How Dark the World Becomes (31 page)

“We’ll try to make sure there’s at least one Marine or Varoki MP in each vehicle,” he went on. “That way there’s a helmet uplink communicator with every group, and the
Fitz
can track each party on the ground, feed us instructions and updates.”

“I still got Private Coleman’s helmet,” I put in. “No need to send a Marine with us, although I wouldn’t mind an MP.” 

Gomez looked back at me, and his eyebrows went up a little.

“Nothing personal,” I added. “It’s just that a Varoki in a uniform—any uniform—will blend in better.”

“Okay, fair enough,” he agreed. “We’re stretched thin as it is. Your Excellency,” he said, turning to
TheHon
, “I’ll have two Marines ride with you, including one of our surviving NCOs. That’s all I can spare, and any more would probably just attract attention.”

“Thank you, Sergeant Gomez,”
TheHon
answered, “but it is not necessary. Mr. Borro and I will be traveling with Mr. Naradnyo’s party.”

Gomez looked at
TheHon
for a second or two, then he turned and looked at me, then back at
TheHon
. He didn’t say anything, though. He had other fish to fry, and we’d just made his staffing decisions a lot easier. But I bet he was dying to ask what the hell was going on.
TheHon
and I were not exactly two guys you’d expect to find bumming around together.

Once Gomez moved along, we huddled up to make sure everyone knew the plan. The Marines would grab as many trucks and cars as they could, we’d take one vehicle as a group, load as many civilians in back as we could manage, and haul ass. 

“Who can drive?” I asked. 

Borro nodded right away, which figured. Wheel man can be a pretty important skill in executive security. 

“I can drive, too,” Marfoglia said. 

“Yeah, so can I,” I said. “I learned in the service, but I’m a little rusty. Nobody drives in the Crack. And whatever driving we do here probably isn’t going to be all that sedate, so let’s leave the wheel to Borro.”

“That’s fine,” she said and nodded to Borro. “I’m sure he’s an excellent driver. But if necessary, I can manage difficult driving as well.”

“Take a course or something?” I asked, imagining some kind of weekend survival driving retreat, complete with lots of controlled pyrotechnics and actors in bad-guy costumes.

“No,” she answered coolly. “But two years ago I finished seventh in the Monaco Grand Prix.”

Across the circle of faces
TheHon
looked at me and smiled. I almost said that wasn’t the same thing as combat driving, but I decided to shut up and just nod instead. After all, I hadn’t done any real combat driving, either, and I hear European drivers can get pretty rude. 

*   *   *

The “fire diversion” and raid for vehicles had all gone as well as anyone had a right to expect. Waiting in the alleyway behind the warehouse with all the civilians and MPs, I didn’t see a lot of the actual fighting, but we could hear it, and once the vehicles showed up we saw its evidence in flechette holes and blood spatter. 

“In the trucks! In the trucks!” I yelled, and the Varoki MPs shouted the same in a couple different languages. The Varoki civilians ran, fell, crawled, dragged, and pulled themselves up into the truck beds. All of a sudden there were rounds coming into the alley from every direction, and a grenade exploded against a concrete wall, throwing fragments everywhere. Screams, sobbing, cries of pain all mixed up with the snap of flechettes and a babble of Tac chatter over my helmet limk. Another grenade went off closer. I instinctively put my head down and tucked in my hands, and felt the concrete chips and wire fragments pepper Private Coleman’s helmet and body armor. In the distance, I heard more explosions, short zips of flechette bursts, and the deep, rhythmic hammering of a Marine two-fifty-four thud gun in autofire mode.

I looked around and tried to see who was firing down the alley, and I saw an MP slump back against the wall and slide to the ground. Gauss weapons are flashless, but I saw a flicker of movement in a window in a storefront down the alley to my right and across the street, a window that all of the glass was gone from. I selected the grenade launcher on the RAG-19, lased the window and got a solid reflection off the back wall of the store, backed the detonation point five meters back, and hit it with a can of nails. Then I switched to the serial flechette system and unloaded twenty rounds into the smoke and dust.

I banged on the truck cab’s door and pointed down the alleyway, and the truck started moving. A couple more had already pulled out—just three left, one for my folks and two for Wataski’s crew. 

“Okay, last serial, haul ass!” I shouted. The warehouse back door had been ajar, and now it flew open and Borro came out with his gauss pistol up, checked my orientation, and covered the opposite direction. Marr came next, her arms around Barraki, and TheHon ran behind her with Tweezaa in his arms. There were about two dozen Varoki civilians in the group as well, scrambling and stumbling out of the doorway and piling into the three light trucks. I checked the Varoki MP who’d gone down earlier. He was bleeding from a chest shot that had punched his armor, and bright red blood bubbled up out of his mouth, but he was still alive and conscious.

“You two, get this soldier into that truck.”

The two Varoki civilians piling into one of Wataski’s truck didn’t even break stride, and thinking back I’d say the odds are they didn’t hear me—very common in the stress and confusion of combat—or probably even understand English, but at the moment I got really mad. The Marines and MPs were dying to get these people out of this alive, and by God they were
not
going to leave this guy all alone to drown in his own blood in a dirty alleyway. I grabbed one of them by the belt as he was trying to climb up into the truck, pulled him back hard, and almost threw him toward the wounded MP.

“HELP THAT MAN UP, YOU MOTHERFUCKER, OR I WILL KILL YOU MYSELF!” I bellowed. 

For a moment, I thought the guy might have a heart attack staring down the barrel of my RAG, or at least wet himself, but after a second of terror paralysis he bent over to pick up the MP, and all of a sudden three more Varoki civilians piled out of the truck to help. 

“Borro, get in the cab and fire it up. I’m going to cover Wataski’s back.”

He nodded and climbed in without argument, pushing the MP driver to the side. I saw Marfoglia’s face look back from the back of the truck, alarm mixed with outrage that I wasn’t right there protecting them. Couldn’t be helped.

“Marfoglia, get your head down! Everybody down in the bed of the truck,” I shouted.

“Wataski,” I called over the helmet’s tacnet, “the last group’s loaded. Have you dropped their recon drone yet?” 

“Affirmative,”
she answered.
“Their drone is down.”
 

Good. We needed to blind them if we were going to get away with this. 

“The train is at the station. Pull the plug and haul ass!” I told her. It wasn’t my call—I was just some guy in the alleyway, but there didn’t seem to be anybody else hanging around.

Then there was more fire from the other end of the alleyway. I heard the
snap-snap-snap
of a flechette burst, and then another, as they ripped through the length of the light trucks, shattering some of the windshields in front. People inside cried out in pain and terror. I felt panic claw at my throat—who had those rounds torn through? 

I turned and let a long auto burst rip down the alley on spec. I didn’t hit anything, but somebody dove for cover and dropped his rifle.
Dropped his rifle!
Part of me wanted to run down there and shoot the stupid bastard just as a lesson, but more bad guys were showing up, and I knew the alley was turning into a death trap. If anyone put a grenade into the trucks sitting there, we weren’t going anywhere except on foot. 

“Wataski, where the hell are you?” I called on the helmet’s tacnet.

“Coming. Five seconds.”

“Be advised, alleyway is red hot—AWiGs everywhere,” I transmitted back. 

I changed magazines on my RAG. I hadn’t done much shooting until the last couple minutes, when everything started going to hell, so I still had half a dozen magazines, but I was out of grenades, because I’d been a dumb ass and hadn’t taken any reloads. I was a civilian, after all, and smart civilians don’t get themselves into dirty little firefights like this.

Then a round punched me in the chest and slammed me back against the concrete, and my head whipped back and cracked the wall. The helmet did its job, but it still left me seeing stars, and the blow to my chest left me gasping for air. I slid down the wall to sit in the alleyway as more rounds tore chunks out of the concrete above me. I checked my chest; there was a frayed furrow in the cloth covering of Private Coleman’s body armor, but the composite plate underneath was intact, and there was no blood. The round must have been either spent or hit a very glancing blow, because the body armor wasn’t designed to stop a clean hit from a smart-head flechette at close range. Who was shooting at me? Where the hell was he now? 

The door opened and one of Wataski’s Marines came out carrying a missile director in one hand and a RAG-19 in the other, and as soon as she took a step out, her face just exploded in gory red mist and she dropped lifelessly to the ground. Who shot her? I scanned right and left in near panic, and then a four-round burst sent another Marine tumbling back through the doorway. Two rounds must have hit the Marine, but one round hit the doorsill at about a meter up and one hit the floor right inside. How was that possible? Then I got it.

I looked up, and the son of a bitch was on the roof of the building across the alleyway. I raised my rifle, aimed, and when he showed himself to take another shot I killed him. I scrambled to my feet and looked over at the doorway. Wataski had been looking up, her own rifle raised, but now she looked at me. 

“Nice shot!” she shouted.

“Get your people in the truck before we’re all fucking dead. NOW!” I emptied my magazine down the alleyway to suppress as much fire as I could and then sprinted for my own truck. Borro had it accelerating as my hand yanked open the right-side door and I pulled myself in, with the Varoki MP sandwiched between Borro and me as we took the corner out of the alley almost on two wheels. 

I triggered my embedded commlink, the sound of flechettes tearing through vehicles and the screams of pain a few moments earlier echoing in my head. 

“Marrissa! Are you okay?” I practically screamed over the link. 

She was okay, and so were the kids, although she was so frightened and excited she started hiccupping. 

It’s funny how under stress you sort of abbreviate things. I meant to say, “Are you
and the kids
okay?” It was really the kids I was most concerned about, but the words came out different. She knew what I meant, though.

We sped out of town and headed northeast, because that was the shortest road to thick jungle. We didn’t pass any disabled vehicles along the way, but I lost sight of Wataski’s trucks in all the confusion. We needed to get some vegetation overhead as soon as possible, hopefully before they got another drone airborne. The RTM rockets made a moaning scream as they passed over, and I heard the rippling crumps as they detonated all around the town. 

We made the jungle edge without even seeing any sign of pursuit. Then we entered the dark tunnel of the rainforest road. There were roads going in a couple different directions, a few vehicles on each of them. There was a car and three other light trucks in our little gaggle of fugitives. My pulse rate slowed down enough that I got some of my higher brain functions back, and I took a good look around.

The jungle road was pretty interesting. The roadway was very hard, almost glass-like, but with a flexible composite covering four or five centimeters thick over the top. You could see that the roadway was buckled and uneven in places, maybe because of tree roots or erosion of the ground nearby, or just settling under the weight of traffic. I’d seen roads like this before—directed-fusion burned, with the heat probably used to incinerate the undergrowth as well as form the roadbed from the soil underneath, melted in temperatures that you usually find inside a star. The composite layer came later—you needed it to protect the vehicles from the roadway, because once that solid sheet began to break—and anything that long and that rigid would start to break right away—the edges would slash your tires to ribbons. But it was a cheap and fast way to cut a road. 

I wondered how they kept the rainforest from burning down while they were cutting it; maybe they did their fusion work in the rainy season. Dirt was not very dense, so you needed to fuse a lot of it to get a solid roadbed. As a result, the road itself was sunken in a shallow ravine, which meant the road would be a canal in the rainy season if it weren’t for the drainage ditches to either side. Maybe it was a canal anyway when it rained hard enough.

After an hour of exciting driving, I spotted a wide spot in the road and told Borro to pull over. Another truck came even with us and stopped, and a Marine corporal I didn’t recognize stuck his head out the cab window.

“Why are you stopping?” he yelled.

“We got wounded,” I yelled back, and hooked my thumb over my shoulder toward the cargo bay. 

“We need to keep moving!” he answered.

“Go ahead. We’ll catch up.” 

Sure, when pigs fly we would.

He hit the accelerator and sped down the road. The car ahead of us had already vanished around a bend, and the two following trucks disappeared after it in seconds.

“They still have difficulty accepting the need for dispersion,” Borro observed. 

“Yup.”

*   *   *

We had some very frightened people in the back of the vehicle—all Varoki, of course, except for Marfoglia. Aside from our original group, we had the MP, four Varoki men, two women, and a little girl. None of the adults were the little girl’s parents.

One of the men had taken a flechette in the side of his head, and it apparently went in and then bounced around inside for a while. We had plastic body bags, so we bagged and sealed him, slid him under the bench seat with as much dignity as the situation allowed, and gave him a moment of silence.