"Priority Red!" calls out Roger. On the screens, we see an explosion followed by the trail of a descending missile followed by another explosion. The sound is garbled for a moment, then a shadow blocks the view. The screen goes blank and the sound goes dead. Sound comes back along with a black screen, and Sally Redfeather’s voice saying, "This is Tommy. Alley Cat is dead. Obsidian is under a missile attack right now." We see a glimpse of Ali Enayat’s face, eyes staring in death at a burning building. The picture jumps down to a view of Sally’s boot crushing Alley Cat’s hand-portable. She moves into a shadow cast by some flames and we see another missile coming down into the town, far enough away so that all we see is the reflection of the explosion off the night air.
"I don’t know who’s sending the mail, but the missiles sound like ZZK’s, which means it’s Tean Sindie. They’re coming in from the east and being launched from over the horizon."
Reaper adjusts his headset, covers the mouthpiece, and says, "Eli, lay in a course for east of Obsidian, and put the coal to it! Start scanning for that missile battery." The ship lurches as it turns and roars toward the Dorado. Taking his hand from the mouthpiece, Reaper’s voice becomes very quiet. "Tommy, did you get hit?"
"Reap, you old bastard. No, I’m not hit, but in about a minute I’m going to be in an excellent position to get burgered. As soon as the shrapnel stops flying, old Raymond Sica is going to pull his face out of the mud and order a payback strike against the Mavedah. As soon as he does, I’m going to twenty-nine him, right?"
"Anybody covering your back, Tommy?"
"Same guy as always."
Reaper covers his mouthpiece and looks at the three of us. "If Sica orders the strike, does she whack him?" Without consultation, all three of us nod. Reaper says into his mouthpiece, "If he orders the payback, give him the twenty-nine."
"Landfall," says Eli over the headset. "We’ll be over Obsidian in a couple of minutes. I have two missile tracks and reverse trajectories in the computer. Everything is armed, aimed, and ticking."
Davidge glances at Kita. She nods. Facing me, he says, "What about it?"
They will be my first Drac executions. Perhaps this will even out things. "Take out the launchers."
Davidge relays the order to Eli, and immediately we feel two missiles launch from the Aeolus. Reaper says into his mouthpiece. "The cavalry is on its way, Tommy."
"Not them?" she protests. "The last time the cavalry came through my neighborhood, my great-grandmother’s great-grandmother wound up in a tarpaper teepee in New Jersey selling polyester blankets from Taiwan. Hey Reap?"
"Still here."
"If it comes to that, let the Drac down easy. Tommy Hawk out."
Davidge leans on the edge of the table and faces Reaper. "When you asked Sally who was watching her back, who did she mean?"
"Same guy as always. That’s her Great Spirit, a giant of a mighty warrior who rides a horse made of stars and carries a lance of fire."
There is silence for a moment, the only sound the dull roar of the ship’s engines. Reaper turns to Janice and she nods. "It’s the Tean Sindie. Flower and the Blade are on it. No warning at all, very high security. I told them to target the two who handed out the orders, the missile site is about to take care of itself."
As we authorize the hits on the battery commander and the Tean Sindie area Jetah, an image appears on the screen. We see six tracked vehicles mounted with launchers. Each launcher has tubes for sixteen missiles, but none of them has the full sixteen. As the launchers fire, soldiers of the Tean Sindie cheer the missiles on their way to Obsidian and Black October. I look at Davidge. He is doing the same as I am: counting the dead before they fall.
We do not see the missiles from the Aeolus come in. One moment there are a hundred or more cheering Drac soldiers of the Tean Sindie, the next the screens go white, the white fades, and there is nothing. No tracked vehicles, no missiles, no soldiers, no cheers. Smoke, a few small fires, a terrible silence. When we had killed nothing but humans, I felt terribly guilty, evil. Now that we have thrown a hundred Drac corpses onto the scales, I feel no better.
I know why they were cheering. They were beaten, life, friends, and lovers taken from them, and at last, in the form of a gleaming blue winged tube full of explosives, they could strike back against all of those who had tortured and oppressed them throughout their lives. I know why they cheered. They cheered from their pain. They cheered because all of them cheered. They cheered because they did not know that the ones they killed were human copies of themselves. There are insignificant differences of color, the genetic orders concerning the number of fingers and toes, accent, language, belief. Trivialities.
But there is the tribe. That is something.
Amadeen is cut up into tribes as primitive as anything on ancient Sindie, as obsessed as any on Timan, as vicious as anything on Earth. The tribe has only one commandment: the tribe comes first. Before right, before justice, before honor, before sanity, before survival, before self-interest, before love. Hissied 'do Timan did not create the war on Amadeen that became a war of three hundred worlds. The old Timan simply pulled the trigger on a gun that was loaded on the plains of the Madah, the mountains of the Irrvedan, the Irnuz Steppe, the streets of Belfast and Sarajevo, and the deserts of the Middle East before either Timans, humans, or Dracs even knew there were stars to touch.
"Does Black October have this yet?" asks Kita.
Reaper nods. "So does the Front, the Mavedah, and all the little sons of bitches." He glances at Davidge. "Raymond Sica ordered the retaliation. Before it could be carried out, Sally Redfeather took him on the dance. Sica’s guards took her down."
Janice reaches out a hand to place it on Reaper’s shoulder, but he shakes his head and continues. "Message from October: Paul Ruche is running October now. He wants to meet with us face to face."
"A setup?" asks Kita.
Reaper rubs his eyes and shrugs. When his hand comes down, his face looks very old. "Hell, I don’t know. The feeling I get is that he wants to know if we’re for real."
"For real?" I ask. "What does that mean: for real?"
"Sincere," answers Davidge. "Perhaps the new leader of Black October wants to know if we’re sincere." He lowers his gaze to the center of the table. "Perhaps not." He looks at Janice. "What about the Green Fire attack on Gitoh?"
"They’ve been looking at the numbers written on the wall and I think they’ve reconsidered."
He nods, puts his hands on the table, and pushes himself up. Once he is standing he says, "Well, that’s something. That’s something." He frowns for a moment and looks up at the screen. Several of the fires have gone out. "Whose hand-portable is that?"
"Fireball. It just got there from training."
"Fireball," Davidge repeats. "Tell Fireball we’ve had enough pictures. Tell it to put down its twenty-nine and get out of there." He removes his headset and places it on the table as he looks back at Reaper. "Arrange a meeting with Ruche. Maybe we can show him we’re for real. See what we can do about getting Ali Enayat’s and Sally’s bodies returned to us."
"Got it."
"For the meeting, I want us all wired for pictures and sound with feeds to all the broadcasting stations who will take them."
Reaper nods. "I’ll take care of it."
Davidge looks down at the center of the table and speaks, it seems, to himself. "Bodies. There is doubt out there; doubt about us. After what we’ve done, after what they’ve paid, after what we’ve paid, there is still doubt." He glances at me and asks, "How many bodies more will it take before we are considered for real?"