Элизабет Мун - Into the Fire

When the exit door at ground level opened just as Price reached the landing above it, Grace had no time to say more than “Look—” before two armed men in the wrong uniform barged in and fired on Price, who fell. Grace had paused on the landing above him, trying to get her breath. She opened the door beside her and found herself in the building’s administration section. The keys she’d insisted on having from day one let her lock the door and she moved quickly down the passage, past Accounting, Maintenance, and Service to lock the service stair door as well. Then she called the guard unit in the basement.

“Rector?”

“Enemy is in the building, ground level, and has access to the stairs. I’m on level two, Building Administration. I’ve locked two staircases into this level; I’m heading for the others. Cadet Price was shot and killed below me on the stairs.” She ended the call and headed for the far end of the building, where another bank of nonworking elevators and two staircases were. This level had few windows, which was good, but she knew it was a trap if they got in. Maybe resistance elsewhere would keep them busy.

She was able to lock the other two staircases before any intrusion, so she found a convenient office that provided multiple hiding places, opened her case of classified materials and devices, and considered trying to find a shredder. Every office had a shredder. But even if she could bypass the lockouts to emergency power, a shredder would make noise, and data cubes and sticks merely jammed shredders. She picked up the shielded communicator Rafe had given her and called him.

“I’ll get help,” he said.

“Not you,” Grace said. “But if you could get word to Ky…”

“Stay alive,” he said, “or I’ll never hear the end of it from your niece.”

And that was that.

Michael Quindlan had heard nothing from Benny. Had Benny not gone home? He wasn’t in the Quindlan headquarters; he wasn’t at the Quindlan warehouse. Though in either case the downtown power outage might be to blame. Frustrating that the progress of the battle wasn’t available on the vidscreen. He peered out the window of his elegant three-story home, seeing nothing now but heavy snowfall.

When his skullphone pinged, he tongued it open.

“Michael—get out!” That was Derrin Malines, his counterpart in the Malines family and his ally in everything.

“What’s wrong?” Ally or not, Derrin did have a tendency to overreact to problems.

“It’s all over. They’re all dead.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know where that bitch got the troops, but our people—I have hundreds dead in the street. Caught in crossfire. There were drones—planes—I thought we had the planes! Isn’t that what Kvannis told you?”

“We did—we do.” Michael tried to sort it out. Something had gone wrong but surely not everything. “Ordnay air base—ours, I’m sure of it. Lots of planes—where are these other planes coming from?”

“How should I know? The whole center of the city is dark, my people are pushed back into the warehouse district, the ships just blew up and sank—”

“What? What do you mean the ships blew up?”

“Michael, they’re just hulks in the water, and the other dockies are ambushing my people—they have weapons, Michael. I didn’t know they had weapons!”

The phone on the desk rang. Michael muted the sound in his skullphone and picked up the handset. “Yeah?”

“Kvannis here. The landing was unsuccessful. Be advised I can get you on a flight to Makkavo if you can reach Ordnay in the next ninety minutes—”

“It’s a two-hour drive—”

“The flight leaves in ninety minutes; take it or leave it.”

“I’ve got my own damn plane—where do we meet?”

The line went dead. Fine. Malines was shouting into his skullphone when he turned up the volume. “Calm down, Derrin. Kvannis called me. He’s pulling out of Ordnay—”

“What about us? What about me? I’ve got—”

“Can your people get around the harbor to the south docks? We have a ship there, ready to go. Zazdotlyn. ”

“Is that where you’re going?”

“No, I’m going inland. But I’ll call the ship. Captain’s name is Mohardhri.” It might just be time to sever the old connection with Malines, if enough Malines—the ones who knew where the bodies were buried—didn’t make it out. “I’ll call him but here’s an ID code for you: Better Days.” He ended that call, made the call to the Zazdotlyn ’s captain, and gave his instructions. Most Quindlan aircraft were somewhere else, as usual—their air freight service was much smaller than Vatta’s, though just as widespread. But the executive craft were always available… if he could get to the small airport south of the city and if the weather allowed a flight. He called the staff he wanted, picked up his overnight bag, and left his wife asleep in her suite.

Ky had lost track of time, focused as she was on the fighting. The attack on the Academy itself had been easily repelled, mounted mostly by civilians—Quindlans or Malines, she assumed—and only two Academy staff had been injured, not seriously. The attack on the condominium tower where Grace lived had been partly successful—a hundred of the enemy had made it inside—but they had been defeated, finally, by the unit assigned to protect the Rector, the General Secretary of the legislature, and the heads of the three major parties. Eight casualties there, including two fatalities, one of them Cadet Price.

The main fighting, concentrated around the government center, had been more sustained, as expected. Some of the enemy troops had made it into both the Palace and Government House, but the majority had been repulsed, again and again, along both sides of the central plaza. Snow continued to fall, making the fight even harder when the power went out and the lights failed. This gave the enemy a chance to withdraw without effective pursuit, though by then they had lost well over half their number. And a better chance to penetrate into the city singly or in small groups. She checked with General Molosay’s staff.

“We’re doing well. With the help of AirDefense and our limited artillery, we’ve halted the advance of the column approaching from the west. We’re mostly in the mopping-up phase.”

“What about Ordnay?”

“Ordnay is still not secured, but Jesek and both the bases near Port Major are, and Ordnay’s lost its air traffic control and two of its three runways, plus a number of aircraft. Do you need additional troops in the city?”

“Yes,” Ky said. “Power’s out, and though we cut the numbers down, we still have individuals and small groups that escaped the cordon and got out into the city. We don’t have enough, even if we used every single cadet, to do the necessary sweeps.”

“Reinforcements will arrive within the hour.” A code contact string followed.

Dawn came late, under the clouds and on one of the shortest days of winter. “No firing in the last forty-five minutes,” MacRobert reported. Troops from the Joint Services base had swept the city within a kilometer of Ky’s command vehicle. Snow had lightened to occasional thin skeins lasting only a minute or so. Ambulances were rolling, carrying wounded from both sides back to Marvin J. Peake Military Hospital.

“I’m going to see what kind of peace we have,” Ky said. She stood up, feeling stiff in hips and back. “Osinery, you’re with me. It’s likely to be gruesome.”

Ky made it to the line the cadets were still holding, with the help of seasoned troops, and met with their class advisers. “Major Leonidze, Major Massoudian, your classes have done extremely well. I understand you both have casualties—have all your wounded been evacuated now?”