Ninth City Burning (50 page)

F
ortunately, all us milites know how to act if we go dark. We've practiced so many times, it's practically instinctual. “Fall stations” is the command to grab onto some secure part of the platform, and I think we'd have done that even if Mersh hadn't given us any orders at all. Dis has hardly any gravity, so it isn't like our platform is going to immediately drop out of the sky, either. We stay pretty much where we are, and so do all the platforms around us, hanging there out in space. That's probably the best thing about our present situation, though. Even though I watched everything happen down on IMEC-1, I still can't completely believe it's all true. Like, unless I'm really, really wrong, the whole battle just turned over on us.

Something crackles beside my ear, and I hear Spammers say, “Well, shit,” through my helmet radio.

“Shut up, Miles,” Mersh says.

“What do we do now?” Hexi asks.

“You shut up and wait for orders,” Mersh answers.

“Mersh is right,” Spammers says. “We'll want to be in position in case some of our fontani make it back.”

“Did you just say ‘Mersh is right'?” I ask. But it's true. In fact, Mersh and Spammers are both right. Pretty soon someone's going to notice the guns on old IMEC-1 have stopped, and they'll come back to help us out.

The trouble is, no one comes back. I think some of our cohorts out there try to swing around toward us, but there are all these big clouds of Valentines waiting to tangle them up, and I guess they don't make it very far. I bet the Zeros that just finished with old IMEC-1 are in a pretty good position to get in the way of anyone trying to get back, too.

“Yup, any minute now,” Spammers says. He's doing his thing where
he pretends something really awful is just like a minor inconvenience or whatever, but you can tell he's as terrified as anyone else.

“They must have us blocked off,” Hexi says. “That's what they'd want to do, right?”

Mersh looks like he's about to tell us all to shut up and wait for orders again when he catches sight of something down below. He rushes to the edge of the platform, and the rest of us follow. At first it's hard to tell exactly what's happening down there. The air all over IMEC-1—or I guess it's just empty space because the air's all gone—anyway, suddenly there are all these chunks of rock and whatnot flying around over the city, and several of the buildings have sort of shifted, like the tops of them are facing a little in the wrong direction. This one very large gun has gone kind of crumbly in the middle, one half of it floating slowly away from the other. And then the bottom edge of another gun bursts up in a cloud of dust, and the whole thing tilts to the side like it's going to fall, only it just sort of hangs there. It
would
fall, I bet, if there was any gravity to pull it down.

Hexi says, “They're shooting at us.”

They definitely are. From the other side of our platform, we can see one of those big clouds of Valentines floating off ahead, all lit up and letting loose with everything they've got. Their sources must be just far enough back that their umbris won't reach us, so they'll be using weapons that can blast us without needing thelemity—bombs and bullets and whatnot. Some of the other assault platforms near ours have already been hit, either broken apart or sent spinning off into space, but old Romeo isn't really aiming for us. He wants those big guns.

The antibombardment arrays on old IMEC-1 have mostly started up by now, and that's enough to intercept at least some of Romeo's shots. The space over the city is filling with flashes and explosions and clouds of debris and so forth. But it's pretty obvious they can't sit through all that forever.

All we can do is sit there and watch it happen. I start thinking about when Hexi's number got called in the draft, and it was like she was choking or dying or something, and even though I wanted to help, I couldn't think how, like there was this big gap between us, so big I could never get to her. It's a real cruddy feeling. It makes you want to jump off a cliff, like even that would be better than doing nothing.

“So how about those orders, dek?” Spammers says to Mersh. “We're not going to just let Romeo wreck the city, are we?”

I've about decided there isn't much we
can
do, aside from sit here and hope some of our fontani make it back, but then Mersh says, “Command wants us to stay put until the Valentines have deployed their ratters.”

I'd forgotten about the ratters. They're the fighters Romeo sends in when we've all gone dark and can't defend ourselves. They've got these big, long, nasty tails they can use to drink up thelemity, sort of like an electrical cord. They can't use ingenic weapons, but they've still got ingenic armor, so as long as part of the tail is connected to an umbris somewhere, the ratters are pretty much invincible. No way our antibombardment guys will be able to stop them.

Once I know they're coming, I have an easy time picking out the ratters' nests from the rest of the Valentines, the ones doing all the bombarding, I mean. The ratters are really kind of dull-looking compared to all those flashing lights and whatnot. They whip out from the nests, and for a while they don't really seem to be going much of anywhere. It's pretty uninteresting, in fact, until they start speeding up. Then they come straight at us.

Mersh yells, “Fall stations!” again, and we all duck just as the first ratters come through, hitting our wall of assault platforms like they're diving into a lake or something. Wherever they hit, platforms go spinning away into space or down toward IMEC-1 or just smashing into other platforms nearby. Even when the ratters have already gone past, their tails keep whipping around, and any platform that gets too close ends up about broken in half. If we could just cut those tails, the ratters would all shrivel up the way Valentines always do when they go dark, but right now we don't stand a chance of getting through that armor.

Two more waves of ratters come diving down, and all we can do is hold on to our platform and hope we don't get hit. Finally, I hear Mersh on my radio. “Everyone all right?”

It doesn't seem possible, but we are. The cloud of Valentines out there seems to go on forever, and each nest must be sending out like twenty ratters at a time. When I raise my head to look around, though, it's obvious most of our platforms haven't gone anywhere. Compared to our whole wall, the ratters—even like a couple hundred or thousand of them—are really pretty small, and just like all the Valentines bombarding old IMEC-1, they're after the guns, not us. If the Valentines wanted to take our platforms out, they'd have better ways to do it than throwing ratters at us.

When everyone's reported that we're still alive and so forth, Mersh
gets on his radio to check in with Optio Sorril. Over the side of the platform, I can see the ratters ripping up the city, tearing through bridges and buildings and leaving explosions everywhere, their tails slicing everything they touch from the ground on up. One tail just misses our platform, and takes two others with it as it swings by, but Mersh doesn't even look up. Finally, he kind of nods, and I can see his mouth forming the words “Yes, ma'am.” He looks around at us, and it's almost like he's forgotten where he is and who we all are.

“Hey, Mersh, boyo,” I say, “what's going on?”

Mersh gives his head a little shake, like he's clearing something out of there, then he stands up and tells Hexi to open up our platform's auxiliary armament locker. It's full of all sorts of special equipment for when you need more than just a lazel.

“Here's the plan,” Mersh says. He says it slowly, almost like he's making it up as he goes along. “In 360 seconds, we're going to launch from this platform toward the Valentine formation. Once we're inside their umbris, we will either cut the tails on those ratters or destroy the nests with ingenic mines. In both cases, we should be able to breach their armor using the blades on our LL-40s.”

I think we waste about a hundred of our 360 seconds just staring at him. Finally, I say, “Mersh, that's completely nuts. I mean, I'd take forever to fly all the way over there, and we'll be getting shot at the whole time. You know we will. And then what? We're supposed to just walk up to those nests and start hacking away?”

Everyone's quiet a minute, then Mersh says, “Those are our orders. Unless we do something now, the ratters will destroy every gun on IMEC-1, and that will be the end of this battle. Anyone who doesn't want to come can stay behind. I'm sure you'll be useful if any of our fontani make it back.”

We all know he's telling the truth. Someone's got to stop those ratters. And as we look around our platform, it's obvious no one's going to sit this out, not when the rest are about to go out and risk getting killed.

“All right,” Mersh says. “Everyone grab two mines and line up forward side.” He looks over at Spammers. “Spams, you set up the slide gun and cover us.”

The slide gun is one of those auxiliary weapons we keep around for special occasions. It isn't as powerful as the 13mm autos, for example, but it'll work pretty much anywhere and can fire either conventional or ingenic
rounds. I'm expecting Spammers to make a joke or something, but all he does is salute, say, “Yes, sir,” and get right to it.

The rest of us follow Mersh around to the front of our platform and line up with our feet on the flat metal and our heads facing the enemy. The cloud of Valentines is still shooting at us as much as ever, only now instead of being in front of us, it's like they're above, and we're looking up into some stormy sky full of lightning and crazy, swirling suns. The tails from the ratters are like fishing lines, or maybe ropes you could use to climb into the sky.

“Ten seconds,” Mersh says. “Launch on my command.”

We crouch, ready to jump off and fly and just hope we make it to that umbris before something shoots us down. I don't even think about what we'll do if we actually get there. What I do think about is the first time I met Naomi, when she caught me by surprise with that great big pistol of hers. I couldn't tell you why. I just see those old woods with everything wrecked all around, and her big eyes watching me over the barrel of that gun.

“We'll make it, Torro,” Hexi says. She's right beside me, and, somehow, she's still smiling.

I just smile right back as best I can.

“Three!” Mersh yells into our ears. “Two! One! Launch!”

W
e push off together, directly toward the cloud of Valentines. Our assault platform falls away beneath us, and it's like we're in this endless, weightless jump. From all along our net of platforms, other squads rise with us, and suddenly there are people in D-87s all around, thousands of us, first in a flat line, then more like a flock of birds as we separate out a bit, some moving a little faster or slower. I get the feeling we must go on forever, like there's no way old Romeo could kill us all. He sure gives it a try, though.

Here and there through our big flock or whatever, people start spinning out of control, just getting knocked down like they've been hit by an invisible brick or something. Romeo's started aiming for us, and out here in space we've got no cover at all. Our only chance is to make it to that umbris, and from here, it looks like it'll take years to get there.

Every second, more of us are getting hit. Nearby, I see two guys from my platform get stabbed out of the air and go falling away out of sight. I'm about sure I'm next when not so far ahead the empty space lights up with little glowing red speckles—ingenic shells from our slide guns going live. Spammers and everyone back on the platforms must have got them working. I can just make out a kind of deeper red farther on, where the shells must be hitting the Valentine lines. The umbris is coming up fast now, and in no time I'm sliding right past those red speckles. It's like I've dived into some tingling bath. My D-87s come back to life, and, instantly, I feel a whole lot better.

I can finally get a good look at the enemy, too, now that my helmet's working again. The ratters' nests are by far the biggest things in sight, probably a hundred meters across at least. The tails coming off have a kind
of wavy, rounded look, sort of like tentacles, but they're also a bit furry, like they really might be the tails of gigantic rats or something. Flying nearby are a lot of smaller fighters, though they're still bigger than your average miles. Type 4s, probably. They're flattish, like saw blades, and they spin very rapidly, spraying huge shells or whatever that move so fast you can't even see them—or anyway I couldn't until my D-87s started up again.

Spammers and our kiddos with the slide guns are already doing a pretty good job keeping the blade-things busy, and I'm just thinking I should be getting after those nests when Mersh hollers, “Get moving!” right in my ear. I unsling my lazel and set my personal gravity to full fall in the direction of the nearest nest. That should get me there in the shortest time possible with the least chance of getting killed. Most of the other milites around me seem to have the same idea, and it turns out we're all wrong.

Several of them are pretty well ahead, since they didn't stop to look around and like take stock of the battlefield and so forth, and it doesn't take those saw blades long to swing around and start laying into them. They can fire null in addition to their heavy shells, the saw blades can. A few of our guys break up their lazels and use the bucklers to block the incoming fire, and that works real well as long as there's only one saw blade shooting at you. As soon as two come at you from different angles, though, you're pretty much done. I watch at least ten people ahead of me get cut apart, slashes of white-blue just slicing through them. Scraps of D-87s fly past my head, probably with bits of people inside, and I think now's a good time to start like contemplating a change in strategy.

I give up on falling straight to the nest and angle my PG so my body swings to the side and goes tumbling toward one of those huge ratter tails. It's a drop of maybe fifty meters, and I hit hard and almost roll off, grabbing on with both arms until I can stand up. I'm pretty dizzy, but at least no one's shooting at me. I call out to Mersh and the rest of my squad, “Find a tail and land on it! They won't be able to shoot at you without risking cutting off their ratters by accident!”

No one answers, though. I look up the way I came, but I can't see a single person from my squad anywhere. The whole place is a mess, just lousy with saw blades and ratter tails and flashes of null going back and forth and milites everywhere getting completely blued. I'm starting to think my whole squad must be gone when Hexi swings up from underneath
the tail where I'm standing. She shifts her PG, does a little dip, and lands beside me. I don't know what else to say except “Hexi!”

“You always were easy to pick out in a crowd,” she says. Mersh has found us, too, and a bunch of other milites, some from our squad, some not. I'm glad as anything to see them.

There's pretty much only one way to go from here, and that's right down along this tail we're standing on. It's basically a big hairy bridge leading right to one of those nests. The surface is covered in crawly-looking Type 3s, the kind with arms and legs all over the place ready to rip you apart, what we generally call Swarm Tactic Skirmishers, or just skirms. They started bunching up around this tail as soon as we landed, and now they're galloping right toward us.

Hexi and me, we start right in with our lazels, but Mersh and the milites closer to the nest break out their blades and bucklers instead. That really does the trick. The bucklers fend off most of the fire coming from those skirms, and meanwhile everyone else has a clear shot with their lazels. We push our way down the tail, using our PG to stick to it on all sides. There are a lot more skirms down on the nest, rushing to climb up after us, but someone's already shooting them to crap from somewhere up above.

That's when I remember our slide guns. It must be Spammers and everyone back on the platforms helping us out. I turn, expecting to see him there, now that I can use my D-87s to look way out into space, but I can't pick him out in all this big mess of fighting.

“Torro!” Hexi calls. “What are you doing? Let's go!”

Mersh and the rest are already charging toward another herd of skirms. They've all got blades and bucklers out, just hacking away. I pull my blade, too, and follow Hexi, but only after I've checked behind us one more time. The trouble is, the reason I couldn't find Spammers is because where he should have been, there was only a bunch of torn-up platforms and hunks of scrap, bits of armor and empty space.

The skirms certainly aren't pushovers, that's for sure. They've got blades of their own, long, hooked ones that can come scratching out of any one of their eight arms or legs or whatever. Mersh is really getting into it with them, but he isn't so distracted he can't give orders. “Torro! Hexi! See if you can plant a mine in this thing!”

Some of the milites who came with us down the tail are already like attacking the problem, but they aren't making a whole lot of progress. That
weird metal fur we saw on the ratters' tails is all over the nest, too, and it keeps getting in the way. I'd thought it was a trap or something, but it's actually a kind of armor. Every time you take a swing at the nest, some strand of fur or whatever stabs out and knocks your blade away.

Trying to get past the fur gets real annoying real quick, and pretty soon, Hexi and me are both starting to panic. We've figured out we can cut through the fur if one of us gets it to extend and the other slices it from the side, but that only works one strand at a time, and clearing enough space to plant a mine would take about 850 years. And all the time, more skirms are coming, swarming out from the side of the nest. Mersh keeps screaming at us to hurry up. He's starting to sound pretty tired, and I doubt it's from yelling. Finally, Hexi goes a bit berserk. She takes her lazel and starts shooting the side of the nest like crazy, making a bunch of those hairs stand up all at once.

“Do that again!” I shout. She shoots again, and this time I cut through each piece of fur that springs up when she hits it with her lazel. The whole patch comes away with a pretty satisfying scratch.

After that, it's no trouble to cut a hole into the side of the nest. I drop one of my mines through and tell Mersh we've done it. I think we're just in time. There aren't too many of our milites left. Mersh is breathing real hard when he orders us all to get clear so he can null this stupid nest. In this case, getting clear means just launching off into the battle. Not a very safe plan, but better than staying here, I guess.

Hexi and I flip our PG and fall up away from the nest, and about half a second later the place where we'd been standing like collapses in on itself. A pack of skirms comes leaping up after us, but before we can get out our blades, someone shoots them apart from below. Mersh and some other milites are still down there, fighting to get away from the nest. I watch three and then four more jump off into space while Mersh hacks through a couple more skirms, and he's about to launch, too, when one of the skirms buries a blade in his leg. I'm thinking somebody's got to get back there and help him, but at almost the same time, there's a gush of white-blue from inside the nest and part of the thing just kind of crumbles and falls off. A lot of the skirms that'd been chasing us crumble away, too. I don't see many other milites getting away, either. And no Mersh. I try to get him through my helmet, but he won't answer.

“Torro,” Hexi says, sort of hesitantly.

I think she's worried about Mersh, too, so I say, “We'll find him, Hex.” I'm starting to feel pretty queasy, though, like I couldn't really have seen what I just saw. A skirm blade is going to take off a lot more than your leg. “He's out here somewhere.”

“No, Torro, look. The nest.”

The nest wasn't hit quite as bad as I'd thought. There's an ugly, kind of caved-in place where I dropped that mine, but nothing much has happened to the rest. There are still plenty of ratter tails squirming around all over the place. I bet the mine only got one or two of them, if it got any at all.

“It didn't work,” Hexi says. “Torro, we can't leave the nest like that. We have to go back.”

She's right. I mean, like, I know she's right. If we don't do something about this stupid nest, all the ratters at the other ends of those tails are going to be loose on old IMEC-1, messing with our guns and killing everybody.

So we reverse our PG and go back, aiming for the collapsed spot in the side. At least there we won't have to cut through the nest to get another mine in, or that's what we think until we see that silvery fur or whatever is actually growing back. There are still plenty of skirms, too, and when they see us coming, they rush in to meet us, shooting away with those terrible old legs of theirs.

We use our bucklers like umbrellas against the needles of null flying up at us, and land right in the middle of a huge crowd of skirms. They pounce on us immediately, and I start really like regretting the decision to come back. We probably won't make it ten steps, let alone over to the hole we blew in this nest. That's what I'm thinking, anyway, when another squad of milites drops down, sending the skirms spinning.

Actually “squad” probably isn't the best description. There's only four of them. They really lay into those skirms, though. One of them calls to me, “Let us finish your work, pawn,” and I recognize the voice, and the weird accent. When he turns around, I see it's that real scarred, scary-looking old bivvie, Thom. The milites with him must be the other bivvies from his tribe, little Naomi's friends.

Together, the six of us, Hexi and me and the four bivvies, fight our way toward the hole in the nest. It isn't easy, with the skirms hounding after us and the hole getting smaller every second as more of that silvery fur grows back. By the time we get there, all that's left of the damage we did before is a pretty small gap.

Hexi runs over and jams her buckler into the hole to keep it from closing up completely. “Get a mine, Torro!”

I pull the second mine I brought from our platform and slam it down on Hexi's buckler.

“Blast!” old Thom yells. “Set it to blast, boy!”

Hexi says, “He's right! Null will only take out a little piece—we've got to blow it apart!”

The mines we brought can use different types of energy, same as our lazels. Null is usually the best when you want to destroy something, but that didn't work out so good last time. I set the mine to blast instead of null and just hope old Thom knows what he's talking about. Then I kick Hexi's buckler down into the hole.

“Make your move, pawn!” Thom shouts. He's the only one of the bivvies I can still see. Everywhere else is all skirms and blades. I grab Hexi and set my buckler underneath me and blow the mine.

Suddenly, we're way up above the nest, like we've been instantly transported there or something. I think the nest must have ballooned out or maybe in and just thrown us here, because it kind of shudders a few more times, then breaks apart in this terrific explosion. The shock of it knocks me tumbling back, and I lose track of Hexi, like she must go off in some other direction. I can't see her anywhere. I try to steady myself with PG so I can find her, but my D-87s aren't working right. They're slow and heavy, and there's some like yellow cracks in front of my face that make it hard to see straight. When I try and wipe them away, the fingers on my D-87s won't move. They're stuck to some other pieces of armor, what looks like an arm, just hanging there off my suit. Which doesn't make any sense at all. That was the hand that was holding on to Hexi.