Sar Gremian spends three point five minutes cursing at the guards in barracks-room language strong enough to peel paint. He then orders them to stop delaying the repairs. The crew finally gets down to business. I begin to entertain hope that I may actually be restored to battle worthiness. Given the steadily worsening news reports and emergency calls from police units, there is very little time left in which I or anyone else will be able to act decisively enough to crush the rebellion.
It would be a fine irony if Vittori Santorini spent twenty billion repairing me, only to find himself looking down the wrong end of Commodore Oroton’s gun barrel, before I am functional enough to prevent the rebellion from deposing him. I do not know, in my own flintsteel heart, whether I would feel chagrin or relief. It troubles me even more that the answer to that question has nearly ceased to matter. I do not like the job I am likely to be given, once repaired. Worse, I see no way to avoid it. So I wait in silent misery while the engineers begin their work.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I
Yalena hadn’t seen Klameth Canyon since her childhood. She didn’t go anywhere near Maze Gap, not with three-quarters of the federal troops on Jefferson camped on the Adero floodplain, forming a blockade across the Gap. She flew nearly a hundred kilometers north from Madison, then turned in a one-eighty flip-flop to follow the long spine of the Damisi range south again. When she hit the first turbulence, she was very glad she’d become a fair bush pilot, on Vishnu, as part of her extreme camping training.
“If you intend to fly into the middle of nowhere to spend time in rough country,” her instructor had said, echoing her father’s words almost verbatim, “then you will by God learn to fly under any and all weather conditions.”
Phil Fabrizio, seated beside her in the two-person skimmer, spent much of the flight gripping the armrests on his seat and trying to pretend he wasn’t scared witless as she whipped them through the jagged teeth of the Damisi highlands, at altitudes nearly a thousand meters below the snow-torn peaks. The air currents were savage, but there was no radar net out here, leaving them invisible to everything except satellites. Yalena wasn’t too worried about those. The P-Squads had better — and easier — targets to shoot at than one small skimmer.
“You sure you know what you’re doin’?” Phil asked as she navigated the obstacle course.
“If I don’t,” she gave him a cheerful grin, “you’ll have plenty of time to bitch about it, while we try to hike out.”
“Huh. More like, we’ll end up a thin smear on some piece a’ rock ain’t nobody else ever gonna lay eyes on.”
“There is that,” she agreed cheerfully. “How about you be quiet and let me concentrate?”
“You got it.”
She hadn’t seen Phil Fabrizio much during the five days she’d been “home.” Her father had kept her busy, running courier jobs through Madison, hooking up with members of the urban resistance, getting the students who’d come with her into place as intelligence liaisons. She’d met the Bolo’s one-time mechanic just once, during a briefing her first night on Jefferson, and had only caught glimpses of him a couple of times, since, when both of them reported back to her father at their constantly shifting base of operations in Madison. Phil Fabrizio didn’t know that she was the daughter of Colonel Khrustinov, who was purportedly still on Vishnu, insofar as most of the urban guerillas knew.
Phil didn’t even know her real name, since Yalena’s name was — or at one time had been — one of the best-known names on the whole planet. Everyone knew who “Yalena” was. And even though her father wasn’t using his real name and didn’t look anything like the man who had come to Jefferson more than two decades previously, neither Yalena nor her father would risk letting any of the locals know who either of them really was. So she was going by the name Lena, without using a last name at all.
Not yet, anyway.
Phil, by contrast, was something of a celebrity amongst the urban guerillas. They all seemed to know him and referred to him with a reverence that surprised her. He was one of their own, had worked as the Bolo’s mechanic and therefore knew how to help the commodore cripple it. Moreover, he’d gotten himself arrested and sent to a death camp, to try finding his nephew, and then he’d escaped that death camp, bringing his nephew and others safely home. Phil Fabrizio was a genuine war hero to the ragged, poverty-stricken urban masses, who were trying hard just to survive under POPPA’s iron-fisted hand.
Phil was meeting with the commodore to hand-carry critical gear they had brought from Vishnu, along with a message of some kind from the leaders of the urban resistance. Those leaders’ prerebellion occupations had been directing organized crime in the seedier sections of Madison and Port Town and running the only surviving construction companies on Jefferson. They had built the lavish new homes occupied by POPPA’s elite and had demolished the unsightly slums that cluttered the view from their sumptuous windows. They were now poised to reverse the process — explosively — if “Commodore Oroton” agreed to an unknown set of terms.
Whatever those were, Yalena’s father wanted her mother to hear the message in person from the man who’d met with them. So here they were, running the biggest blockade in the history of her homeworld, trying to reach Klameth Canyon Dam. Phil Fabrizio just didn’t know why Yalena had been chosen as his pilot. When they reached the spot marked on Yalena’s chart, she took them even lower, rattling their teeth with the turbulence, keeping them well below the elevation the besieging federal troops routinely swept with targeting radar.
They reached Klameth Canyon country without drawing down artillery fire onto their heads, but the last few kilometers were fraught with tension. It dragged at their nerves and tightened their muscles against bone. The maze of canyons stretched away in a dark spidery web of deep slashes through the heart of the Damisi. The more distant slashes were blue with haze. Occasional flashes of light marked distant — and not-so-distant — explosions, where federal artillery barrages were battering the main canyon floor with long-range, high-angle fire.
“They’re shellin’ th’ shit outta those canyons,” Phil muttered, breaking the tense silence. “It’s one thing t’ hear they’ve been dumpin’ artillery on top o’ those folks for five days. It’s worse, seein’ ’em do it.”
Yalena just nodded. Her grip on the skimmer’s controls had turned her knuckles white. She’d never been shelled. Her imagination quailed, trying to visualize what it must be like to be caught under those shells, as they burst open and rained death down onto the heads of hapless civilians.
Phil Fabrizio muttered, “Christ, I’m hopin’ the commodore says yes to what I gotta tell him.”
Yalena knew more about that message than Phil suspected. Her father had given her the bare-bones outline, so that she could pass the word to the students who’d come home with her. They were in position, ready to move at a moment’s notice. The entire urban rebellion was poised to strike, in fact. Everything and everyone was in place. Once her mother had the gear they’d brought out here — and Phil Fabrizio’s message — Yalena’s father was going to turn Madison into a war zone the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Deng invasion.
Only this time, her father’s Bolo wasn’t going to take part in it. He was still down for repairs, while the engineers and technicians tried to chase down the cause of his total blindness. Granted, they weren’t chasing it too hard…
“There it is,” Phil said, pointing out the landing field. It was a handkerchief-sized natural meadow a hundred meters from the upper edge of Klameth Canyon Dam, which glittered in the late afternoon sunlight. Water poured across the lip of the spillway and plunged down the long, shining expanse of concrete, turning the turbines that provided electrical power to the entire maze of canyons and the Adero floodplain beyond — including Madison. Beyond the dam lay the reason for her mother’s continued immunity from direct shelling. Klameth Reservoir lay like a sheet of molten silver in the hot sunlight, stretching back through the mountains in a basin that was nearly as large as the canyon system on the downhill side of the dam.