A Silence in the Heavens Read Online Free PDF Page A

concrete steps leading up to a first-floor office—the nameplate next to the door readHARMONIOUS
    VOYAGING TRAVEL AGENCY . The office’s windows were all broken, and the room inside was dark.
    Laser flashes of rifle fire came from the upper windows across the avenue, and more flashes answered them from the windows above his head.
    A squad of Capellan Confederation soldiers crouched in the shelter of a public transit stop, firing at the windows on the far side of the avenue. One of the CapCons threw a dark green smoke grenade, and in the next instant the air roiled with throat-clenching white fog. The CapCons shouted and rushed into the street, moving like shadowy figures through the smoke. More laser fire came flashing down; some of the shadowy figures fell, but the others kept on running. The smoke scattered the laser fire, making a light too brilliant to look at.
    Then he heard the rumble of engines and the sound of metal thudding on concrete in regular, titanic footfalls.
    He looked to his left. Down at the Hall of Civic Governance end of the avenue, a looming anthropomorphic shape strode around the corner of the building, one massive arm punching out and into the third-floor windows as it came: a Thunderbolt BattleMech, swinging into action. He had no chance at all of crossing the avenue now.
    In desperation, he backtracked a block to a transit tunnel entrance, and plunged down its steps into the dark. He paused at the bottom to let his eyes adjust—as he’d hoped, the battery-powered emergency lights were on, and the tunnel was illuminated by their crimson glow. He didn’t see either CapCons or defenders anywhere nearby. If the transit cars were no longer running, he could follow the tunnel down one—no, two—stops, then go up and through the Governance Center subterranean concourse to get out, and make it home that way from the other side.
    Please, he thought, let them have gotten out in time.
    He lowered himself off the platform and down onto the tracks, taking care to stay away from the electrified rail in case the power should unexpectedly return. That was not the way he wanted to go out, stumbling onto his death by mistake, not with his city, with his entire planet, being murdered wholesale overhead. The air down here was hard to breathe, heavy with chemicals and foul-smelling smoke. He couldn’t feel any vibration in the rails underfoot—as he’d hoped, all the trains were either stopped or dead.
    He trotted down the tunnel, from one dim patch of red light to the next. A platform opened out ahead—the first stop—he kept moving, going on into the dark. At the second stop, he swung himself up onto the platform, barely noticing the pain when he banged his knee against the edge, and climbed the frozen steps of an escalator into the Governance Center concourse.
    On a typical day, thousands of people passed through the concourse’s vast rotunda; at any given moment, it could hold several hundred. Today, after the fighting had passed through and reduced its stores and kiosks to wreckage, it was empty—no, not quite empty. As he made his way around the perimeter of the concourse, he saw half a dozen people, office workers by their clothing, huddled together inside what had been a coffee shop. One of them at least appeared badly hurt, a business-suited woman lying half across the lap of an older, stouter, secretary-looking female. The clothes of both women were soaked with blood.
    He would have gone on, intent on his self-imposed mission, if a young man in a coffee shop worker’s uniform hadn’t pushed himself to his feet and come forward. Here was somebody, at least, who hadn’t left his post—loyalty above and beyond, wasted on “cream-no-sugar” and “double espresso” and
    “I’m-sorry-we’re-all-out-of-that.”
    The coffee shop worker asked him, “Do you know if it’s safe yet outside?”
    He shook his head. “Not yet. There’s fighting all over.”
    “Please,” said the secretary-woman.