From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:
All along the flooded fringes of the Andes the rafts drifted. Nobody knew how many there were, how many people were struggling to survive out there on the breast of the sea.
Nathan Lammockson posted troops along the shifting coastline to stop them landing. There was never any shortage of volunteers for that duty.
And he sent out boats among the rafts. The boats carried doctors, but not to administer to the sick.
Nathan had long been digging up old population-reduction philosophies and techniques. Even before the flood began there had been voluntary human extinction movements, developed by those who believed mankind was essentially a scourge and that its sole remaining duty was to restore Earth to its pre-human condition as best as possible, before submitting gracefully to the dark. Lammockson argued that here you had a rationalization for not fleeing from the encroaching flood, for submitting to it. So the doctors in the boats were “suicide missionaries,” trained to counsel refugees to accept their fate. They were equipped with appropriate medications.
Other missionaries, not sanctioned by Lammockson, sailed among the desolate raft communities. One motorboat carried a preacher, gunning up and down the shore, haranguing with a loudhailer. This is how it feels to live in a world with an intervening god, he said. How mankind was back in the days of the Old Testament. Nathan considered shutting him up, but decided he was doing as effective a job as his suicide doctors.
The population of the rafts wasn’t fixed. Rafts broke up, or were cannibalized by others. Or they drifted away, over the horizon, to a fate nobody on the land cared to imagine. But there were always more, rising up from the flooded towns.
Kristie watched this. Isolated from Cusco for years, she wondered if there was anybody in there who fretted as she did about how long this could go on.
69
August 2035
Ollantay’s ragtag army broke through Project City’s outer perimeters near the airport.
The invasion force had no armor or heavy weapons. But it did have a lot of people, the Quechua and the other dispossessed from the highlands, and a good number of the resentful poor from P-ville, as well as hundreds of able-bodied adults from Walker City. And it did have an awful lot of AK47s and ammunition to spare.
Few died in the desultory exchanges of fire around the airport. Nathan’s forces were too well dug in to be vulnerable to Ollantay’s crude tactics, but on the other hand they seemed reluctant to deploy the heavy weapons they must have possessed. When the skirmish was over, the rebels left a significant detachment of Lammockson’s forces pinned down, holed up in the terminal building. Ollantay presented the stalemate as a victory, because it left this quadrant of Cusco largely undefended.
Then he led his army into the city from the southeast.
The invaders worked their way up a broad, deserted street called the Avenida El Sol, which, according to the elderly maps downloaded into Gary’s sleeve patch, ran straight into the old center of Cusco.
The rebels broke into two files which proceeded down either side of the road, in the cover of the buildings, keeping away from the center line where they would be vulnerable to sniper fire. Such rudimentary military tactics had been grafted into Ollantay’s thinking by a handful of military veterans among the Okies of Walker City. But inexperience showed in the cowering, nervous way the invaders huddled in doorways, clinging to scraps of cover, peering fearfully at shadows and at the sky. Most of them had Kalashnikovs, weapons they waved around with a casualness that scared Gary.
Walker City’s current mayor, Janet Thorson, was a tough fifty-something who originally hailed from Minnesota, graying blond, short, strong-looking, wary. Now she walked with Gary in the van of Ollantay’s army. They both wore their antique AxysCorp-durable coveralls, still their most flexible and enduring garments and, dirtied down as rough camouflage, the nearest they had to battle dress-garments whose purchase had once made Nathan Lammockson that little bit richer, now worn by an army come to bring him down. Neither of them carried weapons save the handguns tucked inside their coveralls. They had no armor, no flak jackets or helmets, and Gary, who was no soldier, felt very vulnerable.
“Shit, these kids got a right to be wary,” Janet Thorson said.“Let’s face it, we’re none of us used to cities anymore. Some of the Walker kids have never been in an environment like this, never in their young lives. And I guess most of these Andean hill-folk types are first-timers too.”
Gary imagined that was true. And it was true that Cusco was a better functioning town than any he personally had seen for years. The buildings were reasonably intact, the road surface maintained. There were even shops lining this long avenue, shut up and boarded now but obviously still working. But there was nobody around, no adults or children, not even a dog; even the birds were quiet. “I guess the town itself is a reflection of Nathan Lammockson’s will,” he said.“Willpower and discipline and leadership, applied across decades.”
Thorson grunted. “Yeah, that and the money he managed to vacuum up while the world was going to hell. But discipline, foresight, yes. Which is why this lull makes me uneasy.” She pointed to a CCTV camera on a stand; it panned silently, viewing the advancing army.“They know we’re here. I think Nathan Lammockson knows exactly what he’s doing. He must have seen that a day like this would come, when the workers in the shantytowns and the mountains who’ve been spending their lives for his precious city would rise up-even if we walkers are a joker in the pack. No, he’ll have foreseen this; he’ll have prepared. We’re walking into some kind of trap, is what I think,” she said grimly. “It just hasn’t snapped shut yet.”
As they pressed on the advance units came up against more defensive perimeters, at intersections of the El Sol with transverse roads called the Avenida Pachacutec, just north of the rail station, and the Avenida Garcilaso a few blocks further on. At each halt Gary, maybe a hundred meters back from the advance guard, was able to hear the popping of gunfire, screams, yells before the column was waved on. Evidently Nathan’s resistance was proving no tougher in the town than at the airport.
When he came through the intersections himself Gary saw the remains of barbed-wire fences, smashed-open roadblocks, pillboxes of sandbags and concrete slabs. And at the Garcilaso intersection he saw a dead man, some guy in a bright blue AxysCorp uniform that looked as if it had rolled out of the factory today. He wore a white helmet, and had a sergeant’s stripes on his arm. He was flung over the road surface, face down, limbs sprawled like a doll’s, a deep crimson stain spreading over his back. This was the first corpse Gary had seen today. He had seen plenty of death in his time with Walker City, and enough violent death, but he never got used to it.
Now the column halted again. The order came to hole up. People looked for shelter, from the sun as much as from sniper fire, in doorways and alleys. Doors splintered and windows shattered as the invaders began to help themselves to whatever they could loot from the shops and residences, offices and churches. But Gary started to hear complaints that there was no food or water to be found.
The mayor told Gary she was going forward to see what was happening, and left him.
Gary went back twenty meters to find Grace, who had been walking with Domingo. Grace looked more uncomfortable than nervous. Domingo looked like some kind of pirate, grinning hugely as he cradled his own AK47, which he had polished until it gleamed in the clear Andean light. He had a looted necklace, a string of chunky aquamarine blocks, wrapped around his head like a bandanna.
“You really are an asshole, Domingo,” Gary said with faint disgust.
Domingo laughed.“But this is a day for assholes. What next, O great non-asshole gringo?”
“The mayor’s going forward. I guess Ollantay’s planning the next step. Come on, we’ll go up with her.” He took Grace’s hand.
“We are mere foot soldiers,” Domingo said.
Gary shook his head. “We got friends in this city. Anything we can do to reduce the body count today, we’re going to do.”
Domingo bowed. “Then I follow your lead.”
Holding Grace’s hand and followed by Domingo, Gary worked up the line until he caught up with the mayor’s party. They had stopped at another major intersection, beside a green space beneath the shoulders of a monumental-looking church.
