Tale of the Thunderbolt (16 page)

“More come every day. Don't forget our people, an' de city folks. We've waiteed for de day of liberation. When Obay make her promeese — ”

“Her prediction, you mean?” Valentine cut in.

“A ‘prediction' from Obay is a promeese, Cryin' Mon. You d' proof.”

They went into a whitewashed brick house at the center of the village's only street, sixty or seventy feet of asphalt flanked by gravel roads. By the shaded windowlight Valentine met the Kernels under a brightly painted ceiling mural of crops and trees and birds and frogs. The owner of the house welcomed them with hugs before she and her family went back to bobbing before Obay. There was an oddly dressed retinue to either side of the oracle. One wore what looked to be the final remnants of a priest's vestments; the other had gold tassels and yellow braiding sewn to the shoulder of a sleeveless green dress army coat.

“Thank you, boys,” Obay said, after recognizing Valentine. She extended a hand. Valentine shook it, touching a heavy ring on her forefinger with a jewel the size of a pea.

He took another look, trying to read the script, as Ahn-Kha engulfed her hand in his long fingers.

“Yale. I would have been class of '23,” Obay explained, sticking out her hand. The knuckles were enlarged with arthritis.

It was a pretty thing, but it looked like a man's. Valentine wasn't sure what to say, so he fell back on what his father used to ask the educated of the Old Order. “What did you study?”

“Pre-law. I buried the needle on my SATs.”

“Essay T's?”

“S. A. Ts. Scholastic aptitude tests.”

Valentine was flummoxed. “You had to do well on those to be allowed to learn? Sounds self-defeating.”

“There's a long answer, but it's not important. Of course, it didn't hurt that my father was a vice president with General Mills. I started as a freshman with a major in Anthropology. Coddled rebellion. Then I got a taste of academics and college politics. I wised up by the end of my sophomore year. I switched to pre-law. With a history minor — I'd always enjoyed it, and you should take your share of fun those years.”

“Never had the opportunity. Unless you count some classes at a shoestring war college. They didn't give out souvenirs.”

Her sons helped her sit down on a bench. The assembly took their seats on chairs ringing the main room of the tiny house. Except for Ahn-Kha. The bench he tried let out such a groan that he shifted his buttocks forward to a comfortable squat with the bench as a backrest.

Obay looked down at her ring. “I was doing an internship in Boston when the Ravies hit. I ended up on a cleanup crew behind a guard unit. Loading bodies. Even martial law was breaking down — it didn't look like there'd be bar exams for a while. I saw the ring on a body — he had a suit worth a good three thousand dollars — and thought, what the hell.”

“Boston's a long way from Jamaica.”

“My father. Pulled every string with every man he'd ever known.”

“Did he make it out with you?”

“He didn't even try. The airport was a nightmare. Gun battles between Boston Police and Massachusetts State Troopers and the National Guard. Nobody had orders. People crying, begging. I saw a man shoot himself right in front of his family.”

She related her story without the shocked, vacant look that Valentine had seen on so many survivors of those days.

“I got flown down here with a bunch of children in a jet with enough fuel for a one-way trip. I guess there was a rumor that Jamaica was Ravies-free. A lot of the kids were sitting two and three to a seat. Babies crying. It was a frightening ride. The bombs were going off by then, and planes were dropping from the electromagnetic pulse. There was an army captain on board. Talked me and the kids through it. We ended up married just before I had my first boy.”

She looked at the man in the vestments. Now that Valentine knew her face, he saw a hint of Obay around the son's eyes.

“Your visions are pretty accurate. A law firm could have used that, predicting a judge's decisions.”

“Oh, that came later. Wasn't something I was born with. Given to me. I suspect you know a few Lifeweavers, too.”

Valentine said nothing.

“One came to Jamaica. He had a small group of men — I suppose they were some kind of Special Forces. A mixture of Americans and British and Cuban soldiers, I think, going by the flags on the uniforms. The visit was brief; he was being chased.”

The light broke through Valentine's doubts.

“I didn't understand much of what he had to say. I never even learned his name. Everyone called him ‘the Brother.' It made him sound like a Mormon or an Amish or whoever that was that called each other that. Then I found out he was more like
The Brother from Another Planet.
He said I was going to be part of a new communications network. A biological one. They had me drink some kind of goop out of a tequila bottle, and I passed out for a few hours. When I came around, the Brother character was speaking in my head. Soon as he saw I was alive and getting his words without him using his mouth, he started glowing and told the rest ‘Obey her.' Pointing at me, you see. Then he and the soldiers left. It made an impression on the kids. Everyone kept looking at me and repeating ‘Obey.' Duane, my captain, had us go into a town in the mountains.

“Whatever he did to me, it didn't quite take, at least in the way you'd think telepathy should work. I get strange images now and then. Visions, pictures — sounds sometimes. Just had an audio last week with a lot of gunfire and explosions. The vision about you, it was a gray ship that seemed to be made of thunderclouds, and I saw your face, clear as I see it now. Your friend, Mr. Ahn-Kha, he was part of the clouds, too, with lightning in his eyes and fingertips.”

“What do you see for the future?”

“Nothing from the Brother. But the men my sons lead will take care of their end, if your ships can help us with the garrison in Kingston.”

“Dey come. Dey come tomorrow, Obay,” Utari said.

“And then what?” Valentine asked.

Obay looked at the ceiling. The island's panoply absorbed her for a moment; then she returned her eyes to Valentine. “A new Jamaica. For all the factions, I hope and pray. With the Specter gone, even the Cockpit Country might see reason.”

“And you?”

Obay played with her ring, twirling it on the shrunken digit between the enlarged knuckles. “Might end up using the old law studies before I die after all. What kind of constitution do you folks operate under there in the Ozarks?”

 

“They're landing now.”

Valentine looked down from his perch on a rooftop water tower at Kingston in turmoil. Two days after the death of the Specter, the
Thunderbolt
and a pair of three-mast clippers sailed into the harbor as though in a naval show. All three ships were filled to overflowing with every willing man of the commodore's who could shoulder a rifle.

Faint booms came up from the docks. The
Thunderbolt
's gun systematically blasted the harbor defenses. The posts were manned by the few troops still obeying orders under the Horsed Police officer. According to the Kernels, a Horsed Police officer named Colonel Hsei had tried to take control of the Specter's organization.

Valentine and Ahn-Kha, through their Kingston contacts, probably knew more about Hsei's struggle to assume the reins than the warlord himself. Formerly in charge of the city's garrison, the colonel managed to keep many of his troops together, even as the Public Police vanished into the countryside. Valentine had to admire Hsei's execution, if not his methods. A storeroom beside the regimental stables held the bodies of rivals and subordinates who failed to agree with his plan for Jamaica's future.

The same grapevine passed word to the inhabitants of Kingston that with the arrival of the ships, the north side of the island would finish the liberation of the south. The sons of Obay guided Valentine and Ahn-Kha to the city, and the Jamaicans filled rooms and streets with men and women eager to meet “the Crying Man” who had delivered them from the Specter. As they moved from village to city, time after time Valentine felt the touch of eager hands, as if physical contact with him somehow guaranteed their freedom.

Now buildings burned, and the clatter of hooves and echoing shots told the tale of the rising city. Ever since Valentine's arrival, machete and club had been matched against horse and gun, but without the Specter's organization and Reapers, Hsei's command had begun to crack. The booming arrival of the
Thunderbolt
and the commodore's flotilla turned confusion into collapse.

Valentine, Ahn-Kha, and a group of armed Jamaicans had occupied what in the late world had been a professional building of some kind. It was three stories of whitewashed brick, with broad balconies servicing the network of rooms inside. Until the Specter's death, it had been a barracks of the Public Police. Valentine chose it for its view of the city and of the main road north out of town. Equally useful for holding up reinforcements or Colonel Hsei's troops, its strategic location demanded occupation with what forces he could organize. The enthusiastic Jamaicans, led by men and women who had sprung seemingly from nowhere, had barricaded the highway before the building and lined the railings of the balconies with mattresses and furniture. Anyone trying to pass along the highway would hit the choke point and come under gunfire at a range that made skill superfluous.

Ahn-Kha looked out across the rooftops from beneath a straw hat and canvas parasol. Despite his fawn-colored fur and thick hide, he suffered from Jamaica's sun more than his bronze-skinned friend. They stood together on a tiny platform running around the edges of a rooftop watertower supplying the barracks.

“And the police, my David? How are they reacting?”

Valentine watched the
Thunderbolt
spit fire from her Oerlikon into a rusted crane, one of the harbor's few strong-points still fighting. A body, ant-size at the distance, plummeted from the tower.

“They're running. Looks like they have a dock secured.
Polaris
and
Vega
are being tied up to the docks — they didn't even have to send in boats. It's almost over.”

“But not for us.”

The Cat turned his gaze to the captain's compound. “It looks like Hsei has seen enough. Two trucks are being loaded up at headquarters. Horses too. Hell, they're firing into the mob again. Wait — yes, they are coming this way. The informants were right — he's going to run north toward the mountain stations. Better get your Grogs to the windows.”

The Golden One picked up his long gun and moved to the roof-access ladder. Valentine watched the column for another minute, just to make certain of its direction. Hsei's men had perhaps been unnerved. The group leaving the barracks was as much of a mob as the Jamaicans hurling rocks from the alleys.

He swung down from the water tower and jumped to the gravel-covered roof, careful to land on his good leg. The work ahead would be bloody; he hoped it would be brief. Allowing Colonel Hsei to escape into the countryside with even a nucleus of armed men might mean trouble for the commodore and the Jamaicans in the days ahead; it would take weeks to organize an occupation of the various stations, forts, and barracks strung out across the Specter's lands. In the meantime, others might rally around the colonel.

Picking up his old Russian-made gun with its drum clip, he hurried down to the first floor. Grinning Jamaicans all around brandished their weapons and called out to him in their local patois. He understood only a phrase or two.

“D' dundus comin', mon?”

“We cut dey bakra asses now!”

Valentine nodded to their officer and went out to the front of the building. He and Ahn-Kha walked the balconies, cutting a serpentine trail down to the first floor, nodding and clapping the Jamaicans on the shoulder. “Keep down and wait for the horn!” he said, over and over again until it became as much of a singsong as their greetings.

He looked out at the barricade from the first floor, where Ahn-Kha's Grogs waited, covering the street from the windows and doors of the front of the building. What had been a parking lot sloped down to the highway. Carts and wreckage had been arranged to force any traffic moving up the road to negotiate a hairpin turn. Valentine wanted the obstacle to look to be the result of accident rather than design, so Hsei would stick his neck well into the trap before it snapped shut.

Valentine knelt behind the walkway barricade and searched southward with his hard ears. He picked up the sound of diesels and hooves. He nodded to Ahn-Kha, who had been walking back and forth in front of his Grogs, grunting out orders as he moved along the sidewalk fronting the shuttered windows. Ahn-Kha picked up a tarnished circular horn, an ancient foxhunting relic from Jamaica's colonial past. It had been gathering cobwebs on the wall of the barracks until one of the Grogs decided it would make an interesting headband.

The first horses reached the barricade, galloping pell-mell up the potholed road. Some fools fired from one of the upper levels, but neither the riders nor the horses took hit or heed. A horse vaulted over the frame of a broken sofa, unseating its rider. Valentine let the others pass and chambered a round in the PPD.

The first of the mass of riders trotted into view, coming up over a rise in the road like ships appearing over the horizon. Behind the clattering riders came the grinding gears of the two trucks and the higher pitched farting of a motorbike. Ahn-Kha barked something to his Grogs.

“Wait for the signal,” Valentine said, loudly enough so it would carry to the balcony above him.