Gueis’ apartment, where they quietly woke the family, got them dressed, and assembled them in their front room.
Normally the teams might have taken positions on the roof, but the gabled mansard roofs common in the district did not permit such a thing. Not only was there no place to hide on the roofs, but a misstep would have pitched them all into the street below.
Once in the Gueis’ apartment, Team 491 opened their duffels and began their transformation into soldiers. On Sula’s head was a helmet with a transparent faceplate onto which combat displays could be projected, and she wore on her torso a midnight-colored carapace that would protect her against small-arms fire and shrapnel. Over it all was a cape that projected active camouflage: it was like a giant video screen that showed whatever was on the reverse side. The image wasn’t perfect, and tended to waver with the folds of the cape, but if she stayed still it would fool the eye even at close ranges, and there was a hood she could pull over her head.
Each team member carried a pistol that fired silent, subsonic ammunition, a rifle, three grenades, and a combat knife. Each carried a gas mask in case the Naxids threw gas at them, and Macnamara assembled a large, tripod-mounted machine gun on the dining table that had been shoved under the apartment’s main window, one that would blast vehicles below with a torrent of fire from the quaint gable that slightly overhung the walk below. Macnamara didn’t even have to expose himself to accomplish this: he could control the gun with a remote pad, or even command it to shoot at anything that moved in a given area.
Below, as the eastern horizon began to glow with a pale jasper light, Sula looked over the ammat trees and watched the traffic move up and down the parkway, mostly heavy trucks bringing goods to the predawn city. The bridge over Highway 16 had sculpted iron railings ornamented in a bright alloy with a lobed, scalloped design that Sula recognized as Torminel in origin. The eleven Action Teams of Group Blanche were hidden in four of the buildings overlooking the ambush site, ready to pump death down on the stunned survivors of the bombing.
Sula’s nerves gave a warning tingle as she saw a truck come into view directly across the parkway from her on Highway 16, a twelve-wheeler that crept slowly down the road as it dipped beneath the broad bridge, and then didn’t come out the other side.
Across Highway 16 from her position, Sula knew, Lieutenant Captain Hong was standing over a command detonator. A drop of sweat trickled slowly down her face. Suddenly she wanted to tear the helmet off her head and take several long, cool breaths.
Sula saw signal lights flashing out of the corner of her eye, and she turned to see several trucks lined up by one of the parkway’s exits. She looked left and right, and saw that the parkway was nearly empty, the few remaining vehicles pulling off. The traffic control computers were clearing the road.
This was worth a message to Hong, Sula thought. She triggered her helmet mic and said, “Comm: to Blanche. Blanche, they’re clearing the parkway. I think we’ll have company soon. Comm: send.” As soon as the last word left her lips, her communicator coded the signal, compressed it, and sent it in a burst transmission to Hong across the parkway.
The response was just a click, no words to be overheard or decoded.
More lights flashed on the parkway, toward the city center, multicolored emergency flashers. Sula pressed her helmet to the window to see a swarm of police vehicles coming in a dense swarm down the parkway, moving in a compact mass in all six lanes. She thought about making another transmission but decided that Hong couldn’t help but see this for himself.
Sula drew back from the window as a river of black-and-yellow police cars poured past, some of them falling out, parking every few hundred paces on either side of the parkway. Sula’s nerves began an unpleasant little crawl as Naxid police emerged from the parked vehicles, their scuttling, centauroid bodies unmistakable in the growing light. They wore helmets and body armor covered with chameleon-weave that duplicated their flash-patterns, the red flashes of their beaded black scales that served as a silent, auxiliary form of language. Each carried a rifle in its forelimbs. They were flashing continually at each other, one pattern after another displayed on their chests and backs, and Sula wished she could read their patterns.
Well, she thought, that’s it. The truck bomb might still work, but surely the rest of the operation couldn’t continue. She could count more police directly below than there were members of Group Blanche, and within minutes many more could arrive, racing down the parkway from right and left. Any second now, she should hear the order for everyone but the team with the detonator to withdraw while they still could.
The order didn’t come. Sula pulled off her helmet and ran a gloved hand through her hair to comb out the sweat.
She wondered if she should transmit to Hong suggesting withdrawal, and then a picture rose in her mind, Hong’s expression of deep concern, his question,Are you all right about this?
Sula would wait. She took several deep breaths, and then she waited some more.
She turned to scan the room. Macnamara was silent and stoic, his hands flexing as if eager to grasp his machine gun; and Spence was pale, looking as if she wished she were in one of those romantic videos of hers, the ones that guaranteed a happy ending.
It occurred to Sula that she had never led other people in combat. Everything she had done against the Naxids had been done entirely on her own, strapped in her pinnace while it shepherded a volley of missiles toward the enemy. The missiles had not possessed beating hearts or bodies of flesh, not like Spence or Macnamara or the Gueis, whose daughter was still gazing at her video game with intent eyes that might soon be called on to witness a massacre…
Sula realized that she would much rather be alone in this. Her own life was nothing, a breath in the wind, of no value to anyone. Responsibility for others was by far the greater burden.
More flashing lights. Sula peered out of the window and saw a pair of police vehicles moving slowly down Highway 16, then disappearing beneath the bridge where the bomb truck waited. The driver of the truck, code name 257, was still in the truck, having feigned a breakdown. He might be arrested, or decide to do something dramatic.
Shit-shit-shit…The word drummed its way through Sula’s brain. She picked up her rifle from where it waited against the wall, and held it in her gloved hands. Taking this as a signal, Macnamara stepped to where the machine gun waited and put a hand on its stock. Sula waved him back.
“Use the control pad,” she said. “Mark out everything in the street or on the sidewalk as a target.”
Macnamara nodded to himself, then stepped back to perform this task. Once he triggered the gun, it would fire automatically at anything in the target area until told to stop or until its considerable ammunition reserve was exhausted. It was ideal for covering a withdrawal by the rest of the team.
The rifles held by Sula and Spence were less convenient, insofar as they needed a person to point them at the enemy and squeeze the trigger. But the view through their sights could be projected on the helmet faceplates of the operators, which meant that neither Sula nor Spence actually had to flaunt their heads in the way of enemy fire. Only their hands and forearms need be exposed, with the trigger permanently depressed so that the gun would fire automatically at anything designated a target.
She could feel her pulse beating high in her throat. She wondered if she should step back from the window if everything was about to blow up right this instant.
Sula gave an involuntary start as her hand comm chirped. She reached for it, encountered instead her camouflage shroud, and then groped inside its folds, all the while wondering why someone had called her hand comm instead of using the far safer burst transmissions of the radio.
By the time she opened the comm and pressed it to her ear, it had stopped chirping. Voices were already engaged in a dialogue.
“What’s the situation, then?” Hong’s voice.
“The police tell me I’ve got to move the truck or get myself arrested.” The other voice was two-five-seven’s. “I a-told them we’ve got a tow on the way. I a-told them this here is a valuable piece of property and that I ain’t a-going ta take the responsibility of running a twelve-wheeler on just one fuel cell, but they sez I got ta. So I told a-them what I’d do, I’d like call my supervisor like.”
Sula winced. Two-five-seven was a team leader and a Peer—a highly educated and cultivated young man— and he was doing his best to speak in some manner of working-class accent, and failing miserably.
If the Naxids didn’t hear something wrong in this, then they were deaf to all nuance.
Two-five-seven had done something reasonably clever, though. He’d rung a number that would contact all the teams at once, so that all would know what was going on and none would panic and try something
