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"Let's go," he said to Ahn-Kha.
They trotted into the Ruins and circled around to the road paralleling the communications lines. Valentine surveyed the line of wires until he found the utility pole he wanted.
"Those are the field-phone lines south. Gimme that sling. I'll cut these; you'll need to do the ones at the railroad bridge. Flare gun, please."
"I can guess which one you want in it," Ahn-Kha said, slipping the flare inside and handing it to him. "I agree. It will be glorious, even if it fails."
Valentine attached the PPD strap to his waist after wrapping it around the pole. Using his claws, he shimmied up the pole easily enough. There was a crossbar for him to sit on at the top. There, four communications lines and one power line shared space on the pole. Careful to avoid the last, he took out General Hamm's light infantry machete and shoved the first phone line into the notch. He used the utility crossbeam as a leaver. Twang-it parted with a push. Valentine looked again at the knife, smiling wryly.
"Nice work, Hamm."
The other lines were easily severed. Ahn-Kha watched the road, ears twitching.
Valentine looked around at-New Columbia from his pole-top perch. Here and mere he picked out his companies, the red tape hung across their bodies muted in the dark but identifiable, moving silently toward their objectives. They'd been told to say their orders were to reinforce the guards at the vital spots: warehouses, dock, bridge, rail yard, prison camp. With all the confusion in me night, Valentine felt they would have a good chance of being believed. Searchlights were lit at the Kurian Tower, probing the darkness around the Tower as guards deployed to hardpoints and Mu-Kur-Ri braced for his coming. At the prison camp, a hand-cranked siren wailed as the guards turned out. He saw truck headlights descending the winding road from Pulaski Heights. The Kurian had already sent for help.
Valentine cocked the flare gun. He looked down at Ahn-Kha. The Grog knew enough human gestures to give him a thumbs-up. He fired the pistol; the flare shot into the air with a sound like a cat spitting. The parachute opened and the signal drifted, a bright green star slowly descending, pushed by a wind from the southwest.
It sparked and sputtered across the sky on March 21, 2071, at 23:28-Captain Moira Styachowski made a note of the flare's time in her order journal. Valentine's Rising had begun.
New Columbia, March of the forty-eighth year of the Kurian Order: Risings. Widespread revolts in the Kurian Zone are rare, successful ones are exponentially rarer. While a number of the Freeholds of 2071 can trace their origins to uprisings against the New Order in the first decade of Kurian rule, since that turbulent period examples of large-scale rebellion hardly exist. The few exceptions succeeded only in cases of geographical isolation i.e. the Juneau Insurrection along the islands and coastline of southeastern Alaska and the more recent Jamaican revolt, or small populations on the fringes of the Freeholds who manage to hold out long enough for help to arrive: Quebec City, the Laramie Mountains, Las Cruces. Stacked against those few successes are the legendary slaughters at Charleston and the Carolina Coast, the Dallas Corridor, Cleveland, and Point Defiance between Mobile and Biloxi. Ten times that number as bloody, but not as famous because of the lack of surviving chronicles, could easily be named. Then there are hundreds, if not thousands, of small actions, where individual groups of desperate sufferers on a city block or two, at a collective farm, or within a factory managed to wrestle the weapons out of their keepers' hands and go down fighting. Sadly, we know virtually none of these stories beyond a faded scribble of names on a wall or a brief radio transmission like a cry for help in a ghetto night.
Whether it's two men with pistols or twenty thousand with a city, the Kurians are masters of suppressing risings. Even if one Kurian principality falls, the six surrounding immediately invade, with the twin goals of preventing the revolutionary virus from spreading and claiming new feeding grounds for members of their own hierarchy. Quisling soldiers know there are brass rings and ten-year exemptions to be won in putting down revolts; their vengeance is all the more brutal when they see their comrades strung up or lying in piles against execution walls. The Reapers return in an orgy of feeding. The aftermath is shown through slide shows at New Universal Church lectures and becomes the subject of homilies about the futility and madness of violence.
But while the flame of revolt burns, it burns brightly, fed by the liberated energy of the human spirit. Now it takes the form of a green flare falling slowly toward the center of Little Rock.
* * * *
By the time Valentine got to the bottom of the pole the flare had returned to earth. Its green glow pulsed from behind a pile of debris-flattened automobiles stacked like rusty pancakes.
"This is it, old horse. I'll see you on the other side."
"My platoon has a good sergeant. Let me come with you."
"I'll be able to do this a lot better if I know you're waiting at the station. Otherwise I'll spend the next two hours worrying about what's happening on that hill. Get out of here."
"Until we meet again, my David ... in this world or the next." They clasped each other's forearms in the Grog handshake.
"Arou ng'nan," Valentine said. Every language has a form of "good luck," though the Grog form was a little more prosaic, hoping that spirit-fathers would intercede on one's side.
They trotted off in opposite directions. Valentine stayed clear of the road, tracing the route out to the edge of the Kurian Tower that he had walked while forming his plans. The foundation of the tower and the construction grounds around it were floodlit, and searchlights from strongpoints atop the first story probed the night.
Nail and five of his six Bears were crouching in the cover of a filled-in cellar. Valentine looked at the faces above the guns pointed at him. The Bears' Quisling uniforms lay in a pile that smelled of kerosene. The Bears didn't need black T-shirts or red sashes. They were in their battle gear, the savage-looking Bear melange of Reaper cloth, leather, combat vests, fur and Kevlar. Rain cradled a combat shotgun in chain-mail-backed leather gloves. Another Bear Valentine knew vaguely as Hack wore a massive girdle with Reaper teeth fitted into the leather. He held a machine pistol in one hand and one of Ahn-Kha's Quickwood spears in the other, its end decorated with eagle feathers like a Comanche war lance. Red, whose freckled face narrowed and ended in a jaw so sharp it looked like it could split logs, had Reaper scalps-at least Valentine hoped they were Reaper scalps- at his shoulder blades and elbows. More strings of black hair hung from the belt-fed machine gun so tied to his combat harness that it looked like part of him. Lost & Found had a shining cross over his heart and Brass, almost as wide as he was high, had painted his face so it resembled a skull. A red-eyed plastic snake head had been slipped over the mouth of his grenade launcher, and he'd wrapped the butt and grips with snakeskin and painted "The Fire Dragon" on the side of the support weapon.
"Where's Groschen?"
"He's got the Grog gun, forward. We like to have a good sniper ready when we go in."
"Signal him to pull back. I'm aborting this."
Nail exchanged looks with another Bear. "But the green flare-"
"We're" still throwing the dice for Boxcars. We aren't going to hit the tower. I got an opportunity to throw a scare into Mu-Kur-Ri. He's protecting his precious aura with everything he's got. Going in there with some kind of surprise is one thing. Breaking down that door into the teeth of six or seven Reapers, and troops besides-I won't do it. In five more minutes there'll be troops from Pulaski Heights here. We'd have as much trouble getting out as going in."
"You're the boss," Nail said. He looked up and out of the basement and made a buzzing sound. "Damn, we're almost in spitting distance of that bas-Groschen's pulling back, he'll be here in two minutes."
"Very good, Lieutenant."
"Sir, you look like hell."
