“Yes, sir!”
When Kafari looked up, Yalena was trembling.
“The Bolo’s coming?” Terror quavered through her voice.
“Yes.”
Her daughter swallowed hard, but she didn’t panic. Didn’t break and run. The courage it took not to gibber — after what she’d been through, the last time the Bolo had come toward her — made Kafari’s heart swell with pride. Somehow, despite all the pain and failures and the ghastly damage wrought by POPPA’s social engineers, she and Simon had managed to produce one hell of a daughter. One who stood there, waiting for her commanding officer to issue orders that she would carry out, despite the black terror in her soul. Kafari loved her so much in that moment, she couldn’t even speak.
Phil Fabrizio waited, as well, but the quality of his silence was altogether different from Yalena’s. His nano-tatt had writhed into a configuration that reminded Kafari of a Deng warrior — black, full of spiky legs, and ready to kill anything within reach. The big-city swagger and bravado had gone, burned away by the rage seething like a forest fire behind his eyes.
“When Sonny gets here, you want I should go out there and try to stop him?” His voice was harsh, full of hot coals and hatred. “We got enough octocellulose left, I could blow a damn ragged hole in somethin’ vital. Seein’ how it’s me and he knows me, I could probably get close enough t’ do all kinds a’ damage.”
“I do believe you would,” she murmured, more to herself than to him.
“Shit, yeah, I would.”
“And he’d mow you down with antipersonnel charges and keep coming. No, I don’t want anyone to go out there and confront that machine. I spoke the God’s honest truth, just now. I can’t afford to lose anybody else.”
“What’re we gonna do, then? I was s’posed to meet my sister, tonight, an’ somebody who came in on that freighter. An off-world officer, they said, t’ talk about guerilla warfare and a better way t’ make hits.”
Yalena spoke before Kafari could answer. “Sir? I think you should tell him who he was supposed to meet, tonight. Right now, we’re the only command staff you’ve got.”
“Point taken. All right, Mr. Fabrizio—”
“Hey, if you can’t call me Phil, ain’t no sense in sayin’ nuthin’ else. I ain’t been called Mr. Fabrizio by nobody in my life, except th’ damn P-Squads who threw my ass in a prison van an’ shipped it to th’ death camp.”
“All right, Phil. That officer you were supposed to meet tonight is Colonel Simon Khrustinov. The Bolo’s old commander is back in town, my friend, and there is going to be one hell of a hot time in that old town, tonight.”
“Holy — ! He’s back? To help us? Oh, man, that some kinda wonder—” Sudden dismay replaced the shock. “Aw, nuts… He’s gonna blow that bastard away b’fore I get a chance to fill his ass fulla holes, ain’t he?”
“That’s the general idea,” Kafari said, voice dry even through the voice-alteration filter. “Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of targets to go around for everybody.”
“Huh. If that ain’t the God’s honest truth, I dunno what is. We’re sittin’ here in th’ middle of the biggest damn disaster I ever heard of, we got almost no soldiers left, and a Bolo’s on its way t’ blow us t’ kingdom come. So how come I feel like we’re gonna win this thing, anyway?”
“Because we don’t have any other choice. And we’re running out of time.”
Kafari started walking toward her command center, which they’d fled, trying to reach Yalena and Dinny with protective gear. She couldn’t think of Dinny, yet. Not without her heart breaking. So she focused on what they could do. What they must do. If there were enough people left to do it. When they reached Kafari’s office, they found fifteen other survivors. Suited and silent, they waited for her next orders. She paused for a moment, half blinded by tears of gratitude, then went to each one in turn and took their gloved hands in hers, offering a silent greeting. Through the biohoods, she saw scared faces, shell-shocked eyes. Through her grip on their gloves, she felt tremors of reaction shock.
“We have a great deal to do,” she said softly. “We have to find out what the gas was, how long it will remain effective, whether or not we have anything in our medical supplies to act as an antidote. We need to track down as many survivors as possible.
And I want someone to scan the news reports coming out of Madison, official broadcasts as well as datachat. I need someone to cover the surveillance boards, looking for signs of survivors, trying to come with a rough tally of equipment that’s survived. We need to finish running down the list of field units, out there, trying to make contact, but I’m afraid most of our crews are dead.
“And we need someone to coordinate with units in every one of our base camps. We have people and guns scattered along the whole length of the Damisi Mountains. The alarm we sounded went out to our whole network of camps, twenty-two of them. Unless POPPA shelled them with gas at the same time they hit us, that warning gave our other units time to suit up in what gear they’ve got, maybe even evacuate some of the civilians. Cimmero Canyon, in particular, could be evacuated, if the federals haven’t already hit them. Any questions before I start assigning tasks?”
No one had any.
“All right, people, let’s get to work.”
It took Sonny an hour to reach them.
Kafari put that hour to good use, organizing her survivors, putting them to work at critical tasks, and trying to hack into the government’s military database, looking for information about the gas that had hit them. The one thing she didn’t dare do was try to contact civilian households, searching for survivors. Sonny would’ve homed in on any broadcasts from farmhouses or shelters under barns and turned them into blackened cinders.
When the Bolo reached visual distance from the opening to Dead-End Gorge, Yalena and Phil went up to the top of the dam, to monitor Sonny’s arrival. Kafari wanted to be up there, as well, but she was the only trained computer engineer left. She was the best chance they had for hacking into Vittori’s computer system. She was also aware that Sonny would not dare open fire on the dam, so she steeled herself to stay in it and continue the exacting work.
She was trying yet another attempt to break the security when Yalena shouted into her comm-link. “It’s stopped! The Bolo’s stopped!”
Kafari sat up straight. “What?”
“It’s just sitting there, in the middle of the road. It’s—” she paused, gulping audibly. “It’s the little boy. Dinny’s little boy. He’s alive. He’s standing in front of the Bolo. Talking to it.”
Kafari was halfway down the corridor before her chair finished falling. Careful, she told herself, slowing down to open the outer-access door with exaggerated caution. The last thing you need is to rip open your suit, now.
She reached the top of the dam and found Rachel at the edge, hands gripping her battle rifle so hard, they shook. Phil and Yalena were standing between her and the platform that would lower her to the ground — and the tableau just beyond the gorge.
“Soldier!” Kafari snarled. “Report!”
Rachel jumped and whirled around. “S-sir!” She struggled to salute.
“Are you trying to desert your post, soldier?” Kafari snarled, trying to jolt Rachel out of her suicidal anguish.
One unsteady hand came up, pointing. “He’s alive, sir!” Her voice shook. “God, he’s alive and all alone down there and that shrieking, murdering thing—”