“Yes, Samrina. Into the copter. Now.”
Khan raises her hand. The movement is jerky and effortful, stitched together out of a dozen separate acts of new will-power. She touches her extended fingertip to the centre of her forehead. “Don’t look back,” she says. Distinctly. Her eyes lose focus, as though she’s peering with difficulty through the disordered drifts of memory into another time and place.
Her lips are still moving, but she has run out of words. It doesn’t matter. There is no mistaking her meaning.
“Colonel, please! Get out of my way and give me a clear shot!”
Khan exhales—a long, breathy sibilance.
She gathers herself, her upper body ducking a little as she compacts the muscles of her legs and arms. Hands splayed wide. Jaws gaping.
In the instant before she leaps, Carlisle places his pistol against her forehead, exactly in the spot she indicated, and pulls the trigger.
Takes what was left of Samrina Khan and paints the grass and concrete with it.
The aborted attack carries her into his arms. He drops the pistol again to catch her, her insubstantial weight not even making him stagger. He lowers her to the ground with excessive care.
He is not crying. He makes no sound. The grief is wedged so deep within him that he can’t turn it into breath.
Sixsmith is examining the brigadier’s body. After a moment of wary circling she lowers her rifle. Most of Fry’s throat and upper chest are gone, so there is nothing to be afraid of there. She turns her attention to Dr. Khan, who is even more indubitably dead.
“What a waste,” she mutters. She struggles for words, comes up with nothing better. “What a fucking … waste!”
“She saved us all from dying back there,” Carlisle snaps. “And everyone on Rosie, too. That’s not waste. Don’t ever call that waste.”
Lieutenant Foss leans down to help him to his feet but he stands unaided, though the pain forces a gasp out of him.
“Sir, we’ve got to get out of here,” Foss says.
The words make sense and he is about to follow her, but he makes the mistake of looking over his shoulder. He stays where he is, unmoving.
“Sir—”
“Rosie,” the colonel exclaims. It’s the best he can manage.
“We’ll rendezvous with Rosie at the south gate, as per plan,” Foss says. But then she follows his gaze and sees what he has seen.
Rosie isn’t moving. And she is surrounded. Not by Captain Manolis and his detail, or by the junker warriors: the diminutive figures clustered around her front and her sides can only be the feral children. And the fact that they have come out of hiding presumably means that Fry’s people are all dead or in the wind.
With an obscene oath, Foss takes aim.
The colonel grabs hold of the SCAR-H’s barrel and forces it down.
The mid-section door has just slid open. Stephen Greaves emerges from the airlock and steps down into the midst of the children. He is holding Samrina Khan’s baby in his arms.
“Listen to me, Lieutenant,” Carlisle snaps. He tells Foss what Khan told him in Rosie’s airlock. He doesn’t have to explain to her what it means. He tells her to get the survivors back to Beacon, and to spread the word to anyone they trust.
Then he heads back across the parade ground, picking his way around the dead.
60
With baby Khan tucked up in Rina’s bunk, surrounded by her smell and her residual presence, Greaves watches the battle from up in the turret. He hates it, but he has to watch because he has made a promise to Rina that he means to keep. His window of opportunity, if it comes at all, will be narrow. He can’t afford to miss it.
More distressingly, he has made a promise to Colonel Carlisle that he will ultimately break. He didn’t lie—of course he didn’t—but he knows that the colonel took a different meaning from his answer than the one that was in his own mind when he spoke.
“If this works, Stephen,” the colonel said, “if the children come, I want you to meet us at the south gate as soon as it’s safe to move. You can drive Rosie, I assume?”
And yes, Greaves said, he could. He had read the manual, and memorised it. He was confident that he could drive Rosie at need. While he was saying these easy, obvious things, he prepared his answer to the bigger question.
“If you make it, Colonel … and if I make it … then I’ll meet you at the south gate.”
He said it fiercely, forcing the words out of his mouth against the rebellion of his breath.
The colonel mistook his intensity for alarm. “You should be fine,” he reassured Greaves. “They won’t fire on Rosie unless they absolutely have to, and our coming out will mean they don’t have to. Or so they’ll assume. We’ll keep them talking until the children arrive, and after that they should have too much on their plates to worry about us.”
“Yes,” Greaves agreed. “They’ll have too much on their plates.”
“Here.” The colonel gave him the tiny hand-held radio that used to be Dr. Fournier’s. “This is on the brigadier’s frequency, so you can’t use it to call us. Not yet. But once you get to the fence, if you don’t find us, just keep this on and I’ll talk you in.”
Then the colonel left.
And now he sits in the turret waiting and watching, knowing that he will never see the south gate. He has lied by omission. It sits in his stomach like a stone.
A voice from inside the lab, high but hoarse, scatters his thoughts. “Colonel! McQueen! Anyone!” Dr. Fournier has woken up and he seems very angry. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given that he was rendered unconscious by means of blunt-instrument trauma and now finds himself tied to the workbench. Greaves tries not to listen, even when Dr. Fournier demands shrilly and repeatedly to be let free. Even when his shouting wakes the baby, who starts to cry.
Dr. Fournier is the other reason why Greaves is up in the turret. He is afraid of the doctor, and seriously needs to keep a safe distance in case the doctor goes from complaining and demanding to asking questions again. Last time that happened, the only thing that kept Greaves from giving up everything he knew was Rina knocking the doctor out with the heavy steel clamp stand. Rina isn’t here now so he has to be very careful.
The fight outside has reached a crescendo. Greaves switches to the infra-red goggles, which turn the bloodletting into an abstract play of shapes and colours. He bites his lower lip hard and tries not to think about punctured and perforated flesh. Teeth and stones and bullets. Blood running out onto the cracked asphalt. He hopes fervently that Rina and the others were able to get clear before the fighting started. That they’re not out there in the middle of this killing field.