“In the car. In the garage. I got caught in that unholy hell of a rally.”
“How — never mind how. Can you get out?”
“No. Not yet. I’m shaking too hard to drive,” she added with grim candor. “And there’s gas everywhere, riot gas. I can hardly see. There’s no way I’m going to try driving through the mess out there in the streets. This thing’s turned ugly. Real ugly. On both sides.”
“Yes,” Simon growled. “I know. What?” he asked, voice abruptly muffled. “It’s my wife, goddammit.” A brief pause, as he listened. Then, “You want me to what? Jesus Christ, are you out of your idiotic mind?”
Whatever was being said — and whoever was saying it — Simon was clearly having none of it. She heard an indistinct mumble of voices, realizing abruptly that the transmission was scrambled, somehow, coming across the unsecured transmission to her wrist-comm as garbled sound rather than sensible words. Who was he talking to? The military? The president? Kafari swallowed hard, trying to muffle another fit of coughing. Whoever it was, they wanted something from Simon and the only reason she could imagine for someone to call Simon was for a request that he send Sonny somewhere.
Here? Into the riot? Oh, shit…
Memory pinned her to the seat cushions, paralyzed her limbs, her brain with remembrance. Sonny’s guns whirling in a dance of rapid-fire death… his screens flaring bright under alien guns… Not again, she whimpered. Not now, carrying Simon’s child. A child they’d struggled so hard to conceive. Then she heard Simon’s voice, cracking through the terror in crisp, no-nonsense tones.
“Absolutely not. You don’t send a Bolo into the middle of a city for riot control. I don’t give a damn how many buildings they’ve broken into. You don’t use a Bolo to quash a civilian riot. It’s worse than killing a mosquito with a hydrogen bomb.” Another interlude of indistinct sounds interrupted Simon. Her husband finally growled, “It’s not my job to make sure you win this or any other election. Yes, I watched the coverage of the rally. I know exactly what that little asshole said. And I repeat, it’s your problem, not mine. You’re on your own. Yes, dammit, that’s my final word. I’m not ordering Sonny to go anywhere tonight.”
A moment later, Simon spoke to her again. “Kafari, do you want me to come in with the aircar?”
“No,” she said, after squelching the instantaneous, little-girl desire to have him swoop down once again to play knight-errant, “I don’t. I’m okay. I may be stuck here for a few hours, but I’m okay. And the baby’s okay, Simon, I’m sure of it. If I need help, I’ll call.”
“You’ve got your birthday present?” he asked, in oblique reference to the console gun she carried.
“In my hand,” she said cheerfully.
“Good girl. All right, sit tight for now. I can be there faster than an ambulance could reach you, if you need help.”
“Okay.” She smiled through the mess streaming down her face, aware that her blouse was wet and that her suit was probably ruined beyond repair by the damage sustained. Her smile turned rueful. If she could worry about her suit, she really was all right. “Simon?”
“Yes, hon?”
“I love you.”
His voice gentled. “Oh, hon, I love you so much it hurts.”
I know, she thought silently. She was sorry for that part of it. Sorry for all the reasons behind it. For her inability to change it, to change the reality behind the old pain, the new fears. The best she could do was love him back, as hard and as fiercely as she could manage. She settled back against the cushions, laid the gun in her ungainly lap, and waited for the end of danger, so she could go home, again.
II
It was, Simon reflected bitterly, one of the worst political mishandlings he had ever witnessed. Images relayed through Sonny’s surveillance systems, picked up from a combination of commercial news broadcasts — including sky-eyes in hovering aircars — and police cameras, told a tale of unfolding disaster in the heart of Madison. The wildly inflammatory performance by Vittori Santorini was bad enough, on its own. He’d never seen anything like that virtuoso performance, with one man plucking and vibrating and drumming a crowd’s emotions to riotous heat, with nothing more than a fanfare, a well-timed sunset, and a few words uttered with stunning skill.
Far worse — infinitely worse — was John Andrews’ reaction to the violence that erupted almost inevitably in the wake of that stellar, if brief, show. With rioters engulfing the heart of downtown Madison, John Andrews had not appreciated Simon’s flat refusal to send in the Bolo. Simon hadn’t thought it was possible to commit folly greater than using a Bolo to break up a riot, but what he was witnessing now…
Riot police, intent on containing the violence, were pumping gas cannisters and riot-control batons into the crowd along a periphery six blocks deep and spreading. Rioters, crazed by hatred, rage, and choking gas clouds, had rushed police lines in dozens of places. Officers were going down under makeshift bludgeons, while the police were using riot clubs in self-defense. Simon noted with a cold, jaundiced eye that none of the commercial news feeds contained footage of rioters beating downed law enforcement agents, but showed graphic images of police clubbing down women and half-grown teenagers.
He sat alone in the apartment, watching the split-screen images in rising dismay, while John Andrews’ reelection chances grew dimmer with each passing moment. If he hadn’t reached Kafari, reassuring himself that she was unharmed, he would’ve been streaking toward Lendan Park in an aircar. He was seriously tempted to fly in, anyway, and land on the roof of the parking garage where she was trapped for God-alone knew how long. The only things that stopped him were an unshakable faith in Kafari’s ability to defend herself from a blockaded bunker — he’d made damned sure that her groundcar was as well armored as her Airdart — and the knowledge that if things went crazy enough in Madison, tonight, he might well need to be right where he was, to watch developments through Sonny’s eyes and ears, rather than in an aircar with nothing but a commlink and a small-scale datascreen.
The crowd spilling out of Lendan Park poured down Darconi Street, looting and pillaging through government offices and retail businesses. A cordon of police stood locked shield-to-shield between the crazed mob and Assembly Hall, swaying in places where the shock of human bodies thudding against the riot shields pushed the officers back, toward the wide steps leading up to Jefferson’s highest legislative nerve center.
Simon had a grimly clear picture of what was at risk, given the mood of that crowd and the contents of that building. He could understand, at a deep level, the president’s desire to use military force great enough to stun that unholy pack of madmen into silence. Not only was Assembly Hall and all its records and high-tech equipment at risk, so was the Presidential Residence, only a few short blocks away. If the rioters breached the locked shields of the police trying to contain the mob, things would go from ugly to deadly.
Something needed to be done, fast.
Simon wasn’t expecting what someone — the president or maybe a panicked military official — did about it. Despite the poor lighting conditions, since full darkness had fallen by now, he caught the first whiff of trouble within moments, far sooner than the news-camera crews realized what was happening. He saw the cannisters go off midair with a gout of flame as they broke open explosively, but there was no smoke, no visible cloud of riot gas, just a colorless burst above the crowd. Within seconds, people were falling down like children’s jackstraws, piled every which way. They toppled in a flopping, macabre wave, grotesquely animated for two or three seconds before going utterly still. The wave spread faster than heartbeats. One of the news cameras abruptly plunged to the street, continuing to record the now-skewed images as its owner plummeted to pavement, as well.