How Dark the World Becomes (26 page)

Marfoglia’s rant had subsided, and the official—Vice-Consul Zasa-litaan, according to the glowing name plaque on the wall behind him—had finally begun speaking again, explaining something in his bored, tired-sounding voice, maybe offering something. He and Marfoglia exchanged a few more comments, and she turned to me.

“He’s offered to put us in touch with AZ Simki-Traak corporate security on K’Tok. That’s about all he’s willing to do until the maglev leaves for Haampta tomorrow.”

I wasn’t crazy about taking the maglev to Haampta to begin with. I wanted to climb back up the Needle ASAP, not head for some place over a thousand kilometers away from it, but we didn’t really have an option. All of us from the
Fitz
were being shipped over to the Co-Gozhak’s subsidiary ground forces headquarters in Haampta, the capital of the uBakai colony—security was supposedly a lot better there. All the
Cottohazz
’s senior commanders and staff wonks had already been flown over, but when one of the birds got knocked down by surface missile fire, they grounded all the air transports and now everything was moving by high-speed rail. 

Okay. So the maglev train ride was a done deal. AZ Simki-Traak corporate security—they’d have lots of resources, and they’d be a lot more interested in helping protect the e-Traak heirs than this empty suit was. 

Hmmm. 

I’m told I have good verbal skills, so even when I use bad grammar, people tend to listen to me and think I’m pretty smart. Maybe you think that, too. But the truth is, I’m not as smart as I sound. I’m not stupid, but I’m no genius, either. If I were, there’s something I’d have wondered about sooner. 

Why hadn’t Bony Jones gone to AZ Simki-Traak corporate security back on Peezgtaan? I mean, they practically ran the place. They had the Needle concession; they were the money behind the new
wattaak.
What the hell?

“Tell him thanks, but we’d rather keep the group small and low profile,” I answered her.

Her eyes got big in her head, like she was getting up another head of steam, this time for me. 

“Just do it,” I said flatly. She’d opened her mouth to say something to me, but she shut it, looked at me with hard, angry eyes for a moment, and then turned back to the empty suit and gave him the news. 

I’d explain later, when we were away from this guy. Once I spelled it all out for her, Marfoglia would agree.

Or not. 

TWENTY-ONE

Flechettes slammed into the rock wall above us, flaying my back with razor-sharp chips. The building was native stone, which made it solid enough to stop all the incoming rounds except for the stuff that came through the windows, but those threw high-speed rock shards all over, and I could feel blood trickle down my back. 

One of Sergeant Wataski’s Marines staggered back from a window, coughing and gurgling wetly, blood bubbling out of her mouth and from around her hands where she held her throat. I was lying over Barraki, with Marfoglia covering Tweezaa closer against the wall. 

“Marrissa, you’ve got to cover Barraki, too!”

She looked at me through a wild tangle of muddy blond hair, eyes wide with fright, but she didn’t protest. She nodded jerkily and I pushed Barraki under her, next to Tweezaa, who was sobbing in terror. Barraki was shaking all over, but he was still in control. Brave little guy. 

I rolled away from them, grabbed the Marine by her harness, and pulled her down onto her back. The Marines had different gear than I was used to, but there was only one thing that looked like it could be a wound kit. I ripped it open, pulled out the A-stop syringe and trachea kit, pushed the autoinserter into her mouth and part way down her throat, fired it and watched her body jerk and eyes bug out with agony as it slammed the breathing tube down her trachea and inflated it. Then I shot her neck full of A-stop, once I was sure it couldn’t get down her throat and strangle her. I hit her with a shot of pain killer, too, and her eyes rolled back up into her head, but she’d probably live.

“You know what the fuck you’re doing there?” Sergeant Wataski bellowed at me from another window.

“Yeah,” I shouted back over the small-arms fire. “Been here.”

“Then pick up her fucking weapon and cover that fucking window!”

For about a tenth of a second, I considered arguing the point, but Wataski had already turned away. My responsibility was Marfoglia and the kids, but if people came through the front door after all the damage Wataski’s Marines had already dished out, they weren’t going to stop shooting until a long time after everyone inside was dead. 

So I picked up the Marine’s weapon and gave it a quick once-over, checking its ammo and making sure it wasn’t damaged. Mark 19 Rifle, Assault, Gauss—RAG-19 to its friends; four and a half kilos of light composites, with a few dense composites in critical places; 4.5mm serial flechette rifle with an integral 3cm grenade launcher; laser designator mounted on the under-slung utility bracket; four grenades and 100 flechettes internal, which added another kilo to the weight. I’d qualified on an older Mark 14, but there wasn’t that much difference: aim, pull the trigger, somebody falls down. 

I unhooked the Marine’s ammo harness and threw it over my shoulder. Then I very carefully unhooked her helmet—tough with her still holding her throat with both hands. I needed the pot for more than just the protection, though; the gun’s boresight video system dumped into the visor, so if I wanted to hit anything without sticking my own head up, I needed the helmet.

Her eyes were big and frightened, even with the painkillers in her bloodstream, and my face wasn’t working right to give her a calm, reassuring expression. I just made myself go slow for the two or three seconds it took to slide the chin strap through her fingers. I cradled her head with one hand as I pulled off the helmet and then lowered it to the floor. She was still looking up at me, terrified, so I winked at her and grinned. It was hard to tell if she was trying to smile back, what with a trachea tube down her throat. 

Marfoglia and Barraki were both looking at me, but their expressions were too wild to make out what they were thinking—if thinking was even how you’d describe what goes on in your head in a spot like this. I scrambled back to them, unzipped the black carryall, and pulled out the little LeMatt.

“You remember how to—”

“Fuck that!”
Marfoglia practically screamed, cutting me off. “
Give me the big one!”

*   *   *

Two hours out of T’tokl-Heem, the maglev current had died and we’d dropped onto the rail and slid about a kilometer along it, slowing to a halt. Nobody knew what was up, but we’d off-loaded, grabbed our gear, and started hiking toward the nearest town. There were over two hundred passengers, mostly evacuees bound for the uBakai colony, including a bunch of
Cottohazz
civilian officials and their dependents. 

There was no well-planned ambush waiting for us. We just started getting some small-arms fire about a klick from the town—scattered single shots at first that didn’t hit anyone, but they put everyone down in ditches and behind hedges. There wasn’t anyone in charge, so no one to tell people to get up and move. Our group was lucky—Wataski and Fong-Ramirez both kept their heads and figured out we needed to get to some hard cover. A few people followed us, but most of them stayed out there in the ditches. 

The firing got hotter as we got closer to the town, and we took our first casualties, but we made it to this stone house on the edge of the built-up area. Then things got very exciting for a while, but whoever was shooting at us decided the pickings were easier elsewhere. There was still scattered small-arms fire from down the road, where everyone else took cover. There were a few armed MPs back there, but if the bad guys—whoever the hell they were—decided it was massacre time, there wasn’t going to be much to stop them.

After about fifteen minutes, the firing died away, and once it looked like it wasn’t going to start up again, Wataski made a head count. She had two Marines down: the Marine I’d patched up—Private Lashia Coleman, I found out—was still hanging on, but the guy who’d called the prisoner “Curley” took a head shot and was gone. That’s one of the things about firing from behind hard cover—the cover protects most of your body, but the exposed parts are real important, and if you get hit there it’s usually pretty bad news.

We’d lost four of the uHokos getting to the house, and two of the uZmataanki Marines had slipped away in the confusion. About a dozen other passengers had attached themselves to us, along with five Co-Gozhak MPs, four of whom were still standing. Including injured civilians, we had eight wounded, of which Coleman was the worst, but three of them would have to be carried if we were going anywhere. 

Wataski reported the count to Fong-Ramirez, since he was the senior officer present—not that this sort of thing was covered by his training. 

Wataski finished her report to Fong-Ramirez and then turned away and threw up in a corner. When she was done, she wiped her mouth and glared around the room, daring anyone to say something. 

“Those bologna sandwiches on the train really sucked,” I said.

“You think you’re funny?” she demanded, eyes hard as steel.

“Yeah, a laugh a minute. You want an ammo count?” 

She glared at me for a second or two, and then nodded. 

“Yes. You dry?”

I shook my head.

“Nope. I got four mags left in the harness and seventeen rounds in the system. Two grenades still in the pipe, too, but I haven’t checked your Marine’s pack to see if she has any more.”

“
Four mags?
You shy about shooting people?” she asked.

Behind me, I heard Marfoglia laugh humorlessly. I nodded over my shoulder.

“My fan club doesn’t seem to think so. I just don’t know when we’re likely to see any more ammo, that’s all, so I kept it on selective fire and used a light touch.”

She scowled at me for a couple seconds, as if to intimidate me. The thing was, I wasn’t drawing Marine pay, so she could give me all the
Real Bad Glares
she wanted to. My concern was three people, and if anybody here was going to live, they were. Period. So glare away, Wataski.

*   *   *

“Well, this is the situation,” Fong-Ramirez said, a half hour later, to the semicircle of “shooters.” He spoke in English, but one of the MPs muttered the translation into some Varoki language I didn’t recognize for the two MPs that didn’t understand English. The six Varoki each stood about a head taller than most of us Humans, so we made a ragged-looking huddle. The shadows were already long as Prime crowded K’Tok’s horizon. Maybe I should have known the star’s name, but nobody uses the star catalogues but astronomers and astrogators. What matters are the inhabitable worlds; the primary stars in most systems are just “Prime” to average guys like me, or “the Star,” the way folks back on Earth just talk about “the Sun,” not Sol.

Aside from Fong-Ramirez himself, there were nine shooters: four Varoki MPs with sidearms, two Marines still standing—Wataski and Aguillar—the ranking uHoko officer, Lieutenant Palaan, who had picked up the other Marine assault rifle, a Varoki private security guy with his own gauss pistol, and me. Four RAG-19 combat weapon systems and five gauss pistols or light carbines—six with Fong-Ramirez’s own sidearm: not much of an arsenal.

“We have a functional TBC—tight beam communicator,” the exec went on, “but the satellite comm system is off-line, so we can’t contact the
Fitz
—that’s
KUs-222
—until we have line of sight, two hours from now. Even then, I’m not sure what the captain can do, but at least she can figure something out if she knows our situation.”

“She can put the Mikes down, sir,” Wataski said. 

Fong-Ramirez nodded.

“That’s correct, Sergeant, provided she hasn’t already had to commit the Mike Force elsewhere, or there isn’t a potential situation which requires her to keep it as a force in being. Remember, if we don’t have access to the Needle, and the bad guys have any sort of air-defense capability, once she drops the Mike Force, it’s down. The landing barge won’t be an option for recovering them.”

Fong-Ramirez went up a bit in my estimation right then. I mean, he’d seemed like a decent enough guy back on the
Fitz
, all that Captain Didactic stuff aside. But now he was showing some brains and perspective. It’s easy to just see your own problems; he was stepping back and looking at the big picture. We had no sure indication that the Needle was compromised, but security was deteriorating in T’tokl-Heem, the attack on the maglev suggested that things were getting worse instead of better, and it was a pretty good guess that we at least shouldn’t
count
on the Needle for a while. How did that shape Gasiri’s options?

Not in our favor, that’s for sure. Well, if she couldn’t drop the Mike Force, maybe she could drop a couple containers of ammo. Not everyone had been as careful as me, and I’d already had to give up one magazine just to give Lieutenant Palaan a reload. I still had more rounds left than anyone else, so unless these guys got really light on the fingers, we had one more fight in us, and then we were dry and it was all over.

“Commander, I got a couple questions,” I piped up, and he nodded for me to go on.

“First off, just what the hell is going on? I mean, maybe everyone in uniform got a briefing or something, but there are a few civilians here and we’re all pretty much in the dark. Who’s shooting at us, for starters?”

“Good question, Mr. Naradnyo. Unfortunately I don’t have a firm answer for you. A few days ago and I’d have said they were certainly insurgents. Now that the uBakai and uZmataanki are at war, and shots have been exchanged between uZmataanki and
Cottohazz
naval forces, we aren’t really sure what the situation is.”

“You mean those might be local colonial troops shooting at us?” I asked. Fong-Ramirez looked uncomfortable with the question.

“I don’t think we can rule that possibility out,” he answered reluctantly. 

Great.

“Okay, next question. When we get word to orbit, why don’t they have the troops back at T’tokl-whatever send some transport aircraft to pick us up?”