part0039

Something about the wind coming in from the northeast changed in Meyers’s perception. It wasn’t the color—still a pale aqua. And it wasn’t the density of the powdery clouds or the taste or the texture—metallic and gritty on his tongue now that his faceplate was up.

The wind died down suddenly, and he stumbled toward Farmers Road, still trying to figure out what had changed. At the head of the alley, the driver looked up to him with pleading, dark eyes. His lips twitched, and his shattered jaw shifted, but he couldn’t manage more than a gurgling rasp. Meyers looked the man up and down, seeing horrific pain and inevitable death in the twisted limbs, the ruptured and blackened skin, and the blood leaking onto the blacktop. The driver’s eyes were bloodshot, seemingly lidless, and yet they managed a stunning level of expressiveness. Meyers realized the driver wanted to be put out of his misery.

Meyers looked up and down the street, now littered with wreckage both human and machine. He recognized the smell the wind had carried: death.

He squatted next to the driver and said, “I know you must be in terrible pain.”

I am, the driver’s eyes said. They all but glowed at Meyers’s understanding.

Meyers shook his head. “It’s terrible. All this death. All this…killing.”

The wind picked up again, drowning out the gurgling. Sand settled onto the driver’s eyes and into his tortured flesh. The eyes seemed to plead now for release.

Meyers stood and looked the destroyed body over again. “I think we’ve done enough killing for today.”

He crossed the street, stopping only long enough to marvel at the work Starling’s satchel charge had done on the Leopard. The bubble had been blown clear of the flatbed and split open. Lying inside one half, the gunner seemed at peace. His jeans were baggy enough that you could almost imagine the legs weren’t impossibly twisted. His arms had lost any hint of definition and seemed almost serpent-like with the strange twists they had taken on in his final repose. His head lay awkwardly to the side, but his face seemed to have escaped significant injury. Meyers recognized the heavily pierced ears, the face that had laughed maniacally.

And then he realized the gunner had been a woman.

Meyers wondered what could have created someone so gleefully committed to killing in such a terrible way, but he quickly stopped once he realized the only difference between them was that the gunner seemed to have enjoyed doing what she had done. Whether that was true or not, Meyers would never know.

He fell against the doorframe of the warehouse, which shuddered with his weight. Chavez and Calderon were on the loft, lowering a litter with Starling strapped onto it. Barlowe already lay next to McNutt, who leaned against the west wall.

“Corporal McNutt,” Meyers said.

McNutt’s eyes opened.

“No dying on me, Corporal.”

“Got too much vinegar in the veins to stop yet, Colonel.”

Meyers nodded and looked around the interior. The place was a wreck, but it was still possible to get a sense of the layout. It looked a lot like the warehouse he’d been hiding behind, although there were no crates in this one.

“This place doesn’t seem like it’s going to stay up much longer.”

Calderon and Chavez descended from the loft using their grip wires. Chavez twisted as he descended, and said, “We’re getting out of here as soon as McNutt gets off his ass, Colonel.”

“You two may have to take an electric prod to him.” Meyers smirked when McNutt’s eyes fluttered open again.

“Good way to get a broken nose, trying that.”

“Okay. I’ll leave the details to the three of you. If Barlowe or Starling wake up, tell them they’re going to be okay,” Meyers said, then he turned and headed back toward the warehouse, mind racing. He opened a private channel to Nunoz. “Ensign Nunoz, what’re you seeing from up there?”

“Not much, Colonel. There’s still the occasional individual or small group trickling back into Reyes’s territory, but a lot of them are being gunned down.”

“Okay. We’ll need to put a stop to all that.”

Meyers brought up the BAS interface and flipped through to the systems Starling had hacked before Ramawat ordered the assault. She’d left a relay in the Grid wide open. Meyers tapped into that.

“Citizens of Turning Point, this is Colonel Lonny Meyers of the United Nations’ Elite Response Force. I would ask you to impose an immediate ceasefire. Hostilities should be brought to an end. Now.”

He listened to the message, brought up a connection to the Grid, then transmitted it to all Grid connections, setting it to loop through a few times, pause for fifteen seconds, then loop through again. Off to the north and west, the message played over the meager public warning system. If it did the same to the south, he couldn’t hear it, but he felt it should be enough to drown out Reyes’s nonstop propaganda. When it had played through all the way, he brought up the Condor’s video. There were crowds gathered all along Theater Street, Addis Ababa Street, and Center Street. The folk were a mix of Arabs, Turks, and Ethiopians, men and women, young and not so young. They held assault rifles over their heads. Occasionally, one would run into Reyes’s territory to throw a rock or kick a corpse. It was the typical reaction of the downtrodden to a broken despot, played out over and over again as far back as Meyers could remember.

It didn’t seem likely that he could say anything to stop the cycle, but he had to try. He leaned against the warehouse that had offered him protection earlier and started recording again.

“The United Nations wants to reach out to Bellar—”

He growled and erased the message.

“The United Nations wants to reach out to you, the people of Bellar, and to establish a relationship. I’m not a diplomat, so I’m in no position to describe that relationship. Then again, I think that’s something you would want to think about. Maybe it’s time you decided what sort of world you want this place to be. It’s your home. Do you want it to be like this—a war zone where people live in fear for their lives? Or do you want something more?”

He played the message back, then sent it through the Grid. After a few seconds, he began another recording.

“I hope we can all find peace and—”

“Listen up!” Reyes’s voice played through the same Grid, over the same public warning system.

Meyers stopped recording.

“You think I don’t know what you’ve all done? Like I suddenly can’t see what the cameras record, huh? I’ve seen every one of you and what you did to my people. Did you forget how we got here? All the lies that put us into prison? You forget about that? You forget about the betrayal from governments? Every time, the lies they told? I didn’t!”

Meyers pulled up the interface into the Grid and frowned. He didn’t have Barlowe’s knowledge or skill with systems. There were no notes on how Starling had hacked into things. Figuring it out would take time. There was no brute force shutting down Reyes.

Not on the Grid, at least.

“Let me tell you something. This pendejo , he comes here and starts up a war, and he tells you, hey, it’s all good now, why don’t you kiss the United Nations’ ass? And you listen? He got nothing left! His people are dead! You didn’t turn on me, we’d be tossing his corpse out in the desert right now!”

“Colonel?” Nunoz’s voice was tense. “You seeing the crowds?”

Meyers checked the Condor’s video, then switched to the Javelin’s hi-res imagery. The crowds were calm now, the weapons no longer thrust into the air.

Not calm, he realized. He looked closer. Fearful. They were afraid.

“I see it. The tyrant hasn’t been knocked out.”

“Yeah. It’s like they’ve completely forgotten what happened a few minutes ago.”

That, Meyers realized, was the power of tyranny.

He opened the connection back into the Grid. He couldn’t shut Reyes out, but he could try to talk him down.

“—fought together, didn’t we? Huh? And who got you guarantees of money when those jobs didn’t come through?” Reyes still sounded angry, but now it was a worked-up, charismatic angry. He was taking the fear of the people and giving it a target.

The outsiders. The United Nations. The ERF.

“Reyes, listen,” Meyers said. “We want to work with you and the leader—”

“No, you listen! We tried working with people. We gave peace a chance. We followed promises: a fresh start, a clean slate, a chance for a new life. Bullshit!”

Meyers’s head throbbed. Even before he’d been tossed around by Waverley’s hauler, there hadn’t been enough history to understand Reyes and the people of Turning Point. There was no context to work from. They’d been done wrong, and now they were the ones doing wrong. “Let’s talk this over.”

“Talk? Like maybe you promise us jobs, huh? Security? Is that what you want to talk about?”

Meyers peered through the holes of the warehouse. The dark, sparkly dirt had collected in piles around the shattered crates. The crates were stacked to the ceiling at the back of the building. He tugged at the remains of the front door, tearing away most of the bottom half, then he ducked into the shadowy interior.

“I want to talk about stopping all of the pointless killing. Can’t we at least start there?”

“The professional assassin wants to talk about peace? You think all these people can’t hear how stupid that sounds? You think we don’t know the smell of more bullshit after having it shoved in our faces our whole lives?”

Meyers found a crate with a functional identifier panel and tapped into it. It presented all the usual information it would to an unauthorized person: mass of the cargo, basic description, owner, source, destination.

“We never wanted conflict with the people of Turning Point,” Meyers said. He glanced at the Condor’s data feed. The crowd’s earlier bravado was gone, and they were now looking up at the giant displays. At Reyes. Meyers was losing them.

“But you killed my people, huh? You talk big about peace, but you come in and assassinate. You come to us and ask us to help you assassinate. Or didn’t you?”

Nunoz said, “Colonel, something’s going on in that compound. Reyes’s compound. They’re moving around…I think it’s a small hauler. Oh, shit. They’ve got another one of those anti-aircraft systems.”

Meyers brought the Condor down and sent it closer to Reyes’s compound. In the courtyard at the front of the mansion, maybe twenty men were securing a bubble to the back of a hauler, another Devil Cat. It didn’t look like another railgun, but it didn’t need to be. A heavy machine gun in an armored bubble would be enough to kill…everyone.

“Reyes, what happened can’t be undone. It doesn’t matter that your men tried to kill my people and we acted in self-defense. Right? And it doesn’t matter that you’ve been living large while the rest of the people of Turning Point barely get by.”

“Hey, puta , don’t you—”

“What matters is I’m not going to allow you to threaten anyone anymore.”

Reyes laughed. “You ain’t got nothing to tell me what to do.”

“I’m going to give you a chance to stop all of this, Reyes. I’m going to give you one last chance to be a part of the future of Bellar.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to, huh? I am the future of Bellar!” The sound of Reyes pounding his chest was a deep, bass thud. “I drove off the Zombies. I got us the food and water. That was me!”

Meyers squinted. He wanted to be sure the gun was the threat it appeared to be and not a bluff. Without sending the Condor or the Javelin in closer, that just wasn’t possible. “Nunoz, get a lock-on. Two missiles. That hauler, and Reyes’s mansion.”

Meyers blew out a sigh. He scooped up the fine dust of the sparkly dirt—dark, heavy. Nothing like the aqua sand blowing through the street outside.

“Reyes, this is your last chance.” Meyers pulled the Condor back up, watched the crowd below. There was uncertainty there, mingled in with the fear. Everything came down to what happened next. He switched back to Nunoz’s channel. “Nunoz, do you see any large concentrations of Reyes’s men anywhere else?”

“Negative. Probably thirty in the front courtyard, half that elsewhere.”

“I got a surprise for you, Mr. ERF,” Reyes said. “You ain’t in no position to tell anyone about last chances.”

“Those men are moving away,” Nunoz said. “I think that gun’s active.”

“On my signal.” Meyers switched back to the Grid, but he stayed connected to Nunoz’s private channel. “You were given a chance at peace, Reyes. I hope everyone will think back to that whenever they consider violence as the solution. Ensign.”

To the naked eye, the missiles were twin contrails—fluffy, gray-white vapor. They didn’t even track back to the Javelin, which was already headed south, over the desert and out to sea. The Condor recorded the reaction of the crowd, all the fingers pointing skyward, the heads tracking the trails down into Reyes’s territory.

And the explosion. On the Condor’s video, it was two white balls of smoke-wreathed fire, but to those on the ground, it would be a boom felt in the chest and head. They would close their eyes as the pressure hit them, a wash of warm air. And the fire and smoke would climb above the intervening buildings, maybe pull debris skyward for a bit before it spun back to the earth.