90

Six months after the Fall of Ilium, on the Ninth of Av:

Daeman was in charge of the raid on Jerusalem. It had been carefully planned.

One hundred fully functioned old-style humans freefaxed in at the same second, arriving three minutes before four moravec hornets carrying a hundred more volunteers from Ardis and other survivor-communities. The moravec soldiers had offered their services for this raid months earlier, but Daeman had vowed a year ago that he would free the old-style humans locked in Jerusalem’s blue beam—all of Savi’s ancient friends and Jewish relatives—and he still felt it was a human responsibility to do so. They had, however, accepted the long-term loan of combat suits, repellor backpacks, impact armor, and energy weapons. The hundred men and women in the hornets—piloted by moravecs who would not otherwise join the fight—were bringing in the weapons too heavy to carry in during freefax.

It had taken Daeman and his team—humans and moravecs alike—more than three weeks to check and double-check the specific GPS coordinates of the old city streets, avenues, plazas, and junctions down to the inch in order to plot the hundred freefax arrival areas and designated landing sites for the hornets.

They waited until August, until the Jewish holiday of the Ninth of Av. Daeman and his volunteers freefaxed in ten minutes after sunset, when the blue beam was at its brightest.

As far as the Queen Mab’s surveillance and aerial reconnaissance could tell them, Jerusalem was unique of all places on Earth in that it was inhabited by both voynix and calibani. In the Old City, which was their target tonight, the voynix occupied the streets north and northwest of the Temple Mount, in areas roughly equivalent to the ancient Muslim and Christian Quarters, and the calibani filled the tight streets and buildings to the southwest of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aksa Mosque in areas once called the Jewish Quarter and the Armenian Quarter.

From the spy images—including deep radar—they estimated there were about twenty thousand combined voynix and calibani in Jerusalem.

“Hundred to one odds,” Greogi had said with a shrug. “We’ve had worse.”

They faxed in almost silently, a mere disturbance in the air. Daeman and his team appeared in the narrow plaza in front of the Kotel… the Western Wall. It was still light enough to see, but Daeman used his thermal imaging and deep radar in addition to his eyes to find targets. He estimated that there were around five hundred calibani lounging, sleeping, standing, and milling just in the space and on the walls and rooftops immediately west of the plaza. Within seconds, all of his ten squad commanders had checked in over the combat suit intercoms.

“Fire at will,” he said.

The energy weapons had been programmed to disrupt only living tissue—calibani or voynix—but not to destroy real estate. As Daeman targeted and fired, watching the running, leaping long-clawed calibani go down or erupt into thousands of fleshy pieces, he was glad for that. They didn’t want to destroy this particular village in order to save it.

The Old City of Jerusalem became a maelstrom of blue energy flashes, calibani screams, shouted radio calls, and exploding flesh.

Daeman and his squad had killed every target they could see when he saw by his visor chronometer that it was time for the hornets to arrive. He triggered his repellor pack and rose to the level of the Temple Mount—Daeman was alone, this was no time to have the air full of people—and watched as the first two hornets swept in, landed, disgorged their people and cargoes, and then swooped out. Thirty seconds later, the last two hornets had arrived and the combat-suited men and women were spilling across the stones of the Mount, carrying their heavy weapons on tripods and repellor blocks. The two hornets swooped away.

“Temple Mount secured,” Daeman radioed to all his squad leaders. “You may fly when ready. Stay out of the set lines of fire from the Mount.”

“Daeman?” sent Elian from his position above Bab al-Nazir in the old Muslim Quarter. “I can see masses of voynix coming up the Via Dolorosa and bunches of calibani coming your way east on King David Street.”

“Thanks, Elian. Deal with them as they arrive. The larger guns may engage as…”

Daeman was deafened by heavy weapons’ fire from the Mount just beneath his feet. The humans all along the walls and rooftops there were firing in all directions toward the advancing gray and green figures. Between the vertical blue beam and the thousands of blue-flashes of energy weapon fire, all of Old Jerusalem was bathed in an arc-welding blue glow. The filters on Daeman’s combat suit goggles actually dimmed a bit.

“All squads, fire at will, report any penetration in your sectors,” said Daemon. He tilted on the hovering backpack repellors and then slid through the air to the northeast to where the taller, more modern blue-beam building rose just behind the Dome of the Rock. He was interested to find that his heart was pounding so wildly that he had to concentrate on not hyperventilating. They’d practiced this five hundred times over the past two months, freefaxing into the mock-up of Jerusalem that the moravecs had helped them build not far from Ardis. But nothing could have prepared Daeman for a fight of this magnitude, with these weapons, in this city of all cities.

Hannah and her squad of ten were waiting for him when he arrived at the beam building’s sealed door. Daeman landed, nodded at Laman, Kaman, and Greogi, who were there in the soft twilight with Hannah, and said, “Let’s do it.”

Laman, working quickly with his undamaged left hand, set the plastic explosive charge. The twelve humans stepped around the side of the metal-alloy building while the explosion took the entire door off.

The inside was not much larger than Daeman’s tiny bedroom back at Ardis and the controls were—thank whatever God might be out there—almost as they’d surmised from reviewing all Shared data available from the Taj Moira’s crystal cabinet.

Hannah did the actual work, her deft fingers flying over the virtual keyboard, tapping in the seven-digit codes whenever queried by the blue-beam building’s primitive AI.

Suddenly a deep hum—mostly subsonic—rattled their teeth and bruised their bones. All of the displays on the AI wall flashed green and then died.

“Everyone out,” said Daeman. He was the last one to leave the beam-building’s anteroom, and not a second too soon—the anteroom, the metal wall, and that entire side of the building folded into itself twice and disappeared, becoming a black rectangle.

Daeman, Hannah, and the others had backed down onto the stones of the Temple Mount itself, and now they watched as the blue beam dropped from the sky, the hum growing deeper as it died—painfully so. Daeman found himself shutting his eyes and gripping his hands into fists, feeling the dying subsonics through his gut and testicles as well as his bones and teeth. Then the low noise stopped.

He pulled his combat suit cowl off, earphones and microphone still in place, and said to Hannah, “Defensive perimeter here. As soon as the first person is out, call in the hornets.”

She nodded and joined the others where they were facing and firing outward from the high Temple Mount.

At some time during the preparation for this night, someone—it might have been Ada—had joked that it would only be polite that Daeman and the other raiders should memorize the faces and names of all of the 9,113 men and women captured in that blue beam fourteen hundred years ago. Everyone laughed, but Daeman knew it would have been technically possible; the crystal cabinet in the Taj Moira had given Harman much of that data.