He should have waited for Calhoun to take out the other APC. It would have been the sound tactical decision, even though it would have meant waiting an extra second, giving the enemy another chance to take a shot at us. Delp went another way, went the way I might have gone if it had been me. He gave his jets another burst and landed on top of the second vehicle, grabbing the emitter of the heavy KE gun with his suit’s articulated left hand and yanking backward. The Vigilante ripped the weapon off its gimbal mount, leaving power cables torn and sparking, sending tantalum darts scattering over the roof of the APC.
Delp tossed the electromagnetic weapon to the pavement, then aimed his grenade launcher into the gap he’d left in the roof and fired a burst through it. Dust and smoke billowed out through the firing ports in the APC and it began to drift aimlessly across the road. Delp jumped down and sauntered away from the thing, and if a Vigilante’s face could have had a smug expression, it would have.
“Stop showing off, Delp,” Bang-Bang told him, sounding unimpressed.
“Enough distractions,” I said, not waiting for Verlander to get his shit together. “Move out, Delta. We have a deadline and we ain’t gonna be the company that was late to the Imperial Palace.”
Civilians. There were so many damned civilians here.
On their colonies, the farther out from Tahn-Skyyiah we’d been, the quicker the civilians had gotten their asses to shelters, stayed out of the way. It wasn’t that way here. They stood in the streets or on rooftops and watched us as we lumbered by, some of them simply staring with dark, sullen eyes, others throwing rocks or pieces of concrete, none even coming close. Males, all of them, old men and adolescents, except for a few prepubescent girls still young enough to live with their male relatives. The females moved to their own enclaves when they hit puberty, and we were going to do our damnedest to steer clear of them, according to command guidance.
It was morning here. It took me a second to remember. The primary star was concealed behind the ever-present overcast, and my optics showed me everything in bright daylight no matter what the current mood of the day, but it meant these people should have had plenty of warning to get to shelter. Yet here they were, acting as if this was a parade.
“Want me to launch a few grenades into the middle of the street?” Delp wondered from up front. “Get them back inside?”
“Not unless they start shooting at us with something big enough to cause trouble,” I declared. He might not have been talking to me, but I was the one who was going to be held responsible for that decision and I was damned well going to be the one who made it. “Don’t get decisively engaged.”
Nightmare images of Port Harcourt and Confluence flashed across my HUD like the suit’s threat computer was displaying them for me, of civilians killing us, us killing them, of them swarming us and leaving us no choice. But I first had a sense that trouble was coming when the civilians started to fade back into their houses, the oldest first, then the younger males. A few still watched, but crouched from behind cover, waiting for the show. I was about to warn Verlander when Delp warned me, first.
“Something’s coming.” He sounded damn calm about it. “Aircraft inbound, one o’clock, nap-of-the-earth.”
The civilians had called ahead a warning. I’d known they would, and nothing short of slaughtering them all would have stopped it. The dual-environment fighter was a fragile thing, lacking much in the way of armor, just an Scramjet aircraft that could make orbit, barely. It lacked the heavy armament and thick armor of an assault shuttle and counted mostly on numbers to overwhelm opposing aerospacecraft.
But it could sure kill the shit out of us.
“Scatter!” I ordered. “Take cover behind the buildings!”
I waited until the last, ignoring Billy Cano’s pleading to move, making sure no one froze and stood in the middle of the street. I’d seen it happen back in the Underground, a bunch of young kids trying to work a heist at the train station and someone had called the Transit Authority Police. The TAP’s had barged down the center aisle of the station, shouldering the crowds aside with their big, armored bulk and the threat of their sonic stunners and someone had yelled for us all to run. And we all had, except this one kid, a thirteen-year-old everyone called Ginger because of his red hair. He’d frozen in place and let them come and bowl him over and put him in restraints, and that was the last we’d ever seen of Ginger.
We apparently lacked any Gingers in this half of the company, since everyone got the hell out of the way, and I found myself the last one still standing in the street, watching the fighter line up to make its run down the residential street.
Unless that means I’m the Ginger.
“Sir, for fuck’s sake!” Bang-Bang yelled at me and I finally gave in and loped forward and to the right, ducking into a gap between buildings.
I didn’t retreat all the way back, partially because the alley was littered with trash and debris, depressingly like any human alleyway I’d encountered, but also because I needed to see. That was the part about being a leader that fit in with my personality, the need to know, the need to see for myself. It would have been easy to bury my head and wait until someone called the all-clear, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t want to die from a threat I didn’t see coming.
I
