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"The hell they're not!"
"They're not my enemies, anyway. It was just a case of mistaken identity. I'm
just a hapless traveller, passing through."
"Wake up, little man. I don't happen to share
Oliver's belief in your 'miracle.' You're not passing through here. This is
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the last stop."
Miles sighed. "I'm beginning to think you're right."
He glanced at Suegar, breathing shallowly and too fast, beside whom he
crouched in watch. "You're almost certainly right, by this time. Nevertheless
--
let them go."
"Why?" she wailed, outraged.
"Because I said to. Because I asked you to. Would you have me beg for them?"
"Aargh! No. All right!" She wheeled away, running he hands through her clipped
hair and muttering under her breath.
A timeless time passed. Suegar lay on his side not speaking, though his eyes
flicked open now and then to stare unseeing. Miles moistened his lips with
water periodically. A chow call came and went without incident or Miles's
participation; Beatrice passed by and dropped two rat bars beside them, stared
at them with a carefully-hardened gaze of general disapproval, and stalked
off.
Miles cradled his injured hand and sat cross-legged, mentally reviewing the
catalogue of errors that had brought him to this pass. He contemplated his
seeming genius for getting his friends killed. He had a sick premonition that
Suegar's death was going to be almost as bad as Sergeant Bothari's, six years
ago, and he had known Suegar only weeks, not years.
Repeated pain, as he had reason to know, made one more afraid of injury, not
less, a growing, gut-wrenching dread. Not again, never again . . .
He lay back and stared at the dome, the white, unblinking eye of a dead god.
And had more friends than he knew already been killed by this megalomanic
escapade? It would be just like the Cetagandans, to leave him in here all
unknowing, and let the growing doubt and fear gradually drive him crazy.
Swiftly drive him crazy -- the god's eye blinked.
Miles blinked in sympathetic nervous recoil, opened his eyes wide, stared at
the dome as if his eyes could bore right through it. Had it blinked? Had the
flicker been hallucinatory? Was he losing it?
It flickered again. Miles shot to his feet, inhaling, inhaling, inhaling.
The dome blinked out. For a brief instant, planetary night swept in, fog and
drizzle and the kiss of a
cold wet wind. This planet's unfiltered air smelled like rotten eggs. The
unaccustomed dark was blinding.
"CHOW CALL!" Miles screamed at the top of his lungs.
Then limbo transmuted to chaos in the brilliant flash of a smart bomb going
off beyond a cluster of buildings. Red light glared off the underside of an
enormous billowing cloud of debris, blasting upward.
A racketing string of similar hits encircled the camp, peeled back the night,
deafened the unprotected. Miles, still screaming, could not hear his own
voice. A returning fire from the ground clawed the clouds with lines of
colored light.
Tris, her eyes stunned, rocketed past him. Miles grabbed her by the arm with
his good hand and dug in his heels to brake her, yanking her down so he could
scream in her ear.
"This is it! Get the fourteen group leaders organized, make 'em get their
first blocks of 200
lined up and waiting all around the perimeter. Find
Oliver, we've got to get the Enforcers moving to get the rest waiting their
turn under control. If this goes exactly as we drilled it, we'll all get off."
I
hope. "But if they mob the shuttles like they used to mob the rat bar pile,
none of us will. You copy?"
"I never believed -- I didn't think -- shuttles?"
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"You don't have to think. We've drilled this fifty times. Just follow the chow
drill. The drill!"
"You sneaky little sonofabitch!" The acknowledging wave of her arm, as she
dashed off, was very like a salute.
A string of flares erupted in the sky above the camp, as if a white strobe of
lightning went on and on, casting a ghastly illumination on the scene below.
The camp seethed like a termite mound kicked over.
Men and women were running every which way in shouting confusion. Not exactly
the orderly vision
Miles had had in mind -- why, for example, had his people chosen a night drop
and not a daytime one? --
he would grill his staff later on that point, after he got done kissing their
feet --
"Beatrice!" Miles waved her down. "Start passing the word! We're doing the
chow call drill. But instead of a rat bar, each person gets a shuttle seat.
Make 'em
understand that -- don't let anybody go haring off into the night or they'll
miss their flight. Then come back here and stay by Suegar. I don't want him
getting lost or trampled on. Guard, you copy?"
"I'm not a damn dog. What shuttles?"
The sound Miles's ears had been straining for penetrated the din at last, a
high-pitched, multi-faceted whine that grew louder and louder. They loomed
down out of the boiling scarlet-tinged clouds like monstrous beetles,
carapaced and winged, feet extending even as they watched. Fully armored
combat drop shuttles, two, three, six . . . seven, eight . .
. Miles's lips moved as he counted. Thirteen, fourteen, by God. They had
managed to get #B-7 out of the shop in time.
Miles pointed. "My shuttles."
Beatrice stood with her mouth open, staring upward.
"My God. They're beautiful." He could almost see her mind start to ratchet
forward. "But they're not ours.
Not Cetagandan either. Who the hell . . . ?"
Miles bowed. "This is a paid political rescue."
"Mercenaries?"
"We're not something wriggling with too many legs that you found in your
sleeping bag. The proper tone of voice is Mercenaries! -- with a glad cry."
"But -- but -- but -- "
"Go, dammit. Argue later."
She flung up her hands and ran.
Miles himself started tackling every person within reach, passing on the order
of the day. He captured one of Oliver's tall commando buddies and demanded a
boost on his shoulders. A quick look around showed fourteen coagulating knots
of people in the mob scattered around the perimeter in nearly the right
positions. The shuttles hovered, engines howling, then thumped to the ground
one by one all around the camp.
"It'll have to do," Miles muttered to himself. He slapped the commando's
shoulder. "Down."
He forced himself to walk to the nearest shuttle, a run on the shuttles being
just the scenario he had poured out blood and bone and pride these last --
three, four? -- weeks to avoid.
A quartet of fully-armed and half-armored troops were the first down the
shuttle ramp, taking up guard positions. Good. They even had their weapons
pointed in the right direction, toward the prisoners they were here to rescue.
A larger patrol, fully armored, followed to gallop off double time,
leapfrogging their own covering-fire range into the dark toward the Cetagandan
installations surrounding the dome circle. Hard to judge which direction held
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the most danger -- from the continuing fireworks, his fighter shuttles were
providing plenty of external distraction for the Cetagandans.
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