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  There were muttered groans and curses as we loaded our gear onto the skimmer. This model had been modified for combat. It still had a low railing, but its underbelly was armored by interlocking plates that looked like fish scales to me.

  The turtle did his best to make us throw up breakfast, but I think the added weight dampened his efforts. We slewed and wallowed at every banking turn. It was frightening, but not as violent and death-defying as usual.

  When we at last cruised into the government district, I was happy to see the streets were empty and quiet. Maybe this mission would be the cakewalk we’d been promised.

  As we landed on a flat section of a pyramid-like structure and leapt off the deck, a second skimmer came roaring down near us. Graves himself got off with another platoon. Several more skimmers were following as three units had been assigned to cover this centrally placed building in the district.

  The original briefing map had displayed this district as yellow, meaning there was no current combat, but we were bordering enemy forces and had to look sharp. When we touched down, we spread out and moved to cover all the elevators and stairways that led down into the building. Harris took care of that, placing his troops with care.

  The Veteran didn’t mess with Carlos and me. We were on our own. Leeson walked over, hands on his hips, and surveyed the roof.

  “Over there,” he said, “west side. Set up your 88 with the best field of fire you can.”

  His order was extraneous, but I didn’t mind. As long as an officer didn’t order me to do something stupid, I was happy. I dragged my artillery piece to the edge of the roof and set it up on a corner. I had a great field of fire down two slanting sides of the building.

  “Don’t you think we’re kind of exposed out here on the corner?” Carlos asked me as he towed the ammo after me.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but you can’t do much if you can’t see anything. This is a line-of-sight weapon. We have to have a clear field of fire.”

  “What if they have snipers?”

  “We’re going to build a bunker up here. I thought you’d be happy out here on this roof. The heavy fighting is kilometers away.”

  Carlos shaded his eyes and looked out toward the financial district to the west. Smoke trails swirled up toward the big exhaust fans and lurid glowing flames could be seen here and there dotting the streets. Something was going on out there, we could see that much.

  “After they take the banks, where do you think they’ll come next?” Carlos asked me.

  I looked at him in surprise. “Take the banks? Do you think they will?”

  Carlos laughed. “I forgot. All you got was Graves’ little pep-talk today. That’s not the whole story.”

  His statement concerned me. Carlos was always cynical, but I’d felt that Graves had been holding back. I was also worried that Carlos was referring to Graves’ speech as a pep-talk. To my mind, the briefing had laid out a grim scenario.

  Carlos knelt and pulled out a portable puff-crete dispenser. It looked like a big caulk gun and worked the same way. You had to be careful though, because if you didn’t get the material out cleanly in one go it would harden up and jam the gun. Once it did that, it was almost impossible to reuse.

  I got down on my knees and joined him. Soon we were squirting out an instant fortification around the 88. It began to take shape, looking like pink-white paste until it hardened. I kept building it up farther out with a large aperture for firing. It was going to feel weird being perched on the corner of the building and hanging out over thousands of meters of air like I was sitting in a bug’s cocoon.

  “Listen,” Carlos said. “We’ve lost about half the city over the last three days. I got lucky and was revived early—well, maybe lucky is the wrong word. Anyway, I was ahead of you in line. I got to watch the enemy spread and advance.”

  For once, I felt no urge to tell Carlos to shut up. He was more serious than usual in his tone as well. I added a reinforced support under the floor of the bunker, attaching it with strands and beads of thick puff-crete and slathering it into place with disposable trowels.

  “Just think of what that means,” Carlos continued. “This hab is huge. Just to march as far as they have without fighting would take days. We haven’t been holding them back or forming a front. We’ve been overrun and pressed back at every engagement. They’re advancing like a flood and talk of this being a ‘battle’ is just wishful thinking.”

  Carlos had never been one to look at the bright side of a situation, but I had to admit he was right. They couldn’t have spread so far, so fast, if we’d been doing much of anything to slow them down.

  “They have sheer numbers,” I said. “I understand that, but what about the city population? How can a few thousand—even a hundred thousand—control millions of civvies?”

  “That’s just it,” Carlos said, “I think they’re joining up. I think every neighborhood full of losers they take over is a recruiting ground. The city is rising up. Their ideology—or whatever they’re using to get people to fight—is spreading.”

  I thought about how selfish the Tau were in this place. These aliens only cared about gaining a credit for themselves. I wasn’t sure what had gotten them into a fighting spirit—maybe it was a culmination of hopelessness among the countless poor.

  “I bet they aren’t all joining up,” I said. “Most are probably huddling in their houses content to let others fight it out. That sounds like your average Tau. They don’t have much community spirit.”

  Carlos laughed. “Try none at all. The threat of Galactic intervention has always kept this place under control—but that’s gone now.”

  “We don’t know that. It’s very risky to assume the Battle Fleet won’t come back and exact revenge.”

  Carlos shrugged. “Tell them about it.”

  I looked out of my completed bunker and stared to the west. The smoke clouds seemed a trifle bigger and blacker than they’d been when we’d started. Could the battle be coming closer?

  “Break out the goggles,” I said. “I want to get a range-reading on the riots.”

  Carlos dug around in our equipment bags and pulled out the goggles, but he didn’t hand them over. Instead, he pulled the strap over his own head and stared through the telescoping lenses, making adjustments.

  “Come on, hand them over,” I said.

  “I’m your spotter, and I’m spotting something right now.”

  Rather than standing around, I got into my gunner’s harness and tried out the swivel controls on the 88. They felt good. I’d trained some with light artillery pieces like this one over the last six months but had yet to use them in combat.

  I liked the way the 88 felt. The handholds on the back were like vertical bicycle handlebars. With my gauntlets off they were cool to the touch, and the swivel motion was very smooth. A lot of alien tech was awkward to use. Even the systems they built for use by humanoids. There was always something extra or something missing that made it hard for a human to operate. For example, most seats had a hole for a tail to hang out the back. That was fine if you needed it, but when a human sat in such a chair it felt like your butt was being squeezed into the tail-hole after a while.

  The 88 didn’t have a tail-hole or a gripping system that was built to be operated by three or four hands at once. It was easy to control and bi-manipulative by design. I could swing the muzzle either up, down, or sideways almost effortlessly. The sights were good, too. I could zoom in and doing so automatically narrowed the projector aperture for longer range precision fire. Zooming out widened the cone of impact, but it was still a pretty tight beam compared to the old shoulder-mounted belcher units I was most accustomed to.

  “I think you’re going to get to fire that thing after all,” Carlos said.

  I glanced up at him. He was crouching at my side, intently staring into the goggles and trying not to move at all. I could tell by the way the goggles had telescoped out to nearly a foot in length that whatever he was looking at was pretty far away
.

  “You checking out the banks?”

  “Yes I am—and it looks bad. There are Tau everywhere. I think—I think they just took over the banking buildings. The streets are overrun.”

  “Crazy,” I said, staring at the horizon. Without a visual aid system, all I could see was a pall of smoke. “Why are so many joining in? What’s the payoff for them?”

  “They must think this is their chance. Only one Tau in a thousand has any real money, you know. They all lust for more. I think they’re willing to burn their whole city down for the chance to get it.”

  “But they have to know that we’re going to burn them down when they get here. I mean, they might win in the end, but they’re going to take horrid losses. What would make them so willing to sacrifice themselves?”

  Carlos shook his head and took off the goggles. He looked troubled, and that was unusual for him. In fact, this entire conversation wasn’t how discussions normally went with Carlos. He was usually as self-centered as the Tau themselves.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Did I tell you I fought them in the streets the second day—after you were killed at the umbilical transport hub?”

  “No—but it looks like you survived.”

  “I did. Let me tell you, it wasn’t pretty. They came at us near the shopping malls that surround the city’s green area—you know, what passes for a park. They swarmed us like lemmings. We burned so many down. They might have won except most of them didn’t have good weapons. Women, even a few of their young—they were all fighting and dying like animals. But only the Tau. Did you notice that? None of the foreign population has joined in with them. Only the Tau are fighting.”

  Frowning, I put on the goggles and studied the throngs that marched slowly closer like ants. Carlos was right. There were only Tau in the horde. I noticed another thing. They were all wearing the same colors: maroon and silver. What the hell did that mean?

  “Stay on station,” I told Carlos. “I’m going to go talk to Natasha.”

  Carlos grinned and the moment I got out of the gunner’s harness he slipped into it and began slewing the gun mount around.

  “That’s not a toy, legionnaire,” I said.

  “I know that. Don’t you think I know that? I know when I’m manning a real gun. This feels great! I almost hope the squid-faces make it all the way up these streets to us.”

  I smiled thinly. That sounded more like the Carlos I knew. Whatever twinge of guilt and worry he’d been feeling, it was gone now.

  Leaving him at the gun emplacement, I went out onto the roof again to find Natasha. I hoped she’d have answers—she often did.

  -19-

  As we were stationed on the flat top of a gigantic pyramid-like building, I had to walk a hundred meters or so to our central encampment. I found Natasha there, setting up a large bunker that looked like a bubble of puff-crete on the building’s roof. The skimmers had lifted off and left us by this time, and the bunker she was spraying into existence squatted next to the newly outlined air-vehicle landing zone.

  After helping her set up the bunker, she deployed a weapons system inside it. I examined her weaponry with a critical eye.

  “Anti-air?” I guessed.

  “Automated drone turrets,” she said without looking up. “They work well for this kind of fortification as long as you can trust their friend-or-foe programming.”

  “Uh, can we trust it?”

  “Of course,” she said, a little abruptly. “I edited the scripts myself.”

  “Must be good then. You got a second to talk?”

  She glanced up at me and shook her head. “You never quit, do you?”

  “What?”

  “Am I the last female on the roof? Or have you already hit on everyone else up here today?”

  “What?” I asked again. “No…I mean…I’m not hitting on you. I want to know something.”

  Natasha turned back to her anti-air drone. She began studiously messing with her turret scripts. That was real work—but I wasn’t fooled.

  “I’ve been dead for several days,” I pointed out, “not fooling around with women in case you’re under some kind of misconception. Did somebody tell you a story?”

  She heaved a sigh and faced me. “I guess I’m not being fair. You don’t always connect well with women.”

  I blinked in confusion. To my mind, I was something of an authority on connecting with women.

  “What’s this about?” I asked, trying to stay on neutral ground.

  “Anne Grant.”

  “The bio? Yeah, she revived me.”

  “She told me she had a date with you and asked if that was cool with me. I told her it was. I told her she could marry your ass if she wanted to.”

  I was beginning to catch on. My mind whirled around—twice, I think—then came to a stop.

  “Did she say yes?”

  Natasha frowned. “Yes to what?”

  “To the marriage idea.”

  Her hand snapped up fast, but I leaned my head back and she missed.

  “Look,” I said, “I was dead. For three whole days. Can’t a man get a break after that?”

  She heaved a sigh. “Maybe. But it seems like I cut you breaks all the time. Do you recall we slept together that last night on Earth when this whole vote thing started?”

  “Of course, I think of it constantly.”

  Her lips formed an unnatural pattern. I wasn’t sure if she was disgusted or annoyed. “Then why have you barely talked to me since? On the whole flight out here you never brought it up. When we got here, we never went out on the town or anything. You knew I wanted to hit the markets and find some cool tech, but you forgot all about that.”

  “Huh,” I said. “What I remember is going on a crazy gunrunning mission then dying in battle with Tau rebels…nope, no shopping trips were planned or skipped.”

  “As if you were going to go out with me even if we were having an easy time here.”

  Truth was, I’d forgotten about her plans in all the excitement. But I knew that wasn’t her real problem, anyway. What had her upset was Anne.

  “Natasha,” I said, deciding to switch the direction of the conversation, “is this situation going to damage our odds for mission success?”

  She straightened up in a hurry when I said that. Whatever else she was, she was a good soldier. When she needed to, she could bury her feelings like few others I knew.

  “No,” she said firmly. “All right then. Forget about my dreams of shopping. Maybe I’m just stressed—it’s silly, isn’t it? This hab is in the middle of some kind of civil war. I shouldn’t be asking you about this at all. Sorry, Specialist McGill.”

  I forced a smile, even though I knew dropping back away from a first name basis wasn’t a good omen. “Great. Here’s why I came to you: in your opinion, what’s with these crazy rebels?”

  She frowned. “You mean why are they fighting? I’m not entirely sure.”

  “Neither am I. What we know is that they’re going completely batshit and the effect is spreading. Could it be drugs? Some kind of secret plan or cult we don’t know about? Usually, the Tau are only motivated by selfish profits. What would make them rise up as a single mass and attack us?”

  Natasha tapped her face with a finger, puzzling it out. I could tell I’d managed to intrigue her as well as deflect her from asking any more unwelcome questions about Anne Grant.

  “That’s a damned good question, James.”

  I dared to let a smile creep back onto my face. I was James again, not that cold-hearted bastard, Specialist McGill.

  “You’re right,” she said thoughtfully. “Why the hell are the Tau acting like lemmings? It just doesn’t make sense. After I set this up, I’ll do some checking around. Some of the other techs must be working on enemy behavioral models.”

  “Great,” I said. I considered giving her a hug but passed on the idea. I beat a hasty retreat instead. A man has to know when he’s been let off easy and not give in to the temptation to go
for broke.

  Before I even made it back to the little bunker on the corner of the roof that housed Carlos and my 88, the situation changed. An alarm tone sounded in my helmet.

  I’d had the visor up, but now snapped it down reflexively. I checked the sky, but found it empty. Natasha’s air-defense drone was in slow-scan mode which indicated it hadn’t detected a threat. The rest of the troops around me on the roof were doing the same thing I was. We looked at each other, mystified. If the attack wasn’t coming via air, where was it coming from?

  My helmet crackled and a familiar voice broke into the chatter of confused troops. “This is Graves. Finish those puff-crete bunkers immediately and get to your assigned positions. We’re about to have company. The Tau are coming up from the subways and should be visible in the streets soon.”

  I broke into a run and reached my bunker in ten strides. I put a gauntlet on Carlos’ shoulder and pulled him around.

  “Get out of my chair, spotter!” I shouted at him.

  He rolled out of the harnessed gunner’s seat, grumbling. He struggled with the spotter’s goggles. “What’s the deal?” he asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  I climbed into the harness and strapped in as quickly as I could. Right away I could tell he’d fooled with all my settings. My balls were smashed up against the barrel and my knees were up so high my legs were almost bent double.

  “Dammit, Carlos! Did you have to fool with the seat?”

  “Sec,” he said, slapping a button on the side.

  The seat immediately moved, whirring. I was eased back into a reasonable position and grunted with relief.

  “I preset the unit for you and me, both,” Carlos said.

  Frowning at him, I narrowed my eyes. “Why? You’re not qualified to shoot this thing. You’re a spotter, not a weaponeer.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “But remember how you got rank? Your weaponeer died on Steel World and you picked up his gun. I just figured…well.”

  “Hoping they take out your gunner so you can be a hero, huh?”

  He shrugged. “Worked for you.”