Sar Gremian does not speak.
He stares blankly into the datacam, saying nothing at all for seventy point zero-three seconds. I am familiar with the homily “one’s life flashes before one’s eyes” at the approach of death. This appears to be a case of one’s career flashing before one’s eyes. I wait.
“I’ll get back to you,” he finally says.
The transmission terminates. I monitor outgoing communications from the president’s temporary office and detect a call to a private comm-unit registered to Vittori Santorini. The transmission is encrypted with a code I cannot break. The call lasts for three minutes, thirteen point two seconds. Sar Gremian calls me back.
“You can’t chase the missing Hellbores?”
“I can attempt aerial reconnaissance with a remote drone. The rebels destroyed the last three drones I launched. I have only one drone left on board and four more stored in depot.”
“Launch the drone, goddammit! Find out where those Hellbores are!”
“Drone launched. No visual contact. Faint IR trail detected. Several motorized vehicles have crossed Haggertown Valley and entered Skeleton Cut. Drone in pursuit. No motion detected. No visual contact. IR trails diverge into three branch canyons. No visual contact. IR trails branch again, into five feeder canyons. Unable to determine which heat signatures were produced by trucks and which were left by mobile Hellbore platforms. Decreasing altitude to check for tire and tread marks. Insufficient light to detect patterns in the dust overlay of stone canyon floor. Regaining altitude. No visual contact.” I hesitate as the IR trails vanish. “IR trails lost. Theorizing. Likeliest explanation is underground concealment. The canyons in this region are riddled with undercuts and caves. Suggest infantry squadrons as optimal search-and-destroy method.”
“Infantry? We don’t have any infantry.”
“Artillery crews would suffice as an acceptable substitute. Federal police units would also serve.”
“Send in the police? Against mobile Hellbores? Are you out of your mind?”
I consider this possibility. “Analyzing heuristics. Resartus Protocols have not engaged.”
“What? What the hell does that mean?”
“I am not insane.”
Sar Gremian stares into the camera. “How immensely reassuring. You can’t find three stolen nuclear weapons platforms or a convoy of multi-ton trucks, but you’re not insane. Is there some other task you can waste time on while looking for the stolen guns?”
“I can keep talking to you.”
This is, perhaps, not the most politic thing I might have said. Sar Gremian’s reply is a snarl that twists his mouth in a particularly unattractive manner. “Find the fucking Hellbores, machine! I don’t give a damn what it takes. Blow holes through every rockface in the Damisi Mountains, if you have to, but find them. Is that clear enough for you?”
“I cannot blow holes in the canyon walls without increasing the amount of hard radiation already contaminating the Haggertown Valley farms and the towns of Haggertown and Gersham. Without the crops in these farms, Jefferson faces widespread food shortages. This conflicts with my primary mission.”
Sar Gremian’s response is both pithy and unhelpful. He terminates the transmission and places another coded call to Vittori Santorini. This call lasts eight minutes, nineteen seconds. Sar Gremian calls me back. “Go to your depot. We’ll send the P-Squads out there. That’ll keep somebody busy earning their pay.”
The veiled threat to my future level of financial support registers clearly in my threat-assessment processors. It is the last clear and fully aware thought I entertain before standing down from Battle Reflex Alert. I feel the loss of analytical power as I back out through the carnage I have wrought atop Barran Bluff. I successfully extricate myself from the rubble, noting the unhappy look on Captain Lokkis’ face as he receives a transmission from Sar Gremian. The man who engineered the downfall of the Hancock family does not appear to relish pursuit of an enemy in possession of high-tech weaponry concealed in a maze of canyons in the middle of the night.
This is not my immediate concern. I limp toward my maintenance depot, registering the damage in pain sensors across my prow and forward turret and track mounts. I move at a crawling pace of barely one kilometer per hour, trying to save further serious damage to my track linkages. It is a long way home. And the only thing I have to look forward to, when I reach it, is the dubious care to be rendered by a functionally illiterate technician who was drunk during our last conversation.
Misery has become my constant companion.
IV
At the one-hundred meter mark, Kafari flashed the commence-attack signal.
Three Hellbores snarled from the darkness. Nineveh’s training barracks, officers’ quarters, and noncom barracks vanished into white-hot, triple fireballs. Debris shot skyward, arcing up and out in graceful parabolas. The smashed pieces of Nineveh’s entire command structure were still falling when Red Wolf leaned through his open window and fired a shoulder-launched rocket at the fence between them and their objective.
The warhead detonated just above the ground. A spectacular flash obliterated a five-meter swath of fence. Red Wolf ducked back into the truck as bits of semimolten debris rained down onto their transport. Kafari put her foot down and roared forward. She charged the gap at full speed and plunged through the smoking wreckage, then skidded into the open plaza beyond. The prison lay dead ahead. Other teams were converging on the rendezvous point. She skidded them to a halt right on target. Kafari and Red Wolf, facemasks and hoods firmly in place, bailed out of the truck while the squads in back tumbled over the tailgate.
Kafari’s team was the first to reach the detention center’s door. She could see officers inside, silhouetted against the interior lights as they peered out at the destruction, too stunned to realize they, too, were under attack. Red Wolf slapped a shaped charge against the sophisticated electronics that kept the door locked. He jammed in fuses and scrambled back. Half the door blew off. Red Wolf kicked down what was left.
Kafari signaled her fire teams to drop into a low crouch, a posture that afforded less target space for the enemy’s guns, then motioned them forward. They dove through the demolished wreckage of the door, rolling into a room full of smoke. The biochem mask lowered visibility to nearly nothing. Kafari couldn’t tell where her team members were and couldn’t see the enemy at all. Gunfire barked in the smoke-filled room. Somebody was shooting blind, taking wild shots through the murk.
A bullet whined past Kafari’s ear and embedded itself in the wall behind her. She tracked the muzzle flash and returned fire, shooting through a reception counter to reach the gunman beyond. She threw herself into a sideways roll, away from anyone shooting back at her and heard a sharp, masculine scream above the staccato chatter of other guns. Movement behind her brought Kafari around, ready to defend against fire from the rear. She recognized Anish by the command helmet he wore.