Undercurrents (28 page)

The obvious course of action was to withdraw to defensible, covered positions, then await reinforcements. The Trueborns weren’t going anywhere. But one of the people in that church was responsible for Sandr’s death, and the other, the woman, had humiliated Polian. And both threatened his mission.

Ruberd Polian, the staff officer, the bookish boy, got to his knees in the shadows, gripped his pistol tighter, and prepared to lead the first, and perhaps last, charge of his military career.

Seventy-two

Kit leaned out of the bell tower as she tapped a fresh magazine into her machine pistol to seat it: then she pitched the removed magazine, which was down a round, to me to reload. I peered down into the dark stairwell while I pressed another round down against the magazine’s spring-loading. Outside, the only sound was someone screaming.

I said, “Why do you get the snoopers?”

“Because I’m a better shot. The screamer’s their C.O., I think.”

“Where’d you hit him?”

“Left thigh. So he’d be conscious and vocal.”

She meant so he’d be bait. Not only had Kit decapitated the organization below us with one stroke, she had left its commander bleeding his life out through a severed femoral artery in the middle of a pan-flat open space.

In a minute or two, the most courageous and daring among the wounded man’s troops would crawl out and try to drag him to safety, and she would plink the poor hero. One of the new casualty’s braver buddies would crawl to
his
rescue, and she would plink him. And so on. It was a very effective tactic to winnow out an outfit’s designated as well as latent leaders, and thus paralyze it as a fighting force.

It was cruel. But as the Trueborn general Sherman said, war is cruelty. The crueler you make it, the quicker you replace it with peace.

The trouble with this tactic in this situation wasn’t its ruthlessness but its math. We would run out of bullets before the Tressen army ran out of replacements. We had to break out of this trap now, before the Tressens could reorganize and reinforce.

A force of two case officers was equipped to multiply itself and defeat a numerically superior force in a pinch like this. But the force-multiplying equipment of Kit’s team lay entombed in an icy crevasse with her junior. My team’s mines, grenades, and microdrones lay scattered across the land and sea of northern Iridia like sneezed-out snot.

We remained handsomely outfitted for eavesdropping and for burning holes in locked steel doors, which helped us here and now like pants helped pigs. What we needed, it seemed to an old tanker like me, was a dose of shock power and mobility. A tank didn’t really have to kill infantry. It just had to come rolling toward them, and its appearance would clear them from a battlefield like an overhead light cleared roaches from a kitchen floor.

Pop-pop-pop.

A needle pistol. There was at least one Yavi down there.

Somebody was yelling down below, loud enough that he almost drowned out the wounded screamer.

Bam-bam-bam.
Kit’s machine pistol spit yellow flame in the darkness.

“Dammit!” Kit hissed.

Bam-bam-bam.

This time, somebody else below started screaming. Several somebodies.

Then the crackle of Tressen gunpowder rifles began, slow at first, like rain pattering on a roof. Then it grew into a deluge. Rounds splintered the beams above Kit and me, and ricochets bonged off the tower bell itself.

Kit and I ducked, covered, as a debris storm pelted us.

In seconds, the shooting stopped. But below us, now inside the church, running feet thundered.

Kit brushed plaster and wood off her sleeves. “Some hero got half of them up and moving. And the other half laying down a base of fire. I got a few, but—”

“I hear ’em down there.” But I couldn’t see them, and neither could Kit, snoops or not.

Outside, the screams of the wounded faded as shock and blood loss drained them.

Below, I heard a creak, barely louder than the thumping of my heart, then more of them, as the Tressens started climbing the stairs toward us.

Seventy-three

Polian knelt behind a pew, staring at the staircase that spiraled up through the church’s arched ceiling and into the bell tower. His breath came in ragged gasps, not so much from exertion as from a combination of terror and exhilaration. He had led and men had followed.

He nodded at four of the Tressen riflemen among the thirty who knelt behind him in the church and waved his needler toward the staircase. In single file, the four crept forward, rifles at the ready and eyes upturned, and began to climb.

Seventy-four

I lay on the belfry’s plank floor, extended my machine pistol over the floor’s edge into the stairwell, and sprayed two unaimed, three-round bursts down into the dark. For my trouble, I got twenty rounds of returned Tressen rifle fire that splintered beams and spalled clanging splinters off the great bell, one of which laid my cheek open like a split pomegranate.

Kit, lying on the opposite side of the stairwell, looked across at me and shook her head. She didn’t need to speak. Tight spot. Maybe, finally, too tight.

How many steps had I climbed from the church floor to the belfry floor? I guessed fifty. Forty-five feet? Fifty? How many riflemen could they pack onto the staircase at one time? Too many of them. Too few of us. And not a tank in sight.

I rolled over on my back to reload and stared at the bell. Then I rolled back, tugged my rucksack toward me, and dug out two door bores.

I pointed out bolts above us that secured the iron supports for the axles upon which the great bell pivoted. Kit nodded.

A rifle barrel poked up in sight, and she sprayed a burst down the stairwell.

There was a scream, then a thud.

Then more creaks as more Tressens climbed toward us.

Kit sprayed another burst, and under its cover I scrambled to the bell, leaned out, and slapped the two door bores on the bell supports’ bolts. Then I ducked back before the return fire gouted up into the belfry.

I nodded to Kit again. She pulled back from the bell and dialed down her snoops against the impending glare. Then I triggered the charges with the remote in my hand.

The smell and smoke of molten steel and charred timber filled the belfry. Kit coughed. The bell creaked.

But it just hung there.

A dozen shots whizzed up from below.

Our adversaries were getting more aggressive, if no more accurate.

I wedged myself between the belfry wall and the bell and shoved with my feet.

Nothing, except a burst from below.

I looked across at Kit.

Her sleeve was shredded, and a red stain spread across it. She waved her other hand and mouthed, “Scratch.”

The next one might not be.

I stared at her again. Then I backed up two steps, jumped across the gap between the belfry floor and the bell, and my chest thudded against the curved iron. I hugged the bell like it was an overweight prom date, while my split cheek bled against the iron. But still nothing budged.

Bwee
.

A round zipped past my ear. I shinnied up the bell and threw a leg across the inverted yoke of timber from which the bell’s axles protruded into the charred pivot points. Seconds later I sat atop the bell like a Trueborn cowboy on a rodeo bull.

I threw myself forward, back, and side to side. The bell creaked, then swung so hard that the clapper thudded against the bell’s wall, muffled by the human wart that clung to it.

The overbalanced bell swung back, wood splintered, and the bell tore free.

In a blink, it plummeted down into the stairwell. And so did I.

Seventy-five

Bong!

At the base of the spiral staircase, Polian squinted up into the deeper darkness when he heard the thunderous peal overhead, so loud that he reflexively covered his ears.

Next came a rumble, a human shriek, and then a rifle clattered down and struck one of the soldiers creeping up the staircase on the man’s shoulder. The stricken soldier’s rifle discharged, and a man above him screamed.

The repeated peals of the bell crescendoed and alternated with great crashes. A limp human body thudded to the floor at Polian’s feet; then the great bell tumbled into view thirty feet above him. It crashed into the tower’s stone wall, then caromed back as it rolled toward him like a runaway train.

Polian’s exhilaration of moments before turned to terror as his eyes widened. He screamed, then turned and dashed toward the church doors.

As he slammed his shoulder against the thick doors he looked back and saw that the bell was gaining on him. The doors parted before him, and he sprinted for his life.

Seventy-six

Each time the bell struck and was redirected by the bell-tower walls, its gong deafened me. As I tumbled, I saw back up the bell tower’s dim shaft. The bell had ripped out the belfry floor as it fell, and a hail of snapped floorboards followed behind me. So did Kit, arms and legs flailing as she fought for balance or a handhold.

The bell rebounded off one wall and caught a Tressen infantryman between itself and the opposite wall. His face was a foot from mine as his eyes bulged, and I smelled his last, sour breath as his chest collapsed with an audible crunch of rib bones.

Then the bell and I were past him. The iron mass, then my body, fell on in nose-to-tail formation, bouncing and deflecting off shattered stair treads and supports that protruded from the stone walls.

The bell spiraled down to the church floor, and the impact of iron lip against marble exploded tile fragments like shrapnel. The bell bounced, deflected off a pew as it crushed the bench, and, redirected, rolled toward the now-open front doors.

Shouting Tressen soldiers flattened themselves against walls to let the bell rumble past, or dashed ahead of it, then tripped and tumbled down the outer stairway and into the square.

I landed facedown on my machine pistol, which knocked the wind out of me. Stunned, I gulped for a breath.

Whump
.

Something as soft and heavy as three flour sacks struck me between the shoulder blades and drove the breath back out of me before I could enjoy the oxygen.

Kit lay on top of me, wheezing into my ear. She got to her feet before me, scooped up her own gun, and dragged me to my feet.

The two of us dashed after the bell as it toppled over the church threshold, bong-bonged down the steps, and rumbled, rolling on its side, across the cobbled square.

By the time the rolling bell began to accelerate down the hill, we were sprinting, crouched and sheltered behind it as Tressen infantry fired. Maybe at the careening bell, maybe at us.

Kit panted, “That was sentimental crap!”

“Huh?” I stumbled over a cobble, then righted myself as a round spanged off the rolling bell.

“You jumped on this bell because you saw me get hit.”

“What?”

“I saw it in your eyes!” Kit ripped off a full auto burst in the general direction of a Tressen who aimed at us while kneeling in a doorway. A halo of orange sparks flashed around the man as bullets caromed off the doorway surround, while our personal steamroller led us past him in the darkness.

We were three-fourths of the way down the hill now, and the bell rumbled straight toward the midsection of the right-hand Tressen truck. Three Tressens between the bell and the truck scattered.

Kit ejected her spent magazine. It clattered to the street; then she wiggled her fingers at me. “Magazine?”

I ripped a spare one out of the pouch in my chest strap and handed it across. As Kit took it, the bell struck the truck so hard that it rocked on its suspension, then toppled onto its side.

Whoom!

The truck’s fuel tank exploded in an orange fireball so wide that it licked the house fronts on both sides of the street. The concussion knocked us flat on our backs, and the heat from the blast swept across us like someone had opened a furnace one yard in front of us.

I blinked away my daze as Kit rolled on her side and faced me. “You can’t play hero whenever I bleed, Parker. I’m a big girl. And I care about something bigger. You
do
see that’s the problem between us?”

Bang. Bang-bang.

Rounds buzzed over our heads, Tressens rushed us, and I returned fire.

As I reloaded, I sighed. In the vast cosmos of human experience was any situation so dire that it could divert a woman bent on discussing The Relationship?

I said, “Could we do this later?”

“Hmph.”

“This is a
gun
fight, for God’s sake!”

Whump.

A secondary explosion aboard the burning truck brightened the street again. An instant later, the new fire must have reached ammunition in the truck. Rounds cooked off like popcorn, flashing green tracer streaks in all directions that ricocheted off the stone of the buildings and the street.

While the Tressens had their heads down, I tugged Kit up by the hand and we sprinted, dodging the cook-offs, toward the narrow gap between the nose of the flaming, toppled truck and the nose of the intact one opposite it.

We drew closer, and I saw the church bell. It had burrowed into the burning truck’s twisted frame and lay, a cracked and crackling iron lump, glowing red hot and spent, like a meteorite newly delivered from heaven.

Religion and I were strangers, but it did seem that the godless had just been smitten by an engine of the righteous, pretty much like the Gideon Bible predicted they would be. It wasn’t enough to convert me, even to the secular Trueborn idealism that Kit wanted from me. But it was enough to make me think about it.

We squeezed through the searing opening between the trucks. Then we ran, limping and leaning on one another, into the quiet darkness beyond.

Seventy-seven

Polian dragged himself, breathing hoarsely, over the square’s cobbles toward the prone and motionless Tressen major. Polian’s right foot dangled, swollen and useless, the ankle crushed by the great bell as it had leapt and bounded from the church. He paused to rest, chest heaving, and stared down at the base of the hill. A ruined truck burned, and its flames lit the dark bodies, and the limping wounded, rifles dragging behind them, as they gathered around the remaining truck.