Walter Williams - The Sundering

Perhaps Team 491 escaped only because Team 211, who had been in Sula’s building at the start, got involved in a high-speed chase with a swarm of police and drew all Naxid reinforcements away. Team 211 eventually crashed their car, and the team leader called that they would try to get away on foot. By that point they were far enough away that their radio transmissions were breaking up, and Sula, driving in another direction, heard no more from them.

Hong made a last transmission telling the remaining teams to go to ground, and then he, too, fell silent.

Sula stripped back her camouflage hood, took off her helmet, and turned off her radio comm. She took out the hand comm that had been dedicated to this mission, stripped the batteries, flung it from the car with enough force to shatter it on the curb, and then lay back on the seat and gave herself up to weariness and the sense of bitter defeat.

We’re going to have to get better at this,she thought.

If we live.

By the time they arrived in their own home area Spence’s leg was too stiff and painful to permit her to walk, so Sula had Macnamara drive to the Riverside apartment they all shared. The car was parked in the alley behind the building, and Sula opened the door to the back stair, the one with the door that led from the second floor landing to their kitchen. As the laughter of children echoed down the stair, Sula helped the bandaged Spence get on Macnamara’s back, and then stayed with the car and its military gear as Macnamara carried her up the stairs to her bed.

“Some kids in the stair saw us,” Macnamara said when he returned. “I told them it was a boating accident, that she got her leg caught between a boat and the quay.”

“What made you think of that?” Sula asked in amazement, but Macnamara only shrugged. She stuffed a pistol down the waistband of her trousers in back, made sure the weapon was covered by her civilian jacket, and left the car to Macnamara.

“Go to your private lodgings,” she told him. “I’ll look after Spence. Make your rounds normally tomorrow morning, but make sure you check the position of the flowerpot before coming into the aparrment.” She hesitated. “If you get a signal that there’s something waiting for us at a mail drop,” she said, “don’t pick it up yourself. Pay someone else to do it, and make sure he’s not followed when he gives it to you.”

Macnamara was startled. “That’ll give away the location of the drop,” he said.

“There are plenty of mail drops,” she said. “There’s only one you.”

She left Macnamara to contemplate this and bounced up the stairs, past the small children who had laid out a toy tea set on the landing, and slipped into the apartment. She moved the flowerpot in the front window fromNo one’s here toSomeone is here and it’s safe, and then went in to check on Spence.

Sula unbound the field dressing and inspected the wound. As Spence had suspected, the bullet had driven clean through the right calf. There was very little bleeding. The calf was swollen, the skin smooth and taut as the skin of a grape and beginning to turn blue, but the wounds seemed relatively clean, with no great amount of tearing, and Sula found no foreign matter in the wound after she cleaned it, no splinters or bits of cloth. She sprayed on antibiotics and fast-healer hormones, put another field dressing on, a dressing that contained even more antibiotics and fast-healer hormones, and then loaded a med injector with a standard painkiller, Phenyldorphin-Zed.

Spence tilted her head back, brushing the hair back from her neck, and Sula pressed the injector to Spence’s carotid. Sula’s heart gave a sickly throb in her chest. Blackness rimmed her vision. She realized her hand was trembling.

“Maybe you’d better do this yourself,” she said.

Sula had to leave the room before the hiss of the injector came to her ears. From the front room she stared down into the busy street, seeing the vendors with their racks and carts, the people who moved along the street in thick crowds but who never seemed to be in a hurry.

Frustration scorched Sula’s nerves. None of these people knew that a battle for Zanshaa had been fought and lost that day. It was very possible that none of them would ever know unless the Naxids chose to tell them.

Sula thought of Guei crawling down the hall with his eye socket pouring blood. The voices of Team 317 calling for help as bullets tore the air around them. Caro Sula, her face slack with narcotics, lying with her golden hair spread on a pillow as her best friend fired dose after dose of Phenyldorphin-Zed into her neck…

Sula slammed her fists down on the windowsill and marched back into the room she shared with Spence. Spence looked back at her past half-lowered, drugged eyelids, the injector still in her hands. The room smelled of disinfectant.

“Can I get you anything?” Sula asked. “Would you like something to eat?”

“Can’t eat.” Spence made a vague gesture at the wall. “Video, maybe?”

Sula told the video wall to turn on, and settled on her bed to help Spence watch one of her romantic dramas. The hero was an older man, a Peer, handsome and cynical; the heroine was young and astoundingly beautiful. Her beauty seemed to unlock the hero’s personality, if not unhinge his sanity altogether: he disgorged a perfectly stupendous amount of jewelry, clothing, and trips to exotic climes before dismissing a long-time mistress and installing the heroine in his High City palace. The heroine seemed bewildered and faintly distressed by much of this, but she understood the meaning of the palace at least, and consented to the Peer’s offer of marriage.

Sula, who had more experience with older, cynical Peers than Spence, watched the ludicrous goings-on with growing impatience. Her mother, she knew, would have loved this story, had in fact done her best tolive it—she had spent most of her life in service to some man or other, her chief problems being that her beauty tended to attract admirers from another end of the social scale than the Peerage, and that most of these were married already.

Her mother, who she had not seen in years.

Claustrophobia began to press on Sula’s mind with cotton-wool fingers. She was in the apartment waiting, and for what? A handsome Peer with a fistful of jewelry? A horde of Naxids with guns? For Martinez, to carry her off to his palace in the sky, the palace that Maurice Chen had bought for him?

Sula made sure Spence was comfortable and then went out into the streets. Laughter and chatter rose around her while gunfire echoed in her skull. The first action against the Naxids had been a catastrophe. Action Group Blanche was in ruins, and the survivors in hiding. The Naxids were doubtless installing their government in the High City at this exact moment.

Simply for a place to go, Sula went to the Grandview apartment, a walk that took her over the better part of an hour. She studied the building for a while, then decided that it was unlikely the Naxids were waiting for her as yet. There were belongings she might as well fetch out, and some preparations it might be worth her while to make.

She saw a light on in the apartment of the toothless old concierge, and an idea occurred to her. She bought a newssheet from the vendor on the corner, walked to the apartment, and stuck a head in the concierge’s door.

“Mr. Greyjean?”

“Yes, miss?” The old man shuffled toward her from the kitchen, carrying in one gnarled hand a plate with a piece of toast.

“I wonder if I might ask a favor of you.”

“Of course.”

Sula eased the door shut behind her. “Mr. Greyjean, do you remember that when I first moved in, you thought I was a Fleet officer?”

“Oh yes, of course. Do you mind if I eat my toast while it’s hot?”