The Fall of the City of Steel

Back From the Power Plant

Soren fidgeted nervously at his desk. He knew that he needed to be preparing for the city's collapse, but he could not clear his mind enough to focus.

"The tribe will be attacking now," he thought. "Right now, they're fighting a battle; people are dying and I'm just sitting here. But if I'm out of my office while it happens, I might look suspicious. There has to be something I can do."

"No," he reminded himself, for the fifth time. "There is nothing you can do. You cannot help them. Anything you do out of the ordinary now will jeopardize their secrecy."

For the fifth time, Soren ran through his well-refined mental list of all things within the realm of normalcy that could possibly benefit the guerillas. Nothing was worth the risk. Soren laid his head in his palms and sighed ruefully. His alliance with the resistance required him to act natural, at which he excelled. However, it also required him to trust others: something he had almost no experience in.

Frustrated, Soren pushed away from his desk and stared up at the featureless ceiling, pretending he could see the sky. Despite himself, he let out a shallow smile; always, he imagined that his mother could see him, and, for once, he believed that she would like what she saw.

Suddenly, an idea struck Soren that, on any better day, would have occurred to him hours ago. There was one thing he could do to prepare for the city's fall.

Quickly, he dialed the closest thing his insane workplace had to a secretary.

"Hello?" she answered.

"It's Caster," Soren introduced banally. "I need you to inform some security guards that they can take tomorrow off."

"Got it, Mr. Mayor," she complied airily. "Hold on... there. Now, which ones?"

After a moment of thought, Soren decided that five was the highest number of guards he could send away without rousing too much suspicion. Five, he knew, was barely a drop in the bucket for his building's frighteningly extensive security staff, but it would help. After another moment, he listed off the names of the five guards who would obstruct him the most over the next day.

"Tell it to... McAllen, West, Giovanni, Thomson and Gasperi."

* * *

Inside his tank, Tony waited, trying in vain to make himself comfortable in the metal drivers' seat, his skin textured against the nightly cold. On his tank's radio, Joan conversed with several other voices, male and female, speaking in their foreign language, with the occasional exchange between her and Emilia. Tony secretly wished he could make small talk with Rico, but all were operating on the same radio channel, and he knew that Joan wanted radio silence.

Tony examined the control inputs before him. Never before had he been inside a land vehicle. He struggled to recall from the training manual exactly how the tank's skid-steer system functioned. Not daring to touch the controls himself until the time came to drive, he instead glanced about the vehicle's cramped interior.

Tony's seat was positioned in the front of the tank's hull, affording him meager view through its armored hatches. Just beside him sat the chair of the commander, who operated the tank's onboard radio and could also fire a machine gun mounted in the vehicle's hull. The viewing port of a periscope also hung above the commander's seat. At the very base of the tank's turret, several feet behind the two front seats, sat the gunner's seat, just behind and beneath its own set of viewing hatches and an independent periscope. A tiny loft above this seat and adjacent to the gun offered just enough room for the loader to crouch and feed shells into the main gun.

Keeping within hearing range of the radio, Rico crawled back in the interior of the tank, finding a fire extinguisher resting on a hook on the wall, next to a hatch, which opened to reveal a portion of the tank's twin, rear-mounted engines. A small box of tools and spare parts rested to the lower-left of the hatch.