The commander of Nineveh Base clears his throat. “We can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t have any trained fighter pilots. And there hasn’t been funding to fuel the fighters. The team they just fried was the best we had.”
Sar Gremian’s obscenities outdo his previous outburst. The president, visible in the background, is staring in stunned disbelief. “We have to do something,” she says. “We have to do something!”
Sar Gremian turns on her with a snarl. “I know that, you stupid bitch! Shut up and let me think. Better yet, go file your fingernails somewhere. It’s what you do best.”
Her mouth drops open. Color floods her face. Then she screams at him. “How dare you speak to me like that! I’m the fucking president!”
“Not for long,” he says coldly.
While she sputters, Sar Gremian turns back to the datascreen and addresses me directly. “Bolo. Go to Barran Bluff and handle the situation.”
“I require authorization from the president.”
Sar Gremian glances around at Avelaine La Roux, who flashes him a look of hateful defiance.
“It would not be good for your health,” Sar Gremian says softly, “to refuse. Those bastards have Hellbores. In case you don’t understand what those are, they’re portable nuclear weapons. And the people who have them aren’t particularly fond of you, just now. Order the goddamned Bolo to destroy them before they drive those things up to your front door and open fire.”
Her polished fingernails bite into the upholstery of her chair. Then she spits out the order like someone with a mouth full of arsenic. “Do what he says! You hear me, machine? Wipe those bastards off the face of the planet!”
For once, my directives are perfectly clear. As I fire up my drive engines, Sar Gremian adds, “Try not to damage too much of the equipment. We can’t afford to replace it.”
“Understood.”
“And don’t start shooting until you get there. I don’t want to advertise the fact that you’re on a war mission. Christ, there are reporters in Gersham; they’re going to want to know what all the explosions were about. I’ve got to get damage control crews out there, confiscate the cameras…”
He ends transmission.
Phil Fabrizio, looking much the worse for an evening of solitary drinking, reels through the rear doorway of his apartment, watching openmouthed as I leave my maintenance bay. “Where ya goin’?” he asks, slurring the words unsteadily.
“Barran Bluff Military Compound.”
“Huh? Why?”
“To destroy Anish Balin and two hundred of his followers. They have seized the arsenal, including ten mobile Hellbores. I may sustain damage. It would be helpful if you were sober enough to effect repairs when I return.” I consider his conversational skills and current state of sobriety and clarify. “You are too drunk to fix me if I am damaged.”
He drags one unsteady hand across his mouth, muttering, “Aw, shit, man, I don’t fuckin’ know enough t’fix you.”
I find myself in full agreement with that assessment.
As I reengage engines, he mutters to himself, “They can’t have nuthin’ that’d hurt a machine that big. Not bad enough t’ need fixin’ or nuthin’. It’s biggern’ the apartment building I was raised in. And it’s got alla that armor an’ stuff… leas’ways, what I could figgur from them manuals they tol’ me t’ read, they all said it’s gotta lotta armor’n stuff won’t nuthin’ penetrate but a plasma lance, whatevern’ hell that’s s’posed t’ be…”
He is still muttering when he reels back into the apartment and closes the door.
His optimism in this regard does not inspire a concomitant feeling in my personality gestalt center. Phil Fabrizio quite literally has no idea what he is talking about. I could almost get to like him, if I could get past his appalling lack of critical need-to-know data. A Bolo tech who doesn’t understand the difference between riot work against unarmed civilians and combat against mobile 10cm Hellbores in the hands of insurrectionists displays an ignorance frightening in its implications.
I console myself with what I can: at least I finally have a concrete objective and a mission for which I am suited.
II
Kafari lay prone in her vantage point up in the Damisi foothills, watching the target through powerful night-vision goggles. Kafari’s little band of freedom fighters — recruited and deployed within two short hours of her first conversation with Anish Balin — had already fought and won two critical skirmishes, neither of which Kafari had been able to participate in.
The first raid, twelve kilometers to the south, wouldn’t be discovered until someone — an officer from another post or an early-morning cleaning crew — entered Haggertown’s police headquarters, where they would find several embarrassed P-Squad corpses and six seriously empty weapons lockers. The spoils had provided the weapons needed by Anish and his team to carry out the night’s second objective: Barran Bluff Depot. Anish’s team had taken the depot in less than ten minutes, a stunning success that left even Kafari amazed. The P-Squad guards had grown lazy, fat, and careless, too busy terrorizing Gersham’s helpless, disarmed residents to bother with any real security. It was always easy, Kafari reflected bitterly, to brutalize people who had been forcibly disarmed.
Tonight’s raids would reacquaint Jefferson’s rulers with an enduring and universal truth: true equality — the power to make a successful stand against tyranny — inevitably flows from the barrel of a gun. A cold, pleased little smile played across her lips. Gun barrels by the hundreds were flowing out into the sea of Jefferson’s people, tonight. So were heavy field-grade weapons, ammunition, biochem gear, communications equipment, explosives and primers, missiles, and mortars.
These were the tools of the warrior’s trade, tools that would force Jefferson’s rulers to restore the equality Jefferson’s founding settlers had worked so hard to ensure. Despite the total lack of experience working together, Anish’s team was loading the bounty smoothly and rapidly. The instant trucks were packed to capacity, drivers headed for the valley floor, scattering to widely separated field caches that she and Anish had worked out using geological survey maps. The Damisi Mountains were delightfully fissured with endless labyrinths where wind and water had scooped out canyons, gorges, and caverns. Kafari could have hidden an entire army in this stretch of the Damisi, alone.
Which was, of course, exactly what she intended to do.
One of the trucks raced toward Kafari’s position, bringing supplies to implement what Anish had dubbed Operation Payback. She waited just long enough to assure herself that three of the ten mobile Hellbore field guns they’d seized had, in fact, made it safely out through the gates and were well on their way toward hiding places. Poor Anish had protested — vehemently — her decision to abscond with only three mobile Hellbores.
“We’ll need that firepower!”
“Yes, we will. But the place we’ll need that firepower most is inside Barran Bluff’s compound.”
“Kafari, you don’t need seven mobile Hellbores to knock out the kind of air response team Nineveh Base will scramble against us.”
“No,” she agreed, “we won’t. But if we take that team out with enough force to rattle even Vittori Santorini, they’ll send Sonny against us. And that, my dear Lieutenant, is exactly what we must goad them into doing. We don’t stand a prayer of getting into Nineveh Base, let alone grabbing the Hancock family and getting out alive, again, if Sonny is still in depot.”