She called for group and team leaders to meet her in the dining room. With a series of questions, she tried to determine the levels of experience available and the state of each group’s equipment. The most capable she reserved for her assault on the government departments. Others she sent to seize the Glory of Hygiene Hospital, so her wounded fighters would have medical care. To the least useful she provided addresses, and sent them to scour the homes of high-ranking Naxids and bring as many officials of the rebellion as possible under her control.
“I want them alive, understand?” she said. “They’re hostages for the other Naxids’ good behavior. We needthem to keepus alive.”
The action teams raced off on their errand of abduction, to which she knew they would very likely add vandalism and pillage. The remaining captains she brought close around her maps on the table, to plan a multipronged attack up each street leading to the Great Refuge.
“I want a line of fighters going up each side of the street,” she said. “Vehicles should lag behind, but should be ready to rush forward and support. Understand? Any questions?”
One young Lai-own raised a hand. “Are you the real Lady Sula?” she asked. “Or a fake, like they say?”
She grinned. “I’m as real as you,” she said. “Areyou a fake?”
She sent them off and told them to begin their assault at 0826. She would hope that at least one column would do well, and that she could support that attack with reserves. Her army’s amateur nature was a severe handicap: the attack on a broad front was necessary because she had no way of scouting the enemy, she could only attack everywhere and hope someone got lucky. And she had to organize the entire assault herself, with communications limited to those who were similarly equipped with headsets, and for those who weren’t, to a hand comm. She badly needed a staff, but didn’t have one. Spence and Macnamara might have filled that role, but they had vital assignments of their own that she didn’t dare trust to anyone else.
While the new assault forces moved into position, she was given a running commentary from Casimir concerning events at the funicular. The Naxid security forces in the Lower Town hotels had finally organized themselves and paged the funicular operator to send the train to pick them up. The operator—an elderly Daimong who had held his job for decades—told the Naxids that he had strict orders to keep the funicular at the upper terminal. The Naxid repeated their demands. The Daimong repeated his explanation.
The Naxids then contacted someone in the Ministry of Works to order the Daimong to lower the funicular. The Daimong refused on the grounds that it was the military who had ordered him to keep the funicular at the terminus. The Naxids then contacted the Commandery, and a senior captain of the Naxid Fleet contacted the terminus and countermanded the order. The Daimong replied that the order hadn’t come from the Fleet, so the Fleet couldn’t countermand it. The Daimong was asked what service had given the order, and the Daimong said he didn’t know.
Successive calls came from the District Patrol, the Motor Patrol, and the Legion of Diligence. In all cases, the Daimong replied that they couldn’t countermand his order since it hadn’t come from that service.
“What officer gave the order?”the Naxid finally demanded.
“The one right here,” the Daimong finally said.
“Let me speak to him!”
The Daimong stepped aside to let Casimir step to the comm unit, wearing his Fleet-issue armor and carrying his rifle. The Naxid stared speechlessly while his scales flashed red, unreadable patterns.
“What doyou want?” Casimir asked.
The Naxid overcame his surprise enough to manage a command. “You must lower the train at once.”
Casimir looked straight into the camera pickup. “Piss on you,” he said. “I work for the White Ghost.”
Sula laughed when she heard this from Casimir. He and the cooperative Daimong operator had kept the Naxids stuck at the lower terminus for over half an hour, during which they couldn’t interfere in the battle of the High City.
Now, however, the Naxids came up the railway, a whole swarm marching up the steep track and the maintenance paths on either side. Most of Casimir’s teams, in good positions in palaces overlooking the Lower Town, opened fire and sent them tumbling down the slope again. Casimir reported that he was having a hard time getting some of the teams to stop shooting once they’d started and that he was worried about poor fire discipline eating up his ammunition supply.
The Naxids took a few minutes to reorganize, and then Casimir reported that he could hear them all shouting slogans in unison: Death to anarchists! Long live our leaders! On to the High City!
On they came, better organized this time, with Fleet security forces in the lead in viridian armor, scuttling up the steep slope as fast as their four legs could carry them. Casimir’s fighters met them with a blast of fire that cut them down by rows but the Naxids charged on, trampling the wounded and dying. Then the two antimatter cannons began to fire, and the head of the long column faltered and turned back. Those at the rear still drove them forward, however, and the collision sent Naxids flying off the track and tumbling down sheer granite slabs to lie broken at the bottom of the acropolis. The survivors pulled back into cover.
“They’re bound to get smarter about this,” Casimir told her.
Sula was concerned that, failing the attack up the funicular, the enemy would try to scale the High City at some other point along its lengthy perimeter. Naxids weren’t exactly built for mountaineering, but it could be done, and at the moment there was no one to stop them. She sent action teams as lookouts to various points on the city’s cliffside to make certain that no Naxids were turning mountain goat.
Reports came in to her that the Glory of Hygiene Hospital had been taken. It was guarded, but hospital security were private and non-Naxid and stood aside. Some of them had joined the loyalists, which would have been more encouraging had they been armed with anything more effective than sidearms and stun batons.
A growing crackle of fire, heard through the open windows of the dining room, told Sula that the coordinated offensive on the government complex had gone forward on schedule. The firing rose to a tremendous din, died away to a continual crackle, then diminished still further, to what sounded like desultory sniping. Sula was in a near frenzy to contact her units to find out what had gone wrong. It seemed that all groups had run into resistance, gone to cover, and were now awaiting further developments.
“Get your people moving!” she told one group leader over her comm unit. He was a youngish Terran with a receding, unshaven chin and a startled expression, as if he hadn’t ever expected to be in this situation.
Perhaps he hadn’t. Few of her army had ever been in actual combat before. The teams that had been passing information and copies ofResistance, firebombing Naxid homes and vehicles, or sniping at the enemy from a reasonably safe distance were now discovering what a genuine battle was like, one where the enemy fought back.
“Well,” the leader said, “getting the people moving is going to be hard. We were advancing up the road, see, and when the Naxids opened fire, everybody jumped into these offices and shops. They’re all kind of scattered out now. I don’t know how I’m going to get them all going again or—”
“Just get out there and round them up!” Sula demanded.
“Well, see,” the man said, “I’d have to get out on the street to do that, and they’ve got machine guns, you know.”
“Bring up the vehicles to give you covering fire!”
“Well,” he answered, “those cars don’t want to come any closer, see. They’d get shot up, and they don’t have armor or anything.”