House of Reeds

The Junction of Provincial Route Twenty-Two and the Railway North of the Mйxica Mandate at Sobipurй

The sick, sinking feeling rushing up in Heicho Felix's stomach slammed into a stone wall as the air-breathing turbines on the Fleet shuttle suddenly regained comp control. The engine fans shrieked up to an ear-piercing whine and kicked over, igniting. The pilot, who had been struggling to deadstick the shuttle into the nearest river, felt his ship come alive.

He jammed on full thrust and slewed his control yoke over and back, sending the shuttle clawing for altitude.

Massive acceleration slammed Felix back into the shockchair for an endless, crushing time. Then, suddenly, they leveled off and the aircraft banked sharply. For the first time in their headlong flight, Felix took a breath, realizing the enemy missile team in the shantytown had failed to peg them with a second rocket and comp control had come back on-line. Still rattled, she tucked loose hair back behind her ears and tuned the eye-v on the inside of her visor back to the cameras in the nose of the shuttle. The whine of her suit systems had never been so welcome.

The tiled roof of a farmhouse flashed past, followed immediately by the blur of a wide field flooded with water, green shoots poking up from the mud. The Heicho grimaced, stomach churning with vertigo. The shuttle pilot was clinging to the deck like a baby to the teat, roaring over roads lined with flowering hedges, fields gleaming with sheets of water, and long stretches of trees planted in regular rows. The slender figures of Jehanan on the ground were glimpsed for fractions of a second and then left behind. Felix felt dizzy, thinking I'm glad I'm not a bleeding pilot… and toggled her view to one of the side-mounted cameras.

With more distance between the lens and the landscape, the frenetic passage of the shuttle didn't upset her stomach so much. She saw broad plains stretching out to the horizon, dotted with conical mounds surmounted by villages. Every square meter seemed to be tilled, planted, farmed or covered with clusters of tiny, compact houses. Heavy rain clouds scudded across the bucolic landscape, chasing their own shadows across byre and barn alike.

A trail of dust rising from a long dike caught her eye and she zoomed the camera. An elevated road sprang into focus and at first Felix thought she was watching a column of vehicles from the 416th Tarascan Rifles regiment burling down the highway. Then her mind sorted out the jumble of exhaust, dust, dull gray vehicles and marching columns of antlike figures. The AI in her comm link steadied the frame, causing details to spring into view, sharp and clear.

Lines of Jehanan soldiers were moving down the sides of the road at a brisk pace, rifles canted over their shoulders, bodies heavy with bags of ammunition, canteens, trenching tools and flaring helmets which reached from their eye-shields back down their necks. Armored cars, tanks and Saab-Scandia trucks rumbled past the infantry, raising a thick pall of yellow dust. The entire force was moving steadily north.

Felix swallowed and keyed her comm. "Kyo, you should switch to camera six on the shuttle 'net. The slicks are rolling hot today."

Kosho looked up, focused on an infinite distance, and the corners of her lips tightened minutely. "I see. Those tanks are not of Imperial manufacture. Do you recognize them?"

"No." Felix grimaced, panning the camera ahead, flitting along the column. "They look like local work – but I thought they'd lost all their tech?"

"Apparently not." Kosho's eyes twitched to the side. She tapped her comm. "Pilot, swing more to the west. We want to avoid the altercation at one o'clock."

Felix looked back to the eye-v and saw a sudden bloom of smoke and fire along the road. Jehanan soldiers scattered down from the dike, splashing through muddy fields. Tracers flashed out from a cluster of buildings sitting beside the road. One of the squat-looking Jehanan tanks was burning, vomiting flame from its engine compartment. The flash of heavy guns rippled between the buildings. Felix felt the shuttle bank again, and the view twisted. Suddenly they were looking down at a high angle into the crossroads.

The marching column was deploying – tanks rumbling ahead while squads peeled away into the fields and everything else ground to a halt – and she could see rows of hastily dug emplacements in and around the village. Jehanan artillerists scrambled to reload crew-served weapons in pits and she caught a glimpse of another native tank hiding in the shadow of a barnlike building, long gun traversing the elevated road. The entire machine bucked backwards, flame gouting from the long muzzle. Then the entire scene was gone as the shuttle continued to roar northwards.

"They're fighting each other?" Felix looked to the Sho-sa, hoping the officer had some clue what was going on. "Different native factions?"

"We've more pressing problems than the disputes of local warlords." Kosho was busily tapping commands into her hand comp. "The Cornuelle is not responding to my direct hail." Her dark eyes looked up, fixing Felix with a grim stare. The Heicho swallowed, seeing an unexpected ashen pallor tingeing the Nisei officer's usually immaculate face. "Twelve anti-matter detonations have occurred in orbit. All comm relays are down, save ones which happened to be shielded. Navplot shows at least one starship destroyed."

"Oh." Felix tested her grip on the Macana between her legs. The assault rifle had a cheerful solidity. Her eyes flicked across the Marines seated on either side of the cargo bay, counting ammunition coils, grenades and gear. There'll be some ammunition in the shuttle stores, too. Plus we've got Helsdon and his engineers for repairs and support… "We'd better make for the Army cantonment at Parus then. They'll need the shuttle for air support and medevac."

Kosho stared at her for a long moment, dark eyes flat and emotionless. Then she stirred, nodded and began working with her comm again. "The shuttle relay node is picking up scattered transmissions," she said in a toneless voice. "Sort through these while I try and raise Regimental command or the Legation. We need to know what the situation is before we set down."

"Hai, kyo!" Felix tapped her comm, letting the node built into her combat armor range free, scanning up and down through the comm bands, looking for the distinctive signatures of Imperial transmissions.

Almost immediately she began to pick up garbled voices, the whine of encrypted bursts and stabbing eruptions of white noise. Grimacing at the violent sound, the Heicho pulled out her own comp and started to filter background noise and countermeasures out of the voice streams.

"Comm is pretty well shot," she said on Kosho's command channel twenty minutes later. "Someone's jamming the Regimental net and the only other clear transmission I can pick up is some scientist yelling for help down at Fehrupurй."

The Sho-sa barely reacted. Kosho had been keeping an eye on the shuttle's flight path and trying to raise the Cornuelle. The ship had still not responded. With an effort, she focused on the Marine sitting across from her. "The University excavations are under attack?"

Felix nodded, wondering how long it would take the officer to break out of her funk. "It's a big operation, I guess. They've barricaded themselves in the camp and are keeping a mob of slicks back with sidearms and jury-rigged flamethrowers." She glanced at her chrono and a map on her comp. "If we turned around, we could be at the dig site in just under an hour…"

"No." Kosho stirred. Her face was beginning to lose its ashen tone. "We're heading directly to the Legation in Parus. I expect the Regimental cantonment to be under heavy attack by…whoever is attacking the Imperial presence here. We can set down in the gardens and disembark behind fortified walls." The Sho-sa tabbed through a series of displays on her comp, then nodded to herself. "There is a primary orbital uplink at the Residence as well. We can use that to punch through the jamming to the Cornuelle."

Felix said nothing, carefully examining the service patches on the man squeezed in next to her. Purely hopeful of the Sho-sa to believe the ship's still up there and not shattered wreckage and a slowly expanding plume of radiation. She clenched her teeth together. They're all dead. Huйmac and Fitz and the captain and everyone. All just ash and vapor.

"The city is coming up, Sho-sa," the Heicho said, recognizing the steadily increasing sprawl of buildings appearing in the camera view. They raced over kilometers of warehouses and rundown apartment blocks and scattered parks and gardens. The streets appeared to be deserted, which the Marine didn't think was a good sign. Huge clouds of black smoke blotted out the horizon, mixing with puffy rain clouds. "Looks like there's fighting…"

"Turn right on the next boulevard," Susan said briskly, one eye on a map of Parus on her comp and one eye on the forward camera feed. "Keep low."

The shuttle boomed across a district of row-houses and sliced into a shallow curve. Lines of trees blurred past beneath the wings, the shockwave of the aircraft's passing shaking their limbs and stirring up whirlwinds of leaves and dirt from the streets. Those few Jehanan still out fled into the doorways of abandoned shops or cowered under their runner-carts.

Empty intersections appeared and flashed past, and the sweeping arc of an ancient Haraphan road led them towards the center of the city. Tall buildings began to appear – the clifflike shapes of khus and the lower, elaborately domed structures of old palaces and temples. Kosho saw the first evidence of fighting – a bus of Imperial manufacture burning beside the road – and then running Jehanan with guns.

Brief glimpses of gangs of natives pillaging shops and overturning imported vehicles followed. A Jehanan tank rumbling down a side-street, main gun swinging from side to side. A line of civilians on a rooftop, handing packages from hand to hand out of a building gushing flame and smoke from its windows. Hundreds of snouted faces in a courtyard turning up at the booming sound of the shuttle's passage overhead. Clouds of sparkling glass bursting from the faces of buildings rocked by the supersonic shockwave rolling behind the shuttle.

I've got the Legation in sight. The pilot's voice cut across her reverie. We've got hostile fire.

Kosho stiffened, automatically checking her shockharness. The forward camera views expanded to fill her visor.

The dull red walls of the Legation were already shrouded with dirty gray smoke. Small-arms fire sparked here and there, but the majority of the haze was the result of a rippling wave of explosions bursting among the gardens and wooden buildings. Susan could see projectiles falling into the compound from the east. At least one structure inside the walls was already on fire.

"What is that?" she snapped, looking to Felix.

"Mortar fire," the Heicho replied, working her comp. The camera view rippled and the spidery web of a radar track superimposed on the image. Trailing arcs from puffs of white smoke raised by bursting mortar rounds arrowed back over the wall to a nearby park. Susan zoomed part of the image on a subsidiary v-pane, saw rows of tubular weapons squatting amid crowds of busy Jehanan gunners and support vehicles. Scowling, she locked the coordinates of the park into comp and mashed an override glyph.

A Sagant free-flying munitions canister spat from a pod embedded in the right wing, making the shuttle jerk slightly before the pilot could correct.

Hey! he complained over the channel. Let me know before you -

"Get us down." Kosho snarled, expanding her radar coverage, fingers light on the tiny display. "I'll handle weapons."

Felix watched with professional interest as the Sagant flashed away from the shuttle, popped up over the park and blew apart into hundreds of sub-munitions. The Jehanan on the ground were already scattering from the sharp crack! overhead, but none of them was fast enough to escape the cloud of black marbles spilling down out of the sky.

A roughly circular area two blocks wide erupted in flame. The park, the trees, the mortars, the trucks carrying their ammunition and fifty or sixty houses were obliterated in an instant. Air rushed into the blast vacuum, igniting dozens of fires in the shattered rubble. A black cloud whooshed up.

The shuttle braked again, engines roaring as the thrust ducts rotated down, and ornamental fruit trees in the gardens below lost their foliage. A whirling cloud of dust, rocks, splintered wood and debris clattered against the windows of the Legation buildings. Landing gear rotated out of the hull, maneuvering jets flared and the pilot slewed down to a perfect three-point landing. One of the wheels crashed through a gazebo of light wood, crunching into hand-laid blue and yellow tiles.

Felix was already at the landing door, hand slapping the controls. Servos whined and a crack of daylight appeared. "Gear up!" she shouted on the command channel. "Dispersed deployment on the deck – the enemy has artillery – we don't know where the friendlies are! Engineers in the back with the Sho-sa!"

The turbines whined down as the landing gear groaned to take the full weight of the shuttle. Heicho Felix darted down the loading ramp, her Macana at the ready. Sunlight blazed on her visor and she ducked to the left, rifle sweeping the face of the nearest building. Her Marines scattered left and right, forming a perimeter twenty meters from the shuttle. Felix turned, waving the engineers out of the aircraft.

"Everybody -" There was a shriek of rocket engines and something blurred at the edge of her vision. Her visor flashed a warning, silhouetting an arrowlike shape. Instantly, Felix threw herself behind the nearest cover, which was an ornamental hedge in a brick planter. "- down! Incoming!"

The missile impacted on the rear ventral surface of the shuttle, shredding armor and metal as its warhead erupted. The surface flexed, tormented by a piercing jet of superheated plasma, and the shuttle convulsed as the ablative armor drank up the heat-flow like a sponge. The outer skin layer shattered, sending white-hot hexagonal flakes whistling across the gardens, breaking windows and shredding the trees. Dozens of secondary fires sprang up where they fell.

A pressure wave of heat and flame smashed down, grinding Felix's visor into the dirt. Cursing, she rolled up, her combat visor reacting to the blast with a polarizing sheen and a flashing icon showing the firing source for the attack.

"Missile team in the skyscraper south-southeast," she bawled, swinging the Macana to her shoulder. "Top quarter, right-hand side! Suppressive fire, all units!"

The roar of a Whipsaw cutting loose off to her left deafened the Marine, and her own fire from the automatic rifle was instantly lost as the flechette storm from the squad support weapon stabbed across the intervening distance – the khus was at least four blocks away – and ripped across the face of the building. Windows exploded, concrete disintegrated and an entire apartment vanished in a gout of flame as the stream of 1mm stiletto rounds licked across the second K'rrhk as the missile team was maneuvering the weapon into position.

Felix dropped her rifle, eyeballing the plume of smoke belching from the side of the building. "Whipsaw on artillery suppression," she snapped, gesturing for the squad support weapon fireteam to head for the main buildings. "Get onto the roof, cover these skyscrapers, torch anything that moves!"

Then she had time to turn back to the shuttle. The aircraft was engulfed in flame, the entire rear third smashed into ruin. Oily black smoke roared up from burning vegetation all around. One wing had been torn straight off and now tipped forward at an awkward angle. The matching landing gear was skewed out like a broken leg.

"Sho-sa Kosho!" Felix felt her stomach twist into a cruel knot. She scrambled forward through smoldering rose bushes. "Second team, with me. We've got to get Fleet out of there!"

Waves of heat beat at her face and the Heicho wished she were in full powered armor. She ducked under the broken wing once she saw the entire rear loading ramp structure was twisted into a snarl of blackened metal and armor plating. The fire-suppression system inside the aircraft was coughing foam, but failing to dampen the blaze. The hex-skin of the shuttle popped and hissed, glowing cherry red. She ran forward, wondering if the forward crew doors were still operable.

The door seemed intact, but the access plate cover was bent and refused to open under her reaching fingers. I'm too damn short, she snarled to herself, quick fingers unfolding a cutting tool. "Carlyle! Get over here and lift me up -"

A white-hot point appeared at the edge of the door. The two Marines who'd come at her call fell back, surprised. Felix watched for a bare second – saw the point travel upwards, shearing through the armored door – and jumped out of the way before the cutting torch beam clove through her right arm.

"Stand back," she shouted, ducking down under the curve of the shuttle body itself. She was sweating furiously – the whole shuttleskin was bleeding heat at a tremendous rate – and the grass under her boots crisped black.

The cutting torch cut off, a ringing clang followed and the entire lock mechanism flew out. Two Marines reached up as the door ground up and seized hold of the first body pushed out of the stricken aircraft. Felix wiped her brow, half blinded by sweat, and keyed up her all-units channel.

"Form on the shuttle," she barked. "We've got wounded and we need to get them under cover to medical."

Another explosion shook the grounds and the upper floor of the Library tumbled down into an ornamental pool. The staccato roar of the Whipsaw followed before the rumbling boom of the rocket blast had faded. Felix slid out into the open, turning to cover the gardens with her rifle, and caught sight of a dull black Fleet z-suit being lowered from the shuttle door. Helsdon was silhouetted there, his back to raging flames, face tight with pain, hands steady as he handed Sho-sa Kosho down to Carlyle.

The commander's face was sheened with crimson and her visor was gone, ripped away by the explosion. Long black hair, matted with blood, clung to her neck and suit. Felix felt time slow, hand reaching out to seize the woman's medband and turn the strip of metal around. There were too many winking red lights.

"Let's go!" The Heicho slapped Carlyle on his shoulder, shoving him and his burden towards the Residence. "Go-go-go!" Felix reached up, took Helsdon's hand and helped the engineer jump down. The broken shuttle groaned, metal twisting in the inferno burning inside, and they ran across the flat, trimmed sward of a zenball field towards the garden doors.

The Whipsaw on the roof roared again, now mounted on a tripod and slaved to the gunner's suit sensors. Another rocket shrieked across the grounds and brushed a stream of flechettes. The weapon staggered in the air, belching flame. Riddled with millimeter-wide punctures, the remains of the missile plowed through the rose bushes, crashed into a low brick wall and failed to detonate.