“Across the tables.” Kafari said, grimly pulling her daughter behind her. They retraced Kafari’s path a little drunkenly, since many of the tables had been knocked over in the panic-stricken crush of refugees. Most of those refugees looked up in numb silence, too shell-shocked to respond to their exodus. Given time — maybe as little as two or three minutes — that stunned crowd was going to transform itself into an unholy killing mob.
They made it to the staircase and fled silently upwards, reaching the dance hall’s cathedral solitude. Kafari closed the upper doors softly and slid part of a microphone stand from the stage through the door handles, forming an effective if temporary lock.
Once the door was as secure as she could make it, Kafari turned to survey the room. The damage from Sonny’s passage was apparent, even here. Some of the stained glass had been broken out. Yalena was having trouble walking. For reasons she didn’t have time to determine, her daughter was staring at Kafari in a way nobody had since Abraham Lendan had met her gaze across the rubble of a refuse-strewn cellar, asking her what to do next.
“We have to get out of Madison. This part of it, anyway. Those folks downstairs are going to start looking for somebody to blame. I have no intention of that someone being us.”
Yalena looked like she wanted to ask something important, but didn’t want to interrupt their escape to do it. “What do we do?” she asked, instead.
“We find food and water we can carry and we get the hell out of this building.”
A curtain concealed the back of the stage. Kafari headed that way, betting there were dressing rooms where band members grabbed a bite to eat between dance sets. They found a small kitchenette stocked with food and plenty of beverages. “Fill your pockets. In fact, grab some of those costumes,” she nodded toward a rack full of glittering clothing, “and tie off sleeves and pants legs to form carry-sacks. God knows how long we’re going to have to hide before it’s safe to come out.”
“Where…” She got her voice under control. “Where are we going to hide?”
“I’m trying to work that out. We’re short on time and options are limited. Do you have a hand-comp with you?”
Yalena shook her head. Kafari’s was sitting on the passenger seat of her aircar, or had been before that wild skid. “Mine’s in the aircar. I’ve got to know what’s happening. If you hear anyone trying to break down those doors, head for the roof and we’ll figure something out.”
“The aircar? Can’t we just fly out?”
Kafari grimaced. “No. The P-Squads shot me down. More or less. I crashed on the roof.”
“Oh. God, that must’ve been…” Her voice trailed off, helplessly.
Kafari summoned a brief grin that stunned her daughter. “The landing was nothing to the flying I did, getting here ahead of Sonny. I had to fly all the way from Klameth Canyon.”
Yalena’s chin shook for a dangerous moment and she blinked hard, then she just nodded and started dumping food and bottled water into the makeshift carry sacks. Kafari headed for the roof. She was worried about the wrecked aircar. It had her identification in it, some of her personal belongings. When it was noticed, someone was going to start poking around, looking for the owner. That attempt might lead to a number of very unpleasant outcomes.
The broken door was still ajar from her frantic rush down. She took a quick look around, then crouched low and sprinted for the aircar. The damage was evident at once. The airframe had tipped slightly on its skid across the roof, tilting it enough to see the hole where a riot gun had punched through the relatively thin outer hull. The pilot’s compartment had been reinforced heavily, but the alloy in the airframe, itself, was of necessity lightweight. A 20mm slug had chewed its way through the housing and sliced into an assembly that fed power from the drive engines to the lift vanes. No wonder she’d lost acceleration. If she could replace the damaged module, they could fly out.
She didn’t feel like scrounging for a replacement, not with the kind of security that would be crawling all over them, pretty soon. From her perch atop the roof, she could see Sonny’s warhull. He had halted at the edge of the lawn around the Presidential Residence. A crowd of people had surged over the high fence, fleeing the Bolo’s treads. Most of the people in it were busy running away as fast as mere feet could carry them. Then Kafari blinked, suspicious for a moment that her eyes were playing tricks on her in the drifts and eddies of riot gas in the last of the twilight. It had looked at first glance like the Residence was burning. Then she saw flames in the upper-story windows. It was burning.
Somehow, in the middle of the craziness, the Residence had been torched. By Sonny? She found that hard to believe, although it looked like a dark line of holes had been stitched across the side of the building, just to the left of the famous rose window of the president’s office. That window bled light from the inside, where the glass had been shattered. What had Sonny been shooting at, when they’d heard the discharge of his guns? Enraged Grangers? Had they stormed the Residence, bent on vengeance?
She crept into the cockpit, found her hand-comp on the floor, switched on the viewscreen. The news reports were garbled, but none of them showed the truly hair-raising sight of the Presidential Residence going up in flames. She narrowed her eyes. Somebody was censoring the news. On a really big scale. Why? There were no aircars visible anywhere in Madison’s skies. Not even news crews with aerial cameras.
POPPA censorship had never been used for humanitarian reasons, so their goal couldn’t be an attempt to defuse the anti-Granger violence bound to erupt in the wake of a riot this big. Why, then? Her eyes widened as the implications hit home. Something had happened to the president. Maybe the vice president, as well. “My God,” she whispered, crouched on the bottom of her aircar’s cockpit. “They’ll spark a witch-hunt. The mobs will turn the Adero farms into slaughterhouses.” They’d kill anybody who looked even faintly like a Granger. She had to get Yalena out. Now.
How?
Mind spinning, she tried to think what to do, how to get herself and a shell-shocked adolescent girl out of a killing ground that the government had blockaded and would lock down so tightly, not even a rat would be able to wriggle its way through. She could call for help, but the nearest help was in Klameth Canyon. By the time anyone could reach them, somebody would have thought to ground air traffic planet-wide, controlling movement by potential “enemies of the people.”
They couldn’t get out through the streets. They had to go either up or down. Up was not possible. That left down as the only viable option. The sewers presented themselves as an attractive alternative. Kafari narrowed her eyes. If they could crawl through the sewers, come up a few streets away… Coming up would be a problem, with Madison set to explode. The civilian emergency shelters would be more sanitary, if they were close to any. Downtown Madison was supposed to be riddled with below-ground shelters, in case of renewed attack by the Deng.
She keyed her hand-comp to access the datanet and found an emergency evacuation map. There wasn’t a shelter anywhere near the dance club. Not close enough to gain it without going out into the streets. Scratch that idea. It was the sewers or nothing. Kafari moved across the roof at a low crawl, easing her way gingerly so she didn’t skyline herself. She slid herself to the back of the dance club, which overlooked an alley through which delivery trucks brought in supplies for the restaurant and dance club. There were dumpsters for refuse and a couple of groundcars parked near the service exit. The building behind the dance club was taller, a three-story structure that apparently housed tri-d screens stacked vertically, to conserve expensive downtown real-estate.