The Course of Empire(112)

Aille took Aguilera's hand, trying to imitate the same grip he had often seen one human use with another, though it seemed awkward. The bare skin felt strangely hot against his own palm. Their body temperature was higher than a Jao's. He had not realized that until this moment. "We will continue to observe," he said. "Now I want to see how effectively my Jao equipment operates."



"Watch when they fire," Aguilera said faintly. His blood gleamed black-red under the light from above. "See how they—" He swayed and Tully took more of his weight. "—how they deal with the lasers."



His chin drooped to his chest and Tully swore. "Later!" he said, and then slipped off into the darkness, half-carrying Aguilera and the old human.

* * *



Aille's party skirted two more brief firefights to reach the center of the fighting. Now that the Jao forces were in the town itself, they'd encountered fierce patches of resistance in many places. Much of the battle raged from structure to structure. Finally, they came to a main boulevard down which some Jao fighting vehicles were advancing. They stopped to observe, crouched behind the rubble of a destroyed building.



"There!" Kralik pointed, into the inadequate light shed by the few remaining street lamps on the street ahead. "That's what Aguilera was talking about!"



Aille squinted and could just make out thousands of tiny metallic strips floating down through the laser cannons' angle of fire. Whenever a beam hit a strip, portions of it were reflected at odd angles and the beam lost coherence.



He rose higher, heedless of stray projectiles, every line of his body shaped into startled-interest. "What are those?"



"Bits of aluminum foil," Kralik said. "The same thing we used during the conquest. Ours were manufactured for the purpose. These are probably improvised, cut up from common household supplies."



From the next street over, a rebel tank fired through the aluminum strips without problem, but the Jao beams continued to be sporadically disrupted. Suddenly, one of the Jao vehicles was badly damaged by some sort of missile. Immediately, humans firing burst-weapons broke out of a nearby house and swarmed over it.



"I advise you strongly to order your troops to fall back, sir," Kralik said. "Or this is going to get very ugly. You don't have a large enough force, and they are neither trained nor equipped for this kind of street fighting. Not against an opponent as obviously well-prepared and numerous as you're facing here. If you keep pushing ahead, your soldiers are just going to—the human expression is 'bleed out.' "



An explosion lit up the night as one of the Jao vehicles took a direct hit. Aille stared at what was left. All the soldiers in it were obviously dead, the vehicle itself nothing but a gutted, burning shell.



Bleed out. It was a savage expression. The sort of thing a certain predator might think up. The kind of predator that is not strong enough or powerful enough to kill its prey outright; so, instead, tears at the flanks until the prey dies of blood-loss.



Such predators were often pack animals, Aille remembered.



"Yes, you are right. Yaut, give the order."



The fraghta brought up his communicator, but hesitated. "The Narvo will be enraged. He will try to use this to discredit you."



"Yes, I know. I also do not care." He gazed at Kralik. "Partly because vithrik is what it is. Partly because the withdrawal will only be temporary. Am I not correct, General Kralik?"



"Yes, sir." The human officer's face was creased with a very thin smile. "This is jinau business."





Chapter 25




Once Tully got far enough away from the fighting, he started looking for a car. He figured he had enough authority derived from Aille to commandeer a vehicle. "Commandeer," under the circumstances, being a euphemism for "hot-wire and steal it," since he didn't have any intention of returning whichever vehicle he swiped back to its rightful owner.



It hardly mattered. The Subcommandant was willing to fudge with the Governor's order to destroy Salem enough to allow the population to evacuate. But Tully was quite sure he would see to the physical destruction of the city. Once the dust and ashes settled, nobody was going to miss an old human automobile.



And it would be old, too. Most of the cars humans still owned in North America were antiques, kept running until the bodies just rusted out. The relatively few new cars still being made were expensive, and Tully was unlikely to find any here.



Eventually, he came across an old pickup that still had half a tank of gas in it. A Ford, ironically. He didn't bother trying to jimmy the lock. Tully and both men with him were already soaked by the rain, so he just smashed in the window on the driver's side. Between his father's training—he'd been a mechanic—and his own misspent youth, Tully had the engine running within seconds.