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_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
Andrew Roller Presents
NAUGHTY NAKED DREAMGIRLS
in
FEVERED FALL
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
Chapter Twelve
The three searchlights stared vacantly at the pile. A homeless
man rummaged amidst the shattered concrete. Otherwise, it was empty.
What would have once been ‘a major news story’, with round-the-clock
coverage, continuous updates, and unending live video feeds, was instead
no story at all. Not that the public had lost its taste for
entertainment; rather, other news had so swamped the news that it no
longer mattered. Worse, there was so much news now that none of it
could lawfully be reported. Martial Law had been declared, cutting off
all news while the Imperial government frantically tried to restore
order.
Eloise Bryan drifted into the room. Charles Bryan was sitting
in his favorite chair, watching T.V. It was a “Big Sur” chair, by
Simmons, all leather, top grain. Eloise reflected to herself that the
name could not be more appropriate. Charles was a wealthy man, with
powerful friends. After all, he’d designed Level 5, and wasn’t that
just the perfect way to ensure everyone stayed where they belonged?
Eloise tugged her mink sweater closer around her neck,
concealing her strands of pearls. Diamond rings on her fingers
glittered. She had a distinctly bored look on her face, relieved only
by wrinkles around her eyes.
“What are you doing?” Eloise asked. She felt caught between a
desire to gaze at the big screen T.V. in the room, and at the panoramic
view of New Washington, seen from above, outside their large picture
window.
“I’m watching T.V.,” Charles replied, perfunctorily. Eloise
remembered a time when he’d avidly watched her every move, anticipated
her every question, and listened when she spoke. Now he seemed slightly
perturbed that she had interrupted the bleach blonde newscaster on the
T.V.
“KCOP News has a live report!” the bleach blonde on the T.V.
assured him. He put a Cohiba Esplendido cigar to his lips and sucked on
it as he lit it with an ivory lighter.
“Hello, Deborah,” a male news reporter said, on the T.V. “I’m
standing here at the New Washington Federal Courthouse Building, where
12-year-old Joshua Paul Reynolds has just been convicted of sexually
molesting an 8-year-old girl!”
Charles puffed on his cigar. “They found him ‘playing doctor’
with the girl,” Charles said, reclining in his ‘Big Sur’ chair, watching
the T.V. with his stogie.
“Good God,” Eloise said. She pulled her mink sweater tighter.
Her jewelled fingers glittered. The T.V. screen won the battle with the
picture window. Eloise gazed at the image of the blow-dried man
standing in front of the Federal Courthouse. “I hope they start that
boy on Depo-Provera right away,” Eloise said.
“I’m sure they will,” Charles replied, taking a deep, luxurious
breath on his Cohiba Esplendido. Then he exhaled.
Eloise turned away. She lost interest in the T.V. She looked
away from it, glad that justice had once again prevailed in the world.
She walked slowly toward the picture window. She gazed out upon the
city.
A day later, it was evening again, and Eloise was standing at
the window again, remembering the quiet peace of the previous evening.
So much had happened, so much was happening, and yet now all they could
get on the T.V., on KCOP, KBAR, and all the other T.V. outlets in New
Washington, even on the satellite channels, was endless re-runs, and
rehashes of the day’s sporting events. Plus the weather. It was a
calm, tranquil evening, just like the evening before, with one minor
exception.
The natives were restless. She gazed down upon New
Washington. Down through the inrolling fog she could see the lights of
the White House. Their Sky Dwelling was out over the bay, almost atop
the Golden Gate Bridge, just a little to the east of it. Alcatraz,
closed for awhile, had been reopened again. It lay on the eastward side
of their Sky Dwelling. It had taken on new life as a Mental Health
Facility for Underage Sex Offenders. She looked toward it. She watched
its lights for awhile. At least THEY were under control, unlike the
people running wild in the midst of New Washington. Her eyes passed
back to the scene to the south of their building. She gazed at the
downed Sky Dwelling, in the middle of New Washington’s commercial
district. Its flames rose up into the night.
Her husband sat cursing the T.V. He surfed from channel to
channel, getting nothing but re-runs.
“Dammit! This is supposed to be an all-news channel, and
they’re re-running yesterday’s news!” Charles swore. He was watching
KCOP. Twelve-year-old Joshua Paul Reynolds was being led from the
Federal Courthouse again, on videotape, though his entertainment value
was now much diminished.
“Yesterday was nicer,” Eloise said. She turned toward her
husband. “Darling,” she said. “Why don’t we leave?”
“And go where?” Charles asked. He aimed his remote control at
the T.V. and pushed a button on it. The all-news channel became the
all-cartoon channel. Joshua Paul Reynolds was replaced by Daffy Duck.
“You know all non-emergency vehicles have been disabled by Level 5,”
Charles said.
She stood watching him as he watched Daffy Duck. Yes, she
knew. Charles had designed Level 5. He’d told her all about it, when
he still fancied having a conversation with her. Any Lift-capable, or
Jump-capable vehicle had a regulator installed in its engine. In times
of emergency, the government could disable the Lift and Jump functions
of cars equipped with the regulator. Level 5, thanks to Martial Law,
was now in effect. Only emergency and police vehicles could still Lift
or Jump.
“We’re damn well not going to DRIVE out of here!” her husband
said, talking to Eloise but looking at Daffy Duck on the T.V.
“Yes, dear,” Eloise answered. “Obviously we can’t get in our
car and drive out of the building.” She laughed, nervously. “We’d
probably wind up on the White House lawn.”
“Smooshed,” her husband said. “I can see it now, on KCOP.
‘Husband and wife, Sky Dwellers, drive out of the building, find out
Level 5 prevents flight, and drop in to meet the president.’ They’d put
it at the end of the newscast, to give everyone a laugh.”
“But dear,” Eloise said. “Level 5 can be overridden, can’t
it?”
“I’m not supposed to talk about that,” Charles said.
“But it can be, can’t it?” Eloise asked. There was a note of
pleading in her voice.
“Where do you want to go?” Charles snapped. He did her the
favor of turning around in his ‘Big Sur’ chair and looking at her. In
doing so, he knocked over his cocktail, which rested on the hardwood
Victorian-era end table beside his chair. It spilled to the floor.
“It’s a mess down there,” Charles said. “Just look out the damn
window! But with Level 5 in effect, we’re safe up here. Nobody can get
to us, except an ambulance, or the police. Besides,” he said. He
smiled. “I just took Viagra a few minutes ago. I’m going to have a
raging erection soon. I don’t fancy farting around with some regulator,
upstairs in the garage, with a boner in my pants. We’d wind up making
love in some haystack someplace, and that’s IF I got the damn thing
overridden. It’s been years since I designed Level 5 you know, even if
I do still get royalty checks for it.”
“But dear,” she said. “I still think we should leave. You
could override the regulator. You know you could. We should fly down
to earth, and find some nice motel. We’d be like kids again.”
“I’m not making love in some goddam motel!” he harrumphed.
“God knows, the place might get overrun by rioters. I may have the
hard-on of a younger man, but in case you haven’t noticed, it’s been
awhile since I exercised.”
“Yes, dear,” Eloise said. She gazed at his fat belly, covered
over by a hand-tailored vest and jacket, which in turn were covered by a
silk shirt imported from Bali. “But look at the other building,” Eloise
said. “The Alexander Building?” she asked. She pointed toward the
ground. The commercial district was a raging inferno where the
Alexander Building, a Sky Dwelling, had plopped down into the midst of
it.
He harrumphed. “I know bad programming when I see it,” he
said.
“But Mrs. Selvine told me that the bug in that building was in
all the others,” Eloise said.
“I’m sure the people downstairs are working on it,” Charles
answered. “Tell the maid to come up and clean up this mess, would you?”
he said. He pointed at the cocktail he’d spilled on the floor. “Good
God! We’ll be like the people down THERE pretty soon if you insist on
standing at that window and whining.”
“Alright, dear,” Eloise said. She walked toward the interior
wall, where a Building Intercom unit was installed. Why did she always
have to summon the maid when her husband made a mess? she wondered.
‘Because,’ a little voice answered, quickly. ‘Because he would have to
get up out of his chair to go press it, and you’re already standing
up.’ It was, she knew, her mother’s voice. Her mother would have
pressed the Intercom button for her father, and that, in the end, is why
she did too.
She reached the far wall and pressed the button. “Gratiana?”
she asked, in a voice slightly perturbed, as if it was the maid herself
who’d knocked over the cocktail, and then failed to clean it up. “We’ve
got a bit of a mess up here!”
“Oh! Yes, ma’am!” the maid answered. She spoke little English
but she seemed to understand it sufficiently well. For her duties, at
least. Perhaps ‘clean up’ had an equivalent in Spanish that sounded
similar, Eloise reflected, letting go of the button.
She turned to her husband. She looked at the ripe olive that
had fallen out of his cocktail and rolled some distance from his chair.
“You could have told me you were planning to take Viagra,” she said.
“I told you,” Charles answered. “Just now.”
She bit her lip. ‘Yes,’ she said to herself. ‘In effect, you
told me, ‘get ready to drop your drawers, honey, I’m going to fuck you
in about an hour.’ Thanks a lot. The only people who got less warning
time were hookers, but at least they spent the afternoon dressing up in
expectation of it.
“I’ll be waiting in the bedroom,” she said.
He lit another cigar. “You don’t have to go yet,” he said,
staring at Daffy Duck on the T.V. “Nothing’s happening yet.” He
harrumphed, then reached for his cocktail, only to find it had spilled
on the floor. “Dammit!” he swore. “Honey, would you get me another
cocktail?”
“Yes, dear,” she said.
Smith felt the speed of the Hoodoo suddenly increase. Thorston
looked up at the dangling handstraps in the interior of the craft,
illuminated by the red Emergency lights. He got up. Without saying
anything, he walked forward to the cockpit.
When he returned, Thorston sat back down in his sling chair.
Perfunctorily, as if announcing tea before dinner, or the arrest of some
low-level robbery suspect, he said, “We’re going to blow Clinton
Bridge.”
“Hmmmm!” Zenger said, grabbing at the pencil behind his ear.
He had been staring vacantly into space, but now he grabbed his pencil,
his pad, and began to write. “Wasn’t that once called the Bay Bridge?”
Zenger asked.
“I have no idea,” Thorston answered. He looked at the reporter
as if the need to inquire about such a thing was somehow suspect.
“Well, it’s called William Jefferson Clinton Bridge now, that
much I know,” Smith offered. “I met a girl near there, on my way to
Indonesia,” he said to Thorston. “If you pull off onto Treasure Island
you get some nice views of the city. You can almost see the White House
from there. It’s great for kissing.” The cop nodded.
On the bridge, which the Hoodoo was racing toward, traffic had
slowed to a standstill. Thousands of people, most of them under 18,
thronged the massive structure. They interweaved with the few cars on
the bridge. Their very numbers prevented traffic from getting onto the
bridge, or from driving across it, if a car did somehow manage to get
on. At the end of the bridge a sheriff’s roadblock had been set up.
Smith looked at Thorston. “Maybe I should go up front, so I
can have a look at the bridge as we come in,” he said. “An ariel view
would help. So’s I can get a good idea of how to blow it.”
Thorston nodded, granting permission. Smith stood. Zenger
stood up too.
“Not you,” Thorston said, still sitting in his sling seat. He
reached for Zenger. But the younger man was slim and quick. He darted
forward, avoiding the cop’s clutching hand.
“KLAW goes wherever there is news!” Zenger declared.
“Dammit!” Thorston swore. He grabbed at his belt. It was
still too tight. He rose up, slow and tired, from his sling seat. He
went forward after Zenger, but the reporter was already in the cockpit.
The view of the city of New Washington, as the Hoodoo glided
in, was astonishing. The TransAmerica Building was dwarfed by larger
structures that had been built in later years, but was still visible.
Treasure Island, once a U.S. Naval Station, was now a wealthy resort.
To the south of Clinton Bridge, almost abutting its southern side, was
the new international port that had once been a U.S. Naval Base. Above
it all stood the Sky Dwellings, suspended above the city like massive
airborne buoys, each one as large as a skyscraper. The Hoodoo flew in
under the Sky Dwellings, toward the earthbound part of the city.
“If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers
in your hair,” Zenger said.
“Huh?” Thorston asked, coming into the cockpit behind the
reporter. Smith stood behind the pilot, Judy Dan. In seeing the
spectacular sight of the city, Thorston forgot that his aim in coming
forward had been to force the reporter back to his seat. Like many
minor functions of a cop, it had been a decision based on his own
personal discretion, subject to being changed, on a whim, or merely
forgotten.
“Just an old song,” Zenger, awed by the view of New Washington,
said quietly to Thorston. “I read about it in a book.”
“Humph!” Thorston said, and tugged on his belt. He was as
incurious about the song, which gave the old, outdated name of the city,
as he was about the previous name of Clinton Bridge. Facts,
particularly those which clashed with present reality, were never
popular with a policeman.
“Looks like the D.C. Sheriffs could use some help,” Thorston
said, craning his pudgy neck over the helmeted head of Judy Dan. He
could just perceive the sheriff’s roadblock. It was at the end of
Clinton Bridge, on the D.C. side. It was holding, at the moment, but
threatened to break under the pressure of the crowd on the bridge.
The radio in the cockpit of the Hoodoo crackled. Something
unintelligible, which only the trained ear of Judy Dan could make out,
was spoken over the radio.
“Roger that,” Dan replied, flicking a switch on the console in
front of her. “Will clear.”
“...on Treasure Island,” the radio ordered.
“Roger,” Dan said.
“IMMEDIATELY!” the voice from the radio said.
“How fast is immediately?” Dan asked the radio. “There’s a lot
of people down there.”
Zenger pointed. “There’s the White House,” he said. He and
Smith and Thorston looked past the cluster of buildings in the city’s
commercial district. Between two tall buildings a small group of white
lights could be seen. Smith wasn’t sure he was looking at the White
House, but Zenger apparently was. “It was once called the Presidio,
long ago,” Zenger said. “When the International Accords were signed,
that’s when the president moved there. With Chinese permission, of
course.”
“Damn Chinese,” Thorston said. His remark was echoed by
Smith. It was a reflexive comment, spoken by both men without even
realizing it.
The Hoodoo swung lower. Dan flicked another switch on her
console. She picked up a microphone and put it close to her mouth.
“CLEAR THE BRIDGE!” Smith heard the Hoodoo say, from a
loudspeaker on the bottom of the craft’s nose. There was movement
below, but it was forward, the one direction the crowd wasn’t supposed
to go.
“Dammit! The sheriff’s lines are starting to give!” Thorston
said. Zenger looked up at the T.V. screen above Judy Dan’s head. It
was dark. She, or her co-pilot, had turned it off. He wondered, if it
were on, what it would be showing. Probably re-runs of Fuller House, or
something equally benign, as New Washington lost its grip on its own
internal security. Zenger wondered what the president was doing at this
moment, over in the White House, beyond the tall buildings of the city’s
commercial district. He could see there were flames in the city itself,
from where a Sky Dwelling had come tumbling down from its perch above
the city. The last thing New Washington needed now, from the standpoint
of order and security, was for a horde of rioters to join those already
wreaking havoc in the city’s interior.
“CLEAR THE BRIDGE!” Judy Dan said again, into her microphone.
The bullhorn on the outside of the Hoodoo echoed her voice, at a much
larger decibel level.
“Where’re they supposed to go?” the co-pilot, also a woman, who
was on her first mission, asked Dan.
“Back,” Dan said. “Away from the sheriff’s lines. Treasure
Island is being set up as a containment area for them. But instead
they’re moving forward!”
“Shit! The lines are cracking!” Thorston said, gazing down at
the crowd on the bridge. It pressed into the sheriff’s lines and the
sheriff’s deputies could not hold them back.
The radio crackled again. The voice on it was more
unintelligible than ever. It sounded like it was screaming, which it
was.
“The WHITE HOUSE!” it yelled, through a mass of static, that
only a pilot, well-trained, could understand. Dan could have gone to
video, but she found it a distraction to look at the person talking,
monitor what was happening outside her quick-moving craft, so low now
between Upper and Lower Washington, and listen. She was a good
listener, well-trained in the art of interpreting radio communications.
The co-pilot, however, reached for the video control. She flicked on
the craft’s Com screen.
Smith watched as a person’s face came onto the Com screen.
Unlike what the T.V. would have shown, were it turned on, this screen
broadcast real news. It wasn’t even moderated by a newscaster, but came
straight from official sources. A woman with a rumpled beige shirt and
a loosened tie was hunched forward. Behind her was the seal of the D.C.
Sheriff’s Department. It was carved in wood and hung up on the wall.
With the presence of the video picture a special Video/Level 2 audio
input cleared the sound of her voice. Even Smith could understand it,
now. So could Zenger, who lifted his camera, and began filming the face
on the Com screen.
“Clear the bridge, whatever it takes. NOW,” the woman on the
Com screen said. “Official from the White House,” she added. She
stared at the interior of the cockpit, suddenly able to see all of them,
thanks to a camera in the cockpit which turned on whenever the Com
screen was on.
“Dammit! I can hear just fine!” Judy Dan snapped at her
co-pilot. She reached over and shut off the Com screen. The face
disappeared. The screen returned to black. The camera recording them
shut off as well. The voice, still speaking, became snarled in static
again.
“Yes, Captain Dan,” the co-pilot apologized.
“...NOW!” the disembodied voice coming from the D.C. Sheriff’s
Department barked.
“What do we do?” the co-pilot asked Judy Dan. Below them, on
the bridge, the crowd was breaking through the sheriff’s lines.
Dan drew in her breath. It was a long, slow, speculative
inhalation. She lifted her chin as she did it, as if contemplating
grander things than the problem down on the bridge.
“Only one thing we can do,” she said, at last. She said it so
quietly that the roar of the Hoodoo’s engines almost drowned out her
voice. She turned to her co-pilot. “Gatling,” she said.
“But they’re only--” the co-pilot gasped. She leaned forward.
She gaped down at the crowded bridge. Behind them, Zenger was still
filming. Dan turned. She looked at Thorston.
“Clear this goddam cockpit!” she shouted at Thorston.
“Yes, ma’am!” Thorston said. He was, like a dog, delighted to
have a clear-cut command to obey. He turned. He put his hand over the
lens of Zenger’s camera. He pushed Zenger back. With his other hand he
indicated to Smith that he was required to obey also.
“What?!” Zenger asked. He tried to speak to Dan, over
Thorston’s bulking figure. The cop shoved him back toward the cockpit’s
door.
Smith and Zenger had just been pushed into the main cabin, and
were turning to go to their seats, when the Gatling opened up.
ZZZUT! ZZZUT! ZZZUT! ZZZUT! The Gatling fired. Each blast
from its mighty, circular, double-barrelled cannons shot out multiple
blasts of laser fire. The greenish glare of the descending lasers lit
up the gunner’s face. He was smiling. Zenger darted toward the opening
in the side of the craft, as did Smith. The Hoodoo passed along the
bridge. Zenger screamed. Below, he could see the people on the bridge
falling as the Gatling tore into them.
Her little sister’s last words echoed in her mind. Lisa was
screaming, but all she could hear was her little sister, asking again,
in frustration, “Why don’t we just fly to Disneyland?”
“Because I broke into the damn thing, and it won’t fly with the
alarm sounding,” Tod was just telling her, yet again, when laser fire
from somewhere above them sliced into their car. It put a hole in their
roof and narrowly missed Tod and Lisa. Lisa’s little sister, hunched
between them on the front seat of the car, was killed instantly.
Lisa screamed, again and again. Tod shouted. He stepped onto
the car’s accelerator. The vehicle shoved forward into the crowd on the
bridge. Tod watched in horror as he ran over several people in front of
him. Then the very pressure of the crowd slowed and finally stopped his
car.
Laser fire tore into the crowd in front of Tod’s eyes. Lisa
was still screaming, clutching at her dead sister.
“My God, you’re killing them!” Zenger shouted at the door
gunner of the Hoodoo. He was still grinning. He fired continuously
from his Laser Gatling, murdering the people on the bridge. “They’re
just children!” Zenger yelled. The Gunner paid no mind. Thorston
pushed at the reporter.
“Sit down, goddam it! Captain’s orders!” Thorston shouted over
the roar of the craft and the shriek of the Gatling.
“You can’t just kill all those people,” Smith said. He hovered
between a desire to obey Thorston, and return to his sling seat, and a
desire to do something about the Gatling. The gunner kept firing,
mercilessly.
Suddenly there was a loud THWUMP! on the outside of the craft.
It teetered in the air. The boxes of explosives in the back of the
craft shifted. Several tumbled to the floor. Smith turned. He
clutched at an overhead handstrap and gaped with horror at the side of
the Hoodoo, near the back. A huge hole had suddenly appeared in the
side of the ship. The edges of it were burning. Through the hole,
obviously made by some kind of high-caliber laser fire from the ground,
he could see the lights of the city.
The trajectory of the Hoodoo became unsteady, as if there were
a 2-year-old in the pilot’s seat, merrily driving it without knowing
how.
“Dammit! Shit!” Thorston cried. He reached for an overhead
handstrap, but too late; he missed, and toppled forward to the floor.
Zenger was torn between trying to film something, and grabbing for a
handstrap. In the end, he did neither, and fell to the floor with
Thorston. Smith held on for dear life.
“CODE RED! CODE RED!” A voice, Captain Dan’s, blurted over the
cabin’s loudspeaker. The Emergency lights flashed. The Gatling
continued to fire, but Smith, staring at the door gunner’s opening in
the side of the craft, saw the laser fire shoot out in a high arc,
obviously missing the bridge. As he watched, the arc became more
inclined. Suddenly, the Gatling’s fire tore into the lowermost windows
of an overhead Sky Dwelling.
“Omigod, we’re going down!” Smith shouted, to no one in
particular. The worst fears of his boyhood phobia about heights
returned. He’d ridden in enough Hummers in Indonesia to be able to tell
even when a big craft like this unfamiliar Hoodoo was in trouble. The
pitch of the cabin became more severe. He gripped the overhead
handstrap, hard. It was now not so much overhead as tilting very much
toward what would once have been the side of his body, when the craft
had flown level. Up was leaning toward Down and Down was leaning toward
Up now, as the Hoodoo rolled into a groundward dive.
Down on the bridge, a cheer went up. A lone tank, stuck amidst
the crowd on the bridge, like some marooned whale, had blown its spout.
On its first try, its mighty gun had not only worked, it had hit its
target.
“Alright!” someone yelled to the girl who had fired the gun.
She grinned. She aimed, and fired again at the Hoodoo. This time, she
missed. But the first blow looked likely to bring the Hoodoo down
anyway, she realized, as the ship went into an unsafe dive toward the
ground.
Tongsun Anu watched the Hoodoo as it dove into the D.C. Bay.
Harold stood beside him. They were on Clinton Bridge. Ahead of them,
where the sheriff’s barricades had been set up, he heard gunfire erupt.
“She got him!” Harold said, and Tongsun knew who he meant. The
girl. The girl who’d asked to drive the tank. She’d known her stuff.
But now their situation had grown more deadly, for he could hear the
sheriffs opening fire. They were no longer just trying to keep back the
crowd. They were killing them.
“Everywhere I go there is death,” Tongsun said.
“I know. I know,” Harold murmured. They watched the Hoodoo
plunge into the bay and wondered, without really caring, whether there
would be any survivors.
“First they killed Her, my love,” Tongsun said. Harold
nodded. Tongsun’s teacher, his lover, had been killed in the crossfire
between himself and the police, at his house. “Now they are killing
everyone in sight,” Tongsun said.
“Yeah,” Harold agreed. He looked forward, along the length of
the bridge. Many of the people on the bridge were not, in fact, under
Tongsun’s control, but merely young people out for the excitement of the
night, watching, or perhaps helping, the Imperium to die. Others, older
than the bulk of the crowd, were simply caught in the wrong place at the
wrong time. They all suffered the same reaction when hit by laser fire,
however.
“We’ve defeated the Oakland Police,” Tongsun said to Harold.
He looked at his assistant. Behind them the Oakland shore, seen in the
distance, was relatively quiet, except for the buildings that the
rioters had set fire to. “I don’t want any more of our people to die.
If we go forward, we’ll have to fight our way into D.C. They’ll try to
beat us back, right down to the last man.”
Harold nodded, silently. In the distance, out along the water,
there was only a still, black surface where the Hoodoo had gone down.
“However,” Tongsun said. “Look. If we can get back to
Oakland, quickly, there is a port over there.”
“Hmmm,” Harold said. He gazed at the Port of Oakland. Had it
been daylight, he would have been able to see the sign, hung on the side
of one of the buildings lining the port, which read, “International Port
of Oakland.” Ships bulked like black shadows in front of the port. A
few were lit, here and there, by cabin lights or by safety lights,
unmoving fireflies against the large frames of the ships.
“One if by land, and two if by sea,” Tongsun said to Harold.
“What?” Harold asked.
“If you can’t get through the front door, try the back,”
Tongsun said. “Our goal is the White House. Trying to cross Clinton
bridge is only going to get us cut up by the sheriffs. Worse, perhaps,
we’d have to move our force through the riot-torn city on the other
side. That building won’t help any, the Sky Dwelling that somebody
dropped down into the middle of D.C.”
“Yeah,” Harold said. He looked over his shoulder. The Sky
Dwelling had landed smack in the center of the financial district,
toppling earthbound buildings and starting a huge fire that burned along
its wreckage and stretched toward the sky.
“What if the president Jumps to the moon?” Harold asked,
looking up. Through the overhead Sky Dwellings he caught sight of the
ancient orb. It glowed down at them with apparent indifference to their
fate.
“Ah, that’s a last resort,” Tongsun said. He shook his head.
“There’s nothing up there but a hotel. I mean, how can you be President
of the Imperium if all you’ve got left to you is a hotel?”
“What if the Chinese intervene?” Harold asked. He stared again
at the fallen Sky Dwelling, blazing hotly in the middle of D.C. He
could hear sirens, gunfire. The sounds of chaos. He wondered if a
body, inside itself, made similar sounds when it died.
“They’ll say it’s an internal matter,” Tongsun said. “That’s
my guess. God knows, they don’t want to do us any favors.”
“Fucking Chinese,” Harold said.
“We have to take the White House, Harold,” Tongsun told his
lieutenant. “As someone once said, ‘It’s not over until the fat lady
sings.’”
“How?” Harold asked. He bit his lip. He wasn’t being
difficult, merely asking, to find solutions.
“The port,” Tongsun said. “Let’s go. We’ll get our best
people and get a small little boat. Not a big one. God knows, we’d
never be able to figure out how to sail it. Just a small little boat,
and our best people.”
“What, and attack the White House, in a boat?” Harold asked.
They began walking. It was a long way back along Clinton Bridge to the
Oakland side of the shore. He hoped they’d find a car or two to
commandeer, and be able to get through the crowd somehow to the Oakland
side. Hopefully they wouldn’t have to open fire on people who were
nominally, at least, for the Cause.
“It’s the path of indirection,” Tongsun said. “The direct way,
across Clinton bridge, is like a trip through Hell. But the bay is
open, and quiet.” Tongsun gestured toward the water.
Together, they approached a car. It looked like someone had
hit the forward part of the roof with laser fire, punching a big hole
there, but the engine was still running.
“Shit, man, I saw something on T.V. once,” Harold said. He
turned to Tongsun. “The White House has mines in the bay. They’re not
turned on, normally, but now they most certainly will be. We’ll sail
right through your peaceful, quiet bay into some fucking mine that’s
just waiting for us, in the water!”
Tongsun kept walking. Harold hurried after him. Tongsun
reached the car. It was a four door car. He pulled open the
passenger’s door of the car, along the front seat. He looked at
Harold. “Get someone with an Uplink,” Tongsun said. “I doubt they’ve
fixed the bug in the computer program that controls the Main Lift Engine
on those Sky Dwellings.”
“Oh, yeah,” Harold said. He opened the back door, as Tongsun,
leaning down, spoke to some female sitting on the passenger’s side of
the car, in the front seat. “Shit!” Harold said to himself. “We could
do that. I mean, with an Uplink, we could drop a building straight into
the bay, right over the fucking approach to the White House. The mines
blow, we sail in. Cool.”
“Oh my God,” the female in the front seat was saying. Tongsun
got in beside her. She had a dead child in her arms. A small girl,
wearing a pink jacket.
“Howzit,” Tongsun said to the car’s driver. “I’m Tongsun Anu.
I need you to get me back to Oakland. We’ll be putting more people in
your car, and on the roof, the hood, wherever we can fit them.”
The driver’s eyes widened. He turned. He looked back through
the car’s rear windshield. “There’s not a lot of room to drive, man,”
he said to Tongsun. “This bridge is full of people.”
“That’s okay,” Tongsun replied. “I don’t want to have to do
it, but we’ve got to get back to Oakland. If necessary, we’ll run over
them. Or shoot them. Whatever it takes, okay?”
“Are you really Tongsun Anu?” Tod, behind the wheel of the car,
asked.
“He’s the real McCoy. Shove this thing into reverse!” Harold,
sitting in the back seat, yelled out.
“Shit. Talk about a back seat driver,” Tod said.
“Just do it,” Tongsun told him. “Stop when I tell you. We
need to get our people in the car so we can move them quickly. If
necessary, we’ll make several trips. Or we’ll get another car on the
way back, if we can.”
“This thing’s almost out of gas,” Tod said, looking down at the
dashboard. Tongsun leaned over. He looked at the gas gauge.
“We can make it,” Tongsun said confidently.
30
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