Ричард Бейкер - Valiant Dust

To his left, Nawab Dayan seems to be sitting up, but his mother, Vadiya North, rolls from side to side, her hands clapped to her face. Sikander’s brothers Devindar and Manvir, his sister Usha, his cousins, likewise begin to pick themselves up. Thank God, Sikander thinks. They’re all alive. But Mother—!

He picks his way through the wreckage to go to her side. Then, not two meters from Sikander, his brother Gamand suddenly spins in a half circle and falls back into his seat with a grunt, blood pouring from his shoulder. An instant later the chirping report of a high-velocity mag rifle echoes through the air.

“Shots fired! Shots fired!” his cousin Amarleen shouts. She is only fourteen, but she dashes to Gamand and tears the sash off her ceremonial dress. Blood splatters the rich gold cloth as she does her best to apply pressure to the wound.

Sikander whirls around, looking for the shooter. From the time he was old enough to absorb the lessons, he was taught to evaluate security threats and survive worst-case scenarios. That training kicks in now, overriding his shock and horror. He grasps the plot in a sudden flash: The Palarists set off the bomb to wreck the grandstand and blow down the bulletproof glass panels, while a rifleman waits to take advantage of any shots presented.

“Across the street!” Sikander yells to the nawab’s dragoons. One of the stand’s dislodged glass panels lies almost at Sikander’s feet. He stoops down, gets his hands under the glass, and lifts. The panel weighs almost ninety kilos, but Sikander doesn’t need to pick it up—he only needs to stand it up on its edge. He rips his fine tunic raising the armored glass, but he wrestles the panel upright and holds it there, interposing it between his wounded brother and the sniper. A heartbeat later, something punches the center of the panel right in front of him with a heavy thunk! and a white spiderweb cracks the armored glass. The impact almost carries the panel out of his hands.

“I have it, Nawabzada Sikander.” A tall, black-bearded soldier—Darvesh Reza, a senior sergeant in the Jaipur Dragoons—moves to stand beside him, taking the panel from his hands. “Please, go with the others. We must get the nawab to safety.”

Sikander relinquishes his burden. Dragoons in gaudy parade uniforms swarm around him, sweeping him out of the ruined stands toward the waiting flyers, shielding him and the rest of his family with their own bodies.…

Someone grabbed Sikander’s arm and jerked him back as another rifle shot rang out. The bullet kicked a puff of dust from the ground not far from where the Gadiran bank manager fell. Harsh daylight and the smell of smoke in the air brought him back to Tanjeer’s streets. Darvesh—leaner, grayer, and less splendidly attired than he’d been in Sangrur that night ten years ago—gave him a sharp look, and returned to scanning the rooftops surrounding the Aquilan consulate.

This is not Jaipur, Sikander told himself. And these are not Palarists. He pulled his eyes away from the dead or dying man in front of him, and made himself lock away the terrible memories of the Bandi Chor Divas bombing. “Thank you,” he said. “That was careless of me.”

“Think nothing of it, sir,” Darvesh replied.

From his safer vantage, Sikander studied the rooftops overlooking the compound. He thought he glimpsed a shadow of movement at the edge of a rooftop, a long block away. “West side, rooftop at one hundred and fifty meters,” he reported to his team. “If anyone’s got a clean shot at the sniper, you’re authorized to fire.”

“Lieutenant, this is Chief Trent.” The master-at-arms keyed Sikander’s private channel. She was posted on the consulate building roof behind him. “I think the crowd by the bank is following the shuttle. There are a lot of people moving in this direction.”

“Understood,” he replied. The situation was getting complicated in a hurry. He turned to Sublieutenant Larkin, who sheltered behind the shuttle right beside him. “Good work at the bank, Ms. Larkin. It looks like you had your hands full there.”

Larkin nodded, but kept scanning for more snipers on the rooftops. “I’m afraid we didn’t get everybody, sir. Two of the bank employees were picked off as we were boarding the shuttle.”

“I think this is turning into one of those days where we just do the best that we can,” he told her. He risked another quick glimpse over the shuttle’s nose. There was definitely more movement on the rooftops in that direction, and the shower of stones, bottles, and debris increased by the moment. Then a sudden commotion by the front gate caught his attention: Two men in traditional robes brought up a large loop of chain and started threading it through the bars. Sikander couldn’t see if they had a vehicle ready to yank the gates out of the wall or if they hoped to do it with nothing more than human muscle power, but he couldn’t let them carry out their plan. He pointed it out to Larkin. “We’d better put a stop to that,” he told her.

“Yes, sir,” she replied. “First fire team, single volley through the gate, nonlethal velocity! Torso or lower, we’re trying not to kill anybody here. On my command … take aim … fire!”

At the gate, the half squad of sailors guarding the consulate’s front entrance quickly popped out of their cover and leveled their mag rifles. The Gadirans pressed up against the gate by the crowd behind them shrieked in sudden panic and turned to move away, but none succeeded in clearing the line of fire before the mag rifles chirped. Unlike older weapons with cartridges full of chemical propellant, mag weapons could easily be adjusted for high-velocity or low-velocity shots. A low-velocity mag-rifle dart could still cause a great deal of injury, but the sabots encasing the dart-like rounds remained in place for a low-velocity shot, turning a lethal arrowhead into a thumb-sized blunt cylinder that wouldn’t break the skin. It would, however, knock a strong man off his feet and leave quite a bruise. Half a dozen Gadirans yelped, tumbled, or sagged back from the volley, and suddenly the people pressing against the gate were no longer interested in standing right in front of the bars. The crowd immediately in front scattered; two of Hector ’s sailors hurried up and disentangled the chain from the bars.

“That’s better,” Sikander said. Then the distant rifle cracked again, and a bullet bounced off the shuttle hull not half a meter over his head. He ducked and swore. “Does anybody have a shot at that damned sniper?” he demanded. No one answered.

He looked down at his vid feed from the Dragonflies, studying the crowds beginning to thicken around the consulate. One image captured several Gadiran riflemen lying prone on the rooftop, in plain sight to the tiny drone flying by overhead. If only Dragonflies were armed … but they were simply too small to carry anything remotely lethal, and too valuable to kamikaze into someone’s ear in order to send a message. Sikander looked over to Darvesh, and met his eyes. Motivation, he reminded himself. He was beginning to form his own best guess about the insurgents’ determination, and he didn’t like the answer he was coming up with.

“ Hector, this is Lieutenant North,” he said into his comm. “I recommend that we evacuate all consulate personnel and abandon the facility. This situation is becoming untenable.”

There was a long pause; then the comm beeped in reply. “Mr. North, this is Lieutenant Commander Randall. We’ve been watching developments closely. I concur with your assessment, and I’m forwarding your recommendation to the captain. Stand by.”

Larkin grimaced. “I hate the idea of letting our consulate get overrun. It’s a bad message to send, sir.”