The Desert of Stars (The Human Reach) (17 page)

“We know he goes by the name Kao Xun,” Naima said, “and we
only learned that from comparing his image to one taken at his entry into
Tecolote five months ago. Our techniques have not earned us much else. He seems
impervious to pain, and we have not been able to dissociate him from reality to
the point where he provides us information, or says anything at all. He is …
very strange.”

“Perhaps we could try speaking with him,” Gomez said.

“The capability of the American National Security Service in
extracting information from prisoners is legendary,” Conrad said. “We would be
delighted if you would try.”

Naima said, “Contact me later today and we’ll set something
up.”

Conrad said, “You both should know we are stepping up our
efforts against the rebels. Colonel Abdulaziz has returned to the field and
will initiate an offensive against their positions within hours. We will also accept
your prior offer of artillery rockets. You have done us a great service,
Lieutenant Mercer and Officer Gomez. We will soon put down the rebellion and
return to a stable state. Generals Naima and Vargas are drawing up a list of
other security-oriented needs to that end.”

Gomez said, “And I suspect we will provide them, if we can
have a few things in exchange.”

Naima smiled thinly at the NSS officer. “What we have been
waiting to hear. Please, explain.”

Gomez, with occasional interjections from Neil on technical
matters, outlined the plans for establishing control of the Apollonian Ocean
and containing the Chinese on their territory of Huashan. Tecolote would serve
as the critical air and sea base. The allies would lease land and build a
number of facilities on the island, which they would turn over to Tecolote once
the war was done. The United States would also offer a package of economic and
military aid to assist their country in rebuilding from the civil conflict, and
make available several older Space Force frigates for transfer.

“Your country could become a significant power on Entente,”
Gomez said.

“That’s quite an offer,” Naima said.

“I will want to see the particulars before agreeing to
anything,” Conrad said.

“Of course,” Gomez said.

Naima’s handheld emitted a brief tone, and someone knocked
at the door and opened it without waiting for a reply. It was Conrad’s massive
Korean bodyguard, carrying a big carbine in one hand and his handheld in the
other.

“Excellency, we are being attacked,” he said. “Someone has
landed several cars on the roof and defeated your guards up there. They are
exchanging fire with our people outside on the ground.”

And we can’t hear a damn thing because they’ve
soundproofed this place to keep all the screaming from disturbing anyone else
at work
, Neil thought. He tried to raise Kelley, but the building also
apparently blocked his handheld from calling out.

Conrad’s face turned into a snarl. “Park, after you kill
them, preserve their bodies as best you can. We’ll need their genes to identify
their families.”

“Yes, Excellency,” the bodyguard said. “All routes of escape
are blocked, so you best remain on this level.”

Naima drew her sidearm and chambered a round. “For your
safety, Excellency, we should stay in this room. It is as secure as any in the
building, and no one can see in. Park, stay outside and protect this door, but
give no indication there is anything inside.”

“I want a gun,” Conrad said. “We all should have guns.”

Gomez quickly produced her pistol. Naima looked askance at
that – they had been searched when they entered the building – but said
nothing. Park surrendered his sidearm to Conrad. He collected a pistol from a
comrade, gave it to Neil, and exited the room.

Naima closed and locked the door.

Neil looked at his gun. It was the same model as the
Japanese 8mm automatic Donovan had given him before the firefight on the other
side of the planet, nearly a year and a half prior. He had missed the one time
he had fired it.

And I could kill these three people and make the world a
better place.
The thought surprised him.
Where did that come from?

They flipped the table on its side and hid behind it, with
Gomez and Neil on the flanks.

And waited.

Conrad was utterly still; Gomez looked angry, and Naima
tried to work her handheld to communicate out, but the attackers had done
something to the building’s network. Neil looked at his gun and recalled a
prison rescue he took part in on Kuan Yin.
This is what it’s like to be on
the other side.

They heard a muffled
whump
.

“Maybe we should relocate,” Gomez suggested.

“No,” Naima said. “We’d just expose ourselves.”

Ten minutes later, another
whump
, much louder than
the one before, followed by a flurry of shots. Park’s big carbine fired a burst
just outside the door; a fusillade answered it, and the carbine went silent.

They watched as the door burst open to Auguste Desroches’
interrogation room, and several attackers entered. Several were wearing
chameleon camouflage, shaded in irregular patterns of gray, black and white for
urban operations. One removed her mask and approached the chef. She was
Chinese.

Unprompted, Naima pressed a key on her handheld, and the
audio feed from the interrogation room cut in.

“Please, please, I didn’t tell them anything,” Desroches
said. “Please don’t hurt my family.”

“How did they learn about you?” the woman asked.

“I don’t know! Please, tell me what you did to my family!”

In response, the woman raised her rifle to her shoulder and
fired a burst into the man’s chest. Red stained white; his head pitched back,
and then forward, and he exhaled, and he was dead.

“Next room!” the woman ordered.

“Get ready,” Naima said unnecessarily. “Lawson, please don’t
expose yourself to their fire.”

“Like that time on Commonwealth? The bastards had it
coming,” Conrad said.

He sounds eager for this,
Neil thought.

A moment later, someone jiggled the handle on the door to
their room.

Here it comes.
Neil felt sweat between his palm and
the gun’s grip.

Out of the corner of his eye, Neil saw the door to the
other
interrogation room open. The rebel who opened it yelled something out the
door, and the door handle stopped moving.

“General,” Neil said. “The audio …”

Naima turned it on.

The Chinese woman walked inside.

“Brother,” she said quietly in Mandarin. “What have they
done to you?”

Kao Xun’s head snapped up, and his eyes seemed to focus for
the first time. He held his hands up, his fingers still draining blood from the
beds of skin where his nails used to be.

“Tai, I will live. Thank you for coming for me. Please, cut
my bonds.”

Sister moved to release brother.

“They’re here to rescue the prisoner. They’re not here for
the president. They don’t know he’s here,” Neil whispered.

“We have to make our way to the roof,” Kao Tai said.

“Very well,” he said. He stopped and pointed at the glass
wall. “They watch me from in there.”

The woman raised her gun and fired a burst into the glass.
It shattered. The nuggets of glass fell straight down, leaving two surprised
Chinese agents looking at Neil, Gomez, Naima, and President Conrad.

Gomez was closest to the window; her body was partially
blocking those of Neil and the others. Gomez raised her gun; Kao Tai adjusted
her aim and pointed at Gomez …

… and in that heartbeat neither fired.

Conrad stumbled as he tried to move, and his gun skidded
across the stone floor. Neil raised his gun and shifted to one side, but Naima
cut in front of him and blazed away. One of her shots grazed Kao Tai’s arm, and
the agent’s submachine gun clattered to the ground, even as she and her brother
bolted for the door.

They heard another exchange of fire in the hall, ending with
a male scream.

“Everyone all right?” Gomez turned and asked. Her eyes did
not meet Neil’s.

Before anyone could answer, Park and several of Naima’s
paramilitaries burst into Kao Xun’s interrogation room. Park turned and vaulted
over the broken glass.

“Excellency, are you injured?”

“I am fine,” Conrad answered.

“They are retreating up the stairs, trying to get to the
roof.”

“Hunt them down and kill them!” he roared. “And Naima, I
want the building’s security chief arrested, now.”

“He’s dead, sir,” Park said.

Conrad smirked. “Good. One less thing to attend to.”

After a few minutes, Neil was allowed to make his way to
the ground level, while Gomez remained with Naima. Harkins, who had spent the
gunbattle crouched behind the consulate’s Honda, unsure who to shoot at,
reported that three skycars had taken off from the roof, but someone shot one
of them down. A column of smoke rose from where it crashed.

“Went in nose down. No one will have survived,” Harkins
said.

“Get a good look at the other two?”

“Yes. One was a ’36 Holden Commodore, dark blue, with the
optional tailfins. The other was a ‘29 Lin KT-5 in hunter green. Nice sound
system in that one. Anyway, tagged them both with my six.” She patted her
rifle.

Neil blinked. Harkins had marked both cars with virtual
traces, tasking the allied satellite network to follow their movements. It was
no sure thing on Entente; the surveillance constellation was not as robust as
around Earth and was subject to Chinese fire from the surface, but her gun had
told her the tasking was successful, and she would have at least a half-hour of
information on the cars’ positions.

I’ll need to arrange some aerostats for Tecolote until we
can get perfect satellite coverage,
Neil thought.
He said, “All
right, I’ll pass that information –“

“Lieutenant Mercer!” came a shout from behind them.

There, striding out the front door of the building, was
President Conrad. He still had Park’s sidearm, which he waved as he approached.
A dozen guards moved around him, all nervously scanning the walls and sky for
any threat.

“Mercer! I’m told several terrorists escaped. Can you assist
us in bringing them down?”

“Assist, Excellency?”

“They have taken our traffic control network offline, so our
police cannot track them. But you have access to a number of assets in space,
yes?”

“Yes, Excellency,” Neil said.
Fulfill the mission.
Now
they were outdoors, his handheld worked again, and he could connect to the
allied fleet network. He quickly described his need to an officer on
Formidable,
who linked him to a ship that was as close to overhead as any.

“Sneaker, this is
Repulse
,” said a voice, English and
male.
Brit R-class cruiser,
Neil knew at once.
More than enough
firepower, if she’s in the right place.
“We’re in a Molniya, descending
over New Albion. Pretty oblique angle to your position, but we can see it.”

“Understood.” Much of the fleet was in a highly elliptical
orbit over Entente, with its periapsis over New Albion, where it could bombard
any attacking Chinese forces while avoiding passing low over Huashan and the deadly
surface-to-orbit lasers there.

Neil transmitted the tags on the cars.

“Got them,” the voice said. “We’ll be shooting through a lot
of atmosphere, so we’ll be firing in the infrared. This an armored target?”

“Shouldn’t be,” Neil said.

“That is the correct response, Sneaker,”
Repulse
transmitted.
“This is a poor angle. All right, we’ve reoriented toward the target.”

Neil heard a muffled “Fire Mission!” from someone else in the
cruiser’s command center. A few seconds later, a crack of thunder rolled across
the San José.

“One target destroyed,”
Repulse
said. “Moving on to
the second … he’s in a different location, over the city. Sorry, Sneaker, your
mission ROE prohibits the shot. Too much risk to civvies. We’ll stay with him
as long as we can in case he heads over safe terrain … whup, lost the tag; your
tracking bird is the over the horizon and couldn’t make a handoff. We’re
setting soon, too. Hope one out of two was good enough, old boy.
Repulse
out.”

He told Conrad that one of the craft had been shot down, but
the other escaped. He avoided saying exactly
why
the
Repulse
did
not shoot down the second car – figuring the British concern for civilians
would not be well-received.

Conrad said, “Your ability to bring force to bear on our
enemies is impressive, Lieutenant Mercer. You shall have your alliance with
Tecolote.”

Mission accomplished
, Neil thought. He wondered who
he just had killed.

Kao Tai saw
a distant explosion over the foothills
and knew the other car had been shot down. Six more of her best, dead.
Killed
by an American or British ship in orbit. With the medication withdrawn, Conrad
is no longer refusing their support.
She immediately dropped altitude to
hide among the buildings of San José, eliciting a yelp of pain from Xun, who
was beside her.

“What is it?”

He pulled a dripping red hand away from his abdomen. “I’m
shot, sister. One of their guards on the roof, just as we were leaving. My
liver, I think.”

She landed the car on an empty lot and pulled Kao Xun onto
the ground. She kneeled over him, watching him bleed onto the weed-seamed
concrete.

“Hospital,” Xun moaned.

“We cannot, brother. That would put you back in their hands,
and they might yet find a way to break you, and your body’s suffering in the
meantime would be immense. Even if they do not, they would certainly execute
you. This is better. Remember, we are born to serve.”

Kao Xun smiled briefly at that. “We are born to serve,” he
repeated.