The Consul pulled him back down. They were in the shelter of a few ornamental trees here, but the skimmer was exposed, and their landing had been no secret. The Consul had glimpsed several armored troops moving down an adjacent street as the skimmer pancaked in for its crash landing. They might be SDF or Ousters or even Hegemony Marines, but the Consul imagined that they would be trigger-happy whatever their loyalties.
“Never mind that,” he said. “We’ll get to a phone. Call the consulate.”
He looked around, identified the section of warehouses and stone buildings where they had crashed. Upriver a few hundred meters, an old cathedral stood abandoned, its chapter house crumbling and overhanging the riverbank. “I know where we are,” said the Consul. “It’s just a block or two to Cicero’s. Come on.” He lifted Theo’s arm over his head and onto his shoulders, pulling the injured man to his feet.
“Cicero’s, good,” muttered Theo. “Could use a drink.”
The rattle of flechette fire and an answering sizzle of energy weapons came from the street to their south. The Consul took as much of Theo’s weight as he could and half-walked, half-staggered along the narrow lane beside the river.
“Oh damn,” the Consul whispered.
Cicero’s was burning. The old bar and inn—as old as Jacktown and much older than most of the capital—had lost three of its four sagging riverfront buildings to the flames, and only a determined bucket brigade of patrons was saving the last section.
“I see Stan,” said the Consul, pointing to the huge figure of Stan Leweski standing near the head of the bucket brigade line. “Here.” The Consul helped Theo to a sitting position under an elm tree along the walkway. “How’s your head?”
“Hurts.”
“I’ll be right back with help,” said the Consul and moved as quickly as he could down the narrow lane toward the men.
Stan Leweski stared at the Consul as if he were a ghost. The big man’s face was streaked with soot and tears, and his eyes were wide, almost uncomprehending. Cicero’s had been in his family for six generations.
It was raining softly now, and the fire seemed beaten. Men shouted up and down the line as a few timbers from the burned-out sections sagged into the embers of the basement.
“By God, it’s gone,” said Leweski. “You see? Grandfather Jiri’s addition? It’s gone.”
The Consul grabbed the huge man by his shoulders. “Stan, we need help. Theo’s over there. Hurt. Our skimmer crashed. We need to get to the spaceport… to use your phone. It’s an emergency, Stan.”
Leweski shook his head. “Phone’s gone. Comlog bands are jammed. Goddamn war is on.” He pointed toward the burned sections of the old inn. “They’re gone, by damn. Gone.”
The Consul made a fist, furious in the grip of sheer frustration. Other men milled around, but the Consul recognized none of them. There were no FORCE or SDF authorities in sight. Suddenly a voice behind him said, “I can help. I have a skimmer.”
The Consul whirled to see a man in his late fifties or early sixties, soot and sweat covering his handsome face and streaking his wavy hair.
“Great,” said the Consul. “I’d appreciate it.” He paused. “Do I know you?”
“Dr. Melio Arundez,” said the man, already moving toward the parkway where Theo rested.
“Arundez,” repeated the Consul, hurrying to keep up. The name echoed strangely. Someone he knew? Someone he should know? “My God, Arundez!” he said. “You were the friend of Rachel Weintraub when she came here decades ago.”
“Her university advisor, actually,” said Arundez. “I know you. You went on the pilgrimage with Sol.” They stopped where Theo was sitting, still holding his head in his hands. “My skimmer’s over there,” said Arundez.
The Consul could see a small, two-person Vikken Zephyr parked under the trees. “Great. We’ll get Theo to the hospital and then I need to get to the spaceport immediately.”
“The hospital’s overcrowded to the point of insanity,” said Arundez. “If you’re trying to get to your ship, I suggest you take the Governor-General there and use the ship’s surgery.”
The Consul paused. “How did you know I have a ship there?”
Arundez dilated the doors and helped Theo onto the narrow bench behind the front contour seats. “I know all about you and the other pilgrims, M. Consul. I’ve been trying to get permission to go to the Valley of the Time Tombs for months. You can’t believe my frustration when I learned that your pilgrims’ barge left secretly with Sol aboard.”
Arundez took a deep breath and asked a question which he obviously had been afraid to ask before. “Is Rachel still alive?”
He was her lover when she was a grown woman, thought the Consul.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m trying to get back in time to help her, if I can.”
Melio Arundez nodded and settled into the driver’s seat, gesturing for the Consul to get in. “We’ll try to get to the spaceport. It won’t be easy with the fighting around there.”
The Consul sat back, feeling his bruises, cuts, and exhaustion as the seat folded around him. “We need to get Theo… the Governor-General… to the consulate or government house or whatever they call it now.”
Arundez shook his head and powered up the repellors. “Uh-uh. The consulate’s gone, hit by a wayward missile, according to the emergency news channel. All the Hegemony officials went out to the spaceport for evacuation before your friend even went hunting for you.”
The Consul looked at the semiconscious Theo Lane. “Let’s go,” he said softly to Arundez.
The skimmer came under small-arms fire as they crossed the river, but flechettes merely rattled on the hull and the single energy beam fired sliced beneath them, sending a spout of steam ten meters high.
Arundez drove like a crazy person—weaving, bobbing, pitching, yawing, and occasionally slewing the skimmer around on its axis like a plate sliding atop a sea of marbles. The Consul’s seat restraints closed around him, but he still felt his gorge threaten to rise. Behind them, Theo’s head moved loosely back and forth on the rear bench as he surrendered to unconsciousness.
“The downtown’s a mess!” Arundez shouted over repellor roar. “I’ll follow the old viaduct to the spaceport highway and then cut across country, staying low.” They pirouetted around a burning structure which the Consul belatedly recognized as his old apartment building.
“Is the spaceport highway open?”
Arundez shook his head. “Never make it. Paratroopers have been dropping around it for the last thirty minutes.”
“Are the Ousters trying to destroy the city?”
“Uh-uh. They could have done that from orbit without all this fuss. They seem to be investing the capital. Most of their dropships and paratroopers land at least ten klicks out.”
“Is it our SDF who’s fighting back?”
Arundez laughed, showing white teeth against tanned skin. “They’re halfway to Endymion and Port Romance by now… though reports ten minutes ago, before the comm lines were jammed, say that those cities are also under attack. No, the little resistance you see is from a few dozen FORCE:Marines left behind to guard the city and the spaceport.”
“So the Ousters haven’t destroyed or captured the spaceport?”
“Not yet. At least not as of a few minutes ago. We’ll soon see. Hang on!”
The ten-kilometer ride to the spaceport via the VIP highway or the skylanes above it usually took a few minutes, but Arundez’s roundabout, up-and-down approach over the hills, through the valleys, and between the trees added time and excitement to the trip. The Consul turned his head to watch hillsides and the slums of burning refugee camps flash by to his right. Men and women crouched against boulders and under low trees, covering their heads as the skimmer rushed past. Once the Consul saw a squad of FORCE:Marines dug in on a hilltop, but their attention was focused on a hill to the north from which there came a panoply of laser-lance fire. Arundez saw the Marines at the same instant and jinked the skimmer hard left, dropping it into a narrow ravine scant seconds before the treetops on the ridge above were sliced off as if by invisible shears.