The Last Legion: Book One of the Last Legion Series (41 page)

“Where’d you come from?” Garvin managed.

“Did … a few basic mods on the laundry chute yesterday,” Njangu managed. “With a rope or two I happened to run across. Good back door, eh?”

Garvin shot at somebody who was showing a bit too much curiosity, skidded into a narrow alley that curved around a building with only a single dim streetlight. The alley came to a dead end, except for a single doorway into a ramshackle building. “Back,” he said, and a bolt screamed off the cobbles beside him.

Njangu booted in the door, heard screams. “Out! Out!” he shouted, and ’Raum streamed down the stairs. Njangu shouldered past into the building, Garvin after him, as a dozen armed ’Raum rounded the corner into the alley.

They were in one of the typical tiny Eckmuhl groceries, with almost-bare shelves. Njangu scooped up two liter bottles of cooking oil, went up the stairs, shouting “Out” like a maniacal traffic director as he went. More screams, more shouts, and more ’Raum men, women, and children boiled downstairs. They pushed through the frenzy, saw an armed man, shot him, and the frenzy got louder. Njangu peered in an open door, saw bolts of cloth and half-finished garments. He put a round into a cloth-bonding machine, and its solvent sprayed. He hurled the cooking oil bottles against the wall, and they shattered, then shot into the mess, and nothing happened. “Goddamn modern weapons,” he snarled, saw an emergency lantern and its igniter, went across the room, lit it, and dropped it into the pooled oil. There was a satisfactory
foomf
, and Yoshitaro lost most of his eyebrows and short-cropped hair.

The screams were louder, and the ’Raum panicked, trying to get out before the building was engulfed. Shouts came below as someone tried to order chaos.

“That takes care of the back door. Now where?” Garvin asked.

“We got any options?” Njangu panted. “Up. To the roof. We’ll cross to the next building from there. These goddamned warrens all connect to each other.”

But this one didn’t. The seven-story building’s neighbors were all just a bit too far for jumping. Garvin set the rifle down, scuffled through the trash on the rooftop, found a long plank. “Pray for me,” he said, and lugged the plank to the building’s ramparts. It looked just about long enough, and he let it fall across to the next building’s roof to become a bridge. His eye was about a meter off, and the plank pinwheeled on down to smash into the street, and blaster fire came back up.

“They would’ve shot you off it, anyway,” Njangu sympathized.

“So what are we gonna do now?” Garvin asked.

“Hope like hell the smoke attracts attention,” Njangu said. “And that the fire department still makes house calls. Dawn’s what, an hour or so away?”

Smoke boiled up through the stairwell, and Garvin surveyed the billow. “Guess they won’t come up that way.”

“Guess they don’t have to.”

Garvin heard a whine, saw the lights of a lifter coming over the rooftops, jumped to his feet, and waved wildly. “It’s the police,” he said. “We’re saved!”

The police lifter sped overhead, banked, and came back. Garvin stupidly stood in the middle of the roof, pistol in hand, waving, and then Njangu tackled him, knocking him away as the autocannon opened fire, and 25mm slugs chewed up the tar paper and debris around them. “Next time … try waving without the goddamned gun!” Njangu managed. “Lie still and look dead, for Allah’s sakes, and maybe they’ll figure they got us.”

The lifter made another pass, very low, low enough so Garvin felt the wind of their passage. “See what happens,” Njangu said, “when you go and depend on a cop?”

• • •

“
Cent
Angara,” the voice said. “Wake up.”

The II Section officer rolled off his bunk, bleared at the displays around the Command Center. The Officer of the Watch stood next to him. “Sir, the scan reports a fire in the middle of the Eckmuhl, and the police frequency says they silenced two snipers on the rooftop of the building.”

It didn’t appear to have anything to do with them … but still. “Turn out the alert unit,” he ordered. “Put an electronics bird over the Eckmuhl. If nothing else, we can relay for the civilians. Wake up
Mil
Rao, but let the old man sleep.” He hesitated. “If they’ve got snipers out, maybe the whole thing’s a blind to suck in the fire people. Get the alert unit in the air, and have one, no two Zhukovs seconded to them.”

“Sir.”

“And is there any of that coffee left?”

• • •

Poynton burst into Jord’n Brooks’ headquarters — a commandeered snack bar. There were a dozen com sets around the room with their waiting operators, all tuned to various Force and PlanGov frequencies. Brooks paced back and forth, listening, eyes half-closed, sorting through the chatter. His eyes came fully open as he reached a decision. He went to one silent com, a high-frequency interplanetary ‘caster, picked up the mike. Brooks touched the mike’s button. “Leviathan, this is Tver,” he said.

“Leviathan,” a voice came back. “Listening.”

“This is Tver. Situation altered. Begin Leviathan at once. I repeat, at once.”

“Leviathan. Operation under way.”

“The traitors failed,” Brooks said. “This is now the Day, and the great Task begins.”

“Sir,” Poynton started. “I’m sorry they managed to deceive me, and I promise — ”

“Sister,” Brooks said, without a hint of anger, “we’re all fools to someone. The point is to ensure it never happens again.”

“It won’t,” Poynton said. “Do you still trust me for my Task?”

“Trust has nothing to do with it,” Brooks said. “There is no time to choose and train another, even if I wished. Forget about what happened, as I told you, and make your work reap twice the rewards as compensation.”

His smile appeared quite sincere. Poynton hurried away, remembering, however, the time Brooks had smiled just as honestly, and then shot a double agent in cold blood.

• • •

Ben Dill was already awake, unable to sleep, when the sirens blared across Camp Mahan’s parade ground.

“ ‘Zat for us?” Kang asked sleepily.

“No. Don’t think so.”

She sat up, reached for her deliberately old-fashioned spectacles, and turned on the antique two-dee vid that had been their only entertainment while waiting to extract Garvin and Njangu. They watched the various ‘casts, saw nothing but the usual early-morning drivel, then the stations started cutting away to sleepy-looking journohs.

“
Something’s
going on,” she said, pointing out the obvious.

“And it’s in the Eckmuhl,” Gorecki said, the noise having wakened him.

“Awright, awright,” Dill said. “Let’s warm it up. Maybe it is for us.”

“You’re gonna have to have a word with that idiot Garvin,” Gorecki said. “First he goes and lets himself get volunteered, then starts doing something or other with the ’Raum. Your boy better straighten out, Dill, for I’m getting tired of being his goddamned fast ship every time he wants to stick his heinie in harm’s vise.”

• • •

Njangu and Garvin lay motionless on top of the roof as smoke rose, ever thicker, ever more choking. The air above was alive with the whine of lifters, from police to fire to media, and the sky was beginning to gray.

“You got any bright ideas?”

“If we move,” Njangu said, “they’ll start shooting at us again.”

“And if we don’t,” Garvin said, “pretty soon we won’t be able to.”

“As long as it looks like we’re for it,” Njangu said, “mind if I ask just what the hell you did before you joined the Force? Hoping for an honest answer.”

“I told you the truth,” Garvin said. “I ran a circus.”

“ Yeh. Right.”

“I shit thee nix,” Jaansma said. “Come from a long line of circus families. Managers, ringmasters, once every now and then a high-wire act, but those were mostly the black jeeps of the family.

“Generally a Jaansma kid’d work for one of the family shins, doing everything from being a joey … that’s a clown … to a slanging-buffer in an arcade, then go out on the road, somewhere out on the fringes to get seasoned, finally end up with one of the big shows on Centrum or somewhere. But my folks were killed in a fire, and I ended up with an uncle who wasn’t that connected. He did the best he could, and I worked the circuit some, but when I got to be seventeen I jumped at the first circus that offered a graft for a Jaansma, any Jaansma. That was Altair, on a world called Willy’s Fortune, believe it or not.

“The show was a gam, crooked from the go. Snakier than any of the hustles you’ve told me about. Rigged wheels, girls, boys, anything for a credit. About the only thing we had that was worth a shit were the animal acts. I was the ringmaster, but since I was just a kid, I didn’t have the pull I should’ve, and the owners didn’t listen when I said things were going sour, and even the diddly flatties … normal citizens … we were gaffing were starting to catch on. So I started hanging out with the acts and trying to figure out what I was going to do next, and where I was going to get the graft to pull out.

“The whole thing went to shit about the fourth month I was with them. Somebody started a rube on the midway … a fight in the middle of the circus … and it got nasty, going from fists to clubs to knives to guns. I heard an animal scream, and saw some asshole trying to set fire to the tent we had the grai — that’s Earth horses — in. I went a little apeshit.”

“You shot him?” Njangu said, fascinated in spite of the madness around them.

“Not quite,” Garvin said. “I opened the big cats’ cages.”

“You
what
?”

“And the bears,” Garvin said. “Sic’ed them on the flatties. Then I took off. Ended up on the neighbor world of Klesura, about busted, seeing the stories of how many deaths I’d caused get bigger and bigger, and all of a sudden there was this recruiting office.”

“Remind me,” Njangu said thoughtfully, “never to get you seriously pissed at me.”

C-Cumbre

The ’Raum at the controls of the cargo lighter had been the best, most reliable pilot at his mine, and there’d been considerable wonderment at his disappearance with his craft. He, and a few other ’Raum, hid in an abandoned survey station in the middle of nowhere, resupplied and equipped by sympathizing crews of the ships that shuttled back and forth between D-Cumbre and C-Cumbre.

The strange device in the back of the lighter had come from a park monument dedicated to the memory of the early settlers of the Cumbre system. It had been mounted in an archaic lifter, and fired explosives in long rows, clearing lanes through the jungle. The apparatus had been stolen from the park, carefully cleaned and refurbished by ’Raum technicians who guessed at what they were doing without manuals, without anything other than old holos, then, after testing, smuggled to C-Cumbre.

The pilot took the lighter out of its “hangar,” a haphazard-looking pile of scrap plas, and, barely two meters above the ground, drove toward the horizon.

• • •

“This is
Matin,
” Loy Kouro bayed into the mike, “giving the News You Need, When You Need It, Loy Kouro transmitting. Our
Matin
lifter is above the suspicious fire raging in the Eckmuhl. Our firefighters have been unable to enter the district and combat the fire due to sniper fire from ’Raum banditry.

“But your
Matin
crew is over the scene, as you can see. We’re trying, with our high-powered stabilized light-amplified cams, to show you two of the snipers who made the mistake of shooting at a police lifter, and were shot down for their pains.

“Here … come in a little closer on that … here we are … now you can see them, and … Great God, from what I’m seeing on my pickup one of them at least appears to be one of the degenerates who’ve deserted our fighting Force to join with the scum who call themselves The Movement.

“Yes, look at that one’s blond hair … no ’Raum ever looked like that!
Matin
sends its compliments to our best, our police, and if you’ll stand by, we’ll give you more coverage of the fire that’s raging out of control in — ”

• • •

“Son of a bitch,” Gorecki swore, staring at the screen. “Ben. Look. That’s Garvin on that goddamned roof.”

“No,” Dill said. “Yes. The bastards got him … no, look. His lips are moving. He’s still alive … and so’s Yoshitaro, next to him.” He took a deep breath. “ ’Kay, troops. There go my stripes. Saddle up. We’re on our way.”

• • •

“No ideas?” Garvin said.

“
Shut
up. I’m thinking.”

A blaster round spanged off metal a meter or so away.

“Now they’ve got shooters on the rooftops around us,” Garvin said. “This isn’t playing out as any fun at all.”

“At least the smoke makes it hard for them to get any accuracy,” Njangu said.

“Don’t be such a pessimist.”

Garvin edged one hand down to his pistol. “I don’t have any intention of
frying,
” he said.

“Nope,” Njangu agreed. “Give me another minute, and if I can’t come up with something, we’ll take on those snipers.”

“Good a way to go as any,” Garvin agreed.

• • •

Dill’s Grierson floated out of the hangar, Ben in the open hatch, wondering what lie he’d use for takeoff clearance, as a column of troops double-timed out of the I&R barracks toward waiting Cookes. At their head was
Alt
Hedley. He spotted Dill, waved him down. “You saw the news flash?”

“Yessir.”

“And were gonna cowboy off to the flipping rescue?”

“Something like that.”

“Dumbshit. Hang back. I’ve got clearance from
Mil
Rao — the old man’s in another flipping conference with Haemer — to go beat things up a little bit. We’re going to suppress whatever snipers they really have on the rooftops, and there’ll be a flight of Zooks inbound if we need heavy hitters. Rao’s got the rest of the flipping Force saddling up now. You go on and get those two flipping idiots out. Or bring back their bodies.”

“I’m gone,” Dill said, and touched his throat mike. “Take it on up at speed, m’boy, and balljack toward the smoke. Kang, anything that you see shooting, level the suckers. It’s time to quit fiddle-farting around.”