Engine City (31 page)

“There’s a CCTV camera up there,” Susan pointed out.

“Oh yes,” said Telesnikov. “Well, let’s see if anyone’s watching.”

They both stepped back from the door and stood waving their hands above their heads. After a minute they heard a lot of heavy steps coming up stairs. Something clunked against the other side of the door.

“Step back and put your hands on your heads,” a voice boomed, amplified by the door as well as by whatever was behind it.

They complied. After some grating and clicking the door banged open to reveal two men with black visors and protective gear and rifles. The rest of the squad were literally backing them up, muzzles poking over the top of the stairwell.

“Who are you and how did you get in?”

“Cosmonaut Mikhail Telesnikov of the Cairns Fleet, Mingulay,” said Mikhail. “And Susan Harkness, mission recorder. We’re part of the advance party of the Bright Star Cultures. There’s a Spider skiff above your roof. If has unlimited stealth and jump capability. If I ask—or if its pilot hears any sounds of violence—it can jump into the exact space where you’re standing now, about two meters in front of me. I suggest you lower your weapons and take us to the most senior available officer of the Illyrian Defense Department.”

Five blank visors and five black rifle muzzles glared back at them.

“All right,” said the squad leader. “We’ll have to search you first.”

“We both have pistols in shoulder holsters,” said Telesnikov.

Two of the men stepped forward and frisked them while a third and fourth kept everyone covered. They took the pistols and then tugged off the mikes and the adapted radios.

“Hey!” said Susan as the radio was pulled from her inside jacket pocket. “That wasn’t—”

“Shut the fuck up.”

The squad leader and his mate tossed the devices, then the pistols, back to the others.

“
Now
we take you—”

Susan heard an enormous crash behind her and hit the deck. Telesnikov’s reflexes were just as fast. A split second later, the rifles opened up. Susan clasped her arms over her head and waited for it to stop. After a few seconds and a yelled command, it did. An implacable grinding noise, accompanied by more crashing, continued. Susan raised her head slightly. The two men who’d searched them were crouched at the top of the stairwell; one of them had an arm raised. He motioned to Susan and Telesnikov to get up. As they scrambled to their feet they glanced back and saw the skiff advancing down the corridor toward them. It was a lot wider than the corridor and on both sides its forward edge was cutting through plaster and lath, concrete and steel, like a plowshare through black earth. Telesnikov faced it and waved his hands above his head. The skiff stopped.

Glass tinkled somewhere.

“Now you take us,” said Telesnikov.

“You may go,” the Director of Military Intelligence told the two visored guards who’d escorted Susan and Mikhail to his office.

“But sir—”

An upraised hand and a mild querying look sent the two guards out. The Director sat back down. The office was modest, its only distinguishing feature what was undoubtedly the best view over Junopolis that the building afforded. An uncluttered desk, a leather office chair, a couple of smaller chairs and a few bookcases and a filing cabinet. The Director, a man in his thirties, was likewise modest in a dark suit with a minimum of slashes and padding. Only his ringletted red hair and luxuriant but neatly trimmed beard made him look vain, almost foppish.

“Please, please,” he said. “Take a seat.” He flicked his fingertips as though shaking off water. “And your weapons and radios.” It was like he didn’t want them spoiling the layout of his desk.

They sat down. “My name is Attulus,” he said. “I have come here from a much busier and more crowded room, as you can imagine. So let’s get down to business. The guard relayed what you claimed, and I’m willing to believe it. A Spider skiff on my top floor is . . . compelling. Tell me more. Fast.”

He listened intently as they told him.

“This is fascinating,” he said. “And your plan is feasible—if your alien allies can jump a skiff with this precision, they can jump right inside the orbital stations, whose location of course we know. But how can you ask us to trust you that”—he wiped a hand wearily across his face—“you’re not as much of a menace to the rest of humanity as Volkov always warned?”

Susan stared at him with a feeling of angry helplessness, a sense that she had walked through a mirror into a world where truth was no argument. It was the world to which Matt had taken her, when they had walked through the door into the house of that frightened latifundia chairman and messed with the poor guy’s head. He’d had a picture of Volkov among the family photographs on top of his television, and had squirmed when Matt had casually asked him about it. The older cadres were still loyal to the Engineer.

At that moment, Susan realized something that she wanted to blurt out right there, but it would have taken too long to explain her intuition and her reasoning. It would have to wait, and she had a more urgent point to make.

“We’re not asking you to trust us,” she said. “We’re offering you a chance to get
your troops
inside the orbital forts. If by the time the Bright Star Cultures arrive we have not persuaded you, that’s our problem. Besides, you must have information by now from Traders who have encountered the Bright Star Cultures.”

Attulus gave her a very sharp look. “That’s an interesting point,” he said. He stroked his beard with thumb and forefinger. “Very interesting.”

He reached for his telephone.

The Ducal Marines were a tough bunch. There was something almost comical about the looks on their faces when they climbed into the skiff and saw Mr. Blue, and about the way they relaxed in the few seconds it took for the Multiplier’s pheromones to overcome the sweat of fear. Then it would all happen all over again when they tumbled out of the packed skiff and into the hangar and met the other Multipliers, and saw the
Investigator
, and saw the other skiffs arrive, disgorge their comrades and depart to repeat the operation within seconds—a continuous shimmering shuttle. Even the saurs were unfamiliar to most of them, almost legendary. The Marines looked at them as though they were elves.

The five hundred Marines were already geared up for action, having just been stood down after preparing for commando raids on the coast of the Half Moon Sea. Their new mission profile wasn’t much different. Even their weapons—plasma carbines, submachine guns, and short swords—were preadapted for use inside the space stations. The decision to use the hangar in Sauria as the base had been taken hastily—despite the suspension of hostilities, nobody knew whether the orbital forts, or for that matter the New Babylon air force, would strike at Illyria. For the moment the whole military and administrative apparatus of New Babylon was not so much paralyzed as flailing about after the blow struck at its center.

There were nine orbital forts—three in geostationary orbit, two on the moons, one at the Trojan point that intercepted incoming merchant starships, and three in the inner reaches of the asteroid belt. Only the Trojan one was known to have a significant contingent of actual troops—in effect, space marines—and even they had mainly experienced nothing but decades of unopposed boardings. Nonetheless, the most effective way to take them on would have been to hit them all at the same moment, so that none would have any knowledge of what was happening to the others. This wasn’t possible, because there were only six jump-capable ships available: the five Multiplier skiffs and the
Investigator.
Of these, only the skiffs could emerge unscathed inside another object, destroying anything that happened to be in the same space more thoroughly than an explosion. The battle plan required a staggered departure of the skiffs and a careful calculation of the light-minutes and seconds that separated the targets, as well as of their military significance—the most distant, a fort that happened to be on the other side of the sun from New Earth, was about thirty light-minutes away, but it presented the least immediate threat.

The plan, then, was for the five skiffs to hit the five forts within easy reach first, and substitute force concentration for surprise in overwhelming the others—first the one in Trojan orbit, then the three in the asteroid belt. Only in these three would there be a need for microgravity tactics—the geostationary and the Trojan forts had centrifugal spin, the lunar ones had low gravity. The three Cosmonauts were hastily explaining micro-gravity movement and fighting to the troops, but there was no doubt that they would find it difficult.

The
Investigator
, and its one onboard Mingulayan skiff, were assigned the role of recovery and backup. Its precision jumping would have to rely on a Multiplier navigator, Mr. Magenta, working together with Johnson and Derige. Its rocketeers and gunners would do whatever was necessary. Their missiles and plasma cannon didn’t amount to much but they were better than nothing. In terms of weapons deployed outside the ship, nothing was what the Marines had.

Susan hopped out of the skiff after its first return journey and watched the preparations in the hangar’s late-afternoon gloom, recording with her tiny Mingulayan camera gear and murmuring her own notes. She managed to corner Matt and Mikhail after they’d both stepped back from a conference of the Marine officers around a table spread with sheets of paper. Matt seemed to have recovered his morale.

“You’re not coming,” he said as soon as she faced him. “It’s not a question of danger, it’s just that it would leave room for one less Marine or Cosmonaut on—”

“Oh, shut up, Matt,” she said. “I know that. History will have to make do with what I record here, and that’ll be more than enough. No, it’s about something you need to know. Both of you. And the troops.”

Matt reached for a mug of coffee that Johnson handed him. “Okay.”

“You too, Phil,” said Susan, pulling in the captain before he could get away.

“So what is it?” asked Mikhail.

“Volkov is alive,” she said.

“What?” they all said at once.

“How would you know?” Matt asked.

“I’m not saying I know,” she said. “I’m saying it’s very likely. Think about it. Who else could have ordered a missile strike on New Babylon, and been obeyed? Who is the one person who had more authority than the Senate and the President and all the rest of them put together?”

“Yes, informally, when he was alive, but—” said Matt.

“Come on Matt, Mikhail, you knew him, you’ve told me all about him. The consummate political Cosmonaut. He would never have fallen to a palace coup. Oh, the coup might have been carried out, the plotters might even have thought they’d succeeded, but Volkov would have been ahead of them. And I’ll bet he’s been up in one of these orbital forts for all the decades since. The SDF
must
have been Volkov’s power base. So I think you and the brave lads there are going to face absolutely fanatical resistance in at least one of the forts.”

“That or some very clever negotiation,” said Mikhail, with a skeptical grin that partly humored her.

“You overestimate him,” said Matt, half to Mikhail and half to Susan. “He had a way of setting things in motion that ran away from him. That’s what happened with the Modern Regime, I don’t doubt. But, yeah, I can see he could still be alive—hell, he still has supporters in the bureaucracy and the SDF, sure, if he was alive he could get them to do it if anyone could . . . but why should he attack New Babylon? Especially with a crisis like this. If he wanted to make his comeback he could do it without wiping out the people who ousted him. I mean, the old President was just about dead of—”

He stopped, and his hand jolted so hard he splashed hot coffee over it—Susan could just see the half-started gesture of slamming his fist on his palm.

“That’s it!” he said. He was smiling for the first time in days, for the first time since it had all gone wrong, and now he was straightening up, a weight off his shoulders.

“Yes,” said Susan. “I just thought of it when we were speaking to Attulus, and I mentioned the Traders who’d met our side already.”

Mikhail and Phil frowned at them.

“You’ve lost us, you two,” Phil said.

“Whoever hit New Babylon,” she said, “wasn’t just aiming to wipe out the central apparat. They were aiming to wipe out people in the apparat infected by the Multipliers. People right at the top.”

She hardly had time to explain the rest—to the Marines as well as to her friends—before whistles sounded, and the run for the skiffs began.

Recording events from the hangar was a safe but uncanny and terrible way of being a war correspondent. The skiffs blurred into their jumps and returned for more troops about once every minute as they zipped back and forth at lightspeed between the geostationary and lunar forts, then in longer jumps as they took on the Trojan-orbit fort and, at even longer intervals, two of the three asteroid bases. It was from the Trojan fort that the first casualties from both sides came back, sliding in blood down from the skiffs’ hatches. The dozen or so Multipliers who weren’t piloting pounced on the wounded men and began repairing them without waiting for permission. Ramona and Susan rushed around explaining. All that the combat medics could do, and all they had to do, was hold down thrashing, screaming men while the Multipliers worked. After the first few terrifying miracles, soldiers who’d been mangled or dead minutes earlier could reassure the new arrivals that the Spiders were doing them good. Even some of these revenants were frightening—men with only a scaffolding of Multiplier offspring, a webwork of minute Spiders passing blood and bits along where parts of their bodies had been, visibly being repaired on the run. Some of the revived Marines went back into action, carried away by the fever of the benign infection, the ecstasy of the strange vision through their rebuilt eyes. There were still deaths—not even the Multipliers could do anything for a blasted-out brain. Corpses were laid out one by one, but they were not stacked up by the score, as without the Multipliers they certainly would have been.