SEVENTEEN
Trampas, the eczema-plagued low man who inadvertently let Ted in on so much, rushed to the stream of Breakers who were fleeing from Damli House and grabbed one, a scrawny excarpenter with a receding hairline named Birdie McCann.
"Birdie, what is it?" Trampas shouted. He was currently wearing his thinking-cap, which meant he could not share in the telepathic pulse all around him. "What's happening, do you kn-"
"Shooting!" Birdie yelled, pulling free. "Shooting! They're out there!" He pointed vaguely behind him.
"Who? How m-"
"Watch out you idiots it's not slowing dozun!" yelled Gaskie O'Tego, from somewhere behind Trampas arid McCann.
Trampas looked up and was horrified to see the lead fire engine come roaring and swaying along the center of the Mall, red lights flashing, two stainless-steel robot firemen now clinging to the back. Pimli, Finli, and Jakli leaped aside. So did Tassa the houseboy. But Tammy Kelly lay facedown on the grass in a spreading soup of blood. She had been flattened by Fire-Response Team Bravo, which had not actually scrambled to fight a fire in over eight hundred years. Her complaining days were over.
And-
"STAND CLEAR!" blared the fire engine. Behind it, two more engines swerved gaudily around either side of Warden's House. Once again Tassa the houseboy barely leaped in time to save his skin. "THIS IS FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!" Some sort of metallic node rose from the center of the engine, split open, and produced a steel whirligig that began to spray highpressure streams of water in eight different directions. "MAKE WAY FOR FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!"
And-
James Cagney-the taheen who was standing with Gaskie in the foyer of the Feveral Hall dormitory when the trouble started, remember him?-saw what was going to happen and began yelling at the guards who were staggering out of Damli's west wing, red-eyed and coughing, some with their pants on fire, a few-oh, praise Gan and Bessa and all the gods-with weapons.
Cag screamed at them to get out of the way and could hardly hear himself in the cacophony. He saw Joey Rastosovich pull two of them aside and watched the Earnshaw kid bump aside another. A few of the coughing, weeping escapees saw the oncoming fire engine and scattered on their own. Then Fire-
Response Team Bravo was plowing through the guards from the west wing, not slowing, roaring straight for Damli House, spraying water to every point of the compass.
And-
"Dear Christ, no," Pimli Prentiss moaned. He clapped his hands over his eyes. Finli, on the other hand, was helpless to look away. He saw a low man-Ben Alexander, he was quite sure-chewed beneath the firetruck's huge wheels. He saw another struck by the grille and mashed against the side of Damli House as the engine crashed, spraying boards and glass, then breaking through a bulkhead which had been partially concealed by a bed of sickly flowers. One wheel dropped down into the cellar stairwell and a robot voice began to boom,
"ACCIDENT! NOTIFY THE STATION! ACCIDENT!"
No shit, Sherlock, Finli thought, looking at the blood on the grass with a kind of sick wonder. How many of his men and his valuable charges had the goddamned malfunctioning firetruck mowed down? Six? Eight? A motherfucking dozen?
From behind Damli House came that terrifying chow-chowchow sound once again, the sound of automatic weapons fire.
A fat Breaker named Waverlyjostled him. Finli snared him before Waverly could fly on by. "What happened? Who told you to go south?" For Finli, unlike Trampas, wasn't wearing any sort of thinking-cap and the message
(GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOU WON'T BE HURT)
was slamming into his head so hard and loud it was nearly impossible to think of anything else.
Beside him, Pimli-struggling to gather his wits-seized on the beating thought and managed one of his own: That's almost got to be Brautigan, grabbing an idea and amplifying it that way. Who else could?
And-
Gaskie grabbed first Cag and then Jakli and shouted at them to gather up all the armed guards and put them to work flanking the Breakers who were hurrying south on the Mall and the streets that flanked the Mall. They looked at him with blank, starey eyes-panic-eyes-and he could have screamed with balked fury. And here came the next two engines with their sirens whooping. The larger of the pair struck two of the Breakers, bearing them to the ground and running them over. One of these new casualties was Joey Rastosovich. When the engine had passed, beating at the grass with its compressed-air vents,
Tanya fell on her knees beside her dying husband, raising her hands to the sky. She was screaming at the top of her lungs but Gaskie could barely hear her. Tears of frustration and fear prickled the corners of his eyes. Dirty dogs, he thought. Dirty ambushing dogs!
And-
North of the Algul compound, Susannah broke cover, moving in on the triple run offence. This wasn't in die plan, but the need to keep shooting, to keep knocking them down, was stronger than ever. She simply couldn't help herself, and Roland would have understood. Besides, the billowing smoke from Damli House had momentarily obscured everything at this end of the compound. Red beams from the "lazers" stabbed into it-on and off, on and off, like some sort of neon sign-and Susannah reminded herself not to get in the way of them, not unless she wanted a hole two inches across all the way through her.
She used bullets from the Coyote to cut her end of the fence-outer run, middle run, inner run-and then vanished into the thickening smoke, reloading as she went.
And-
The Breaker named Waverly tried to pull free of Finli. Nar, nar, none of that, may it please ya, Finli thought. He yanked the man-who'd been a bookkeeper or some such thing in his pre-
Algul life-closer to him, then slapped him twice across the face, hard enough to make his hand hurt. Waverly screamed in pain and surprise.
"Who the f**k is back there!" Finli roared. "WHO THE FUCK IS DOING THIS?" The follow-up fire engines had halted in front of Damli House and were pouring streams of water into the smoke. Finli didn't know if it could help, but probably it couldn't hurt. And at least the damned things hadn't crashed into the building they were supposed to save, like the first one.
"Sir, I don't knozv!" Waverly sobbed. Blood was streaming from one of his nostrils and the corner of his mouth. "I don't know, but there has to be fifty, maybe a hundred of the devils! Dinky got us out! God bless Dinky Earnshaw Gaskie O'Tego, meanwhile, wrapped one good-sized hand around James Cagney's neck and the other around Jakli's.
Gaskie had an idea son of a bitching crowheadjakli had been on the verge of running, but there was no time to worry about that now. He needed them both.
And-
"Boss!" Finli shouted. "Boss, grab the Earnshaw kid! Something about this smells!"
And-
With Cag's face pressing against one of his cheeks and Jakli's against the other, the Wease (who thought as clearly as anyone that terrible morning) was finally able to make himself heard.
Gaskie, meanwhile, repeated his command: divide up the armed guards and put them with the retreating Breakers. "Don't try to stop them, but stay with them! And for Christ's sake, keep em from getting electrocuted! Keep em off the fence if they go past Main Stree-"
Before he could finish this admonishment, a figure came plummeting out of the thickening smoke. It was Gangli, the compound doctor, his white coat on fire, his roller skates still on his feet.
And-
Susannah Dean took up a position at the left rear corner of Damli House, coughing. She saw three of die sons of bitches-
Gaskie, Jakli, and Cagney, had she but known it. Before she could draw a bead, eddying smoke blotted them out. When it cleared, Jakli and Cag were gone, rounding up armed guards to act as sheepdogs who would at least try to protect their panicked charges, even if they could not immediately stop them. Gaskie was still there, and Susannah took him with a single headshot.
Pimli didn't see it. It was becoming clear to him that all the confusion was on the surface. Quite likely deliberate. The Breakers"
decision to move away from the attackers north of the Algul had come a little too quickly and was a litde too organized.
Never mind Earnshaw, he thought, Brautigan's the one I want to talk to..
But before he could catch up to Ted, Tassa grabbed the Master in a frantic, terrified hug, babbling that Warden's House was on fire, he was afraid, terribly afraid, that all of Master's clothes, his books-
Pimli Prentiss knocked him aside with a hammer-blow to the side of his head. The pulse of the Breakers' unified thought
(bad-mind now instead of good-mind), yammered
(WITH YOUR HANDS UP YOU WON'T BE)
crazily in his head, threatening to drive out all thought.
Fucking Brautigan had done this, he knew it, and the man was too far ahead... unless...
Pimli looked at the Peacemaker in his hand, considered it, then jammed it back into the docker's clutch under his left arm.
He wanted f**king Bravitigan alive. Fucking Brautigan had some explaining to do. Not to mention some more goddamned breaking.
Choio-chow-chow. Bullets flicking all around him. Running hume guards, taheen, and can-toi all around him. And Christ, only a few of them were armed, mosdy humes who'd been down for fence-patrol. Those who guarded the Breakers didn't really need guns, by and large the Breakers were as tame as parakeets and the thought of an outside attack had seemed ludicrous until...
Until it happened, he thought, and spied Trampas.
"Trampas!" he bawled. "Trampas! Hey, cowboy! Grab Earnshaw and bring him to me! Grab Earnshaw!"