“You’re alive!” The whisper held a shocked, knife-edge throb, part pain, part unbearable joy.
The boy she was staring at said, “Yeah. So’s… so’s Uncle Phil. We couldn’t tell you…”
Her mouth began to shake. The boy just opened his arms. She flung herself forward and engulfed him in a death-hold embrace. Tears streamed unheeded down her face. Maria’s daughter came in from the kitchen, carrying a tray with a plate on which she’d stacked a few crackers and some cubes of cheese. She looked up and saw the boy her mother was hugging so tightly. The tray fell from nerveless fingers. The plate shattered on the bare floorboards. An agonized moan broke from her, then she, too, hurled herself forward, threw both arms around the bits of him she could reach, and started to cry in jagged sobs. His resemblance to Maria and her daughter was obvious enough to name the kinship without hesitation. The prodigal son had come home. Evidently from the dead. Given his emaciated condition, he’d probably been rescued from one of the death camps.
There were two other men with the boy. Simon hadn’t met them. When the worst of the emotional storm had passed, one of them said, “Listen, we got work t’do, see? There’s a helluva lot goin’ on, tonight, and we got things to take care of, so how’s about we grab a bite of whatever’s on the stove and get to it?”
Maria pulled herself together, bestowed a smile on her son, even managed to smile at her daughter, cupping one hand to wipe tears from the girl’s ravaged face, then said gently, “Let’s clean up, eh?”
The girl nodded.
They weren’t talking about tear-streaked faces or shattered plates.
Five minutes later, they sat down at Maria’s kitchen table. They made short work of the meal, such as it was, and settled in the living room to map out their strategy. They’d barely begun when Simon’s wrist-comm lit up, screaming with an emergency code. He slapped it. “Report!”
“We’re under attack!” The terror in that familiar, beloved voice wrenched at Simon’s heart. “They’re using biologicals or chemicals, I don’t know which! I’ve ordered everyone into the shelters, but there aren’t enough. Oh, God, we’re dying by the thousands, out here…”
His wrist-comm screamed again, on a different emergency frequency. The second voice shouted, “The government’s ordered us out of the Bolo’s maintenance depot, at gunpoint. They’re loading him onto the heavy-lift platform…”
The datascreen in Maria’s living room clanged to life, sounding an alarm that meant a government broadcast was about to begin, important enough that every citizen of Jefferson had better drop whatever they were doing and pay attention. The screen lit up with a view of the Presidential Palace’s private broadcast studio. Vittori Santorini was standing at the podium. The wall behind him blazed with the green and gold peace banners of the POPPA party.
“Beloved friends,” he said, “we have gathered here this evening to share with you our final triumph over the criminals running the Granger rebellion. We have known fear, my friends, unending fear and far too much death. But tonight there is blessed hope on our horizon, hope and a promise — my personal pledge — that after tonight, the good and loyal people Jefferson need never fear the hand of oppression again.
“Even now, our courageous Bolo is back in the field. He will smite the unholy. Crush the wicked underfoot. Jefferson will be safe forever. Safe from the menace of Granger hatred. Safe from the threat of bombs and bullets. Safe from the destruction those monsters have visited on us for so many years…”
Simon had stopped listening. “Oh, dear, God,” he whispered.
Maria’s son had gone deathly pale. “Th’ stinkin’ bastards!”
Simon touched his wrist-comm again. “Red Dog, are you there?”
“Yes,” Kafari’s voice came back, muffled and strange through the voice-altering technology she’d used for four years, now. “I’m here.”
“They’re sending the Bolo out. It’s heading your way on the lifter. How many people can you get out?”
“I don’t know. Not many. They fired conventional artillery and biochemicals into the canyon, simultaneously. Most of my people are dead. Or they’re cut off from escape, wearing biohazard gear and can’t risk hiking out through rough country and ripping their suits on the rocks. Dinny’s gone.” Her voice wavered. “He died saving our little girl.”
Simon’s eyes stung. He closed his fingers around the edge of the table, unable to speak. Gratitude and grief choked him into silence.
Kafari went on, horror seeping through despite the techno-altered voice. “Some of us had biocontainment gear. Not nearly enough. I have no idea how many survivors I’ve got. There are two with me,” she added, voice hoarse. “We sounded the sirens, but I don’t know how many had time to reach shelter. Some of the farmers and ranchers probably made it. Our surveillance cameras are picking up images of the dead…” Her voice broke on a sob. “Oh, Simon, so many… They’re already hitting us again. With conventional artillery. God knows how long the shelling will last, this time.”
Kafari’s whole family — and Simon’s — lived in that canyon. The sickness in his heart twisted, lanced like jagged lightning through every nerve. His hands ached from wanting to close his fists around Vittori Santorini’s throat. The silence in Maria’s living room was the silence of wounded men and women just before the scream bursts loose, still too stunned by the shock of the mortal blow to give sound to the agony. Their careful plans had crashed to the floor in pieces, like the plate Maria’s daughter had shattered just minutes ago.
Kafari added with bitter exhaustion in her voice, “We don’t have many gunners left. The P-Squads can waltz in here any time they want, unopposed.”
“They won’t need to,” Simon bit out. “They’ve got Sonny. Even blind as a bat, he’s more than enough to take out any survivors. If I know Vittori Santorini, he’ll order Sonny to blow every damned farmhouse in the whole maze to hell, just to be sure he got them all.” Simon realized in that moment what he had to do. The pain of it stabbed like a hot knife. He should have used the damned destruct code the moment he’d arrived. Vittori might still have destroyed Klameth Canyon. But without the Bolo to back up his regime, would he have dared?
Simon had betrayed half a million people to their deaths.
The agony of Etaine hurt less than the knowledge that he had killed those people by failing to act, just as surely as Vittori Santorini had, when POPPA’s founder had given the order to fire those biochemical warheads. On the datascreen, Vittori was telling the whole world about his sainted plans for a Granger-free universe. Face alight with an unholy ecstacy, he spoke joyously about the refugees trapped in Klameth Canyon, the “enemies of the people” who lay dead in the gathering darkness under Jefferson’s rising moons.
Simon couldn’t help those already murdered. But he could by God save others. He had spent half his life as Sonny’s commander and still thought of the machine as a friend. But now, in the moment when lives hung in the balance — the survivors in Klameth Canyon’s maze, hundreds of thousands of Grangers scattered throughout other fortified canyons in the Damisi Mountains, millions of urban dissidents in the cities — he found that which he had dreaded for so long was remarkably easy to put into practice.
He switched frequencies and transmitted the code he had carried in memory from the day he had been assigned as Sonny’s commander. The code that would wipe Sonny’s Action/Command core and kill him. He closed his eyes for a moment, mourning a friend and hating the men who had turned a protector into a mailed fist enabling mass murderers to stay in power. Nobody spoke, which was a mercy. He finally switched back to the original frequency. “Are you there?” he asked in a strangled voice.