The general turned his head, the power gun moving off-target just enough. "It's a trick!" Pogue shouted, but Jaime was already lunging forward, grappling with Spratly, trying to knock the weapon from the general s grasp. Spratly gasped as Jaime slammed him against one wall of the hut, then clamped down on the trigger; a dazzling, blue-white bolt of energy seared past Jaime's side, ana he felt the hot snap of its passing. Jaime managed to slam his fist into the man's jaw, then wrenched the power gun from his hand.
Two of the general's toadies hit him from behind, dragging him down. He elbowed one in the face and wriggled free of the other, waving the gun. "Back! Back, all of you!"
He felt a wave of heat upon his bare back and heard a fierce crackling. Turning, Jaime saw that the wild power gun beam had sliced diagonally across the hut's wall, setting the rotting wood ablaze. As the fire spread, the general's staff rushed for the door, tearing the curtain down in their haste to get outside.
Swiftly, Jaime stooped, gathering up the oily rags
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and carefully rewrapping the pistol. He tucked the parcel into the waistband of his shorts, then he hoisted the stunned form of the general to his shoulder. As the hut filled with thick, white smoke, he staggered through the door curtain and into the open air.
A crowd of slaves was already gathering, attacking the flames with ragged blankets and articles of clothing, beating at the fire as others ran to get buckets of water from the troughs. A second hut, its wall just a few meters from Sprady's shack, had also caught fire when the power beam sliced through rotting wood and the inhabitants were scrambling out into the open. As the flames mounted, sparks and burning fragments swirling in the air threatened to ignite other buildings nearby.
"What the hell have you done to us!" Pogue shouted, his face a contorted mask of fear. "What have you done"?"
Jaime ignored him, depositing Spratly on the ground a safe distance from the converging mob. No one was paying attention to him. Holding the wrapped bundle tightly, he shouldered past the new arrivals and jogged southwest, toward the latrines. Behind him, dirty brown smoke stained the sky as the fire spread.
Fire was always a deadly danger in makeshift settlements like the Camp, and one of the most important things the original military command council had done was to organize fire drills and firefighting procedures. Cook fires and the fires used to boil water from the contaminated bay sometimes got out of control, and the shanties surrounding the wrecked manufactory were tinder-dry, a disaster waiting to happen. It certainly had not been Jaime's intent to start a fire as a diversion, but he was more than willing to take advantage of the confusion. There could be no going back.
"Jaime!" Shan called, waving. "Over here!" She was waiting next to a water trough with Alita, as they'd
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planned. The latrine and the ditch running under the fence was just a short distance farther on.
"What happened?" Alita asked as he joined them.
"The general protested a little more strongly than I expected," he told her. "Come on!"
"Did you get it?"
He patted the cloth-wrapped bundle. "Let's get out of the camp before the machines move in." He could already see several floater eyes in the distance drifting toward the swirling, smoking center of the diversion.
Sliding down the muddy embankment into the creek, Jaime started forging ahead, making for the wash-out beneath the force fence. Shari and AHta followed. He'd hoped to wait until after sunset for this part of the plan.
Thirty minutes later, they crouched among the ruins on the west slope of Overlook Hill. Behind them, smoke continued to rise from the buildings, though Jaime could see no open flames now and thought that the fire was probably under control.
Up the hill, though, things had changed in the past few hours, and very much for the worse. There were !б!б1 machines up there now, and they were erecting a number of spindly looking towers along the crest of the hill. Jaime recognized them; he'd seen similar towers a year ago, when the human survivors of the invasion were first being rounded up and marched to die site of the Celeste camp. Each was a sophisticated sound or heat sensor array, together with uplink hardware and a small but powernil laser. When that array was complete, a mouse wouldn't be able to sneak past the !*!*! outer perimeter, much less a human.
They were replacing Hector with the same impenetrable electronic wall that they'd installed north and east of the camp.
"But what does that mean for Hector?" Alita whispered. "If they don't need him up here anymore, blocking the highwayў"
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