Flight of the Vajra (94 page)

The woman with the gun-sleeve turned herself
sideways and inserted herself between two people trailing self-driving cargo
pods. Between her and the front line of IPS men were only two or three more
rows of civilians. I felt hair I didn’t even know I had standing on end; I
wanted to tear off my own skin and throw myself into any of the bodies I saw
. . .

Someone—or rather, someone with Enid at his
controls—climbed up on top of one of the cargo pods and flung himself onto the
gun-woman. The people nearest them cried out as the two of them turned into a
revolving tangle of limbs that rolled along the ground, stumbled to their feet,
fell down again, and went FOOP! right onto a gel-mine. The gun discharged once,
point-blank, sending a projectile through several centimeters of hardening gel
and then straight into the ground.

Four or five folks in the front dragged her back,
keeping her weapon pointed down and away the whole time.

—
Good work, Enid,
I CLed.

—
Thank the guy who said yes to me doing that
swan dive off the crates with his body. He’s going to be sore for weeks, but the
word “gun” was a real motivator for him! That and he also knew a few moves of
his own . . .

—
Ulli, find out who
that
was, if you
can. I have the sneaking feeling we’re going to see a few more such
shit-disturbers coming up through the ranks. Angharad—?

—The stalemate is about to be broken,
Angharad
CLed me back.

I was about to ask how she planned to do that,
given how Ralpartha wasn’t even returning our calls, when heads in the
crowd-mosaic turned at the sound of a chugging rumble that sounded way too
familiar to my ears. Granted, it was more than likely for some other vehicle to
use the same engine I’d chosen for Kanthaka, but the same engine,
and
the same custom chassis,
and
the same swept-back lines all around,
and
the same chrome-and-gold-and-black chasings?

So if that’s Kanthaka, I said to myself, who’s driving?

I got my answer as soon as Kanthaka finished
nosing its way along the side of the road and sideswiped to a stop within a
meter of the line where the gel-mines had been deposited. You can’t mistake
Angharad for anyone else at any distance, I thought, even when her wimple is
flapping so hard in the wind it hides half her face. It’s all in how she holds
herself. Even when she’s climbing out of the front seat of my cycle
. . .

—
Henré!? Are you seeing this!?
Enid reared
up out of her seat on the
Vajra
hard enough to strip the upholstery from
it.

—
I’m trying to figure out how it happened in
the first place.

I watched, through the dozens of eyes around her,
as one of the folks in the crowd nearest her (he was one who had helped peel
the gel off the first mine victim) rushed up and helped her get her footing on
the roadway, now cross-cut sharply with sudden high winds and left uneven and
jagged from the treads of the IPS carriers.

Wait, I thought. Of course.
The master key for
the ship.
I’d given it to her, which not only gave her control over
Kanthaka but
her CL image in the ship as well.
With all of us plugged in
and preoccupied, all she would have had to do was set up a dummy presence in
the ship and link that back to her real self as she drove out. And since
Kanthaka had both manual and direct-CL drive, it wasn’t like she needed to take
a crash driving course, either.

She’s made herself into one fast learner, I
thought.

And given what we’re up against, she’ll need to be
one.

Ulli and Cioran had started their own
what-in-the-cosm-is-she-
doing
? routine between themselves as Angharad steadied
herself, then walked to the line where the refugees ended and the IPS began.

“Stand behind me, please,” Angharad told those around
her. IPS targeting dots and crosshairs converged on her, then skittered away
slightly to aim instead at her feet and the ground around her.

“I am still awaiting an answer from your
commissioner,” she called out to everyone within earshot. “I intend to remain
here among you until we receive an answer, no matter what form that answer
comes in. If it comes in the form of a bullet, then I will receive that bullet
too.”

The refugees behind her shouted in dismay. The one
who’d helped Angharad out of the driver’s seat took hold of her shoulder, as if
to lead her back to safety, but she reached up and with her own much smaller
hand lifted his away.

Kallhander:
—She’s not responding to CL hails.

Enid:
—No luck here either. I think she’s
waiting for an answer from Commissioner You-Know-Who and no one else,

Ulli: —
At a high enough pitch of fervor, who
can tell the difference between strong and merely stubborn?

Cioran: —
Well, I’d like to think I can!

Ioné: —
I imagine you believe you know better
than most, Cioran.

Me: —
Not from what I’ve seen.

I was tempted to tell them all to shut up, but with
all of us stuck as spectators to the action, I suspected we all needed some way
to blow off the tension. Call it my attempt to best heed words Angharad had
spoken once, long before I’d met her:
There won’t always be a time when you
can
do something.
Whatever there was to be done, it was hers alone now.

Angharad stretched her arms out to her sides and
waited. The wind shifted direction violently enough to snap one of her sleeves
upwards.

Angharad to Ralpartha. I insist on an answer.

The rest of us had only been patched in for that
as read-only. There was now barely a person on the planet who didn’t know what
the stakes were or who they were divided between.

The hatch of the forward-most IPS troop carrier
unmelded, and out came two officers, faces invisible behind opal-and-onyx
helmets. One bore on his sleeve an orange, bursting-triangle insignia I recognized:
demolitions.
The other officer, who sported only the half-circle chevrons
of a field officer, gestured and broadcast: —
Stand back. Stand back at least
two meters. Move those vehicles back or to the side.

Angharad had parked Kanthaka off to one side, so
all she needed to do was step back slowly—arms still outstretched—as the
vehicles behind her powered up and also inched backwards, almost butting up
against each other.

The bomb-squad man knelt at the edge of where the
gel-mines had been planted and spread a hand flat on the ground. A second later
there was a succession of
plump-plump
noises, like the universe’s
biggest volleyballs being spiked, as each of the buried mines detonated and
turned into blobs of wine-colored substrate. Three more officers ran up and
started rolling, kicking, and dragging each glob to the side of the road.

The sapper stood up, then gestured and broadcast:
Move
forward.
Behind him, each of the troop transports ground up the pavement a
bit as it backed up into the treeline.

Angharad raised up the hands of those standing on
both sides of her. I could have sworn I heard the crowd screaming through the
walls of the ship long after I disconnected, even though we were any number of kilometers
away. But Enid’s arms thrown around me from behind (for real); Cioran and Ulli hooting
and weeping with joy; Kallhander and Ioné clasping each other’s hands and
shoulders—I saw and heard and felt all that, no mistake about it.

There wasn’t time to celebrate,
and I
knew it. The IPS roadblock had, ironically, bought me a little more time to
clear out the grounds, but one quick glance at the space we had to work with
and the number of people that needed rescuing told me we’d be making room for
them right up until the engine delivery arrived.

One ark, coming right up.

First: for the cargo box, reserve a spot to act as
a crash pad—a big block of Type D. Also, the vehicles everyone arrived in couldn’t
me taken with us, so I set up an auxiliary reclamation yard right off the main
road to allow people to do just that, so anyone with a scrapped vehicle could
be
credited for its raw reclamation value. This I thought of at the last
minute while slapping together the reclamation site; it was the most of a bone
I could toss them all on such short notice—a bone I knew I
could
throw
them, even if it ended up being out of my own pocket.

It wasn’t as if the heaviest lifting couldn’t be
automated, but to automate anything you still have to do the initial legwork.
Then you have to let the automation run through in a few different ways to
catch any corner cases, and then look back over your shoulder to make sure you
haven’t set any traps for yourself that only come out in the long run
. . .
and
do all that on a clock which has given you mere
hours to pull it all off. And this time, if you blow it, it’s not just those
hundreds of thousands that will get boiled alive along with their planet’s
atmosphere; it’ll be you, too. Any chance you had to save only your own life
was forfeited the minute you took theirs into your hands.

The assembly line, as I called it, went like so.
Enter at what was formerly the main gate to the Prince’s compound. If you have
a vehicle, detour to the left to drop it off and claim a reclamation receipt. (Volunteers
from Planet Caravan directed traffic.) Next, position yourselves and your few
belongings on one of a dozen or so assembly pads, around which and from which
your cargo pod will instantiate itself. The finished pod is then fitted with
life support and then docked into one of a series of ever-growing pyramidal
piles for the time being. Once the engines arrived, we’d move to the next step,
but for now getting everyone canned and loaded was the first order of business.
Setting up multiple processing queues also helped.

And busy as we all were, especially me, that
didn’t stop me from doing the one thing I’d wanted to do to Angharad ever since
she’d run off on us: scold her.

—
Daring and bold as that was,
I CLed,
we
need to find a better way to handle situations like this. Having you run out
there so you can get shot before anyone else ... that doesn’t strike me as
being sustainable behavior.

—It made my intentions clear. No, more than
clear: unmistakable.
(Outside of our CL link, she was mingling with the
crowd as they walked through the gate—hugging here, gripping a shoulder there,
smiling to all.)

—At least give me some warning ahead of time,
next time?

—That much, at least. But you must accept
something: where I am going, even with you following, there will be times when
I must risk more than any of the rest of you. Sometimes there is no other way
to say what needs to be said, especially when it is people like Ralpartha who
are listening.

—I’m not disputing that. I knew this walking
in.
(“Know”, I told myself, is not always the same as “take seriously”.)
But . . . don’t resign yourself to that being the ultimate solution
for those problems. Are you willing to at least provisionally accept the idea
that there may be ways to do what you want without throwing yourself into the
furnace first? You worry you won’t be taken seriously unless you’re in danger
of catching the same bullets as everyone else?

At some point during our conversation Angharad had
casually allowed me to start connecting through her CL. On top of that, I
continued using the free-form mix-and-match group CL feed that people in the
crowd around her were providing. I was familiar with the curious side effects
you’d experience in such a situation: sometimes, when she was hugged, I felt
both the giving and receiving it. But each time it happened, it felt that much
less like a side effect, and that much more like the way such a thing ought to
feel.

—
You have other people around you now,
I
went on.
They see things in ways you don’t and can’t. Isn’t that the whole
reason you wanted them with you in the first place? That and they care a cosmos-ful
about you.

They
, I thought, also means
me
. She
ought to know that by now. And you, Henré, you also ought to know by now you
love her
because
she doesn’t bend. Not even for someone like you.

—I know they do,
she replied at last, after
trading another round of handshakes.
But I trust in them to understand there
are some things only I can do, and only in the ways I can do them. You, and all
the rest, will always offer what you can. I will never turn that down. But you
must let me go where you know only I can go.

—
I will. Just don’t ask me to keep my mouth
shut when you do. And don’t tell me I should
like
it.

That I could tell her those things, and that her
response was to embrace me through the body of another and hold on tight for
seconds on end, only convinced me I loved her all the more.

“You all right?” Enid said. She was standing next
to the console where I was plugged in—in the real space of the
Vajra III
’s
main flight deck. (Although, I thought, after what happens next, we might as
well rechristen the ship entirely.) When I didn’t give her an answer right
away, she ducked low and wiped at the side of my face. “I just unplugged to
stretch my legs for a bit and came down and saw you like that.”

“Like what?” I touched where she had just been
wiping and realized it was still damp. Not tears, but it may have seemed that
way—the sweat rolling off my face had dripped down from between my lashes in
such a way that anyone looking on could have made that mistake. No wonder she’d
wiped there and nowhere else. I extruded a disposable towel from the side of the
seat and blotted my forehead.

“She’s never going to stop doing this, you know,”
I said. No one else was in sight; everyone had unplugged and squirreled
themselves away in separate compartments for the sake of comfort right around
the time the road had been cleared. “She’s never going to stop risking
everything.”

“Because she can,” Enid said, “and because she
knows it works.” She sounded the same way I felt: both happy and sad at the
same time. Happy that someone has that kind of urgency in their soul, and sad
that anyone needs to have it at all.

“Look—we’ve got to get this tub ready,” I said.
“Get strapped back in. We’ve still got a few hours, by my best guess, for when
the engines make landfall. I want to make sure we’re in position long before—”

“Don’t change the subject,” she said gently.

I was all set to argue priorities with her, but I
knew as well as she did that taking a minute to say the right thing wouldn’t derail
the schedule.

“She’s scary like that, isn’t she?” Enid went on.
“I wonder what it’s going to be like when she finally does meet my dad—what
kind of talk she’ll give him. How harsh it’ll be, or maybe not harsh at all.
And I did say
when
, not
if.
I want to see her do that, and then
go on to do all of the other things she wants to do, too. Okay?”

“What if we don’t get that chance?” I said. “It
almost came to that this time. What if she slips away on her own again, beats
me to the punch?”

“Then you’ve just got to—I don’t know, punch
harder and faster, that’s all!” Her one laugh just then was heavy with despair.
“Because if she does something stupid, then she’s going to leave a lot of unfulfilled
promises behind. And I know I’m only one person, and compared to all the others
she’s trying to help I don’t add up to much. But—”

I picked up where she left off after she didn’t
speak for seconds on end.

“But sometimes it’s better to do right by one
person than just everyone at once,” I said. “Is that what you mean?”

“Yes,” she said, and hid her face in her hands.
“And I just don’t want to lose her to something that—that
stupid
.”

I reached out and took her hands away, but gave
her a moment to cry first.

“I’m going to do what I can,” I said, “and in the
meantime, I need you to get back to your post and keep coordinating everything
on the ground. One of the groups you were tracking, they had food and air-scrub
modules coming in, right? We need all that stuff ready in the assembly zone.”

She nodded and used my towel to wipe her face,
then went back upstairs.

Well, I said to myself, I didn’t lie to her. I
didn’t say I would save her, or keep her safe from everything. I just said I
would do what I could, a promise I would have made under any circumstances. But
oh, how I wanted to promise her so much more.

There was at last
nothing left to do but wait and bite our nails. Several
hours of clearing the grounds in an expanding spiral had provided more than
enough space for every refugee’s cargo pod, which we’d outfitted with life
support systems provided by one of the other groups on the ground. The drop pad
for the engines was a slab of multi-layered Type D—thinner, almost aqueous at
the top; thicker below. I’d undocked the
Vajra III
(maybe we could call
it the
Vajra IV
at this point) and flown it to the north end of the
refugee zone, where I’d parked it in a temporary dock—nothing more than a pair
of cusps protruding from the ground, with an umbilical for external power—and
let Angharad drive Kanthaka back on board after she’d made the rounds and said
as many hellos as she could. Now that we were here, too, I thought, for her to
rejoin us wouldn’t be seen as running off.

Under the red-mooned Bridgehead night, the
glittering humps of the refugee pods took shape like so many squared-off little
eggs laid by some giant cubist hen.

Enid embraced Angharad the second she stepped into
the main cabin. No lecture from Enid, no don’t-ever-do-that-again speech—they
just stood there and hugged each other. Then they separated, and Angharad said
out loud, “I have never forgotten my promise to you.”

It always takes more than words to convince
someone of anything that hefty, I thought. Even if they’re Angharad’s words.
But by now even Enid had to feel like they carried some weight.

They embraced briefly once more, and then Enid returned
upstairs once more to pull the last few pieces into place.

If Enid was still shaky inside, she channeled that
nervous energy well. She needed to have the Planet Caravan crew double-check
the local CL grid that we were setting up within the
Vajra III
. Ulli and
Cioran were batting around the idea of using said grid for staging that concert
they had been planning before, if it hadn’t been for all those pesky
insurrections and novas. Most of the refs were already talking between
themselves, but Ulli had said something entirely spot-on: “They need something
more substantial from us, certainly something more than just ‘Follow me and
live’.”

At one hour before dawn, a delivery manifest
arrived with Deepetha Khiam’s name on it. Requested consignment; orbital
insertion coordinates; estimated gross weight . . . and each
container would have its own complement of functional engines to make them
self-delivering. All I had to do was send them a touchdown grid and get
everyone back. I sent Deepetha back a thank-you, a payment notice with a lot of
zeroes in it, and a promise (redeemable on any IPS-signatory world) for dinner
sometime.

Forty-one minutes after the first morning sun
stretched across the main encampment area, six self-propelled cargo containers
entered the atmosphere over the landing zone. They had their grid from me, and
so all we needed to do was sit and watch. Just over the horizon, the glittering
silver thread of the elevator was joined by many other, even more slender
threads spitting skywards as everyone who had a ship began leaving. I didn’t
need to glance at a solar-output curve graph; the sun’s new brightness made all
the shadows harsher and the air outside like that of a summer beach, even at
dawn.

“Send out the word,” I told everyone. “Engines are
on their way. Get everyone buttoned up and plugged in. We still short on life
support?”

“Planet Caravan tells me the last ones were in and
accounted for two hours ago,” Enid said. “And the ship’s CL grid is also
live—actually, it’s been live for a while. Ulli’s been moderating a discussion
about how a sun could go nova like this on short order. Reigning theory is
still ‘Marius did it’. Just nothing more specific than that.”

I had theories of my own, but I decided I didn’t
need to air them just yet. It wasn’t like people needed to be any more scared
than they already were.

The first cargo pod splashed down an hour later.
Its descent had been kept to a reasonable three-something meters per second,
thanks to its own complement of engines, but it still made a fairly big
splat
on the gelled landing pad. The cargo grapple I’d erected next to the pad set to
work dragging it out, cleaning it off, moving it into position, and preparing
for the next one. Another automated grapple cracked open the side of the
container, and prepared to start installing each engine for every few refugee
pods that we added in a single long string to the ever-rotating hull of the
Vajra
III
. Each layer of pods would be built up along the outside, like strings
of beads wound around a ball, and as each new engine came online it would take
up the weight of the whole and help continue rotating it to receive more pods. Kilometers
of pasta spooled around a fork, I thought. It would take forever to unwind all
those noodles, but worry about the logistics of that when we weren’t about to
be baked into charcoal.