"How long before they hit our perimeter, do you think, Greg?" she asked, and the calmness of her own voice astounded her. It seemed to belong to someone else, someone whose nerves weren't tied into knots and whose belly muscles weren't clenched.
"Hard to say," Hilton replied after a moment. "They're obviously headed our way, and those militia sad sacks aren't going to stop them. Might slow them down a bit, I suppose." He frowned judiciously. "Of course, I imagine quite a few of our noble militiamen are busy finding new and compelling loyalties at the moment."
"You really think many of them will go over to the other side?"
"Don't sound so surprised, Larva." Hilton chuckled harshly. "First, it's pretty damned obvious from the remotes that the mob is gonna roll right over anything that gets in its way, and these poor militia pukes live here. They're going to be thinking about that, in between pissing themselves. They aren't gonna want to get rolled over, they don't have anyplace to go, and they aren't gonna want to kill a whole bunch of their friends and neighbors. Especially not if they're gonna go on living here... and if doing that won't stop the mob, anyway.
"Second, I'd be real surprised if there weren't quite a few GLF sympathizers in the militia to begin with. They're going to go over to the other side in droves, and they're gonna take as many of their buddies with them as they can." He shrugged. "Frankly, in their shoes, I'd probably be thinking the same way. What're we gonna do about it later? Shoot 'em all? Especially if we can't prove what they were up to during the present... unpleasantness? Oh, a few of them might catch it in the neck, but even so, that's somewhere off in the future. They're thinking about right now."
"Well, someone's still putting up a scrap," Alicia observed, waving a hand as a fresh wave of weapons fire chattered and thundered in the distance.
"Yep." Hilton nodded. "There's gonna be some who stick it out all the way to the end. Some of 'em because, frankly, they're good troops, even if they are stuck in this useless militia. And like good troops everywhere, they're gonna be the ones who take the heavy losses while the rest of their sorry outfit packs up and bugs out behind them.
"And some of them are gonna stick because they don't have anywhere else to go. You think maybe Jongdomba or Sharwa is gonna be especially welcome in the bosom of the Revolution?"
"They can't possibly expect to win, not in the long term," Alicia murmured.
"The mob? The GLF?" Hilton said. She looked at him, and he shrugged. "Alicia, this isn't-none of this is-what you might call a reasoned response." He waved one hand in the direction of the smoke and thunder and shook his head. "When Pankarma got his ass killed, 'reasoned' went right out the window. Neither side ever expected it, and neither side had any kind of plan in place in case it happened. And now the whole damned situation's completely out of control. No one's in charge of this, Alley. It's just happening, and by now it's feeding on itself. I've seen it before."
"Well," Alicia said after a minute or so, "at least we managed to get most of our people inside the perimeter."
"There's that," Hilton agreed. Then he sighed. Alicia looked at him, and he smiled sadly.
"Think about what you just said," he told her quietly. "We've got 'most of our people' inside. Who are 'our people'? Just us off-worlders and our dependents? What about all the people here on Gyangtse who supported the Incorporation? The ones someone in that mob is going to know supported Incorporation? What happens to them? And, for that matter, what happens to the mob when it does hit our perimeter and finds out the difference between the local militia and the Imperial Marine Corps?"
Alicia looked at him for a moment longer, then turned back towards the distant wall of smoke.
Somehow, at that instant, that rising breath of destruction was far less frightening than the questions Gregory Hilton had just posed.
***
"This is a frigging disaster," Akos Salgado said bitterly as he strode into Governor Aubert's office. Aubert stood by the window, back to the door and hands clasped behind him, gazing out at the same smoke Alicia could see from her own position. "I warned Palacios that this knee-jerk, iron fist approach of hers can only make things worse, and the goddamned lunatic basically told me to go fuck myself! I swear to God, I'll see that bitch court-martialed if it's the last thing I -"
"Akos," Aubert said levelly, "shut up."
Salgado's jaw dropped, and he stared at the Governor's back with the eyes of a beached fish. For at least three full seconds, that appeared to be all he was capable of doing. Then his mouth started to work again.
"But... but..." he began.
"I said," Aubert said, turning from the window to face him at last, "to shut up."
Salgado closed his mouth, and Aubert walked across to seat himself behind his desk. Then he leaned back in his chair, his expression grim.
"This isn't the result of any 'iron fist' on Major Palacios' part," he said flatly. "This is the result of our stupidity."
"But -"
"I'm not going to tell you again to keep your mouth shut." Aubert's voice was an icicle, and Salgado felt a sudden stab of very personal panic as he looked into his patron's eyes and suddenly read his own political future with perfect prescience.
"Palacios has been trying to tell us for months that something like this was coming," Aubert continued. "I thought she was wrong. I thought she was an alarmist. I thought Jongdomba's so-called intelligence analysts knew the local situation better than she did. And, God help me, I thought you knew your ass from your elbow. I wish-you'll never know how much I wish-that I could look in my mirror and tell myself this was all your fault. You're the one who's been manipulating my schedule to keep Palacios from bending my ear with her 'alarmism' and her 'paranoia.' You're the one who's been 'losing' messages from her to me. And you're the one who came up with this brilliant plan to arrest Pankarma. But the only problem with blaming it all on you, is that I knew exactly what you were doing when I let you do it. I even agreed with you, despite everything Palacios tried to tell me, which makes me just as big a fool as you. No, a bigger fool, one who kept his eyes closed and his fingers in his ears so I could go on ignoring all the warning signs. Kereku was completely correct in his reading of what's been happening here on Gyangtse, and he's twelve light-years from here. Which means, much as I hate to admit it, that he was also absolutely right to try and get my worthless ass fired."
"Governor-Jasper," Salgado began desperately, "of course this is all a terrible -"
"Get out," Aubert said almost calmly. Salgado goggled at him, and the Governor pointed at the office door. "I said, 'get out,' " he repeated. "As in get your stupid fucking face on the other side of that door, and out of my sight, and keep it there. Now."
Akos Salgado looked at him for another heartbeat, recognizing the utter and irretrievable ruin of his career. Then his shoulders sagged and he turned and walked blindly from the office.
Chapter Eight
"Fall back! Fall back!"
Karsang Dawa Chiawa's throat felt raw as he shouted the command.
Even now, he could scarcely believe how explosively the mob had reacted, how quickly it had gathered and how violently it had grown. Nothing in any of the intelligence reports he'd seen had suggested that anyone in the planetary government or the militia had believed the GLF enjoyed any real support among the general population. Apparently, they'd been wrong.
And sending Salaka out to face it had been exactly the wrong move, he thought grimly. Although, to be fair to himself, even now, he couldn't think of anything which could have been considered the "right move." Especially not given Sharwa's demand that he "disperse" the mob immediately coupled with the colonel's refusal to allow Chiawa to take charge of it personally. After all, it had been so much more important for Sharwa to continue ripping a strip off Chiawa than to let the captain do anything constructive about the situation. Or for the colonel to call up more of the militia. Or even to inform President Shangup of what had happened.
But Chiawa knew that, however badly at
fault Sharwa might have been, he would never forgive himself for not telling the colonel to shut the hell up while he handled the dispersal. Of course, he hadn't realized there were weapons in the crowd any more than Salaka had, but he should have allowed for the possibility.
Salaka's death had been the final straw. The brick-throwers had turned suddenly into a screaming tide of enraged humanity, and most of Salaka's men had been just as confused, just as shaken, as anyone else. They hadn't expected any of this, and when Salaka went down, they'd hesitated. Maybe that was Chiawa's fault, too. He was the one who'd specifically cautioned Salaka against the use of lethal force. He was sure he'd go on second-guessing himself for the rest of his life, but the truth was that he didn't know if it would have made any difference if they'd opened fire the instant the crowd-become-mob started forward. In any case, they hadn't. They'd tried to give ground, to avoid killing their fellow citizens, and those fellow citizens had swarmed over them.
As far as Chiawa knew, not a single member of Salaka's platoon had survived, and he didn't know, frankly, how he'd gotten anyone out of the hotel as the howling mob seemed to materialize out of the very pavement. They'd had to shoot their way out, and he knew at least some of his people hadn't even tried to. He didn't know how well they'd made out with their efforts to join the mob, but he knew some of them had at least made the attempt.
Those who'd stuck with him had tried to reach some sort of support, some haven from the typhon. It hadn't been easy, with the capital's streets infested with rioters-more and more of whom appeared to be armed-screaming their hatred for anyone in uniform. They'd managed to link up, briefly, with Echo Company, the only other militia unit Brigadier Jongdomba and Colonel Sharwa had mustered for the "routine" operation. But Captain Padorje, Echo Company's CO, had insisted on attempting to carry out Colonel Sharwa's order to retake the Annapurna Arms. Exactly what Sharwa had hoped that might accomplish escaped Chiawa, although the colonel had apparently believed even then that a sharp, successful show of force would "whip the street rabble back to its kennel."
Whatever Sharwa might have thought would happen, the orders had been a mistake-another mistake-but Padorje had refused to take Chiawa's word for that. And so they'd gone back against the tide... and disintegrated like a sand castle in the face of a rising sea. Chiawa had seen it coming, and he'd done his best to pull his own people out of the wreck, but they'd been hit from three sides as they entered Brahmaputra Square, three blocks short of the hotel. Padorje's lead platoon had simply disappeared, and the rest of Echo Company-and Able Company's survivors-had splintered into desperately fighting, frantically retreating knots with the mob baying savagely in pursuit.
And now, after what seemed an eternity but couldn't have been more than a few hours in reality, he was down to this. He'd been trying to work his way towards the spaceport, where the Marines were supposed to be holding a perimeter, but every time he headed east, he ran into a fresh surge of rioters who drove his remaining people back to the west. By now, they were almost half way across the city from the port, but he couldn't think of any other objective which might give his people a chance of survival.
The two dozen-plus militiamen still holding together under his command-only eight of them were from his own company-actually managed to obey his latest fall back order. The jury-rigged squad under the sergeant from Echo Company rose from its firing positions and headed back past Chiawa's own position at a run. The captain had managed to select the location for their next no-doubt-pointless stand from his map display, and the sergeant-whose name Chiawa couldn't remember-flung himself back down on his belly behind an ornamental shrub's ceramacrete planter. The other members of "his" squad found spots of their own, most with decent cover, at least from the front.
"Position!" the nameless sergeant announced over Chiawa's com.
"Copy," Chiawa responded, then looked back to his front. "Chamba! Time to go!"
"On our way!" Sergeant Chamba Mingma Lhukpa replied, and rose in a crouch, waving for his own men to fall back.
They obeyed the hand signal, moving, Chiawa noted, with a wary care they'd never displayed in any of the militia's exercises. He couldn't avoid a certain bitterness at the observation, but he made himself set it aside quickly. These people were the survivors. The ones who'd possessed the tenacity to stick when everyone else bugged out... and who'd been fast enough learners-and nasty enough-to survive. So far. If Chiawa had had a single full platoon of them under his command at the Annapurna Arms, none of this would have happened.
Bullshit. You-and Sharwa and that idiot Jongdomba-still would've fucked it up, and you know it, a small, still voice said in the back of his brain as Lhukpa's exhausted, grim faced people fell back around him. Bullets whined and cracked overhead, skipped across the pavement, or punched fist-sized holes in the fa‡ades of buildings, and he heard a sudden scream as one of his remaining privates went down.
Lhukpa started back, but Chiawa pointed back to the position from which the nameless sergeant and his people were laying down aimed covering fire.
"Go!" the captain screamed, and once again, the sergeant obeyed.
Chiawa turned back. An icy fist squeezed shut on his stomach and twisted as the incoming rifle fire seemed to redouble. He heard the thunderous, tearing-cloth sound of a firing calliope added to the cacophony, and he felt like a man wading into the teeth of a stiff wind. Except, of course, that no wind he had ever faced had been made of penetrators capable of punching straight through the breast and backplates of the unpowered body armor he wore.
He went down on one knee beside the fallen private. Chepal Pemba Solu, he realized. One of the handful from his own company, like Lhukpa, to stick by him. He rolled Solu onto his back and checked the life sign monitor. It was black, and he bit off a curse, grabbed Solu's dog tags, and went dashing after Lhukpa.
And even as he ran, he felt a fresh stab of guilt because a part of him couldn't help thinking that they were better off with Solu dead than trying to carry a badly wounded man with them through this nightmare.
Something louder than usual exploded ahead of him. The shockwave caused him to stumble, still running, and he tucked his shoulder under, grunting with anguish as he hit the ceramacrete full force, still driving forward at the moment of impact. He rolled as he landed, flinging himself sideways until his frantically tumbling body bumped up over the curb of a sidewalk and he slammed into a city bench. That stopped him... and would have broken ribs without his body armor.
There was another explosion. And another.
Mortars, his brain reported even as he gasped for the breath which had been driven out of him. The bastards have gotten their hands on some of our own mortars!
A moment later, he was forced to revise his initial impression. If that was an ex-militia mortar, it wasn't a bunch of untrained rioters using it. The initial rounds had landed long, well beyond his people's positions; the follow-up rounds were marching steadily and professionally up the avenue towards him. Someone who knew what he was doing was on the other end of those explosions, so either it was one of the weapons Sharwa had assured all of his people the GLF didn't have, or else it was one which had once belonged to the militia... and was being operated by a mortar crew which had once belonged to the militia, as well.
Not that it mattered very much. His double handful of people had semi-adequate cover against small arms fire, but not against indirect fire that could search out the dead spots behind planters, parked cars, and ceramacrete steps.
"Inside!" he shouted over the com. "Into the buildings!"
He was already up, running for the broad flight of steps to the main entrance of the office building behind his bench. Someone else was running up them with him-at least two or three someone elses. That was good; at least he wouldn't be alone. But this was the one thing he'd tried to avoid from the beginning of the nightmare retreat. Once his people were broken up into tiny, independent groups he couldn't coordinate and control, their cohesion was bound to disappear. And ev
en if that hadn't been the case, as soon as they split up, they could only become complete fugitives, unable to rely on one another for mutual support.
"Everybody, listen to me," he panted over the com as he burst through the office building's door into the incongruously spotless and peaceful lobby. "Keep going. Break contact, scatter, and get to the spaceport somehow. I'll see you all there. And... thanks."
He said the last word quietly, almost softly. Then he looked over his shoulder at the four militiamen who'd managed to join him. None of whom, he noted, were from Able Company.
"All right, guys," he said wearily. "That goes for us, too. You-Munming," he read the name stenciled on the other man's breastplate. Munming was a corporal, armed with a grenade launcher, and he still had half a bandolier of grenades. "You're our heavy fire element. You stay behind me. Load with flechette for right now. You two," he indicated two riflemen, neither of whom he recognized. "You and I are point. You," he tapped one of them on the chest, "right flank. You," he indicated the other, "left flank. I'll take the center. And you," he turned to the fourth and final militiaman, "you've got our backs. Clear?"