Come the Revolution (26 page)

Chapter Thirty-Five

There were still a lot of people in Sookagrad, stragglers from the column, people who didn’t believe the Army would really kill them, some who had lived here secretly all along and didn’t know why everyone else had left. It sounds strange, but even in Sookagrad there were people living below the radar. Pushing through them sometimes was our main delay, trying to answer their questions, explain. Some of them joined us, so the group grew as we went. Just seeing purposeful action, armed men at the front and rear, was pretty persuasive to desperate people.

Some wanted to argue. One old guy, with about a dozen others with him, mostly women and children, had a petition. He wanted us to turn due south, march along the Shadowed Way to Katammu-Arc, so we could petition the uBakai
Wat
. I just ignored him and we kept marching. He tried to talk some of the others into joining him, but in the end most of his people followed us. I never saw him again.

The fighting to the north grew heavier as the Army closed in on the perimeter. I heard the thud of mines up there, saw more fires starting. There were already plenty of fires and they had started to spread, join together in larger conflagrations, and the flickering light and stark dancing shadows they cast turned Sookagrad’s final night into Dante’s nightmare.

We came out into the semi-open ground where the shelters were and found our lead scout crouching behind a metal building, waving us to stop. He laid his right arm across his chest, hand on his shoulder, two fingers extended like a pistol barrel—the
Cottohazz
tactical hand signal for armed soldiers, and then pointed around the corner of the building.

“Stay here,” I told Aurora and she nodded wordlessly, eyes wide with fear.

Chernagorov moved forward to the scout and I joined him. He looked around the edge of the building, looked for several seconds without moving, then came back, face twisted with horror and rage. I looked.

I saw uBakai troopers, over a dozen of them, executing people, lots of them, all civilians who had taken cover in the shelters.

I turned and waved Aurora forward. “Record this,” I hissed, “but don’t let them see you.” Then I turned to Chernagorov. “Get all your people up here, everyone with a gun.”

“What if are more soldiers than just those?”

“Then we die, but those guys go first.”

“Da!”

* * *

It won’t go down in history as the best-executed charge ever, but what we lacked in skill we made up for in earnestness. We charged in earnest, and we killed in earnest, and we took them by surprise, still drunk from their orgy of murder, and some of them died without firing a shot at us, staring stupidly at their oncoming doom. One even looked ashamed to have been caught in the midst of this unspeakable act. He dropped his gun and stepped back, as if to distance himself from what he had done.

I killed him.

The first man I ever killed I killed for vengeance, executed for what he had done, but every man I had killed after that I had done only to keep them from doing something else, killing me or someone important to me, never as revenge or punishment. Now I had come full circle, and for this execution I felt no remorse. I stood there in the sudden silence, my nose filled with the odor of ozone from the gauss weapons and then the rising coppery smell of blood, lots and lots of blood. I looked at the silent Human bodies, the hundreds of bodies, the carpet of bodies, and I threw up.

I felt a hand on my arm and I turned suddenly, pistol up, but it was only Aurora. She recoiled in alarm, in fear, and she was right to. I gestured to the killing ground.

“Record this!” I ordered, my voice hoarse. She nodded mutely, and I could see she already was.

There were still people alive, clumps of them, rising from the ground, emerging from two of the shelters, sobbing with horror or relief or emotions they would never be able to put a name to. At my feet I saw a blood-spattered soccer ball. Were those kids I saw earlier here? Who could tell? That wasn’t the only soccer ball in Sookagrad, but it belonged to someone, and I couldn’t stand to look at the ground anymore.

“Chernagorov!” I shouted. “Where are you?”

“Here!” he answered and held up his arm, maybe twenty meters away.

“Get your shit together. Pull every weapon, every grenade, every round of ammunition off these guys. Reorganize your squad, arm whoever looks like they can use it, and let’s get moving.”

He gestured to the ground, where many of the people shot now moved, twitched. “Some still alive.”

“Medtech!” I shouted, but she’d already come forward, was kneeling by one of the wounded. Behind her the rest of our people were straggling out onto the open ground to see what had happened.

“Medtech, look at me!”

She looked up, face twisted with emotion.

“You have ten minutes to identify people we can take with us who are likely to survive.”

“I can’t—”

“People are coming who will kill everyone here.
Ten minutes!”

She looked overwhelmed. Everyone did. Everyone was. I picked up the RAG the Varoki I shot had dropped and then I knelt and stripped his ammunition harness and helmet. The helmet was a little big, but it had a night vision visor and projected a sight picture from his RAG onto it. I adjusted the chin strap so it wouldn’t move around too much. Others were starting to strip weapons and ammo as well.

A female fighter walked up to me, looking bewildered.

“uBakai throw grenades into shelter,” she said. “Incendiary grenades. Was full of people, uBakai shot as tried coming out.”

“Weapons and ammo,” I said. “These guys aren’t just going to stop on their own, and you can’t stop them with an empty rifle.”

She nodded and moved off toward Chernagorov.

Aurora walked back to me, her face no longer blank with shock, but determined.

“I can’t go yet,” she said.

“There’s no choice. We need to get out of here. We need to get the story you’re carrying to the
Cottohazz
, especially after this.”

She nodded. “We need to get it to them, but we need to get it to them
right now
. They need to see it as it’s happening, not a couple months from now in a documentary. The access to the data pipe is right over there, not fifty meters south of here. I need a knife, though.”

I looked south toward where Moshe had tapped into the data pipe. “What do you need a knife for?”

“I can edit internally, but my bio-recorder normally downloads wirelessly. With the jamming I can’t. But there’s a subdermal backup link. It’s compatible with Moshe’s input socket; I saw it before. I’ve never used it, but I have a tattoo that shows where it is. I have to cut my arm open to get to it.”

* * *

I told Chernagorov what we were going to do. He wanted to wait for us, but that was stupid. He had wounded to carry, a mob of over two hundred people to keep moving, and he needed to get started. The three of us could move a lot faster, would catch up with him when we were done with our business, and he ended up agreeing. We shook hands and Aurora, our father, and I headed off to find the data pipe. The old man said he would rather go with the column, but his rathers didn’t carry much weight anymore.

We found the maintenance shaft without any trouble. The medtech had given me what was left of a roll of surgical tape and a mostly empty bottle of spray bandage, because we were going to have to patch up Aurora’s arm when we were done. I used part of the surgical tape roll to secure the old man’s hands behind his back, around the base of the stanchion above the maintenance shaft. It wouldn’t hold forever, but long enough.

“You don’t need to tie me up,” he protested.

“Of course not. You’d never go off and leave
me
in the lurch, would you? Now don’t go twisting this tape all up. I may need to use it later on Aurora’s arm. I’m going to climb down there and help her get started. Then I’ll be back up. If you wander off, I’ll find you and shoot you in the knee so you can’t wander again.”

“How will I keep up if you do?”

I didn’t bother to answer him.

I climbed down into the shaft first, my night vision helmet letting me see well enough to find the switch for the work light. Once it was on, Aurora climbed down. It was a close fit. She found the download socket and then pulled out the knife I’d given her, rolled up her left sleeve, and held her arm up in the light to see the tattoo. She had to wet her fingers with spit and rub some of the dirt around until she found the mark, just a short blue-black line less than a centimeter long. “Cut here” it might as well have said.

“Where’s Ted?” I asked. “Your vid tech guy? He should be helping with this.”

“He took the hard recorder and ran off on his own after the last bulletin. I think he wants to make his own documentary.”

“Afraid of the completion?” I asked, more teasing than serious.

She pushed the point of the knife deep into her arm and sucked in her breath with pain. Then she shook her head, lips pursed tight.

“No,” she said, voice trembling. Blood oozed around the cut, a fair amount of blood. She handed the knife to me and held her arm in her right hand, knuckles white. “That hurt,” she whispered.

“No shit. That’s too much blood. You must have nicked the vein. The medtech told me what to do if you did. Here, let me hold your arm.”

I steadied her arm with my left hand and with my right hand pressed the pressure point near her elbow to slow the blood flow to the cut. “Can you get the jack out?”

“I think so.” She bit her lower lip and then probed into the cut with her little finger. I could feel her arm start to tremble in my hand and she closed her eyes and bent her head back, but she didn’t make a sound. After what seemed like a long time to me, and which must have been an eternity to her, she pulled the small composite socket and fiber data link slowly out of the wound. Then she slowly exhaled and I realized I’d been holding my breath too. Her head lolled back a bit and then came forward.

“Feeling little woozy,” she said, the words slurred. I lowered her back so she was lying in the tunnel and tried to get her knees elevated with one hand, keeping my other on the pressure point in her arm.

“You’ll be okay. Just give yourself a minute. I’m going to use a little of the spray bandage on your arm. It’s got an anticoagulant that should help. We may have to do it again later. I don’t know if you put that thing back or what.”

“I don’t know either. I knew it was a backup but didn’t think I’d ever need it. If I did, it was supposed to be a simple in-and-out procedure at the med center. I guess they’d put it back in, huh? And seal me back up? I’d just say the hell with it and cut the plug off when I’m done, but the damned system cost me a fortune. You think this invalidates my warranty?” She laughed. “Okay, help me up.”

I got her sitting and after a quiet moment, waiting for dizziness to pass, she pulled the protective cover from her arm plug and had me connect it to the data jack in the signal splicer Moshe had put in. She closed her eyes and breathed in and out slowly three times, and then opened her eyes and nodded.

“I’ve got a channel. It will take me about ten minutes to download what I’ve got. It’s rough, wish I could do more of an edit, but…”

“Yeah, but,” I said. “You planning on sending that taped confession our father made to bioweapons research for AZ Kagataan?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Send it,” I said.

Her brow furrowed in confusion. “But I thought you didn’t believe it.”

“Who knows? I’ve been wrong about a lot of things in my life. I could be wrong about that too. Send it and let the rest of the
Cottohazz
dig out the truth. Here, use your right hand to keep the pressure on the vein. Will you be okay here if I go up and keep the old man company?”

She nodded and I climbed the ladder into the darkness. I made sure our father was still where I left him and then I made a long slow sweep with the thermal viewer. The field by the shelters had a lot of thermal signatures: people too wounded for Chernagorov to take with him, people dying whether they got taken or not, people already dead but not down to the ambient temperature yet—lots of signatures, but none of them moving.

I saw traces of thermal movement here and there around us, but a ways off. Most of them looked like people wandering lost, not like a military sweep. Nothing looked immediately threatening. I sat down next to our father.

“Are you going to take the tape off? I can’t feel my fingers.”

“Maybe later. While Aurora’s sending she can’t be recording, so we’ve got a few minutes to ourselves. There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“I’m sorry I left you, Sasha. I wanted to take both the children, but your mother insisted she go instead of you. I know I should have said no, should have stood up to her. I’ve never forgiven myself for—”

“Ancient history,” I interrupted him. “It’s not about that. I want to know about neurotoxins. They’re proteins, right?”

“Yes,” he said cautiously, clearly surprised by the change in subject. “All naturally occurring neurotoxins are proteins.” He looked at me as if he distrusted the question, thought it might be some sort of trap.

“So doesn’t that make them
all
species-specific? I mean, since the major races all have incompatible protein chains?”

He frowned in thought, I guess trying to figure out what this had to do with his abandonment of me. “Yes.”

“So how does a non-species-specific neurotoxin work?”

“We aren’t exactly sure,” he answered, but as soon as he said it he knew he’d blundered. His eyes shifted up and then to the right, the sign he was lying. “I mean…no one knows, because there is no such thing.”

I grinned.

“Sure there is. The neurotoxin used as an antitamper device for the jump drive works on all the races, right? Otherwise it wouldn’t be any good. Sell a drive to a Human, he gets a Zack or a Katami to look inside with impunity. But when the drive on the
Rawalpindi
cracked,
everyone
died, Human and Varoki. How did that happen?”

“I’m…not familiar with the particulars of that—”