Ninth City Burning (49 page)

For all the imperative significance of her orders, Tessie Leu has to issue them twice before any of Old Faithful's crew reacts, and even then compliance is spotty at best. The network of clips and straps that seemed so simple during training now strike me as bafflingly counterintuitive and complex. Only the knowledge that a solid jolt in zero gravity could launch me at neck-breaking speed into the nearest wall focuses my attention enough to hook myself in. I pull up my mask and feel it close around my face, a vacuum-tight seal that will keep me breathing at a pressure of one Earth atmosphere for five hours at least, more if I can stop hyperventilating. I've got everything in place and double-checked when I remember our emergency safety protocol says to raise masks first, and I'm actually about to pull straps and mask and start over when I realize how pointless and potentially-life-endingly-stupid that would be.

Hardly have I taken my first breath of D-55-conditioned air when a furry disorientation passes through me, and my mask fills with the smell of rotten eggs, one of the many unpleasant odors that sometimes arise when thelemity meets the mundane world. My involuntary jerk of surprise as I feel myself lifting gently from my seat sends me shooting forward, but my straps tighten, holding me in place. My head swims with the woozy
feeling of dangling over a cliff's edge, accompanied by panic-level heart palpitations that won't go away no matter how much I remind myself I'm all locked in and safe as can be under the circumstances.

As incompetent as I was in deploying my safety gear, most of my comrades have fared still worse. Two gun monkeys from the bench ahead of me bounce into the air, propelled by some careless pressure against floor or seat that wouldn't have mattered were there gravity around to provide a counteracting force; one manages to grab a nearby handle, but the other snatches only open space as he floats gently and helplessly upward.

Beside me, Big Dipper has made the same mistake I did regarding mask-and-strap order, but hasn't progressed past his straps. Fortunately, Old Faithful, and every other heavy gun aboard IMEC-1, has an air lock that slams shut when the thelemity cuts out, thus sparing Dipper from imminent asphyxiation. He does start to rise from his seat, however, causing him to flail even more frantically. I reach over and pull him back down, and after bonking him on the head as a reminder to close up his mask, I get to work on his straps.

My strap-work is quicker the second time around, but not quick enough. I've only got Dipper about half-secured when the world suddenly turns white.

My next sensation is of bouncing around like some crazy, high-energy particle, the straps holding D-55s to the seat tensing to absorb the force of my movement. I'm left with a gyroscopically spinning brain and the understanding that there's been some kind of impact or explosion. Without thelemity, all the nifty countermeasures that protect IMEC-1 from attack will be disabled, allowing Romeo to sit back and shoot proverbial fish in a barrel.

Ironically, the one weapon he can't use directly against us now is thelemity. Thelemic artifices can't last outside an umbris, meaning any weapons that rely on thelemity for their destructive output won't work. That doesn't mean Romeo can't use thelemity to fire some good old-fashioned explosives, however, or pelt us with projectiles thelemically accelerated to superhigh velocities. And if our heavy artillery has been as pivotal in this battle as we down here were given to understand, Romeo will want to get rid of us as promptly as possible. Probably Old Faithful was targeted in the very first volley.

Whatever that blast was, it didn't hit us directly—if it had, the atoms of
my brain would no longer be sufficiently interconnected to ponder the matter—but it came close enough to hurt. To my left, through eyesight that keeps sliding askew and spasmodically righting itself, I spot an elephant-sized hole in Old Faithful's side, and beyond stars and dark sky intermittently visible between flashes of colorful strobing light.

A hazy, mostly incomplete thought floats across my consciousness, something on the order of
Hey! We're in a war! Fancy that!
With calm near to paralysis, I note bits of debris pinging off of my mask before exiting into the general vacuum, and a floaty feeling in my limbs quite separate from the literal weightlessness of zero G.
Is this really what all the fuss is about?
is what I ask myself. It seems so silly. We're just a bunch of junk drifting through space, fighting over other junk floating through space.

The two rows of benches nearest the hole in GR-15 are mangled and splintered, their levers twisted to uselessness, their former occupants all gone, most likely pulverized in the blast or sucked through the breach as Old Faithful explosively decompressed. Dazedly, I realize my own bench is almost empty—everyone from
Psycho
Girl on has simply vanished, leaving only me and possibly Big Dipper of the eight who had been here I'm-not-quite-sure-how-long before. I swivel to search for Dipper just as his limp left arm connects with my mask.

He's still there, in body if nothing else, floating half a meter above his seat. His incompletely affixed safety straps kept him tethered in the overall area of our bench, but he must have been whipped around quite a bit. Also, he never got his mask up. I yank him down, and have his mask closed and sealed before I notice the blood trailing from his nose and the bloated, bluish tinge of his face. My sense of time is too addled to know whether he's been exposed to the vacuum in here for fifteen seconds or fifteen minutes, but I'm afraid all the friendly atmosphere in the world won't do him any good.

My distress at the possibility that Big Dipper might have been killed is as unexpected and overwhelming as the impact that likely killed him. I am seized by the sudden conviction that if this boy is dead—this near-complete stranger whose name I don't know and whose voice I wouldn't have recognized if replayed for me in crisp high-fidelity sound—the entire world and life itself are totally and absolutely without meaning.

After a few panicked and confused moments, during which I become determined to at least finish strapping Dipper in, I happen upon the
diagnostic patch on the thigh of his D-55s. The pressure and temperature inside his suit are both good, and to my astonishment there's the blip of a weak but consistent pulse. By some improbable happenstance, he's alive.

High above, the top of GR-15 lights up with a halo of chattering light—our antibombardment batteries getting to work. They'll slow Romeo down, but without thelemity, I can't imagine us lasting long. Already, another barrage has started falling, each impact shaking Old Faithful like a bottle of bugs in the hands of a mean-spirited child, flinging poor Dipper around like a rag doll. I hold on to him, trying to keep him safe until the shaking stops, and I can finally close up his straps.

O
ut here, you could see the whole thing happen. Well, not the
whole
thing. This battle's so big, there's no way to really keep track of it all at once, especially considering how there's fighting all over the place, including both sides of the city, and we've got to pay attention to shooting old Romeo at least part of the time. But you really can see quite a bit from an assault platform. Like, you can see old IMEC-1, or most of it anyway, and the great big net of assault platforms around it, and the cohorts of equites and whatnot we've got chasing Romeo all over the place, though they're mostly way out and just look like a bunch of whizzing, popping lights. So when those Zeros got onto old IMEC-1 and the whole battle started going pretty much to crap, I had about as good a view of it as anyone.

We'd launched out from one of the battle spires on IMEC-1 with about a million other assault platforms and formed up into a wall just like we learned in training. Only this wall was pretty different from the ones we'd practiced because instead of making a big solid stack of platforms, we left several pretty large gaps. The whole thing looked more like a fishing net than a wall, actually, and in fact that's sort of what it was. A net, I mean. The way all our platforms were laid out, the Valentines would be kind of funneled toward the gaps, but that put them right in the path of the big guns down on IMEC-1.

We were all nervous as anything, of course, me and the rest of my platform. Everyone else in the Twelfth of the Third, too, I bet. We knew how to fly an assault platform, but this was our first real battle where someone was really intentionally trying to kill us. And if that weren't bad enough, this was supposed to be like the most important battle ever. Like,
if we lost, that was pretty much it for Earth and everyone. Old Romeo was just going to march in and kill whoever was left. Optio Sorril was pretty clear about that. As we were waiting to load up into our battle spire, she gathered our whole century around, the Twelfth Century, that is, and told us with that easygoing smile of hers that if there was anything we cared about, anything at all, we were fighting for it now.

That got to me a bit. I mean, I've never been like ecstatic about the Legion and everything, and I'm not too fond of the Prips, but I do care about a few things. I really do. I kept thinking about that as we put on our helmets and climbed to our platforms, and I was still thinking about it when we launched. I watched old IMEC-1 get smaller and smaller behind us, and all the other platforms flying around all over the place. I felt pretty strange, but I had a hard time deciding why, and before I could, Mersh started calling me a lazy turd and yelling for me to get to my firing post.

I was pretty sure we were all about to get blued right there, though I was planning on having a like pulmonary embolism first. Then I got my lazel up and saw no one was really coming at us. What was going on was this other part of the Legion, the vanguard, had already flown ahead to clear the way for everyone else, and now that old IMEC-1 had arrived in the thick of things, we were off to help them out.

Those kiddos from the vanguard were really going at it. You could see them flying around like crazy, just slashing and blasting away. They were giving it to Romeo pretty good, but I think they were glad when we showed up. When the big guns down on IMEC-1 got going, whole chunks of Valentine fighters started to just disappear, like they'd been drawn there on a blackboard or something and someone came with an eraser and wiped them away. It didn't take old Romeo long to figure out what was happening, though, and he kind of pulled back a bit so his fighters weren't completely out in the open and everything.

Anyway, at first there wasn't all that much to do. We'd built our wall or net or whatever of assault platforms, and Romeo knew the minute he got close we'd just give him another round from the big guns, so he was trying to stay out of the way as much as possible. That wasn't terribly easy for him, though. The guns were going pretty much nonstop, really rumbling away so much it felt like an avalanche inside your head. You could see all these huge swarms of Valentine fighters, just thousands and thousands of them way out ahead, and big flashes of light going off right in the
middle of them, like when lightning strikes inside of a cloud. Meanwhile, whole cohorts of our guys were out there chasing Romeo's fighters around, trying to bring them closer or trap them someplace where our guns could really chew them up.

From our perspective, there wasn't all that much to do, except every so often when one of those Valentine swarms made a run for our part of the net. They would sort of swirl around a ways out, and once in a while one little stream of fighters would break off and come at us. We'd fire our lazels and the pair of 13mm auto-ingens mounted on our platform, and eventually the Valentines would turn around and fly away. Usually, before they even got very near us, a few of the guns down on IMEC-1 would see them and let loose with a close-range attack. Anyone who's watched a chain saw going to work on a tree can about picture what that looked like.

Those big guns didn't let up for a minute, but after a while I started to worry about the wall or net or whatever. Our platforms were all in pretty close, relative to everyone out there chasing Romeo around, but it still must've taken a crazy number of us to cover old IMEC-1 from like every conceivable angle. In between runs, I'd get a look around, and I started to notice the net sort of looked like it was thinning out in some places, and in others it'd been kind of bent out of shape. I pointed that out to Spammers and Hexi, and I think they were a bit concerned, but Spammers just said formations never last very long anyway, and Hexi agreed. Mersh told me to shut up and worry about my own area of operation. I still felt sort of nervous, though, like I was supposed to be doing something but didn't know what.

And then this one time, old Romeo really came in crashing at a bunch of platforms just above us, and while I was craning up to shoot them, I saw something big had changed. I didn't even know what at first, until I looked more closely at the other end of our net, and there was nothing but a lot of empty space. Assault platforms can be hard to spot if they're not grouped especially close together or lighting up the way they do when they're shooting, and I'd thought there just wasn't very much happening, but in fact someone'd torn a huge hole right through the net protecting old IMEC-1. I looked down at the city, and even though it was difficult to tell with the guns going nonstop, I thought I saw some fighting down there.

I called up Mersh through my helmet. “Hey, Mersh,” I said. “I think there's something going on down on the IMEC.”

“Eyes forward, boyo,” he said. “Our orders are to make sure no one gets past. How're you gonna do that if you're looking the wrong way?”

“Yeah, but, Mersh, you should probably just take a look. Maybe these guys'll come our way if they need to make a run for it.”

Mersh did take a look, too. He even seemed a little surprised, but all he said was “Command'll know all about that. If they want us to do something, they'll tell us.”

And sure enough, about two seconds later, Mersh sort of cocked his head, like he was listening to something, and I knew he was getting orders from Optio Sorril or maybe someone even higher up. Mersh took another look below, and this time he really was worried, no question about it.

He was looking at some fontani flying over the city—or sources, I should say. Fontani are ours and Zeros are Romeo's. These starry things had to be both, I thought, because of the way they were moving, really tearing around the city but not going anywhere in particular.

Pretty much our whole platform had turned around to see what Mersh and I were looking at, and when Mersh noticed, he started yelling again about getting back to our posts. But before anyone could move, there was this terrible ripping sound. I thought old IMEC-1 was about to split in half or something, that's how loud it was. Half a second later, it came again, though this time it sounded more like breaking than ripping, to be precise. Nothing really happened to IMEC-1, though. Instead, all those sources just stopped their crashing around and hung in the air awhile, kind of twirling a little bit. While that was going on, Mersh got another call from Sorril or whoever, but no one paid much attention to him.

Then, suddenly, three things happened pretty much all at once. Mersh yelled, “Fall stations!” and at about the same moment those sources disappeared, and my D-87s went dead. I couldn't really say which I noticed first.

Only one thing could have happened. Some of Romeo's Zeros must've gotten past our net and onto old IMEC-1, and wiped our fontani out almost before we knew what was going on. After that, the Zeros would have just taken off, because if we had no sources left, those great big guns that'd been giving Romeo such a monumental pain in the ass wouldn't work anymore.

Zeros move so fast they could've flown right by our platform, and we wouldn't have known, but it was pretty obvious once they were out of range. My helmet just went black, then clear, the way it does when we're all out of thelemity, and that was pretty much that.