Once you get a cycle of revenge and retribution going … "
"Exactly." The new arrival nodded approvingly. "That's what's so interesting about it. Commandante Alpha is an idea. To dispose of him the PEO will have to do more than simply point out that he does not exist."
"Huh?" Frank heard a distant noise like the tide coming in; an impossibility, for they were more than three hundred kilometers from the sea, and besides, Newpeace had no moons large enough to raise tides. He pulled out his keyboard and tapped out a quick note to himself. "Who did you say you were?"
"I didn't." The woman stared at him. It was not a friendly expression. "You are Frank the Nose Johnson, correct?"
Something about her manner made him tense. "Who's asking?"
She ignored the question. "And you are Alice Spencer, so you must be Thelma Couper. Three little piggies, warbloggers united. It's your good luck that you're all very lazy little piggies, up here on the roof this historic morning rather than down on the streets with the unsuspecting mob. If you're smart little piggies, you'll stay here and not try to leave the building.
Relax, watch the fireworks, drink your beer, and don't bother trying to get an outside line. I'll come for you later."
Alice grabbed hold of Frank's arm, painfully hard. He hadn't even noticed that he'd begun to move toward the stranger. "Who the fuck are you?" he demanded.
The woman ignored him, instead turning back to the staircase. "See you around," she called over her shoulder, a mocking smile on her face. Alice loosened her grip on Frank's elbow. She took two steps toward the stairwell, then froze. She slowly spread her arms and stepped backwards, away from the steps.
"What—"
"Don't," Alice said tightly. "Just don't. I think we're under house arrest."
Frank looked round the open doorway leading down to the penthouse.
"Hey, freak! Get back! Didn't you hear the boss-woman?"
Frank got. "Shit!"
"My thoughts exactly." Alice nodded. "Y'know what? I think they want witnesses. Just far away enough not to smell the tear gas."
Frank found that his hands were shaking. "That cop—"
"Smart guy." It was Thelma; she sounded mocking, but maybe it was simply nerves—his or hers, didn't matter. "How's he armed?"
Alice seemed mostly unaffected. "He's got body armor. Some kind of riot gun." She paused. "Shit! He's in blue. Did you see that, Frank?"
Frank nodded. "So?"
"So, cops hereabouts wear black. Blue means army."
"Oh. Oh!"
The noise outside was getting louder.
"Does that sound like a demonstration to you?" asked Thelma.
"Could be the big one, for the land protesters they locked up last week."
Alice started dictating names to her chunky plastic disposaphone—she'd had it for only three weeks, since she arrived on Newpeace, but the digits were already peeling off the buttons on its fascia—then frowned. "It keeps saying 'network congested.' Fuck it. You guys? Can you get through to anyone?"
"I can't be arsed trying," Thelma said disgustedly. "It's a setup. Leastways we're supposed to survive this one long enough to file our reports and get out. I think."
Frank looked at his own phone: it blinked its display at him in electronic perplexity, locked out of the network. He shook his head, unsure what to believe. Then there was a thud from behind him. He turned and saw that someone had come out of the stairwell and fallen over, right at the top.
There was blood, bright on the concrete. It was Phibul, the small guy from Siam who was booked in one floor down. Frank knelt beside him. Phibul was breathing fast, bleeding messily from his head. "You!" Frank looked up and found himself staring up the barrel of a gun. He froze. "Get this sack of shit outa my face. You show your head, you bettah pray I don' think you doalie."
Frank licked his lips; they felt like parchment. "Okay," he said, very quietly.
Phibul groaned. The guard took a step back, servos whining at knee and ankle. The gun barrel was flecked with red.
"Nothing happen' here," said the guard. "You unnerstand?"
"I—I understand." Frank blinked, humiliated and angry, but mostly just frightened. The guard took another step back, down the stairs, then another.
Frank didn't move until he was out of sight at the bottom. Phibul groaned again and he looked down, then began fumbling in his pockets for his first-aid kit.
The surf-on-a-beach noise was joined by a distant hammering drone: the sound of drums and pipe, marching with the people.
"Let me help, dammit!" Frank looked up as Thelma knelt beside him. "Shit."
She gently peeled back one of Phibul's eyelids, then the other. "Pupillary reflex is there, but he's gonna have some concussion."
"Fucker whacked him over the head with his gun barrel."
"Could be worse," she said tersely. "C'mon. Let's get him over to the sun lounger."
A couple of pops and whines came from the edge of the roof—Alice was sending bird-sized drones spinning through the air to orbit overhead, circling for perspective shots taking in the entire square. Frank took a deep breath, smelling hot blood, Thelma's sweat—surprisingly rank—and the stink of his own fear. A hot tangy undernote of dust rose from the soon-to-be-baking surface of the plaza. "I've got an open channel," Alice called over her shoulder. "One of the local streams is relaying some kind of federal announcement. Do me a favor, Frank, get it out of my face. Transcribe and summarize."
"Okay." Frank accepted the virtual pipe, let it stream through the corner of his left eye as he watched Thelma efficiently cut up a wound dressing and gum it down on the mess of blood and thin hair atop Phibul's head. Despite the fear he was glad they were facing this together—not alone and frightened, locked in their rooms or in a police cell. The distant surf had become an approaching roar of voices. Alice threw some output at him from two of her birds, and he shuffled them round until he could see the back of his own head, kneeling alongside the drained swimming pool next to an injured reporter and a busy woman. "This is—hey, everybody!"
He tweaked the stream over onto one of Alice's repeater screens. There was a background of martial music (which hereabouts sounded like classical heavy metal) and a pompous guy in midnight blue, lots of technicolor salad on his pest, sitting uneasily behind a desk. "In view of the state of emergency, the Peace Commission has instructed all loyal citizens to stay indoors wherever possible. In the affected cities of Samara and Redstone, a curfew came into effect as of 2600 hours yesterday. Anyone outdoors in the region of Greater Samara and Metropolitan Redstone must seek shelter immediately. Assembly in groups of more than four individuals is forbidden and, in accordance with the Suppression of Terrorism Regulations, Peace Enforcement units will use lethal force if they consider themselves to be under threat—"
Thelma stood up. "I've got to get a channel off-world," she said tensely.
"You guys up to helping me?"
"How do you propose to do that?" Alice asked mildly, turning round. She was tearing repeater glasses rather than using optic implants—a stupid retro affectation, in Frank's view—and they cast a crazy quilt of colored light across her eyes. "Didn't you hear? We're being routed around. If you try to crack their security, they'll probably point some of their infowar assets your way—"
"I've got a causal channel in my luggage," Thelma confessed, looking scared but determined. "It's on the second floor. If we could get past laughing boy downstairs—"
"You've got your own causal channel?" Frank asked, hope vying with disbelief.
"Yeah, one that goes straight home to Turku via a one-hop relay in Septagon. No worries." She turned her hands palms up. "Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies. But if I can't get a secure handshake with it, it's not a lot of use, is it?"
"What do you need?" Alice asked, suddenly intent. Frank focused on her expression in a sudden moment of scrutiny: eyes widening, cheekbones sharp under dark skin, breath speeding—
"I need the thing physically up here, so I can handshake with it. I didn't know we were going to be bottled up here when—" She shook her head in the direction of the stairwell.
"How big is it?" Alice demanded.
"Tiny—it's the second memory card in my camera." She held her thumb and forefinger apart. "Looks just like a normal solid-state plug. Blue packaging."
"Your camera doesn't do real time?" Frank asked.
"I've seen it and it does; it's got local memory backup against network outages," Alice said tersely. "Let me guess. You've got the channel in your camera so you can bypass local censorship, shoot in real time, and have the outtake saved straight to your editor's desk? That's got to be costing someone an arm and a leg. All right, this camera is where, exactly?"
"Room hundred and seventeen, floor two. Corner window with a balcony."
"Hmm. Did you leave the balcony door open?"
"I think so—why?"
Alice looked over the waist-high safety wall, then backed away from the edge. "I'm not climbing down there. But a bird—hmm. Think I've got a sampler head left. If it can eject the card … you want me to have a go?
Willing to stake half your bandwidth to me if I can liberate it?"
"Guess so. It's got about six terabits left. Fifty-fifty split." Thelma nodded.
"How about it?"
"Six terabits—" Frank shook his head in surprise. He hated to think how much it must have cost to haul those milligrams of entangled quantum dots across the endless light years between here and Turku by slower-than-light star-wisp. Once used they were gone for good, coherence destroyed by the process that allowed them to teleport the state of a single bit between points in causally connected space-time. STL shipping prices started at a million dollaros per kilogram-parsec; it was many orders of magnitude more expensive than FTL, and literally took decades or centuries of advance planning to set up. But if it could get them a secure, instantaneous link out onto the interstellar backbone nets …
"Yeah, let's try it," said Alice. The noise from beyond the balcony was getting I louder.
Frank saw that Alice was already rooting through her bag of tricks. She surfaced with a translucent disc the size of her hand, trailing short tentacles that disquietingly resembled those of a box jellyfish. "I think this should do the trick."
"Is it strong enough?" Thelma asked edgily. "If that thing drops it, we'll never—"
"It'll do," Alice called. She flipped it upside down and coupled it to its small propane tank. "With you in a minute, just as soon as I've gassed it up."
"Okay."
Phibul groaned again, then groaned louder; Frank turned and knelt by him.
"Easy, man. Easy. You're going to be all right. Phibul?"
"My—" Phibul tried to raise one hand. Frank caught it, torn between sympathy and a strong urge to go and take a look over the parapet at the plaza. The crowd noise was enormous. Alice had stopped tracking her airborne birds, and they'd wandered off-station; Frank had a dizzying, unstable view down side streets, watching a sea of heads flowing down the Unity Boulevard, then across the roofline of a bank to another road, where boxy gray vehicles were moving purposefully—
"Alice!" he shouted, sitting up: "Don't launch it!"
Alice looked at him abstractedly as she flipped the trigger on her tripod and sent the discus spinning into the air above the rooftop. "What did you say?"
she called, and for a desperate moment Frank thought it meant that everything would be all right, that the gray-painted vehicles and the brightly spinning disc and the sunburst flashes in the corner of his eye didn't mean anything. But the window in his left eye disappeared, all the same. The laser beam skybounced from the antimissile battery to the fighting mirror above the bank building was invisible to the naked eye, and the fighting mirror sure didn't care about journalistic credentials or, indeed, who owned the recce drones floating high above the city. All it knew about was friend, enemy, and counterbattery fire. "Take cover!" Frank yelled, just as the top of Alice's head vanished in a spray of red mist with a horrible popping sound, like an egg exploding in a microwave oven.
For a minute or so Frank blanked. There was a horrible noise, a screeching roar in his ears—blood on his hands, blood on his knees, blood everywhere, an ocean to Phibul's dried-up creek. He was dizzy and cold and the hand holding his didn't seem to help. It seemed to want to let go. Alice in the bar downstairs. Alice explaining the facts of life to him after bribing a government official, joking about the honeymoon suite when they moved in.
Alice flying drones over the cityscape far below, spotting traffic, spotting likely hot spots with a look on her face like—
There was shouting beyond the balcony. Shouting, and a grinding metallic squeal he'd heard before, down below. Alice was dead and he was stranded with a dried-up swimming pool, a stranger from Turku, and no way to make the fuckers pay. No real-time link.
"You can't do anything for her." There was a hand on his shoulder, small and hard—he shook it loose, then pushed himself to his knees dizzily.
"I know," he heard someone else say. "I wish—" His voice cracked. He didn't really know what that person wished anymore: it wasn't really relevant, was it? He hadn't been in love with Alice, but he'd trusted her; she was the brains of the operation, the wise older head who knew what the hell to do. This wasn't supposed to happen. The head of mission wasn't supposed to die in the field, brains splattered all over the roof by—
"Keep down," Thelma whispered. "I think they're going to start now."
"Start?" he asked, shivering.
A hush fell across the square, then the noise of the crowd redoubled. And there was another sound; a pattering, like rain falling onto concrete from a clear blue sky, accompanied by a crackling roar. Then the screams. "Alice was right," said Thelma, shuddering and crouching down below the parapet.
Sweating and whey-faced, she looked the way Frank felt. "It's the season for bullets."
Below them, in the packed dusty square before the government buildings, the storm drains began to fill with blood.