Complete Short Fiction, page 123
“Come on, Landor, you serious? Me? She’d as soon kill me as assign me latrine duty. Of course, those things wouldn’t smell half so bad if that vent was working right . . .”
“But why, man?” Landor was almost in tears. “What she got against you so bad?”
Tutun slapped Landor on the shoulder. If Landor’s suit was at the regulation setting, he felt it on his skin. “Because I’m friends with you, hump. That’s pretty much the story. She sees that it unfits me for command. Makes me untrustworthy. Poor taste in shithole bros. But you know what? I’m sticking with you. To the end.”
“Screw you, man!” Landor stepped away, as if ready to throw a punch.
“This ‘Angle’ thing is still bugging me,” Kingsman said.
“Typo, for crissakes.” Landor directed his rage at Kingsman. “How else? That’s the first report we got, after Kalatra. So that’s what we stuck with. Like a prophecy, or something. That’s what most prophesies are, right? Typos and ‘what did you say?’ and shit. Like that. So you’re the Angler. We know you.”
“Mistakes can be intel too,” Tutun said. “Are we at the shit face yet?”
“We’re not looking for combat,” Kingsman said. “This is recon. You’ve done recon?”
“Not with you. Never with you. And I didn’t put getting killed on my list of things to do before I die.”
“Good one, Tun!” Landor chortled, wanting to be friends again.
“Come on,” Kingsman said. “We’ve got a specific thing to check out, and we’re done.”
They scrambled over a pile of rubble into a ruined kitchen cubby. Not too far above them started the Phob-occupied areas, where there were other kitchens that still worked, still fed people. Tutun pushed his fingers against a stretch of wall still stained with the remnants of old food.
According to local informants, there were several different political organizations in the area: a communal supply organization, a gang-run territory around a power unit, and a safety group of families that had started dictating personal dress and rules of conscience. Aside from confusing the geography, Phobos’ ruling clique had explicitly dissolved itself into dozens of contradictory and uncooperative political units. No single group had the authority or power to surrender the moon to the invading force. It was self-binding on a vast and deranged scale.
“This way.” Tutun blew a hole in the wall.
Kingsman was on point. He knew the other two could let him get ahead, and then leave him there. But if he kept worrying about things like that, he’d completely lose effectiveness. He went through the wall, and into the narrow access space that kinked up from there. After a moment, he heard the other two behind him. All around them was the whisper of occupied apartments.
From all evidence available to Ferhat, the main water lines ran through this volume. They supplied the unconquered parts of Phobos. If they could be seized, resistance would have to end.
That assumption had been the cornerstone of Ferhat’s dispositions. But she looked for disconfirming evidence. Kingsman could see that that was her particular gift, a rare one. That she could test and accept his evidence, despite not liking or trusting him, was even rarer.
Kingsman already suspected that the old water channels were no longer in use, that they were now a decoy and a trap. But he hadn’t invested himself and the lives of his troops in another interpretation of the intel. It was easier for him.
The three men came to the separation point. Tutun pushed off down a side passage, leaving Kingsman and Landor curled up like grubs, listening to the sounds of children’s voices, dishes, a rumbling piece of cleaning equipment just below them. They waited in darkness and silence, their very metabolisms slowed to minimize the burble of their blood. They would outwait anyone who might have heard them and raised the threat level.
Several hours later Landor shook himself, tapped Kingsman’s foot, and set off the microdetonations.
They dropped slowly into someone’s living room.
“Lie down, lie down!” Landor was yelling before his feet even reached the floor. “Hands over head. Down, down, down!”
The apartment had a complicated three-dimensional layout, with sleeping and other private areas dropping down below the entertainment/eating area that was their initial target. It hadn’t been chosen because it was an easy tactical problem. It had been chosen because it was the most likely spot for Kingsman to test the new hypothesis.
And because he had information that led him to think Elise might have been around this volume in the days and hours before the Union assault on Phobos. That was something he hadn’t shared with Ferhat.
It was a high room with lights shining upward onto a domed ceiling, a ceiling that now had a hole in it. A few fragments floated down after Kingsman and Landor.
The front of the room opened out onto the main corridor for this residential area. Kingsman, as practiced, jumped over and put up the privacy screens, then shot a preliminary defensive net across the openings. He could hear the hum of conversation from the corridor as people went about their business. If things went as planned, the three men would be gone before anyone got suspicious.
A woman and two children had been sitting down to a meal. For a long moment they just sat straight up as the two armored figures dropped through their ceiling and food flew.
Then, as requested, they got on the floor.
Landor secured their wrists and ankles. “This is a temporary occupation.” He quoted the standard message. “You will be informed of what to do. You will not be harmed. You are not the target. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
To Kingsman: “Someone ran. We’ve given them enough head start. Chase them down to the left bottom.”
Kingsman had already launched himself out of the dining area and down the passage to the lower sleeping spaces.
There he was, a boy, maybe early teens, screaming. Why fire a disrupter grenade when you could use a member of the household to do the job for you? He couldn’t convey any information, only panic. Kingsman let him keep his lead.
The apartment was packed with stuff. Clothes, arranged by color and texture, filled shelves. Elaborate hats dangled from hooks. Spherical aquatic environments full of fish and other creatures hung from the ceiling. Scurrying toy animals crunched underfoot. You took your life in your hands moving around a Phobos apartment even in peacetime.
You needed the clothes to catch skin fragments, because otherwise the moon would have filled with masses of dust, but the rest was just for entertainment.
Turning a corner, Kingsman ran into a woman, her black hair wild, wearing only a pale-blue sleepsuit.
“Please stop,” Kingsman said. “Stop or be processed.”
Instead, she kicked over a case of decorative plates, which spun slowly into Kingsman’s path.
Two more kids came out, one crying, one sleepily rubbing his eyes. Not in the records—some kind of sleepover or other annoying social event.
There was a lower exit here, one leading to waste disposal and other support functions. If she got out here, she could raise the alarm, and the local militia would be on them. She half ran, half swam, staying ahead of Kingsman.
As she reached the utility room, Tutun punched through the wall, showering her with fragments.
“Please lie down,” he said.
A long moment, and she did so.
“Why is this one part out in the open like this?” Tutun pushed his face up to the braided stream of water that went from one wall to the other in the small room.
Kingsman stopped himself from pointing out that, at the velocity it was moving, the water could rip Tutun’s nose off. Either Tutun knew that, or it wouldn’t make any difference what Kingsman said. “If we’re right, they jury-rigged the whole cycle, fast. Used what they had. This jump makes enough noise that it sounds like a lot more water than it is. Plus it looks cool.”
Human physiology required water, lots of it. Every cell needed it. It brought nutrients into the body and took waste out. And regardless of technical advances, it was just as massive and bulky as it had been when the Sumerians started digging canals. Every society in the solar system spent a lot of time and energy managing it. Supply failures led to a quick and unpleasant death.
Extra clothes hung on the room’s walls. The Phobs seemed to take this pretty casually. But that was part of the plan. There was absolutely no sign from outside that this was here.
“I saw something downstairs.” Tutun pulled his nose safely away from the water. “There’s a big ass bladder down there. Heavy bag bigger than this room. It could support this family for months.”
Those bags were a specialty of Elise’s, Kingsman thought. She’d saved a lot of lives with them in asteroid relief efforts.
Or maybe they were just water bags, like any emergency service would have on hand. He had to be carefully how many hypotheses he was juggling at any one time. He could float away from reality and never get back.
Kingsman pulled out a syringe and put the needle almost parallel to the water. “If this is just a short recirculating loop, like we suspect, the radioactive tracer will come back in a couple of minutes. I’d be happy not to see it.”
“Nah,” Tutun said. “I doubt you’re ever happy being wrong, no matter what you say.”
Landor was in the other room monitoring the family. The two mothers were sullen, sitting cross armed in the kitchen, refusing to answer any questions, or chat about family life, despite Landor’s somewhat ponderous efforts to create a calm situation. The kids, however, saw this as an opportunity to continue this sleepover with their friends. They had piled decorative cushions in a corner of the main family room and were playing a kind of hide and seek game with them.
The makeshift fortress had collapsed again. Giggling, kids were crawling out from under it.
At that moment, the black-haired woman Tutun had captured in the lower hall brightened up. “Where did you say you were from?”
Pleased at any attention, Landor turned to her. “A little town in the Great Plains, called—”
“Count the kids!” Tutun bellowed. “How many kids in there?”
Landor’s head snapped and his eyes wiggled back and forth. The kids chose this moment to run madly around, pretending to play hide and seek. “One . . . hey, there’s one missing, man. That skinny kid. Where—?”
“He’s suffocating!” the other woman said. “Help him!”
It wasn’t remotely persuasive.
“Watch their asses. You guys, stop moving. Now.” Tutun toed through the cushions, weapon at ready, while the kids stood in a row and watched, wide eyed. “Where does this go?” He had found a small opening in the base of the wall, barely large enough even for the child who had gone missing.
“He’s going to die in there!” The woman wasn’t giving up. “No air. Get him out! Please, mister. . . .”
It had gotten silent outside the apartment. Tutun knelt and looked into the hole, which looked like a passage for a pet. “This leads into the corridor. He’s raised the alarm by this point.”
“So let’s get the hell out of here!” Landor glanced up at the ceiling hole, which dangled dust-covered fibers.
“Easy way to get caught, hump,” Tutun said. “These guys are fast.”
“No kidding,” the black-haired woman said. “You better surrender right now. I’ll put in a good word for you.”
“Thanks,” Landor said. “We all appreciate it.”
“You better appreciate it. It’s that, or death.”
Tutun glanced at Kingsman. “How much longer do you need to know you’re wrong?”
“Oh, man.” Landor couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “We gotta move.”
“Just a few seconds more,” Kingsman said, looking at the water, and the radiation sensor he had placed next to it. How long would the longest possible closed loop be? Or what if he was actually wrong, and he’d never see the tracer?
“Let us go!” The black-haired woman was getting agitated. “Otherwise, it’s bad news for all of us.”
“Bad news is something I’m always willing to share, honey.” Tutun’s eyes flicked back and forth as he scanned up through the ceiling. “Yep. Sly, quiet. But they’re there.” He started to bring up his weapon.
Kingsman pushed it down. “Will you do anything but make a lot of noise and let them know we’re on to them?”
“They’ll move on us soon, and that’ll be it.”
They could try to keep these people as hostages and negotiate a way out. But protracted hostage situations seldom turned out well in combat theaters. The opposition didn’t value the hostages as much as you thought they should. Decisions tended to turn brutally pragmatic. People could feel sorry about it later.
But what other options did they have? The route they had taken in was now cut off. There was only the front of the unit, on the main hallway, or the smaller bottom exit, in the utility corridor. The front here was now covered by a mob of angered Phobs. Presumably they’d covered the bottom exit too, but, Kingsman remembered, that one had some interesting space constraints that made it hard to surveil thoroughly.
“Tutun,” Kingsman said. “Just down the passage from the utility area—”
“Egress there. We looked at it, if you will remember—”
“I remember, soldier. At that point we rejected it as too risky, but right about now it’s looking pretty good. How would you get down to it? I mean, without getting killed.”
“Thanks for qualifying that, sir.”
The three of them sat and stared at each other. The detector beeped.
Landor looked startled. “So it is . . .”
“You’re surprised?” Kingsman said. “You thought I was wrong?”
“Sure I did. Sir.”
So, they were calling him “sir.” That either meant they were starting to respect him, or they were starting to be sure they were going to die.
“Um,” Landor said. “The water bag. The bladder.”
Kingsman got it instantly. “Brilliant, Landor. You have hidden depths. Tutun.”
Tutun kept his eyes on the prisoners. “What?”
“Let them go.”
Tutun hesitated.
“We don’t really have a choice. No reason to increase civilian casualties.”
“That it? They get out, we die, like everyone else you command?” Tutun, enraged, stuck a gun in a crying child’s face. “What did they do to earn that?”
Everyone knew what had led to his disastrous decision on Kalatra. Or at least they thought they did.
“They had a sleepover.” Kingsman stayed calm as he unhooked the mesh over the front openings. “They sat down in their PJs to have some breakfast. They built a fort out of pillows. Maybe they wanted to skip a day of school so that they could play with their friends some more. None of us earn life, Tutun. We just get it as a gift. Are you qualified to decide who doesn’t get to open theirs?”
“Yeah, hump.” Landor’s voice was shaking. “We’re getting out. Just . . . he’s got a plan. Don’t you see that? He’s got something that might get us out.”
“It will take those outside a few seconds to process that these are their people,” Kingsman said. “Let’s use that.”
“Run!” Tutun screamed at the family. It was a genuinely terrifying sound. “Before you get killed!”
The kids scattered first, the mothers after them, their toes grabbing the tiny bumps on the sides and bottom of the corridor with the quick reflexes of those who had lived their whole lives in low, spinning gravity.
Their rescuers had concealed themselves at a corner. A couple of them now darted out to gather in and protect the children. Kingsman and Tutun took advantage of the moment of distraction to hang out of their entrance and shoot the Phobs when they exposed themselves. Kingsman got one clean shot, Tutun, younger and faster, two. At least one of their opponents went down and was pulled back out of sight.
Kingsman hoped they would think that was the sole point of the exercise.
Kingsman and Tutun tumbled down the passage to the lower bedrooms. As soon as they were down, Landor hit the microdetonators he had installed in the few seconds he’d had. There was a tiny crack, and the wall of the water storage area crumbled into a side corridor.
There was the big water bladder, a dull red with a rough surface. It had embedded logos but those had been plastered over with stickers from the Coruscating Cooperative: “Water of Life, courtesy of your allies, CC.” A childish bit of advertising, but new entities had to establish legitimacy however they could.
All three men put their shoulders against the floppy water storage bladder.
It rolled into the hallway. They could hear the buzz-snap of fire from the other side, but that amount of water could absorb an incredible amount of energy.
Including kinetic, provided by their muscles. It took a few seconds of maximal effort to get it rolling, a slow few feet per second. Kingsman was gasping for breath. But it was moving faster.
The bladder was well-designed—and it was one of Elise’s. Kingsman was sure it was her design, and the original logo that of Nam Lo’s relief organization, Soft Landing. Presumably it was leaking water from the other side. But it did not give way or explode.
“It’s coming up.” Landor spoke calmly. “Let it roll. . . . Just a bit farther . . . go!”
The rolling bladder cleared a side passage. In the few seconds it gave them, Landor dove down it, followed by Tutun and Kingsman. They jumped over the squatting Landor, who placed another set of detonators. Another crack, and the passage crumbled into rubble behind them.
“How did you know to look for that?” Uy looked up at the diagram of the Demavend district as it loomed over him and took a sip of his drink.
“What?” Ferhat said. “You mean this cross passage?” A line appeared in response to her finger gesture, showing where she had taken the unmapped corridors into account.
“Yes. The location of that hit our intel stream . . . when, Servan?”
The young staffer flicked a pale-lashed eyelid to bring up the data. “Eight hours ago, sir. Rumors before, from local informants. Marked unreliable. But a detonation there gave us a nice solid echo.”
