Walter Williams - The Sundering

“Use the control pad,” she said. “Mark out everything in the street or on the sidewalk as a target.”

Macnamara nodded to himself, then stepped back to perform this task. Once he triggered the gun, it would fire automatically at anything in the target area until told to stop or until its considerable ammunition reserve was exhausted. It was ideal for covering a withdrawal by the rest of the team.

The rifles held by Sula and Spence were less convenient, insofar as they needed a person to point them at the enemy and squeeze the trigger. But the view through their sights could be projected on the helmet faceplates of the operators, which meant that neither Sula nor Spence actually had to flaunt their heads in the way of enemy fire. Only their hands and forearms need be exposed, with the trigger permanently depressed so that the gun would fire automatically at anything designated a target.

She could feel her pulse beating high in her throat. She wondered if she should step back from the window if everything was about to blow up right this instant.

Sula gave an involuntary start as her hand comm chirped. She reached for it, encountered instead her camouflage shroud, and then groped inside its folds, all the while wondering why someone had called her hand comm instead of using the far safer burst transmissions of the radio.

By the time she opened the comm and pressed it to her ear, it had stopped chirping. Voices were already engaged in a dialogue.

“What’s the situation, then?” Hong’s voice.

“The police tell me I’ve got to move the truck or get myself arrested.” The other voice was two-five-seven’s. “I a-told them we’ve got a tow on the way. I a-told them this here is a valuable piece of property and that I ain’t a-going ta take the responsibility of running a twelve-wheeler on just one fuel cell, but they sez I got ta. So I told a-them what I’d do, I’d like call my supervisor like.”

Sula winced. Two-five-seven was a team leader and a Peer—a highly educated and cultivated young man—and he was doing his best to speak in some manner of working-class accent, and failing miserably.

If the Naxids didn’t hear something wrong in this, then they were deaf to all nuance.

Two-five-seven had done something reasonably clever, though. He’d rung a number that would contact all the teams at once, so that all would know what was going on and none would panic and try something desperate.

“Right,” Hong said. “You might as well pull out, the people we want won’t be here for a while. Take the first left on top of the ramp, and I’ll meet you there. Four-nine-nine, are you there?”

“Yes, Blanche.” Another voice.

“I need you to send me your car with a driver. Have him meet me at the truck, and have him bring all his gear.”

Meaning his weapons, presumably.

“The rest of you,” Hong said, “sit tight, and stick with the plan.”

Sula returned her hand comm to her trouser pocket, her mind spinning with the effort of trying to work out what Hong now intended. Surely he couldn’t retrieve the ambush now.

Surely the only sensible thing to do was to order his teams to leave as quietly as they had come.

Sula watched as the truck slowly pulled out from beneath the bridge and disappeared from sight around the corner of the building. The Naxid police drew their vehicles across the road on either end of the underpass as roadblocks.

Hong’s voice came over Sula’s helmet phones, and Sula hastily put on her helmet to better hear him.

“Someone has to signal me when the convoy passes.”

Others hastened to assure Hong they would do this. Sula remained silent.

She looked over the room again, saw the Gueis with their taut faces, the daughter still fierce in her determination to win her video game. Plopping sounds came from the video wall, and odd little cries. Apparently the game had to do with animals jumping over one another in a rather complicated arboreal environment.

More police flashers to the right, far down the parkway, away from the city center. Now that Sula had her helmet on, she turned up the magnification on the faceplate to see a wedge of police vehicles coming toward her, and behind them larger transport, visible only as they passed through the brilliant slices of dawn that fell between the buildings.

“Comm: to Blanche,” Sula said. “I think they’re coming. Comm: send.”

“All teams,” came Hong’s response. “Let me know when they begin to cross the bridge.”

Sula turned to the Gueis. “I want all of you down flat on the floor,” she said. “When things start, I want you to crawl out of here.Crawl, understand?” She swiped her hand parallel to the floor in a gesture that meant,flat on the floor. “Take shelter in the hallway, or with a neighbor on the far side of the building.”

“Yes, my lady,” said Mister Guei. Sula felt a spasm of amusement: she must be good at being a Peer for Guei to call her “my lady” when no one else had. Guei and his wife looked at each other, then lowered themselves and their infant son to their creamy carpet. The daughter was reluctant to leave her game, but her mother snapped at her and dragged her to the floor by one wrist. The daughter looked as if she might cry, but then decided against it.

Sula turned back to the window. The Naxids were coming on quickly and it was less than half a minute before the first wave of police vehicles came by. They moved at moderate speed, unhurried. Behind them were sedans, then trucks and buses, all moving widely spaced in a long column. Sula couldn’t see the column’s tail even with her faceplate on full magnification.

“Comm: to Blanche. They’re on the bridge. Comm: send.” No doubt every other team leader was shooting Hong the same message.

All the vehicles were dark with Naxids. Some of the trucks were open and carried long weapons, machine guns or grenade launchers, operated by alert crews that scanned the buildings as they passed by. Sula drew farther back into the room and hoped that the grenade launchers weren’t loaded with antimatter grenades.

That would be very, very messy.

“Comm: to Blanche. They’re heavily armed, and there are a lot of them. I don’t think we should engage…”

Her words trailed away as the bomb truck reappeared, booming down the Highway 16 ramp at high speed, the silent electric motors pushing each of its twelve huge wheels at maximum acceleration. Following the truck came a blue Victory sedan, presumably the car that belonged to Team 499.

At Hong’s wild audacity a frenzied admiration sang through Sula’s heart. The group leader was attempting to repair the flaws in his plan with sheer courage.

Sula’s nerves gave a leap as the truck hit the Naxid police roadblock and flung the vehicle aside like a man waving off an insect. A piece of the police car, curved yellow metal, flew high into the air and hit the pavement with a clang that Sula could hear even through the window. A Naxid lay sprawled where his own car had hit him. Another danced aside with surprising speed and then was clawing on the pavement for the rifle that had fallen off his shoulder.

The truck disappeared under the bridge with a series of distant booming noises as its tires vaulted expansion joints in the pavement. The Victory followed. The Naxid grabbed his rifle and raised it to his shoulder, then seemed to dissolve in a shower of sparks.

Each of Group Blanche’s rifles held a box magazine with four hundred and one rounds of caseless ammunition, all of which could be discharged in something less than three seconds. It looked as if the Naxid had just absorbed about half a magazine.

Then the weapon was turned on the police car, and the vehicle leaped and juddered and sparked, then sagged on its suspension as a baleful white mist rose from its punctured frame.