“He’s still got functional guns.”
“Yes, he does. But he’s got to know where to shoot and that gives us an edge. A pretty good one, actually. Simon’s got a full list of everything that’s malfunctioned, courtesy of Vittori, himself. He had to send a parts list to the Shiva Weapons Labs and Simon got hold of it. Sonny’s sensors are out. Everything but thermal imaging. As long as we keep our distance, he can’t do much more than take pot-shots in the dark. Trust me, I have no intention of sending any of our people close enough to that Bolo to register as a heat signature he can shoot at. I didn’t pick the timing and I’d like to strangle the commander of that damn-fool pack of idiots calling themselves the Rat Guard Militia, but whatever else is true, the odds will never be better. If Simon were here, he’d say we’ve just reached our Rubicon. All that remains is to decide whether or not we cross it.”
“Rubicon?” he asked, frowning. “What the devil’s a Rubicon?”
“A boundary. A line in the sand. A river crossing that divides a person’s life. On one shore, there’s only blind, unquestioning obedience to authority and on the other shore is the courage of your convictions. Once you’ve crossed that river, for good or ill, there’s no going back. Vittori’s crossed his Rubicon for all the wrong reasons, issuing the order to execute helpless people. You and I must decide whether or not to cross our Rubicon for all the right reasons, trying to rescue helpless people. If we don’t cross this river, Dinny, if we stay hidden in our safe little bolt-holes in these cliffs, we’ll never be fully human, again. Will you and I be able to look at ourselves in the mirror without flinching, if we hide in safety while three quarters of a million people are slaughtered? We must act, Dinny. If we don’t, we will never free this world—”
“How can you say that?” Anguish and anger fought for control of his voice. “If we go out there now, if we just give away the location of our ammunition depots, our field rations, our equipment caches, they’ll throw everything they’ve got into scouring us off the face of this planet! They’ve got twenty-five thousand troops, fully trained, and every damned one of ’em lives and breathes for the chance to destroy us. It would be bad enough to lose the people we’d have to send out against those trigger-happy bastards. But if we lose you—”
“If I’m that indispensable, Dinny Ghamal, then try putting a little faith into what I have to say.”
He stood glaring at her for long, dangerous minutes, breathing like a foundered stallion with a jaglitch closing in for the kill.
“At least,” Kafari added, gentling her voice, “do me the courtesy of listening.”
A low, frustrated groan tore loose, a sound like a tree splitting down the center on a bitter winter’s night, torn apart by the stress of ice expanding through the heartwood. “I’m listening,” he said through gritted teeth.
“We have one chance, Dinny. One breathless, fleeting chance, to turn the tide of this war to our advantage. We have to hit them hard and fast and we must do it right now. The Bolo is out of commission and the bulk of their own troops have scattered to round up more people to slaughter. Have you stopped to think — really think — about what will happen if we liberate six or seven hundred thousand people in one fell swoop?”
He frowned, trying to suss out where she was headed and not able to see it. “We’ll have a hell of a provisioning problem,” he muttered. “But something tells me that’s not what you’re getting at.”
“No. It isn’t. We’ve been thinking about the P-Squads and their twenty-five thousand officers from the viewpoint of guerilla soldiers. We are vastly outnumbered by a well-armed enemy. That’s about to change, my friend. Even if we manage to walk out of this with only a quarter of those prisoners still alive, we’re talking a hundred eighty thousand new soldiers fighting on our side.”
His eyes widened. “Holy—”
“Yes,” she said, voice droll with understated humor. “Our guns can turn the tide, Dinny, but we have to act right now, before the hour is out. Our guns and crews can get those people out. We can kill those trigger-happy guards and blow those electrified fences apart. And once we’ve got the prisoners out, we take this stinking game they’re playing and turn it on them. Is it worth the risk? You’re damned straight, it is.”
She didn’t say the rest of it. She didn’t have to, because he said it, for her.
“You came for us, that night,” he whispered. “That ghastly, horrible night on Nineveh Base…” He lifted his gaze, met hers, held it for long moments. “All right,” he muttered, “let’s go cross this Rubicon of yours and get it over with, ’cause somebody’s got to watch your damn-fool backside while we’re doing it.”
Twenty minutes later, they were airborne, flying nap-of-the-earth in a tight formation of seven aircars. They’d made modifications to a whole fleet of aircars, months previously, knowing that eventually, a day like this — a moment like this — would come. For good or ill, they were at least ready. Kafari flew rear guard, letting Red Wolf do the actual piloting so she could concentrate on coordinating the multipronged attack. They couldn’t reach all the camps, not directly. She would do the best she could, by targeting the farthest ones with ballistic missiles capable of traveling halfway across the continent to strike the most remote camps.
Her years of work as a spaceport psychotronic engineer were about to pay off. She waited until flashes of code reached her, signaling readiness from the entire strike force. Kafari touched controls on the console built into her command aircar. A signal raced out, providing the codes necessary to interface with Ziva Two’s communications systems, which in turn activated connections with the entire satellite system, eleven eyes in the sky that gave Kafari an unprecedented view of the field of war about to erupt below.
She jabbed out the code that sent eighteen long-range missiles screaming through Jefferson’s skies. She could actually see the contrails as they gained altitude and kissed the stratosphere, high above any ground-based air-defense system. Savage satisfaction swept through her as the missiles streaked across the heavens then plunged back toward the ground.
“Fly, you sweet little moth-winged mothers…”
The total lack of jabber on official military and police channels, which she also monitored, was music in her ears: her missiles were literally three seconds from impact and the attack hadn’t even been noticed, yet. She sat with her finger poised over the console, ready to transmit the code that would allow her to jam the weapons platforms and communications satellites, if somebody on the ground realized what was happening and tried to shoot them down.
The first wave of missiles impacted.
Gouts of flame appeared on her screen, tiny flickers as seen by POPPA’s orbital spy-eyes. Kafari said a prayer for the people trapped in those camps, because that barrage of missiles was all the help they were going to get. She hoped it was enough. Then Red Wolf said, “We’re going in!” She touched controls, brought up a different view. The camp Kafari’s strike force had targeted lay dead ahead. It had been built on the desert side of the Damisi, down in the foothills, where the only thing green was the paint on the landing field. High, electrified fences enclosed the camp, which had been designed to house close to a hundred thousand people, not counting the guards.
The sprawling buildings, cheap barracks thrown together like tar-paper shacks, shimmered in the heat haze. Ground temperatures were hot enough to fry eggs on bare rock faces. Guard towers punctuated the high fences, jutting up every twenty meters. There were automated weapons platforms on the towers, infinite repeaters that could be triggered manually by the guards or left on automatic, to shoot at anything approaching the fence without a transmitter broadcasting on the correct frequency. A huge trench had been gouged out of the hard-baked ground, just inside the fences. The deep pit wasn’t new. Its first ten meters had been partially refilled, already.