“He jumped into a crowd of rioters and was bludgeoned to death before I could fire on those attacking him.”
A collective shudder rushes through the room, followed by a rising snarl of anger. I foresee an impending planet-wide explosion of rage that will make all prior-existing anti-Granger sentiment look like attenuated smoke on the wind, by comparison. I do not foresee a likelihood that the Grangers will accept this without a fight. I offer a suggestion. “I would advise immediate mobilization of what military forces remain in operational condition. Public sentiment will doubtless express itself violently.”
“Yes,” Avelaine La Roux says, running a distracted hand through her hair, which disarranges its careful coiffeur. “Yes, I think you’re right. Uh… How do I do that?”
It has been sufficiently long since Jefferson had a truly operational military structure, the person third in line for the presidency does not even know how to scramble the military for a world alert. She is, in large measure, responsible for the dismantling of that military structure, insisting that tax money was more productively spent protecting the rights of the urban poor and providing a “decent living wage” for those unable or unwilling to find gainful employment.
As a result, there are insufficient military resources to step in and act as peacekeepers until tempers have cooled and public hysteria has been calmed. I am not a policeman, but I fear that I may be forced into that role, by default. This does not send joy of any kind through my personality gestalt center. Darconi Street is covered with blood and spilled chemicals from ruptured vehicles. Flame and smoke blacken the skies from structural fires and spilled fuel and solvents which burn with a characteristic, dirty smoke. Once again, the heart of Madison resembles a war zone. This is not a war in which I am proud to have fought.
For the first time in my career, I know shame for having done my duty.
II
Kafari was halfway to Madison, flying at the Airdart’s minimum speed in an effort to compose herself, when her wrist-comm beeped. It was an emergency signal, from Yalena. “Mom? Oh, God — Mommy — we’re in trouble—”
The transmission was patchy, fading in and out. Kafari could hear a snarling roar in the background, the roar of thousands of voices locked in combat.
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know — somewhere on Darconi Street. Ami-Lynn and I came down here to find out what’s really going on. I went on the datachat boards, Mom, like you told me to, and it was just awful. So I called Ami-Lynn and Charmaine and we came downtown. We got caught in the mob and now we can’t get out. There’s barricades up everywhere and P-Squads blocking all the streets — we can’t get out!”
Kafari hit the throttle. The Airdart roared forward, kicking her back into her seat. “Keep your wrist-comm on send. I’ll home in on your signal. Can you get into a building somewhere?”
“No — we can’t get near a doorway — too many people—”
The transmission broke up again. It sounded like Yalena was coughing. Or throwing up. Kafari was almost to Nineveh Base when she saw it. An immense, dark shape in the twilight. A moving shape, bristling with guns and speckled with running lights. Sonny. The Bolo was out of his maintenance depot, moving toward Madison. Fast. Something that big shouldn’t move that fast. A mountain of steel and death, outsprinting her aircar…
“Oh, God.” She jammed the controls to maximum acceleration and shot forward, flying nap-of-the-earth and hoping desperately that Sonny wouldn’t decide her aircar was an enemy ship to be blasted from the sky. She homed in on Yalena’s signal and tried to raise her daughter.
“Yalena? Can you hear me? C’mon, baby, can you hear me?”
A choked, garbled sound came back. “Urghh — y-yeah — hear you, Mommm—”
More horrible sounds left Kafari ice cold. “Yalena?”
“Yeah?”
“Baby, the Bolo’s coming! Get off the street — I don’t care how, just get off the street!”
“Trying—” More ghastly sounds came through.
Did those bastards use retch gas?
Better gas than nerve agent. Kafari raced Sonny neck-and-neck, pulled ahead, reached Madison’s outlying suburbs before he did. The streets would slow him down. She might make it. There might be time to get in, to get Yalena and her friends out. She roared into Madison at lamp-post height, whipping around corners between office towers, car-sales lots, restaurants. Kafari was no fighter pilot, but Uncle Jasper would’ve been proud of her. She zipped under traffic-signal cables or whipped her nose up and shot over them, where trucks took up necessary airspace.
The signal from her daughter’s wrist-comm was getting closer. Peripheral vision showed her a dense throng of people dead ahead, blocked by barricades and P-Squads. Madison’s infamous enforcers stood shoulder-to-shoulder with shields locked, doing nothing to stop the riot, but preventing anyone from getting out of the riot zone. They were funneling people straight down Darconi Street, toward the Presidential Residence. Right into the path Sonny would follow.
It’s murder, she realized in a split-second moment of horror. They mean to kill the protestors! And somewhere ahead, lost in a heaving, surging mass of trapped humanity and riot gas, Kafari’s little girl was fighting to stay alive. Anger blazed to life. He’s not killing my child!
Kafari slapped controls, killing her air-intake system, then her aircar slashed through trailing tendrils of gas, an arm’s length above the helmeted, armored line of the P-Squad’s dragoons. Somebody shot at her. She heard the impact against the undercarriage. A warning light flashed urgently on her boards. She swore viciously, unable to tear her attention away from navigating the riot gas and packed streets.
Uncle Jasper must’ve wrapped ghostly hands around hers more than once, as she whipped through the heart of the riot, on a virtual collision course with the Presidential Residence. Kafari was one block away from Yalena’s wrist-comm signal when her aircar started losing power. “Damn!”
There was nowhere to set it down. Just a vast river of struggling, running, fighting people, punctuated by outcroppings of parked cars, toppled delivery vans, and wrecked signposts jutting up like spears where their signs had been ripped down. Then she spotted it. The long, low rooftop of a trendy dance club. Kafari gunned the engines, yanked on the controls, brought the nose up by sheer willpower. She gained precious elevation while the engines screamed, bleeding noise and God-alone knew what kind of parts across the packed streets. She was going to hit the upper windows. She wasn’t going to make it—
The belly of her fuselage scraped the edge of the roof. They skidded across, leaving a metoric trail of sparks. Kafari cut the forward thrust, shunted all remaining power into the side-thrusters, and sent the air-frame into a wild spin. The world reeled out of control… Then firmed up again as the combination of friction and counterthrust brought her careening to a halt. She hung against the crash webbing for several ghastly seconds, just shaking.
I’m too old for this. Last time I did this kind of thing, I was still in college…
Then the world swam into focus and showed her a sight that dumped more adrenaline into her jangled system. An upper turret, studded with guns bigger than any trees Kafari had ever seen, was crawling its way down Darconi Street. Toward the Presidential Residence. Toward her. And Yalena…
Kafari slapped the restraints loose, tumbled out onto the roof. She dug into the bin under her seat and came up with the gun she had been carrying illegally for years. Kafari dragged on her belly-band holster, which tucked the gun snugly between her abdomen and the elasmer band, then hunted frantically for a way down from the roof.