The door began to shudder in its frame and make tremendous booming noises. Carl stepped forward and peered through the peephole; it was a couple of urban homeboy types having at it with a fire axe. He stepped away from the door, shrugging the rifle from his shoulder, levered in a shell, and fired it through the door, aiming away from the youths. The booming stopped abruptly, and they heard the head of the axe ringing like a bell as it fell to the pavement.
One of the Zulus kicked the door open and leapt into the alley, whirling his blade in a vast, fatal arc like the blade of a helicopter, slicing through a garbage can but not hitting any people. When Carl came piling through the door a few seconds later, he saw several young toughs scattering down the alley, dodging among several dozen refugees, loiterers, and street people who pointed helpfully at their receding backsides, making sure it was understood that their only reason for being in this alley at this time was to act as a sort of block watch on behalf of the gwailo visitors.
Without talking about it much, they fell into an improvised formation there in the alley, where they had a bit of room to maneuver. The Zulus went in front, whirling their poles over their heads and hollering some kind of traditional war-cry that drove a good many of the Chinese out of their path. One of the Jews went behind the Zulus, using his skull gun to pick off any Fists who charged them. Then came Carl Hollywood, who, with his height and his rifle, seemed to have ended up with the job of long-range reconnaissance and defense. Colonel Spence and the other Israeli brought up the rear, walking backward most of the time.
This got them down the alley without much trouble, but that was the easy part; when they reached the street, they were no longer the only focus of action but mere motes in a sandstorm. Colonel Spence discharged most of a clip into the air; the explosions were nearly inaudible in the chaos, but the gouts of light from the weapon's barrel drew some attention, and people in their immediate vicinity actually got out of their way. Carl saw one of the Zulus do something very ugly with his long weapon and looked away; then he reflected that it was the Zulus' job to break trail and his to concentrate on more distant threats. He turned slowly around as he walked, trying to ignore the threat that was just beyond arm's length and to get a view of the larger scene.
They had walked into a completely disorganized street fight between the Coastal Republic forces and the Fists of Righteous Harmony, which was not made any clearer by the fact that many of the Coastals had defected by tying strips of red cloth round the arms of their uniforms, and that many of the Fists were not wearing any markings at all, and that many others who had no affiliation were taking advantage of the situation to loot stores and were being fought off by private guards; many of the looters were themselves being mugged by organized gangs.
They were on Nanjing Road, a broad thoroughfare leading straight to the Bund and the Huang Pu, lined with four– and five-story buildings so that many windows looked out over them, any one of which might have contained a sniper.
A few of them did contain snipers, Carl realized, but many of these were shooting across the street at each other, and the ones who were firing into the street could have been shooting at anyone. Carl saw one fellow with a laser-sighted rifle emptying clip after clip into the street, and he reckoned that this constituted a clear and present danger; so at a moment when their forward progress had stalled momentarily, while the Zulus were waiting for an especially desperate Coastal/Fist melee to resolve itself ahead of them, Carl planted his feet, swung his rifle up to his shoulder, took aim, and fired. In the dim fire– and torch-light rising up from the street, he could see powder explode from the stone window frame just above the sniper's head. The sniper cringed, then began to sweep the street with his laser, looking for the source of the bullet.
Someone jostled Carl from behind. It was Spence, who had been hit with something and lost the use of his leg. A Fist was in the Colonel's face. Carl rammed the butt of the rifle into the man's chin, sending him backward into the melee with his eyes rolled up into their sockets. Then he levered in another shell, raised the weapon to his shoulder again, and tried to find the window with his sniper friend.
He was still there, tracing a ruby-red line patiently across the boiling surface of the crowd. Carl took in a deep breath, released it slowly, prayed that no one would bump into him, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle butted him hard in the shoulder, and at the same moment he saw the sniper's rifle fall out of the window, spinning end over end, the laser beam sweeping through the smoke and steam like the trace on a radar scope.
The whole thing had probably been a bad idea; if any of the other snipers had seen this, they'd be wanting to get rid of him, whatever their affiliation. Carl levered in another shell and then let the rifle dangle from one hand, pointed down at the street, where it wouldn't be so conspicuous. He got the other hand into Spence's armpit and helped him continue down the street. The ends of Spence's mustache wiggled as he continued with his endless and unflappable line of patter; Carl couldn't hear a word but nodded encouragingly. Not even the most literal-minded neo-Victorian could take that stiff-upper-lip thing seriously; Carl realized now that it was all done with a nod and a wink. It was not Colonel Spence's way of saying that he wasn't scared; it was, rather, a code of sorts, a face-saving way for him to admit that he was terrified half out of his wits, and for Carl to admit likewise.
Several Fists rushed them at once; the Zulus got two, the leading Israeli got one, but another came in and bounced his knife from the Israeli's knife-proof jacket. Carl raised the rifle, clamping the stock between his arm and his body, and fired from the hip. The recoil nearly knocked the weapon out of his hand; the Fist practically did a backflip.
He couldn't believe they had not reached the waterfront yet; they had been doing this for hours. Something prodded him hard in the back, causing him to stumble forward; he looked back over his shoulder and saw a man trying to run him through with a bayonet. Another man ran up and tried to wrench the rifle out of Carl's hand.
Carl, too startled to respond for a moment, finally let go of Spence, reached across, and poked him in the eyes. A great explosion sounded in his ear, and he looked over to see that Spence had twisted himself round and shot the attacker who had the bayonet. The Israeli who had been guarding their rear had simply vanished. Carl raised his rifle toward the people who were converging on them from the rear; that and Spence's pistol opened up a gratifying clear space in their wake. But something more powerful and terrifying was driving more people toward them from the side, and as Carl tried to see what it was, he realized that a score of Chinese people were now between him and the Zulus. The looks on their faces were pained and panicky; they were not attacking, they were being attacked.
Suddenly all of the Chinese were gone. Carl and Colonel Spence found themselves commingled with a dozen or so Boers– not just men, but women and children and elders too, a whole laager on the move. All of them surged forward instinctively and reabsorbed the vanguard of Carl's group. They were a block from the waterfront.
The Boer leader, a stout man of about fifty, somehow identified Carl Hollywood as the leader, and they quickly redeployed what forces they had for the final push to the waterfront. The only thing Carl remembered of this conversation was the man saying, "Good. You've got Zulus."
The Boers in the vanguard were carrying some sort of automatic weapons firing tiny nanotech high-explosive rounds, which, indiscriminately used, could have turned the crowd into a rampart of chewed meat; but they fired the weapons in disciplined bursts even when the charging Fists penetrated to within a sword's length. From time to time, one of them would raise his head and sweep a row of windows with continuous automatic fire; riflemen would tumble out of the darkness and spin down into the street like rag dolls. The Boers must be wearing some kind of night vision stuff.