Revolution's Shore (20 page)

“But I didn't—it didn't sink in. Why? Why make it now?”

His gaze, resting on her, left no room for any reason but the obvious one. “My magnanimous nature, of course,” he said impatiently. “Bringing the ambrosia of semi-immortality to the benighted. For God's sake, Lily, you know perfectly well why.”

As the light faded, she could no longer see his face clearly, but the taut intensity of his body was easy to read. “Yes,” she said softly, beginning the descent, “You made it for me.”

In the shop, Bach was happily ensconced in Blumoris's comm-room, hidden behind a cleverly disguised partition that was in itself partially concealed by a large pile of old metal and rusting pieces of antiquated equipment in the far corner of the work space.

Blumoris looked up as she entered. His coveralls were grimy with oil and unidentifiable stains, but his broad face creased in a grin when he saw her.

“Got your console fixed, I did,” he said. She began to speak enthusiastically, but he forestalled her. “It's a nice piece, but I wouldn't use it here. I reckon that's how they caught you incoming and trained their fire so accurately: it's got what I call a strong pulse. And that hand-pack's got no range, begging your pardon.”

Lily smiled slightly. “I'm hardly likely to take offense at
that
truth, especially after all you've done for us. I wonder if the engines—”

He shook his head, a gesture she took for a moment as a complete negative. “I never thought,” he began with that ponderous way of speaking that marked him as a man of deep opinions and long patience, “that any good would come of Inocencio's obstinacy about off-planet vessels. I told him there wasn't any good setting his sights on a living he couldn't ever get admittance to, but he kept on. I don't say he's fixed them, or even that he can, but he's in paradise just working on that boat, and if anyone here can cobble up a fix, given the damage she took, I think it's not boasting to say that my boy can.”

“I think you have every reason to be proud of him,” said Lily carefully.

He considered this seriously. “I won't say he isn't a stubborn boy, just to show he can be, or that he doesn't make trouble just to get attention, or get the Telesford girl into scrapes to prove he can influence her, but still, he's the gift in him for understanding and coddling engines. Here now, that creature of yours seems to be saying we're ready.”

He refused to call Bach a robot and had shown a remarkable aptitude for reading the basic messages in Bach's singing speech to Lily. Neither had Bach surprised him, when he first saw the 'bot, a circumstance later explained when he had lifted a similar round globe out of his junk heap and showed it to Lily. The globe had several obvious differences from Bach; slightly smaller, it was also an imperfect sphere, being heavier at the equator. Although Blumoris did not say as much, Lily suspected that he had not given up on fixing it someday.

Lily cleared a space for herself on a stool and sat down, watching the console. Bach had an attachment plugged in, and as one of the unauthorized broadcasts Blumoris had previously mentioned began its brief evening's program, he began a coded transmission to the old man's specifications.

“Now,” said Blumoris softly, “if we don't get anything with this, there's another broadcast we can hide in at sunrise, and that will give us a broader—”

Bach winked red. Through the soft static of the receiver a voice spoke, faint, and desperate enough that it dispensed entirely with codes or identification.

“Thank the Void. Is it you, Heredes? We're in desperate trouble.”

Lily had no difficulty recognizing Yehoshua's voice: strained, weak from fatigue, but steady. She grabbed for the switch, almost tripping over her own feet in her haste. “This is Heredes. We are safe for now. Where are you?”

Yehoshua coughed, shuddering the static. “I don't know. But there is an embankment here, studded with five metal poles and three dishes in a Quince configuration. We're dug in at thirty Q seven.”

“That's Cemetery Hill,” said Blumoris softly. “I know it. It's a good thirty kilometers from here.”

“We've got a fix,” replied Lily. “We're coming tonight.”

“Bring Hawk.” His voice shook on the name. Someone spoke behind him, but the words were muffled by static and distance. “Military is still running sweeps, but none through here since last night.”

“Any news of Two?”

A pause, and the undertone of the illicit broadcast giving trading prices on the black market. “All dead. Have you had news from the
Cairn
? We can't raise her.”

Lily caught in her breath, let it out, feeling choked for a moment. Swann dead, and Yehoshua did not know about Callioux. “We're on our own, Yehoshua,” she replied. “I'm going off now. Acknowledge.”

Another pause. “I see.” The hiss of static. “Accepted.”

The connection broke.

Lily stood up. “I need a guide.”

After some argument, Absinthe Telesford—Red—was allowed to volunteer. Lily kept her own forces small: herself, Hawk, Jenny, and the Mule—strength and speed. With some trepidation, she left Pinto in charge, giving Lia the job of intermediary between the Shanty elders and the crew.

Elder Hoang had an old six-wheeler van, marked for deliveries, which he claimed was registered to someone on the other continent. Jenny drove.

Red lost her bearings once, but the mistake proved fortuitous. Driving up without lights on the back height of Cemetery Hill, they saw three military vehicles stopped on the road they had meant to come in on. Jenny shut off the engine and let the van drift into the cover of a large satellite dish.

Seated in a front bubble, Lily surveyed the uneven height around them. “Why is it called Cemetery Hill?” she asked.

Red shrugged with the blithe disinterest of youth. “I don't know. Reckon people must have been buried here once. My mam once told me this used to be a courting place when she was a girl. I guess it's lonely enough.” She looked out at the lights of the military trucks, sweeping in arced patterns across the series of embankments that shored up the hill itself. “Or used to be.”

“Courting?”

“Yeah.
You
know.” Red used that tone of voice that suggested that she herself knew quite well and did not want to say, but revealed instead that the opposite was more likely true.

Jenny chuckled softly. “Oh, yes, Lily-hae.
You
know. Hawk once told me—”

“Leave Hawk out of this,” Lily muttered grimly.

“
Hawk
?” murmured Red. The way she spoke his name betrayed her conversion to Blue's worship of Kyosti as the pinnacle of rebellion, cosmetic and otherwise. After a suitable silence, she let out her breath. “Gee.” She sounded disappointed, but whether that sprang from her judging Lily unsuitable to receive such an honor, or from her own now-shattered dream of becoming the Chosen One—given the competition—was unclear.

“Hoy.” Lily loosened her rifle strap and eased out her pistol. “Jenny. Based on my reading of this configuration, Yehoshua should be over—damn.”

Jenny echoed the curse. Dark figures fanned out from one of the trucks below: troopers on foot recce.

“Red,
stay here
.” Lily's tone was adamant and not a little threatening. “Let's go, Jen. You and the Mule downside, Hawk and I covering upside.”

She soon lost sight of Jenny and the Mule. Her own face was streaked with grime. Fingerless gloves covered most of her hands. Kyosti had a hood pulled down to cover his head and face—all but his eyes and nose, and they both wore the dark night-fighting coveralls issued for planetside missions.

The rough outlines of the hill, the product of much excavation, provided good cover. They reached the Q7 line out from the center and circled out as far along its circumference as they could given the terrain. So far the troopers had not advanced farther than a quarter of the way into the kilometerwide configuration.

“Good thing they're cautious,” whispered Kyosti as Lily stopped, panting, beside him after her bent-over run across a dark, flat gap between ditches. “I keep expecting to see them move in on the road we came in on.”

She did not reply, but let herself relax, grow still, stretching out her senses as far as she could. In the distance, she heard an engine idling; far above, a shuttle passed over the city. Embankments slid away into darkness below them, traced by the nimbus of light coming from the trucks beyond, which they could not see.

Kyosti's hand tightened on hers. “This way.” His voice was barely audible. “I smell the blood.”

He was off so swiftly and silently that she did not have time to question his comment. The ditch led down, deeper, until their view was restricted to a narrow band of sky. They turned a steep corner and ran up against the stub end of a laser rifle.

Jenny lowered it. “Just in time. We're ready to pull out.”

It was not a heartening scene. Four shadowy figures huddled over two prostrate ones on the ground, the pitiful remnant of Yehoshua's crew of ten. One of the figures straightened to reveal the thin crest of the Mule. Five left from One. Two was gone entirely. Lily wondered what had happened to Team Veeta on the other continent.

Kyosti had already gone forward to kneel beside the wounded. Lily gave a curt nod to Jenny, and the mercenary moved out to establish a more generous perimeter. As Lily joined the group around the casualties, she heard Kyosti's overly sharp rejoinder to someone's suggestion.

“No, I don't need a light. It isn't safe to risk it, which any damn fool would know if—”

“Hawk,” she said softly, and then she realized how close the edge on his voice was to complete loss of control. She reached down and touched his neck. He was trembling—shaking—and his head was lifted to look not at the injured but at someone else. He was poised to rise and lunge.

“Finch,” she said, knowing who it must be even as her grip tightened on the nearest thing to hand—Kyosti's hair. “Get out to your left, on perimeter with Jenny.
Now
.”

“You're
protecting
him?” Finch's voice cracked and he caught back a sob. “You aren't worth—” He broke off, gasping in pain.

The body that interposed itself between Kyosti and Finch was Yehoshua. He had gotten a hard grip on Finch's arm.

“Out,” Yehoshua hissed. “We've all lost loved ones. Go.” He shoved Finch out, following him.

Lily knelt beside Kyosti and wrapped her arms tightly around him. He shook in her grasp. “We need you now, Kyosti,” she whispered, intense, her face hidden in his hair. “Don't leave us now.”

He gulped air, fighting, and slowly his ragged breathing evened and his trembling stopped. She realized how tense her muscles had been when she relaxed her grip on him. He groped blindly forward until his hand came to rest in a damp patch of ground: blood seeping from a hastily bandaged wound. Touching the body, he felt along it with both hands, pausing now and again: at the sticky mess of his abdomen, at the rasping, shallow rise and fall of his lungs, at the pulse under his jaw. It was a peculiar examination, until Lily realized that Kyosti's eyes were closed. At last his fingers brushed along the man's temple, and Kyosti shook his head.

“Even in a hospital, we couldn't save him. It's just a matter of hours.”

Lily felt a presence, still and unmoving, at her back. She turned her head to see Yehoshua staring at Kyosti.

“No hope at all?” Yehoshua's voice was so quiet that it scarcely penetrated the air at all.

“I'm sorry.”

A wet, warm drop struck Lily's face. She glanced first at the sky, but it was clear and black and studded with stars.

“Do what you must,” said Yehoshua above her. “We must be moving.” He knelt briefly to kiss the dying man's forehead, rose again to collect his three remaining men.

The other casualty proved to have a shattered femur. The team medic had administered a painkiller, and the soldier was only semiconscious.

“I'll need two people to carry her out,” said Kyosti, applying a quick, stiff wrapping to the wounded leg. “And the Mule to carry Alsayid.” He turned his head toward Lily, for her confirmation of his orders.

“Thank you,” said Yehoshua softly. “I thought you were going to leave him.”

Kyosti rose. “In other circumstances I would, but we can't afford for them to find his body.”

Yehoshua did not reply, but rather knelt to shoulder a large, bulky pack that clearly was quite heavy.

“That is?” asked Lily.

“Our shuttle's com-console.”

“We have one. Leave it.”

“No!” Yehoshua's reply was bitter and stubborn. “Alsayid lost his life saving this.”

Lily bowed her head and waved the others on. The line headed back along the ditch the way she and Hawk had come. Hawk walked past her to the bend, stopped, and waited. She gestured him on, but he did not move. As she came up beside him he grabbed her and tugged her in to him, began to kiss her face repeatedly.

Lily got out from under his grasp, broke it, and shoved him hard away from her. “Move!” she hissed.

He hesitated, reached out, but withdrew his hand without touching her. She just walked past him. At the top of the ditch Jenny waited, flat on the ground, her rifle pointed toward the lights of the military trucks.

“I sent Finch on ahead,” she whispered as Lily crouched beside her. “One truck has left. They've pulled back the team covering the left side, but the group on this side might intercept the wounded.”

Lily nodded. “We'll keep heading up. If they get too close, you and Hawk run rear guard and I'll draw them off.”

“But Lily,” Jenny began, “you're our commander—”

“No. Yehoshua is senior. Don't argue.” Lily rose up and started a careful circuit forward.

They climbed. Once she thought she heard a muffled gasp of pain from ahead, but it did not sound again. Twice, definitely, she heard a shouted command carry all the way from the distant trucks, caught by some current of the air.