Mallet slapped Ailly once, hard on his back, almost propelling him forwards with the force of what was supposed to be a comradely, reassuring gesture, and handed him his rifle.
Bedlo moved to the door into The Drum proper, and held up the forefinger of his left hand: command. Then he held his flat palm out in front of him. Mallet stood beside Bedlo, ready, as always. The boy wondered if he would ever be ready.
The next moment, they were through the doors and into the darkness of the playhouse. Bedlo fired up his flamer and orange light spread before them, picking out the enemy, one at a time, lined up in front of them, in formation. They were ready, too, and there were a lot of them.
Ailly heard an odd rattling sound right next to him that made him jump. He lifted his hand slowly towards his face, the hand that should have been holding his weapon. He realised that the sound was his rifle falling to the floor. He had lost his grip on it. He had lost his grip on everything.
He could see the strange, angry men facing him, walking towards him as if through water, slowly and deliberately. He could not see their mouths moving behind the strange impassive expressions on their masks, but he could hear a long, slow moan that didn’t sound like words at all. He couldn’t hear the krak of Mallet’s las, but he could see the blast residue of individual shots issuing from its barrel.
What was happening? In the Emperor’s name... What was happening?
Mallet was the first to fire. He had fought his entire life. He had skirmished and ambushed; he had stood on the front line and been the last to retreat; he had fought at any distance, fired any weapon and indulged in hand-to-hand combat when there was no other option. He had never faced down so many of the enemy at close quarters, without hope.
He fired his las almost continuously, picking off any target he could home in on instinctively. Death held no fear for him; it didn’t even make him angry. He had been killing for eight years, legitimately. He’d been killing for twenty years. He’d lived killing, and he would die killing, given the chance.
Bedlo triggered his flamer and watched as the scene was revealed. It was not what he had been led to expect.
This was not how it was supposed to be. How had this happened? Why had this happened? Who had betrayed them? Where was Shuey? Why hadn’t he come back to warn them? How many of the enemy were standing in front of him? Was there any way to retreat? Could they escape? How many could he kill before it was over? How had this happened? Who was to blame?
Three minutes later, Mallet was astounded to realise that he was still alive, and still shooting.
The boss had given up on the flamer, and was shooting his las into a crowd of enemy soldiers that he could barely make out in the gloom.
Ailly had not managed to fire a single shot. His feet were planted heavily and his arms were limp at his sides. Everything was happening very slowly, and he thought it had been hours since they’d left the kitchens.
Somehow, the animals had managed to separate the boy from Mallet and Bedlo. The more experienced resisters had moved slowly to the right, away from the stage and the worst of the fire that was being returned by the enemy.
Bedlo didn’t know what he was hitting, if he was hitting anything, but he knew that he wasn’t being hit. It was as if they were missing him on purpose. Bedlo and Mallet wove to the right. The boy didn’t move.
The enemy formed around Ailly, almost ignoring the two older men. They started to laugh and point. They got very close to him. The boy thought that he was going to stop breathing. They wanted him to move; he wanted to oblige, but he couldn’t.
Someone took a potshot at the floor. At least, Ailly thought the foe was shooting at the floor, but then he felt something in his foot. It was wet and hot. He didn’t dare look down, and he couldn’t fall down. What were they saying? Why couldn’t he see their mouths move, but could hear their strange grunts? Nothing would come into focus.
Then one of the foe picked Ailly up, over his shoulder, and took him up the steps onto the platform. He stood the boy back on his feet, and jumped off the stage, back into a pack of his comrades.
Ailly was mute and incapable. His eyes were blurry and he still couldn’t hear properly. He wasn’t terrified any more, though. He couldn’t possibly stay so terrified for so long.
He wanted to do what they wanted him to do, but he didn’t know what that was. He didn’t know that Shuey had danced and convulsed for them. He didn’t know they’d had their sport before they’d killed him. He should be dead already.
There was a square of light, suddenly, in front of him. Two dozen enemy beasts were silhouetted, back-lit by the door that opened out into the daylight. Everything came back to Ailly in a rush. He could hear the howls and jeers of the crowd, and see the enemy as they turned to face the intruder. He could smell the blood that Shuey had left on the stage. He could feel the pain in his wounded foot. He could feel the muscles in his gut clenching around his stomach, and the heave in his oesophagus as his body reacted to the situation.
His movement still wasn’t voluntary, but whatever was compelling Ailly’s body to react forced him to lean over before he emptied the contents of his stomach onto the stage. He could not stand after that.
Whether bored or exasperated, or simply reactive, someone shot the man that had opened the external door to the playhouse, more than one someone. The tall, grizzled old man went down under a hail of fire. He died, instantly, from one of the seventeen shots that found ways into his torso before he fell.
Ailly didn’t recognise the man who had come to their aid; he only saw his dark outline jolting against the light with the impact of las-fire. He was conscious now, more conscious than he had been since entering the kitchens, and it was his conscious state that killed him. The boy dropped slowly, silently to the floor, without a single shot being fired in his direction, and without any fanfare or any sign that he was about to die. It didn’t matter what had killed him. It didn’t matter whether it was a stroke or a heart attack. It didn’t matter whether an aneurysm had erupted in his fragile body.
Ailly died without a fight, without firing a shot, and with only a flesh wound in his foot to show that he had been in any danger. There was no dignity. There was never any dignity.
Bedlo and Mallet turned as the playhouse door was thrown open to the scene. For a split-second, Bedlo thought that someone was coming to the rescue, perhaps the cell that had armed them. For a moment, he had hope. Mallet felt nothing, but simply kept on shooting at the enemy, glad of the extra light, once he had squinted the suddenness of it out of his eyes.
He did not wonder why the enemy was not shooting at them. He knew why.
After killing the last man in, the enemy returned to taunting Mallet and Bedlo. The boy had pissed them off by dying before he’d done anything to entertain them, and they wanted their revenge. They wanted something so badly that several of them had embarked on pitched battles between themselves, and three had died at the hands of their comrades. Bedlo and Mallet had injured several others between them, but both of their kill-rates increased dramatically with the extra light that was coming in through the door that no one had bothered to close.
Mallet kept shooting all the time that no one was shooting back to kill. He wanted to give them a dose of their own medicine, and started to aim at legs and arms instead of heads and chests.
The beasts started to work on separating Mallet and Bedlo. It didn’t matter any more. They were very close. Mallet watched one of the animals swing at the boss’s head, making him stagger. Then, another swung at his knees, and Bedlo was having trouble standing. Then two more started shooting at the floor, close to Bedlo’s feet, and Mallet saw the boss’s head bobbing up and down to his left. It looked for all the world as if Bedlo was dancing.