Yalena lifted her gaze from the canyon floor, looking for the defenses her mother had mentioned. She couldn’t see rebel gun positions on the surrounding mountainsides, although she knew they were there. She tried letting her eyes go unfocused, looking for movement, rather than trying to pick out details, and finally spotted two or three positions within half a kilometer of the dam. Those gunnery crews were good — very good — at staying hidden. She could learn a great deal from crews that good. If there was time…
“Well,” she told herself, “there are a couple of crews I can talk to right now, without having to climb halfway up a mountain to reach them.” She headed for the nearest gun emplacement atop the dam. There were three of them: one at each end and one slap in the middle, all of them bristling with battle-blackened gun snouts. The access door she’d come through was near the left-hand end of the dam, so she headed toward it.
Yalena wanted to ask the gunnery crews what skills and techniques served them best in a combat crisis. She’d listened to the off-world combat vets aboard the Star of Mali more than enough to know that seasoned troops could give her tips and techniques that no textbook and no drill instructor could ever match. She wanted to learn the tricks of her new trade and she wanted to put those tricks and techniques to good use in the field.
So she approached the battery at the end of the dam and swept her gaze across the massive weaponry guarding this portion of Dead-End Gorge. The battery consisted of five 30cm anti-aircraft guns, a dozen ranks of hypervelocity missile launchers, and a miniature forest of infinite repeaters, clustered in twenty separate pods. Each infinite repeater rested in its own rotational mount, creating a complex gun system that allowed every single barrel to swivel and track independently or could be configured to whirl them all in unison, to deliver massed, volley-style fire.
The centerpiece of the battery, planted squarely in the middle, was the 10cm mobile Hellbore. Its snout looked as wicked as Satan’s backside and as full of death as the devil’s heart. The last time she’d been this close to Hellbores, they’d been attached to a Bolo intent on crushing everything in its path. She held in a shiver and made herself cross the last couple of meters to reach the first of the guns. The men and women manning those guns watched her come, eyes shuttered. No one offered her a greeting.
There was just one thing to do. She lifted her chin, gave them a wan smile, and toughed it out. “The commodore asked me to come up and get familiar with the gun emplacements.” The wind snatched her words and dashed them against the mountain slopes. Nobody answered. “I’ve never been this close to an artillery battery,” she added, determined to see this through.
“You’re from town.” The shuttered stares were cold as ice. Colder. The speaker was a woman who looked like she’d crossed swords with Satan more than once. “You rat-gangers have a lot of nerve, coming out here and trying to join up. Your kind took POPPA’s handouts for twenty years. You sang Vittori’s praises to the skies. You only switched sides when you finally got hungry. We’ve been fighting to survive. You’ve been living on free handouts POPPA took from us at gunpoint. We don’t need your kind out here. So just climb back into your skimmer and get the hell out of our canyon.”
Yalena’s face flamed, but she didn’t back down. “I’m no rat-ganger,” she said with an icy chill in her own voice. “I’ve never lived anywhere near Port Town. I’m a college student back from Vishnu. A whole group of us came home to fight. So did a shipload of combat veterans on their way home. Estevao Soteris taught me things not even my instructors on Vishnu knew about combat. But I’ve never seen a live artillery battery, before. So the commodore asked for my report on what the students are doing in town, then sent me up here.”
Her uncle’s name acted like a magic talisman. Suspicion and hostility thawed. The woman actually quirked one corner of her mouth in a faint smile. “You couldn’t ask for a better teacher, honey. What’s your name, girl?”
“Lena, ” she said, using an abbreviated version of her name. The last thing she wanted was for these battle-hardened warriors to figure out who she really was before she’d earned their trust. They were more than capable of “accidentally” nudging her over the railing and watching her fall the long, ghastly drop to the canyon floor.
“C’mere, then, Lena. I’ll show you how to program a fire mission into a battle computer. My name’s Rachel.” She paused for a moment, then added, “My sister is married to General Ghamal.”
Yalena’s eyes widened. “You were part of the Hancock Co-op?”
Rachel’s eyes went hard with memory. “Oh, yes. We were. The commodore risked his life, going into Nineveh Base to rescue us.”
Little wonder she hated rat-gangers.
“My sister was pregnant when the P-Squads tried to finish what those filthy rat-gangers started, smashing their way into our family’s cooperative. They tortured us for fun. If they’d known my sister was pregnant…” A hard shudder caught muscles rigid with memory. “But they didn’t find out. And then the commodore attacked and got us out.” Rachel pointed to the house Yalena had spotted earlier, at the mouth of Dead-End Gorge. “That’s my grandfather’s house. We’re staying there, now, sleeping in shifts. And my sister’s little boy is three, now,” she added, with a softness in her voice that hadn’t been there, a moment previously. “He was born in one of our base camps, northeast of here.” She pointed back toward the desert side of the Damisi. “He came into this world free. That’s how he’s going to grow up. Free.”
“Yes,” Yalena said softly. Tears burned her eyes.
Rachel studied her sharply for a moment, but she didn’t ask what had prompted the tears. There were too many people, out here, who’d lost someone precious to them. The details — who had died, and how — didn’t matter. It was the aching loss that bonded them together. Shared grief became shared hatred. And shared resolve.
“What about gas attacks?” Yalena asked. “Before we left Vishnu, Colonel Khrustinov told us POPPA’s been stockpiling the ingredients to produce war agents. Biologicals and chemicides.”
Rachel jabbed a thumb toward a bundle of gear behind the gun emplacements. “We’ve got suits. So do the other gun crews.”
“And the civilians?”
Rachel shook her head. “Most of them would be helpless. Some of the farmhouses have ‘safe’ rooms, mostly in the cellars. My grandfather’s house has one. Others have put safe rooms under the barns, in case they can’t reach the house in time. We’ve had refugees digging shelters, too, trying to build more, but there isn’t enough construction equipment to dig shelters for half a million people. Even if we could, we don’t have enough filtration systems to protect them against air-disbursed war agents.”
Yalena shivered. “If I were Vittori Santorini, that’s exactly what I’d do. He’s done it before, when he was coming to power. My mother got caught in one of those POPPA riots he used to stage. She was lucky enough to get upwind of the gas. She said POPPA blamed it on President Andrews, but she was certain it was Vittori’s people, who did it.”
“I remember that riot,” one of the men growled. “One of these days, we’re going to shove a cannister of that crap down Vittori’s windpipe, open the stop-cock, and watch him drown in it.”
Yalena’s fingers twitched, wanting to do the shoving.