Andrews nods as she points to it, and gives a thumbs up. “Gotcha.”
“Straight in when—“ Koda breaks off as the com unit at her waist vibrates and buzzes softly. She thumbs it on. “Rivers.”
“Allen. It’s time.” The unit clicks off abruptly.
“. . . the time comes,” Koda continues. “Johnson! Now!”
The woman flings herself up over the stream bank in a gymnast’s clean vault and is on her feet and streaking for the gate before Koda finishes the order. She covers the hundred yards in seconds, plants the charge and sprints for the corner. Thirty interminable seconds later, the plasique goes off with a whump and the clang of metal against metal as the lock blows away from the heavy steel panels.
“Let’s go!”
Koda swings up out of the gully and is running full out even as the echoes of the explosion reverberate against the high walls of the compound. Andrews is beside her, the rest in a tight knot behind. They crash into the gate and keep going. The panels swing back to reveal an empty yard perhaps fifty meters square, the snow stained with grey sludge along the mathematically straight path the sentry droid has followed as it makes its circuit of the wall. A number of trucks are pulled up beneath a carport to one side of the central building, all white except for the CCNW logo of Justice’s scales enclosed within a wreath of laurel leaves. The building itself is white and featureless, its blankness relieved only by the steel-blind windows, its single story sprawling off from its original axis in half a dozen ill-proportioned wings.
The loading bay is at the end of the carport, close but difficult because of its double-door airlock construction. Koda opts for the kitchen entrance instead, cutting across the open space from gate to carport, then hugging the cell-block wall as she leads her unit through the deepening shadows around one wing and across a second yard to another.
”What the fuck?” Andrews mutters. “Where the hell are they?”
“There,” says Koda as they turn the corner of the second wing.
Six droids stand in a perfectly straight line across the service entrance to the prison. All are armed with Uzis and M-16’s.
Bracing her rifle at waist level, Koda stitches a row of holes neatly as her mother’s sewing machine across the middle of one of the droids. It drops its weapon, and Koda raises her own her shoulder to fire straight into its optics, large and luminous in the half-light. Her squad fires beside her in a storm of gunfire. She hears a scream from somewhere to the right but cannot take her attention off her targets long enough to see who is hit. “Grenades!” she yells, plucking one from her belt, pitching forward and rolling in the snow, coming back up with a perfect overhand lob into the middle of the four droids still standing. It explodes like lightning struck too near, but the smell is of gunpowder and hot metal, not the clean ozone of the walking thunder. Two more grenades arc down upon the droids, then two more again, and the step before the kitchen door stands clear except for shrapnel and shards of Lexan, fragments of printed circuits and twisted copper wire scattered over the snow.
“Larke’s hit, Ma’am.”
Andrews, his own sleeve streaked crimson, kneels beside the Corporal where he lies in the in the open yard, a wide scarlet stain seeping through the snow beneath him like the bloom of some exotic flower. The layers of his battle dress are soaked with it. Larke is conscious, but his lips are ashen with pain as much as cold. His wry smile, isolated by the bone-white of his ski mask, seems to Koda the macabre grinning of a skull. “Just a flesh wound, Ma’am.”
Unbidden, her hand goes again to the medicine pouch about her neck, but she says crisply, “Reese. Martinez. Get him up the steps and into the building. As they move to comply, assisted rather too eagerly by the Lieutenant, she adds, “Andrews.”
“It’s only a graze, Ma’am. Just took off a bit of skin.” He pulls down the frayed edge of the tear in his jacket to expose a long, narrow scrape. “Really.”
“You’ll live,” Koda concedes, stepping over the jagged fragments of metal and plastic that are all that remain of their enemies. The entrance, as expected, leads into a large institutional kitchen. Pots and pans hover just above their heads, suspended from the ceiling by stainless steel hooks. Choppers and graters occupy the countertops, together with piles of bowls and spoons. On the stove a huge tub of rice boils energetically, foam overflowing its sides to sizzle on the burner beneath. Its smell recalls her grandmother’s washdays, the stiffly starched blouses and shirts into which she and her brothers had been buttoned every school day of every year until their high school graduations. “Because you must always look better and do better.” Prison uniforms, she and Phoenix had called them.
Reese and Martinez set Larke down on a large central worktable, with his pack under the calf of his injured leg and a stack of clean dishtowels to hand. Quickly but gently, Koda cuts the fabric away from the wound, which lies about a hand’s breadth down from the groin. She folds a pair of towels into a compress and slips it under the exit wound. From the open door she can hear the muffled rattle of gunfire and men shouting. “Andrews,” she says, “Take everyone but Martinez and start moving up the central hall. I’ll be right behind you.”
To Larke she says, “You know what ‘flesh wound’ really means? Severed tendons. Ripped muscle. Shredded veins. Still, you got off fairly light.” She slaps another compress into place on the entry wound and bears down hard on the torn flesh.
Larke gasps, turning even paler. “Oh Lord, Ma’am. You wouldn’t take advantage of a guy when he’s down, would you?”
The attempt at a joke is the best sign from the wounded man yet. “Nope,” says Koda, maintaining pressure with one hand and swinging her rifle back down to the ready with the other. “Martinez is going to do that.” As Martinez’ hand replaces hers, she says, “Press down as hard as you can. Change towels when they get soaked. We’ll be back for you.”
“Got it, Ma’am.”
Koda sprints down the branching hallway, following the increasingly sharp reports of automatic weapons, their own arms and the droids’. As she runs, she can hear the beginning of resistance from the cells she passes, prisoners shouting encouragement to their jailers’ unseen enemies, the sparse metal furniture of the prison banging against walls and doors. Somewhere up ahead the shouting becomes a chant, reverberating rhythmically in the narrow passageways, taking strength from the beat of steel on steel within the cells.
Kill the droids! Kill the droids! Kill the droids!
As she turns a sharp corner, Koda almost slams into Andrews, skews off to the right and slides in beside him and the rest of the unit where they hunker behind a improvised barricade of overturned desks. The space before them is an open intersection where three hallways meet. Two droids, their heads blown to fragments, lie frozen in a bizarre mechanical rigor mortis, joints still bent at elbow and knee. Another form sprawls between them, an enormous charred red hole where its right ribs should be and no arm or shoulder at all. The blood beneath it has already begun to congeal with the cold.
“Johnson?”
“Yeah. She went down just as we got here. The droids are over there—“ Andrews points toward a corridor to the right. “—and they’ve got a fifty-caliber. The Colonel and the rest are around the corner to our left. They’ve got a couple injured, but she doesn’t want to call in the gunships yet. We’d lose too many civilians if we did.”
“Damn. We need to get behind them.”
“There’s another entrance over on the other side; we might be able to get through there.”
Koda shakes her head. “That would take too long. There’s a quicker way.”