John Steakley - Armor

It got worse. Four blasts slammed against the outer wall within three seconds. The warping floor bounced us like babies about the room. Chunks of masonry crashed to the floor from high above. The sound of it was… Godlike.

It stopped suddenly, all at once. We got to our feet. Holly rushed to a panel on the wall and read some dials.

“Uh-oh,” he said quietly. And was silent.

“Don’t do that!”

“Huh? Oh, I think we have a lacing split here.”

“That’s bad?”

“The lacing is behind two half-meter layers of reinforced plastiform.”

“What’s behind the lacing?”

He made a face. “Mqstly paint.”

“Holy shit!” I cried, grabbing him and dragging him back from the front.

“It won’t collapse, Jack.”

“It will when the grenades hit it.”

“What grenades?”

“They stopped the mortar barrage for something!”

“Shouldn’t we be shooting ’em as they run up to throw?”

“To do that, we would have to approach the guns. The guns are on the….”

Wham! Two, three, four-five-six. Pause. Three more almost at once.

On the floor from the first one. Holding my ears. Opening my eyes reluctantly, sure of seeing blood.

Smoke and dust were filling the room—thick and black and brown and gray, but I saw through it for just an instant, just long enough to recognize the river through a two-meter-high, meter-wide, gash.

They had pierced the first wall.

On impulse, I grabbed a concussion grenade from one of the scattered cases. I threw it, without looking, out through the smoke. Screams followed its detonation. I grabbed up three more and threw them, too.

Now was the time to go to the cannon. “Wait here,” I said to Holly who lay sprawled and choking dust.

“No. No, I’m fine,” he lied and thumped awkwardly head-first into a cannon station.

My cannon had been where the gash was. I stepped one over and keyed it up. I had a target for maybe a second and a half. Once he may have been where my beam struck.

“Dammit! barked Holly. He took his eyes off of his screen and frowned in my direction. “You know, I’d like to shoot back at least once. But unless it’s a tree, there’s never any damn target.”

Bingo! “Shoot ’em.”

“Huh?”

“The trees?”

“Why?”

“They burn?”

“So?”

“They burn down.”

We made a forest fire. It was quite an impressive blaze in no time at all. The far side of the river disappeared behind the wall of smoke. I decided to take a small chance. I stepped through the gash and looked around.

Chunks of plastiform were scattered all over the slope to the water. Much of it was from our wall, but the vast majority of the debris had been blasted from the walls on either side of the core. But no breaches, as Holly had promised. Instead of standing still for the punctures, and making an entrance, the other walls simply collapsed atop one another. One spot, repeatedly targeted, had a massive cone of masonry that seemed to have been torn through a good five meters. But the pile was right where the wall had been and just as obstructive.

I took another quick chance. I trotted around to the ground underneath an eave. Bootprints covered the entire area. This is where they stood when they threw the grenades and made the gash. I stood in one of the spots and pressed myself against the wall. Out of range.

After forty-five minutes of waiting for something to scare us, we decided to get a bite to eat. I was starving. I hadn’t eaten since… I wasn’t sure. Not today or yesterday or….

Damn. Felix had been just yesterday. Damn.

Borglyn’s programming was fun for a while. Mutineers and deserters weren’t much at fire-fighting. They were damn good at trenches, though. They had two of them dug deep enough for the mortars long before the fire went out.

“Pretty far back, though,” observed Holly.

He was right. Too far back to melt the barrels, anyway. Cannon are not made for distance. Then I saw what Holly meant. I didn’t know much about artillery, but Borglyn had called them medium-range mortars. They were a kilometer away.

The question was answered as we watched. The crews began firing at us. We rushed to the outer room, ready to seal it off if need be. It wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t even dangerous. I sat in the gash, enjoying fresh air and a smoke and admired the splashes for half an hour. Not that they didn’t have the range. They did. At least two shells whistled over the Dome. But no accuracy.

When the shakes came, an hour into the respite, I went to the head and sat them out. When I returned, I pretended not to see Holly having an even worse time. I could do that, had been doing it for him since it had begun. It was really getting to him. Too smart not to appreciate what could happen, he was also too sensitive to ignore it. A nice man.

An hour later, the fire was finally going out. I figured we had another hour yet to come. It was an exhausted, ragtag crowd across the river.

“You think it will matter to them?” wondered Holly aloud.

He was leaning against the wall as before, his head back and staring.

“Who?”

“The people who are left after.”

“Under Borglyn?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Depends on how well we do. On how much we make them work for it. There’re only two of us, after all. Far as they might know, only you. If we make them treat us like an army, it’ll be remembered.”

“Do you think we can?”

“No.”

“Why not? We’ve done pretty well.”

“But we’re out of trees.”

He laughed shortly. “I would like this to count,” he said wistfully.

“Well,” I said encouragingly, “it would help if we could make them flatten the hillside. Or better still, land the Coyote.”

“Should that be our goal?”

“Hell, no. We’re either doing this to win, with the idea of trying to win, or it’s masturbation.”

“I’d still like to see the Coyote. You think we will?”

I had been pondering that. “We might,” I said carefully. “But I don’t think it will attack us. Nothing eats fuel like a Nova-blaze.”

He nodded. We sat there, watching the smoke rise into the sunshine.

“Hey!” I blurted suddenly. “It’s daytime.”

Holly smiled. “Has been since it started.”

I relaxed. “I suppose so,” I mumbled.

What was I doing? Why was I here? I knew how it was going to end. I knew. But still I went along, on and on as if not really examining the madness would make it safer.

Holly. Sweet Holly. I knew why he was here. He felt he had to be. He felt he was the last hope and therefore responsible to try. I understood that. I understood those reasons. For him.

I did not understand those reasons for me. Yet here I was. Idiot.

There were a lot of things I didn’t understand lately. Like that morning when I had….

“What?” he asked.

“I guess I was mumbling.”

“Tell me,” he said excitedly, sitting up and leaning forward.

I smiled. “It’s not as much fun as that.”

“Is it bad?”

“Mostly.”

“About what you did?”

“No. About something else I did. This morning.”

“What?”

“I killed five people in the City.”

He blinked. “Why?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Why don’t you just tell me what happened.”

So I did. About Wice and about Northrup, the tortured fool. And about Lopes. About the other three.

“The thing of it was, I knew I was going to do it before I felt like doing it. Well, I didn’t want to do it. I had no passion for that fight. But I knew I was going to do it because….”

“Because it was the right thing?”