Well, she thought, that’s it. The truck bomb might still work, but surely the rest of the operation couldn’t continue. She could count more police directly below than there were members of Group Blanche, and within minutes many more could arrive, racing down the parkway from right and left. Any second now, she should hear the order for everyone but the team with the detonator to withdraw while they still could.
The order didn’t come. Sula pulled off her helmet and ran a gloved hand through her hair to comb out the sweat.
She wondered if she should transmit to Hong suggesting withdrawal, and then a picture rose in her mind, Hong’s expression of deep concern, his question,Are you all right about this?
Sula would wait. She took several deep breaths, and then she waited some more.
She turned to scan the room. Macnamara was silent and stoic, his hands flexing as if eager to grasp his machine gun; and Spence was pale, looking as if she wished she were in one of those romantic videos of hers, the ones that guaranteed a happy ending.
It occurred to Sula that she had never led other people in combat. Everything she had done against the Naxids had been done entirely on her own, strapped in her pinnace while it shepherded a volley of missiles toward the enemy. The missiles had not possessed beating hearts or bodies of flesh, not like Spence or Macnamara or the Gueis, whose daughter was still gazing at her video game with intent eyes that might soon be called on to witness a massacre…
Sula realized that she would much rather be alone in this. Her own life was nothing, a breath in the wind, of no value to anyone. Responsibility for others was by far the greater burden.
More flashing lights. Sula peered out of the window and saw a pair of police vehicles moving slowly down Highway 16, then disappearing beneath the bridge where the bomb truck waited. The driver of the truck, code name 257, was still in the truck, having feigned a breakdown. He might be arrested, or decide to do something dramatic.
Shit-shit-shit…The word drummed its way through Sula’s brain. She picked up her rifle from where it waited against the wall, and held it in her gloved hands. Taking this as a signal, Macnamara stepped to where the machine gun waited and put a hand on its stock. Sula waved him back.
“Use the control pad,” she said. “Mark out everything in the street or on the sidewalk as a target.”
Macnamara nodded to himself, then stepped back to perform this task. Once he triggered the gun, it would fire automatically at anything in the target area until told to stop or until its considerable ammunition reserve was exhausted. It was ideal for covering a withdrawal by the rest of the team.
The rifles held by Sula and Spence were less convenient, insofar as they needed a person to point them at the enemy and squeeze the trigger. But the view through their sights could be projected on the helmet faceplates of the operators, which meant that neither Sula nor Spence actually had to flaunt their heads in the way of enemy fire. Only their hands and forearms need be exposed, with the trigger permanently depressed so that the gun would fire automatically at anything designated a target.
She could feel her pulse beating high in her throat. She wondered if she should step back from the window if everything was about to blow up right this instant.
Sula gave an involuntary start as her hand comm chirped. She reached for it, encountered instead her camouflage shroud, and then groped inside its folds, all the while wondering why someone had called her hand comm instead of using the far safer burst transmissions of the radio.
By the time she opened the comm and pressed it to her ear, it had stopped chirping. Voices were already engaged in a dialogue.
“What’s the situation, then?” Hong’s voice.
“The police tell me I’ve got to move the truck or get myself arrested.” The other voice was two-five-seven’s. “I a-told them we’ve got a tow on the way. I a-told them this here is a valuable piece of property and that I ain’t a-going ta take the responsibility of running a twelve-wheeler on just one fuel cell, but they sez I got ta. So I told a-them what I’d do, I’d like call my supervisor like.”
Sula winced. Two-five-seven was a team leader and a Peer—a highly educated and cultivated young man—and he was doing his best to speak in some manner of working-class accent, and failing miserably.
If the Naxids didn’t hear something wrong in this, then they were deaf to all nuance.
Two-five-seven had done something reasonably clever, though. He’d rung a number that would contact all the teams at once, so that all would know what was going on and none would panic and try something desperate.
“Right,” Hong said. “You might as well pull out, the people we want won’t be here for a while. Take the first left on top of the ramp, and I’ll meet you there. Four-nine-nine, are you there?”
“Yes, Blanche.” Another voice.
“I need you to send me your car with a driver. Have him meet me at the truck, and have him bring all his gear.”
Meaning his weapons, presumably.
“The rest of you,” Hong said, “sit tight, and stick with the plan.”
Sula returned her hand comm to her trouser pocket, her mind spinning with the effort of trying to work out what Hong now intended. Surely he couldn’t retrieve the ambush now.
Surely the only sensible thing to do was to order his teams to leave as quietly as they had come.
Sula watched as the truck slowly pulled out from beneath the bridge and disappeared from sight around the corner of the building. The Naxid police drew their vehicles across the road on either end of the underpass as roadblocks.
Hong’s voice came over Sula’s helmet phones, and Sula hastily put on her helmet to better hear him.
“Someone has to signal me when the convoy passes.”
Others hastened to assure Hong they would do this. Sula remained silent.
She looked over the room again, saw the Gueis with their taut faces, the daughter still fierce in her determination to win her video game. Plopping sounds came from the video wall, and odd little cries. Apparently the game had to do with animals jumping over one another in a rather complicated arboreal environment.
More police flashers to the right, far down the parkway, away from the city center. Now that Sula had her helmet on, she turned up the magnification on the faceplate to see a wedge of police vehicles coming toward her, and behind them larger transport, visible only as they passed through the brilliant slices of dawn that fell between the buildings.
“Comm: to Blanche,” Sula said. “I think they’re coming. Comm: send.”
“All teams,” came Hong’s response. “Let me know when they begin to cross the bridge.”
Sula turned to the Gueis. “I want all of you down flat on the floor,” she said. “When things start, I want you to crawl out of here.Crawl, understand?” She swiped her hand parallel to the floor in a gesture that meant,flat on the floor. “Take shelter in the hallway, or with a neighbor on the far side of the building.”
“Yes, my lady,” said Mister Guei. Sula felt a spasm of amusement: she must be good at being a Peer for Guei to call her “my lady” when no one else had. Guei and his wife looked at each other, then lowered themselves and their infant son to their creamy carpet. The daughter was reluctant to leave her game, but her mother snapped at her and dragged her to the floor by one wrist. The daughter looked as if she might cry, but then decided against it.