New Decameron Twenty-Six: Walter Jon Williams (Patreon)

Occurrence at Rahul's Canteen

by Walter Jon Williams

The open-topped Sun Ray automobile provided little protection, and the explosion pummeled Sula’s ears and gut. Concussion blew her hair in her face, and its was a moment before she could make out what was going on ahead. She saw smoke and sprawling figures and debris bounding down the road, and she realized that what had blown up was a checkpoint that separated the Fleet dockyard from an industrial area farther down the ring— and she saw Daimong with rifles sprinting through the smoke and wreckage, and heard the crackle of fire.

Her aide Macnamara had already braked to a stop. “Back up!”  Sula shouted so that her words would penetrate Macnamara’s stunned eardrums.

There was a time in her life when she was called the White Ghost and explosions such as these ruled the night— and the reflexes of the White Ghost hadn’t faded apparently, because everyone else was staring at the lost checkpoint while her vehicle was moving in reverse, away from the attack. She half-crouched on the back seat and turned to look over her shoulder as her car dodged another vehicle and swerved into a new lane. Beside her, she saw Shawna Spence looking at the checkpoint with narrowed eyes as her engineer aide calculated lines of fire, angles of attack, the size of the explosive that had just gone off, all the elements of her own volatile domain.  

Nobody had planned to start this war. It had begun with people out of their depth, in the midst of an economic crisis, making a series of decisions that only made the crisis worse. Certain politicians had decided that the blame had to be laid somewhere else before it got laid on them, and they found some convenient targets, almost all of whom seemed to be Terran. When the shooting started, it was Terrans vs. Everybody Else, and the Empire had embarked on its second civil war in ten years. 

The other species outnumbered the Terrans four or five to one, but one Terran officer, Fleet Commander Michi Chen, had managed to seize the entire Fourth Fleet at its base, and had provided a place to which Terran forces could rally.  

And so the woman called Senior Captain Caroline, Lady Sula, ex-White Ghost, ex-lots of things, had journeyed with a host of fellow officers and enlisted to help crew the stolen warships, and possibly save their own species from annihilation.

But now, it appeared, at least one of the other species was registering an objection.

The Sun Ray raced on in reverse, weaving through traffic. People were still staring, or turning to confer with each other. Sula reached into her holster for her sidearm, and waved it. “Run!” she shouted. “Enemy attack!” Still looking over her shoulder, she saw the gold-on-brown ornament of the officers’ hostel coming nearer.

“Fuck!” she said. “They’re after the officers’ quarters!”

The Terran command had far too few officers available. A strike on the officers’ hostel could deal the Fourth Fleet a deadly blow.

Sula scanned the structures across the road, saw a narrow building with a canteen on the ground floor, and high windows on the storeys above. She slapped Macnamara on the shoulder. “Park here!” 

The vehicle lurched over a curb and bent a traffic sign. Sula jumped out onto the road. “Follow me!”  

She sprinted for the canteen, which she now saw was called Rahul’s Cafe. It had an automatic door which began, very slowly, to open, and out of frustration she punched the door glass with her fist.  

Shots crackled in the air. People were starting to run now.  

Sula tried scraping through the opening door, caught a button on her tunic, and wrenched it free. The silver button sang as it struck the floor. The warm, humid air of the canteen was filled with cooking smells. Fleet personnel and dock civilian dock workers stared at her, forks half raised from their plates. “Enemy attack!” she shouted, and waved her pistol again. “Who here is armed?”

Two Terran females stood, both young cadets. “Good!” Sula said. “You’re coming with me!” She made a general wave at the rest of the room. “The rest of you run out the back door, if there is one! If you’ve got access to a gun near here, get it and come back! Otherwise, report to your units!”

Macnamara and Spence burst into the canteen after her, and Sula turned to see the door begin its agonizingly slow close. She turned to the room, looked at a waiter frozen with plates balanced on his forearms.  

“We need to lock this door!” she said. “Who can do that?” The waiter stared, then dumbly looked over his shoulder toward the kitchen.

Gunshots sounded, close by. Then there was a ripping, hammering sound that Sula recognized as an automatic weapon cycling caseless ammunition very fast, at least fifty rounds per second, and she hunched into her shoulders as she half-expected the window to collapse into shards behind her. But she hadn’t been the target, and the bullets had gone somewhere else. They’re going to run out of ammunition at this rate, she thought, and ran up to the waiter. “How do I get upstairs?” she said.

The waiter had lost the ability to speak. Wide-eyed, he rolled his eyes in the direction of the door to the kitchen. Sula ran for the door, kicked it open, and then looked over her shoulder at the roomful of stunned, motionless diners.  

“Run, you idiots!” she said.

The kitchen was full of bright lights and old, worn machines doing basic tasks: chopping vegetables, washing dishes, stirring pots. Two obese humans in aprons and caps stared at the armed intruder. One held a whisk poised above a cast-iron skillet, dark roux dripping.  

“Enemy attack!” Sula said. “You need to lock the front door now!”  

“Ruin my fucking roux,” said one of the humans. She dropped the skillet to a tiled countertop, walked to a control panel, and punched the lock button.

Sula walked farther into the kitchen, saw a door, and shouldered it open, revealing a kind of foyer with a door leading to the road behind the canteen. A stair of dark composite stretched up to a narrow landing above. “This way!” she called, and sprinted up the stair. Muffled shots pursued her as she ran.

The floor above the restaurant seemed to be private apartments, and so was the floor above that. Sula found the door to the apartment overlooking the avenue, knocked, then lost her patience and threw herself against the door. Pain crackled through her shoulder, and the door barely trembled.  

A bitter laugh escaped Sula. They could hardly fight the enemy if they let a door defeat them.

“If you’ll step aside, my lady.” Macnamara studied the door for a brief moment, then took a step back, hurled himself forward, and kicked with both feet at a part of the door adjacent to the lock.

The door came open with a crash, pieces of the frame flying through the air to land on the floor with a clatter. Sula hopped over Macnamara’s prone body and ran into the apartment.

The apartment was stuffy, and filled with old, sagging furniture. She saw a credenza full of framed photographs of a man in Fleet uniform, ranging in age from a young recruit to a graying petty officer on the verge of retirement, and Sula suspected the man was in the dockyard now, having been called back to service. From amid the photos two white long-haired cats stared at Sula in horror with blue eyes, and then their claws scrabbled as they panicked. One of the photographs crashed to the floor as the cats leaped from the credenza and disappeared into another room.

Good idea, Sula thought, and went to the windows overlooking the front. They released with a simple lever, and Sula unlocked one window and pushed it open. The sound of shots was much louder, and Sula looked across the avenue at the officers’ hostel and saw a group of men in front, peering down the avenue. Most were in uniform, and some at least carried pistols. Among them Sula recognized Lieutenant-captain Alana Haz, who had been her first lieutenant on Confidence, and who had fled with her to the Fourth Fleet. Haz sent the others scurrying back into the hotel, took one last look down the avenue, and then sprinted for the door.

Well good. They wouldn’t be caught completely by surprise.

Spence had already opened the other of the two windows. “How many spare magazines do you have?” Sula asked.

“One spare,” Spence said.

“Me too.”  

Sula took a quick survey of her whole party, which by now included Macnamara and the two cadets from the canteen. Between them they had a total of five pistols, all unsuited for the sort of fight that was developing, and a total of ten full magazines. Sula pictured them plinking down from their windows while the enemy emptied two-hundred-round magazines of caseless ammunition in response.  We’ll just have to be very clever, Sula thought.

She looked at the cadets. “I don’t suppose either of you is a crack shot?” she said.  

One shook her head. “No, my lady,” said the other.

“Macnamara, take the window on the right,” Sula said. “I’ll take the one on the left.” She turned to the others. “When Macnamara uses up his ammunition, one of you pass him your pistol and your spare magazine.”  

Constable First Class Macnamara was by far the best shot, having most recently utilized his talents in dispatching a Naxid assassin in New Zealand, on Terra.  Sula had emerged from that encounter covered in blood, but Macnamara’s uniform remained spotless.

Sula looked at the two cadets. “One of you stay by the stairs, in case they try to come up behind us.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Let’s get ready here.” Lamps and tables were shifted out of the way. The one light in the room was turned off. Drapes were drawn over the window, leaving slits for the shooters to fire through. Macnamara crouched behind his window, his pistol resting on the sill. Sula, standing, peered out to see the Daimong attackers coming up the avenue.

Like all Daimong they were tall and gangling, grey-skinned and expressionless, with round fixed eyes and a round fixed mouth. They seemed comfortable with their weapons, but Sula saw they weren’t moving like an experienced combat team. They kept hesitating, then urging each other forward, and they’d stop to blast anything that looked threatening, or anyone who seemed to be in uniform. Their officer, if they had one, wasn’t keeping them focused on the mission, and they were burning through a lot of their ammunition.

Sula had seen a lot of that in the war, with her untrained Secret Army volunteers willing to fight, but uncertain how to go about it. Sometimes they’d come back from a raid having fired every single bullet, mostly at shadows. Fortunately Sula had managed to recruit a hard core of violent criminals to put some drive into her operations.  

The Daimong apparently hadn’t thought to bring gangsters with them.

The Daimong came up the avenue in little rushes, taking cover behind vehicles they’d shot into immobility. Sula got a first glimpse of the officer, who wore black body armor and a helmet. Most of his team were in civilian gear, and the armor didn’t give Sula a positive impression of the officer’s courage.

“Officer at thirty-five degrees low,” Sula told Macnamara.  

Macnamara answered without shifting out of his shooter’s crouch. “Shall I shoot him, my lady?” 

“He’s armored. Find a softer target, and wait.”

A few shots popped out from the officers’ lodge--- apparently the defenders weren’t any better armed than Sula’s group. The response was overwhelming— at least a half-dozen rifles returned fire, some burning through two-hundred-round magazines in a few seconds, but some firing a more measured response. Other Daimong simply dived for cover. The gold-and-brown façade of the lodge seemed to fly into the air, and windows were hammered in. Brass medallions were shot off the walls and bounded into the road. Through the windows Sula saw sparks fly from shattered light fixtures.

The shooting ended in an abrupt silence that left Sula aware of the ringing in her ears. Sula felt a mild surprise that the officers’ hostel remained intact, its front heavily scarred but apparently sound. The attackers scurried forward, calling to each other in their melodic Daimong voices, and Sula saw one attacker run to cover behind the wheels of a windowless Sun Ray van. Sula saw him reach into a pack he was carrying, and knew at once what he was reaching for.

“Bomber in front of the yellow Sun Ray,” Sula said. “Shoot him before he can throw.”

She dropped into a crouch, holding the pistol with both hands, the butt resting on the window sill. Macnamara made a small adjustment in his posture, acquired his target, and fired twice. Sula saw sparks as one bullet hit the vehicle, but the other seemed to have hit the bomber, because he slumped, one hand clutching at the Sun Ray for support. Sula lined up the bomber in her sights, but by that point Macnamara had fired twice more, and the bomber flopped onto the rubberized road, dead or dying.  

The scent of propellant stung the air. Sula widened her attention to the whole group of attackers, who seemed not to have yet realized there was an enemy behind them. The officer called another attacker to run up to the Sun Ray, and the attacker just stared at the officer, then replied in a complaining tone. For a few seconds the combat paused while the two had what seemed to be an argument, and then a third Daimong decided to take the mission on herself and ran toward the van. A couple shots from the hostel pursued her, and the whole body of attackers replied with another massive volley.  

“Take out the bomber,” Sula said, and Macnamara fired two pairs of shots that sprawled the second bomber over the body of the first.  

“Find another target,” Sula said, and found another herself. As long as the Daimong were burying the hostel in fire, they weren’t going to notice someone shooting at them from an unexpected angle.

Sula fired three measured shots at one of the attackers firing from behind a vehicle, which resulted in the Daimong dropping her weapon and sagging against the car; and Macnamara picked off two more before his magazine ran dry and he had to reload. By this point the officer had apparently won his argument with his reluctant subordinate, and the third bomber sprinted forward, crouched over his rifle as if protecting an infant from a hailstorm. He dived for cover behind the Sun Ray, threw down his weapon, and began to dig the explosive satchel out from beneath the two corpses.

Sula took aim at the bomber and began to fire deliberately. The bomber’s movements grew more frantic as bullets punched into the van behind him. He pointed in Sula’s direction and squalled out a piercing shriek that could only come from the Daimong vocal apparatus, and Sula saw heads begin to turn in her direction.

The bomber rose to his feet, satchel in hand, and began to make a clumsy run around the Sun Ray toward the officers’ hostel. At best, Sula knew, the bomb would blow out the door of the hostel and let the attackers enter to begin a massacre. At worst its would take off the whole front of the building. So Sula did her best to track the bomber in her sights and kept pulling the trigger until a light shone on the back of the pistol to tell her the magazine was empty. Return fire smacked into the wall of her building, twitched the curtain above her head. She dropped the magazine out of her pistol and slapped her spare, and saw the light wink out. But she’d lost sight of the runner, and then she heard the thrashing sound of one of the rifles on full automatic, and the open window frame dissolved into flying metal splinters while bullets hammered the wall and plaster and dust filled the air.

Sula rolled back onto the floor as bullets began to fly through the window and chop out pieces of the ceiling overhead. She glanced over the room and saw that everyone else was flat on the floor as plaster and resinous laths came raining down. Sula rolled onto her stomach to keep from inhaling debris, her mind spinning while she tried to come up with a new plan. Extreme cleverness had taken her only so far.  

The flash and sound came simultaneously, and Sula felt the kick as the floor bucked and tried to throw her off. The torn window curtains were blown horizontal, debris filled the air, and the photographs all spilled off the credenza.  

Sula felt her heart sink. The explosion was certainly large enough to have blown in the front of the officers’ lodge, perhaps destroyed it completely, and if that were the case there was very little she could do to help anyone trapped in the building. In the dusty, dazed silence that followed the blast, Sula uncertainly rose to a crouch, and crunched over rubble to look cautiously out the window. She could look into the front of the hostel without exposing herself to fire from the road below, and to her surprise the battered exterior was largely intact. She stepped forward with care, revealing more of the avenue, and saw the crater that had dug through the ring’s floor to the thick layer of lunar and astroid material that armored the ring against radiation. Flames still licked upward from the crater.

The bomber hadn’t reached his target. Maybe one of Sula’s bullets had dropped him, or someone else’s had, or the bomb had gone off prematurely. In any case the officers’ hostel still stood like a proud, battered fort above the carnage scattered in its moat.  

The Sun Ray van had been hurled across the road and was lying on its side, acrid fire now shooting from its battery packs. Sula’s own car had been flipped on its back. A number of the attackers had been knocked flat and were only now picking themselves up.  

Sula heard a hiss, and fire retardant began to fall onto the scene in a gentle rain.  

“Macnamara,” Sula said. He rose to his feet and came to his window. Sula stepped to her own window, steadied her pistol on the sill, and fired on one of the stunned Daimong struggling to his feet.

That started the firefight again. Return fire came through the window or slapped the wall, but the volume was nothing compared to what had come before. Shots came also from the officers’ hostel, and though the pistols were inadequate weapons they at least had the advantage of catching the attackers in a crossfire.

Then there was a rapid chug-chug-chug from the hostel, and Sula felt her heart lift. It was the sound of a Sidney Mark One, a homemade weapon that Sula’s army had used in the fight for Zanshaa City. In fact it was probably her own personal weapon, taken from her suite by some enterprising officer. She wanted to cheer.

The chug-chug-chug died away in a blizzard of suppressive fire. Sula emptied her second magazine and one of the cadets slapped a pistol into her hand. She risked a three-second look through the shredded curtains, didn’t find a clear shot at a target, and drew back.  

The firefight had slowed down. Sula figured the attackers were running out of bullets, and had pretty well lost direction after their bomb went off at the wrong instant and in the wrong place. The attackers’ chances of perpetrating a massacre at the officers’ hostel had faded, and they didn’t know what else to do. A retreat was doomed to failure and fatality, and the Daimong seemed to have given up trying to advance. The officer was as baffled as the others, and had stopped giving orders.

As for the defenders, all they had to do was hold in place until rescue arrived. There was a lot less reason to expose herself at the windows now, and Sula took advantage of it.

Alarm sang in Sula’s nerves as she saw the silhouette of something dark and crablike move on the other side of the window, and then there was a gushing noise, and Sula realized that it was a remotely-operated fire-control robot in the act of deploying. Fire was a terror in an artificial environment such as the ring station, and there were elaborate safety measures, including large robots that glided over the ceiling on a series of tracks, and which featured a nozzle on a long boom that could direct fire-suppressing chemicals to the danger spot.

And so the crater and the flaming Sun Ray batteries were drenched, and then the boom swung slowly out over the avenue, took careful aim, and covered one of the attackers with fire retardant. A second fighter had been drenched before the attackers woke to their new situation, and they began directing fire at the boom. The boom, undamaged, shifted over to where the officer was frantically directing his men to shoot the robot, and smothered him in frothing goo.  

Sula laughed aloud. Whoever was operating that boom, she decided, was going to get a medal.

The quality of light shifted, shadows appearing where there hadn’t been shadows before, and Sula slipped to one side of the window and peered along the avenue. The overhead illumination had been switched off farther down the road, which argued that something was happening there that the authorities didn’t want the attackers to see.  

A lethal response deploying, presumably.

“Shouldn’t be long now,” Sula said. “Don’t expose yourself unnecessarily.” Her words were punctuated by the roaring sound of the firefighting robot drenching another attacker.

The counterattack launched a few minutes later, military constabulary in helmet and full body armor carrying a variety of lethal weaponry. They came hunting down the avenue from out of the dark, moving from doorway to doorway, weapons trained on Daimong illuminated by the overhead strips and pinpointed by the robot boom.

“Rescue’s here,” Sula said. “Take cover and stay safe. Our part’s done.”

A growing fusillade echoed her words, followed by the shrieks of terrified Daimong.  

The firing continued, and eventually the shrieks faded.

#

The avenue was a wreck, slick with fire suppressant, covered with debris and shattered vehicles, and littered with bodies. The lighting strips overhead burned at maximum intensity, and every piece of wreckage, every shard of window glass, and every corpse, was rendered brilliant and unnaturally distinct. Ambulances gave priority to the wounded, and the dead lay sprawled where they had fallen.  

The chemical reek was searing, but Sula preferred it to the scent of dead Daimong, who smelled like corpses even when alive. Fleet constables moved uneasily though the ruin, weapons poised, alert to any possible threat.  

“Your rifle, Lady Sula.” Lady Alana Haz presented Sula with her Sidney Mark One. “I don’t know if I hit anything with it, but at least I kept their heads down.”

“Thank you.” Sula hung the rifle over her shoulder on its strap. She stepped on something soft, and looked down to discover that she had just put her foot on a flayed Daimong arm, presumably that of the bomber. Her stomach turned over, and she looked away.

Through the shock of revelation Haz’ words were perceived dimly. “I had to kick your door down to get your gun. But other than the broken door, I think your suite survived pretty well.”

“Let’s go inside,” she said.

They walked to the sturdy, scarred doors of the hostel, which had survived surprisingly well. Spence and Macnamara followed, along with the two cadets, who apparently could think of nothing more useful to do.

“Lady Sula! Wait!”

Sula turned to see Captain Naaz Vijana hurrying toward them. He wore a helmet and body armor, and carried a rifle over one arm.  

“You were part of the counterattack?” she asked. Vijana was a warship commander, and had never served in the constabulary so far as Sula knew.  

“I sort of led it,” Vijana said. “I have some experience, after all.”

He had fought in the capture of the Striver, and before that had annihilated the Yormak uprising along with most of the Yormaks. Sula supposed he was as experienced at this kind of warfare as anyone who hadn’t served in the Secret Army.

“Thank you for rescuing us, then,” Sula said.

“You were in the hostel?”

Sula gestured toward Rahul’s Cafe. “I was across the road,” she said. “Setting up a crossfire.”

Vijana was impressed. “Good work, my lady,” he said. “I wondered how so many bodies ended up on that side of the road.”

“Macnamara is a very good shot,” Sula said.

Vijana viewed the constable. “I know. I’ve seen him at work.” He glanced over the scene, the bright overhead light outlining his sharp features. “We’ve got three wounded prisoners,” he said with satisfaction. “Once they’ve been stitched back together, we’ll find out who they are and who’s behind it.” He snarled. “I’ll interrogate them myself, if I can stand the stink.”

“There are professionals for that.”

“The professionals?” Vijana grinned. “How good can they be, if they didn’t stop us from taking the Fourth Fleet?”  

Sula didn’t have an answer for that. Her nerves gave a sudden leap at a pair of shots that echoed down the road, and the constables all instantly went on guard, their weapons trained in the direction of the sound. Vijana busied himself with his communications systems, then turned to Sula with a look of apology.  

“Shooting at phantoms, probably,” he said. “But I’d better go calm them down.”

“See you at the meeting tomorrow,” Sula said.

Vijana was surprised. “Meeting?”

“There’s bound to be one.”

He laughed. “True.” He waved goodbye and trotted off.

“You know,” said Alana Haz, “I think Vijana enjoys this sort of thing too much.”

“Some people do.” Sula knew that she’d have nightmares about this for weeks, her dreaming senses choked with the acrid reek, the hard edges of rubble gleaming in the blazing light, the flayed arm of the bomber.  

“I’m going to take a shower,” she said. “And then get started on my report, because someone’s going to ask me for one. Then I’ll be asked for recommendations, all of which will be ignored.”

Haz looked at her. “You seem to have a very good grasp of Fleet procedure,” she said.

“I wish it didn’t have such a grasp on me,” Sula said, and reached for the scarred hostel door.

****************************************

"No food," Maya says teasingly.

"There was that sauce while they ran through the kitchen. But I didn't grab it. Too exciting!"

"Yes that was really exciting. But I'm sort of sorry we didn't see many aliens. I love the aliens in those books. I don't think he has any aliens in other books, does he? Some in short stories. I might not have read everything. He's written a lot."

"And he's so versatile. I mean right now he's writing these and he's writing the Quillifer series, which are more like The Name of the Wind." He nods. "There's probably a Walter Jon Williams book for everyone, whatever you like."

"All right," Maya says. "I can't wait for the rest of that book, but since I have to, what else is there?"

"How about Sonya Taafe's Imperator? She's probably best known as a poet, but she also writes short stories, and this is one of them."

"All right," Maya says. And they read.