“Yes. We can see the Bolo, now. His lander’s just touched down at Maze Gap. Sonny’s off-loading, heading through the Gap. The federal troops have pulled back—”
“What?” Horror congealed in the basement of Simon’s soul. “He’s moving? On his own?”
“Yes. He’s passing through the Gap, now, turning into the main canyon. He’s coming to the dam.”
Maria, her face white and scared, swam into his awareness when she clutched his arm, asking, “What’s wrong?”
Simon met her gaze. He didn’t recognize his own voice. “They’ve changed the destruct codes. I can’t kill the Bolo.”
“You can’t kill the Bolo? Destruct codes?” Maria was staring at him. “What do you mean by that? Who the hell are you, anyway?”
Simon met her gaze, still feeling numb from the shock. “Simon Khrustinov,” he said hoarsely. “I’m Simon Khrustinov. The Bolo’s last commander.”
Maria’s daughter, busy cleaning the table, dropped and shattered another plate.
“You don’t look like—” Maria broke off mid-sentence. Her eyes, already wide, went suddenly wet as she stared at his face. The face even he wasn’t used to, yet, after four years of staring in the mirror at it. “The crash,” she whispered. She didn’t seem to realize that she was crying. “I forgot about the crash. Your face got smashed up in the aircar crash, didn’t it?”
He just nodded.
“You can’t kill it? Really can’t kill it?”
He shook his head.
“Oh, God…”
There did not seem to be a whole hell of a lot else to say. Not to the people who’d gathered in this room, trying to help him end the threat that had just claimed half a million lives. He spoke to Kafari, again. “Red Dog, can you evacuate?”
“No. There aren’t any aircars left. They hit our landing field, blew it to ashes. The forest fire’s still raging, out there. And we’d rip our suits open trying to hike out across the Damisi. We’re trapped right where we are.”
In a box canyon with a Bolo Mark XX on its way to blow them to hell. Simon had never felt more helpless. At least on Etaine, he and Sonny had been fighting on the same side…
“They’ve changed the code,” he said in a voice he did not recognize.
Kafari didn’t have to ask which one. “Understood,” she said. Then she added two more words that broke his heart and put steel into his resolve. “Avenge us.”
“Oh, yes,” he whispered. “On the graves of Etaine’s murdered millions, I swear that, my love. Kiss Yalena for me.”
“I love you,” the voice of his soul-mate whispered.
Then the connection went silent. When Simon dragged his attention back to the little room where Vittori flickered silently on the viewscreen and the urban guerillas stood staring at him, Maria whispered, “That was Commodore Oroton.” It wasn’t really a question. “The commodore’s your wife, isn’t he?”
The mixed-up genders were irrelevant.
Simon just nodded.
“Kafari isn’t dead?”
He shook his head. “Not… yet.”
Ragged emotions tore across her face, like lightning snarling through a black thundercloud — or the smoke of battle. “Kafari Khrustinova saved the best man this ball a’ mud ever produced. And that piece of dogshit,” she jabbed a finger at the viewscreen, silent because someone had killed the sound, “just ordered her death, didn’t he?”
Simon nodded again.
The look in Maria’s eyes scared him. “We got work to do,” she said. Her eyes tracked toward the viewscreen, where Vittori stood gloating.
“Oh, yes,” Simon said softly, “we certainly do.” He met and held the gaze of every person in the room, silently taking their measure and liking what he saw. The eerie sense of deja vu that crept across him left Simon with crawling chills along his nerves. Once, long ago, Simon had sat in conference with a group of this world’s people, preparing to fight a different war of survival. Memory of looking at each of them, measuring them against the coming conflict, and liking what he saw brought an ache to his heart that caught him totally off-guard. The people of this world deserved something better than Vittori Santorini and the butchers he had used to consolidate his power.
The ache in his heart turned to flintsteel.
The Deng, alien and incomprehensible, were at least an enemy a man could respect. Vittori Santorini and his army… “All right,” he said, “we’re through planning for this little war. Here’s what we’re going to do…”
III
I have been ordered into combat. The dismay that spreads through my entire neural network is so keen, I experience a psychotronic stutter. I need to convey an entire list of urgent reasons explaining why this order is seriously flawed. My cognitive focus, however, scatters itself into a thousand separate threads of thought: reasons, arguments, and warnings that need to be presented. I am literally unable to think of a single, cogent argument that would persuade Vittori Santorini to wait until I have been fully repaired. He is not willing to wait — not even another hour. My treads have been repaired and my guns are operational. That is all that matters to President Santorini.
My duty is clear, even if nothing else is: I will carry out the president’s orders to the best of my limited and failing ability. I am a flawed tool crawling blindly into a suicidal mission against an enemy that has demonstrated its tenacity in trying to destroy me. But I will continue as long as there is power in my electronic synapses. It is my duty to destroy the Eenemy or be destroyed by it. Their mission and mine are the same. We differ only in capability.
I cannot see my Enemy.
They can see my thirteen-thousand-ton warhull distressingly well.
I direct my heavy lifter to carry me across the Adero floodplain, toward Maze Gap. There is no movement anywhere on the floodplain. No air traffic. No ground traffic. Just empty fields to either side of the Adero River and the road that parallels it.
My destination lies fifty kilometers ahead. The Damisi Mountains are a nightmarish place to do battle. The Deng did not have time to prepare fortified emplacements, when they seized Klameth Canyon. They barely had time to offload their ships before I was among them, wreaking havoc. The commodore’s guerillas have been digging in and hunkering down for an entire week. I am not anxious to experience the logical result of that advance preparation.
I progress slowly. The heavy lifter carrying me is capable of reaching orbital velocity, but the main thrusters point down, rather than laterally, and this configuration cannot be changed. This is an old lifter — far older than I am — without the variable-mount thrusters of modern lifters. Horizontal cross-country speeds, therefore, are a minuscule fraction of vertical speed. I am restricted to a paltry hundred kilometers an hour, which means I face a thirty-minute transit just to reach the battlefield.
I have been airborne only four minutes, thirteen seconds when Vittori Santorini interrupts programming on all military and civilian communications frequencies for an unscheduled broadcast. He stands at the podium in the Presidential Palace’s own news studio, a bunker of a room under the palace, which is the only place Vittori Santorini will consent to give a televised press conference or interview. Notoriety has its price. Vittori has good reason for his paranoia.