Between the two buildings, Kafari spotted a tell-tale metal circle embedded in the pavement, providing access for sewer-system maintenance techs. All they had to do was reach the alley, pry up the cover, climb down, and pull the lid back on top of themselves. And at the moment, nobody was in sight to notice them doing it. Kafari peered over the edge of the dance club’s roof, trying to see if there might be a way down from here. She spotted a fire escape farther along, allowing rapid exit through one of the dance hall’s windows. That ought to serve nicely. Kafari rolled back from the edge, crawled across the roof, then skinned her way down the stairs and found Yalena waiting for her.
“The Presidential Residence is burning. There’s no report of it anywhere, no aerial news crews, not even a peep on the datachats. I think Gifre Zeloc’s been killed and a news blackout’s been ordered.”
Yalena gasped. Then once again, she demonstrated her father’s cool level-headedness under fire. “They’ll blame Grangers. Won’t they? We have to get out of Madison. And…” She bit one lip, then said it anyway. “And we have to warn people, somehow. On the farms.” She swallowed, realizing how that sounded, coming from her, then she lifted her chin in defiance and said, “Well, we do. Especially the Adero farms.”
Kafari reached out and touched her daughter’s tear-stained cheek, smeared with makeup and dirt and horror. This stubborn, brainwashed child had just slashed through fifteen years of indoctrination, had finally realized that people she had considered “the enemy” all her life were about to be slaughtered without mercy. “Yalena,” she said, reaching back across the years to a memory very precious to her, “I am proud to be your mama.”
Yalena started to cry, gulped the sound back, tried to stiffen her shoulders.
In that moment, Kafari knew they would be all right. If they could survive.
Chapter Twenty
I
I return to my maintenance depot covered once again in misery, broken power cables, and dangling traffic signals. My mechanic is glued to a datascreen, watching the spectacle of Madison burn. When he hears me approaching, Phil runs out and greets me with an exhuberance I find puzzling, given the sudden death of Jefferson’s president.
“Hooeee! You really kicked some ass, big guy! Wow, how many a’them land hogs didja run over and shoot? About a thousand of ’em, at least! I’m so freakin’ jealous, man, I can’t even stand it, ’cause I hadda watch on the screen, stead’a bein’ there, while you was right in the middle of it.”
I come to a complete halt outside my maintentance bay, at a total loss for words. I have come to expect ruthless disregard for human life from the enemy, since species like the Quern, Deng, and Melconians operate under a belief system that does not include coexistence with another sentient, let alone space-faring, species. But not even fifteen years of monitoring POPPA leaders and their inflammatory rhetoric has prepared me for such an outburst from an individual who, so far as I have been able to determine, has never met — much less suffered abuse at the hands of — a Granger. I literally do not know how to respond to his glee.
He grins up at my nearest external sensor array. “So, how’d it feel, finally gettin’ to show them land hogs what they got comin’ to ’em? Betch’a ain’t seen anythin’ like that, ever, have you?”
Phil’s questions give me the referents I need to frame a response.
“I am a Bolo Mark XX. Clearly, you do not understand what it means to be a Bolo. I am part of an unbroken lineage of humanity’s defenders, a lineage that stretches back nine-hundred sixty-one years. I am programmed to defend humanity’s inhabited worlds from harm. I have seen active service for one hundred fifteen point three-six years. During that time I have fought in three major wars, beginning with the Deng War of one-hundred fifteen years ago. I fought a new threat during the Quern Wars and was seriously damaged in the battle for Herdon III, where my Commander was killed. I have fought three campaigns in the current Deng War, which now engulfs thirty-seven human star systems.
“During those one hundred fifteen years of active service, I have received seventeen campaign medals, three rhodium stars, and four galaxy-level clusters, including a gold cluster for heroism on the killing fields of Etaine. During the battle for Etaine, I was part of a Brigade battle group of seventeen Bolos with a mission to halt the Deng incursion at any cost, since possession of Etaine would have opened the way into the heart of humanity’s home space.
“We faced fifty Yavac Heavy-class fighting machines, eighty-seven Yavac medium-class, and two-hundred and ten Scout-class Yavacs. The deep gouge melted across my prow was inflicted by the concentrated fire of fourteen Yavac Heavies using a synchronized-fire tactic which punched through my defensive energy screens. Yavac fire melted ninety-eight percent of my armor and blew all of my treads to rubble. They then concentrated their plasma lances across my prow in an attempt to melt through my flintsteel warhull to inflict a fatal hull breach.
“I destroyed all fourteen Yavac Heavies and ground my way across the field of battle on bare drive wheels, killing every Yavac I could bring into range of my Hellbores. I destroyed seven troop transports attempting to land and took down a Deng heavy cruiser entering low orbit. By the end of the battle, all sixteen other Bolos in my battle group had been destroyed. Seventeen million human civilians had been killed, but the Deng advance was halted and turned into a retreat. The Deng High Command rightly concluded it would be far too expensive to continue mounting full-scale assaults at humanity’s heartland. They therefore turned their attention to the border worlds just beyond the Silurian Void in an effort to gain a toe-hold for their own refugees. They had been forced to do this, as the Melconians have destroyed a third of the Deng’s colony worlds in this sector and have threatened the Deng homeworlds.
“Given the extent of the war along the Deng/Melconian border, I was deemed essential to the continued defense of human worlds. Rather than being scrapped, I was fitted with new armor and treads and my damaged gun systems were repaired or replaced. I came to Jefferson, where I defeated a Deng battle group consisting of two armored cruisers, six Deng troop transports, eight Yavac Heavies, ten Medium-class Yavacs, twenty-eight Scout-class Yavacs, and large numbers of infantry I did not bother to count, but which ran to the thousands, at a minimum.
“Today, I was ordered to drive through city streets jammed with civilians who had been exercising their lawful right to free speech and assembly and did so in a peaceful manner until federal police forces began lobbing retch gas and breaking their bones with heavy truncheons. When they attempted to run for safety, they were met by a mob of urban vigilantes who hammered them into the pavement with a clear intent to kill. Their sole escape route was through the grounds of the Presidential Residence. This caused Gifre Zeloc to order me to crush anything in my path in order to prevent the panic-stricken crowd from climbing his fence. Despite my protests, he repeated the order to drive over everyone in my path, including the urban rioters entangled with the crowd of Grangers.
“I do not know how many people I crushed on Darconi Street tonight. I do not want to know. My purpose is defending humanity’s worlds, not running over protestors. When Grangers stormed the Presidential Residence, I fired through the walls. I did so to protect a man who ordered the slaughter of his own supporters in the interests of saving his own neck. He then stupidly jumped through a window and landed in the middle of a group of people with intense cause to hate him. He died messily. Unfortunately, so did nearly a thousand innocents.”