Steinfeld took a deep breath. “Where they are in place, they have already isolated Jews and blacks and Muslims into barricaded sections of the towns. Crandall is said to hate Muslims even more than Jews…”
Hard-Eyes snorted and shook his head. “If it’s true… what do you think you’re going to do about it?”
Steinfeld shrugged. “You know already. A guerrilla war. You want to know more about our strategy?”
Hard-Eyes nodded.
Steinfeld shook his head. “No.”
And once again, the men in the room looked to their respective masters for their cues.
That’s when a man Smoke didn’t know came in. He was a slender black man who wore horn-rim glasses on his nose and field glasses around his neck. There was a submachine gun on a strap over his shoulder. He turned to Steinfeld and then realized that what he had to announce should be said to everyone. He looked around at them and then said carefully, “Jorge got it on the radio. The Russians have blockaded the Colony. The space Colony. Orbital battle stations have gone on full alert.”
And once more, every man thought the same thing, so that no one actually said it: Maybe it’s finally coming.
There was always a feeling that any plans you made, any hopes you drummed up, were empty. Hollow. Like plucking fruit and cutting it open to find it dried out inside. Because it was assumed that, sooner or later, the conventional war would heat up into a nuclear war. And maybe that wouldn’t be the end of the world. But it would be close enough.
Steinfeld was the first to shake off the paralysis of despair. “Another escalation.” He shrugged. “But it’s just taking the conventional war to a new battlefield.”
Jenkins shook his head. “What’s the point? What’s the point of fighting for what’s going to be radioactive ashes in a few months?”
Hard-Eyes said, “Maybe it’s—”
He broke off, staring at the window. They all heard it. A jumpjet. Close this time. Close. The Armies.
Shouts from down the hall, and the roof. Steinfeld’s sentries shouting warnings. The jumpjet had come suddenly. That was the jumpjet specialty: One moment the sky was clear; the next a jet was ten feet overhead, hovering on vertical retros.
The room shivered with the jumpjet’s whine and grumble. Hard-Eyes moved toward the door.
The black sentry panicked, went to the window, put his hand on the latch—
Steinfeld stood, turning to shout at him, “No!” But it was lost in the roar of the jumpjet…
As the sentry flung the windows open.
The room’s lamplight caught the pilot’s eye.
Reflexively, Smoke—and Hard-Eyes—paused at the door looked past the sentry and out the window. Everyone in the room was frozen with looking.
The Harrier jumpjet was a swept-wing fighter jet designed in the early 1980s, this particularly adroit model mass-produced only in the early twenty-first century. The two oversized jets on the underside of its wings, computer-controlled for precision, were swiveled to point down, forward, backward, to the sides, so the jet could go virtually any direction; refined computer control and Casimir force generators added extra maneuverability and lift.
It hovered like a helicopter, thirty feet beyond the window, tilted back a little so you could just make out the USAF insignia on the underwings. They could feel the monstrous engineering of it, the precisely machined bulk of it, its engine heat reaching them, the chemical smell of its burning fuel choking the room.
But looking at it, in that compressed moment, Hard-Eyes thought of it as a plasteel dragon. In Smoke’s mind, an insect. Dragonfly, to combine the two, a dragonfly from a Japanese horror movie. Sixty feet long, hovering, trembling as if with metallic rage, tilted up a little as if about to strike. Limned in starlight, glowing nacreously from the cockpit glass, the driver’s head was an insignificant arc of darkness within the lozenge of the crystal. Perhaps this was one of those computer-reflexed planes that brought the pilot along mostly for the ride, and just in case. And perhaps the plane made the decision and not the pilot.
The decision to fire. The 60-mm cannon emerged from the socket on the underside of the plane, swiveling to point squarely through the window—the plane pulling back so as not to get caught in the backblast.
In the room, the paralysis passed. Steinfeld scooped up the papers from the desk, and with the expertise of long practice swept them into a vinyl briefcase, vaulted over the desk, and was out the door. Willow and Voortoven were close behind, Jenkins crowding after. Hard-Eyes hesitated, shouting something to Smoke, and Smoke turned, seeing Hard-Eyes raise the Weatherby—
Smoke thinking, the madman’s going to shoot at that thing!
The Weatherby boomed. No ordinary rifle. Big motherfucker of a rifle. The so-called bulletproof glass on the jumpjet’s cockpit starring, the arc of helmet jerking.
The plane wobbling. Steadying, the 60-mm guns returning to their target. All of this, from Steinfeld’s grabbing papers to the gunshot, taking five seconds.
The crow flapped up, cawing, from Smoke’s shoulder. He grabbed at it, lost sight of it. Saw instead the sentry still in the open window staring in horror at the plane. The plane pilotless but operating itself cybernetically now. Hard-Eyes trying to pull Smoke back out through the door.
Smoke thinking, We’re not going to make it.
He never actually heard the blast.
As the 60-mm cannon fired. It was as if the noise was too profound for his auditory nerves, registering as a squeal like guitar feedback and an ugly metallic ringing. Then heat from a sheet of fire expanded to fill the room; a spatter of warm wetness: blood from the sentry as he was blown apart. All this just the background sensation. The primary sensation was the hardening of the air itself around the blast center. The soft damp air had become a slab of chilled steel that slammed him back into the wall. It SLAMMED! him. He could feel his body imprinting its shape in the plaster; feel things straining inside him, buckling—and then giving under the strain, bones creaking and then cracking, all time sadistically slowed so he could savor the hideously lucid sensation of his right arm popping from its socket and his pelvis cracking… breastbone cracking… cracking…
A white-hot freight train of pain roaring down on him.
And—
He woke, thinking, Where’s my crow?
He tried to say it, and a steel hammer struck a gong in him and he reverberated with pain. He tried to see, but his eyes were covered by a swarm of black bees.
“Give him more morphine,” said a dream-voice. Steinfeld’s voice.
Smoke never felt the needle. But its load drew a blanket of translucent numbness over the breakage in him; the pain still glowed, beneath, but muted like coals in a fog.
He opened his eyes: it was like lifting a window that had been painted shut; like it strained his back to open his eyes.
Saw through a feverish mist—a corner of a basement room; part of Yukio walking past; heard Hard-Eyes’ voice.
“…we want a guarantee of passage out of France whenever we choose to take it.”
“If you’ll take my word as a guarantee. That’s all I’ve got to offer.” Steinfeld’s voice. “But you’re not fooling anybody. You could have split off from us when we ran, and we wouldn’t have stopped you. You shot at the jumpjet to give Smoke time to get out. Who’re you kidding? You’d have been safer away from us and you knew it! But you stuck with us.”
Hard-Eyes is NR now, Smoke thought. I’m probably internally hemorrhaged, probably die, no doctors, no surgeons. The black bees swarmed over his head again. Stinging. The last thing he thought was, Where’s my bird?