by Tony Daniel
“We’ve taken a casualty, sir. Keiran is KIA. This ship is definitely under control by hostiles.” Strode squeezed his eyes shut. In the USAF, you didn’t call boomers ‘ships.’ They were ‘spacecraft.’
But the colonel had missed it. “Lieutenant Keiran? That poor boy. How did it . . . ? Well, that will wait. Ahh . . . I think you’d better return to the LeMay, Major. We need to confer on our next move . . .”
Strode made a disgusted face. He couldn’t say he was surprised. Klaus had started out flying EB-47 electronics warfare aircraft out of Japan during the sixties. He’d later been transferred to tankers. A decade as a 135 pilot had given him a truck driver’s mentality: stolid, cautious, and slow moving. “I disagree, sir.”
“Ah . . . what’s that, Major?”
Strode gave him a quick rundown on what Morris had discovered.
“They’re not individual propulsion units?”
“No, sir, they’re not . . .” Strode bit off his words before he could say “pills,” another term Klaus didn’t care for. “The yield is in the megaton range.”
“I see. So the Rokossovsky was in fact some kind of backup for the Moscow plotters.”
“So it seems.”
It was as they’d suspected in the first place. It was simply too much of a coincidence that a nuclear-armed boomer had broken its assigned orbit and started heading for Earth at the same time that Boris Pugo and the KGB moved against the Soviet government. The Committee of National Renewal under arrest, Yeltsin shot for treason, people being executed in the streets . . .
But they’d missed Gorbachev, who reached a friendly Army base and rallied the people to resist the coup plotters. At which point the Rokossovsky, halfway between Earth and Luna, had lit off an entire string of pills and headed off in what seemed a perfectly random direction. It had taken the LeMay a week and half to catch up, at nearly unbroken acceleration, in the process using up most of its pill supply. They’d have to be refueled one way or another before they headed for home.
“. . . we’ll need to locate and secure that warhead cache.” Or destroy it, if it came down to that.
“Agreed. You understand that we’ll have to arm a warhead, Major.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way, sir. I’d also advise that the LeMay move away twenty or thirty kilometers. Their electronics seem to be degraded, but whether they can fire a weapon, I have no idea.”
“And your next move, Major?”
“I’m gonna track ’em down and clean ’em out.” A moment passed before he remembered to add, “Sir.”
“Ah, all right, Major. Best of luck. And keep us in the loop.”
Strode signed off. That last was going to be quite a trick. The hull of this bird was too thick for a headset radio to penetrate, so they’d been dragging along a relay box with a cable connected to the EV. Unfortunately, they’d about reached the end of the cable.
He turned things over in his mind for a moment, well aware of the team’s eyes on him. Boarding tactics for spacecraft were still largely theoretical. In point of fact, this was the first time they’d ever actually been carried out. So this operation was going to be one for the books—either how it was supposed to be done, or how you never ever do it unless you’re some kind of brain-damaged halfwit like Frankie Strode. “Awright—so we’re not fighting the entire crew.”
Gogol shook his head. “Nahhh—if there was a couple hundred of them, they’d be up our asses.”
The others nodded and grunted agreement.
“I think we can take it for granted that they’re KGB. Not combat troops.”
“Used to beating up widows and orphans.”
“More or less. So that’s good. Now, they’re going to be defending critical points . . .”
“CIC.”
“Right. So we’ve gotta hit ’em there, and they know we’re coming.” He ran his eyes over their faces, shadowed and distorted in the helmet lights. “Here’s what we’re gonna do . . .”
Strode studied the blank circle of the CIC entrance up ahead. The lights were still off, so he was using the lowlight slide-down goggles built into the suit helmets. They could lower over the wearer’s eyes even with the faceplate in the up position.
It had puzzled him for a moment that there wasn’t a hatch they could close, but after a little thought had realized that the ship’s KGB unit would want open access to the CIC at all times.
He hoisted the pistol. It was a piece of shit called a Gyrojet, basically a handheld rocket launcher. It had the heft of a water pistol and he didn’t trust it at all. But a recoilless pistol was still in the works, unlike the shotguns and grenade launchers the other troops were armed with.
He still had his visor up and was listening closely. He’d sent Heske into one of the air ducts. He had a spare conformal oxy tank and was supposed to toss it up the duct after ten minutes had passed. He was about thirty seconds late now.
On the opposite side of the ship, Kruger and Page were headed up a secondary access tube. They ought to be . . .
He heard a rattle that seemed to be coming from somewhere to his right. Immediately, there were muffled sounds from the CIC. He nudged Cruz, who has gripping the cover from the computer room printer. Cruz let it sail toward the entrance, assorted parts and objects attached with bungee cords banging against the metal bulkhead as it went.
Shouts rang out, followed by gunfire as the cover sailed into the CIC. Strode squeezed his eyes shut and lowered his head as the team fired four high-intensity flares into the space. The shouts got louder, the gunfire intensified.
“Let’s go . . .”
Cruz and Gogol were already at the entrance. They slipped inside, shotguns blazing, just before Strode reached them. Strode swung over the edge and down to get out of the way of the rest of the team. He collided with a wall console with a thud and glanced around the space.
Four of his team—he couldn’t tell one from the other—were blasting away at a several dark figures silhouetted by the glare of the tumbling flares. They seemed to be well at home in mike, using the cover of the consoles as they fired back. As Strode watched, one of them was hit and slammed into the far bulkhead. He raised his pistol but couldn’t find a clear shot.
The gunfire died down, both sides emptying their magazines more or less at the same time. As it started back up, one of Strode’s boys was hit and went tumbling backward. Strode shot at a Russian, the round leaving a trail of fire across the space.
“They’re cutting out,” somebody yelled.
“I see ’em . . .”
Strode spotted the Russians slipping into the tube entrance at the far side, firing as they went. He fired again and missed, as he might have expected. Within seconds no further Russians were in sight.
“Cease firing,” he shouted.
“Cease fire . . .”
The CIC went quiet.
To his right, somebody shouted the password: “White Rabbit!” Page and Kruger emerged from the secondary entrance.
Gogol sent two of the men to the tube that Russians had disappeared into. As they reached it, shots rang out. They sent a few shells down the tube and all went quiet.
Strode ducked as one of the Russians, clearly dead, sailed overhead. He glanced around. Two more Russian dead. Alongside the entrance, Naylor was working on their wounded man. In the flicker of the flares, Strode couldn’t tell who it was.
Several spacesuits were hanging from what looked to be a portable rack to his far right. On the other side, Gogol was gazing down at something on the other side of a console.
“We got a wounded here, Chief,” he called out.
Gesturing to Morris, Strode headed over to join him. He slowed down as he reached the console. At the other side, strapped into an acceleration couch, lay a Russian, his square Slavic face now covered with sweat, slicked-back hair strangely unmussed, high-necked dark coverall stained with two large patches of blood at the chest. Strode could see clearly that he wasn’t going to make it. It was surprisin
g he was still alive as it was.
The man raised a shaking hand. “Krest, radi lyubvi k Bogu, krest.”
“A cross . . . for the love of God, a cross . . .”
Strode bit his lip. “Anybody here got a . . . y’know, crucifix?”
“I’ve got one,” Cruz said. “But I’m wearing it.”
“Right.”
Morris was bent over the Russian, whispering something in a soothing voice.
“Krest, tovarishch, pozhaluysta . . .”
Dolan suddenly slid up against the other side of the console. “Here . . .”
It was a cross, something Dolan had evidently thrown together just now, what looked like a couple of straightedges fastened with tape. Morris handed it to the Russian, who accepted it with visible relief and clutched it against his chest.
Strode eyed him in silence a moment. Grown up in some backwoods village, or an urban blockhouse no better than a slum, scooped up by the military and finding himself dying out here on the edge of creation. He’d want a cross, too.
He bent closer. “Can he talk?”
“Chto sluchilos?”
The man’s eyes remained closed. “Gebisti.”
“KGB did this,” Morris said.
“Plekhov. U cheloveka d’yavol.”
“Plekhov. A human devil.”
“He’s the chief political officer,” Morris went on. “CO of the KGB unit on this bird . . . Part of a camarilla . . . that’s a conspiracy . . . To destroy the perestroika infection, wipe out the main enemy . . . and create a new Russian imperium . . . a new Rome.”
“Nice,” Strode said. “What happened to the crew?”
“Mostly dead . . . Plekhov killed them. Some tried to escape in the EVs—he dropped a pill and vaporized them.”
“Oh my God . . .” That was Cohn. He shook his head as well as he could in the suit and turned away.
“There was a gun battle . . . KGB having most of the guns . . . They captured the rest of the crew . . .”
“Where are they?”
The crewman’s face contorted. He seemed to be laughing. “Shestnadtsat’-V.”
“Sixteen-B. Room number.”
Someone brushed against him. It was Naylor, holding a syringe in one glove. “I’ve got some morphine for this guy.”
“Good—one minute. What about . . . Krilov?”
“Krilov . . .” the man’s eyes opened wide. “Velikiy chelovek, Krilov.”
“A great man, Krilov . . . he defied Plekhov, brought the ship out here, he . . .”
The Russian groaned and his head fell back.
“Major,” Naylor said. “I’ve got to get back to Fenton.”
“Give it to me.”
He accepted the syringe and bent toward the Russian. It was obvious they’d get nothing further from him. As he gripped his arm, the Russian muttered something else.
“You’ll find him with his bombs,” Morris said.
He emptied the syringe into the man’s vein. With his bombs? What did that mean?
The man’s face went slack and his grip on the cross loosened. Strode patted his arm. “Sorry it ended up this way.”
The crewman’s eyes shot open. “Vy ne zastrelit’ menya.”
He relaxed once again. Strode looked quizzically at Morris.
“You didn’t shoot me,” he said.
Strode swung away. A few consoles over, Cruz was examining something. He raised it and shook it at Strode. “Booby traps. They were working on a dozen of ’em here.”
Strode nodded. He felt exhausted, far more tired than he had any right to be. He pulled himself past another console. There was a kind of board at the top for notes and messages. This one featured a number of pictures: Titan, Mercury, Earth from Phobos.
He smiled. He could guess whose station this was.
There was something on Mars that seemed to change and adapt as long as nobody was looking at it. The minute anybody tried to analyze it, it froze up solid as a piece of crystal. There was some kind of material floating around Jupiter apparently created deep inside the planet and then flung out into orbit, that couldn’t be categorized as a metal or anything else. It was light as foam, harder than diamond, and superconducting. There was an ocean several miles under the ice sheets of Europa that was apparently the source of all those organic chemicals scattered across the surface. There was a brown dwarf, a companion star only a few diameters larger than Jupiter, less than a thousand AUs from the sun. Wonders piled atop wonders.
But all that had to wait. No hurry—they’d all still be out there. They’d keep.
We have to do some killing first, Strode thought. Once that was done, maybe then we’ll have time to look. If we don’t have any more massacres to carry out.
Fenton was arguing with Naylor. “Don’t you go shooting me up with that stuff. I ain’t staying back here.”
“Mose, your shoulder’s all fucked up, you can’t use that arm . . .”
“I’ll use the other one . . .”
Strode went over to them. “Mose . . . look at me. Tell me straight: Can you keep up?”
Fenton glared at him as if they’d been having this argument all too often lately. “Yeah, I can keep up.”
“Awright.”
“Gimme a couple codeine,” Fenton told Naylor.
Strode raised an arm. “Gentlemen . . . assemble.”
The team crept up the tube leading to the next level above the CIC, as spread out as they could manage. Cruz was in the lead, pushing an empty Russian suit ahead of them. It seemed that the suit rack was full of badly damaged suits (sabotaged, Strode suspected) that the Russians had been trying to patch up. They’d taken one of them, stripped some metal bars off the consoles and taped twenty feet of them together with duct tape (the material that would conquer the solar system), and fastened it on the end. Strode was betting that the Russians wouldn’t recognize it as one of theirs before they opened fire.
The next level lay right ahead. Cruz slipped the suit out, then quickly pulled it back. There no response from up above.
Three of team headed up the tube. Strode and the rest followed after they signaled all clear. They waited while the men made a quick examination of the corridor.
“They’re demoralized,” Morrow was saying to Naylor. “That’s what I think.”
Strode shifted toward them. “What about the rest of the crew? What if they cut ’em loose from wherever they’re locked up?”
“Nahh . . .” Morrow shook his head.
“You don’t think they’ll fight for, y’know, Holy Mother Russia?”
“Rodina. That’s what they call it. Mother Russia.”
“Okay, the Rodina.”
“Yeah—they’d do that. But they ain’t gonna fight for the fuckin’ KGB. I think this Plekhov is caught between a rock and hard place.”
“Well, I hope—”
Cohn appeared at his elbow. “We’ve got a large door up there with 16V on it. Is that the one the kid was talking about downstairs?”
“Could be.” Strode reached for the rail and gave himself a push. “Let’s take a look.”
Dolan and Cruz were waiting by the door. Strode got everybody arranged, Dolan with his ZG SAW aimed at the door, the rest at either side.
It took Cruz a couple of minutes to wrestle with the handle. Somebody had strapped it down tight.
The door slid open. Dolan stood staring for a moment then let the barrel of his weapon drop. “Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
Strode shifted to where he could see inside. All he could make out at first was shapes drifting in darkness. He impatiently flicked on his helmet light.
He gasped without will, without a thought in his head. Before them floated a shoal of dead men, most wearing the same coverall as the Russian down in the CIC, a few in officer’s uniforms. Many of their faces were covered with blood, sticking to the skin the way it did in mike. There seemed to be dozens of them.
“What the fuck . . .”
“They decompressed t
hese guys,” Morris whispered. “They opened this room to vacuum.”
“What are these fuckers?”
“I dunno, Micky,” Strode said. “I dunno.”
He gestured Cruz to close the door. It took him several tries.
A moment passed before Strode remembered to shut his light off.
“Let’s finish this.”
It wasn’t clear where the KGB quarters would be—they were never marked as such on the blueprints. All they knew was that the Gebisti, as the Russian called them, were quartered apart from the crew, and that they held complete control of the ship’s nukes.
All the same, it happened exactly the way that Strode thought it would. So certain was he, he had the claymores strapped to his belt free and armed even as the gunshots on the level above them started tearing into the Russian suit emerging from the tube.
Strode tossed the claymores ahead of him and then hugged the side of the tube. There was a flash, a concussion, and a thud against his Kevlar vest that left him breathless for a moment. Someone up above started screaming. Then the team burst out of the tube, guns ablaze as they raked the area where the flashes had been coming from.
Strode pulled his way up, favoring his right side. The claymore shot had cracked a rib or two, at the very least. At the top he saw three dead Russians turning in the corridor.
“Three others,” Cruz said. “They went through that door.”
The team was already after them. Pausing to one side, Gogol tossed a concussion grenade through the door. As it exploded he stepped inside, followed by Heske and Page. Strode moved after them.
Gunfire erupted almost immediately. Strode squinted against the flashes. A Russian flew backward, gun slipping from his hand. Gogol moved past him, kicking him aside. The place was something of a warren, a lot of doors and doglegs.
Just beyond one of them, a Russian crouched with one hand gripping his side, the other raised in front of his face. Strode had a single glimpse of terrified blue eyes as Gogol raised his shotgun and without a word opened fire. He kept pulling the trigger until the gun was empty.
Morris stepped past him and examined the dead man’s coverall. It took a moment amid all the blood. “This isn’t Plekhov either,” he said.