The End of All Things (27 page)

“You have five minutes,” I said.

“Of course, because any more time would make this too easy.”

“I missed a step,” Lambert said.

“I’m still for flattening the building,” said Powell.

“Quiet,” I said to Powell. And turned to Lambert. “We can track the shot but you said we’d have a problem accurately returning fire. And we don’t want to blow up the building.” I glanced back at Powell for this. “So rather than aiming
for
the sniper, we send a rocket filled with trackers into the apartment he’s shooting out of.”

“It busts open, covers the asshole with trackers, and then it doesn’t matter where he goes, we know where he is,” Powell said.

“Right,” I said. “And we don’t have to hit him head on, we just have to have him dusted.”

“Found it!” Salcido said. “I’ve got something that should work. Building up a round now.”

“So now all we have to do is wait for the next shot,” Lambert said.

“We’re not going to wait,” I said. “We’re going to draw his fire.”

“How do you suggest we do that?”

I motioned to my combat unitard. “These should be good for one round.”

“You’re going to go out there and let the asshole take a shot at you,” Lambert said.

“I didn’t say it was going to be
me,
” I replied.

“Well, I’m sure as shit not volunteering,” Powell said.

“For once I’m with Ilse.” Lambert jabbed a thumb at his squad mate.

“Sau?” I asked.

“You want me to build this Frankenstein rocket
and
take a slug to the head? Come on, boss. Cut me some slack here.”

“I’m the officer here,” I pointed out.

“And we’re all super inspired by your leadership, Lieutenant,” Powell said. “We’ll be right behind you.”

“Emphasis on ‘behind,’” Lambert said.

I looked at the both of them. “When we get back to the ship we’re going to have a little talk about military chain of command.”

“We’re looking forward to having that conversation if you survive, Lieutenant,” Powell promised.

“We might have it with me on one side of an airlock and the three of you on the other.”

“Seems fair,” Lambert said.

“Locked and loaded,” Salcido said, to me. “I’m already tracking the bots. Ready when you are.”

“Fine,” I said. I turned to Powell and Lambert. “You two make like you’re laying down fire for me as I make my way up the road. With any luck that asshole will miss me when he takes his shot. Be watching the building for the shot. Sync with each other and with Sau so you can triangulate. It will give Sau a better target for the rocket. Sau, call it in and let them know what we’re up to.”

“Got it.”

“We’ll keep him busy,” Lambert said. Powell nodded.

I had my combat unitard cover my face, loped out from behind cover, and started hoofing it up the street, Lambert and Powell’s cover fire rattling behind me.

I made it about forty meters before I was hit by a truck.

Colonial Defense Forces combat unitards are amazing things. They look like something you’d wear if you were performing Swan Lake, but the fabric, designed with the Colonial Union’s trademarked nanobotic trickery, protects its wearer better than anything short of a foot of steel. Probably better, since steel would fragment and spall and send shrapnel into your guts. The unitard doesn’t do that. It stiffens on projectile impact and dissipates the energy it receives, up to a point. It’s usually good for keeping your ass alive for a single direct hit of, say, a sniper’s bullet.

But that doesn’t mean you don’t feel the hit.

I felt it just fine. Felt the stiffening of the unitard make it feel as if my ribs were cracking, and they might have been, felt my feet lift up off the road, felt my body fly backward through the air a few yards and then crumple into a heap as gravity took hold again.

All of which was according to plan. There was a reason I ran straight on into the sniper’s sights. I wanted him to hit me center mass, where the unitard was best equipped to take the shot without killing me outright. If the sniper had been ambitious, he could have tried for a headshot, which I probably could have survived, but I wouldn’t have been happy or mobile for several days afterward.

But Salcido was right. The sniper wasn’t all that good. I figured—hoped might be the better word—that he’d go for the bigger, easier target. And he did.

Still hurt like hell.

I heard the
poomp
and hiss of Salcido’s rocket fizzing toward the sniper’s position, followed a few seconds later by a dull pop and the sound of glass shattering.

“Rocket hit,” Salcido said, talking to me through my BrainPal. “You alive, Lieutenant?”

“It’s debatable,” I said. “You tracking?”

“Yeah. Sending the feed over the squad channel.”

“That asshole still have a gun to my head?”

“No, he’s on the move now.”

I rolled and called up the squad feed and looked up at the building. The sniper was visible as a superimposed pattern of tiny dots, each representing a single, mite-size tracker. He was currently moving from one apartment to another.

“We going in after him?” Lambert asked.

“We don’t have to,” I said. “We just have to wait for him to position himself to take another shot. Then we take him.”

“How are we going to get him to take another shot?”

“Easy,” I said, and stood up.

“Your suit’s not going to take another direct hit,” Powell said.

“Then maybe the three of you should kill the shit out of him before he gets the chance to take another shot,” I said.

“On it.”

“Good.” I stood there in the street, watching the pixelated sniper settle into another apartment, a floor below his previous one, and over the course of a couple of minutes, carefully position himself by a window to take another shot at me.

“Got you,” I said.

The apartment building exploded.

More than a hundred meters away, I was knocked back by the crack of the pressure wave and then by the rush of heat and flying debris.

“What the
fuck
just happened?” I heard Salcido yell, followed by Powell and Lambert yelling at each other to get back. I rolled again, then looked up and saw a dirty wall of dust rolling toward me from the collapsing concrete. I ducked my head and held my breath despite my mouth being covered by my mask, and filtering my air for me.

After a minute the worst of the dust cleared and I stood up. There was a pile of rubble where the apartment building used to stand.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Wasn’t that what we
didn’t
want?” I heard Lambert yell, via my ears rather than my BrainPal. I looked back and saw him, Powell, and Salcido walking up on me.

“It looks like what we wanted and what the higher-ups wanted were two different things,” Powell said. “I told you we should have just called it in. We could have saved ourselves some trouble.”

“Shut up, Ilse,” I said, and she shut up. I turned to Salcido. “Find out if there was anyone in the building besides the sniper.”

“I’m pretty sure it was cleared out before we even got here.”

“Make sure,” I said. “If there are any civilians in there, we start digging them out.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Lambert said. I turned to him to snap his head off for complaining about rescuing civilians, but he held his hand up. “Not about that,” he said. “Look at your feed. That goddamn sniper is still alive.”

I looked back at the building—or more accurately, at the pile of rubble. Near the periphery of the rubble, under about a meter of concrete, our sniper was trying to push a pile of concrete and rebar off of him.

“Come on,” I said.

We reached the spot where the sniper was buried. Salcido trained his Empee on where the sniper’s head would be while Powell and Lambert and I pulled chunks of building away from the hidden shooter. After a minute, I pried off a final slab, clearing a shot for Salcido.

“Jesus,” he said.

Our sniper was fifteen standard years old at best and she was covered in blood from where the fallen concrete had creased her skull. I glanced through the rubble as best I could and saw her left arm pinned and her right leg going off in a direction it shouldn’t.

“Get away from me,” she said, and her voice told me that at least one of her lungs had collapsed.

“We can get you out of there,” I said.

“Don’t want your help, green.”

I was confused by this until I figured out she meant me, with my green skin. I looked back at Salcido and his Empee. “Put that down and help us.” He looked doubtful but did as he was told. I turned back to the sniper. “We’re not going to hurt you,” I said.

“You brought a building down on me,” she wheezed.

“That wasn’t our intent,” I said. I skipped over the part where our intent was to shoot her in the head the moment she gave us a chance. “We’ll get you out.”

“No.”

“You don’t want to die here,” I said.

“I do,” she said. “This is where I lived. I lived here. And you destroyed it. Like you destroy everything.”

“How are we doing?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the girl.

“Almost there,” Powell said. Then she sent a message to me through her BrainPal.
The chunk of concrete on her leg is the only thing keeping her from bleeding out,
she said.
If we move it, she dies
.
She’s dying anyway
.

“Okay,” I said.
Call in for a medic,
I said through the BrainPal.

Why?
Powell asked.
You’re being awfully nice to someone who was just trying to kill you and who we were just trying to kill. She doesn’t even want our help. You should just let her die
.

I gave you an order,
I said. Powell visibly shrugged.

“We’re going to call for a medic,” I said, to the sniper.

“I don’t want a medic,” she said, and her eyes closed. “I don’t want you. Why don’t you leave. This isn’t your planet. It’s ours. We don’t want you here.
Leave
. Just leave.”

“It’s not that simple,” I said.

The girl didn’t say anything. About a minute later she was dead.

*   *   *

“Well?” Lambert asked. He, Powell, and Salcido were waiting for me outside the security offices in Fushimi, where I had gone for a discussion—to use the word euphemistically—of the sniper incident.

“I talked to Colonel Maxwell,” I said, naming the head of the CDF joint mission in Fushimi. “She tells me that it was the Kyotans who requested we drop the apartment building.”

“Why would they want that? I thought we were working on the assumption they
didn’t
want that. Thus, all the sneaking up and trying not to destroy it on our part.”

“The apartment block was apparently the local headquarters of the rebellion. Or more accurately, the local headquarters of the rebellion was in the apartment block.”

“So the building was chock full of agitators,” Powell said.

“Maxwell didn’t break down the ratio of agitators to normal humans,” I said. “And I didn’t get the impression from her that the Kyotan government much cared. They wanted to send a message.”

“How many other people did we kill getting out the message?” Lambert asked.

“None,” Salcido said, and looked at me. “Sorry, you asked me to find that out and I didn’t tell you because we got busy with other things. The Kyotan security forces did a sweep of the building a week ago and pulled everybody out. Block questioning and intimidation. That’s what started this whole set of riots we’re helping put down.”

“So if they weren’t all rebels before, they probably are now,” Powell said.

“You wanted to drop the building,” Lambert reminded her.

“The building got dropped,” Powell reminded him. “Although Lambert’s right. If they were just going to drop the building, why the hell
did
they send us in?”

“They sent us in before someone in the Kyoto security upper ranks remembered a CDF ship could level a building in a single shot, apparently,” I said.

“We could have been killed.”

“I guess they decided we were safe.”

“
That’s
reassuring,” Powell said.

“At least it wasn’t our idea,” Lambert said. “That girl hated us enough. And if she hated us, she had to have learned it from someone else.”

“It wasn’t our idea, but one of our ships did the honors,” I said. “I don’t think that distinction would matter much to her or to anyone else. We’re on the hook for this as much as the Kyoto government.”

“Did you get anything on the sniper?” Salcido asked me.

“Rana Armijo. Sixteen standard. Parents apparently in deep with the rebellion. No sign of them. Either they’re gone or the Kyotans already have them.”

“So she becomes a martyr for the rebellion,” Lambert said. “The government rounds up everyone in her apartment block, she stays behind, starts taking out security officers, and is so successful they have to drop the building on her head. It’s a good story.”

“It won’t do
her
much good,” Powell said.

“That’s how it’s supposed to work for martyrs.”

“So what now?” Salcido asked.

“We’re done here,” I said. “There’s ongoing rebel action in Sakyo and Yamashina, but the
Tubingen
has other orders. It’s someone else’s problem now.”

“It was already someone else’s problem,” Lambert said. “Then we made it ours, too.”

“Don’t start, Lambert,” Powell said. “It’s especially tiring today.”

“If it’s tiring for you, think how it feels to them.”

PART THREE

A Thursday this time, and we’re called upon to manage a protest.

“I’m not going to lie, I’m
really
curious to see these things in action,” Lambert said, as the hurricane funnels were set up around the Colonial Union administrative building in Kyiv.

The administrative building itself was a skyscraper deposited in the center of a hectare of land in the downtown district. The entire hectare was a flat plaza, featureless except for a single piece of abstract sculpture. That sculpture was currently populated by several protesters, as was a large chunk of the plaza. The skyscraper was ringed by Kyiv policemen and CDF soldiers and hastily assembled metal barriers.