Come the Revolution (20 page)

We got to trauma receiving and they put the stretchers down by the door. The triage specialist looked at them and shook his head.

“Damn! I don’t know…what are we going to do with them?”

“Something for the pain?” I said.

He shook his head, but more in confusion than denial. “I don’t know if we’ve got any Varoki-specific drugs. I mean, yeah, probably somewhere, but—”

“What’s the delay here?” I recognized Doc Mahajan’s voice and saw her make her way to us. “Oh my God!” she said when she saw the two Varoki.

“Yeah,” I said. “And this soldier says there are a lot more just like them, and that’s just the north barricade. The mines worked—better than we figured.”

“Basil, get them to Krautmann’s recovery area,” she ordered the triage specialist. “He’s worked with Varoki. Have him start them on a saline drip while I see what we’ve got for pain meds and antibiotics.” She looked at them again and shook her head. “Move!”

I walked back to the sullen knot of construction workers.

“Look, nobody expected this,” I said, “but we should have. We knew we were going to generate some Varoki casualties and we should have thought through what that meant.”

“What’s to think about?” one of them asked.

“Shut up, Andy,” another muttered.

“Good advice,” I said. “There’s still fighting at three or four of the barricades. Why don’t you link up with one of the other teams, see what you can do to help?”

“We’ll need our stretchers,” the first guy said.

I turned to look at him.

“Listen,
Andy
, let’s get a couple things straight. Those aren’t your stretchers, they’re my stretchers, and you work for Logistics, which is me, which means you do what I tell you. Right now I’m telling you to get your asses to the south Shadowed Way strongpoint and make yourselves useful.”

I took a long breath, tried to get the anger out of my voice.

“Look, all of you. You did a good job getting the mines set up, reinforcing the perimeter strongpoints, and then right away this attack comes. You gotta be tired, but you’re doing a great job evacuating casualties anyway. Fight’s not over, though, so let’s just do our jobs and no drama, okay? The Varoki are giving us plenty of that. Now go, and be careful.”

They went, but none of them looked very happy about the whole thing. I wasn’t sure how much of that was the fear and fatigue talking and how much of it was a real problem going forward. I liked to think of outfits I ran as one big happy family working together harmoniously toward a shared common goal, and for some reason I was always surprised when it never seemed to work out that way. Despite the evidence of my entire life, I still had this stupid notion that the default setting for everything was “ticking along fine,” as opposed to “careening out of control toward disaster.” I honestly have no idea why. It had to be some sort of hardwired genetic thing; it couldn’t have been a learned behavior.

I turned and scanned the sky above the perimeter. The north should have gone dark again, as there were no flares left, but it glowed and flickered with the residue of fires from the minefield explosion. Most of the aerial flares to the east and west had drifted down to the ground or burned out, although there was a ground fire still going out to the northwest where the second minefield had gone off. Another flare went up to the east, but just one. I heard small arms fire from there but no more grenade explosions. I hadn’t seen a mine detonation there either.

Thank God.

“Hey!” I heard someone yell and recognized her as one of my Second Runners, now sprinting flat out down the street toward the ammo depot. “They’re breaking through on the east side!”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

An hour later the fighting settled down again and we pushed them back across their start lines in every direction, but it had gotten tense for a while. Our kids had done really well. Mostly they’d followed instructions. The platoon leader covering the eastern approaches had a better idea. He pushed his reserve force forward to reinforce the barricade, stop the assault there. Then when some Varoki infiltrated around him, overran his ammo position and cut him off, he panicked and tried to surrender.

Fortunately for almost everyone involved, the Varoki shot him when he tried to parlay with them. His platoon sergeant stepped up and took over and the platoon kept fighting. When my ammo runner let us know something bad was going on, I got word to Zdravkova and she sent her reserve strikers to sort things out, which they did. In the meantime my ammo runners and I had some anxious moments, but they ended up not having to fire a shot in anger.

It should have calmed down then, but it got worse in a totally unexpected way. The fires our mines started up north and to the northwest got out of control. There was just too much flammable stuff lying around everywhere, including the very trash we’d use to camouflage the minefields. Lean-tos and plastic sheet tents caught and went up, along with clothing, paper, anything in the dwellings that would burn. The only thing working in our favor was the fact that everything was pretty wet from a couple days of rain, but once the fire got into some enclosed and flammable buildings, it got bigger and hotter, and it started drying out the trash around it, adding it as fuel.

The wind was blowing from the west and a bit from the north, so the fire started spreading across the northern half of Sookagrad, and creeping a bit south toward the clinic and other central buildings. The only water we had to fight it with was our drinking water, and once it was gone, we’d be pretty much finished.

I had Moshe start hooking up a large capacity pump we had to some hoses, although we didn’t have very many of them. Meanwhile I got Billy Conklin to start digging down over the trace of a storm sewer, and had Dhaliwa, his explosives guy, go recover one of the unexploded Bangalore torpedoes. My plan was to use it to blow a shaft down to a storm sewer, drop our intake hose down into the flood water, and pump it up to fight the fire.

As it happens, the fire got taken care of for us before we had time to plant and blow the charge. Two big ducted-fan Municipal Fire Service aerial tankers flew over and dropped a couple thousand liters of flame retardant on the fire and then banked away. Later one of our perimeter fighters came in—drenched in flame retardant—and gave us a message she’d seen dropped from the lead tanker. It read:

Good luck Municipal Police Deputies.

(signed) Tanker Company Five, Municipal Fire Service.

So somebody out there knew about our broadcast. I wasn’t sure how someone in Sakkatto knew, but it meant the soundproof blanket the Army had cast over the city was not one hundred per cent effective.

I wasn’t sure what to do about the message. Part of me wanted everyone to know right away, let them know we weren’t alone, that at least one Varoki fire service tanker company was pulling for us. On the other hand, that sounded like a good way to get those Varoki in trouble, maybe even killed, if word got out.

The aftermath of the attack…well, we really didn’t see all these Varoki casualties coming and we had to do something about them. When Zdravkova tried to parlay at the north barricade a sniper came within a few centimeters of taking her head off. With no way to communicate directly with them, it came down to an emergency broadcast, which was my sister’s department. An hour after the fires were put out, she was recording in front of a burned-out, still-smoking building.

“This is Sookagrad calling with an emergency appeal. Before dawn this morning the Municipal Police fought back a concerted attack from the surrounding CEM forces and inflicted heavy casualties on the rebels. However, a large number of critically wounded Varoki have fallen into the hands of the Municipal Police, many of them close to death.

“I am talking to Dr. Boris Petrov. Can you tell us the situation with the Varoki wounded?”

The vid recorder turned to include Petrov in the picture. With wild hair and a dirty white lab coat smeared with dried blood, he looked like something out of a horror vid. In a way he was.

“We have done what we can to stabilize them, but some of them are very badly burned. Our supplies of Varoki-specific antibiotics and pain medication are all but exhausted.”

“Won’t the CEM provide the supplies you need?” Aurora said. “Surely they understand that Varoki-specific drugs cannot help the Human defenders of Sookagrad.”

“We cannot contact them,” Petrov said. “Every attempt to parlay has been met with gunfire before we could explain the problem. And medicine isn’t enough. Some of these people will die without specialized treatment.”

“Thank you, Dr. Petrov. I also have the director of the Sookagrad Citizens’ League, Mr. Bogomil Katranjiev, to explain the overall situation.” She took a couple steps to her right and the recorder followed her until she stood next to Bogo. “Director Katranjiev, where do the negotiations stand?”

“There are no negotiations,” he said with a scowl. “The CEM will not speak directly with us, and with the Army jamming all wireless bands, we cannot communicate with the Provisional Government.” He turned to address the recorder directly. “If anyone listening to this bulletin can influence the Provisional Government at all, tell them we have forty-one wounded Varoki, fifteen of them in critical condition. We will post a medical truce flag at the northern entrance to the district. When the CEM posts a similar one, we will transport the wounded across the Avenue of Peace.”

“How can you be sure the CEM will not seize or kill the stretcher carriers?” Aurora asked.

“We have enough captured uninjured militia personnel to carry the stretchers, more than enough. We will release them all, subject to their parole not to return to the fight against us. Hopefully the CEM won’t fire on their own people, once they know what the situation is here.”

Aurora turned back to the recorder. “Amidst the relief of having fought off a major assault by the CEM and having suffered only minor casualties themselves, the defenders of Sookagrad find themselves in the middle of a medical crisis. I toured the trauma ward where the Varoki injured are being cared for and the condition of the seriously wounded, particularly the burn victims, is heartrending. This goes beyond politics and species. Anyone hearing this bulletin, contact the Provisional Government, pass along our appeal, please. This is Sookagrad, calling, and signing off.”

She paused a couple seconds then nodded.

“Okay,” her vid tech said, “I’ll edit in the footage we shot of the trauma ward with your last pitch as a voiceover.”

“Ted, let’s just get it on the pipe right away,” Aurora said. “I don’t…their ward is as good as the Human wards, but it still looks like something out of Dante, and those burns! We’ll stick with the humanitarian appeal and keep it simple, nothing artsy.”

The recorder shook his head. “You’re wrong on this.”

“Then I’m wrong,” she said. “It won’t be the first time. Send it out.”

“I agree with Aurora,” Katranjiev said. “Send it.”

I looked at him. Katranjiev agreeing with Aurora? Was he mellowing? Or had he decided she and I weren’t exactly pals and so it might be okay to back her up?

Ted shrugged and pulled the data tab from the recorder, then headed for the maintenance access shaft where our illegal transmitter was spliced into the underground fiber network.

I saw Stal and Zdravkova so the whole troika was here for the postbattle executive meeting. They were the executives; I just had to make the report on logistics. Zdravkova looked tired but alert. Stal looked reserved, remote. I wondered where he’d been during the fight. Katranjiev seemed upbeat, maybe from having been in the vid. We walked toward the guarded studio building, the one where Captain Prayzaat now lived, virtually a prisoner of the fiction we had created.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“So what happened with those mines?” Katranjiev asked as soon as we settled into chairs around Prayzaat’s desk.

“It’s kind of a long story,” I said. “You sure this is what you want to go into first?”

“Don’t patronize me, Naradnyo. Just answer the question.”

“I would be interested in an explanation as well,” Captain Prayzaat said.

I glanced at the others. Stal looked vaguely interested, but also sort of involved in his own thoughts. Zdravkova just looked beat.

“Okay, this stuff we made, PLX? The aGavoosh word for it is
kanaakt’antay
; its main ingredient is what we call nitromethane.”

“Yes, I am familiar,” Prayzaat said.

I reached in my pocket and pulled out the scrap of paper I’d had Moshe write for me. “Nitromethane’s chemical formula is C-H-3-N-O-2. That O-2 at the end means it contains its own oxygen, so you can use it as an explosive in an enclosed space, like a pipe bomb. Gasoline you put in an enclosed pipe with no oxygen, it won’t even burn, okay? The thing is, and this is what we didn’t count on, that O-2 is only about half enough oxygen to combust all the other stuff in it. So you set it off and half the stuff detonates, which is enough to blow open the pipe and throw fragments all over, but also blow out the unburned part of the fuel.”

“Which burn soon as get oxygen,” Stal said.

I nodded.

“Crispy critters,” Katranjiev said and made a grim smile, and then frowned and colored when he saw Prayzaat’s look. I guessed he hadn’t visited the clinic, hadn’t seen what those poor bastards looked like, but that wasn’t really much of an excuse.

“How are the burn injuries?” Prayzaat said.

“Horrible. Doc Mahajan is trying to cope, best as she can, but they need a good Varoki medical team.”

Prayzaat nodded and looked away.

“We haven’t heard from the CEM yet,” I said. “I’m not sure what else we can do until they move.”

“Of course,” Prayzaat said. “I want to thank you for the appeal which went out so promptly. Hopefully they will respond soon. How many casualties did our forces suffer?”

“We took twelve dead and thirty-two wounded in the fight, and six more burned trying to fight the fire. Nine of the wounded and one burn case are pretty serious. Doc Mahajan says we might lose two of them, and the other eight are out of the fight for the duration. The more lightly wounded will be okay. I think five or six already rejoined their units.”

“That’s not bad,” Katranjiev said. Zdravkova’s head came up quickly.

“That’s fifty killed, wounded or injured out of three hundred people deployed,” she said. “Sixteen per cent losses, perhaps ten or twelve per cent once we got back the lightly wounded, and this was the first serious attack. A few more days like this and we’ll be too thin to cover the perimeter.”

“I thought your shortage was weapons, not willing fighters,” Katranjiev answered. “Can’t you use the weapons of the casualties to arm their replacements?”

Zdravkova shot him a hard look but then shrugged. “Willing, yes. Trained and experienced, not so much. We already armed our best prospects, and I lost four squad leaders and a platoon leader—not easy to replace. But yes, you’re right, the numeric losses we took have not crippled us. We should be able to improve our firepower on the line with some of the captured weapons. The CEM had a fair number of Army-issue RAGs, and left a lot of them behind.” She turned to me. “How many, Naradnyo?”

“Still counting, and we have to make operability assessments since some of them got cooked in the fires pretty good, or just banged around. I’ve got Greenwald working on it, even though it’s not exactly his bailiwick, and we’re looking for some qualified armorers. I’m thinking we need an ordnance repair department, but I’ll work that out. Ballpark estimate for now, we’ll end up with about a hundred more operational RAGs and at least as many civilian rifles.”

“
Really?
That many?” she said, and she sat up straighter, energy coming back into her eyes. “Why, I can put three or four more RAGs in every squad! Convert the Strikers to an all-RAG outfit, get rid of all the pistols in the front-line units. If we had the leaders to handle it, and someone to train them, we could raise two more platoons all with long guns. I didn’t realize they left so much materiel when they ran.”

“Well, they left a lot of bodies, too,” I said, and glanced at Prayzaat, “so they didn’t exactly all run. I’ve got some work details out there collecting the corpses for burial or disposal. That may turn into a permanent department, too.”

I remembered the line of Varoki bodies I’d already seen, some of them horribly burned, some looking untouched, as if they were just sleeping. I’d seen dead people before, but seeing rows of them all at once is a different matter. Last time I’d seen something like that was over two years ago, on K’Tok. I looked up and saw everyone waiting for me to go on.

“Looks like we’ve got about a hundred dead Gaantist militia fighters. I’m not sure what to do with them, and they’re going to start to decay if we don’t burn them or get them underground soon.”

“How many prisoners?” Prayzaat asked.

“Forty wounded, since one of them died an hour ago, and thirty-seven uninjured. Our people saw a lot of wounded withdrawing as well. Killer, your kids took a hell of a bite out of them. If I were running that show over there, I’d be wondering how I was ever going to get those guys to make an attack like that again.”

“They are fanatics,” Katranjiev said. “Do you think losses really matter to them?”

Prayzaat looked at him with an expression of contempt. I hardly knew how to answer that myself. I didn’t want to get into an argument right now, but misreading the enemy that stupidly could get a lot of people killed.

“It’s easier to be a fanatic when people aren’t dying all around you,” I said. “You want the rest of the logistics report or not?”

All three Humans nodded. Prayzaat seemed lost in his own thoughts.

“Okay, ammo. Our troops on the line blew through about thirty-five thousand flechettes.”

“Thirty-five
thousand
?” Katranjiev exclaimed. “And they only killed a hundred of the bastards? That’s insane!”

Zdravkova leaned forward and opened her mouth to fire back but I held my left hand up to stop her.

“Katranjiev, if you keep interrupting with editorial comments, this report is going to take all day. And between the dead, the wounded we recovered, and our estimates of wounded who returned to their own lines or were carried away, I’d estimate over three hundred hostile casualties. That’s about one casualty for every hundred flechettes fired. Given the level of training and experience of our people, that is insanely
good
shooting. Killer, you tell your kids I said so.”

“I will,” she said. “Thanks.”

Privately, I figured the high casualty rate was more due to stupid militia tactics than to excellent Human shooting, but better to let our folks feel good about what they did. From what I’d heard from the fighters I talked to, the Varoki just charged, firing their weapons as they came, and then bunched up in the streets once they encountered resistance. Hard not to hit something when your target is a big milling mass of bodies.

“So, back to the hard numbers. We had a total magazine capacity for all our weapons of about sixty thousand flechettes, when every magazine we own is loaded and charged. That means we burned through over half of our ready ammunition in about an hour, maybe a little less. We’ve got a bunch more flechettes fabricated but it takes time to recover the magazines, reload them, and then recharge them.

“We also suffered some attrition in our magazine supply. We still could use some improvement in how conscientious the troops are about recovering and taking care of their spent mags, but some attrition is inevitable. Here’s why that’s important. Once we distribute the captured arms, we’re going to about triple the number of RAGs we have, but those guys must be having magazine problems too. Most of their fighters only had a magazine or two on them, so I’m guessing we’re going to add at most fifteen thousand flechettes to our RAG magazine capacity and less than that to the civilian weapons.”

“Get to the point, Naradnyo,” Katranjiev said, but Zdravkova frowned.

“I see where you’re going, Sasha,” she said. “If we ran through over half of our ready ammunition before, if we triple the number of RAGs but only increase the magazine capacity by a half…I’m too punchy to do the math.”

“Okay, here it is in simple terms,” I said. “We had about fifty RAGs with a total of about three hundred magazines, or six magazines per system, and we burned through over three per system. We add a hundred RAGs to the mix and about a hundred fifty more magazines, and we end up with only three magazines per system instead of six. If each one blows through the ammunition just as fast next time, we’re bone dry after about three quarters of an hour.”

We sat there in silence for a couple seconds, each of us thinking that over.

“But you said they had a similar problem,” Katranjiev finally said.

“They seem to, at least for now, but the Army could solve it for them in pretty short order if they decided to. Now don’t get me wrong. A hundred more RAGs is
great
news, not bad. It just doesn’t put us on Easy Street, that’s all.

“I think ammo is our biggest and most pressing issue for now, so I did that first. Here’s an overview on where we stand on the other things.

“Rations. The protein’s going to get even more boring before long, but we’ve got two buildings full of hydroponic tanks and grow racks giving us a good veggie yield, and we haven’t had as much of a refugee influx as we figured, probably because of how thick the CEM positions are around us. I’m a little concerned one of our hydroponic buildings is so close to the east perimeter, and we’re scouting a site closer to the headquarters cluster. But we’ve got food to last probably four weeks and can stretch it to six if we have to. After that we’re in trouble, but I doubt this mess is going to go on that long.”

“What,” Katranjiev said, “you still think your precious
Cottohazz
is going to—”

“Shut up and let me finish,” I said, cutting him off. He opened his mouth to answer but then glanced at the others and thought better of it. He leaned back and frowned—sulked was more like it.

“We have a big potential fire problem, as I’m sure everyone noticed. I don’t think we can count on Municipal Fire and Rescue to save us next time, so we’re sinking some shafts down to the storm sewers and will pump waste water up to fight the next fires. We’re going to test the water as well. If it’s not too bad we may be able to process it to potability, supplement our own supply, and even if it’s not quite drinkable we may be able to arrange some showers.”

“That would be wonderful,” Zdravkova said.

“Yes,” Katranjiev said, “it’s starting to smell so bad in the headquarters building I can hardly stand going in.”

I wondered what he did there. For that matter, what did Stal do all day? I knew what Zdravkova and I did. Something to think about later.

“Power,” I said. “We need some sunlight. If we get it, and today looks pretty good in that respect so far, we’ll at least keep our heads above water. We’ve been supplementing the LENR generators with some juice still left in auto and truck battery packs, which is a dwindling supply and not a very efficient use of Greenwald’s crew’s time, but we really need the wattage, especially with all those magazines to charge right now and the autodocs going full tilt.

“Med looks okay, aside from all those Varoki. We have a couple autodocs which might pack it in, but we’re okay on the rest and have a good supply of key trauma drugs. Only thing we can’t fabricate is nanites, so that’s forcing med to rely on more invasive treatments. The autodocs have the programming they need to do it. We could use another couple surgical techs, but we’re squeaking by.

“Facilities and Infrastructure: next big priority is getting some below-ground shelters for our people. We still have some technical issues to iron out, but I want to get going on the initial excavations this afternoon, and we’ll work the rest out as we go. We’ll be using some of the PLX for that, so I want to have the fire fighting contingency in place first.

“By the way, some of my infrastructure guys working as litter bearers got in a dispute with a couple fighters from the north strongpoint.”

“I heard about that,” Zdravkova said.

“Yeah, well my guys were in the wrong and yours were right, so extend my apologies.”

Her eyebrows ticked up a little in surprise, but she nodded.

The buzzer on Prayzaat’s desk sounded.

“Yes?” he said.

“A runner just came for commander Zdravkova,” the Varoki patrolman serving as door guard said through the speaker. “He says the militia members are displaying a medical truce panel on the north side of the Avenue of Peace.”

Zdravkova grinned and picked up her RAG from beside her chair. “You know what that means? It means our bulletins are getting out there and somebody is not just listening; they’re acting.”

Prayzaat looked at me.

“What else do you have, Mr. Naradnyo?” he said.

“End of report.”