14. Acolyte AtomOn the trail of the Apostate
Ingress
Precentor Sian’s Domain
238rd year since the founding of the Blessed Order by the sainted Jerome Blake“BANG! You’re dead!”
Three boys were playing Militia and Rebels in the rubble outside the apartment building. Grubby-faced boys with unwashed clothes and hollow cheeks, but still they played blithely on with their makeshift weapons, a discarded length of metal tubing and an L-shaped piece of tiling standing in for their more deadly real-world counterparts. That was a good game, Atom thought, and he wished he could join them.
He followed Gore, Mutai and Shinobu as they carefully crossed the street, dashing across the open spaces in case there were still snipers about. The boys laughed at their caution.
“BANG! You’re dead, too!” The open with the metal tubing pointed it at Shinobu as the four men crouched by a pyramid of fallen debris. Shinobu smiled, almost sadly, reached out to ruffle the boy’s hair, and said:
“Natsukusa ya
Tsuwamono domo ga
Yume no ato”The boy jerked his head away, frantically patting his hair back in place and muttering about foreign devils.
“Good shot,” Atom told him. “One day, you’ll make a fine addition to Blake’s footsoldiers!”
The boy had to crane his neck to look up at Atom, squinting one eye against the sun high over Atom’s head. The boy seemed to consider that for a moment, trying to decide if it was a compliment or not, and if he wanted to be complimented or not.
“Bang,” said the boy, pointing the tube at Atom’s head. “Got you, too.”
“It would take more than one bullet to kill me,” said Atom.
“No it wouldn’t," sniffed the boy, then turned and ran off after his two mates.
“C’mon, Atom, we’re going,” Gore patted him on the shoulder, then sprinted to the apartment entrance and ducked inside. Atom spared one last look after the boys, still dashing in mad, happy little circles about one another, insisting they had killed one another, inventing new excuses why they hadn’t. Maybe one day, they would join the Order. He could hope.
He got up, followed Gore into the building, and up the stairs to the roof.
*
“We attack.” Gore tapped the map. “Here.”
They stood on the roof of a ten-story apartment building, affording an almost uninterrupted view across the city. Gore held a hand-drawn map of the Citadel, with the spaceport circled in red. The wind made it flutter and flap at the corners, like a moth trying to escape. Atom liked Gore’s map. The Citadel outline was done in black, the defenses in red, Confederation units in green. Almost like a circuit diagram. It reminded him of the pictures in the
Collected Wisdom.
He hoped he wouldn’t have to kill Gore when this was over. Adept Levato said he’d have to, if any of them spoke with the Apostate Zlato. That made him sad, but he’d promised her he wouldn’t say anything to the others. He’d kill them though, if he had too. Blessed Blake said they were each his little warriors. Atom liked the sound of that. Sounded better than ‘acolyte’ anyway. He liked it when Levato touched him, too, in that special place, the one she said he mustn’t tell anyone else about. She was always watching, with that magic eye in the sky, always listening. So he kept his promise, and said nothing.
“Ain’t that right, Mutai?”
Commander Mutai stood at Gore’s elbow, though his eyes were far away. “Mmm? I, uh. Yes. That is, I mean. Well.”
“Thanks Abe, couldn’t have said it better myself.” Gore’s finger traced a line from the green boxes around the edge of the map towards the red circle. “Intel says the FIA have tunnels from the Citadel all throughout the city. Cappie—no offense Abe—foot is going into the tunnels, trying to flush ‘em out. Tunnels’re too small for a ’Mech, so our job is to cut off any off-world escape at the port. Far as we know, there are still a couple of DropShips they used to bring in mercs like Khitai’s boys, stored in underground hangers. Our job is to take the above-ground facility, stop them from moving anything into launch position.”
“Zlato will be there,” grinned Atom. “When the noose closes, she will come to us, and when she does—” He smacked a fist meatily into his open palm. Of course she would. Zlato was the only one with anything that could match the firepower of a BattleMech. Which was, of course, why Levato had insisted he be there to take her out. What a fight that would be! He giggled a little to himself in anticipation.
Gore looked at him oddly. “You feelin’ all right, Atom?”
“Grounded as a wire, charged as a battery.”
“Ah’m just gonna assume that means ‘yes’,” Gore sighed. He folded the map away and stuffed it into a pocket of his leather jacket. Then pointed away across the city, over rubble-strewn roads and ragged columns of marching militiamen, to a distant sparkle of silver amid the black forest of the Citadel. “Ain’t gonna be a cakewalk. You can see the defenses from here.”
Atom raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes, and adjusted the magnification. Was presented with a sudden close-up of a crumbling wall, beside which a militiaman squatted with his trousers around his ankles. “Your pardon,” Atom muttered, reflexively. He adjusted the binoculars, panning upwards, until the spaceport filled his view.
The spaceport itself was quite plain, consisting of four circular ferrocrete launch pads, plus two cracked landing strips for aerodyne DropShips. A number of squat, unlovely buildings of mossy or mold-streaked concrete clustered around the edges, many missing windows, doors, or walls. Two great ramps led underground, presumably towards the DropShip hangars.
The perimeter of the spaceport was dotted with a dozen dug-in tanks forming mini-bunkers, mostly Partisan SPAA tanks with a scattering of 60-tube missile platforms. A platoon of four Bulldog tanks was parked around one of the buildings. Atom could just make out the twin mirror-image Bs of Barsegh’s Bandits stenciled on their turrets.
The outer ring of defenses was formed by a zig-zagging, 10-meter high ferrocrete wall, trapezoidal in cross-section with sloping sides, perhaps 10 meters wide at the top, 60 meters wide at the base. Stick-figure soldiers prowled the wall, and firing positions with field guns crowned each outward-flaring ‘zig’. The blunted teeth of pyramidal ‘Dragon’s teeth’ tank traps studded the outer slope of the walls. There was no gate, but rather the only road leading out from the spaceport ran straight towards the wall before dipping into a tunnel directly under it, reappearing a hundred meters on the other side.
It reminded Atom a bit of the picture of an atom getting split in a nuclear fission reaction: The nucleus of the spaceport, throwing out little electrons of gun pits, tanks and trenches. It was a nice image, and he savored it a moment—Atom and the atom. Made him feel good, like confirmation he was on the right path. Like destiny.
“How do we get in?” he asked Gore.
“Gate,” said Gore. “It’d be one thing if we could jump over the wall, but none of us can and climbing up that thing’ll make us silhouetted all nice and pretty against the sky, and a perfect target for every gun they got in there. Nope. We’ll punch through the gate, try to use the buildings to block their LOS so we can defeat the tanks in detail, take ‘em out one at a time.”
“Will the Capellans help?” asked Atom.
“Mutai?” Gore turned to the liaison.
“What? Oh yes, um. The ah. The 21st regiment and 2nd independent armor company will attack first and pin down their perimeter defenses.”
Gore raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Spaceport’s right on the boundary between the 2nd and 3rd divisions, Abe. I don’t want my ass hangin’ in the breeze just cos some o’ your boys back at HQ’re havin’ a pissing contest. Specially not with Leyan bein’ a little, you know, upset these days.”
Mutai wet his lips nervously. “I’ll, ah. Yeah. Don’t worry. They, um. The headquarters. I’ll make sure they do it. The thing. Back you up. And. Stuff.”
“Very reassuring.” Gore turned away from the liaison, so Mutai would not see Gore roll his eyes.
“What about civilians?” Shinobu asked. Gore’s head snapped around to look at Shinobu. Even Atom found himself blinking in surprise. “Civilians,” Shinobu repeated. “Refugees. What if they try to escape through the spaceport?”
“They knew the risks—” Mutai began, but was cut off by a sharp metallic hiss. Shinobu had thumbed the hilt of his blade a centimeter out of its scabbard, glaring at Mutai with murderous eyes.
“Can Ah suggest a different answer, Abe?” Gore asked tightly. “We see your guys gettin’ trigger happy, all bets are off. Ares Conventions and whatnot.” Then, in a quiet whisper to Shinobu: “Of all the times you could discover your tongue. We gonna talk about this later, kamikaze.”
There was a long silence, broken only by a stumbling “Well, yes. I’ll see what I can ah. Right,” from Mutai. Atom watched them all with eager anticipation. He was slightly disappointed when finally, Shinobu nodded slowly, and snicked his sword back with a quick, sharp movement.
Gore sighed and tipped his head heavenwards, a give-me-strength look on his face. The skies had little support to offer though, only the mindless blundering of a great rolling band of morning glory clouds, and above them the fading contrails of fighter aircraft. It wasn’t like anything in the
Collected Wisdom, and Atom found himself quickly losing interest. He was about to look away, when one of the contrails caught his eye. Not a fighter. A long bright thread, arcing up from just over the horizon to the north. A flickering candle flame now visible at its tip.
“What the frack is that?” Gore had gone very still, his upturned face now turned in the same direction.
Something buzzed at Mutai’s belt, and he fumbled for his communicator. Had a rushed and mumbled conversation in Chinese, “
Shi ma? Zhen de ma? Zhen de!”, as the other three watched the comet burning brightly across the sky. Coming almost certainly straight towards them. Mutai clicked off the communicator. Gore looked down to meet Mutai’s look, one eyebrow arched in unasked question.
“It’s uh,” Mutai said. “Haha, weird. But it’s. Ah. Your DropShip.”