The next 12 hours were the definition of hell — and he’d seen some of the worst of the fighting back home:
On his belly amidst the creosote and gravel of the midnight desert outside Albuquerque, awaiting the next drifting flare and pounding artillery barrage. Running the damnable, rain-soaked Northern California coastal ridges, all stumps and mudslides and psychotic hillbillies dug in with .50-caliber heavy machine guns. Phoenix, a sprawling labyrinth of burned out suburbs and boobytraps and point-blank, house-to-house combat.
He’d been scared before. Sure thing. Pissed his pants as a shell took out a dozen of his buddies not five yards away. He’d wept at the sight of his C.O., eyes like boiled eggs, gagged at the smell of napalm and charred flesh. Something he now, truly, never could forget.
And despite all this, Midway was different. Worse. Because in this battle, Corporal James Deschutes was barely a combatant, largely unable to defend himself, to shoulder his rifle or lob a grenade or pull out his 9-millimeter for a finishing shot to the gut.
At no other time in his life was he more profoundly and completely a victim.
From the moment that first display erupted above in huge, shimmering 3V, he’d known it was a diversion. He averted his eyes — all lies, it was — and dropped to his knees.
There were voices everywhere, and the awful sound of the terrorist propaganda like shattered glass cutting into every stray, coherent thought.
“Gibbs! Gibby!” he whispered. “Gibson!”
His partner was staring upwards, slackjawed. “God’s blood,” he finally muttered, looking down. “Jimmy! You see that? You see what I mean?”
“Sergeant, I need orders. What are my orders?”
Gibbs shook his head. “What?” he asked, then squatted. “Orders. What’s it say on the com?”
Jimmy was switching through the various channels, but they were all dead. Static. He tapped at the earpiece, and suddenly his head exploded with sound, a voice, female, calm.
“Give up, soldier. You’re outgunned. There’s no hope. Here’s your chance to make it home. Right now. Put down your weapons. Put up your hands. Gather in the Northeast Sector cargo hangar. You will not be harmed. We’ll send you home. Home to your friends, your family, your churches. Your women. Safe. You have our word. Give up, soldier. You’re outgunned.”
Jimmy tore the voxbox and earpiece off. Snarled, looked around, Gibbs was standing again, agape.
“Thorns and locusts,” he swore. “What I tell you, Jimmy?”
He looked down, around. Corporal James Deschutes was nowhere to be seen. He swore some more and then cycled through the com band. All the same, a lilting voice whispering about surrender.
There were flashes of light up at the stage, and, faintly screams. He saw them now. The terrorists. Unlike any he’d seen. Clad in strange, dull armor, their faces occluded, clasping little handguns that strobed in concentrated, silent bursts.
And men fell loose limbed and abruptly to the floor.
There was a pair of them now, racing up the stairs, directly at him. Gibbs gazed at the tiny, oblong devices in their hands.
His automatic rifle was heavy, dark, full of angles and tricks and the flaring scent of machine oil, so very rare, these days.
He slipped it off his shoulder and lowered it to the ground. Raised his hands, just like the voice in his earpiece said he should.
The shot him anyway.
Jimmy crouched low. Behind a pair of seats. All was darkness and light and confusion. There was a woman now speaking, some Godless propaganda.
They really are doing it! Trials, hostages, hijacking the convoy, the entire station! His heart beat and his tongue was thick and sticky.
He took a breath and held it, exhaled, praying for calm, for clarity, watching the soulless creatures move amongst the good citizens, his brother officers falling, the great men of the church onstage, corralled, roughly handled in shackles and leg irons.
Dear Jesus, he prayed. Scared. He’d seen Gibby drop. Could only imagine what the Godless had in store. The 3V woman kept speaking. Lies.
Someone cleared his throat and Jimmy was gripped by a seizure of panic. He looked to his right and there was a man, a child with big eyes, and a woman, sitting all in a row.
“Hush now,” the woman said, and the child looked up at her. She closed her eyes and enfolded her hands, and the child did the same.
The man — the father — was looking directly at Jimmy, and then he extended his arm and dangling from his hand, a greatcoat, an antique it appeared, made of real wool with a high collar and buttons carved in the likeness of the crucifix.
Jimmy removed his vest and flack jacket — didn’t seem to do old Gibbs any good — locked his rifle down, his pistol, his shrapnel blasters. What use were bullets? Or any projectile?
He kept his knife, though. Stowed his hat, and all the electronic gear, they would track it all down and know exactly who was missing.
He took the coat. The man nodded. “We’re praying for you,” he said, and Jimmy’s eyes flooded and he turned his head, trying desperately not to snuffle like a child.
He didn’t look back. Crept low between the bleachers, overhead the 3V was blaring and he dared not look up, or over the seats and down at the stage, but kept his head low.
The floor was sticky with spilled drinks and chewing gum, nuplast wrappers and flattened soymod pops. He could smell the salt and butrflavr, and his stomach growled.
Not yet. There’s plenty of time for picking through the garbage, after all. As long as he could keep underground. A day? Maybe. A week?
Not a chance … they’ve jacked the network. They’ll be tracking infrared, electronic signatures, acoustic resonance. He’d need to stay in a crowd, move amongst the people. Try to blend in.
No, they’d spot his boots. He’d have nowhere to tidy up. He’d look like a ragman. Eating garbage, right? Living underground. They’d be checking everyone as they leave, as they board, as they queue up for rations, or to use the crapper … ident chips, paper stamps, retina scans …
He cursed, silently prayed for forgiveness, eyes clenched shut, tension anchored at the edges of his mandible and creeping up into his temples.
Sweat gathered along his shoulderblades and armpits, beads of it cooled under some hidden vent or overhead fan. His tongue hurt: He realized he had been chewing it, and a dull throb pounded into the depths of his ear every time he swallowed.
Jimmy had crawled all the way up to the topmost tier, and now faced a dead end, a low custodian’s access panel, smooth and faceless, set into the gray-angled hypertensile. He’d need a functioning ident chip and an override code to get through.
“Mother fuck,” he blasphemed, and was instantly sorry. “Please, Lord. Please, I beg. Forgive me. Show me. Lead me, Lord.”
The 3V above abruptly became quite loud, full of the sounds of weapons and engines, intercut with some narration, deep-voiced and reassuring, like a Sunday broadcast pastor.
He prayed and whispered and shouted to his Lord, and after a time the terrible sounds ebbed and the silence and shadows grew long.
There were crowd noises, and lights too that faded like a sunset he recalled once, after the Santa Fe bomb. Dusty and red-tinted.
He realized after a time that he was alone. In a great and airy silence. The stadium interior was empty, he peered cautiously between the seats, stuck his head up slightly.
Nothing. The cycling breath of the ventilation system. Trash strewn everywhere, chairs on the floor, scattered, knocked about in clusters and clumps.
And not a soul to be seen. No long dusty mops and hovering autovacuums, no idling supervisors with their feet up, chewing gum.
The wall-sized sliding stage doors were stuck in a ponderous spasm, drifting up against and away from an upturned catering table and an amoebic mass of crepe ribbons and pamphlets and a long white tablecloth entwined in an ugly blue nuplast tarp.
Drifts of confetti and half-full buckets of soypops gathered in corners, nudged along by the blasting HVAC system.
He saw a grounded autovac, pathetically lurching into a blind corner, pausing, rotating along minute search arcs, and lurching into the corner once again. Graceless technology, utterly inadequate.
The lights flashed and dimmed, came up again and then faded to a twilight luster. After a long, slow count to 100, Jimmy stood.
There was nothing and no one about.
He crouched and ran along the high balcony that ringed the stadium, came down lightly, quickly, along the sidemost stairwell above the stage door loading dock.
Under normal circumstances the room would have been stripped bare, the hypertensile automatically de-activated and refolded upon itself, broken down into infinitely recombinant microbuckies, all neatly stored lines and struts and points and planes and panels and ultra-compact weight-bearing joints.
He imagined the expanse, a hemispheric absence. But somehow the process had been interrupted. Jurist computers putting up more of a fight than those hellbound Godless ever expected!
A staring grin seized his face and vanished in an instant. He gnawed his thumbnail. Now … choices. Hide? Maybe in the farmdome. Amid the hectares of bananas and coconuts and coffee and soya. In the terradome, washing himself like a feral in the waterfalls.
He’d catch a fish, build himself a fire! His stomach rasped, he was devilishly hungry.
Creep down now. Down the stairs. Careful. Look again, long and slow. Through the doors he could just make out a long empty corridor, lights flaring up and then fading back to an abandoned somnolence. He slipped past the doors, and out.
Up ahead was the broad stairwell leading up to the embarkation lounge, the farmdome, the terradome, the aquadome, and the long encircling mall of crew quarters and the concourse and the Midway administrative suites.
To the right, the hangar’s master control room and hypertensile fabrication labs. And the hangar crew’s own gymnasium and spa, converted for the occasion to a green room for Jubilee dignitaries, full of catering and couches.
Gibbs had been talking excitedly about the “acres of forage” bound to be left behind after the evening’s conclusion. Jimmy’s stomach growled again, this time loud enough to be hear across the room. He cursed and prayed again.
To his left was the medcenter, one of a dozen auxiliary storage vaults, retrofitted with gurneys and multipaks of hemoglobin and saline and disinfecting instaplasters for the holy rollers who’d bit their own tongues nearly in two, who’d flung themselves to the ground in brightscarlet and purplebruised displays of devotion.
Thrice damned, not a single safe passage. The faithful, it seemed, had all been shuttled back to their arkships, but he was certain the silence and absence was a temporary situation at best. The Godless were running Midway’s corridors even as he stood there, rooting out the loyal crew and … what? Penitentiary ships? Deep space? Out the airlocks?
A clatter of footsteps and voices came rushing up the leftmost corridor, barking tones and breath in gasps.
Jimmy raced back behind the oscillating stadium doors as they slid dumbly up against the clutter and debris, leapt over a banister and down into the floor-level seating.
The corridor outside came alive with commotion.
“… supposed to be locked down, major. Locked down. Hours ago.”
“It was, sir, it is, the rest of the station is, you’re not listening. There was a glitch, a software problem. A redundant backup on a separate circuit, the virus wasn’t able to fully penetrate … ”
“It’ll fucking penetrate. Show me the console.”
“You sure Mol’s going to be OK?”
The footsteps came to halt, Jimmy estimated just at the entrance to the rightmost corridor, and the green room, and the control suite.
“No, I’m not sure. At this point I’m not sure about a single goddamned thing any of you so-called advance guardsmen have put in place. I asked for a total system compromise, something I know the Library City is fully capable of mustering, and you give me a teenage hacker with security protocols three months out of date. I ask for a division of bookkeepers to run security details and mop things up before the trial, and you give me four platoons and a canine unit. No, major, I do not know if Mol will be alright, which is why I think you need to quit wringing your pasty little hands and show me the master data console right fucking now …”
The voices diminished, vanished, and Jimmy bolted out again, his heart was racing, he stopped in the dead silence and peered down the long curving passage to the left, where Mol, whomever he was, awaited, apparently vulnerable.
Jimmy was heartened to know of this weakness. It made his knife seem almost adequate.
He crept along the smooth sheetflooring, 25 meters, 50, and more, up to an abrupt rightwards jog. Peered cautiously around the corner.
There was Mol. Tall, thin, back to him, shifting his weight between his booted feet, the synthetic fibers of his pants crinkling and rustling, thumbing idly through a datapalette.
He wasn’t wearing a helmet, the reddish-pale hair was buzzed back short and bristly. Jimmy drew his knife and leapt through the air and before Mol had completely registered the commotion had yanked the Godless bastard’s chin back and drawn the knife across in a swift and soundless motion.
And Mol turned and clawed at the air, and there was a hideous gurgling sound as the blood jetted over the floor, over Jimmy, who realized that Mol was a woman.
He dropped the knife, grew dizzy, puked and heaved.
A woman! A woman! I killed … What kind of pig … what kind of pig puts a woman into battle …
This wasn’t some subhuman squatter in the Arizona wastes. She could have been a girl at Sunday school. Big-boned, pale eyes (now drowned in panic, now horrified at their own fading light, now widening, now vacant, so very blank, not even staring), the kind of girl who would stand awkwardly at the edge of the room at the parish social, waiting for someone to come ask her name.
Jimmy bawled. There were sounds coming from his mouth he didn’t recognize. He made the sound as he rummaged through Mol’s possessions, ripped the dogtag — a woman soldier! — and ident chip from around, from what remained of, her neck …
There was a door. She had been guarding it. An unwieldy manual locking mechanism fused into place.
He’d seen them before, used them himself. His hands were shaking but somehow he managed to slide in Mol’s keychip, and the lock flashed green and fell to the floor.
The door slid open.
It was dark inside, half-lit. They were all there, rushed out in tight formation, bowling Jimmy over and spilling into the hallway.
“Wait! Wait! He’s one of ours!”
“Killed the bitch … ”
“Good job, boy! Good job! What’s your name? I recognize you, son.”
Jimmy tried to focus, and a face materialized, calm, searching. Familiar features — deep set black eyes under a dark brow, famously craggy, a Gallic nose, a scar running across the chin.
“Commander …?”
“Good job, boy,” Marchand repeated. “I remember you. Deschutes. A good Baptist lad, from Idaho. In the thick of it again, eh?”
“I killed a woman, sir,” Jimmy began.
“You killed an enemy combatant, corporal. And a rather splendid job it was. God’s work takes steel, boy. Strength. Don’t doubt for a moment you weren’t meant to do it. God brought you here to cast her Jezebel spirit into darkness. You were led by God.”
Jimmy nodded.
“Get up, lad, we don’t have any time. They’ll be back in moments. I’m promoting you, and I have orders. Are you ready, lieutenant?”
Jimmy found himself at attention. “Yes, sir.”
“We’ve got ourselves a challenge, son. These bastards have some kind of damping field that sucks the velocity right out of our bullets. Though your knife seems to have done the trick. So what we need is like a knife, only bigger. Something that can take out a bunch of ‘em all at once.”
He gazed thoughtfully at Jimmy. “If I’m not mistaken,” he said then, “I recall seeing a fair amount of mining gear in one of these ancillary hangars.”
“It’s for a ShearstoneYeunger expedition, out to the asteroids. Supposed to leave on Tuesday, after the Jubilee … we did a full security survey, sir.”
“So you looked through the manifests? Any explosives? Any sort of weapon that might cut their devil hides.”
“Some shaped charges, little things, they looked like,” Jimmy said, searching his memory. “But mostly just gear. Big drills, rigging, laser borers. Quonset habitats. Lots of hypertensile. Nothing like a proper bomb, sir.”
“What I’m going to ask of you is not going to be easy, lieutenant. But I trust you. You’ve survived some of the worst battles of the Tribs, and you’ve seen the enemy’s real face. But now we come to the end of it. These are the final days, lieutenant. You understand how important you are to the success of His plan.”
“Sir, we all have a place in God’s plan, but I’m not — ”
“We all have a place. That is correct, lieutenant. We all have a role. And we of the militia doubly so. Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace, but the Lord God enforces that peace with a sword. We are the strength and consequence of this will. In the Bible it says that we are to pursue our enemies, and that a hundred of us will pursue ten thousand. When the Israelites took the city of Ai, they destroyed every living thing within it, with the sword. Men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys. We are that sword, lieutenant. We are weapons of God. You are His weapon, and He will bless you and keep you at his side, among the righteous. Go to the Shearstone hangar and take the explosives. Use them against the Godless, against their judges, their commanders, their soldiers. There is your knife. Strike as if you were the hand of the Lord. For that is what guides your every move.”
A man dashed up. Their gear had been found, piled on the floor of an adjacent supply room. The two whispered briefly, then Marchand nodded, and turned again to Jimmy.
“Lieutenant, we’re going for the St. Andrew. We’ll try and make it to Elysia, and rally the brethren. We can’t let them get the better of us. Good Christians are counting on us, and we’re counting on you, lieutenant. Carry the bombs into their midst. Hurry to the vessel, if you can, but time is against us.” He looked at the ground, and when he lifted his head a moment later his eyes glistened. “Remember, lad, that a martyr is honored among God’s children.”
And he saluted, and clasped Jimmy by the shoulders and prayed him God speed. Deschutes’ heart was pounding as he turned and jogged down the corridors.
The commander’s words were tangled in his mind. They put out leaves and grew into a thick twining bramble he could feel on his skin in racing pins and needles.
His teeth chattered as he slipped through the Shearstone hangar’s palpitating iris door, the lighting caught in a buzzing surge and ebb. In the dimness he could make out a big room, full of stacked boxes and cargo cylinders.
And there, the yellowblack crating.
The charges were flat discs with a digital interface, and controlled by a simple remote transmitter. The explosion was a focused, lateral scythe for cutting access channels into huge drifting asteroid fragments rich with ore.
He could lay several of these around the station, trigger them at his leisure.
Use the accompanying epoxy autodaub to cement them in strategic locations, tight bundles of latent concussion and heat waiting to burst open. The judges’ chambers, surely. And any command suites.
And what about the “refugees”? He should have asked. Then again, Jurist protocols were quite explicit that a renegade’s best hope was the mercy of Christ.
And maybe there were woman among them. But it was after all as Marchand said. The killing of sinners, heathen, Godless, was burdensome. Yes. An awful burden. Never undertaken lightly. But who can show mercy to a mad dog? You put it down and are done with it. One must mourn for their passing, and pray for what was left of their souls.
It’s just that it’s easier to do when they look like animals, Jimmy thought. These terrorists, these refugees, they look like good Christians.
Just don’t be fooled. Don’t feel sympathy. Don’t feel trust. Look what it got old Gilbert. We do our jobs and leave the judgment to the Lord.
He repeated the phrase in what would have been called a mantra, in another time. We do our jobs. The charges were significant pieces of equipment. More than three would be very heavy. Two in the big coat’s pockets. One in his left hand. The dauber in his right. No free hand for a knife …
The technical conundrum sparkled and teased him, and a sheaf of brilliant, absurd solutions fanned out like playing cards.
You can keep it in the sheath till you place one. You can put one down and draw the knife. And you might not need the knife at all.
That’s where his train of thought kept ending. He ran through it a few more times, but always came back to that same, dangling conclusion.
If he wound up in a confrontation, his knife would probably be useless. But the bombs wouldn’t be. Couldn’t be. Best if he was in a crowd of them, in that case.
It was a cold thought, and he tucked it brusquely away, shuffled in among his other options.
He had to piss, but tightened his jaw and took a breath, a deep breath, set his shoulders out and chest up against it. The corridor outside was empty, Marchand and the other officers gone on their desperate break for the Elysian shuttle.
Mol’s body had been shoved to the side of the corridor, her clothing now torn, her body slashed. How strange. He couldn’t pause to think of it.
The floor slick with blood still glistening. Jimmy battled against the urge to retch, glanced furtively around the corner. Nothing, still. He set the first charge at waist level by the short staircase to the grand promenade. The second, he had decided, should go outside the hangar control room, one of the Godless command points.
If he could place that, the third would go outside the magistrate’s offices. Armed, though. Turn the damn things on! He surprised himself with an awkward, abased grin, muttering at his foolishness, and tapped though the arming sequence.
A red light glowed on each, and he felt a reassuring vibration against his palm as he paced down the hallway, picturing the Godless hunched over dataterminals as the explosion slashed through the room.
His reverie shattered as a cluster of a half-dozen or so, in their blank beige armor, un-helmeted, bounded around the corner.
The instant of paralysis that followed gave way in turn to a roar of voices and limbs entangled and grasping fingers.
Jimmy dropped the dauber and clutched desperately for the detonator, cursing himself. A terrific blow against the back of his head sent him sprawling forward, he saw stars and was stricken moments later by a sizzling jolt that seemed to crackle in the fibers of his nerves.
The voices began to differentiate, but it was all murky, as if heard through a depth of silt and water:
“.. carrying a bomb …”
“Molly! Try and raise Molly!”
“He’s a fascist alright, just look at those boots … ”
“Give him some fucking boots!”
Jimmy had thought to struggle, to spin about and hurl himself at the voices, which, somewhere in the distant parts of his being, he hated and raged and wailed against.
But he could barely move, his limbs pressed into the floor like blocks of wood. He could make out shapes and motions, was aware that he was being yanked around violently. His perspective jerked suddenly. Jimmy realized he was being kicked and beaten. Faces crowded above, peering down through a tunnel of fists.
He saw their lips move, but it was harder to hear now. Lurid shapes billowed up before his eyes, yellow and luminescent violets bleeding into a saturated black, and overlain by a dim, flashing latticework.
Oddly, the only pain he could feel was in his bladder. Which he let go of. He recognized at one point that it was getting difficult to breathe, but he otherwise couldn’t feel a thing.
Coming soon: The Separation — Chapter Nine
copyright (c) by Josh Wilson