Valiant Dust

11

Tanjeer, Gadira II

Chaos reigned in the streets of the capital as two of Hector’s orbital shuttles streaked low over dun-colored buildings and dusty palms. Sikander checked his seat harness and tried to ignore the lurching sensation in his stomach as the shuttle pilots jinked and slalomed between the taller buildings and the occasional minaret or comm tower. They had to avoid the controlled airspace around the palace, which meant spending more time over Tanjeer’s crowded outlying districts than Sikander would have liked, especially since the local insurgents had so recently demonstrated that they had the capability of knocking flyers out of the sky. Petty Officer Long and the other shuttle pilot certainly proceeded as if they expected to be fired on at any moment.

“I do not like the looks of this,” Darvesh Reza murmured, watching the rooftops and crowded streets passing by beneath the small viewports in the shuttle’s passenger area. Like the rest of the landing force, he wore battle dress and carried a mag rifle, although he wore a small turban instead of a fatigue cap. He gave Sikander a long look, but did not voice any more objections. They were commited at this point, after all.

“Nor do I,” Sikander admitted. “At least we’re not Gadirans or Montréalais. The locals have no particular reason to be upset with us.”

“I suspect one offworlder looks like another to most of these people, Nawabzada. I would not count on a different uniform to deflect their anger.”

“So noted,” Sikander replied. Then he gripped his seat as the pilot threw the shuttle into one more sharp turn and dove down to the ground, landing heavily inside the walls of the consulate compound. The hatch by Sikander cycled open, and a barrage of impressions—the bright late-afternoon sunlight, the humid air, the smell of smoke, and more ominously the distant pop-pop or chirp-chirp of distant gunfire—assaulted his senses all at once.

Darvesh gave him one more look, but Sikander ignored him and scrambled out of the hatch. The valet and fifteen more of Hector’s sailors armed for ground combat followed him. Forty meters away, on the other side of the courtyard, the second shuttle likewise landed and opened its hatches; Sublieutenant Larkin, Chief Trent, and the rest of the landing force quickly exited and fanned out. Sikander moved aside and studied the scene, allowing Larkin to direct the sailors to take positions around the consulate grounds. He had no reason to believe he would do it better than she would, and he wanted to keep focused on overall situational awareness.

The consulate itself was a small palace in the heart of Tanjeer’s Sidi Marouf neighborhood. Over the last forty years, the Sidi Marouf had grown into the heart of offworlder activity on Gadira; the picturesque manors that had formerly sheltered Gadira’s wealthy old families had been quickly bought up by Montréalais or Aquilan businessmen, who were fantastically rich by Gadiran standards and could afford to live in the planet’s most affluent neighborhood. Handsome low-rise buildings nearby harbored banks, corporate headquarters, luxury apartments, theaters, and restaurants catering to offworlders with money to spend. Sikander observed that some of the nearby rooftops commanded the area inside the consulate walls; snipers overhead might be a real concern if a siege situation developed. Bricks and broken bottles littered the courtyard, and most of the consulate’s windows were broken.

He turned his attention to the front entrance, an ornamental iron gate that was currently closed. Two plainclothes Aquilan security agents stood guard nearby, while scores of Gadiran men—some dressed in Montréalais-style working clothes, others in more traditional Gadiran robes—protested just outside, shouting angrily or waving signs with Jadeed-Arabi slogans Sikander couldn’t read. He found the experience unsettling, since he’d never been to a planet where he couldn’t understand what the people were saying; Standard Anglic was universal among Commonwealth worlds, and of course he understood the High Panjabi and Tari Urdu spoken in Kashmir. In any event, the sudden arrival of two large shuttles and deployment of well-armed soldiers momentarily quieted the crowd.

Larkin trotted up to Sikander, with Chief Trent a step behind her. “We’ve secured the compound walls, sir,” she reported. “I’ve got two squads on the perimeter, and one reserve here in the courtyard with our shuttles. The back gate and the alleyway behind the consulate seem clear, but we think they’re being watched. We’d better assume that trouble might come from that direction at any time.”

“Do we have any drones in the air?” Sikander asked.

“Four Dragonflies, sir,” Chief Trent answered. The thumb-sized remotes combined excellent vidcams with stealthy profiles, good endurance, simple operation, and the ability to perch, creep, or hover as needed. Combined with Hector’s orbital cameras, they’d go a long way toward keeping anything from surprising the landing force.

“Very well,” Sikander replied. “Your dispositions seem good to me, Ms. Larkin. Make sure we keep an eye on those rooftops, and instruct your troops to set their rifles for nonlethal fire. I’m going to find Mr. Garcia and see what else we can do to help.”

“Yes, sir,” Larkin answered. She remembered not to salute; one never knew who might be watching, after all.

Sikander headed into the consulate building; Darvesh followed him. Inside, the place was in almost as much chaos as the streets outside were. Half a dozen consular employees in the outer office busily collected dataslates and sterilized information-storage devices, or locked up valuables against a possible attack. Sikander continued on in to the interior office, and knocked on the doorframe. “Consul Garcia?” he called.

Franklin Garcia sat on the edge of his desk, watching several vid feeds at the same time. An administrative assistant worked around him, stashing small valuables and important documents in sturdy boxes. Garcia looked over at Sikander, and allowed himself a sigh of relief. “Mr. North,” he said. “Words cannot express how happy I am to see the Navy this afternoon. Most of our local security guards have chosen to call in sick today. We’ve been afraid that the mob outside would decide to scale the walls while we were shorthanded.”

“Hopefully we’ll deter them from anything like that,” Sikander replied. “We’ve got the compound secured for now. What else can we be doing?”

Garcia pointed at one of the vidscreens. “First Bank of High Albion,” he replied. “They’ve called me five times in the last half hour. We’ve got a dozen Aquilan citizens and local employees pinned in by another large crowd, and they tell me they’re taking small-arms fire.”

Sikander studied the screen that the diplomat indicated. The consulate sat on a relatively quiet residential street, but it looked like the bank occupied the corner of a major intersection, and the crowd gathered outside it was substantially larger. A vehicle burned just outside the bank’s front door. “Where is this?” he asked.

“Five blocks west of here. Can you send some troops over to disperse the crowd or escort the people back to the consulate?”

“That’s a much larger crowd than the one outside your door,” Sikander said slowly. “Darvesh, what do you think?” Darvesh had twenty years’ more experience with civil disorders and urban combat scenarios than he did, after all.

“We don’t have the numbers to disperse a crowd of that size without employing heavy weapons,” Darvesh told him. “The repercussions of such a decision I leave to your imagination, sir.”

Sikander suppressed a shudder. Most of the demonstrators on-screen were unarmed. They might be hostile toward offworlders at the moment, but he was certain that slaughtering scores or hundreds of Gadirans would in no way advance Aquila’s interests in this system. “We’d better look for a way to get the bank employees out of there, then,” he said. “Did you say this was just five blocks away, Mr. Garcia?”

“I did,” the consul confirmed. “I can’t tell you much about the condition of the streets between here and there, though.”

“We’ve got reconnaissance assets in place, so we’ll know more soon,” said Sikander. “But I think that it would be very dangerous to put troops on the street right now. No, the way to go is to fly the civilians out of there. If they can get to the roof, we can have one of the shuttles pick them up.”

“Ground fire may be a risk, sir,” Darvesh pointed out.

“It’s the best option I see,” Sikander replied. “Mr. Garcia, contact the bank and tell them to get to the roof, or even a higher-floor window. We’ll make arrangements to move them to safety.”

“I’m on it,” the consul replied. He picked up his desk comm, and started to dial.

Sikander hurried back outside to the courtyard, and motioned to Larkin and Trent to meet him by the first shuttle. The angry roar of the crowd seemed to fill the air, echoing between the low-rise apartments and businesses of the Sidi Marouf. A rock thrown over the consulate’s outer wall clattered off the shuttle’s stubby wing; he jumped in spite of himself, and turned to keep half an eye on the front gate while waiting. Maybe bringing civilians to the consulate isn’t the right move, he thought. Maybe we should be evacuating everyone we can to some safe place out in the countryside. The problem was, he didn’t know what might qualify as a safe place.

Petty Officer Long cracked the hatch by the shuttle’s cockpit, opening it just enough to speak to Sikander while taking advantage of the cover it provided. “What’s going on, Mr. North?” he asked.

“One moment.” Sikander waited for Larkin and Trent to join him, then addressed all three together. “We need to rescue some civilians trapped in a bank building a few blocks over. Getting them out on the ground seems problematic, but we might be able to take them off the roof. Here, let me show you.” He opened his dataslate and picked up the feed from the nearest Dragonfly, steering the tiny drone to show the First Bank of High Albion and the ugly mob surrounding it.

The three Aquilans watched for a long moment. “The flight space is a little cramped, but I think I can get the shuttle in there,” Long said. “I don’t like the look of the crowd, though.”

“I’ll take a half squad of riflemen along for security,” Sikander said. “Ms. Larkin, find me half a dozen steady hands. Long, figure out the best way to get in and out of there.”

“Yes, sir,” Long replied. He ducked back into the cockpit and pulled up his own recon feed.

“Chief, let’s send half our reserve squad,” Larkin told Trent. “I don’t want to pull anyone off the perimeter.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Chief Trent nodded, and hurried off to gather a crew.

The instant the chief was out of easy earshot, Larkin turned on Sikander. “Sir, you shouldn’t go. You’re in command here—I should go instead.”

“I need you here to maintain tactical control of the consulate,” Sikander told her. “I’m the extra officer. I’ll go.”

Larkin fell silent, fixing her eyes on the shuttle hull behind Sikander. He could almost feel the barriers slamming into place behind her expressionless face. For a woman who wasn’t more than twenty-five years in age, Angela Larkin had some of the densest armor he had ever seen; her finely shaped features might as well have been carved out of surgical steel. “Do you lack confidence in my ability to get this job done, sir?” she asked.

Now what do I do? Sikander wondered. That was exactly his concern, although he could hardly be honest about it. He decided to make the decision about him, not her. “No, Ms. Larkin,” he answered. “I know you are trained for landing operations. But I have some personal experience with riots and civil unrest. I am sorry to say that this sort of situation comes up from time to time on my homeworld.”

“I know.” A shadow of old pain flickered across the younger officer’s face. “My father was very nearly killed serving in Kashmir. As I understand the story, it was a situation a lot like this one.”

Her father was wounded in Kashmir? Sikander remembered seeing a note in Larkin’s service jacket that her father was a retired officer in the Commonwealth Army, but he hadn’t paid attention to the exact date or the circumstances; normally, they wouldn’t have been any of his business. A suspicion took shape in Sikander’s mind. “When was your father injured?”

“It was 3077, the Palarist Uprising. He was shot and blinded while under orders not to fire back.” Larkin took a deep breath. “The doctors did the best they could, but he’s never seen me with his own eyes.”

Sikander nodded to himself. All of the sudden, many things about his difficult start with the younger officer made a good deal more sense. Twenty-five years ago, the Palarist movement had racked large parts of Jaipur and Srinagar. Nationalists and extremists had rioted for weeks, protesting Aquilan rule over Kashmir and demanding more autonomy. Thousands of Aquilan troops had been involved in the fighting. In fact, the terrorists who had struck at Nawab Dayan and the North clan during the Bandi Chor Divas had been Palarists, fighting on fifteen years after their defeat. No wonder she finds it difficult to serve alongside me. Every time she sees me, she is reminded of her father’s injury.

He met Larkin’s eyes. “My family, too, fought against the Palarists. You must understand that many Kashmiris died at their hands. Their reckless violence hurt both my people and yours.”

“I didn’t know that, Mr. North,” Larkin admitted.

“This is not Kashmir. Most of the demonstrators outside the walls are not our enemies—they are angry and misguided, and they don’t know what else to do. Yes, we can’t let them hurt people we’re here to protect. But we have to be careful not to make things worse.”

Larkin nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Very well, Ms. Larkin.” Sikander took a step back and signaled to Chief Trent, waiting a short distance away with the armed sailors she’d gathered. “It’s your shuttle. Inform your team that they are not to fire unless you release them to return fire, and do so only as a last resort. We don’t want to take any chance of hitting noncombatants.”

“Understood, sir.” Larkin motioned to the sailors of her detachment. They quickly boarded the shuttle as Sikander backed away to give Long plenty of room to lift off. With a shrill whine of the engines, the stubby vehicle kicked up off the ground. It hovered just above the consulate grounds for a moment, and then slewed around and disappeared over the surrounding rooftops.

Darvesh watched the armed shuttle fly off. “You allowed the sublieutenant to go?”

“She was right to insist—it’s her job. And I seem to recall that you had some words for me about choosing my risks more carefully.”

“I am surprised that for once you heeded my advice, Nawabzada.”

“I promise I won’t make a habit of it,” Sikander told him, watching the feed from the Dragonfly drone as the shuttle moved into position and alighted on the bank’s rooftop. Then he made himself put away his dataslate and pay attention to the neighborhood immediately around the consulate. Plenty of people would be watching the shuttle’s rescue attempt, and he didn’t need the temptation of micromanaging Larkin’s efforts via vid feed. He settled for quickly circling the compound, checking the positions of the landing force. Four sailors protected the front gate, staying back around the wall to minimize their exposure. The low roof of a garage that stood up against the compound’s eastern wall provided a good vantage for another fire team to protect that whole side of the grounds, while the windows and roof of the consulate building itself offered good positions for another fire team to guard the back of the compound. He left Chief Trent in charge there. But the western wall offered no good places for a rifleman to stand and look over its four-meter parapet—anything could be going on just on the other side of the wall, and the Aquilans would have no idea. Sikander settled for repositioning one of the Dragonflies to provide a constant view of the street on that side of the compound, and instructed the fire team there to keep a close eye on its video feed.

“Is there anything we’re overlooking?” he asked Darvesh as he studied the compound defenses again.

“The consulate cannot be held against a determined attack, sir,” said the Kashmiri soldier. “It simply comes down to whether or not the people in the streets outside have the motivation to make such an attack. Your guess about that is as good as mine.”

“I do not find that reassuring,” Sikander muttered. He glanced at the video from the Dragonfly watching over the bank evacuation. The shuttle remained parked on the rooftop. Several of Larkin’s squad knelt with mag rifles raised as they covered different quadrants around the rear hatch, while the rest of the team hurried to move a handful of civilians from a roof access panel to the shuttle. It seemed to be going slowly.

He keyed his comm device and spoke. “Status report, Ms. Larkin?”

“Taking fire, sir. Several of the civilians are wounded. We’re moving as fast as we can.”

“Very well,” he replied. Larkin had enough on her mind for the moment; he didn’t need to distract her with extra orders or suggestions. Instead, he keyed the two medics in the landing force. “Thierry, Niles, it sounds like Ms. Larkin will have wounded civilians on board when she returns. Be ready to treat casualties.”

“Yes, sir,” the two medics answered. A few moments later, they appeared by the consulate building entrance and hurried over to wait beside Sikander. He glanced again at his vid feed just in time to see Hector’s shuttle lift off from the rooftop. Silent puffs of paint and dust showed the impact of bullets on the hull. Small-arms fire posed little threat to the orbital shuttles; they were rugged craft. But if the Caidists in the crowd had any more of their antiair missiles, it might be a different story.

The shuttle darted out of the Dragonfly’s view, accelerating hard as soon as it was clear of the rooftop obstructions. Sikander heard the low hum of the returning shuttle’s induction engines echoing through the streets, growing louder as it quickly spanned the short distance between the bank and the consulate. Then the shuttle suddenly appeared overhead, circled around just above the rooftops, and set down again in the consulate courtyard. The crowd outside the front gate shouted in consternation and anger, and a new shower of bricks and bottles came over the wall. Sikander hurried over to the main hatch, with the two medics just a few steps behind him.

The hatch slid open, and Angela Larkin hopped out. Without a word to Sikander she turned and immediately helped down a crewman bleeding from a bad leg wound. More than a dozen civilians—three Aquilans judging by their clothing, the rest Gadirans dressed in business attire now torn or rumpled in some cases—tumbled out of the shuttle as soon as the wounded sailor was clear. “Head for the consulate!” Sikander shouted to them, and pointed the way. “Right over there!”

An old-style rifle barked from somewhere high and behind Sikander. One of the civilians running for the consulate door, an older Gadiran man in a good suit, grunted and stumbled, falling on his face. A neat round hole between his shoulder blades oozed red.

“Sniper!” several voices called over the tactical comm network at the same time. Civilians and sailors alike scattered in terror, seeking cover anywhere they could find it or throwing themselves flat on the ground. Sikander ducked back under the shuttle’s stubby wing, and managed to knock his helmet against the fuselage hard enough to bite his tongue.

I have been here before, he realized. The panic, the screams, the taste of blood—

—in his mouth. Then he becomes aware of the sounds: shouts of dismay, thin wails of pain, the ringing echoes of the blast all strangely dull and distant to his ears.

Sikander slowly levers himself upright from the wreckage of the reviewing stand. It’s difficult to make out what he is looking at. Ceremonial costumes are nothing but colorful tatters; smoke roils across Sangrur’s central square while Jaipur Dragoons scramble to reach the nawab’s family. He can see his own fear and confusion mirrored in their expressions.

To his left, Nawab Dayan seems to be sitting up, but his mother, Vadiya North, rolls from side to side, her hands clapped to her face. Sikander’s brothers Devindar and Manvir, his sister Usha, his cousins, likewise begin to pick themselves up. Thank God, Sikander thinks. They’re all alive. But Mother—!

He picks his way through the wreckage to go to her side. Then, not two meters from Sikander, his brother Gamand suddenly spins in a half circle and falls back into his seat with a grunt, blood pouring from his shoulder. An instant later the chirping report of a high-velocity mag rifle echoes through the air.

“Shots fired! Shots fired!” his cousin Amarleen shouts. She is only fourteen, but she dashes to Gamand and tears the sash off her ceremonial dress. Blood splatters the rich gold cloth as she does her best to apply pressure to the wound.

Sikander whirls around, looking for the shooter. From the time he was old enough to absorb the lessons, he was taught to evaluate security threats and survive worst-case scenarios. That training kicks in now, overriding his shock and horror. He grasps the plot in a sudden flash: The Palarists set off the bomb to wreck the grandstand and blow down the bulletproof glass panels, while a rifleman waits to take advantage of any shots presented.

“Across the street!” Sikander yells to the nawab’s dragoons. One of the stand’s dislodged glass panels lies almost at Sikander’s feet. He stoops down, gets his hands under the glass, and lifts. The panel weighs almost ninety kilos, but Sikander doesn’t need to pick it up—he only needs to stand it up on its edge. He rips his fine tunic raising the armored glass, but he wrestles the panel upright and holds it there, interposing it between his wounded brother and the sniper. A heartbeat later, something punches the center of the panel right in front of him with a heavy thunk! and a white spiderweb cracks the armored glass. The impact almost carries the panel out of his hands.

“I have it, Nawabzada Sikander.” A tall, black-bearded soldier—Darvesh Reza, a senior sergeant in the Jaipur Dragoons—moves to stand beside him, taking the panel from his hands. “Please, go with the others. We must get the nawab to safety.”

Sikander relinquishes his burden. Dragoons in gaudy parade uniforms swarm around him, sweeping him out of the ruined stands toward the waiting flyers, shielding him and the rest of his family with their own bodies.…

Someone grabbed Sikander’s arm and jerked him back as another rifle shot rang out. The bullet kicked a puff of dust from the ground not far from where the Gadiran bank manager fell. Harsh daylight and the smell of smoke in the air brought him back to Tanjeer’s streets. Darvesh—leaner, grayer, and less splendidly attired than he’d been in Sangrur that night ten years ago—gave him a sharp look, and returned to scanning the rooftops surrounding the Aquilan consulate.

This is not Jaipur, Sikander told himself. And these are not Palarists. He pulled his eyes away from the dead or dying man in front of him, and made himself lock away the terrible memories of the Bandi Chor Divas bombing. “Thank you,” he said. “That was careless of me.”

“Think nothing of it, sir,” Darvesh replied.

From his safer vantage, Sikander studied the rooftops overlooking the compound. He thought he glimpsed a shadow of movement at the edge of a rooftop, a long block away. “West side, rooftop at one hundred and fifty meters,” he reported to his team. “If anyone’s got a clean shot at the sniper, you’re authorized to fire.”

“Lieutenant, this is Chief Trent.” The master-at-arms keyed Sikander’s private channel. She was posted on the consulate building roof behind him. “I think the crowd by the bank is following the shuttle. There are a lot of people moving in this direction.”

“Understood,” he replied. The situation was getting complicated in a hurry. He turned to Sublieutenant Larkin, who sheltered behind the shuttle right beside him. “Good work at the bank, Ms. Larkin. It looks like you had your hands full there.”

Larkin nodded, but kept scanning for more snipers on the rooftops. “I’m afraid we didn’t get everybody, sir. Two of the bank employees were picked off as we were boarding the shuttle.”

“I think this is turning into one of those days where we just do the best that we can,” he told her. He risked another quick glimpse over the shuttle’s nose. There was definitely more movement on the rooftops in that direction, and the shower of stones, bottles, and debris increased by the moment. Then a sudden commotion by the front gate caught his attention: Two men in traditional robes brought up a large loop of chain and started threading it through the bars. Sikander couldn’t see if they had a vehicle ready to yank the gates out of the wall or if they hoped to do it with nothing more than human muscle power, but he couldn’t let them carry out their plan. He pointed it out to Larkin. “We’d better put a stop to that,” he told her.

“Yes, sir,” she replied. “First fire team, single volley through the gate, nonlethal velocity! Torso or lower, we’re trying not to kill anybody here. On my command … take aim … fire!”

At the gate, the half squad of sailors guarding the consulate’s front entrance quickly popped out of their cover and leveled their mag rifles. The Gadirans pressed up against the gate by the crowd behind them shrieked in sudden panic and turned to move away, but none succeeded in clearing the line of fire before the mag rifles chirped. Unlike older weapons with cartridges full of chemical propellant, mag weapons could easily be adjusted for high-velocity or low-velocity shots. A low-velocity mag-rifle dart could still cause a great deal of injury, but the sabots encasing the dart-like rounds remained in place for a low-velocity shot, turning a lethal arrowhead into a thumb-sized blunt cylinder that wouldn’t break the skin. It would, however, knock a strong man off his feet and leave quite a bruise. Half a dozen Gadirans yelped, tumbled, or sagged back from the volley, and suddenly the people pressing against the gate were no longer interested in standing right in front of the bars. The crowd immediately in front scattered; two of Hector’s sailors hurried up and disentangled the chain from the bars.

“That’s better,” Sikander said. Then the distant rifle cracked again, and a bullet bounced off the shuttle hull not half a meter over his head. He ducked and swore. “Does anybody have a shot at that damned sniper?” he demanded. No one answered.

He looked down at his vid feed from the Dragonflies, studying the crowds beginning to thicken around the consulate. One image captured several Gadiran riflemen lying prone on the rooftop, in plain sight to the tiny drone flying by overhead. If only Dragonflies were armed … but they were simply too small to carry anything remotely lethal, and too valuable to kamikaze into someone’s ear in order to send a message. Sikander looked over to Darvesh, and met his eyes. Motivation, he reminded himself. He was beginning to form his own best guess about the insurgents’ determination, and he didn’t like the answer he was coming up with.

“Hector, this is Lieutenant North,” he said into his comm. “I recommend that we evacuate all consulate personnel and abandon the facility. This situation is becoming untenable.”

There was a long pause; then the comm beeped in reply. “Mr. North, this is Lieutenant Commander Randall. We’ve been watching developments closely. I concur with your assessment, and I’m forwarding your recommendation to the captain. Stand by.”

Larkin grimaced. “I hate the idea of letting our consulate get overrun. It’s a bad message to send, sir.”

“If you can see a way to stop it without killing a lot of people, you’re smarter than I am,” Sikander said. “We’ll stand our ground if the captain orders us to stay. Otherwise, I intend to get our troops out of the way and let this mob burn itself out.”

“Mr. North, this is Randall. You are ordered to withdraw. We’re sending your pilots a flight path to a safe location fifteen kilometers northeast of the city. Get the civilians and your people out of there, over.”

“Acknowledged,” Sikander replied. The consulate staff and bank employees would be a tough fit in the two shuttles alongside Hector’s landing party, but for a short flight they’d make do. He met Larkin’s eyes. “Time to go, Ms. Larkin. Pass the word, please.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. She took a deep breath, then broke cover and ran back toward the consulate in a low crouch, already shouting orders as she went along.

Sikander watched her move off, thinking about the implications of what Larkin had told him earlier, and replaying any of a half-dozen interactions with her over the last couple of months. She should have told someone about her family history with Kashmir before he’d ever set foot on board … but of course she wouldn’t have wanted to seem like she was prejudiced against Kashmiris, even if she had reason to associate him with difficult emotions. But perhaps by bringing her story out into the open she could begin to move past it.

Another rifle shot interrupted his thoughts, and he ducked again. His eye fell on the Gadiran bank manager, lying motionless a few meters from the shuttle. In just a minute or two, they’d need to bring all the consulate personnel through the courtyard again. We’ve got to do something about the snipers, he realized. Suppressing fire might keep their heads down—and might play directly into the narrative the initiators of the riot hoped to create. But if there were some way to screen the civilians from potshots as they moved to the shuttles …

“Landing force, this is Lieutenant North,” he said over the tactical net. “I want everybody to pop your smoke markers inside the courtyard. First squad, smoke the east wall. Second squad, smoke the west wall. Third squad, cover the front gate.” The consulate building itself would cover the fourth side. “We need a smoke screen to cover the evacuation.”

“Yes, sir,” the various squad leaders replied. Sikander pulled out his own smoke grenade, pulled the pin, and rolled it a few meters away, producing a thick white cloud by the shuttle. He heard the sharp hiss of other grenades going off all around him, and saw dozens of smoke clouds billowing up from the ground along the walls before he was completely engulfed. Outside, the roar of the crowd swelled and echoed; the Caidist demonstrators could see that something was happening, but they didn’t know whether it was dangerous or not.

“Good thinking, sir,” Darvesh told him.

“We’ll see,” Sikander replied. He keyed his comm button. “Ms. Larkin, get the civilians to the shuttles. Lead them by hand if you have to.” He waited in the shifting smoke. Shots still echoed through the air. Some of the snipers were shooting blindly into the smoke, he guessed. Well, there was nothing he could do about that. A moment later, a line of gray shapes appeared in the smoke, shuffling forward in single file with joined hands—the consulate civilians, coughing and cringing as they hurried to the shuttle hatch.

“Everyone aboard,” Sikander told the first of them. He turned his attention back to the perimeter, trying to gauge how long the billowing clouds would last. People in business dress clambered into the shuttle one after another, murmuring words of thanks or stifling sobs of terror as they passed by. Then Chief Trent jogged up, with the squad of sailors from the consulate building and Consul Garcia at her side.

“The consulate’s clear, sir,” she reported to him.

“Good.” Sikander raised his voice and called into the smoke. “Ms. Larkin? Embark your troops.”

Garcia paused by the hatch, checking to see that his people were on board. Then he turned to Sikander. “My thanks, Mr. North. I hate to leave like this, though.”

“I do, too,” Sikander replied. “You’d better—” That was as far as he got, because at that moment Garcia suddenly grimaced and clapped a hand to his neck. A distant rifle report echoed above the noise of the crowd; whether the persistent sniper had found a clear patch of air to shoot through or had simply gotten ridiculously lucky, Sikander never knew. But a terrible spurt of blood burst out of Franklin Garcia’s mouth, and he sagged to his knees with a wet, strangled gasp.

“Mr. Garcia!” Sikander cried. The consul clutched at Sikander’s trouser leg, fighting for breath. Sikander reached down, grabbed him by the shoulders, and half carried, half threw the wounded man through the hatch into the shuttle’s passenger compartment. A woman, one of the consulate secretaries, screamed at the sight, but Sikander didn’t see what else he could do; the smoke was thinning, and his sailors pelted in from all sides, throwing themselves on board the shuttles.

“The compound’s clear, Mr. North,” Larkin reported over the tactical comms. “All the landing force is accounted for. We’re buttoning up Shuttle Two.”

Sikander stared for a moment at the bloody handprints Garcia had left on his trousers and arm. “Buttoning up Shuttle One,” he replied, and climbed through the hatch. “Petty Officer Long, get us out of here.”

He had one last glimpse of the smoke-filled consulate and the surging crowds filling the streets outside before the shuttle streaked away. Franklin Garcia died five minutes later.