agreed. “That’s a corner the rebels may try to back us into. Stay in control of the situation.”
Command was listening. “Don’t be too conservative. This is a show of force.”
It started out well. A young Ender who’d been standing on a box, haranguing, suddenly jumped off and ran over to stand in the way of our progress. One of the mounted police touched him on the bare back with a cattle prod, which knocked him down and threw him into a trembling seizure at David’s feet. David stopped dead and the soldierboy behind him, distracted by something, ran into him with a crash. It would have been perfect if David had fallen over and crushed the helpless fanatic, but at least we were spared that. Some of the crowd laughed and jeered, not a bad response under the circumstances, and they spirited the unconscious man away.
That might protect him for a day, but I’m sure the police knew his name, address, and blood type.
“Straighten up the ranks and files,” Barboo said. “Let’s keep moving and get this over with.”
The block we were supposed to demolish was identified with a girdle of orange spray paint. Hard to miss, anyhow, since a solid square of police and sawhorses kept the crowd a neat hundred meters away on all four sides.
We didn’t want to use explosives more powerful than the two-inch grenades; with the rockets, for instance, individual fragments of brick could go a lot farther than a hundred meters, with the force of a bullet. But I queried for a calculation and got permission to use the grenades to weaken the buildings’ foundations.
They were six-story concrete slab constructions with crumbling brick facades. Less than fifty years old, but the work had been done with inferior concrete—too much sand in the mixture—and one building had already collapsed, killing dozens.
So it didn’t sound like a big deal to bring them down. Grenades to jar things loose at the foundation, then put a soldierboy at each corner to push and pull, putting torsion on the framework structure, and jump back as it falls—or don’t jump back; demonstrate our invulnerability by standing there unaffected by the rain of concrete and steel.
The first one went perfectly—a textbook demonstration, if there were a textbook on bizarre demolition techniques. The crowd was very quiet.
The second building was recalcitrant; the front facade fell away, but the steel frame wouldn’t twist enough to snap. So we used lasers to cut through a few exposed I-beams, and then it came down with a satisfying crash.
The next building was a disaster. It came down as easily as the first, but it rained children.
More than two hundred children had been squeezed into one room on the sixth floor, bound and gagged and drugged. It turned out that they were from a suburban private school. A guerrilla team had come in at eight in the morning, killed all the teachers, kidnapped all the children, and moved them into the condemned building in crates covered with UN markings, just an hour before we had gotten there.
None of the children survived falling sixty feet and being buried by rubble, of course. It was not the sort of political demonstration a rational mind might have conceived, since it demonstrated their brutality rather than ours—but it did speak directly to the mob, which collectively was no more rational.
When we saw all the children, of course we stopped everything and called for a massive medevac. We started clearing away rubble, numbly looking for survivors, and a local brigada de urgencia crew came in to help us.
Barboo and I organized our platoons into search parties, covering two thirds of the building’s “footprint,” and David’s platoon should have done the other third, but the shock had them badly disorganized. Most of them had never seen anyone killed. The sight of all those children mangled, pulverized—concrete dust turning blood into mud and transforming the small bodies into anonymous white lumps—it unhinged them. Two of the soldierboys stood frozen, paralyzed because their mechanics had fainted. Most of the others were wandering aimlessly, ignoring David’s orders, which were barely coherent, anyhow.
I was moving slowly, myself, stunned by the enormity of it. Dead soldiers on a battlefield are bad enough—one dead soldier is bad enough—but this was almost beyond belief. And the carnage had just started.
A big helicopter sounds aggressive no matter what its actual function is. When the medevac chopper came beating in, someone in the crowd started shooting at it. Just lead bullets that