Chapter 2
Pushback
The Blackbrick Diplomatic Center was a new building, only open a month, but it sure as the void didn’t look like it anymore. When Dastou ran out of a corridor and entered the lobby proper, he came to an abrupt halt at what he saw. There was broken glass from the windows and door panes absolutely everywhere, accompanied by stone and metal debris. The spacious, luxuriously appointed lobby was a dangerous mess by any standard. People covered in scrapes, bruises, and cuts of all kinds rushed into the building through the destroyed doorway, some helping others get to safety, others greedily pushing their way through. There were at least twenty dirty, bleeding, hurt people in the lobby already and double that past the pane-less doors, trying to get in or moving aside. The sounds of wailing, crying, and seeking out loved ones created a cacophony of anguish.
The dead or severely injured were down, on the sidewalk, the panicking crowd mostly trying to avoid them as best they could. There was a lot of blood, most of it on people, the rest scattered in drops or streams, darker than anything else around it. The air outside the building was the same as the office Dastou was almost killed in, with a fog of concrete dust filtering visibility down to an almost monochromatic state. Through the broken windows and doorway, Dastou saw what Evara pointed out: people running toward the embassy carrying weapons, three of them were seconds from the door and four farther down the street, coming in at the edge of the concrete fog. They all had their noses, mouths, and chins covered in cloth masks and wore ragged, patched, ill-fitting clothes.
Dastou rushed forward, not bothering to check if Nes was coming along. He reached the crowd halfway to the exit and shoved his way forward, shouting above the sounds of disaster for people to get out of his way. When he was closer to the door, he craned his head back and saw Nes right behind him.
“Get people further in, away from the door,” Dastou ordered in a shout. “Keep people from trampling each other.”
Nes nodded and got to it, immediately helping a limping woman who was hugging her preteen daughter.
Dastou continued to force his way out and was a few steps from the door, trying not to hurt panicking people as he pushed his way along when he uttered a name. “Evara,” he said in a normal tone, knowing the patch at his throat would pick up the vibrations and let his words come out clearly. “Evara, are there any more explosives that you can see?”
There was a shuffle and then a grunt in his ear-piece. “Not at the front,” Evara said. “That’s where the bags with explosives were dropped.”
“Check the rear of the building,” Dastou ordered. “I need to know if we’re being flanked.”
“On it,” said Evara before her channel went quiet.
Dastou ignored the questions that could easily pile up in his mind as this situation unfolded because they would all be too distracting, and was a second away from the doorway. He was closer than ever to the three enemies leading a charge and could see determination and violence in their eyes. Looking for something to use as a weapon, he noticed a vase on the floor, only partially cracked at the top and some flowers still in it. He bent over and picked it up on the run, not faltering in his step, and was fully upright in time to push some guy out of his way at the door.
When Dastou was finally outside and fully visible even within a crowd thanks to his eye color, the three closer enemies all screamed a near-simultaneous, wordless war cry. It was pretty stupid, but thankfully the screams made the crowd take notice and get out of the way. That was probably not intentional.
In the middle of the long war cry, Dastou ran forward, pulled the flowers out of the vase, and threw the flora at the closest armed attacker’s eyes. The man had been running, got staggered by the explosion of petals in his sight, and lost his balance. He tripped over his own feet and almost face-planted on the sidewalk. The Saint threw the vase in the face of a woman with a knife in practically the same motion as the flowers. The vase shattered on her nose, she cried out in pain and fell to the ground with blood all over her face. The remaining crowd was now truly getting out of the way, stumbling over the dead and injured to move either left or right and not get caught in the fight.
Flower Boy was back upright fast, wiped a couple of purple petals from his face, and swung his club at Dastou. The Saint hopped sideways to avoid the swing, but put himself closer to the third enemy, a chubby man with a rusty kitchen knife. Chubby moved within arm’s reach of Dastou and tried to stab low, toward the gut. The Saint made a lowering circular motion with an arm, blocked the stab, and kicked the bastard in the knee. The guy’s shin went the opposite way it was supposed to and he cried out so hard it quickly became a pathetic whimper as he fell to the filthy ground. Flower Boy came back in for more, swung again, this time downward and with a lot more power. Dastou interlocked his wrists and brought them up fast, connecting hard with the wrist of Flower Boy’s weapon hand. The impact hit exactly the way the Saint wanted. His counter stopped the swing and hit a nerve, causing the enemy’s hand to pop open the club to fall away.
As the wooden weapon hit the ground with a hollow krak, Dastou swiftly elbowed his enemy in the side of the head as hard as he could manage. Flower Boy’s eyes rolled back as his body crumpled limp next to Chubby. The Saint looked back up the street to see the other four armed assailants coming, the rest of the bunch he was warned about. Two men and two women were a couple dozen meters away and running, one of the men with a fresh pink scar across the bridge of his nose. Dastou picked up Flower Boy’s club and immediately up-shifted his brain function to better control his muscles. Time slowed, he aimed, and then perfectly threw the wooden club between a pair of civilians in his line of sight. The club spun and hit one of the women in the forehead as her eyes bulged wide at the incoming awkward projectile.
Dastou down-shifted to watch in real-time as he got a lucky break. The thick club spun off to the side after the first impact and smashed another running enemy dead in the mouth, causing a spray of blood and a couple of teeth to spit out. Was that actual luck, though? He could have easily calculated the physics needed for such a feat fast enough that his conscious mind wouldn’t have registered it. Unfortunately, as incredibly as that two-for-one special was, the remaining man and woman, including New Scar, were still coming. The Saint stood still as a tree trunk and couldn’t wait for these people to reach him. He put on the expression he called his “beatdown face,” which he had practiced in his mirror and in front of Nes, to make sure enemies knew what might happen when they got to him.
A bare moment later, Dastou saw three more raggedly-clothed people rushing out of an alley, all of them with bicycle chains for weapons. They didn’t hesitate at all as they turned toward the embassy. Summoning more people to a fight was certainly not the intended effect of beatdown face, but the world has a way of teaching Saints lessons when they get too full of themselves.
That’s five more coming, and who knew if they would take hostages, or worse. As the myriad complications to his very likely stupid decision to come out here at all were trying to organize themselves into neat piles of reprimands in Dastou’s head, his train of thought was halted completely by a squeal of feedback from the loudspeaker above him. There was one of those speakers on each outer wall of the embassy for announcements, a self-indulgent feature that worked in his favor as Saan-Hu’s voice came through after the feedback.
“Clean-up crew on the way out, Your Eminence!” Saan said, the announcement causing all five remaining enemies to slow down or stop altogether. “Get inside, they will finish the job for you” she added.
That order, or very strong recommendation as the case may be, was punctuated by four small, stark-white flying spheres whirring out of a sewer drain a meter in front of Dastou. The spheres were the size of a fist, with three small offset rotors on the top halves of their round bodies that let them fly with precision, and that they did. From the drain they buzzed up to Dastou, stopped in front of him. Their little black camera lenses looked at him as the spheres hovered in place,
and the Saint played his part by nodding, his expression impassive, stone-like. The four spheres turned to face the enemies, all of whom were equally focused on the mysterious, shiny white flying machines. After a few seconds of waiting – you know, for tension – the spheres buzzed off at their fastest speed, went further up into the air to about double Dastou’s height, and scrambled directly for the raggedly-dressed attackers.
The situation turned immediately from dangerous to comical as all five armed enemies turned and ran as fast as they could, tripping over themselves to get away from the speedy mystery objects. They all rushed down the same alley the last few came from, jostling for position. With a sigh of relief, Dastou watched as the spheres stopped at about where New Scar turned around and buzzed down to the dirty street. After waiting a moment, they sprayed a cleaning and disinfecting liquid down on the ground with automated movements.
Dastou double checked the transmitter on his belt to make sure it didn’t get switched off or damaged in the fight. “Saan,” he said, “pull those cleaners back in before they get clogged. And if you call me Your Eminence again I’m cutting your stipend for a month.”
“As I would expect,” Saan replied. “Resetting the cleaners now, sir.”
The spheres stopped their spraying, froze in place, then whirred back to the same sewer drain they came from at full speed. Dastou was feeling paranoid at the moment and never stopped looking out into the street in case something else came to ruin his temporary feeling of victory.
“Evara,” Dastou called, “can you hear me?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” said the girl. “There’s no one at the rear other than curious people trying to find out what’s happening, and none of them look dangerous. We’re clear.”
Another sigh of relief. Dastou took his time looking around, knowing he’d have to study this situation very soon in a calmer frame of mind. Everything was still a mess of debris and glass near him, but thankfully the crowds had more or less settled down. No more explosions and the end of the fight between the Saint and whoever those people were meant some breathing room. Only the folks closest to the embassy went running toward it for safety, everyone else barely moved, confused by the situation, and were now shambling past Dastou and into the relative safety of the indoors. Those people had to walk around the bodies of the dead. Near holes in the walls caused by explosives, there were at least twenty people on the ground, maybe more under rubble.
This violence, this scene of death and destruction, was making Dastou angrier than he had been in a long time. His chosen purpose in life was to help as many as he could, and the fact that this attack was obviously meant to strike at him was digging into his skin. The Saint took a few deep breaths and looked down to realize his hands were balled into tight fists. He opened his hands to see that it wouldn’t have taken much more for his nails to cut the skin and draw blood, something the raggedly-dressed enemies hadn’t managed. The worst life choices were made in torrents of emotion, and in order to figure out what this attack was all about and who were the perpetrators, he needed to force himself into a stable frame of mind.
He closed and opened his eyes slowly, breathed in and out. He pretended that the force of his breath was pushing the rubble away into a dark expanse where it ceased not to exist, but to matter. He was brought out of this process by three small electronic chirps in his ear.
“Captain Hays,” Dastou said, recognizing the call-sign for an officer needing a response. “You’re listening in like I expect you to?”
“Of course, sir,” Hays answered.
The captain was in charge of the secondary team the Saint brought to Blackbrick with him. While Dastou, Nes, and Saan met with politicians, Hays was to manage some local reconnaissance using five Private First-Class students, a field test for a few promising recruits.
“Is the Caravan ready to dock?” Dastou wondered, though he already guessed it was.
“Heh, I knew you’d ask that after all those booms. I’ve got the order on hold.”
For a field test of a handful of first-years anyone could have come along, but Dastou was suddenly very thankful that Hanyan Hays had been available. The guy had a demeanor that would not easily be broken into panic or faulty decision-making, and would instead have a constant, sensible idea of what to do next.
“Yeah,” Dastou confirmed, “lock it in.”
In the space of a few blinks after Dastou gave the go-ahead, he heard and felt the clanking of gigantic gears and alloy pulleys in the soles of his feet. The ground vibrated, glass shards and pebbles of rubble shifted from one place to another, and after a few seconds the vice-locks clamped in place with a metallic, familiar but muffled klong-klang-kling. The crowd both outside and inside the embassy lobby that had grown eerily quiet outside of pained moans gave a nearly simultaneous cry of surprise at all the new noise, their nerves having grown hair triggers after this horrific attack. The Caravan, Dastou’s huge mobile headquarters, was now docked directly below the embassy.
His hope that he would be leaving town soon after the meeting with the Blackbrick Council was up in smoke. Dastou and his people weren’t going anywhere for now.
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