Severance (44 page)

“Some government guy. From a long family of government guys,”
Bruce said. He opened another door, revealing another set of stairs up to the
fourth level. “From a long family of stair fetishists, also maybe.” He led them
upstairs.

The fourth level was obviously the most lived–in floor, but
even here, Stein wasn’t impressed with what she saw. It was the wastefulness of
it all that irritated her. Someone hoarding space and not using it. And she
knew there was still more space to come.

There had always been rumors of extremely well–connected
people with suites that extended above the fourth level into the normally off–limits
floors above. Stein had never cared enough about the rumors to wonder whether
they were true or not. Even Bruce, with his healthy passion for prowling around
secret places, never gave the stories of these illegal suites much credence.

An opinion he was forced to change when he was bribed to fix
the heating in one. As Bruce explained the story — and Stein knew to never
completely believe these — an extremely nervous–looking man had pulled up to
Bruce at the bar a few years ago and asked him if he wanted some work under the
table. Bruce, with a lukewarm attitude to work independent of its position
relevant to tables, had humored the man only out of a sense of curiosity.

His curiosity did not go unrewarded. The man explained that
the suite, which had been passed down in his family for generations, both contained
and stood testament to his family’s greatest secret: that they were fucking
morons. At one point they had turned their beautiful, palatial, entirely legal
nest into a beautiful, palatial, wildly illegal nest by expanding it into the
fifth floor above. So illegal that it actually limited the amount of usable
space they had, guests restricted from the upper–levels of their home, lest the
secret attic be uncovered. Cocktail parties became tense and uncomfortable
affairs, velvet ropes guarded with unusual diligence. The family gained a
reputation.

Eventually, the suite passed into the hands of the current
owner, who had managed to shed his family’s reputation of being weird and was
now simply unpopular. With no guests wanting to spend any length of time around
him, the illegal suite no longer posed him any trouble, at least until something
went wrong with the heat. Something happened upstairs, something which turned
the entire apartment, top to bottom, into a sauna. Months of sweaty, sleepless
nights passed for the sticky, unpopular owner before he had heard about a
fellow who might be capable of both fixing such a problem and keeping his mouth
shut about it.

“I was that fellow,” Bruce had explained.

“Yeah, I got that, Stein had replied.

Bruce arrived with his tools the next evening, where the man,
stripped to the waist, quickly hustled him through the front door. The hidden space
above, originally a hydroponics farm, had been converted into a wholly
unremarkable fifth bedroom, furnished quite haphazardly in comparison with the
main floors below. Bruce deduced that they had been reluctant to be seen
carrying too much furniture in and out of the space. Amongst the haphazard
decorations was a dingy wall hanging, which Bruce decided probably concealed a
door connected to the rest of the fifth level. Bruce finished the job at a
leisurely pace, checking carefully for anything worth stealing via the great
back door he had found. But not finding anything immediately interesting, he had
finished the job and filed the information away to be used at a later date.

“It is now a later date,” Bruce said, opening the door of a
suspiciously large wardrobe. “Welcome to the future, everyone.”

Inside the wardrobe, a cramped set of ladder stairs led up
to the secret level above. The three of them climbed the stairs, Bruce fumbling
for the lights on the floor above. The ugliest floor yet, dingy and haphazard,
just as described. “He hasn’t changed a thing in three years,” Bruce said.

Croutl looked around, a distasteful look on his face. “The fucking
thing is so illegal, he was afraid to even use it.”

“Nice temperature, though,” Stein observed, finger extended
at her friend.

“
Thank you
for noticing,” Bruce said, beaming at her.

Bruce walked to the side of the room, where the aforementioned
deeply unattractive wall hanging lay. With a swipe of his hand, Bruce tugged it
to the ground, revealing a door. He pressed his ear against it, then shook his
head — no sounds from the other side. “Well, I got you this far,” he said. “Which
is the point where I’m officially out of ideas.”

Stein opened the map on her terminal, double–checking the
route they had already planned. “It’s all supposed to be mothballed hydroponics
past there,” she said. “Shouldn’t be anyone around for blocks. Or halls.
Whatever. And the staircase heading up is just down the hall.”

Croutl moved to the door, readying his pistol. “All right.
You guys ready?”

“Wait. Moving stairs or the bad type?” Bruce asked.

“The bad type.”

“This plan sucks.”

§

“They’re pretty dug in along here,” Hogg said, pointing at
an intersection on the map. “They recovered really quickly.” He straightened up
as Linze crouched over the display set into the coffee table. They were in the
living room of a largish apartment, just south of the shattered barricade. A
double–wide unit, one of the nicer apartments in this part of the ship, it had
been repurposed as the forward command center for the Loyalist army.

“Yeah, well, we knew that would happen. Okay, let’s not bang
our head against a wall. So, we tell everyone to go the other way,” Linze said.

When Hogg arrived, he had seen them carting away the injured
officers who had been by the barricade when it exploded. They were pretty
messed up. And he had known every one of them. The explosion was way larger
than what he had imagined. Way larger than what he had asked Kinsella for. “I
don’t know,” he said, hearing his voice tremble, feeling ashamed. “We could
stop here. Regroup. We were lucky to get this far. If our guys are attacked
with any kind of intensity, they’ll crumble.”

Linze’s eyes widened. “Come on, Hogg. Our only advantage is
numbers. We throw as many of us at as few of them as possible. Just keep moving
and shooting. Don’t give them time to set up. Look here…we tell squads…Tiger,
Monkey, Laser, and Potato to push south, then west around here.”

Hogg’s face twitched. Too much, too fast. Intellectually, he
knew Linze was right: their only advantage was numbers, and the longer this
went on, the more likely his side was to get scared and run away.
Or bored
and walk away.
But the intellectual part of him was drowned out by the part
that had seen three of his former colleagues with blood streaming out of their
ears, a part of him that was screaming,
Slow Down
. “Let me think about
it.” Linze balled her hands into fists, but retreated to the dining room, where
a group of volunteers were coordinating the communications.

Hogg sat down heavily on the couch of the apartment. The
last four weeks had taught him that he liked following orders more than giving
them. He had a modest talent for leadership — he had had to, to make it as far
as he had in his career. But that was small scale stuff. Stuff that didn’t
result in blood streaming from ears. He closed his eyes and rubbed his knuckles
into them, trying to see anything else.

He took a deep breath and opened his eyes, examining the map
on his terminal. He tapped around a bit, watching the battle unfold, the good
guys marked by red dots. The red dots had simple orders: if they see a bad guy,
take cover and start shooting. If they don’t see a bad guy, move around until
they do. The plan was messy by design — his soldiers couldn’t handle anything
more complicated. And once they had breached Helot’s static defenses, numbers
and messiness should work for them. That was what he had told Kinsella, and
what he had told himself.

His terminal beeped. He examined it, an incoming call from
Kinsella.

“Have we won yet?” the mayor asked.

“Uh, not yet, sir. Might take awhile,” Hogg said. Linze
returned to the room, looking at him impatiently. He turned away from her. “We’re
actually thinking of slowing down for a bit and consolidating our gains.”

“Yeah? Okay. Why?”

Hogg licked his lips. “Just so…we can…have them
consolidated.”

A long pause while Kinsella considered that. “Yeah, I don’t
know what that means. You keep going, Hogg. You win this war immediately.”

“Yes, sir,” he said into a blank screen, Kinsella having
already ended the call. Hogg looked up to see Linze staring back at him, a
faint hint of mockery in her eyes. “Okay, do it,” he said. “We keep going.”

§

Helot slumped forward in his chair, chin resting on the tactical
table. He watched from this low angle at the dots and blips moving around.
There were an awful lot of red dots. Thorias manipulated the table controls
like a dervish, shouting orders into his commlink, ordering his units to stop
getting shot. Two other officers assisted with the display, drawing lines and
moving icons around, indicating tactical items of interest, places where people
weren’t getting shot fast enough, presumably. An enormous chunk had been carved
out of the lines they had held for the past month.
It had been so easy for
them.

They had known an attack was coming — couldn’t not see the
mass of armed morons slowly gathering all day. But Thorias’ careful schemes of
staggered retreats and fall back positions had been shattered by the explosion
on Africa Street. There had been some feint attacks prior to that, which
Thorias had overcommitted to, rushing support away from where it was actually
needed. By the time they knew what was happening, thousands of Othersiders had
poured through the gap.

The fighting was dying down a bit now, the Othersiders
stopping and consolidating their gains. No tactical expert, that still seemed
like a mistake to Helot.
They had us on the ropes.
They just had to keep
spreading out, and it would be over.

“Captain?” Thorias asked from across the table. It was the
most deferential Helot had ever heard the chief. “I think it’s time to stop
playing nice.” The room didn’t go quiet — too many people doing too much work
for that to happen — but it seemed quieter to Helot. Without needing to be
told, Helot knew what Thorias was referring to — the small cache of lethal
weapons they had. To his credit, Thorias hadn’t discussed these at all during
his defensive preparations. There probably were secret plans, with larger,
angrier arrows on his terminal that took the bigger guns into account. But
Thorias hadn’t even hinted at them until now.

Helot looked down at a corner of the tactical table, where a
loop of footage from the feed on Africa–1 was playing. He watched in slow
motion as the stolen van accelerated at the barricade, the officers there
scrambling out of the way of the driverless vehicle. Then the explosion — a
sure sign the Othersiders had gotten around the safeguards preventing the
manufacture of volatiles.
Kinsella tried to kill them.
If those officers
survived, it was by luck, not design. That was real blood on the streets, real
screams of pain.

“Yeah. I think so, too,” he said, looking up at Thorias.
Just
be careful,
he thought, but didn’t say, while Thorias turned away to make a
quick call.
I really should offer some words of restraint.
He watched
Thorias hurriedly leave the room, finally off the leash.

“Go get ’em, Chief,” he said softly instead.

§

From the fifth floor, they went straight up, using one of
the emergency staircases. At this latitude, they were still outside the core,
though paralleling its border as they rose up to the 20
^th
floor,
where a connecting passage would allow them to pass through.

The climbing got easier as they rose, but they nevertheless
paced themselves, taking breaks at regular intervals. “I guess they’re not
chasing us,” Stein noted during one of these stops, sitting on the landing of
the 17
^th
floor.

“Seems that way,” Croutl said. He stretched up, bent his
knees slightly, and sprang upward, bouncing off the ceiling before coming back
to rest.

“You coming, Bruce?” Stein asked down the stairs. Heavy,
labored cursing answered her. A few seconds later, Bruce appeared, wheezing. He
sat down heavily — no easy trick in low–gravity — and leaned against the wall.

“No taking off this time. You guys keep taking off as soon
as I catch up.” A hoarse, lispy wheeze. “It’s bullshit is what it is.”

Croutl looked like he was about to say something, but
thought better of it. “Wait here,” he said instead, getting to his feet. “I’ll
scout ahead.” He continued his climb, rapidly moving out of sight.

“Bruuuuuuce,” Stein whined. “You’re making us look bad in
front of the army guy.”

“Sorry, Stein. I didn’t know this was a dating opportunity
for you.”

Stein patted Bruce on his hand. “Ha.”

“I should have guessed when I saw you’d shaved your
mustache,” he added, earning a punch in the neck in response.

They sat quietly for a few minutes, Stein looking at the map
on her terminal, Bruce breathing. Eventually, the sound of footsteps
approaching from above, both of them readying their pistols. A landing above,
then Croutl’s face appeared, staring down.

“We’ve got a problem,” he said.

§

“Yeah, that’s definitely not a regular gun,” Griese said, looking
at the magnified image on the terminal he had pressed against the window. “Muzzle
flash is too blue.”

“Sure sounds different,” Ellen agreed. Lying one window
over, she shifted behind the rifle, panning it slightly to her right. “What do
you think?”