being fought off by private guards; many of the looters were themselves being mugged by organized gangs.
They were on Nanjing Road, a broad thoroughfare leading straight to the Bund and the Huang Pu, lined with four– and five-story buildings so that many windows looked out over them, any one of which might have contained a sniper.
A few of them did contain snipers, Carl realized, but many of these were shooting across the street at each other, and the ones who were firing into the street could have been shooting at anyone. Carl saw one fellow with a laser-sighted rifle emptying clip after clip into the street, and he reckoned that this constituted a clear and present danger; so at a moment when their forward progress had stalled momentarily, while the Zulus were waiting for an especially desperate Coastal/Fist melee to resolve itself ahead of them, Carl planted his feet, swung his rifle up to his shoulder, took aim, and fired. In the dim fire– and torch-light rising up from the street, he could see powder explode from the stone window frame just above the sniper's head. The sniper cringed, then began to sweep the street with his laser, looking for the source of the bullet.
Someone jostled Carl from behind. It was Spence, who had been hit with something and lost the use of his leg. A Fist was in the Colonel's face. Carl rammed the butt of the rifle into the man's chin, sending him backward into the melee with his eyes rolled up into their sockets. Then he levered in another shell, raised the weapon to his shoulder again, and tried to find the window with his sniper friend.
He was still there, tracing a ruby-red line patiently across the boiling surface of the crowd. Carl took in a deep breath, released it slowly, prayed that no one would bump into him, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle butted him hard in the shoulder, and at the same moment he saw the sniper's rifle fall out of the window, spinning end over end, the laser beam sweeping through the smoke and steam like the trace on a radar scope.
The whole thing had probably been a bad idea; if any of the other snipers had seen this, they'd be wanting to get rid of him, whatever their affiliation. Carl levered in another shell and then let the rifle dangle from one hand, pointed down at the street, where it wouldn't be so conspicuous. He got the other hand into Spence's armpit and helped him continue down the street. The ends of Spence's mustache wiggled as he continued with his endless and unflappable line of patter; Carl couldn't hear a word but nodded encouragingly. Not even the most literal-minded neo-Victorian could take that stiff-upper-lip thing seriously; Carl realized now that it was all done with a nod and a wink. It was not Colonel Spence's way of saying that he wasn't scared; it was, rather, a code of sorts, a face-saving way for him to admit that he was terrified half out of his wits, and for Carl to admit likewise.
Several Fists rushed them at once; the Zulus got two, the leading Israeli got one, but another came in and bounced his knife from the Israeli's knife-proof jacket. Carl raised the rifle, clamping the stock between his arm and his body, and fired from the hip. The recoil nearly knocked the weapon out of his hand; the Fist practically did a backflip.
He couldn't believe they had not reached the waterfront yet; they had been doing this for hours. Something prodded him hard in the back, causing him to stumble forward; he looked back over his shoulder and saw a man trying to run him through with a bayonet. Another man ran up and tried to wrench the rifle out of Carl's hand.
Carl, too startled to respond for a moment, finally let go of Spence, reached across, and poked him in the eyes. A great explosion sounded in his ear, and he looked over to see that Spence had twisted himself round and shot the attacker who had the bayonet. The Israeli who had been guarding their rear had simply vanished. Carl raised his rifle toward the people who were converging on them from the rear; that and Spence's pistol opened up a gratifying clear space in their wake. But something more powerful and terrifying was driving more people toward them from the side, and as Carl tried to see what it was, he realized that a score of Chinese people were now between him and the Zulus. The looks on their faces were pained and panicky; they were not attacking, they were being attacked.
Suddenly all of the Chinese were gone. Carl and Colonel Spence found themselves commingled with a dozen or so Boers– not just men, but women and children and elders too, a whole laager on the move. All of them surged forward instinctively and reabsorbed the vanguard of Carl's group. They were a block from the waterfront.
The Boer leader, a stout man of about fifty, somehow identified Carl Hollywood as the leader, and they quickly redeployed what forces they had for the final push to the waterfront. The only thing Carl remembered of this conversation was the man saying, 'Good. You've got Zulus.'
The Boers in the vanguard were carrying some sort of automatic weapons firing tiny nanotech high-explosive rounds, which, indiscriminately used, could have turned the crowd into a rampart of chewed meat; but they fired the weapons in disciplined bursts even when the charging Fists penetrated to within a sword's length. From time to time, one of them would raise his head and sweep a row of windows with continuous automatic fire; riflemen would tumble out of the darkness and spin down into the street like rag dolls. The Boers must be wearing some kind of night vision stuff.
Colonel Spence suddenly felt very heavy on Carl's arm, and he realized that the Colonel was unconscious, or close to it. Carl slung the rifle over his shoulder, bent down, and picked up Spence in a fireman's carry.
They arrived at the waterfront and established a defensive perimeter. The next question was: Were there any boats? But this part of China was half underwater and seemed to have as many boats as bicycles. Most of them seemed to have found their way downstream to Shanghai during the gradual onslaught of the Fists. So when they arrived at the water's edge, they discovered thousands of people with boats, eager to transact some business. But as the Boer leader rightly pointed out, it would be suicide to split up the group among several tiny, unpowered craft; the Fists were paying high bounties for the heads of barbarians. Much safer to wait for one of the larger vessels out in the channel to make its way to shore, where they could cut a deal with the captain and climb on board as a group.
Several vessels, ranging from motor yachts to fishing trawlers, were already vying to be the first to make that deal, shouldering their way inexorably through the organic chaff of small boats crowded along the shore.
A rhythmic beat had begun to resonate in their lungs. At first it sounded like drumbeats, but as it drew closer it developed into the sound of hundreds or thousands of human voices chanting in unison:
An army of hoplites– professional warriors in battle armor– was marching toward the river, a score abreast, completely filling the width of Nanjing Road. These were not Fists; they were the regular army, the vanguard of the Celestial Kingdom, and Carl Hollywood was appalled to realize that the only thing now standing between them and their three-decade march to the banks of the Huang Pu was Carl Hollywood, his .44, and a handful of lightly armed civilians.
A nice-looking yacht had penetrated to within a few meters of the shore. The remaining Israeli, who was fluent in Mandarin, had already commenced negotiations with its captain.
One of the Boers, a wiry grandmother with a white bun on her head and a black bonnet pinned primly over that, conferred briefly with the Boer leader. He nodded once, then caught her face in his hands and kissed her.
She turned her back on the waterfront and began to march toward the head of the advancing column of Celestials. The few Chinese crazy enough to remain along the waterfront, respecting her age and possible madness, parted to make way for her.
The negotiations over the boat appeared to have hit some kind of snag. Carl Hollywood could see individual hoplites vaulting two and three stories into the air, crashing headfirst into the windows of the Cathay Hotel.
The Boer grandmother doggedly made her way forward until she was standing in the middle of the Bund. The leader of the Celestial column stepped toward her, covering her with some kind of projectile weapon built into one arm of his suit and waving her aside with the other. The Boer woman carefully got down on both knees in the middle of the road, clasped her hands together in prayer, and bowed her head.
Then she became a pearl of white light in the mouth of the dragon. In an instant this pearl grew to the size of an airship. Carl Hollywood had the presence of mind to close his eyes and turn his head away, but he didn't have time to throw himself down; the shock wave did that, slamming him full-length into the granite paving-stones of the waterfront promenade and tearing about half of his clothes from his body.
Some time passed before he was really conscious; he felt it must have been half an hour, though debris was still raining down around him, so five seconds was probably more like it. The hull of the white yacht had been caved in on one side and most of its crew flung into the river. But a minute later, a fishing trawler pulled up and took the barbarians on board with only perfunctory negotiations. Carl nearly forgot about Spence and almost left him there; he found that he no longer had the strength to raise the Colonel's body from the ground, so he dragged him on board with the help of a couple of young Boers– identical twins, he realized, maybe thirteen years old. As they
