The End of All Things: The Third Instalment (4 page)

“Easy,” I said, and stood up.

“Your suit’s not going to take another direct hit,” Powell said.

“Then maybe the three of you should kill the shit out of him before he gets the chance to take another shot,” I said.

“On it.”

“Good.”
I stood there in the street, watching the pixelated sniper settle into another apartment, a floor below his previous one, and over the course of a couple of minutes, carefully position himself by a window to take another shot at me.

“Got you,” I said.

The apartment building exploded.

More than a hundred meters away, I was knocked back by the crack of the pressure wave and then by the rush of heat and flying debris.

“What the
fuck
just happened?”
I heard Salcido yell, followed by Powell and Lambert yelling at each other to get back.
I rolled again, then looked up and saw a dirty wall of dust rolling toward me from the collapsing concrete.
I ducked my head and held my breath despite my mouth being covered by my mask, and filtering my air for me.

After a minute the worst of the dust cleared and I stood up.
There was a pile of rubble where the apartment building used to stand.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Wasn’t that what we
didn’t
want?”
I heard Lambert yell, via my ears rather than my BrainPal.
I looked back and saw him, Powell, and Salcido walking up on me.

“It looks like what we wanted and what the higher-ups wanted were two different things,” Powell said.
“I told you we should have just called it in.
We could have saved ourselves some trouble.”

“Shut up, Ilse,” I said, and she shut up.
I turned to Salcido.
“Find out if there was anyone in the building besides the sniper.”

“I’m pretty sure it was cleared out before we even got here.”

“Make sure,” I said.
“If there are any civilians in there, we start digging them out.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Lambert said.
I turned to him to snap his head off for complaining about rescuing civilians, but he held his hand up.
“Not about that,” he said.
“Look at your feed.
That goddamn sniper is still alive.”

I looked back at the building—or more accurately, at the pile of rubble.
Near the periphery of the rubble, under about a meter of concrete, our sniper was trying to push a pile of concrete and rebar off of him.

“Come on,” I said.

We reached the spot where the sniper was buried.
Salcido trained his Empee on where the sniper’s head would be while Powell and Lambert and I pulled chunks of building away from the hidden shooter.
After a minute, I pried off a final slab, clearing a shot for Salcido.

“Jesus,” he said.

Our sniper was fifteen standard years old at best and she was covered in blood from where the fallen concrete had creased her skull.
I glanced through the rubble as best I could and saw her left arm pinned and her right leg going off in a direction it shouldn’t.

“Get away from me,” she said, and her voice told me that at least one of her lungs had collapsed.

“We can get you out of there,” I said.

“Don’t want your help, green.”

I was confused by this until I figured out she meant me, with my green skin.
I looked back at Salcido and his Empee.
“Put that down and help us.”
He looked doubtful but did as he was told.
I turned back to the sniper.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” I said.

“You brought a building down on me,” she wheezed.

“That wasn’t our intent,” I said.
I skipped over the part where our intent was to shoot her in the head the moment she gave us a chance.
“We’ll get you out.”

“No.”

“You don’t want to die here,” I said.

“I do,” she said.
“This is where I lived.
I lived here.
And you destroyed it.
Like you destroy everything.”

“How are we doing?”
I asked, not taking my eyes off the girl.

“Almost there,” Powell said.
Then she sent a message to me through her BrainPal.
The chunk of concrete on her leg is the only thing keeping her from bleeding out,
she said.
If we move it, she dies.
She’s dying anyway.

“Okay,” I said.
Call in for a medic,
I said through the BrainPal.

Why?
Powell asked.
You’re being awfully nice to someone who was just trying to kill you and who we were just trying to kill.
She doesn’t even want our help.
You should just let her die.

I gave you an order,
I said.
Powell visibly shrugged.

“We’re going to call for a medic,” I said, to the sniper.

“I don’t want a medic,” she said, and her eyes closed.
“I don’t want you.
Why don’t you leave.
This isn’t your planet.
It’s ours.
We don’t want you here.
Leave.
Just leave.”

“It’s not that simple,” I said.

The girl didn’t say anything.
About a minute later she was dead.

* * *

“Well?”
Lambert asked.
He, Powell, and Salcido were waiting for me outside the security offices in Fushimi, where I had gone for a discussion—to use the word euphemistically—of the sniper incident.

“I talked to Colonel Maxwell,” I said, naming the head of the CDF joint mission in Fushimi.
“She tells me that it was the Kyotans who requested we drop the apartment building.”

“Why would they want that?
I thought we were working on the assumption they
didn’t
want that.
Thus, all the sneaking up and trying not to destroy it on our part.”

“The apartment block was apparently the local headquarters of the rebellion.
Or more accurately, the local headquarters of the rebellion was in the apartment block.”

“So the building was chock full of agitators,” Powell said.

“Maxwell didn’t break down the ratio of agitators to normal humans,” I said.
“And I didn’t get the impression from her that the Kyotan government much cared.
They wanted to send a message.”

“How many other people did we kill getting out the message?”
Lambert asked.

“None,” Salcido said, and looked at me.
“Sorry, you asked me to find that out and I didn’t tell you because we got busy with other things.
The Kyotan security forces did a sweep of the building a week ago and pulled everybody out.
Block questioning and intimidation.
That’s what started this whole set of riots we’re helping put down.”

“So if they weren’t all rebels before, they probably are now,” Powell said.

“You wanted to drop the building,” Lambert reminded her.

“The building got dropped,” Powell reminded him.
“Although Lambert’s right.
If they were just going to drop the building, why the hell
did
they send us in?”

“They sent us in before someone in the Kyoto security upper ranks remembered a CDF ship could level a building in a single shot, apparently,” I said.

“We could have been killed.”

“I guess they decided we were safe.”

“
That’s
reassuring,” Powell said.

“At least it wasn’t our idea,” Lambert said.
“That girl hated us enough.
And if she hated us, she had to have learned it from someone else.”

“It wasn’t our idea, but one of our ships did the honors,” I said.
“I don’t think that distinction would matter much to her or to anyone else.
We’re on the hook for this as much as the Kyoto government.”

“Did you get anything on the sniper?”
Salcido asked me.

“Rana Armijo.
Sixteen standard.
Parents apparently in deep with the rebellion.
No sign of them.
Either they’re gone or the Kyotans already have them.”

“So she becomes a martyr for the rebellion,” Lambert said.
“The government rounds up everyone in her apartment block, she stays behind, starts taking out security officers, and is so successful they have to drop the building on her head.
It’s a good story.”

“It won’t do
her
much good,” Powell said.

“That’s how it’s supposed to work for martyrs.”

“So what now?”
Salcido asked.

“We’re done here,” I said.
“There’s ongoing rebel action in Sakyo and Yamashina, but the
Tubingen
has other orders.
It’s someone else’s problem now.”

“It was already someone else’s problem,” Lambert said.
“Then we made it ours, too.”

“Don’t start, Lambert,” Powell said.
“It’s especially tiring today.”

“If it’s tiring for you, think how it feels to them.”

PART THREE

A Thursday this time, and we’re called upon to manage a protest.

“I’m not going to lie, I’m
really
curious to see these things in action,” Lambert said, as the hurricane funnels were set up around the Colonial Union administrative building in Kyiv.

The administrative building itself was a skyscraper deposited in the center of a hectare of land in the downtown district.
The entire hectare was a flat plaza, featureless except for a single piece of abstract sculpture.
That sculpture was currently populated by several protesters, as was a large chunk of the plaza.
The skyscraper was ringed by Kyiv policemen and CDF soldiers and hastily assembled metal barriers.

The protesters had not taken it into their heads to try to rush the skyscraper, but it was early in the day yet.
Rather than wait for the inevitable, and the inevitable casualties to both protester and security forces, the Colonial Union had decided to employ the latest in less than lethal protest management: the hurricane funnel.
One was being placed directly in front of my squad.

“It looks like an Alp horn,” Powell said, as it was placed and started expanding out and up.

“Alpenhorn,” I said.
I was a musician in my past life.

“That’s what I said,” Powell replied, and then turned to Salcido.
“You’re the weapon nerd here.
Explain this.”

Salcido pointed up, at the very long tube snaking up to the sky, now about two hundred feet up.
“Air gets sucked into the thing from up there.
It gets drawn down and accelerated as it goes.
It hits the curve, gets an extra push, and out it goes that way.”
He waved in the general direction of the protesters.
“We set a perimeter length, and anytime one of them tries to get past it, the funnel ramps up a breeze and blows them down.”

“Which should be fun to see,” Lambert said.
“Although these things are awfully inefficient, if we’re talking
real
crowd control.
It’s like we’re daring them to try to cross that line.”

“They’re not supposed to be efficient,” I said.
“They’re supposed to send a message.”

“What message?
‘We’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow your protest down’?”

“More like ‘We don’t even have to shoot you to render your protest utterly pointless.’”

“We seem to be sending a lot of messages recently,” Lambert noted.
“I’m not sure the message we’re sending is the message they’re receiving.”

“The message this time will be a blast of wind that could knock over a house,” Salcido said.
“It’ll get received.”

“And we’re not worried about getting sucked out into the rioters,” Powell said.
“Because that would be bad.”

Salcido pointed upward again.
“That’s why collection happens up there,” he said.
“Plus there’s some airflow mitigation happening on this side of the thing.”

“All right,” Powell said.

“Just…”

“What?
Just
what?
”

“Don’t get
too
close to the thing when it’s running.”