Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

"The hearings?"

"Yeah. I've---

There was a sudden bang as the sheet-metal door to the rooftop burst open. A shouting. gang of rebels scrambled forward, clutching bamboo clubs.

Hotchkiss spun from the hip and opened up on the doorway with his submachine gun. There was a nerve-shattering racket.

Two rebels sprawled, punched backward by impact. The others fled screaming, and suddenly everyone was down, gripping the pebbled surface of the roof in terror.

Lu and Aw kicked the door shut and fired a tangle-round against the jamb, sealing it. They pulled thin loops of plastic from their belts and handcuffed the two fallen, gasping rebels.

They sat them up.

"Okay, okay," Hotchkiss told the rest of them, waving his beefy hand. "Only jelly-rounds. See? No problem, la."

The Rizome group rose slowly. As the truth dawned on them, there were nervous, embarrassed titters. The two reb- els, teenagers, had been strafed across their chests, tearing gaping holes in their paper shirts. Beneath it, their skins showed fist-sized blotches of indelible purple dye.

Hotchkiss chivalrously helped Laura to her feet. "Jelly bullets don't kill," he announced. "Still pack plenty of sting, however. "

"You shot us with a machine gun!" said one of the rebels sullenly.

"Shut up, son," Hotchkiss offered kindly. "Lu, Aw, these two are too small. Throw 'em back, eh?"

"Door is secured, sir," Lu pointed out.

"Use your head, Lu. You have your ropes."

"Yes, sir," Lu said, grinning. He and Officer Aw frog- marched the two boys toward the front of the roof. They began snapping their first captive into a set of chromed rappelling gear. From the loading docks three stories below, furious, bloodthirsty yells rose from the roused A-L.P.

"Well," Hotchkiss said casually. "Seems the rioters have made an operations nexus out of your HQ." Lu kicked one captive over the edge of the roof and paid out rappelling line as the boy hissed helplessly downward.

"But not to worry," Hotchkiss said. "We can break them wherever they stand."Suvendra winced. "We saw them demolition your squad car....

"Sending that car in was the politicals' idea," Hotchkiss sniffed. "But now it's our business."

Laura noticed the SWAT leader's complex military watch- phone. "What can you tell us, Colonel? We're starved for news up here. Is the Army really in Johore?"

Hotchkiss smiled at her. "This isn't your Texas, dearie.

The Army's just on the other side of the causeway just a little bridge. A few minutes away." He held up two fingers, an inch apart. "All miniature, you see."

The two Chinese SWAT officers hooked the second rebel to their ropes. Below them, the angry rioters vented howls of frustrated abuse. Flung bricks arched up to crack on the roof.

"Throw a few dye-rounds into them," Hotchkiss shouted.

The two Chinese unlimbered their sidearms and cut loose over the parapet. The guns blasted a fearsome racket, spitting spent cartridges. Below them, the crowd shrieked in fear and pain. Laura heard them scatter. She felt a surge of nausea.

Hotchkiss gripped her elbow. "You all right?"

She swallowed hard. "I saw a man killed by a machine gun, once."

"Oh, really?" said Hotchkiss, interested. "You've been to

Africa?"

"No-"

"You look a bit young to have seen real action.... Oh,

Grenada, eh?" He let her go. Frenzied pounding was shaking the roof door. Hotchkiss fired the remaining jelly-rounds of his magazine against it. Brutal pounding and splattering. He flung the empty magazine away, and fitted a second with the casual look of a man chain-smoking cigarettes.

"Isn't this 'real action'?' Laura shouted. Her ears were ringing.

"This is only theater, dearie," Hotchkiss said patiently.

"These little parlor radicals don't even have carbines. Try something like this in the bad old days-in Belfast or Beirut- and we'd be lying here with great Armalite sniper holes in us. "

" `Theater.' What's that supposed to mean?" Laura said.

Hotchkiss chuckled. "I've fought real war! Falkland Is- lands, '82. That was a classic. Scarcely any televisions ..."

"So you're British, then, Colonel? European?"

"British. I was S.A.S." Hotchkiss wiped sweat. "Europe!

What kind of outfit is that, the European Common Army?

Bloody joke, is what that is. When we fought for Queen and

Country...h, hell, girl, you wouldn't understand any- way." He glanced at his watch. "Okay, here come our boys."

Hotchkiss stalked toward the front of the building. The

Rizome crew followed in his wake.

A six-wheeled armored personnel carrier, like some great gray, rubber-wheeled rhinoceros, surged easily over and through the street barricade. Bags burst and squashed aside. Its turret- mounted water cannon swung alertly.

Behind it came two wire-windowed paddy wagons. The wagons flung open rear double doors and cops decamped by the numbers, falling rapidly into disciplined ranks: shields, clubs, helmets.

No one showed to offer resistance. Wisely, because a pair of choppers hung like huge malignant wasps above the street.

Their side bays were open and cops crouching inside were manning tear-gas launchers and Gatling tangle-guns.

"Very simple," said Hotchkiss. "No use street-fighting when we can seize the riot's leaders at will. Now we'll grab ourselves a building full of them, and... oh, bloody hell."

The entire front of the godown collapsed like cardboard and six giant cargo robots roared into the street.

The cops scattered, stumbling. The robots rushed forward with vim. There was a crude dementia in their actions, the sign of rotten programming. Crude, but efficient. They were built to haul cargo the size of trailers. Now they were grap- pling wildly at anything remotely the right size.

The paddy wagons toppled over at once, sides denting loudly, tires whirling helplessly at the air. The APC opened up with its water cannon, as three robots tugged and mauled and punched at it with ruthless mechanical stupidity. Finally they levered it over, toppling it stupidly onto the exposed arm of the third robot, which tried to back away, screeching and buckling. The cannon fountained aimlessly, a furious white plume, four stories high.

The rebels were all over the cops. The streets gleamed with water, sloshed under charging feet. Headlong melee, mind- less and angry, like a bed of giant ants.

Laura watched in absolute amazement. She could not be- lieve that it had come to this. One of the best-organized cities in the world, and men were beating the shit out of each other in the streets with sticks.

"Oh, Jesus Christ," said Hotchkiss. "We're better armed, but our morale's blown.... The air support will tell, though."

The copters were firing tangle-rounds at the melee's edges- without much success. Too crowded, too chaotic and slip- pery. Laura flinched as a skidding dock robot knocked three cops headlong.

Renewed .pounding came from the door. Someone had jammed the ceramic edge of a machete through and was saw- ing vigorously at the tangle-tape. They turned to face it-and saw, beyond it, over the waterfront, one of the loading cranes.

The skeletal arm was spinning on its axis, gathering speed with ponderous grace. At the end of its cables was a cargo fridge container, rising high above the docks with centrifugal force.

Suddenly the crane let loose. The heavy cargo box, half the size of a house, spun free and arched dizzily through space. It flew almost gently, arcing and tumbling, like a softball tossed underhand.

Its flight ended suddenly. It slammed, with cybernetic precision, into a black police chopper hovering over the waterfront. There was an explosive burst as the fridge car ruptured, with gaseous jets of frost and the bright cartwheeling of hundreds of cardboard boxes. The chopper snapped, buckled, and splashed dramatically into dirty seawater. It lay sprawled amid the floating boxes like a dragonfly crushed by a car grill.