House of Reeds

Lines of Jehanan soldiers were moving down the sides of the road at a brisk pace, rifles canted over their shoulders, bodies heavy with bags of ammunition, canteens, trenching tools and flaring helmets which reached from their eye-shields back down their necks. Armored cars, tanks and Saab-Scandia trucks rumbled past the infantry, raising a thick pall of yellow dust. The entire force was moving steadily north.

Felix swallowed and keyed her comm. 'Kyo, you should switch to camera six on the shuttle 'net. The slicks are rolling hot today.'

Kosho looked up, focused on an infinite distance, and the corners of her lips tightened minutely. 'I see. Those tanks are not of Imperial manufacture. Do you recognize them?'

'No.' Felix grimaced, panning the camera ahead, flitting along the column. 'They look like local work – but I thought they'd lost all their tech?'

'Apparently not.' Kosho's eyes twitched to the side. She tapped her comm. 'Pilot, swing more to the west. We want to avoid the altercation at one o'clock.'

Felix looked back to the eye-v and saw a sudden bloom of smoke and fire along the road. Jehanan soldiers scattered down from the dike, splashing through muddy fields. Tracers flashed out from a cluster of buildings sitting beside the road. One of the squat-looking Jehanan tanks was burning, vomiting flame from its engine compartment. The flash of heavy guns rippled between the buildings. Felix felt the shuttle bank again, and the view twisted. Suddenly they were looking down at a high angle into the crossroads.

The marching column was deploying – tanks rumbling ahead while squads peeled away into the fields and everything else ground to a halt – and she could see rows of hastily dug emplacements in and around the village. Jehanan artillerists scrambled to reload crew-served weapons in pits and she caught a glimpse of another native tank hiding in the shadow of a barnlike building, long gun traversing the elevated road. The entire machine bucked backwards, flame gouting from the long muzzle. Then the entire scene was gone as the shuttle continued to roar northwards.

'They're fighting each other?' Felix looked to the Sho-sa, hoping the officer had some clue what was going on. 'Different native factions?'

'We've more pressing problems than the disputes of local warlords.' Kosho was busily tapping commands into her hand comp. 'The Cornuelle is not responding to my direct hail.' Her dark eyes looked up, fixing Felix with a grim stare. The Heicho swallowed, seeing an unexpected ashen pallor tingeing the Nisei officer's usually immaculate face. 'Twelve anti-matter detonations have occurred in orbit. All comm relays are down, save ones which happened to be shielded. Navplot shows at least one starship destroyed.'

'Oh.' Felix tested her grip on the Macana between her legs. The assault rifle had a cheerful solidity. Her eyes flicked across the Marines seated on either side of the cargo bay, counting ammunition coils, grenades and gear. There'll be some ammunition in the shuttle stores, too. Plus we've got Helsdon and his engineers for repairs and support… 'We'd better make for the Army cantonment at Parus then. They'll need the shuttle for air support and medevac.'

Kosho stared at her for a long moment, dark eyes flat and emotionless. Then she stirred, nodded and began working with her comm again. 'The shuttle relay node is picking up scattered transmissions,' she said in a toneless voice. 'Sort through these while I try and raise Regimental command or the Legation. We need to know what the situation is before we set down.'

'Hai, kyo!' Felix tapped her comm, letting the node built into her combat armor range free, scanning up and down through the comm bands, looking for the distinctive signatures of Imperial transmissions.

Almost immediately she began to pick up garbled voices, the whine of encrypted bursts and stabbing eruptions of white noise. Grimacing at the violent sound, the Heicho pulled out her own comp and started to filter background noise and countermeasures out of the voice streams.

'Comm is pretty well shot,' she said on Kosho's command channel twenty minutes later. 'Someone's jamming the Regimental net and the only other clear transmission I can pick up is some scientist yelling for help down at Fehrupurй.'

The Sho-sa barely reacted. Kosho had been keeping an eye on the shuttle's flight path and trying to raise the Cornuelle. The ship had still not responded. With an effort, she focused on the Marine sitting across from her. 'The University excavations are under attack?'

Felix nodded, wondering how long it would take the officer to break out of her funk. 'It's a big operation, I guess. They've barricaded themselves in the camp and are keeping a mob of slicks back with sidearms and jury- rigged flamethrowers.' She glanced at her chrono and a map on her comp. 'If we turned around, we could be at the dig site in just under an hour…'

'No.' Kosho stirred. Her face was beginning to lose its ashen tone. 'We're heading directly to the Legation in Parus. I expect the Regimental cantonment to be under heavy attack by…whoever is attacking the Imperial presence here. We can set down in the gardens and disembark behind fortified walls.' The Sho- sa tabbed through a series of displays on her comp, then nodded to herself. 'There is a primary orbital uplink at the Residence as well. We can use that to punch through the jamming to the Cornuelle.'

Felix said nothing, carefully examining the service patches on the man squeezed in next to her. Purely hopeful of the Sho-sa to believe the ship's still up there and not shattered wreckage and a slowly expanding plume of radiation. She clenched her teeth together. They're all dead. Huйmac and Fitz and the captain and everyone. All just ash and vapor.

'The city is coming up, Sho-sa,' the Heicho said, recognizing the steadily increasing sprawl of buildings appearing in the camera view. They raced over kilometers of warehouses and rundown apartment blocks and scattered parks and gardens. The streets appeared to be deserted, which the Marine didn't think was a good sign. Huge clouds of black smoke blotted out the horizon, mixing with puffy rain clouds. 'Looks like there's fighting…'

'Turn right on the next boulevard,' Susan said briskly, one eye on a map of Parus on her comp and one eye on the forward camera feed. 'Keep low.'

The shuttle boomed across a district of row-houses and sliced into a shallow curve. Lines of trees blurred past beneath the wings, the shockwave of the aircraft's passing shaking their limbs and stirring up whirlwinds of leaves and dirt from the streets. Those few Jehanan still out fled into the doorways of abandoned shops or cowered under their runner-carts.

Empty intersections appeared and flashed past, and the sweeping arc of an ancient Haraphan road led them towards the center of the city. Tall buildings began to appear – the clifflike shapes of khus and the lower, elaborately domed structures of old palaces and temples. Kosho saw the first evidence of fighting – a bus of Imperial manufacture burning beside the road – and then running Jehanan with guns.

Brief glimpses of gangs of natives pillaging shops and overturning imported vehicles followed. A Jehanan tank rumbling down a side-street, main gun swinging from side to side. A line of civilians on a rooftop, handing packages from hand to hand out of a building gushing flame and smoke from its windows. Hundreds of snouted faces in a courtyard turning up at the booming sound of the shuttle's passage overhead. Clouds of sparkling glass bursting from the faces of buildings rocked by the supersonic shockwave rolling behind the shuttle.

I've got the Legation in sight. The pilot's voice cut across her reverie. We've got hostile fire.

Kosho stiffened, automatically checking her shockharness. The forward camera views expanded to fill her visor.

The dull red walls of the Legation were already shrouded with dirty gray smoke. Small-arms fire sparked here and there, but the majority of the haze was the result of a rippling wave of explosions bursting among the gardens and wooden buildings. Susan could see projectiles falling into the compound from the east. At least one structure inside the walls was already on fire.

'What is that?' she snapped, looking to Felix.

'Mortar fire,' the Heicho replied, working her comp. The camera view rippled and the spidery web of a radar track superimposed on the image. Trailing arcs from puffs of white smoke raised by bursting mortar rounds arrowed back over the wall to a nearby park. Susan zoomed part of the image on a subsidiary v-