The Desert of Stars (The Human Reach) (9 page)

At a cross-street about fifty meters ahead, a bloodied man
in an olive jacket appeared, running at a full sprint, crossing from right to
left in front of them. Others in similar uniforms followed, scattering as they
went. One turned and threw his baton in the direction he came from, then ran
on.

A mob followed: hundreds of people, in the moment of
frenzied transition from a demonstration into a riot. Signs dropped to the
ground, and a march became a charge. Rocks flew at the fleeing paramilitaries.

Gunshots marked the riposte: Thumping from the heavy
gunships, and a staccato chatter from police semi-automatics. A cluster of
people in view fell, and the mob screamed and wavered. Runners broke from the
main body, and the mass spread out onto the broad avenue, trying to get away
from the shooters, moving toward Neil and Gomez’s car.

“Go back! Go back!” Gomez shouted. Neil pulled into a
U-turn, but the Honda turned wide and ended up pointing at a parked van. He hit
reverse, finished the two-point turn, but the mob was on them, engulfing the
car, sweeping around it like a school of fish fleeing from a predator.

Frustrated and tasting a little fear, Neil saw himself in
negotiation with the mob. He pressed the accelerator, a declaration of his power,
and the car surged forward.
Let us go, and I won’t run over you.

But the pressing crowd took no notice. Bodies bumped into
the car.
He gunned the engine again, hitting someone in the hip.
I’m
not making progress
. A woman knocked against the passenger side door,
shouting.

Gomez, disgusted, produced a handgun, lowered the window
halfway, and shot her in the shoulder. The pistol’s retort echoed through the
car, and the woman screamed, falling backward onto the street.

Gomez reached out of the window, pointed the gun at the sky and
fired three times. Somehow the crowd took notice, and gave the car some space.

“What the hell?” Neil said, more out of shock at her
audacity than anything else. He revved the engine again. The crowd parted, and
they were free.

“She’ll live,” Gomez muttered.

One street away, they raced by some paramilitaries jogging
behind a pair of wheeled armored vehicles. Another block, and they reached some
civilian police placing their cars nose-to-nose to close the street.

A white-gloved, white-belted officer flagged down their car.
Neil lowered his window, and the cop leaned in.

“
Diplomáticos estadounidenses,”
Neil said. He hit a
series of buttons on his handheld to transmit his credentials.

The cop nodded, stepped back, and another policeman pointed
his handheld at their car.

It made an unhappy noise.

Every cop in view turned their way. The first cop put his
hand on his white holster, but he did not draw his weapon.

The gray cloud from the drone,
Neil remembered.
Nanotransmitter
tags.
They were used to mark people who participated in unsanctioned public
assemblies; police could later scan them to determine if they had taken part.
They stuck tight to clothes and hair, often tighter than normal bathing could
wash away, and they broadcasted until their power supplies failed.

Gomez tensed.
Is she going to shoot our way out of here,
too?
Neil wondered.
Is she that crazy?

The first cop leaned in again, his eyes alert.

“Were you taking part in the demonstration?” he said in
Spanish.

“No,” Neil said. “We were caught in it. We were lucky to get
away.”

The cop retreated again. His hand went to his ear; an
officer was calling him. More nods, now at the unseen commander, punctuated by
one-word responses Neil could not hear. Then a white-gloved wave, and the police
cars parted, and they were on their way back to the consulate.

Near Poznan, Europa, en route to Moscow, Russia, Earth

They had taken the train from Paris so Senator Gregory
could stop and meet with local ministers along the way. Warsaw was the next destination;
the Polish government was about as pro-U.S. as anyone within the European
continental commonwealth, but it didn’t have nearly the heft to change foreign
policy. After that, Moscow.

The train car was exclusively for the American delegation;
at the moment, everyone was reclined and asleep, and dawn was a few hours away.
Donovan’s dreams were a gray-green mesh of images of civilians killed by the
war, punctuated by sounds of kinetic bombardment that were, in reality,
reinterpretations of Trip Bell’s erratic snoring.

His brain further tried to incorporate the ring chime in his
ear, emanating from a tiny speaker that received transmissions from his
handheld, but another part of his brain recognized the sound as something important
from the real world, a call from Langley. Donovan awoke.

“Yes?” He replied, muffling his voice with his hand to avoid
waking the others.

“Jim, it’s Sonya. New orders.”

“Go ahead.”

“Our people in Moscow have told us the Russians are going to
turn you down, as we expected. So we’re going to break you off from the
senator’s delegation before you cross the border and their security folks get a
good look at you. Get off at Warsaw, and fly to Astana. Your contacts will meet
you there.”

Kazakhstan?
“What’s the mission?”

“We’re going to try to convince the Russians what their best
interests are,” she said cryptically.

Donovan grunted. “Sonya, you just woke me up to tell me
something you could have messaged me instead. Please don’t play games with me
like I’m one of your rookies. This is a secure channel; if you can say what
you’ve said already, you can tell me the mission.” It was a harsh way to speak
to his nominal boss, but Sonya needed Donovan more than he needed her – at
least, if she was going to continue to be promoted.

Sonya relented. “All right. Astana is just a waystation
where you can meet your contact and pick up your travel passes. You’re headed
to Siberia, fully undercover. The Chinese guest workers there are getting
restive again, demanding crazy things like heat and steady paychecks. The more
noise they make, the more Russia and China are forced to deal with it, and each
other.”

Donovan thought it over. “That’s not a bad idea. We’ll
assist the miners in an uprising, and the Russians will send in the troops. The
Chinese will react to protect their citizens, making the Russians come running
to us. But how does a
bakgwei
like me fit in?”

“Given the Hans know who you are, and we don’t have time for
facial reconstruction, we’re going to have you run some of the kids and keep an
eye on the Russian reaction.”

“All right, but this is my last one, Sonya. You agreed that
there would be no more fieldwork for me, and now you’re throwing me back out
there. No more, understand? If Senator Gregory wants to keep playing globetrotting
diplomat, he can do it without me.”

Sonya sighed. “Yes, Jim. There are very few who are better
at this sort of thing than you, and most of them aren’t on Earth right now, but
I promise this is it.”

As good as I’ll get,
Donovan thought. “Now, who’s my
contact in Astana?”

“Fairchild. He requested you for this one.”

Gardiner’s back on Earth?
They had last parted months
ago, not on bad terms, but with a promise to steer clear of one another.

We don’t want to arouse suspicion.

CIUDAD EL TRIUNFO, GUADALUPE – Dancing beneath the
light of two suns and three moons, colonists celebrated the settlement’s first
year with a raucous festival that drew three quarters of the planet’s
population – amounting to roughly 900 people. At a distance of more than 54
light-years from Earth, Guadalupe is humanity’s most far-flung colony; its
settlement by a coalition of Latin American and Caribbean nations is being
hailed as a model of international cooperation. Pressure is mounting from a
number of governments, however, for the colony to begin rapid expansion;
opponents say the colony needs more time to establish itself before accepting
an influx of new immigrants.

Near Sycamore, Sequoia Continent, Kuan Yin

Vincennes
was far too distant to help Rand and the
others locate the guerrilla base, which was several days walk from Sycamore.
Instead, they communicated with the other Americans via nervous bursts of
transmissions, not on the planetary internet, but directly between their
radios. The distrust was necessary – neither side could be certain the other wasn’t
the Chinese playing games. Markers were left and located, and eventually a sergeant,
a corporal and a private met them in plain sight.

“You Lieutenant Castillo?” the sergeant said in a
less-than-deferential tone.

“That’s me,” Rand confirmed.

“Staff Sergeant Tim Ruiz. We should go. The Hans have been
putting more drones in the air. We lost a captain to one last week.”

“Lead the way.”

It was a five-klick hike to the base, and they didn’t talk
much en route. As they walked, Rand spied a couple of poorly concealed,
remote-controlled machine gun emplacements and wondered at the wisdom of
putting hardware out in the open like that.

“Sergeant, who’s in charge at the cache?” he whispered to
Ruiz.

“That’s complicated, sir,” Ruiz answered.

Great,
Rand thought. “Don’t tell me the captain’s
death means you are out of officers.”

“No, we have plenty, sir. But, well, things are in flux. We
had a recent arrival, who outranks us all, but she’s in a bad way. She’ll want
to see you, when we get there, sir.”

“All right,” Rand looked at Ruiz’s fatigues; he still had a
few patches on it. “You were with the buck-twenty-nine?” The 129th
Heavy
Infantry Brigade had been based in Sycamore and was overrun during the initial
Chinese invasion.

“Yes, sir, Special Forces, a Paladin driver. Though my suit
don’t work no more, so I’m light infantry, just like everyone else.” He paused.
“We’re close, now.”

They emerged into an alpine meadow, the sort of place one might
take a daylong hike to discover. Blue and red wildflowers ran riot, and Rand
spied a wide creek meandering through a thicket of quaking aspens.

“Nice spot to hole up,” Aguirre said. “Plenty of fresh
water.”

Ruiz snorted. “Yeah, just don’t drink that without treating
it first.”

“What, you guys can’t handle a little dysentery?”

“Not dysentery. Look, how do you think we keep the lights
on?”

“Solar?”

“Nope, solar’s out, wind’s out – the capture platforms are
too conspicuous.”

“Pebble-bed reactor?” Rand put in. “We use those for our
surface-to-orbit lasers.”

“Nice try, but no. Fission puts out enough xenon that they
could find us.”

Violet Kelley spoke for the first time since they met Ruiz.
“Geothermal.”

“That’s right.”

”You guys hiding in some kind of mine?”

“Good guess, but no. Home is a network of old lava tubes.
This part of the continent is riddled with them. Water’s too full of sulfur to
drink straight up; you’ll smell it when we get closer.”

They reached the entrance ten minutes later. It was a
five-thousand-year-old hole in the ground, created after a lava flow bubbled
too close to the surface. They climbed down a rope ladder, and, for the first
time in more than a year
,
Rand, Aguirre, Lopez and Kelley were safe
among friendlies.

A squad of well-armed sentries was posted near the entrance.
A few gave casual welcome-to-the-party salutes in Rand’s direction.

They walked about fifty meters down the main shaft, and the
tubes branched and branched again. Well away from the entrance, artificial
lighting colored the brown-and-silver rock a wan blue.

“Bathrooms are that way,” Ruiz said, pointing in one
direction. “You can hose yourself off there, or if you want a bath there are
some hot springs about a klick away.” He pointed in the other direction down
the tube. “Stores are that way.” As they walked, Rand spied two women skinning
an elk in one chamber.

“Fresh meat tonight,” Ruiz said, smiling for the first time.
“That’ll be a nice switch. I thought we’d wiped out the herd.”

The sergeant waved to a corporal, who escorted Aguirre and
Lopez to some quarters. Rand felt some fellow-hetero-male sympathy for Aguirre,
who had taken up with Lopez more than a year ago; he thought it would be
unlikely the base had enough individual chambers for them to share space as
they had for some time, moving from one abandoned farmhouse to another.

The four of us have been together so long. But things are
changing now. What are they going to do with three out-of-work artillery
operators freshly arrived from the south? And what are they going to do with
the NSS commando who isn’t within their chain-of-command?

They came to another chamber, the base’s makeshift clinic.
Ruiz led Rand and Kelley to a curtained-off corner.

Rand tried not to grimace when the sergeant parted the
curtain.

Colonel Regina Foster, the highest-ranking free American officer
on Kuan Yin, lay on a bed inside. A white sheet covered her torso and abdomen.
Her legs were blackened by burns from an orbital laser strike; her right arm
and the right side of her face were bubbles of red flesh. She was reclined and
awake; a mechanical arm kept a handheld suspended in the space above her.

Her alert eyes turned to Rand, Kelley and Ruiz; she issued a
strained sigh, the sort of noise only someone in deep and constant pain can
produce.

“New arrivals, Tim?” she croaked.

“Yes, ma’am.” He looked at Rand.

Rand saluted crisply. “Second Lieutenant Rand Castillo, leader,
Third Platoon, Bravo Battery, 34th Brigade. Arriving with two survivors from my
SDA unit, ma’am, and an, um, irregular, formerly of the Marine Corps.”

Foster’s eyes flicked to Kelley.

“My name is Violet.” Rand picked up an edge of disdain in
her voice, a mimicking of the sort of voice a child might use when introducing
herself to a class. Kelley did that when she was pissed.

But if Colonel Foster picked up Kelley’s sarcasm, she
ignored it. “
Vincennes
told us you were coming. Castillo, you’ve done
well, so I’m going to field-promote you to a brevet captain. That will put you tenth
in the chain of command here. We’ll give you a combat unit and include your
people in it.”

Rand had been on his own for so long that he had almost
stopped thinking about rank and promotion. “Thank you, ma’am,” he stammered.
I’m
back in the military hierarchy. Not sure I like it.

“Things are moving,” she said. “I’m not going to be able to
lead the fight, but the Hans are getting lax with their security. We are going
to hit them, and soon.”

She paused, coughed. One of the machines monitoring her let
out a worried beep. “It always fills me with such pride when another one of you
kids comes in from the wilderness. Listen to me, Castillo. We’re going to hit
the fuckers. They’ve got one hundred seventy thousand Americans in that
stinking camp in Sycamore. They took families from their homes, from our homes.
Make them pay, Castillo. Make them pay.”

Rand said, “Yes, ma’am. Anything we can do to help.”

Colonel Regina Foster smiled and started to speak, but she coughed
again, this time violently, and a medical tech led Rand and Kelley away.

San José, Republic of Tecolote, Entente

The loudspeaker in the wooden tower emitted a double
tone, followed by a brief screech of feedback.

“The firing range is clear! You may unsafe your weapons!” it
announced in Spanish. A score of men and women did so. There was a pause,
punctuated only by a trainee’s sneeze, while the safety officer in the tower
gave a long look at the firing line and the range, ensuring no one was at risk.

“Commence firing!” she said.

A ragged fusillade followed. Neil and General Naima watched as
errant bullets kicked up sand around the targets, 25 meters downrange.

Naima shook her head. “Believe it or not, they’re getting
better.”

Neil, no great judge of riflery, nodded politely. “Are they
being trained as infantry?” he half-shouted.

“They haven’t been assigned yet; we’re taking a page from
your Marines and trying to make everyone at least proficient with a rifle,” she
said. “Anyway, thanks for coming out today. I wanted to talk to you privately
about a few things. Let’s walk.”

Neil read the implied message.
Like Dietrich’s, the
firing range isn’t subject to Conrad’s authority. Or at least she wants me to
think that. Tread carefully; this might be some kind of trap.

They walked down the beach until the din of the rifles
quieted, and they could speak in something close to a normal voice.

“I’m sorry you were caught in the disturbance last week,”
Naima said. “It’s why it’s taken me so long to be able to meet with you; we’ve
been too busy rounding up the ringleaders.”

“No problem,” Neil said.

Naima said, “As you may have guessed, Lawson declining those
artillery rockets came as a surprise to me. He never used to be so … careful …
about matters of state security. We’ve got a bonafide and growing threat from
the rebels in the north.”

“Yes, you do,” Neil said. “How did General Vargas take the
news?”
I still need to find a way to meet the general. I’m relying too much
on Naima as my conduit to the government.

“Not well, Neil. Not well. He cares about his troops. With
good artillery, we have a significant advantage over the rebels, and we don’t
have to expose our forces to an even fight with the other side.”

Neil nodded. “Right.”

“Vargas wanted me to ask you whether there was a way to …
see those rockets delivered directly to our forces.”

There it is. Proposing an end around that defies the
president’s wishes. How weak is his position? What’s the best choice here? What
best serves the mission? The mission is to make Tecolote an ally so we can base
our forces here. That’s up to Conrad … for now.

“I’m afraid we don’t have the ability to do that,” Neil
dissembled carefully. “For one, our plan was deliver the weapons clandestinely
via a commercial freighter or aircraft. We can’t really get them to forces in
the field without them going through San José. And I’m not sure …”

“I understand,” Naima said quickly. “Vargas asked me to inquire.
Now, I hope you realize this was a question about your capabilities …”

“… and not whether we’re willing to go around the
president’s wishes,” Neil said. “Sure.”

We’re lying, both of us,
Neil knew.
Whether it’s
for some microphone or a weak cover to guard against a future retelling when
some truth software is listening, I don’t know. I wonder what she would have
done if I’d eagerly offered to make it happen.

Naima said, “Now, about your request … ”

“I didn’t make a very good case for it in the message.”

Naima stopped walking, turned to face him. “You don’t need
to. General Vargas and I are on board. It is my hope that Lawson will be more
amenable to accepting your country’s aid if an expert like you can provide him
an independent assessment of the threat from the rebel forces.”

“Well, thank you. Where do you want me?”

“District Seven, Colonel Abdulaziz’s battalion. Good unit,
and Aziz is a good commander. And that’s as hot a sector as we have.”

That afternoon, Neil read the file Akita had provided
about the rebels.

The Patriotic Union of Tecolote is an amalgamation of
various groups that rejected the assumption of leadership by Lawson Conrad and
his filibusters in 2129. It has an estimated strength of roughly 2,500
combat-capable personnel, traditionally organized as motorized and foot-mobile
light infantry. It is primarily based in the highlands of the northern
peninsula of Tecolote island, but its members have significant contacts with
sympathizers in San José and Ciudad Bonifacio.

Beginning in 2140, the group underwent significant
reorganization that is believed to be continuing at this time. Previously,
military units were ad hoc in mission, and were generally organized along
ethnic lines (e.g. Mexican, Moro, Tagalog, Punjabi), but they are now being mixed
and trained to operate in complementary fashion, with standardized unit
structures, equipment and operating procedures. These changes are credited to
two circumstances: Chinese assistance, the full extent of which is unclear at
this time, and the influence of Colonel Tan Pierce, one of Conrad’s filibusters
who served as a senior officer in Conrad’s regime until his defection to the
rebels nine months ago.

Neil jumped to the bio of Colonel Pierce.
Naima never
mentioned a high-level defector, and I guess Gomez and the others aren’t
plugged in enough to know about him.
He was young for a colonel – early
thirties, according to the Japanese information, born on Reunion, like Conrad
and Naima.
Skilled infantry officer. Defected for “ideological” reasons,
Neil
read, but the bio provided no more detail.

Neil found a note tacked on to the end, in a different font:

Lieutenant Mercer, we have become aware that someone in
the American consulate is communicating with Chinese intelligence officers in Tecolote.
We don’t know the content of these communications, but you should not fully
trust anyone you work with. They may try to extract information from you, seduce
you and steal information, or find ways to hinder your efforts.