Ричард Бейкер - Valiant Dust

“Do we have any drones in the air?” Sikander asked.

“Four Dragonflies, sir,” Chief Trent answered. The thumb-sized remotes combined excellent vidcams with stealthy profiles, good endurance, simple operation, and the ability to perch, creep, or hover as needed. Combined with Hector ’s orbital cameras, they’d go a long way toward keeping anything from surprising the landing force.

“Very well,” Sikander replied. “Your dispositions seem good to me, Ms. Larkin. Make sure we keep an eye on those rooftops, and instruct your troops to set their rifles for nonlethal fire. I’m going to find Mr. Garcia and see what else we can do to help.”

“Yes, sir,” Larkin answered. She remembered not to salute; one never knew who might be watching, after all.

Sikander headed into the consulate building; Darvesh followed him. Inside, the place was in almost as much chaos as the streets outside were. Half a dozen consular employees in the outer office busily collected dataslates and sterilized information-storage devices, or locked up valuables against a possible attack. Sikander continued on in to the interior office, and knocked on the doorframe. “Consul Garcia?” he called.

Franklin Garcia sat on the edge of his desk, watching several vid feeds at the same time. An administrative assistant worked around him, stashing small valuables and important documents in sturdy boxes. Garcia looked over at Sikander, and allowed himself a sigh of relief. “Mr. North,” he said. “Words cannot express how happy I am to see the Navy this afternoon. Most of our local security guards have chosen to call in sick today. We’ve been afraid that the mob outside would decide to scale the walls while we were shorthanded.”

“Hopefully we’ll deter them from anything like that,” Sikander replied. “We’ve got the compound secured for now. What else can we be doing?”

Garcia pointed at one of the vidscreens. “First Bank of High Albion,” he replied. “They’ve called me five times in the last half hour. We’ve got a dozen Aquilan citizens and local employees pinned in by another large crowd, and they tell me they’re taking small-arms fire.”

Sikander studied the screen that the diplomat indicated. The consulate sat on a relatively quiet residential street, but it looked like the bank occupied the corner of a major intersection, and the crowd gathered outside it was substantially larger. A vehicle burned just outside the bank’s front door. “Where is this?” he asked.

“Five blocks west of here. Can you send some troops over to disperse the crowd or escort the people back to the consulate?”

“That’s a much larger crowd than the one outside your door,” Sikander said slowly. “Darvesh, what do you think?” Darvesh had twenty years’ more experience with civil disorders and urban combat scenarios than he did, after all.

“We don’t have the numbers to disperse a crowd of that size without employing heavy weapons,” Darvesh told him. “The repercussions of such a decision I leave to your imagination, sir.”

Sikander suppressed a shudder. Most of the demonstrators on-screen were unarmed. They might be hostile toward offworlders at the moment, but he was certain that slaughtering scores or hundreds of Gadirans would in no way advance Aquila’s interests in this system. “We’d better look for a way to get the bank employees out of there, then,” he said. “Did you say this was just five blocks away, Mr. Garcia?”

“I did,” the consul confirmed. “I can’t tell you much about the condition of the streets between here and there, though.”

“We’ve got reconnaissance assets in place, so we’ll know more soon,” said Sikander. “But I think that it would be very dangerous to put troops on the street right now. No, the way to go is to fly the civilians out of there. If they can get to the roof, we can have one of the shuttles pick them up.”

“Ground fire may be a risk, sir,” Darvesh pointed out.

“It’s the best option I see,” Sikander replied. “Mr. Garcia, contact the bank and tell them to get to the roof, or even a higher-floor window. We’ll make arrangements to move them to safety.”

“I’m on it,” the consul replied. He picked up his desk comm, and started to dial.

Sikander hurried back outside to the courtyard, and motioned to Larkin and Trent to meet him by the first shuttle. The angry roar of the crowd seemed to fill the air, echoing between the low-rise apartments and businesses of the Sidi Marouf. A rock thrown over the consulate’s outer wall clattered off the shuttle’s stubby wing; he jumped in spite of himself, and turned to keep half an eye on the front gate while waiting. Maybe bringing civilians to the consulate isn’t the right move, he thought. Maybe we should be evacuating everyone we can to some safe place out in the countryside. The problem was, he didn’t know what might qualify as a safe place.

Petty Officer Long cracked the hatch by the shuttle’s cockpit, opening it just enough to speak to Sikander while taking advantage of the cover it provided. “What’s going on, Mr. North?” he asked.

“One moment.” Sikander waited for Larkin and Trent to join him, then addressed all three together. “We need to rescue some civilians trapped in a bank building a few blocks over. Getting them out on the ground seems problematic, but we might be able to take them off the roof. Here, let me show you.” He opened his dataslate and picked up the feed from the nearest Dragonfly, steering the tiny drone to show the First Bank of High Albion and the ugly mob surrounding it.

The three Aquilans watched for a long moment. “The flight space is a little cramped, but I think I can get the shuttle in there,” Long said. “I don’t like the look of the crowd, though.”

“I’ll take a half squad of riflemen along for security,” Sikander said. “Ms. Larkin, find me half a dozen steady hands. Long, figure out the best way to get in and out of there.”

“Yes, sir,” Long replied. He ducked back into the cockpit and pulled up his own recon feed.

“Chief, let’s send half our reserve squad,” Larkin told Trent. “I don’t want to pull anyone off the perimeter.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Chief Trent nodded, and hurried off to gather a crew.

The instant the chief was out of easy earshot, Larkin turned on Sikander. “Sir, you shouldn’t go. You’re in command here—I should go instead.”

“I need you here to maintain tactical control of the consulate,” Sikander told her. “I’m the extra officer. I’ll go.”

Larkin fell silent, fixing her eyes on the shuttle hull behind Sikander. He could almost feel the barriers slamming into place behind her expressionless face. For a woman who wasn’t more than twenty-five years in age, Angela Larkin had some of the densest armor he had ever seen; her finely shaped features might as well have been carved out of surgical steel. “Do you lack confidence in my ability to get this job done, sir?” she asked.

Now what do I do? Sikander wondered. That was exactly his concern, although he could hardly be honest about it. He decided to make the decision about him, not her. “No, Ms. Larkin,” he answered. “I know you are trained for landing operations. But I have some personal experience with riots and civil unrest. I am sorry to say that this sort of situation comes up from time to time on my homeworld.”

“I know.” A shadow of old pain flickered across the younger officer’s face. “My father was very nearly killed serving in Kashmir. As I understand the story, it was a situation a lot like this one.”

Her father was wounded in Kashmir? Sikander remembered seeing a note in Larkin’s service jacket that her father was a retired officer in the Commonwealth Army, but he hadn’t paid attention to the exact date or the circumstances; normally, they wouldn’t have been any of his business. A suspicion took shape in Sikander’s mind. “When was your father injured?”