“You don’t recognize me, do you?” Simon asked softly.
P-Net’s star news anchor shook his head.
“I’m not Commodore Oroton,” he said gently. “But Pol, my friend, before this night is over you’re going to wish the commodore had walked through that door, not me. Oroton is a brilliant commander. But what I’m trained to do will make the commodore look like a Sunday preacher.” He crouched down and smiled coldly into the newsman’s eyes. “My name,” he said in a near whisper, “is Simon Khrustinov.”
A wild whimper broke from Pol’s throat.
“That’s right. The Butcher of Etaine is back, my friend. With a new face, courtesy of Vittori Santorini. And this time,” he smiled down at the shuddering newsman, “I’m not playing by the Brigade’s rules. Do you know why that is, you sorry piece of dogshit?”
Pol shook his head, wild-eyed with terror.
Simon grabbed a fistful of expensive silk shirt. Steel turned his voice into a weapon. “Because my wife and only child were in Klameth Canyon, tonight!”
“Oh, God…”
Simon snatched him to his feet, slammed him into the nearest wall. “Don’t you dare take that name in vain! Your master bought your black little soul years ago. And for what? A few pieces of silver? No. Something even more pathetic: network ratings.” The man hanging from Simon’s fists flinched. Disgust curled Simon’s lip. “How does it feel now, to be the world’s most popular propaganda mouth? How does it feel, knowing you helped put into power a man who just murdered five hundred thousand helpless men, women, and children?”
He wet his lips with his tongue. “But they’re criminals,” he whispered. “Terrorists!”
“Oh, no,” Simon told him in a hard, flat voice. “You don’t even know the meaning of the word terrorist. Not yet,” he promised in a grim tone. “Those people weren’t soldiers or terrorists or any of the other dehumanizing labels you like to throw around. They were just ordinary people, half-starved, with nowhere else to go. And now they’re dead, my friend. All of them. Do you have the slightest idea who you helped Vittori kill tonight?”
He shook his head. “Infants at their mothers’ breasts. Toddlers playing with a few pebbles. Little girls trying to boil potatoes and wash diapers and boys scrounging firewood from any tree they could find. That’s who you helped Vittori kill, you sanctimonious fraud.”
The man with the golden tongue had lost the use of it. He just hung there, shaking, staring into Simon’s eyes like a bird hypnotized by a spitting cobra.
“Nothing to say? No bleating excuses? Not even a plea for mercy?” Tears started leaking from the man’s eyes. His mouth quivered, wet and pathetic. “You’d better find something to say, my friend, because now it’s my turn to write your script. Let me tell you what the Butcher of Etaine is going to do with that clever little tongue of yours…”
V
The guns atop the dam had fallen silent. Rachel and the other gunners up there were alive, but when Kafari started calling units on her command helmet, a massive, unbearable silence met her ears. She closed her eyes against clawing pain and nausea and kept calling her people, running down through the list in battle order.
“This is Red Dog, report. This is Red Dog to all units, report.”
Silence. Unbearable silence…
“Red Dog,” a sudden, faint crackle startled her so badly, she nearly jumped out of her skin, “we copy. There’s six of us, all suited. We’re above Alligator Deep. It’s…” The voice choked off. “It’s not good,” the soldier whispered. “Oh, Christ, it’s bad down there…” He sounded like he was crying.
“Steady, soldier,” Kafari said. “Report. What can you see?”
“I’m switching to video mode, transmitting from our surveillance cameras.”
Kafari’s battle helmet was abruptly full of dead refugees. Thousands and thousands of them. Dead livestock, too. Nothing but death, as far as the camera lens could see.
“There’s power in the farmhouses,” the team leader was saying, “but we can’t see anyone moving, down there. We can’t tell if anyone got to shelter. They hit us with that shit right in the middle of the artillery barrage. If we hadn’t got your warning… if we’d been at a lower altitude…” His voice was breaking apart, again.
“Can you see other gun positions?”
“Y-yes, sir.”
“Signal them. Can you see any sign of movement from those positions?”
There was a pause. “Yeah, there is. My God, we’re not alone, out here, there’s somebody else alive…” The strain in his voice set it to wobbling. “It’s the battery right across the canyon from us, sir, where the main canyon splits off into Seorsa Gorge. They’re not responding to radio signals, sir. Sam, try the heliograph.” Another pause ensued. “They’re signaling back, using light-flashes for a coded message. Stand by, sir… It’s Anish Balin, sir! The general’s alive! He says Red Wolf is with him.”
Kafari closed her eyes and sent a tiny prayer of thanks skyward.
“General Balin says his aircar was hit during the shelling. They landed at Seorsa. Their transmitters were shot to pieces. The gun battery’s comm-gear was knocked out, as well. They’ve lost half the guns and four of their crewmen were killed, but the rest of them got into suits in time.”
Hope kindled to life in Kafari’s heart. With Anish Balin and Red Wolf still at large, her command staff was mostly intact, if widely scattered. There might be other pockets of survivors, maybe even enough to keep the fight going. If Sonny didn’t just blow them all to hell in the next few minutes…
“Signal them back. Tell General Balin to lie low. Really low. The Bolo’s coming in, do you copy that? POPPA’s put the Bolo on a heavy-lifter and it’s on its way here. When it rolls into this canyon, do nothing! Don’t attack it. Don’t even switch your guns on. Power everything down and keep your heads down, as well. Do you copy?”
“Nothing, sir?” A spark of anger crackled through the horror.
Anger was good. Her people would need their anger.
“That’s right, soldier. Nothing. That Bolo will blow you to atoms if you try to engage it. Vittori’s impatience to finish us off just might save our butts, because the repair team didn’t finish the job. That machine is still blind in damn near every spectrum but infrared. Get your guns out of sight from the canyon floor. Pour water over the barrels to cool ’em off, if you have to, anything to make your fighting position invisible to IR scans. Signal the other fire team to do the same. If we can keep the Bolo from destroying all of us, if we can save enough of our guns, we can keep this rebellion going. We’ve already got teams tearing Madison apart. Do you copy that? This fight is far from over.”
“Yes, sir!” New hope rang through the soldier’s voice.
“Good. Get to work. Try to reach other units by signal flashes as well as radio. Report to me the instant you make other contacts. Let them know the commodore is still alive and still has a few tricks up his uniform sleeve. And when you see that damned Bolo, pull your head down and stay down. I’m not in the mood to lose even one more of my people tonight, do you copy that?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Get to work, then. And soldier—”
“Yes, sir?”
“Good work, getting into your suits. Tell the squads I said so.”