“You were right Flora,” Cecile said, “An excellent vantage point, and remarkably close. Well done.”
“Tout est clair,” said one of Cecile’s men, joining them on the roof. Mehta also lumbered up to the railing at the edge of the roof and peered over. They raised their binoculars, scouting the area for any sign of Talon.
“Remember, he will probably be in a disciple uniform,” Flora said, “and he may have a maroon armband, the mark of the Shinogi.”
The four of them searched through the crowds. Occasionally one of them would point out a disciple to Flora and she would take a closer look. There were only about a hundred or so disciples they could see in the main congregation. There had to be more somewhere else. She reckoned there had been at least three hundred Shinogi in Grand Caverns when she left.
The bullets had become more sporadic. A man’s voice on a loud bullhorn reverberated between the houses. The spoken words were too distorted by the echoing streets to make out, but it sounded like some kind of rallying cry.
There was a roar of follow-on cries and cheers, and then hundreds of Essentialists began streaming eastward, down Oak Boulevard and parallel side streets. The gunfire picked up, and some of the Essentialist militants were taken out, but not nearly enough to slow them down. It wasn’t until they were about two blocks away from the forwardmost Spoke positions that the gunfire really began in earnest.
Suddenly armored tanks rolled out of concealed positions.
Huge swaths of Essentialists were mowed down. The tank guns fired and shells exploded down the street, hurtling Essentialist bodies in all directions. The Essentialists didn’t stop, however. Two or three Essentialists ran to within crossbow range and fired, but the shots hit nothing. Those brave souls lived only a few seconds longer before succumbing to gunfire.
When the vast majority of the Essentialist drive had been decimated, the tanks started their advance, and the Spoke snipers also moved up their positions. Gunfire echoed and rattled through the avenues. A few sneaky Essentialists managed surprise attacks, and some crossbow bolts rang true, but as soon as the Spokes identified these threats they quickly snuffed them out.
Having halted most of the advance on Oak Boulevard, the tanks began blasting away at a large wall that protected a significant gathering of Essentialist forces on the slow incline that led up to the cavern entrance. Meanwhile other Spoke infantrymen took positions of cover nearby, anticipating a surge of Essentialists coming around the wall.
Still, there was no sign of Talon, and barely any disciples were visible. To the casual observer, it might seem like the Essentialists were spent, but Flora knew how many of them there were. The Spokes had seen but a small fraction of the reserve forces.
A horn blew, even louder than the first. It resonated through the explosions of tank ordinance, and through sporadic machine-gun fire.
The amount of gunfire doubled, then tripled. Spoke snipers fell backward off buildings, bullets rattled against the tanks.
“What’s happening?” Flora asked.
“Hard to tell, exactly,” Cecile replied, her binoculars glued to her eyes. “I would guess your people have gotten over their fear of guns.”
Their view of the wall below the cavern entrance was mostly obscured by the curvature of the topography, but you could tell the gunfire was coming from that direction. For a while the two sides traded bullets in this way. The Spoke side was incurring real losses. The tanks began firing rounds into the hillside above the wall.
Then the mortars started. Incredibly, they came from the Essentialist side, not the Spoke side. First they seemed completely random, just as likely to destroy an Essentialist house as to land near a Spoke position, but then the second round landed closer. The third wave successfully hit two of the more entrenched positions. The Spoke side seemed rattled. Some of them started to fall back or seek better cover.
A mortar shell hit one of the tanks, and it erupted into a ball of flames. They heard a chorus of cheers coming from somewhere around the hillside below them.
“Incroyable. This is not how I thought this would go,” Cecile commented.
Firing from the Essentialist side ceased temporarily, and then thousands of cloaked figures ran out from behind the Essentialist wall and other barricades. The staging area below the cavern entrance quickly emptied but just as quickly was replenished by militia running out of hidden tunnels in the massif. Of those charging into the fray, some brandished bows, some had rifles, and some held flaming bottles. Some of them chased after fleeing Spokes. Others found cover and dug in.
Flora was furiously scanning the new disciples pouring onto the scene.
Then she saw him. It was a partially obscured profile of his face at first, but as he moved forward to find another covered position she had a better view.
“There he is!” She pointed. “Behind the green building, wearing the maroon armband.”
“I see him,” Cecile said, “Owen—do you see him?”
Owen had been standing behind them. He took out his binoculars and pointed them in the direction Flora indicated. “Yes,” he said.
“Tell us if he moves.”
Cecile began attaching her earpiece and microphone. “You’re sure this will work, Owen?”
“Yes, it should,” Owen said, taking out his own earpiece. “I tested them when I was in Yorktown, and they worked fine. I also tried them out last night. There are no more retchers, even this far west.”
Flora attached her earpiece as well. If other Essentialists saw her up close they would be suspicious of the device, but she didn’t plan on getting close to anyone except Talon.
Cecile patted Owen on the shoulder. “Wish us luck,” she said.
Owen nodded in return and assumed his position at the edge of the roof.
They left Owen there, rapidly descended the stairs and navigated out the main entrance. They brandished their weapons in one hand and huffed down the hill toward the gunfire and explosions.
“This is lunacy,” Mehta said, with no signs of slowing. No one responded, assuming his comment was rhetorical.
It was true, of course. They all knew extracting a live combatant from the middle of a conflict was fraught with risk. But Flora wasn’t about to object to her only chance at rescuing Talon. And Cecile had spent years trying to find a way into this so-called sanctuary. She certainly wasn’t about to forego her only opportunity, no matter how desperate the attempt. Ironically it left Mehta, the homicidal merc who seemed to take a life with every breath, as the one to highlight their recklessness.
The grade began to level out, and they slowed their pace. Then they moved from building to building to keep as much cover as they could.
As they entered the theater of war in earnest, the noise was deafening. Bullets flew everywhere. Explosions went off. Buildings shed shingles and siding. Every shockwave seemed to flow through Flora’s body.
But even when there were no explosions, even when there were no bullets dancing around her, her body still trembled with every step.
“Talon,” she whispered, “we’re coming for you.”
THE BATTLE OF GRAND CAVERNS, PART 2
“I see you,” Owen said through his headset mic. “Cut right on the next street, then move two buildings east. You should have a direct line of sight to Talon from there.”
The group followed Owen’s directions and arrived at a large, Old World concrete wall that had been used as the foundation for a newly built, wood-frame house. Hopefully the wall would make for good cover.