Holland hesitated, frowning uncertainly. “I don’t know, sir. I can see it—I can understand the reasons for it, all right. But it doesn’t…” He looked quickly at Garvin, obviously wondering whether it was safe to go on.
Matt chuckled again, more freely. “I won’t eat you just because you tell me that what we did doesn’t feel right. This is still a free republic.” He gestured at the dark buildings, and his face twisted with regret. “Out there, it isn’t, yet. But it’s the same as it was when Gus and I knocked on your father’s wall and told him what his choice was, the same way Gus knocked on my wall. Gus was wrong, that night after the ambush. He was right, but he was wrong. We can make them do things our way—if we knock louder than Gus ever thought we could make ourselves do.” He turned away from the window and put his hand on Holland’s shoulder.
“Better go change the downstairs guard, Jack.”
He looked down at the moonlit rubble that had been the next building. He could almost read the sign that surmounted the tumble of brick, metal, glass, and flesh.
“Yes, sir,” Holland said. He turned to go. “Merry Christmas, sir.”
SECTION TWO
PROLOGUE
The ground in the foothills was rocky, covered by loose gravel, and treacherous. The car heaved itself up over a sharp ridge with torturous slowness and pancaked down on the other side with a hard smash. The steering levers whipped back and forth just short of the driver’s kneecaps, and the motors raced.
“No more seeing, Joe,” the driver told Custis. “Lights?”
“No. Bed ’er down, Lew.”
The driver locked his treads, and cut the switches. The damper rods slammed home in the power pile, and the motors ground down to a stop. The car lay dead.
Custis slid down out of the turret. “All right, let’s button up. We sleep inside tonight.”
The driver dogged his slit shutters and Hutchinson, the machinegunner, began stuffing rags into the worn gasproof seal on his hatch. Robb, the turret gunner, dogged down the command hatch. “Load napalm,” Custis told him, and Robb pulled the racks of fragmentation shells he’d been carrying in the guns all day. He fitted new loads, locked the breeches, and pulled the charging handles. “Napalm loaded,” he checked back in his colorless voice.
“Acoustics out,” Custis said, and Hutchinson activated the car’s listening gear.
Henley, standing where the twin .75s could pound his head to a pulp with their recoiling breeches, asked: “What’re you going to do now, Custis?”
“Eat.” Joe broke out five cans of rations, handed three to the crew and one to Henley. “Here.” He squatted down on the deck and peeled back the lid of the can. Bending it between his fingers, he scooped food into his mouth. His eye sockets were thick with black shadow from the overhead light. His face was tanned to the cheekbones, and dead white from there to the nape of his recently shaved skull. The goggles had left a wide outline of rubber particles around his eyes. “We’ll see all the bandits you want in the morning.”
“You mean you’ve made us sitting ducks on purpose?”
“I mean if I was a bandit I wouldn’t talk to nothin’ but a sitting duck, and I’m under contract to let you talk to some bandits.”
“Not from a position of weakness!”
Custis looked up and grinned. “That’s life, Major. Honest, that’s the way life is.”
“There’s somebody,” Custis said at daybreak. He stepped away from the periscope eyepiece and let Henley take his look at the soldiery squatted on the rocks outside.
There were men all around the battlewagon, in plain sight, looking at it stolidly. They were in all kinds of uniforms, standardized only by black-and-yellow shoulder badges. Some of the uniforms dated two or three Republics back. All of them were ragged, and a few were completely unfamiliar. West Coast, maybe.
Or maybe even East.
The men on the rocks were making no moves. They waited motionless under the battlewagon’s guns. At first glance, the only arms they seemed to have were rifles that had to be practically smoothbores by now—and it had taken Custis a while to find out why these men, who looked like they’d known what they were doing, were trusting in muskets against a battlewagon. There were five two-man teams spread in a loose circle around the car. Each team had an rifle fitted with a grenade launcher. The men aiming them had them elevated just right to hit the car’s turtledeck with their first shots.
“Black-and-yellow,” Henley said angrily.
Custis shrugged. “No blue-and-silver, that’s true,” he answered, giving Henley the;needle again. “But that was thirty years ago. It might still be Berendtsen.”
Custis went back to the periscope eyepiece for another look at the grenadiers. Each of them had an open, lead-lined box beside him with more grenades in it.
Custis grunted. Napalm splashed pretty well, but it would take one full traverse of the turret to knock out all five teams. The turret took fifteen seconds to revolve 360 degrees, while a grenadier could pull a trigger and have a grenade lofting in, say, one second’s time. A few seconds later the grenade would have covered the outside of the car with radioactive dust that would make it death to stay inside, or death to get out. Nor could the battlewagon get out of the grenade’s way in time—the basis of an interdictory weapon like this was that it would be used as soon as you made the slightest move, but, you could believe, no sooner than that.
“Stalemate,” Custis grunted. “But no worse than that. Generous of ’em.” He unbuckled his web belt and took off his .45. He walked under the command hatch and unclogged it.
“What’re you doing?” Henley demanded.
“Starting.” He threw the hatch back and pulled himself up, getting a foothold on the saddle and climbing out on top of the turret. He flipped the hatch shut behind him and stood up.
“My name’s Custis,” he said carefully as the men raised their rifles. “Hired out to the Seventh Republic. I’ve got a man here who wants to talk to your boss.”
There was no immediate answer. He stood and waited. He heard the hatch scrape beside him, and planted a boot on it before Henley could lift it.
“What about, Custis?” a voice asked from off to one side, out of range of his eyes. The voice was old and husky, kept in tight check. Custis wondered if it might not tremble, were the old man to let it.
He weighed his answer. There was no sense to playing around. Maybe he was going to get himself killed right now, and maybe he wasn’t, but if he played games here he might never get a straight answer to anything.
“Theodore Berendtsen,” he said. “About him.”
The name dropped into these men like a stone. He saw their faces go tight, and he saw heads jerk involuntarily. Well, the British had stood guard over Napoleon’s grave for nineteen years.
“Turn this way, Custis,” the same worn voice said.
Custis risked taking his eyes off the grenadiers. He turned toward the voice.
Standing a bit apart from his troops was a thin, weather-burned man with sharp eyes hooded under thick white eyebrows. He needed a shave badly. His marble-white hair was shaggy. There were deep creases in his face, pouches under his eyes, and a dry wattle of skin under his jaw.
“I’m the commander here,” he said in his halting voice. “Bring out your man.”
