevards of the old park district, and the Munies always made sure it was kept clean—no structures and no trash. They would plow the shacks and buildings away once a month, my father told me, although I don’t remember anyone trying to live there. That’s the northern boundary of Sookagrad.

“You see the other thoroughfares? The broad one cutting straight from e-Kruaan to Katammu, right under the maglev tracks, is The Shadowed Way North. It cuts almost through the center of north Sookagrad. The southern boundary of the district is Grand Vision Way, running almost east-west between Bannaz Arcology and Arc-Jannu. Father says there used to be a maglev line running there before e-Kruaan was built, but that was almost one hundred years ago, before Humans lived here.”

She sketched out the less-well-defined eastern and western perimeters, pointed out the important buildings such as they were: the broad metal dormitory, the white clinic building which had acquired two large metal shipping containers attached by composite sheeting walkways as overflow trauma care, the Citizen League headquarters building which now flew a Municipal Police flag provided by Captain Prayzaat. All of those buildings huddled almost in the shadow of the maglev tracks and were close to the Shadowed Way.

The smaller streets wound seemingly randomly, having more to do with where large cargo containers had been abandoned than anything else. Most were little more than pedestrian alleys, but two larger streets, wide enough for vehicles, came into the district from the west and one from the east, in addition to the Shadowed Way which bisected the district north-south.

Divya’s act of giving the alleys and buildings names and functions almost elevated them from the squalid shacks and discarded storage units they were to something substantial, something with utility and, by implication, a future. But that was an illusion. Sookagrad was simply the place where a desperate group of Humans had gathered and tried to survive, and that was before everything really started going to hell.

As she talked, I looked at the mountains of trash, the collapsing hovels built on the broken rubble of the previous generation of dwellings, and I knew Sookagrad was finished, no matter what else happened. The idea of Humans, or any race, living like this in the heart of the Varoki home world was insane, and the times which produced the bizarre chain of circumstances and decisions which brought all this about were coming to an end. What was coming next might be a little better, or it might be much, much worse, but in either case there would be no place for Sookagrad. About the best we could hope for was that it not end up a mass grave.

Divya had just begun naming the lesser streets when a flare burst in the sky to the north, over the maglev tracks, and then three more burst in rapid succession. In the flickering light I saw people moving south in the Shadowed Way, lots of them. We all heard the distinctive sound of small arms fire from the north.

“Divya,” I said, “get down the stairs and run back to the kitchen. Hurry!” She scampered back to the stairway and then down.

“Come on, Aurora, let’s go. There’s no cover up here and there will be stray rounds. Not many of those guys can shoot straight.”

More aerial flares exploded over the east and west sides as well and a grenade
crumped
down near the maglev tracks barricade. Aurora began walking around the edge of the building, looking at the unfolding panorama of a massed assault.

“Come on, let’s go! I’ve got to start pushing ammo.”

“Just a moment,” she said, still walking steadily around the edge of the building, looking at the flickering light of flares and burning shacks, the darting shapes of men seen between blowing columns of smoke. Then a thunderous explosion echoed from the Shadowed Way, accompanied by two rising fireballs. She turned and faced it, holding her head steady the whole time. Then she turned to me and blinked.

“Tell me, Sasha, how do you think the fight is going?” She held her eyes open just a little wider than she had before.

I turned my back on her and headed for my main ammo dump, taking the stairs down the side of the building two at a time.

My sister wanted me to like her. I might have liked her a little more if she’d come clean with me about being fitted with a bio-recorder, but not necessarily. You never know.

* * *

By the time I got to the main ammo dump, I could hear small arms fire and grenades from the south, which meant they were hitting us from all four compass points. A second minefield detonation made the ground shake and I saw a fireball rise up to the east, which meant there were two places they’d broken through the perimeter. At least two.

My ten ammo runners and my new ammo assistant, Yash Zaradavana, were waiting for me. The runners were armed for self defense, but only with small caliber gauss pistols, and for the most part pistols spared from frontline service by virtue of their poor performance or unusual ammunition or feed system which made supplying them awkward. The men and women detailed as runners were fit enough to haul ammo, and so to fight, but for one reason or another they hadn’t found a place in a combat unit. Most of them were happy with that. My point is, their job was to haul ammo, not fight, and that was just as well.

Zaradavana had them organized and settled down, but as soon as I showed up voices rose again. I held my left hand up to quiet them.

“I saw about five minutes of the fight from a rooftop, but I don’t know any more than you do. They’re pushing all along the perimeter, from all four directions, which means this is a serious and coordinated effort to plow us under. We can’t slack off tonight, or there won’t be a tomorrow. Everyone clear on that? Good. That said, no heroes tonight, okay? Just do your jobs. People are counting on you, a lot of lives depend on you doing your job, not getting distracted and going off to fight, no matter how much you want to.”

I didn’t think many of them actually wanted to, but I said it anyway. We did need them to hump ammo, people’s lives did depend on it, and they may as well take some pride in it instead of feeling ashamed they weren’t doing something more directly violent.

“Near as I can tell, we’re engaged on all main axes, so what’s our first priority?”

“Feed the RAGs,” about a half dozen said at once.

“Right. First runners, one sack of RAG bandoliers each. Push it to your assigned ammo point, make an assessment of what they’ll run short of next, and hustle back here. Move now!”

The five “first runners” took their sacks of RAG ammo and trotted off in five different directions. Once they were gone I turned to the “second runners,” who would alternate with the first runners or replace them outright if they had to. “You five, give me a security perimeter about thirty meters out, and keep your eyes open. Between the ammo dump and the hospital, this is a key location, and you’re just about all there is in terms of firepower.”

I could see the fear and excitement in their eyes as they jogged off to take up guard stations with a somber sense of purpose. I didn’t expect a breakthrough, but you never knew. The bigger danger was infiltration. We just didn’t have the people to cover every little alleyway and back door, and we could have burned half our perimeter force trying and still not gotten the job done.

The wounded started coming in, some walking under their own power, some carried by two-man stretcher teams provided by Billy Conklin’s construction gang, and some carried by friends from their squads, even though Zdravkova had given clear orders not to leave the firing line. I became a one-man retreat-blocking detachment, barking the able-bodied troops back to the line. Some went back sheepishly, some sullenly, but they went back. They weren’t cowards—most of them weren’t anyway—they were worried about their friends. I understood, but this sort of stuff is how wars are lost.

The First Runners started trickling back, breathless with excitement. They’d seen the fighting, seen wounded coming to the rear, heard the zip of flechettes passing overhead. Some of them wanted to make the return trip but I put them on the perimeter and started the Second Runners forward with whatever the Firsts called for—mostly more RAG ammo.

Then shouting, anger, a small crowd of fighters and some of the construction crew arguing, jostling. I trotted over to sort it out and as I got there I nearly vomited. The four fighters were carrying stretchers with two horribly burned Varoki.

“What the hell’s going on here?” I shouted. Everyone started talking at once so I waved them quiet and pointed at one of the construction guys.

“We’re supposed to be hauling wounded but these jerks stole our stretchers to carry a couple leatherheads. They—”

I cut him off and pointed at one of the soldiers.

“Yes, took them,” she said in the thick local accent. “These men not carry and leatherheads burnt too bad to pick up.”

“We need those for Human wounded,” the construction guy yelled and the argument restarted until I shouted them quiet again.

“They’re here now. Let’s get them to trauma receiving and see what the docs can do.” I looked at them again as the soldiers lifted the stretchers. Much of their skin was burnt black, carbonized, but where patches of it had sloughed off, the exposed meat was the color of blood. Neither of them had ears anymore. Both of them were having a hard time breathing and one moaned in a way that made my skin crawl. I couldn’t imagine them surviving, but maybe the docs could give them something for the pain. I walked alongside the lead stretcher.

“The work gang was right,” I told the fighters. “Our wounded—your wounded—have to come first.”

“Our wounded already back here,” the soldier who spoke before told me with puffing breath as she shuffled toward the clinic. “But many leatherheads still there, burned bad, like this. Mines burn them. Platoon leader tell us help them. Those are orders. Work crew not carry them, want to kill them.” She spat on the ground.

I didn’t have anything to say about that. “How’d the fight go?” I asked instead.

“Stopped assault, drove leatherheads back all way across Avenue of Peace, still running when we stop. Perimeter secure.”