I wrote a little something for one of my favorite recent cyberpunk/synthwave universes that I've plunged far too much time into - the
Brigador universe. Have I written here about
synthwave as distinct from my earlier ramblings about vaporwave? I don't think so. That may be due.
The
Canary in the Coalmine Called Cassandra
By
Adam Wykes
Rain
on rusted tin roofs in a pre-morning haze. Dead grass and dead
vehicles littering little yards where garbage fires gutter fitfully,
puddles awash in the low red bias glow of adjacent districts leaking
over the parapets.
Home for Noé Abraham wasn't much. What
had been a "zero asset man's refuge," this narrow strip of
land under the elevated rail lines heading into Central from the ammo
dumps - devoid of services and therefore citizenship and its
associated subscription costs - was now, if possible, even worse a
place for a man in his forties. Past his physical prime, more gray
than brown in his beard, a young former prostitute he called Angola
his partner, a young baby named Ty his son, a corrugated metal shack
with a mechanic's toolkit and a mattress his home.
In
fact, it was for the birds.
The Corvids had come to
roost, bribing the train operators to throw ordnance over the side in
transit. Ever ramping up for their glorious revolution.
Angola
was shaking his shoulder, rousing him from sleep.
"Noé."
The
baby was asleep between them, mud red eyes shut in their sockets.
What was wrong?
"Noé."
"What!?"
He hissed. "Is it flooding?"
"Cassandra.
It's on."
Noé had no idea how the Corvids got
the Canary. A ubiquitous sight in "restless" districts,
Canary agravs were tall, roughly cylindrical flyers propped awkwardly
on tire struts that could have been nothing other than a design
retrofit. An odd "bill" protruded from their fore amid
multi-spectrum spotlights, serving as its primary control surface.
They hovered in the black nights above Solo Nobre, Great Leader's
omnipresent eyes and mouth immanentized in the sky. At some point the
Corvids had acquired it. Retrofitted it. If you stripped out the
comms package, the ECM and the sensor array, it turned out you could
mount artillery on it - as Corvids would always do. But they had yet
to pull the plug on the BBS connection - that was too valuable - and
as Noé peered through his window at the shack which hid the Canary,
he could tell someone had left the hatch open. Something on the BBS
interface was blinking phosphorescent white in a dreamlike world of
pooling blood. Noé knew this because he was the one the Corvids had
pressed into working on Cassandra. He was the one who had named it -
for he had been a history teacher like any other; a prophet
unheeded.
In a moment, Noé was up, putting his
clothes on. Angola was doing the same. Marvelously, Ty stayed asleep.
As he dressed, he kept his eyes on the window. No signs of movement;
no strobing shadows across the huddled yard which separated them from
the agrav, their bundle of ramshackle structures erected against the
district wall like so much flotsam.
Under the bed
was a knife. Noé took it. Corvids viewed him as one of their own,
but the BBS link was jealously guarded. Angola, her brown cheeks
fierce in the night's glow, her tough, lithe body tense underneath
her underwear, was coming with him, scooping Ty swiftly and expertly
in her arms. The baby cried. Noé told himself how often the baby had
cried in the night before. No one would care. Please saints, let no
one care. Difficult words eked from a nonbeliever scraping for light
in the dark.
Noé made his way across the yard,
slipped in the doorway of the shed where the Canary slept, tangled in
hardline data connections, power cables, and ammunition belts. The
door was indeed open. The BBS display within the spacious compartment
was luminous.
Behaving as one who might still think
himself in a dream, Noé crept within to glimpse at what so bothered
his woman. The readout was in the clear, written in a tongue he had
studied:
WELCOME BRIGADOR
Not for the first
time, Noé felt like he was not a man, but a character on a stage,
written already, tracing a path grooved in ink or coal. He ripped
himself away from such fantasies. Tonight he, and Angola, and Ty, and
Cassandra would very likely live or die together. And he knew all too
well - he could try to run, but those who ran were the enemies of
all. Those who stayed died... and sometimes lived. Noé had a choice
to make - quickly. There, at the bottom, the line read:
SNC
INVASION DATE MARK: -1 LOCAL CYCLE
Angola's
eyes met Noé's, but she didn't wait for him to say anything before
slowly, dreadfully reaching out - without breaking his stare -
finding the door handle (Canaries had a full-blown door on the side -
the hatch was up top), and closing it. Shut in the metal tomb, Noé
felt trapped and safe simultaneously. The dim blue of the BBS
display's cathode ray tube replaced the red glow of the night
outside, illuminating the crew bay; a little bossed metal stage
comprised of two leather seats on swivels, surrounded by banks of
controls - most ripped out and replaced with ersatz targeting
computers and autoloader configuration switchboards. Noe's mind
absently fell on the smoke projector switches he'd been instructed to
install only yesterday; the toolbox below the console where most of
his tools still resided...
"What's a Brigador?"
Angola whispered, searching Noé's eyes for the knowledge of past
things she knew he had. Noé had told her many stories about Novo
Solo before Great Leader. He hadn't told her about
Brigadors.
"Amateur mercenaries dressed up as
revolutionaries," Noé heard himself say. "Wolves in
sheep's clothing. The SNC is back for Solo Nobre, but the big guns
are stopping them from landing. Great Leader's purchases from the
Spacers and his military spending make them think twice about landing
far-side and marching over. Not cost-effective. They want to pay
citizens to do it for them. In the past, they paid citizens to kill
each other, to try to stop the revolution." It felt like recital
of a history lesson, only it wasn't history yet.
Angola
looked like she was trying to find fault in what he said. Noé was a
former historian and cut rate mechanic. Noé was only a man on the
margins; a nobody like her. He could not know these things before
anyone else. But Angola was too level-headed to let prejudices get in
the way of rational thought - he knew that if he stayed silent, she
would eventually swallow the pill, however foul.
Eventually
the tenor of her silence changed. The tension in her shoulders
relaxed and she broke his gaze, eyes falling to her hands tight
around the baby. This was despair.
"Perhaps the
Corvids are hacking the BBS," she said plaintively.
Noé
ignored it. "We are not taking this contract."
Angola
nodded. Tears were forming on her cheeks, falling on Ty.
"We
are not getting ourselves killed if the Corvids want to have their
revolution."
She nodded again.
"And
we are not going to run to the Novo Exército do Povo."
Angola
looked up, fire in her eyes. "Don't bring my life and Ty's into
the balance with your stupid politics, Noé," she hissed. "We
can't stay here. We need help. If this is really
fucking happening, we need help. You gonna take the Saints away from
me, color them corporate slaves no better than the rest of us, and
then say nobody alive can save us either? That you're some kind of
God, Noé?"
That last was intended to sting him, and
he knew she wouldn't have done it unless she really felt cornered.
Truthfully, neither of them was sure the baby was his, although their
relations were carnal enough. Noé felt like an uncle more than
anything else toward Ty, and Angola knew it. Her natural distrust
sometimes led her to test his devotion; suspicious of any man's
claims to altruism. When the world closed in on Angola, she would
test the floor under her for signs of weakness - she would jump
without a second thought if she found anything. Noé knew. And though
he truly was weak in so many ways, it was not the time to show any of
that. Like he had done when he first met her, Noé was going to make
himself into a lie in order to save her. But first, a little
truth.
"The NEP is not going to take us. Even if they
could, there's no guarantee they will even survive the next few days.
Angola, if this is real, much of Solo Nobre is going to burn
down."
Angola said nothing. She raised her eyes to
him again, but this time it was the same way she'd looked at him when
she had come to his door almost a year ago now, accusing him of
fatherhood, holding the baby out in front of her. He wondered if she
still thought that had convinced him. They had never discussed it,
but her accusing stare had been a plea for help. It was now. She
wanted him to tell her what they were going to do.
"We
are going to hide, just like we are now. We are not going to get
involved."
The two of them froze. Voices and
footsteps from somewhere nearby, outside Cassandra, filtered faintly
through the anti-spall fibermesh walls of their little doom closet.
Noé's gaze flashed to the door lock - it was secure. Almost as soon,
he heard someone try the latch from the outside, muttering something
indecipherable.
"Angola," he whispered, "the
switch behind you labeled 'PVS' - flip it."
She
found the switch and toggled it, bringing a series of panels flashing
to life in the same blue glow of the BBS, bathing the interior of the
Cassandra in light that made it seem like a nocturnal aquarium
display. Each was for a camera, covering the full 360 degrees of
visibility the agrav enjoyed in remarkably high monochrome definition
on a grid to the right of the pilot's seat where Angola was, between
the two of them and directly right of the door. The man outside, his
head blown grotesquely out of proportion to his body by the fisheye
lens, was Carlos, one of the Corvid squatters - and a better one, if
Noé was honest with himself. Not caught up in the revolution: quiet,
level, and good at what he did, which was train tank crews in the
legions they were cooking up out there, past the gates. A loyal
Corvid, but not one who would string you up as a loyalist the moment
he sniffed lack of revolutionary zeal in the wind. Behind him was
Zaya, a rope kid pilot.
To anyone familiar with
Corvid culture, little more needed to be said about Zaya. Only
crazies would be willing to strap themselves into a massively
overpowered agrav twin-engine with a seat - and then put guns on that
and ride them into street fights with NEP patrols. She wore
Giancarlo-style double glasses in the style of her hero - cheap
abrasively-colored frames without any lens in them, the part of her
face behind these totems a spray-painted cyan halo around piercing
black eyes. A cultist, as Noé thought of her. She had a pistol in
her hand, but she also looked drunk.
"They
can't get to us before we get out of here," Noé said as calmly
as he could. "Let's talk to them, let them know what we've seen
- broadcast it on the terminal we're connected to out there..."
he trailed off as he swiveled in his seat to face the BBS keyboard,
punching in the commands he'd used to troubleshoot the cranky onboard
main processing unit with Carlos only a few days ago. "It's the
button right next to the headset wire jack." Noé heard Angola
put the headset on. Good, he thought. Let's
ease into this.
"Hi Carlos..." she faltered
as Ty cried, and Angola lost her cool for a moment. In the camera
view, Carlos froze, stopped trying the door as he processed what was
going on.
"Angola? Open the door." He didn't
even sound angry, only worried; perplexed.
"...look
at the terminal readout, Carlos" Noé added. Carlos looked over
his shoulder. An old man, his eyesight was bad from long, dark work
in the mines. He stumbled over to read it. Zaya approached from
behind, mumbling - vibrating, even. Not drunk, Noé realized as she
got closer. Amphetamines. Even in the monochrome blue of the camera,
the sight of her black hair streaked in rain and engine grease, her
crow wing tattoos a stain on each shoulder, her movements reminded
him of a predatory animal. Raised without parents in the Deads, so
the story went. Hunted bear-dogs outside the walls with a lance. Noé
doubted that last part, but the emotional truth of it was
undeniable.
Zaya's eyes focused on the terminal
screen, looking over Carlos with all of her dagger-thin two meter
frame, turned with a jerk, and left, her back fading into the shadows
of the shacks and rain as she headed for the garage they'd dug under
the district wall's foundation.
"Come out of
there, Noé," Carlos said slowly once he had finished. "If
what this says is true, we need to get that skidmark Travis and his
grease stain Yasmin in those seats; there's something we need a
look-see at."
Noé could tell Carlos didn't believe a
word of it, but he thought Noé and Angola might believe it enough to
run with his bird - something he didn't want. Noé didn't have time
for the games.
"I'm taking Cassandra, Carlos, but I'm
not taking that contract. I want you to know that."
There
was yelling, pounding on the exterior. What Carlos did after it was
said didn't much matter to Noé. Angola's look did. Her body,
normally fluid and solid all at once, silk stretched over a titanium
frame, looked suddenly awkward and unimposing in the pilot's seat.
Never called tall, she looked almost childlike now, except for her
accusing eyes and the way her arms covered Ty. Noé knew he had to
push her before fear overcame - not judgment, because Noé knew he
himself was acting on instinct...
"I'm in here with
you, Angola," he began; "I know how this rust bucket works,
but you need to be the pilot. You have the reflexes, you have the
eyes for it. I can tell you what to do, but I need to work the
subsystems for you over here - neither of us has a jack; we'll work
together."
"You're killing us," she said,
her affect flat - but she thrust Ty into Noé's arms. This was
Angola's way of agreement when she was afraid of failure - this way,
if anything bad happened, it was all on Noé. The baby cried and
struggled; it never liked him; could sense the difference. Noé
didn't have time to address either of them, so he gripped the baby
tight to make sure it didn't fall out of his grasp when they took
off, and he took Angola by the shoulder.
"Everybody I
ever studied was already dead, Angola. It was how they got there that
mattered."
She turned from him with a sigh and
focused on the controls, her eyes scanning for something that would
make sense.
"The collective lever is by your left
hand. It takes us up and down. The system power control is mine,"
he explained, and as he did, turned the knob that initialized the
Cassandra's primary powerplant and control systems. Carlos' banging
outside stopped.
Angola shuddered, but Noé
continued slowly, as calmly as he could - telling himself this was
the same as any maintenance check flight, wishing on the graves of
the founders he had a smoke.
"Raise the
collective, and watch that meter over there; don't get us above 200
meters."
"Why?" Angola asked, easing the
collective up with all the evident apprehension of someone trying to
lift a sleeping infant.
As she did, Noé fed the
agrav plates their subsystem power and addressed some harmonics
calibration issues he knew would be there, causing a wobble that
would make any maneuvers more complex than this impossible. A low
bass hum with a high thin companion warble emanated from the floor
into the crew cabin. Noé listened to the hum more than the readouts
on his control panel as he made adjustments; thought about how to
break it to her.
"Above 200 meters, the automated
flak towers kill us."
"Noé!"
"That's
not going to happen; I won't let it. I control the agrav plates.
Just... be careful. The altimeter's over there."
The
Canary rose, cables outside snapping off like so much cobweb. Sparks
illuminated the workshop and Carlos' retreating form on the cameras.
Noé raced to bring the shields online, knowing the main capacitor
had been coughing up maintenance codes to his diagnostic screens ever
since he'd started working on Cassandra months ago. The shields came
on though, cracking and fizzing. Angola squinted, rolled her tongue
over her teeth. Noé could feel it too - like the ionized air
thunderstorms produced, only magnified until it made your bones
itch.
"Cristo Maria e los Santos!" Angola swore
in the old tongue, "what is that?"
"Hardshields,"
Noé intoned. "Brace for impact, but just keep pulling up on
that collective."
Angola was good at powering through
things. When Cassandra hit the roof of the workshop - a thin joke of
corrugated sheet metal and rough-hewn wood beams - she barely
flinched as the structure gave way around her like eggshell. The
sound was terrific, the screeching of metal on metal and ceramic
ablative skin, but then Cassandra was through, and all was silent
except for Ty's frightened mewling. Below, the workshop collapsed
into the hole they had risen out of, spewing rust-red dust in a cloud
around them and out through the doors and windows along the
ground.
Noé fumbled for the thin headphones of the
set operator and put them on, scanned quickly through the frequencies
like he was doing a spot check on the radio. In a way it was a
blessing in disguise Cassandra had its comms package stripped out,
because he doubted he'd have known how to use most of it anyway -
probably would have ended up broadcasting himself on a government
channel somehow The radio left was just a commercial transmitter. Its
frequencies were full of normal traffic. If it wasn't for the fact
his entire family was flying a hot upgunned reconnaissance vehicle in
protected NEP railway, one could be forgiven for thinking this one
more early morning night among many during the rainy season.
Then
Noé remembered the guns.
All
one had to do was look up. In the crew bay itself, forming a hump in
the ceiling between Angola and Noé, a panel had been removed to
reveal the massive breech and cradle apparatus of a cannon the
Corvids had affixed through the front of the Cassandra. Stamps on the
breech read "Autocannon, Mk II, 76mm. HE, SS-HEAT, HEDP, HESH,
WP." A simple set of three gravity-fed ammunition trays were set
into the rear wall of the crew compartment where the old stun laser
fire control system had been; there were four green rounds, three
orange rounds, and two rounds in the last bay - one white, one black
- each hastily spray-painted their respective colors. Noé hadn't the
faintest clue what any of them were.
Directly behind his
seat was a maintenance access panel for the engine that represented
one of the few relatively clear surfaces in the crew bay.
Ingeniously, the handles for this hatch also constituted the first
few steps of a ladder that proceeded upward into a tunnel in the
ceiling terminating in a small turret with button-able slit viewports
in all directions atop the Canary chassis. Noé had never actually
been up there; that had been Carlos' work area since he was the
weapons expert. He needed to see what it held.
"What's
our altitude?"
Angola glanced over.
"Twenty
six meters." The awkward wheels of the Cassandra would be well
above most of the hovels and wrecks in the field below. Noé
locked-in the agrav plates with the flip of two emergency switches he
knew about, typically used by trained crews, he guessed, to recover
from uncontrolled descents when pilots were incapacitated. These
would watch the ground distance directly under the vehicle and adjust
agrav power as needed to maintain that gap.
"I've set
us stuck at 26, then," Noé told Angola. "Ease off the
collective and nudge up that scrolling wheel at its top; that's the
throttle. The cyclic is that joystick on your right; it does the
turning. Get a feel for it, but let's get going."
Now
he climbed up, carefully cradling Ty in his right arm as he went. One
of the faults of the Canary design, as far as Noé was concerned, was
its stupidly high profile and the resulting distance between the
turret cupola and the crew compartment. Had the Design Bureau
forgotten all sense when making what it considered an air unit for
non-frontline work?
In any event, once up top, there
was about a meter and a half of space below his feet, which simply
rested in stirrups inset in the access tunnel he had ascended, his
seat a cramped affair surrounded by still-included spotting optics
and the controls system for a weapon he did recognize - the "Disco"
seven megawatt laser. This was a good sign. Noé didn't know much
about weapons, but he still remembered the news reports that had
circulated on Parade Days years ago when Great Leader had first
acquired these old Spacer weapons. If rumors were to be believed, a
potent weapon, despite its small collimator. The battery readout on
it was 100%. A spot-welded rifle stock jutted out from the turret
wall behind the barrel of the weapon, cables dangling freely into
crevices unseen, and a holographic targeting system installed atop a
rail that looked decently-sighted, inviting Noé's shoulder into it,
his one hand feeling the trigger's resistance while the other, with
Ty carefully balanced on his lap, found the turret slew controls,
rotating him at a decent clip.
To the rear, he saw Zaya's
rope kid coming in fast in the gloom, its agrav plates glowing like
cold hell reflected in the pilot's goggles, fixed as a big cat's
might be on their prize.
Instinctively,
Noé squeezed the trigger. A cold shiver in the base of his brain
stem was terrified nothing would happen, that a safety or some other
critical preparation would be forgot, but immediately a multifingered
stream of light, blue like the ghosts of childhood dreams,
materialized in the space between Cassandra and Zaya's rope kid
agrav, boiling off so much rain between them that a cloud of steam
formed instantly. When it cleared moments later, Zaya was nowhere to
be seen.
"Noé, what was that?"
Noé
had no idea. Had he just vaporized someone? Shouldn't there have been
a stricken vehicle careening to the ground, or an explosion?
There
was an explosion. It came from behind him - somewhere to the fore of
their vehicle - a white flash followed by a wave of heat and an
orange fireball. Particulate matter washed over the Cassandra's hull,
pattering and skittering. Noé slewed his turret back to the front,
taking his hand off the gun to press it against the struggling
infant's body, holding it in place. Zaya's rope kid was there,
shooting off ahead of them with sparks erupting from its top right
near where Zaya herself sat. That was, surprisingly, the least
interesting thing to behold. Instead, Noé's stare fixed on the
gutted concrete walls enclosing what had once been a power substation
tower the Corvid camp had been siphoning power off of. In its place,
revealed by a ragged hole in the concrete several meters across, was
a blackened tangle of wires and structural steel. The glow from over
the district walls, at least in their vicinity, was flickering
out.
Noé did not respect the authorities in Solo
Nobre. Nor did he abide, necessarily, by notions of social
responsibilities and contracts when such concepts were tainted by the
corrosive nature of the oppressive state. Books had taught him
contempt for things like these, long since internalized and calcified
in his heart. The scale of what had just been perpetrated, however,
made him forget that high-minded conceit. Unwarranted guilt by
association gnawed at him; the self-incriminating fear of child whose
disciplinarian father was out of the room when the crime was
committed. The fault falls on whoever is there when justice is meted
out. Knowing all this did little to help abate the remorse.
"I
shot Zaya with the laser up here," he shouted down to Angola, "I
thought she was trying to kill us. She was blowing up the power
station instead; she's taken the contract."
For a
moment there was silence. Noé would have been impatient with Angola
for hesitating, but he was still fighting the urge to flee. Both of
them knew the nearest gate in the district walls was ahead, where
Zaya had been going. Staying on the tracks and heading back toward
the other gate, further out by the city limits, was some twenty
kilometers distant. In the time it took to get there the Corvids
would have certainly found them - or, if they didn't have bigger
problems by then, the NEP security post's soldiers, heading up the
track to see who'd bombed their power station.
"We're
gonna go over the wall," Angola announced, her mind obviously
following a similar thread. "We can sneak over without reaching
200 meters... and I want to stay away from the gates."
Noé
began climbing back down into the crew bay, terrified as he was to
leave the Cassandra without another pair of eyes on the horizon with
Zaya out there, wreaking havoc with whatever insane artillery she'd
managed to weld to her hotrod on who knows what else. As he went he
held Ty close to his chest; the poor infant's screams were coughs
now; the heart beating palpably against his own breast. Thought was
not coming to Noé easily. Which way to go; which wall to go over? He
wasn't sure he remembered what was over the walls, not precisely...
Angola could tell he was debating it.
"We just need
to get higher; once we see where we're at, then we'll make the
decision," she told him.
Noé nodded. The need
to move was as much a block to logical thinking as anything else. Do,
the mind screamed, you're a sitting duck.
Carefully,
they adjusted the emergency altitude switches and rose again, just a
few meters higher - the district walls themselves were only some 33
meters here. Their cameras panned past the train tracks, then
momentarily blurred as the city skyline came into view. The rain was
abating, and the cameras focused themselves quickly, offering a view
Noé and Angola had seen before only mediated through other
screens.
On the one side a gated community sprawled,
all green grass and imported trees manicured like a golf course
(perhaps it was a golf course - Noé hadn't paid attention to
historical sports). Beyond the immaculate, invariant clay tiled roofs
of estates, hovering over broad, well-lit avenues and beyond the far
district wall which enclosed that absurd diorama, a darkness swept.
Noé knew it was a finger of the Solo Nobre bay, but in the night it
was little more than a blankness, an erasure that ceased where the
far shore began, leading up into the neon-lit industrial parks and
suburbs and from there, to countrysides still more distant.
On
the other side the districts of the Outer Core leading into Central
rose. A billion pink and red points of light, dotted with yellow
ribbons and blue festoons here and there where signage loomed over
the canopy of the city, the vehicle lights moving as lava might
through cracks in the basalt firmament. Noé was always reminded of a
glowering ember, or alien coral reefs luminescing as well they might
under the unexplored ocean waves of Novo Solo; this human
construction only a refraction of what had already been done here. It
repulsed him.
And yet, fish hid in reefs.
"We'll
lose followers in those narrow streets," he told Angola. But
Cassandra didn't move.
Things were starting to happen
fast, now. Across the skyline, from wherever the lights were dimmer
on the ground, lime-green flares were shooting into the sky.
The
color was close enough that Noé could guess what it meant,
especially tracing their smoky trails back to their origins in the
poorer neighborhoods. The sensor panel in front of him was reading
noise from outside that Noé didn't hear, so he flipped the switch to
patch in the outside mic. Raid sirens were wailing somewhere distant
in the city, more revving up nearby even as he listened.
"Angola,
flip that switch next to your headset labeled 'external
patch'."
Angola did as she was told and heard
the sound as well.
"Are you trying to scare the
shit out of me? I already know what's happening." She flipped
the switch back off.
"You
do? One step ahead of me."
"Not what I meant..."
Angola gritted out through clenched teeth.
Noé
scanned the nearest buildings. There – one of the taller structures
in the middle of the block was a communications tower of some
description, larger than most such in the city, in fact. Its spindly
cage rose above the rest of the city around it and offered a platform
they could power down on and hopefully look like any other parked
loyalist vehicle. And
"Head for that tower over
there, with the communications dishes on it. Let's see if we can hide
inside it and listen in on what else is going on."
Angola
pushed Cassandra over the wall, gliding smoothly and directly toward
the tower. A loudspeaker from somewhere nearby crackled to life,
tinny and almost inaudible to her crew:
"NEP vehicle,
identify yourself."
Angola,
to her credit, did the right thing and kept moving forward at the
same pace. Noé scanned the feeds but saw nothing in the green
monochrome of the street below, so he toggled to thermals.
There.
An NEP patrol bike, troubadour class. Those could be armed; this one
had some kind of low-caliber machine gun mounted on it. The officer
atop it was watching them intently, revving his engine.
"Halt,
or we will fire on you!"
"Noé..." Angola
started.
Noé dropped the altitude, and the Cassandra
plummeted into the street below. Massive suspensions on the overbuilt
tires strained as the 22-ton vehicle came crashing to the pavement,
kicking up dust from the road all around the Cassandra. Ground cars
jumped on their wheels and one parked inexplicably in the middle of
the street, abandoned, disappeared under their front treads as the
agrav's forward momentum dragged it down the street. Tracers
flickered green in the dust cloud as the police came to the logical
conclusion about what was going on. A few found their mark.
Fuck,
Noé!" Angola screamed, "Bring us back up! Get us
out..."
The air was forced from her lungs as he
pushed the altitude adjuster back up and her death grip on the
collective rocketed them back into the air. He topped them off at ten
meters - enough to stay hidden between the buildings. Signs and wires
crisscrossed their path at this level, but he knew Cassandra could
brush it all aside, military spec as she was.
"Down
that street over there," he wheezed, pointing at one of the
feeds ahead. Angola obeyed.
Something passed big behind
them in the air, leaving a contrail in the dust cloud. The treadbike,
just getting started in its pursuit, vaporized in a flash, petrol
fires splashing across the pavement in all directions in their rear
view cameras.
"That wasn't us." Angola said
flatly. "Tell me you didn't just kill an NEP."
"No,"
Noé confirmed - he didn't have to think very hard about who had.
"But get yourself ready, because we might have to very
soon."
As Cassandra pushed through the urban forest,
Angola taking periodic turns to throw pursuit off their track, Noé
took his shirt off and fashioned a sling around his torso with it,
fitting Ty into it like a hammock. Then he took a look at the 76mm
and figured out how to load one of the green shells and close the
breech on it.
"Figure out how to shoot that
thing. It's going to have a reticle when you toggle that switch over
there, and the trigger we put on the cyclic where your index finger
is if you slide it up. The hat on top under that lid is going to make
the cradle adjustments so you can actually hit what you're going
for."
Angola glanced down at her hand on the cyclic,
thumbed gingerly over the hat and the firing trigger. Noé knew she
studied fast - everyone from the street did. Remembering it when the
shit hit the fan was another story, but there was nothing to be done
about that now.
"I'm going up to man that laser
again. I've got Ty secured a little better."
Then
they turned a corner and flew right over a throng of several hundred
dazed looking people in yellow raincoats, huddled around what Noé
realized could only be the district's police station.
Noé
shook his head - though perhaps it was more of a shudder - and forced
himself up the ladder. Yellow raincoats were as old as the colony
ships and they marked the surrender and suffering of the innocent in
every war and whose faces from past lives might he see staring up at
the killing machine he crewed over them? His sister's? Noé clenched
his eyes shut and bit his lip until it bled. No sense going there. No
sense - no sense. But below, Angola was not yet afraid of
ghosts.
"Popping our smokes" she yelled in a way
he knew she'd hit upon something to fight with; tones of anger and
happiness married in her voice. He hadn't told her about those
switches...
A sound like bubble wrap crushed all at once
told Noé she'd flipped all the switches. Smoke
canisters careened in every direction their projector tubes had
randomly been bent to during their installation; jets of white cloud
bounced off building walls and stabbed into the crowd below, turning
the intersection into chaos immediately. Flashlights from below
strobed through the haze in a crazed rush for every perimeter, joined
by sporadic small arms fire from the police that had up until that
point been organizing the crowd, no doubt waiting for Great Leader to
tell them what to make of the evil portents closing in all around
them. If Angola had wanted to sow confusion to throw pursuit off
their trail... Noé almost slapped himself. Of course. Angola might
not be experienced in every way, but in others she swam like a sewer
fish through shit.
Through all, the Cassandra piled on the
speed. Before they were clear of the smoke, Noé felt the inertia in
his body pull him hard to the left, then to the right again - when
they came out into the darkened street there were raincoats flashing
lights everywhere below, in every direction. The comm tower was
nowhere to be seen. Angola might be simply running for the sake of
it, which practically speaking, wasn't a bad idea. It was up to him
to keep a leveler head and find the comm tower they were after.
He
slewed his turret in a circle, hunting the claustrophobic horizon of
the rooftops for the spire of the comm tower - there, and
miraculously closer than before. Now to reorient and bring his
mustang pilot to heel.
"Whoa Angola, no one's on us.
Tower's up on our right; take the next intersection and go straight
until you get to the far district wall."
No
response, but none needed. The agrav lithely made the turn, throwing
Noé and his charge against his shoulder again, and straightened out.
They sped past another treadbike pair busy corralling citizens below;
their vehicle a blurred silhouette against the red-gray grain of the
starless sky, aglow with ghostfire that the old might recall with
fear and the young conjure from stories.
Noé's own
hair stood up at himself and what he was doing. At the end of the
street the comm tower grew in their rush to it, and the Cassandra
jerked as Angola lost control for a brief moment to raise the flight
ceiling controls he had previously been at, then reached back to
handle the collective.
The Cassandra lurched up, slowed,
and came to rest on the maintenance platform halfway up the tower's
structure, a landing just large enough to fit the whole of the
vehicle within the open structure of the tower. It groaned under the
weight, but held to specs Noé guessed it had by looking at it. He
told Angola to turn off the engine and power down, and after a few
tense moments this too was accomplished, and they perched, another
gargoyle adorning the walled city. Through every viewport in the
turret, Noé saw the lights of vehicles tracing the streets below,
and more ominously, saw flashes of what might be lightning out from
behind buildings here and there afar, though the air was still. But
the baby Ty was also still, and sleeping - exhausted - and nothing
eyes could tell him suggested they were noticed.
Temporary
escape could only evince a grimace from Noé, though. One could hide
within a target only for so long.
A
target, a hideaway, and a window with a view to what in the seven
hells was going on. It was a moment's work for Noé to slide down the
ladder, hand over the baby to a stony Angola, pop the hatch, jump
down onto the maintenance platform of the tower, and find the
terminal to the city BBS. The adapter plate in the side of the
terminal was still there - and Cassandra had what was missing. The
old mechanic went back into the Cassandra, sweating profusely with
hurry in the muggy atmosphere which hung dead and cloying about them.
Rummaging, he found the spare extension cable stowed in one of the
tool cabinets in the cabin, yanked it from its spool, clambered back
out, and screwed one head into the terminal, the other into the side
of the Cassandra after removing the frayed remainder of the previous
cable, which they'd had to pull free of on their ascent from the
Corvid hideout.
Back in the cabin with the door
safely shut, Angola lit a cigarette she'd somehow procured and Noé
leaned over the blue screen of the terminal once again. The BBS menu
was of course swamped with many posts copying or commenting - mostly
hasty, brash disinformation from the government - on the Brigador
Contract, as it was apparently being referred to. Noé knew about the
contract. He wanted to find out what else was going on.
Only
a few posts from the government far below the first menu screen were
unrelated; one appeared to be governmental but upon inspection turned
out to be someone posting apparently incoherent ASCII soup followed
by the line "The ANTIpodes of Eixo lies in bLOoD but u can hitch
a starry ride there." The only implication Noé could draw was
that the government was clearly not totally in control of its
networks tonight, so he tabbed on to the next post down, which was a
message concerning a Spacer kill squad apparently captured in
Central. Apparently the NEP badly wanted someone to know, because the
mere admission Spacers could be on Novo Solo, let alone anywhere in
Solo Nobre - let alone running around in Central - was a severe
departure from the Official Narrative. Noé tabbed on. The third and
final message before the previous days' was a rote notice to allow
trains outbound from the city but halt all inbound traffic regardless
of purpose. So someone thought it was worth running, or at least
hedging their bets. The city felt more like a trap all the
time.
"What is it?" Angola asked, reading
over his shoulder. She was not the most literate, so he had been
scanning much faster than she could keep up. Thoughts raced through
Noé; calculations on this woman he sat beside. How well did he know
her? He dumped the output to local storage and shut the terminal
screen off.
"What was that?" she repeated around
her cigarette. "Who's winning?"
"The
government's on its back foot but still standing and putting up some
kind of fight; I don't know how much or how well. It seems like there
are problems everywhere in the city and we're sure to find gates
closed - or open for the wrong reasons - everywhere we could go."
"I
don't want to stay here. We have to keep moving."
"That's
a good feeling; I agree with it. I just don't know where to point
you."
A distant blast like dynamite going off in an
immense cavern interrupted them - the starboard video feed showed an
orbital gun on the horizon firing up into the sky; something neither
of them had seen or thought they would ever see. Dust quickly
obscured the gun on the horizon. The tower trembled slightly. Angola
forgot to take a drag on her cigarette. Noé interrupted the reverie
to refocus their minds on something of a scale they could manage;
bugs needed to focus on bug problems; not the boot coming down on
them they were helpless to prevent.
"I can still try
to take a look at the radio; that's also accessible if I climb out
and switch terminals on our cable, but I won't know how to descramble
it, so unless someone's broadcasting clear we won't learn much beyond
what the volume of traffic looks like."
It wasn't
clear that Angola understood him, so Noé went to open the door
without her reply. As he did, however, she spoke up.
"Was
the contract still posted?"
Noé forced himself
not to pause or give the question credence.
"The
government says it's a ruse."
"Then you know
it's real," she replied, and exhaled all her smoke at once.
Noé
broke her gaze and went to the radio terminal, trying to focus on
something that made sense to him; something productive, but
everything was scrambled, ciphered beyond recognition. There was
plenty of traffic, but it was all noise, anything related to them a
star's glow lost against the background radiation of a government
going nova.
With a real security clearance, Noé knew he
might be able to pull information about whether certain gates were
open or shut in the city, giving him some insight into where the
fighting between Corvids, brigadors, and NEP might be heaviest.
Without that, the BBS and radio were of little use.
Noé's
inclination was to turn the city into a machine in his mind and
imagine how it might fail; if one thought of the Corvids as a high
pressure explosion coursing through the fuel of the poorer areas,
they would break through the gates and the sewers into the places
that offered them the most room to expand - the freeways and train
yards would be a natural conduit for any large group trying to go
anywhere in the city - and they'd want to go to Central, to
decapitate despots and ravage their oppressors. The roads would get
them there, at least to the walls, but the roads would also be choked
with another, secondary explosion - the refugees.
Corvids
were willing to crush just about any individual under the juggernaut
of their glorious revolution, but even they generally understood the
need to keep from massacring innocents in order to maintain the
facade of a moral high ground. There'd be a few nuts here and there,
but by and large they would be slowed - and their fanaticism wouldn't
allow that. They'd branch out into the surrounding areas from there,
pillaging. And at some point, the NEP would get their conscripts
organized enough to mount some kind of concerted effort to put this
fire out - likely with overwhelming, indiscriminate firepower.
Wherever that went down, Noé and his family needed to be far
away.
Walking to the edge of the comm tower platform, Noé
looked to the city streets a few hundred feet below. Groups were
exchanging small arms fire somewhere to the east of the district,
near the gate, and yellow raincoats with bobbing flashlights streamed
in clumps and lines away from there, seemingly having abandoned any
notion of organizing for evacuation at the regional police office. It
would only be a matter of time before the first NEP heavies arrived,
or the Corvids - and then both would be here, and they'd start to
tear this district to the ground. It was far too close to the poorer
zones and the upper-class at the same time; a veritable no-man's land
for class warfare. Give it a few weeks' time, and if no one had
clearly emerged the victor, the flattened, colossal wreck of turf
here would stretch far and wide, studded with spikes sporting the
skulls of traitors. To Noé, the nightmare superimposed itself over
the slick monotone concrete of the city below in full, awful color.
The
urge to run was overcome only by the suffocating feeling they were
trapped in a cage, however large, descending into a lightless anoxic
chasm.
Yet
if eyes could not see whither they were headed, ears could hear.
Noé's suddenly trained on a sound nearby, coming from an unknown
source. A mechanical, low, reverberating growl -
and almost familiar.
Noé's
brain snapped to - it was heavy mech engine - something like a Touro.
Far too close, never mind he couldn't see where it came from - Noé
ran back to the Cassandra. Inside, Angola was still staring at the
screen, rocking Ty gently. Noé shut the door loudly enough to
startle the child, which sent a scowl across Angola's face.
"Psss!
Don't do that!"
Noé
ignored this, turning on the engine controls he was responsible for,
taking the child back into his sling, and climbing up to the turret
seat.
"Get
that engine turned on, but keep the running lights completely off,
Angola," he said, then remembered she wouldn't know where those
toggles were. "Under the forward view screen, yellow capped
switches - put them all down. And patch in external audio
again."
The
reason didn't need explanation - Angola knew this all meant imminent
danger.
"I
didn't see anyone come up on us in our video feeds..."
"Because
you were busy looking at that damned contract. I heard a big engine
nearby; we're not sticking around to find out whose."
"I
didn't take it!"
Noé
strapped in and got his finger on the laser's trigger. A quick
rotation of the turret confirmed there was nothing as big as a Touro
in any direction - he did spot a shield truck of some sort moving up
through the streets a few blocks away, but this was absolutely not
the source of the noise. Then he felt a big shield power on
nearby.
"Angola,
move!"
The
Canary launched out of the comm tower at high speed. Angola
shrieked.
"Behind
us!"
Noé's
turret whipped to face rear just in time to see the tower
disintegrate in a shower of metal shards and concrete dust. Through
this curtain, like a monstrous stage magician, a heavy mech emerged
with a sloped top made mostly from cooling vents and gun barrels,
pursuing them with long, loping strides. A Mantis; one of the new NEP
designs. Where in the sainted heavens had it come from?
"Shields,
Angola!"
The
shields came up just as a pair of red lines drew themselves through
the air between the mech and Cassandra, exploding against their
shields with a snap like digitized lightning. Those would be the
"Little Chickens," Noé realized; the nom de guerre for
some of the latest lorenz-force weaponry to come out of the NEP
design bureaus, and among the deadliest in the colonies. He fired
back, his blue laser light playing over the immense shield face of
the foe, but he knew his defenses would come down first. Whoever
wanted them dead had nothing but the best. The pilot wouldn't make
many mistakes. They'd have been trusted not to.
Then
the Mantis lurched to the side; struck on its flank by a meteor that
had come down one of the streets - someone from that NEP shield
tank's group, probably. Friendly fire? But before the behemoth could
triangulate its tormentor, another round struck it, popping its
shields. The twin little chickens started up in full fury,
perforating entire neighborhoods as the pilot returned fire. Smoke
grenades popped in all directions.
Noé
stopped firing; no sense in reminding anyone of his continued
existence.
"Angola,
find somewhere to go. Let's get out of here."
But
Angola didn't. Without slowing or diverting their path, she rotated
the Cassandra so that it was backing up, its finned nose pointed
right at the Mantis. Noé heard her harness buckle snap open. Then
the 76mm receiver slammed shut. Angola had seen Carlos cycle that gun
before, when it was installed. Panic filled Noé.
"Aim
high -" was all he managed to get out before Angola fired.
The
shot wasn't difficult - perhaps two hundred meters - and the 76mm's
trajectory was murderously flat. The round hit the Mantis in between
its legs in a puff of smoke, spreading itself all over the armored
gear housing as though inert for one stomach-churning moment before
detonating. The housing scattered off in every direction, revealing
the clockwork of the mech underneath - unscathed. Noé trained his
laser on this and fired again, molten metal slag dripping away under
the heat. The great legs ground to a halt. The chassis
turned.
Angola
wasn't at her seat; the Canary drifted slightly to the left in a lazy
arc. The twin barrels of the Galinhas, red hot eyes gazing down at
them, began to fire again. Noé's hand instinctively left the trigger
to cover his baby boy helplessly against the onslaught.
Then
a burst of something from down the block found the side of the
Mantis, and rapped against it in a quick succession of solid hits.
Nothing else seemed to happen, but the guns immediately fell silent.
It struck Noé how odd it was an NEP soldier would have demolished a
tower to kill them... unless whoever this was wasn't NEP - at least
not anymore.
Another
round slammed home below.
"It's
dead, Angola!" She fired anyway. This time the round was HE; it
knocked the battered mech onto its back, fascia blackened by
fire.
“Fuck
you! Fuck
you, Fuck
you!" Angola screamed.
The
cabin was silent for a moment, but Angola turned the Cassandra back
around and sped into a side street to hide.
"We
could have just left him."
Noé
was surprised by Angola's response - a sob through clenched
teeth.
"He
was another Brigador for sure, Noé."
Noé
said nothing; it seemed like she would go on.
"There
will be more."
Again
he did not reply. It began to come out.
"It's
not like your history. There's a bonus on casualties. On
people."
"On
buildings, Noé."
"On
houses and stores."
"On
Corvids and Spacers and the NEP."
Of
course she could only know this if she had taken the contract. Rage
built up inside Noé, but Angola shrieked hysterically, jolting him
immediately out of it. She was losing the self-control typical of the
street child, utterly terrified and coming off adrenaline. Someone
had to remain cool. It felt lonely in their little agrav.
"Say
something, if you know what to say! They want it all dead, Noé - all
of Solo Nobre. Where does that fit in anywhere in your forbidden
books?"
That
was different than what he had expected. Surely the corporation would
have wanted something from Solo Nobre... but what could it provide
them? He had always believed it was the people - the workforce,
always the historical source of power in any state system since time
immemorial. On dark nights sometimes he worried Great Leader's
propaganda vids were not entirely unhinged - maybe they wanted the
natural resources at Solo Nobre's disposal; the accumulated capital
the city itself represented. But now, plainly, they wanted to burn it
all. No winners, either; no franchise puppeteering to explain it. Noé
realized Angola had uncovered something he'd been
blind to:
the SNC just wanted Solo Nobre out of the way so they could start
again, clean slate. Whatever
it was, they didn’t want the people or the city, even if they
weren’t willing to glass it in nuclear fire. Just the real
estate.
Hiding
had been the plan. Hiding would get them killed; just so much
collateral. The nightmare: Noé would have to fight.
"You
said you hadn't taken the contract." He couldn't help it.
"Not
in my heart, Noé," Angola sobbed. Ty woke to his mother's pain
and joined in. Noé smelled shit
in
his diaper. It would have to wait. "I wanted to know what they'd
get, you know. What they're after. And the only thing they can even
give is a ticket off-world, because they want to send everything else
to the seven hells. Now you have to tell me - are you gonna help me
get us that ticket and save our baby boy?" She yelled it through
tears, over the infant's wails.
That
meant there was a spaceport in their future... something unhinged
stirred in Noé. He knew he wasn't doing the contract. The dirty
truth at the bottom of his soul was he couldn't - even for the lives
of his woman and this
baby. The muddy red eyes in the little one cradled on him stared up
and he feared
finding
accusation in
them;
couldn't meet the stare of an infant.
"Where's
the nearest spaceport?" It felt like a lie to say, though it was
only a question.
But
while Angola wracked her memories of tricks past, Noé's mind raced
into the ground. Almost subconscious, subterranean... like the
memories of his father passed down, come back from two kilometers
underground to haunt him.
Perhaps
even now he was standing over his father's grave - that was the
trouble with mineshafts and superstition - they ran under the living
city, separate save for the ghosts that shuttled between them.
"Old
Cascais" Angola blurted out suddenly. "The nearest
spaceport is in Old Cascais. Behind a blast wall at the end of the
office block there. Hasn't been used in years, but I've been through
a maintenance door to the other side. There's a tug sitting on the
launchpad."
Situated
in a small valley with natural rock walls, Noé remembered, though
that hadn't stopped the city planners from insanely building their
own district walls within them, as per regulation. One of the first
spaceports built... and ore hauling train tracks that led to...
where? Blackness.
"OK,"
Noé said mechanically. "Fly us straight there. Maybe no one
will have got the district's Orbital guns yet, and we can get the
easiest contract of them all. If not, there's plenty hunting nearby."
Angola
knew the ways streets connected to each other in Solo Nobre better
than Noé ever would, so he let her figure that out. Neither did he
jump back down from the turret to man what remained of the
Cassandra's sensor arrays and recalibrate its shielding. Not yet -
too much thinking to do, and too much flux to do it in without
getting himself involved. That was something Noé liked about
history: it could be frozen - the primary sources, anyway - and one
could move around it, prod it, like a chess board half-shadowed, but
amenable to peering. The present, on the other hand, invaded one's
thoughts, intruded on postulates and threw them to the ground,
helpless before the terror of indeterminacy.
Noé
opened the viewports in his turret, letting in the streetlights wash
over his face like waves, the gunfire and grunt of engines in the
streets a rolling storm front. The air's wet touch was gone, leaving
the heat and ozone and dry rubble dust. The historian himself was
still. These were necessary distractions; justifications for his eyes
and ears. The mind reeled on and far ahead.
It
seemed bizarre and dreamlike that he was spending what were in all
probability his last hours alive inside a jury-rigged war machine,
even if he had seen this all before. What must Angola be thinking? In
Angola's mind they would be off-planet in a few short hours, or
doomed. What would she do to escape that doom? Noé forced himself to
recall her tears and denial. If it had been any different he would
have had her set him down on a rooftop somewhere, washed
his hands.
That certainty was dissolved by those tears; she might still want him
to do what she couldn't for herself, because of the baby. It wasn't
easy for her because he had told her stories for so long.
That
was the moral weight of the historian; the storyteller - eventually,
people you loved would make decisions based on your stories. Noé was
at peace with this problem, at least. No human could take leave of
stories - not even spacers.
Noé
dwelt on that thought. Perhaps
even spacers
least
of all... so
long as cultures survived, their narratives grew more twisted and
elaborate and self-justifying. Spacer culture was in fact only the
attenuated end of a very long branch, insulated against outside
argument in vacuum-sealed créches. And they might be there at the
spaceport, he figured. Invisible, deadly as sharks come up at night
out of the deep ocean to hunt the shallow reef for terrestrial prey.
Thermal vision systems might spot them if they were on the move, but
if they were there, they wouldn't be. They'd be waiting in hides
because that was the story; they were hunters to
themselves.
Not in groups, and not in defense of anything in particular; they
might even have let some Corvids or NEP through if they were hunting
for bigger sport... like brigadors.
That would certainly be cost-effective for the SNC.
Ahead,
something like a dull flare lofted above the skyline, a glowing orb
describing a lazy parabola. It disappeared again behind the rooftops,
and a white flash strobed from where it had fallen. The streetlights
flickered out. Immediately, they were rushing through a pitch-black
tunnel through which Noé could see nothing, except at regular
intervals the cross streets vivisected a district full of insanity,
flashlights of the unfortunates milling in every direction, vehicles
frantically changing position to avoid newly imagined threats bearing
down on them.
Noé
climbed back down into the main crew compartment and strapped himself
in. He brought the thermal vision system back up and dropped their
shields. Angola tensed as if to say, tell
me what the hells you're thinking,
but she didn't want to wake the baby.
"That'll
be Zaya. She's been targeting the power stations because she wants
the job done so she can get to the spaceport, too. Doing what the SNC
wants will get her that, but we haven't done any work... yet. We'll
want to follow her closely."
"And
the shields?" Angola asked in a low voice.
"For
the SNC to have the spaceport under their control, they'll need to
have neutralized the district's NEP compliment, but with the gates up
nobody terrestrial was getting in without a fight. They'll have used
Spacers, and spacers will be better at seeing shield signatures than
we will be at finding them. We don't want to be seen, but we want
Zaya to light them up like a star."
Angola
nodded and kept the Cassandra on its heading.
"We're
headed right for the gate, but she had to detour to hit those power
stations. We'll hunker down over there -" Angola pointed ahead
on the camera screens, and Noé saw she referred to a pile of
shipping containers stacked to the side of the gate (which was indeed
down) in a fenced loading yard, "and wait. That rope kid won't
take long."
Noé
waited until they were over the fence so as not to destroy it and
reveal their passage before he dialed their agrav plates down and let
the ludicrous Canary tires roll to a stop behind the pile of cargo.
The brief lull granted a moment to peer past the gate into the
highway beyond. It extended beyond the range of the thermal vision;
only a few refugees, bright little smudges on their screens,
skittered off into the vanishing point.
Then
the rope kid flew past them, not ten meters above the road. Buttoned
down as they were, Angola and Noé barely saw the vehicle pass on
their camera feeds, but he caught a glimpse of the rider - the woman
was crouched low in her seat to streamline her profile like a racer.
Zaya was going places fast. No time to notice 22 ton homemade death
closets on wheels barely concealed scant meters away.
Almost
like a trained team, Noé brought their plates back online, dialing
them in to their accustomed height limit while Angola got them on the
tail of their faster target.
"You
said you wanted to light her up; go shoot at her in your turret;
she's either got no shields left, or turned hers off too,"
Angola advised. Right. Noé practically leapt up to his gun. Once the
woman put her mind to something, her approach demanded appreciation.
All efficiency and killer instinct, without a hint of doubt.
The
range on Zaya's agrav was rapidly growing, so he wasted no time in
squeezing off a few shots. They went wide or didn't reach her, but
they didn't go unnoticed. The air immediately wrinkled in a vague
sphere around the agrav - shields up - and something slung beneath
its chassis inverted its position, displaying a barrel of improbably
enormous caliber pointed back at them.
"Swerve!"
Noé shouted, and Cassandra jolted sideways, its nimble attitude
adjustment plates coming in supremely handy in the adrenaline soaked
hands of its young pilot: almost too fast to see, a red-hot bowling
ball launched at them from Zaya's gun flew past, cratering the
pavement and tossing raincoats like confetti behind them. The deaths
didn't even register in Noé's consciousness.
"She's
saying something over open comms," Angola reported. "Didn't
catch it, but didn't sound very nice." The underslung bowling
apparatus switched back to its original forward-pointing
configuration and Zaya poured on the speed, leaving them well behind.
Noé jumped back down - his legs were beginning to feel the strain of
all this - and switched off thermals, since the highway lights were
on a different circuit and still lit. He could see her take the ramp
off up ahead - toward Old Cascais.
"That
happens, too, in dreams," Noé whispered to himself. But by now
he was no longer concerned about whether this was real; his
words were
only a prayer he could be wrong. For once the zero asset man's plans
were proceeding exactly as predicted, which was almost more
terrifying than if they had simply failed, like everything else in
his life up to this point.
They
followed the rope kid onto the ramp, and the medians turned to flower
beds under the street lights as they raced on. Ahead, a gas station
nestled against a gated community's walls glowed neon. Zaya zoomed
off to the left, delving deeper into the district without any
apparent interest directed toward her. Cassandra followed, Angola
hugging the district walls and their floodlights out.
Nothing
in the neighborhood looked touched; a parking lot across from the gas
station was empty save a few cars here and there, their windows all
intact, glassy under the sodium lights like a museum display after
hours. Ahead, Zaya swerved again, crossing the path of the gated
community's main entrance.
In
an instant, the rope kid was transfixed by multiple blue beams which
snapped onto its chassis, beatifying it at lightspeed. In the next
instant, the road ahead was showered with the molten droplets of what
had once been Zaya.
What
happened next blurred in Noé's memory - everything past Zaya's death
to the spaceport unfolded in a continuous, atomic mnemonic; an
indivisible experience silent in recollection because utterly
deafening in actuality; a continual roar of guns, engines, collapsing
buildings, and the screams of infants which lost meaning and faded in
the slipstream like any notion of time or thought. A nightmare.
Who
had spoken when Zaya died? Noé could not recall. Cassandra turned
nimbly away from the scene of her death and careened back toward the
gas station as though chased by invisible demons. He'd lased the gas
station - wasn't that depraved? How could that have been him? At the
time it seemed logical; a simple escape. He had no memory of pressing
the trigger; nor a single word to justify himself.
It went
up, taking the neighborhood wall behind it with it, a fiery plume
which formed a door into the rest of the remembrance in Noé's mind.
The Cassandra passed through the flames. Its shields on now, it
crashed through trees into a park - something like a soccer field,
but littered with what he could only now recall as golf carts. Over
it loomed a far concealment hedge and another wall, trapping them
once more - but towering above that, one of the Orbital guns.
They'd
blown up the gun and its volatile ammunition stores to get through
that - and on the other side, as the panic walls shot up from their
recesses in the road surfaces, closing off their line of advance yet
again, they'd found themselves in the midst of an NEP force recon
patrol. Perhaps a hundred infantry, a dozen Mongoose powersuits, a
few "Fork" leg units, a Scarab support vehicle, and - Noé
was sure he'd remember this until he died - one of those massive
Tinkers with the twin main guns bringing up the rear. The
bastard.
Fighting commenced immediately. With one round in
the chamber when they had come through, Angola had fired point blank
into the nearest Fork, explosively disassembling it. Infantry lasgun
fire sprayed the air, so they had dropped down, crushing a few under
their chassis, sliding across the asphalt - too far! - into the
glacis plate of the Tinker. Its long gun barrels pinned to one side
of their Canary, it popped smoke in all directions and began backing
up; Noé had re-energized the antigravity plates to claw for
altitude, hoping the guns couldn't climb fast enough.
Not
enough. The tank had hit them dead-on, one of the shells popping
their shields to let the other through, detonating
some reactive armor the Corvids had welded there and exploding
itself. All the video feeds on their right side had gone out.
Cassandra ducked down a side alley that miraculously seemed to open
up at their side then, leading them into a dense urban block, weaving
through high rises as the Tinker's guns chased them, hammering the
buildings apart, its chassis ripping through any detritus on the
street, inexorable.
Noé
remembered suddenly feeling oddly unconcerned by the monster tank;
where had the other Fork gone? The Cassandra came out of the
commercial block and over some wide gauge train tracks; the absence
of the customary panic walls here at the safety fencing around them
made all the stranger by the sight of another orbital gun tower - and
without remembering how, Noé's laser turret had slewed left, to
their blind spot, catching the Fork in his sights. It fired first and
missed, so the Canary's laser chopped up its shields - just in time
for its main gun to send the orbital gun up in a massive ball of
fire. The fork disappeared in Noé's memory then - caught in the
blast, the Cassandra had been thrown through the safety fencing on
the far side of the tracks, coming down with power knocked out and
ripping through a semi truck in a parking lot, dead in the
water.
Onward came the Tinker. The memory was timeless,
silent as ever. The guns fired, somehow missed. Maybe something to do
with the dust of all the rubble, the flames everywhere, or the
twisted pile of metal the stricken Canary had nested in. But to make
sure, it would run them over. Noé knew this; that was old hat for
NEP tread heads - turn the dissidents into zippers under their
tracks. Wash their remains down the sewer drains. Down into the
earth, with his father.
They had not died. Angola
had done something below, and the Cassandra sprang into the air as
the Tinker closed within a few dozen meters of their position,
shedding sheet metal and car parts as it rose far above the gun
elevation of the tank, which simply stopped. The Canary turned to
fire - but needed ammunition in its gun. The laser practically
useless against the tank, Noé dropped down to assist; loaded the
last green shell. No sooner had the action eaten the round than
Angola had fired. The explosion shattered one of the Tinker's guns,
but the tank only backed up, firing more smoke canisters to retreat
into.
Not a sound: Noé remembered the vibration of
its horn echoing in the streets, furious.
The sweaty feel
of his fingers on Angola's shoulder - was it from the bedroom the
night before, or had it actually happened then? Noé remembered the
monochrome light of their little death closet on their skin, in the
beads of sweat rolling between his fingers. Imploring her. Angola
turned away. They would not pursue; they would flee. They would
live.
This almost killed them. Crossing the street, the
Canary slipped behind an apartment block, putting as much between
itself and the general location of the enemy as it could. Ahead,
however, an opening in the buildings appeared; a plaza with a huge
statue of Great Leader in it stretched between them and the safety of
the next row of apartments. In the nightmare, time dilated. They
crossed - and the Tinker did not miss.
The tank crew had
backed up to the street which terminated in the plaza; waiting,
guessing what the Cassandra was here for; that they would have to
come back this way. The shell holed the laser turret - mercifully, it
was some kind of nonexplosive round. Shattered metal fragments
sprouted from Noé's shoulders and head like some kind of grotesque
window garden grown in time lapse. Something sliced Angola's right
eye and cheek open instantly, baptizing the infant Ty in its vitreous
liquid - but no blood. Noé would never forget.
The
Cassandra spun from the force of the strike, but Angola's hands were
still on the controls - she probably didn't even know she was half
blind yet. She was acquiring the Tinker in her sights, so it was
simple - load the next round. There were only two left - black and
white. Noé chose black. Reached over to steady Angola's hand.
The
shot was taken as the Cassandra drifted behind the apartment
building, so there would only ever be a glimpse of their kill, but
the round placed true in the middle of its glacis plate - a flash of
light and a puff of smoke - and the tank simply stopped moving in the
middle of the road.
Noé was still wiping the blood
out of his eyes and picking tiny metal daggers from his scalp,
dreading the feel of brain tissue, when he felt the Cassandra stop
moving. In the forward camera sat the Tug on its launchpad, running
lights on, helm viewports occupied by shadowy figures he could not
make out.
Now for the final, mad deceit.
Angola
plainly wanted to do something; she was half out of her seat, leaning
toward the Cassandra's door, her other hand dialing down the agrav
plates as she'd see Noé do until their fat tires rest on the
launchpad surface, going through the motions to get this all over
with, like rape.
It was obvious the pain of her injuries was starting to affect her.
She went to open the door, but Noé's hand was on her
shoulder.
"Ty,"
he intoned. "Give him to me before you go out there."
Before
Angola could reply, another voice – cold, low resolution, inhuman –
emanated from the space tug.
"Congratulations,
Brigador. Your current off-world earnings will be transmitted to
you." The voice paused.
"While
SNC operations are underway on this planet, you may be... eligible
for further opportunities. If, however, you require immediate medical
attention, you may terminate your contract and exit your vehicle to
consult with our shipboard experts for a nominal fee, to be followed
by a flight off-world."
"Something's
wrong with my sight..." she began, pulling away.
Noé's
fingers pressed into her shoulder, reminding and restraining
her.
"Ty,
Angola. Give him to me, and go get help. I don't trust them far
enough. When I see that you’re taken care of, then we'll come out,
too."
She
made eye contact with him, such as she could. Two characters on a
stage, under an isolated spotlight, watched for plays of emotion
under bloodstained brows.
Did
she guess? Noé knew she didn't. She wasn't stupid; it wasn't like
she didn't know him; know he'd never give up his principles
completely. She was just hollowed out, looking for hope where she'd
previously found it - like a ghost returning to to plate of food it
was eating when its reckoning had come. Lips moved, but they could
not partake. Her brain probably knew, but it shielded her from that
knowledge. She unwrapped Ty from her bosom and handed him over. Noé
bound the boy to himself, sat back in the pilot's seat, and gazed
into those mud red
eyes. If
there was accusation or accolade there, he didn’t see it, which was
best of all.
The
door opened for Angola, and she stepped outside, then closed it
behind her. Noé watched for a few seconds on the cameras to ensure
she was moving toward the tug under her own power, putting up a
convincing act. Bathed in the yellow light of that great ship's
running lights, she was made a silhouette of anyone. Noé got up and
went to the 76mm cannon's last shell - the white one.
No
matter what this ammunition was, he doubted it would make it through
the reentry-shielded hull of the tug. Very little would. But that was
not what he'd have to do, because when Angola approached, the door
would open.
And
it did.
And
Noé loaded the shell.
There
were figures, all black and anonymous to Noé, in that bright doorway
at the side of the ship, where the hull swung down to form an
embarking ramp. And when Noé adjusted the gun's aim, the clever
watchers in the ship took note, and the little men scrambled as the
ramp began to reverse - far too slow. He fired. The
shell burst inside the tug, a flash of pure white that spilled
angrily everywhere within, sparking, furious, and caustic. The
white phosphorus round.
The
door closed, but the ship burned in its own atmosphere, cooking .
Angola sat on the tarmac, limp, unsurprised, as the control room's
windows at the top of the ship filled with smoke and the little
bodies inside writhed, choking, and fell.
And
now there was no reason for anyone to come here anymore.
Noé
gathered her up, for she was too weak now even to hate him, and took
her back to the Cassandra, which flew away down the train
tracks.
These
it followed, its running lights off, its frame low to the ground,
until it came to a diversion in the track, which it took,
and this declined into the ground. Those who had gone before that
night had cast aside the barrier stones laid there once the old coal
mine had been used up, and Cassandra followed them into absolute
night.
This
was as close as his father ever had to a tomb. Noé took a few turns
in the vaulted, empty halls, past cowering forms in yellow rain
jackets, and set his vessel down to wait for the owners of the ground
over his head to finish what they had begun. He got out of the
Cassandra and started walking, carrying his baby and holding Angola's
hand, her
eye no detraction here.
No
one chased very long after zero asset men; there was nothing to take.
And that was all the
leverage remaining to keep what he most valued.
END