The battle for Ilseville’s outer ring lasts thirteen days. This is how long it takes the Silver Fist to destroy the river gates, swamp the outer city with their soldiers, and fight street to street and house to house until a circle of flame swallows the entire area. Sixty thousand of OctoV’s troops remain outside the inner walls when those gates get locked.
Mostly they’re militia.
All will die.
We know that, the enemy knows that, it takes those trapped a while to catch up. Group after group falls back toward the inner gates expecting to be let in. Some swear and others just accept their fate. Mainly it’s the mercenaries who go down fighting. Given how the Enlightened feel about those who fight for money rather than belief, it’s not a surprising choice.
Their slaughter is viewed by neutral observers and watched with horrified fascination across the known galaxy. Haze patches us between Uplift and U/Free but there’s small difference between their data feeds. Our troops are killed in running fights and bitter last stands; little is added by way of commentary because little is needed.
And the Enlightened are clever. They wait until the afternoon of the second day, when a group of our militia captures and beheads two Silver Fist officers, before launching their most vicious attack.
Over the course of three and a half hours, a single high flier seeds and reseeds the offending section of ghetto with flamefire until the buildings eat themselves and those inside become fragments and ash.
“Do something,” Franc begs Haze.
We have rockets targeting the high fighter, but most of our batteries are busy protecting the inner city, and anyway nothing we own can eat its way past the fighter’s defenses. As if to prove this, a rocket explodes impotently, and the high fighter casually flies through the explosion, fire dripping from the rear edge of each wing.
“Please,” she begs.
Hunched over his slab, Haze shakes his head. Tears are rolling down his face, which is thinner and older than when the slaughter started. “I can’t,” he says. “I don’t have that level of power.”
“Power?” says Neen.
“Control,” he says, amending his words hastily. I leave them to it.
Have you ever stayed drunk for six weeks? Believe me, it takes real effort. Hot Bar Wild is gone, obviously enough. It’s that black patch of ash down near the river’s edge, between those two patches of ash that used to be warehouses.
I can go down there if I want, in theory at least, because a new truce has just been announced, and it’s going to last just long enough to take us all to the edge of deep winter.
That’s probably called strategy by the U/Free.
As I said, there’s a Hot Bar Wild in every city, and if you get really lucky or the city is really scuzzy, you’ll probably find two, or three, or four…
The SIG and I go hunting for alcohol.
We find it first at a cellar bar behind the cathedral, inhabited by Ilseville’s lowlife. They glower and glare, but once I put my gun on the table and my gold behind the bar they decide it would be simpler to leave me alone. And I’m impressed: No one even gets hurt while we’re reaching this decision.
I’d share the colonel’s supplies, but that offer he made me of a place on Ion’s ship nags at the back of my mind. So much so that I waste some days in the bar just wondering whether or not to kill him.
His offer and the explosion could have been a coincidence. But then as the gun reminds me, I could have been a career sergeant in the legion with a long and impressive record behind me, Franc could have kept her knife use for the kitchen, Haze could have been born virus-free, and Shil could have fallen for my sophisticated charms.
We leave Maria out of it, because she’s normal. In fact, we can’t really work out what she’s doing with us in the first place.
“She opened the door,” says the SIG. “Remember?”
Thinking about it, I do…
On the third day Neen tracks me down.
“Sir?”
If I really concentrate, I can see only one of him. “Sergeant.”
He wants me to return to the house. I tell him it got burned and he tells me he means the new one. I send him away anyhow.
The gun and I move bars. Frederico’s is above a machine shop, backs onto a laundry, and is approached through a particularly unsavory railway arch. It takes Neen five days to find me and he comes back every day for weeks. He even tries staying to drink with me, but I tell him drunks are boring and he’d be better off staying at home to fuck Maria.
We’re now halfway through the new truce. Forty-two days of enforced stalemate while trained negotiators shuttle between Colonel Nuevo and the Enlightened general.
It’s going to fail. Everyone in the bar nods when I tell Neen this. It’s going to fail, because these things always fail. You’d think the U/Free would have learned to stop trying by now. Everyone nods at that, too…
The final bar is built into the city’s inner walls. You have to know someone in the previous bar to discover that this bar exists, which is fine, because by now I know pretty much everyone in the previous bar. They’re survivors, like me.
A pimp called Vice-which may or may not be his real name-introduces me to the madam. An old ex-militia sergeant, given to wearing silk dresses and too much rouge.
Leave your gun at the door, reads a notice. Apparently it was put up as a joke. A lot of strange things go on at Madame Jess’s. There are racks, whips and chains, and a room with a plunge tub so cold it freezes around you if you sit inside it for too long.
This isn’t surprising, since snow now hides the blackened ruins beyond our windows and helps keep the corpses from stinking. Ice has closed the Ilseville River, and the Silver Fist are using the truce to build better camps and reinforce their positions. Enough of the customers at Madame Jess’s think the U/Free favor the Enlightened for me not to bother to disagree.
The madam even has a pair of nude contortionists to entertain her customers. I think they’re the two from Hot Bar Wild, but that could just be the alcohol, or maybe nude contortionists are a type. And it’s weird: You always think you want to meet a woman who can get her knees behind her ears, but when you do, it’s like having sex with a sea anemone.
“Visitors,” announces my gun.
So I help the contortionist untangle herself and struggle back into my trousers. She leaves with a gold coin and a smile that lasts almost as long as it takes her to reach my door. I don’t know what she says, but Franc is grinning sourly as she comes into my chamber.
“Nice,” she says, taking a look at the rack and chains. I’m looking for the irony, but she seems to mean it, and that makes me wonder a bit about home life with the Hazes of this world, or her world, or whichever world is appropriate.
“Drunk as a skunk,” the gun says.
“Join me,” I suggest.
Franc shakes her head. “The truce is about to end.”
It seems I’m a week out, not that it matters. My metabolism means staying drunk takes real effort and sobriety comes all too soon. Only that’s still not quick enough for Franc.
“You’re needed.”
“The colonel?”
She spits with great accuracy, hitting dead center on a floor tile. Her opinion of Colonel Nuevo made clear, she helps me to my feet.
“There’s a cold tub next door,” says the SIG.
I go in, trousers and all. I must help somehow, because looking at Franc it doesn’t seem possible she could maneuver me over the edge on her own. The water is freezing, and feels even colder when she ducks my head under and holds me down for a couple of seconds.
“You stink,” she says.
“You stink, sir.”
“Ignore him,” says my gun.
Haze has locked himself in the cellar with long loops of copper wires nailed to our side of the door. The wire begins and ends at a fat-wheel battery, which sits on bricks below one hinge.
When Franc finally persuades Haze to release the door, I discover he’s nailed similar loops of wire to the walls on both sides of the stairs. My arm brushes one of the wires, and sparks flare in the blackness. It’s dark, but I don’t need light to know he’s crying.
I strike a match all the same.
Hollow eyes stare at me. It’s like looking into the face of death.
“We need to talk.”
He shakes his head, closes his eyes. I want to shake Haze or slap him, but that’s just my hangover arriving. Anyway, I’m scared of driving him deeper, and I’ve just realized something else.
“You’ve lost your ability to read my mind?”
Whatever he says is below the edge of my hearing, and my hearing is good. He points to a candle, so I light it with my last match. Then he points to a scrap of paper and an old-fashioned pencil. A design for the wires on the wall is scratched on one side. It’s been drawn and redrawn half a dozen times.
Haze holds out his hand.
I give him the paper, then the pencil.
They’re looking for me. His writing is shaky, far worse than the writing next to his drawings of the wires, and that is shaky enough.
“Who is?”
Everyone…
I take a deep breath. This boy saved our lives when he downed a high fighter before it could flame our trenches for a second time. And with that thought I have my answer. “The Enlightened?”
Yes, writes Haze.
“In here?” I tap my head.
He nods, but I already knew the answer.
“We’re going hunting,” I tell my gun.
“About time.” The SIG is sulking because I’ve been drunk and it’s been bored, but it forgives me when I let it select its own ammunition.
“Ceramic hollow point.”
I load a clip with the right shells.
“Flechette.”
The gun doesn’t really like flechette, but we both know they’re useful and anyway the tiny carbon darts take up so little room.
“Overblast, explosive, incendiary…”
I alternate the shells in a single clip, four of each, and slam the final clip into the SIG’s handle. And then, wrapping myself in my coat, I sling a pulse rifle across my back, stuff the SIG diabolo into my belt, and check that I’m carrying a dagger, throwing spikes, and my laser blade.
No one tries to stop me as I make my way across the inner city…My face is known to most Death’s Head officers, and the others take one look at my scowl and decide I must have official business.
“Sven.” Colonel Nuevo stares at me through the bottom of a glass. “I’ve been wondering where you were.”
“Sir…”
We’re in his bunker, because this isn’t an official meeting. So I finally get to see his famous blast walls after all. More blocks of gold than you can imagine. Utterly useless, providing an illusion of protection. We both know that a direct rocket strike would wipe Ilseville Bank off the map, strong room or not.
“I’ve got to get out.”
“Haven’t we all.” He smiles. “Not going to happen, though. Is it?”
“I mean…I’ve got to be allowed into the outer city.”
The colonel pours himself another glass. On his table are a bottle, a glass, a pistol, and a map of the inner city with dozens of pencil lines dividing it into small squares. It looks like he’s been playing one of those games where you block out every hit and put a cross for every miss. No one can have any doubt about who is winning.
“Want to know how many buildings we have left?”
I shake my head.
“Very wise,” says Colonel Nuevo. “No point depressing yourself. Now tell me why I should give you permission to leave.”
“Don’t want to leave,” I tell him. “Just go into the outer city.”
“You don’t want to leave?” He shrugs. “You’re weirder than I thought. Everybody else is desperate to get out of here.”
This is going to be more difficult than I thought.
“The enemy have food,” I say. “And weapons. Okay, not as many as they’d like, but more than us. I want to hit a couple of their dumps, cause some damage before they have a chance to get stuck into us again. And I’m sick of being cooped up in here. I want to kill some Enlightened.”
His eyebrows rise.
“As many Enlightened as I find.” For a second I consider telling the colonel about Haze being NewlyMade, then decide not to complicate the issue.
“The Silver Fist are preparing an attack,” he says.
“Soon,” I agree. “While the ice still means they can cross the river without needing pontoons or bridges.”
“Did I say that?”
I shake my head. “Worked it out for myself.”
Colonel Nuevo raises his glass. “We’ll make a proper officer of you yet.”
“God forbid.”
He smiles sourly. “Let’s pretend I didn’t hear that.” Pulling a sheet of paper from a drawer, the colonel hunts for his official seal and finds it where he found the paper. He scrawls his signature across the bottom and seals it.
“Write your own orders,” he says. “Get killed, see if I care. I can always find another ADC.”
I salute, smartly enough to be insulting.
His comments about my parentage, manners, and lack of anything resembling breeding follow me from his bunker, leaving the captain and lieutenant in the next room wondering what is funny enough about this to make me grin.
By the time night arrives, I’m as sober as the silver moon that hides behind scudding clouds above my head, and my hangover is little more than a faint echo. On the dot of 2100 a dozen mortars arrive from across the river to celebrate the end of the truce, but they explode where mortars have already exploded and the rubble they destroy is worth nothing anyway.
The streets beyond my house are silent as I stamp my way through freshly fallen snow. A militia patrol catch me in their torches, see my uniform, and apologize. We salute each other and I walk on, moving toward a pump station with a heavy lock on its doors.
I’ve been watching a sector beyond our wall all evening. The houses are expensive, used by senior Silver Fist and members of the Enlightened. A house two streets back has a three-braid, while a house on a square behind has another. They’ll do for a start.
According to the map in Colonel Nuevo’s office, a tunnel runs from the pump house to a substation in the outer city. I’m about five minutes away from finding out if that’s true. Slashing away the lock, I take a deep breath and steady myself. When I walk out of the substation only one thing must be on my mind…
Killing Enlightened, plus anything else that gets in my way.
Silver Fist engineers have welded a grid across their end of the tunnel, so I wrap fire string around the bars, debate stepping back, and decide a falling grid will make too much noise for me to take the risk.
Molten metal splashes my face like tears.
On the other side is a long ladder rising into darkness. It leads where I need it to lead.