Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (32 page)

So we started off, our motley little task force.

Mazzie and Suki of the Hillbilly team were in front with their shields.

Suki was the one who had found them. She broke into an empty police station while all the cops were busy elsewhere with other matters, either on our side or not. Who knew? But they had been in a long-unused storage locker that had been opened only hours before. One of the functions of police was crowd control, riot control. So far as I knew, there had never been a riot in the ship, but on a voyage this long, there was no telling what social tensions might evolve, so the man Travis had appointed as police chief twenty years ago had asked for them, and now they were being used.

But not all of them. The cops had left a few, and Suki had scooped them up. It was good thinking, and we had congratulated her on it. They were clear plexi with a slight curve, about three feet tall and two wide. Straps on the concave side held them to your arm. It was a simple design developed over many decades on Earth, where violent confrontations were common. When the girls sat in the front seats and held them up, the shields provided what we hoped would be protection against the stun guns. Bullets was another matter. They were described as “bullet-resistant,” and I hoped that wasn’t wishful thinking.

Two boys and a girl got behind the car and started pushing. Once it started rolling, there was almost no resistance. What there was, was the one-twentieth gee from the engines, which made the tunnel appear to be uphill, when it was really parallel to the inner surface and a few hundred yards beneath it. But even with that, one boy could keep it going easily. Everyone else strung out behind us.

We went down the tunnel at a trot. Well, everybody but me and Polly and Suki and Mazzie did, anyway. I got a free ride. I wished it was on the roller coaster in Fantasyland instead of where we were.

Not all the overhead lights were working. Some were flickering. We figured it was just more of the screwed-up systems from the fighting going on in the computers.

We were watching the positioning system, and when we got a quarter mile from the last station, we slowed down and advanced as quietly as we could. Flashlights were off, there was no talking. Suddenly, there were bright lights in our eyes, and two big explosions. I was deafened for a moment.

“Mask on!” Polly shouted to me. “Everybody, fall back!”

“I’m staying,” Suki shouted, and Mazzie chimed in that she was, too. Smoke approached us, then enveloped us. I saw the two girls trying to hold their breath, and finally inhaling. They looked at each other. They were coughing a bit, but not collapsing.

“Flashbangs,” I said. “Everybody, cover your ears!”

We were all wearing our skypool helmets, which had holes over the ears and padding inside that pressed in a circle around the ears. Polly and I had stuffed cloths in the ear holes. We hoped we could still hear each other but that the cloth would deaden any shock waves. Still, my ears were ringing, and it was hard to hear anything softer than a shout. However, in a situation like that,
everyone
is shouting, and it’s hard to hear anything at all.

There were two more explosions, much smaller, and two bolts of electricity came sizzling out of the smoke. Well, no, that wasn’t the sequence. Two small projectiles caromed off the shields in front of us,
then
the lightning bolts hit. What was happening was a visual effect of those stun rifles. They trailed very fine, almost monofilament wires behind them, and when they hit something, the charge came down the line and burned the wires up, shooting fire like holiday sparklers. It was dazzling.

“Anybody hit?” Polly shouted. I couldn’t tell what the answer was, but it didn’t look to me like the charges had hit anyone. Suki and Mazzie were still holding up the shields, looking frightened.

“Fuck this,” I said. “They want to play rough? Let’s give it right back to them.” I dug in my pack and got out a grenade. Polly watched me as I set the timer to ten seconds and held my thumb on the release.

“That will tear them up,” she said.

“Right now, I don’t really care.” I ducked as two more shots were fired at us, followed very closely by two more projectiles, and two more sizzling sets of wires. “But I don’t think so. We’re at the far range of those stun guns, and I can’t throw a grenade more than half that distance.”

“Okay. But it might roll back at us.”

She was talking about the twentieth gee, and she was right. It would be slow, but still . . .

I reset the timer for five seconds, and saw Polly doing the same.

“Get down and cover your ears!” I called to the ones in back of us.

We threw as hard as we could, then all four of us hunkered down in the car and I counted.

The explosions were almost simultaneous, and much louder than the flashbangs they had fired at us. I could feel the pressure all over my body. Damn. Using grenades in a tunnel was maybe not such a good idea. But we only had one alternative, and that one was lethal.

I took my hands away from the ear holes and thought I heard a scream. Impossible to be sure what it was.

Well, they started it.

“I think we need to get moving,” Polly said.

“Right. Right.” I was still a little stunned from the explosions. Suki looked that way, too, but Mazzie was raring to go.

“Let’s move!” I called to the troops in back, and at once two determined-looking girls and one boy ran up and started to push. Polly and I stood up and braced ourselves, pistols in hand, aiming forward.

It seemed the fans were still working. In fact, they were working overtime, loud enough to hear them. If things were working right—and there was no way of telling—somewhere a fire alarm would be going off, alerting the fire brigades who were, most likely, too busy with other fires to bother about this unknown subway.

But the smoke was clearing rapidly. There was no need for stealth now, and behind us two girls were aiming flashlights ahead of us. And behind us a strange sound began to build. It was a combination of the warbling war cry of my team, the Gators, borrowed from celebrating Arab women, and the harsh
“Hua! Hua! Hua!”
of the Hillbillies, borrowed from the United States Marines.

Almost at once, we came on a body, dressed in black and wearing body armor and a black helmet. It was a man, lying on his back. His face was a bloody mess, blood streaming from his forehead. It looked like one of his legs might be broken, from the way his foot lay twisted too far. I fought an urge to throw up.

But he was moving, feebly, like a turtle on its back. Trying to raise his head. We slowed as we neared him, and I kept my pistol pointed at him.

“Medic,” I called back. Coach Peggy had turned out to be a conscientious objector, some religious thing. But she had wanted to go along to treat any injuries. She hurried to the front.

“Check him and see if he’s bleeding bad,” I said. “Someone, tie his hands behind his back. Someone take that stun rifle and move up to the front with us.” All that was done quickly, and we headed forward again.

We passed two other people lying on the floor. The first was another man, unconscious, but not looking too badly injured. We paused while someone tied his hands behind him. The second was a woman sitting with her back to the wall. She was dressed like the others, in riot gear. She had shoved her stun rifle away from herself with her foot, and held one hand high in the air. Her other hand was trying to staunch the bleeding from a piece of shrapnel in her left leg. She looked terrified.

“Please don’t kill me,” she pleaded. “I have a three-year-old son.”

“You shouldn’t have shot at us,” Cheryl said, picking up the rifle.

I looked at Polly. “What do you think? Should we question her? We might learn something.”

“I think we ought to press on. I feel like we’d lose our momentum if we hung around here too long. Plus, I feel so damned exposed here in this tunnel. It channels anything they fire right at us.”

Just at that moment, there were two more of the bangs we now knew were stun rifles firing. I didn’t even have time to shout for everyone to take cover, and sadly, the troops had bunched up around the car to see the injured woman.

One round ricocheted off one of the shields ahead, hit the ceiling over my head, and then bounced back down into the crowd. Two girls fell down and started jerking. I guess the charge hit one and passed to the other by contact. I didn’t see where the second round went for a minute, then realized it had hit the injured woman. She was jerking, too.

I saw red. I mean, I literally saw a red haze in front of my eyes. I pushed the shields aside and fired three bursts of three shots directly down the tunnel. I could hear them clattering back and forth from wall to wall, a weird sort of siren wail as the slugs tumbled and shattered.

Polly fired a single group of three, and pulled at my hand. I had meant to keep squeezing the trigger, but I calmed down.

“You,” I said, pointing to one of the younger girls, “see if you can stop the bleeding on that woman. And tie her up. And if she comes to, see what you can learn about what’s ahead of us.”

“I want to go with you all,” she said. I knew I had no way to force her to do anything, no real authority except what Polly and I had seized, and that could stop at any time.

“Look,” Polly told her. “We really need to know what she knows. Try to wake her up. And please, stay with these girls who got stunned.”

One of those girls was sitting up, looking a little dazed but game to go on. She must not have experienced the full charge.

That all got sorted out quickly. Our blood was up, all of us, and we hurried down the last yards of the tunnel.

—

It didn’t take long to pass the first body.

It was another man, and there was no point taking a closer look at him. The bullet, or fragment, had hit him in the neck, and he had bled out. It had done a lot of damage. I looked away, then forced myself to look back. Then I looked at Polly. She was pale. At that moment, I was very glad that she had fired, too. We would never know who had fired the fatal bullet. I looked down at the gun, which had suddenly grown to look very ugly.

I looked back and saw that the troops had bunched up again, getting closer to see what had happened.

“Spread out!” I yelled, louder than I needed to. “They can still fire at us, dammit.” I paused to get myself under control as they obediently moved into a ragged double line behind us.

“Here’s another chance for all of y’all to turn back,” Polly said. “Take a look at this guy as we pass him. Take a good look. This isn’t a game. This is a real mutiny, and if we lose, you could all be in big trouble. Think about it, please. Cassie and I did the shooting; we’ll take the fall if it comes to that. This might be your last chance.”

I signaled to the pushers, and we started up again. I looked back. Two girls and a boy had remained just short of the body. One of the girls turned back and started running. I didn’t know her name. The other two walked past the body and followed us.

We didn’t pick up the man’s stun rifle though we could have used it. It felt too much like robbery, and not the spoils of war.

—

There was another body, a man, and a third person, also male, badly wounded. Coach Peggy had caught up with us. We paused only a moment to see her begin work to stop the bleeding, which was from the thigh. It wasn’t spurting; she gave us the thumbs-up, which I took to mean she thought he would be all right. We didn’t talk about the second dead man.

The station, when we arrived there, was chaotic. Nothing was moving, there were no dead bodies, but there was a lot of equipment and some blood. Some of it was the remains of medical supplies, sterile gauze packs ripped open, a few empty syringes, stuff like that. There was some torn black clothing. There were spatters of blood here and there, but no deep pools.

“They’ve carried their wounded away,” Polly said.

From the station, which was a circular room about thirty feet in diameter, a single corridor led to a pressure door. It was closed and locked, and we knew our people were only about a hundred yards beyond that door.

We put our heads together. All the others gathered around us.

“First thing, I guess we try thumbprints,” I said. Polly walked over to the door and put her thumb to the plate. Nothing happened.

“Plan B?” she said.

“Blow the door.”

So we got out grenades. We peeled off the paper patch on one side of each, exposing the sticky stuff underneath, and arranged three of them where we thought they would do the most good, pressing them in place. We set the fuses for twenty seconds, which was the maximum. We told everyone to go back in the tunnel and keep their heads down.

“And cover your ears! This will be noisy.”

We pressed the start buttons, and sprinted back along the tunnel and got down on the floor.

Twenty seconds never took so long.

The explosions, when they came, fractions of a second apart, seemed to lift me right up off the floor and blow me backwards, but that might have been my imagination. Seconds after the bang, we were all on our feet and racing toward the cloud of smoke.

Coughing, we slowed down a little as the fans worked at clearing the smoke. The door was a few feet down the newly revealed corridor, slightly distorted, blackened in three places.

“Let’s go!” I shouted, and stepped over the door and into the smoke on the other side.

That’s when the stun bolt came out of the smoke and hit me right in the gut. The next thing I knew, I was flopping like a fish, unable to control any of my muscles.

It didn’t seem fair.

Polly:

I probably should have shot when Cassie went down, but I held my fire. I guess I was still shaken by the idea that we had killed people. I guess all soldiers in a war are shook up the first time they kill someone. I guess the still-vivid images, which I knew would stay with me all my life, stayed my hand.

It didn’t stay anyone else’s.

The troops with the stun rifles were in the breach almost before my sister hit the floor, three of them, two girls and one boy, firing bolts rapidly and moving forward at the same time.

They were also being fired at. Bolts came out of the smoke, and one of the girls went down, jerking like an epileptic. A bolt sailed over my head as I crouched there, and I heard a thud as someone else went down.

Then something different. It was the sound of a shotgun going off, and a terrible pain ripped through my left shoulder. My whole left arm went numb. Though my gun was in my right hand, the shock made me drop it. I heard people crying out, and a scream. The smoke was still thick, and I couldn’t see much, but it looked like all the people in the front, crammed together there in the corridor, had gone down. I saw blood.

The shotgun fired again, and something hit my helmet so hard it was jerked off my head, which rang like a bell. I was groping around for my pistol.

“Everyone get back!” I shouted. “These aren’t stun guns!”

Cassie was still flopping, but feebly now. I couldn’t find my own gun, so I rolled over on top of her and found hers in her hand. I pried it from her stiff fist and aimed it down the corridor. I fired three-round bursts until the clip was empty. Then I ejected the magazine and managed to get another from my backpack, which had been torn open. I jammed it in and fired more until that clip was empty.

No fire was being returned. I sat up, cautiously, and looked down at my left upper arm. I wished I hadn’t. A flap of skin about three inches wide was hanging out there where it shouldn’t be. It wasn’t bleeding a lot, and I guess that was the good news. And it didn’t hurt much.

Not just then.

I must have been sort of stunned there for a while. I don’t know how long. There were soft moans from some of the people around me. I looked around, found my helmet, picked it up. I saw that a round metal object, a ball bearing, was embedded in the thick plastic. It would have taken the top of my head off if the helmet hadn’t been there.

I gradually became aware of activity around me. The uninjured people who had been behind us had moved up and were tending to the wounded. There were several who were just stunned and were pulled out of the way to recover on their own. Four girls and one boy had been hit by pellets from the shotgun. Three of the wounds were not any more serious than mine. The boy had been hit in the stomach and was groaning pitifully.

“We’ve got to get this one to a hospital,” Peggy said. She moved over to one of the shapes that wasn’t moving.

It was Cheryl. Coach Peggy took a look at her head, which had a deep hole in one side. She straightened up, looked at me, and shook her head.

Suddenly, I felt a lot better about all that shooting I had done.

And a lot worse about leading these girls and boys into the line of fire.

We were almost there, but far from out of the woods. Peggy put a compress around my wound, which was beginning to make itself known, and I was able to stand up and try to get things under control.

This was always going to be the tricky part.

Two girls had gone down the corridor where the firing had come from. They reported five corpses and two badly injured. They brought back an ugly piece of metal, a tube bolted to a piece of plastic. I realized it was a homemade shotgun, probably turned on a metal lathe, bored from a steel rod. It was a muzzleloader, because building anything more complex would take a lot of designing and time. A big zip gun, and they didn’t even have shotgun shells. You jammed in some powder and some shot, plugged it with something, and fired. Then you had to do it all over again. Just like in the eighteenth century, the American Civil War. It was the cumbersome nature of the weapon that had kept the carnage down and probably saved mine and Cassie’s lives.

Yeah, tell it to Cheryl Chang.

The stragglers from down the subway tunnel all arrived. They brought with them one of the wounded mutineers. He objected to that term when I called him that.

“They told us that Captain Broussard had gone crazy, and they were taking control of the ship under . . . some regulation. They read it to us.”

“What are you, anyway?”

“I’m a cop, from the Castle Rock police force. I’ve never done anything like this before. You killed some cops!”

“They were shooting at us, and we represent the legal authorities under the law. They fooled you. And by the way, who
are
they?”

He seemed to be debating whether or not to talk to me anymore, but he was also struggling with the idea that he might be in big trouble if his side lost, and it didn’t look good for his side at the moment.

“Some big fat guy. I don’t know him. Max . . .”

“Max Karpinski.”

“That’s him. Some others. They showed us what looked like legal authority. It was verified by the computer protocols.”

“I’ll bet it was. Come here.”

Two others and myself frog-marched him down the hall until we were facing the door where everyone important to me except Papa was being held. There was a little Judas window in the door, closed tight just then. I grabbed the prisoner’s collar and shook him.

“We have to get in there. Can you communicate with the guards? Is there a password? A secret knock-knock signal?”

This was the part that had worried Cassie and me from the start, when Travis gave us the broad outline of the plan . . .

Well, we were also a bit nervous about what he planned to do after we got them all out, but he had refused to discuss that. Get us out, and I’ll deal with the rest, he had said. I presumed it had to do with getting to one of his concealed and protected arsenals and using those weapons.

But first things first. We needed to get into that room, and the only way we had figured out to do that was to blow the door.

But who might be sitting against that door? Who might be sitting a few yards way? We desperately needed a way either to get through the door without violence or give those inside some warning so they could move away, even if they had to risk being stunned.

Speaking of stunned, Cassie was awake and alert, and almost ready to stand on her feet again. All this had taken about fifteen minutes. She was following our conversation intently.

“We haven’t had much communication with our people inside for half a day,” the prisoner said. “All the phones are down. What we’ve been doing is knocking on the door.”

“And they take a look at you, right?”

“That’s it. They know me.”

“What’s your name?” I put my gun under his chin and pushed so hard his head was forced back. “And if you lie to me, it’s the last lie you’ll ever tell.”

“My name’s Vince. I got ID in my pocket.”

Cassie reached into his pocket and pulled out a badge. Vince, all right, and a lieutenant in the Castle Rock force, just like he said.

I looked at Cassie. We were clearly on the same page.

“Here’s how it’s going to be, Vince,” she said. “We’re going over to that door. You will knock on it, and stand with your face close to the glass. When they ask you, you’ll identify yourself. When the little door opens, you will tell them that you need help out here, and you need it fast. Tell them there’s been a firefight, and you’ve got some of the . . . the . . .”

“How about rebels?” I suggested.

“That’s good. Some of the rebels are cornered, and you need some help rooting them out. And, Vince, are you an actor?”

“An actor? No.”

“Well, you’re going to give the performance of your life, anyway.” She pulled the waistband of his pants away from his belly and shoved the muzzle of her gun down the front. “If you say anything else to them, I’ll shoot your cock off. If you don’t convince them to open the door, I’ll shoot your cock off. If you try to take this gun from me, I’ll shoot your cock off. Are we clear, Vince?”

I nudged under his chin with my gun again in case he needed any more prodding. He didn’t. He nodded, carefully, swallowed hard, and we took him to the door.

He stood for a moment.

“Take your time, Vince. Rehearse your lines. Get it right, because you won’t have a second chance.”

He nodded again and started breathing hard, hyperventilating. I liked that. It meant he was thinking carefully. A method actor. Getting into the part.

At last he knocked on the door. Cassie was off to one side, to the left, and all the other uninjured were close up behind us. The plan was to hit it hard as soon as the door opened, do our best to surprise them.

Vince knocked. Someone not far from the other side of the door called out, asking who it was.

“It’s me, Vince! Hurry up, we need some help out here.” Maybe overacting a little, but on the whole, not bad. I kept my eyes on his face, my gun down out of sight, as the little door opened. I couldn’t see any sort of facial signal, and I really didn’t think these people were well enough organized to have set up something like that, but you never know.

He read his lines perfectly, with just the right mixture of fear (which was probably easy enough, with Cassie threatening Little Vincie and the family jewels) and excitement. The guard inside shut the little door and almost at once yanked open the big one and started outside—

—when Cassie grabbed her by the shirtfront and yanked her out of the room to go sprawling under a pileup of very angry skypool players. Cassie and I leaped inside—

—scanned the room quickly—

—spotted the two other guards, who had already started toward us—

—and we yelled for them to drop their weapons—

—and one of them stutter-stepped and dropped his—

—and the other started to bring his stun rifle up—

—and Cassie and I both shot him, my round into his leg, and hers knocking the rifle out of his hands. He went down and started to yell.

“Lucky shot,” I told Cassie. And suddenly I was feeling faint. I sat down, and in an instant Mama was at my side, crying, hugging me, reaching out for Cassie, and she was crying, too. I don’t know when two girls have ever needed their mama so badly.

—

And just like that, it was over.

Well, not
over
over, you know. But we had done what we set out to do, and it was like the weight, all the gigatons of the whole ship, was lifted off my shoulders. I just wanted to sit there and cry for a long time. But we didn’t have time for that. Because it wasn’t truly all over, and we knew it.

Aunt Elizabeth was a whirlwind. We had brought along basic first-aid supplies, and she pounced on them as soon as the others entered the room carrying them. First, she went to the injured guard, stopped the bleeding. She was issuing orders just about as fast as she could talk, with Dorothy acting as her nurse. When she heard there were more casualties outside she started in that direction, but Mama grabbed her arm and put her roughly down beside me. She zeroed in on my wound like a heat-seeking missile.

“Sorry, Podkayne, girls,” she said. “I didn’t realize.” She got a good look at it and shouted for more bandages. She clucked her tongue. Don’t you just hate it when a doctor does that? And don’t you just hate it even more when taking off the bloody bandage feels like skin being stripped right down to the bone? Well, I sure did, and I let everyone know about it, too. I’m not one to suffer in silence. That’s highly overrated, that’s a macho thing, a boy thing. I
howled
.

I howled even louder when I got a better look down into the wound, where I was pretty sure I could see a little bit of bone. It looked like the ball bearing had gone right on through, and Elizabeth confirmed it.

“That’s good news,” she said. “Means all we need to do it clean you out and patch you up. Girls! Have any of those stretchers arrived yet? We need to get Polly to a hospital.”

“No way,” I said. “Where’s Travis? I’m going with him.”

“You’re out of your mind, Polly,” Mama said.

“Totally crazy,” Dorothy confirmed.

“Elizabeth, I want you to patch me up. I’m okay, I’m not bleeding much. After all this I’m not going to miss the end.” I struggled to my feet. I was only a little bit dizzy.

“You sit right back down there, Pollyanna Sue,” Mama said, in that steely voice that brooked no argument. Well, the heck with that, too.

“I’m going, Mama. Where’s Travis?”

She looked startled and, for the first time in my life, backed down. She pointed mutely to the far wall.

Travis was a wreck. I gasped when I saw him and quickly knelt beside Cassie. His face was swollen so badly that his eyes were closed. There was blood all over his clothes, and one of his front teeth was knocked out. Part of one ear was missing, one arm was cradled in a makeshift sling, and that hand looked like it had been burned, and three fingers were swollen, like they had been broken. He heard my gasp, or Cassie’s, as she had reacted the same way, and he managed to open one eye. One side of his battered mouth twisted up in a grin.

“What took you so long?” he said. Typical Travis. A line right out of a bad action-hero movie, only this blood was real.

“We had to kill some of them, Travis,” Cassie said. Instantly, his grin collapsed, and he reached out to her with his good arm.

“Oh, girls, I am so sorry. But there was no other way.”

It didn’t seem like the time to tell him about Cheryl and our wounded. I was amazed that he was conscious.

Mike and Marlee had been waiting anxiously while I was being patched up. I spotted them and waved them over.

“Patrick was okay when we left him,” I told them. “He’s with Papa, either at the Timberline Lodge or aboard Travis’s private ship. She’s a terrific AI, and she will take care of them.”

Marlee hugged me carefully, and Mike was wiping tears away. Then Travis spoke from down on the floor.

“Help me up, Polly.” He reached out to me, and I took his undamaged hand. Cassie scooted around in back of him, gingerly got her hands under his armpits, and lifted. He winced but didn’t complain.