by William King
“Citizens, I am wearing Harbinger Mark Four kinetic exchange armor reinforced with Dyson fields.”
An old woman glared at me. She looked like everybody’s favorite granny: rosy cheeks, eyes that probably twinkled when they weren’t sighting along the barrel of a Magnum. She said, “So?”
“So your pop guns aren’t going to hurt me very much,” I said. “And the ricochets probably won’t do your children’s health any good. Fortunately, we are in a hospital, so medical assistance will be immediately available should you choose to go that route.”
A number of the ladies present moved put their bodies between me and the kids. I shook my head. “Won’t help. Bullets will go everywhere. You can never tell how they will be deflected by the armor. It’s semi-random.”
“Semi-random my donkey,” the granny said. “You’ve got ten seconds to get out of here.”
I must admit I kind of liked this one.
“If you take a look in my right hand,” I said, nodding to indicate the thunder flash, “you’ll see a Series Two plasma grenade as manufactured by the Akami Corporation of Algol Seven. You’ll notice that my finger is on the detonator and that it is armed. In the extremely unlikely event that you hurt me and I fall, the grenade will detonate. A wave of white-hot plasma will pass through this waiting-room and you will all be reduced to your component atoms. Children included.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” said one sweet-looking lady whose little boy was clutching her leg wide-eyed. His eyes were fixed on the burning skull.
“Citizen, I am a Federal Stormtrooper. You don’t want to piss me off.”
Granny wasn’t having any of this. “Better the children all die now than get dragged off to your Big Government torture camps.”
She had me stumped with that one. “Torture camps?”
“You take them there and you’ll brainwash them in your liberal ways.”
“Liberal ways? Citizen, you must be confusing me with some other stormtrooper.”
She was not to be stopped. “You’ll take away their guns and you’ll make xeno lovers out of them.”
“Oh, those torture camps . . . They’re called schools. They are not so bad once you get used to them. They taught me how to take a punch.”
“What?” It was the granny’s turn to look astonished. Now did not really seem to be the time to discuss my pre-school career as a feral boy soldier with them.
“Hey they’ll get three square meals a day. Their diseases will be treated by the Federal healthcare program. They’ll probably be a lot better off than they are now. But tomorrow is my day for child abduction. Today I’m here to arrest a known terrorist leader. So tell you what—you all clear this waiting-room, I’ll go about my business and you can get about yours.”
“But we are here to see the doctor,” said one of the ladies. The kids were all screaming and crying now. The more sensible people were heading for the door. Keep it up, I thought.
“I’m afraid the doctor won’t be seeing anybody for quite some time,” I said.
“You’re here for Doctor Olson,” Granny said. The gun did not waver in her hand. She looked like she was considering shooting me. I hoped she didn’t. It had been a long time since I’d punched an old lady and I’ve never felt good about it.
“Doctor Olson is on the Federal Wanted list. I’m taking her in to answer a few questions.”
The ladies looked at each other. They all knew what that meant. “Torture,” said the granny.
“She’s too old to send to school.”
“We can’t let you take Doctor Olson,” the granny said.
“Believe me, Citizens, you can’t stop me.” How it had come to this? Caught in a Mexican stand-off with a bunch of kids, their mothers, and one little old lady. It wasn’t the highest point of my career as a Federal Stormtrooper. I consoled myself with the thought that it wasn’t the lowest either.
The door opened. An extraordinarily beautiful blonde-haired woman stood there. She held a shotgun in her hand, pointed right at me. Behind her I could see a little girl and her mother. They had obviously been in for a consultation with the good doctor.
“It’s alright everyone,” she said. “Get out of here. I don’t want any of the children harmed.”
Granny looked at the blonde goddess and said, “We’re not letting this Fed take you, Tanya.”
“You don’t know what this man is capable of,” she said. “Don’t worry. The boys will free me.”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” I said. I know. I know. My mouth runs away with me. I should have kept it shut. She seemed to be a pretty good job of convincing these people to leave. I could tell that a fair number of them, having got over the initial shock and fear, were starting to consider the matter seriously.
More and more of them headed for the door. The granny stayed. Two little boys huddled behind her. I toyed with offering them some ration bars. They looked hungry. They would probably have spat on me. And the granny would probably have shot me. The old lady’s attention was on the doctor now. Before any of them could do anything I reached out and took the gun from her hand.
She looked at me as if I had just pulled a really dirty trick. “That’s my property. You can’t just take it.”
“Citizen, I’m preventing a crime.”
“I wasn’t committing any crime.”
“I was considering punching you,” I said. Her mouth shut like a trap. The kids looked at me with wide eyes. I don’t know whether they were horrified or they thought I was the coolest thing they’d ever seen. It’s hard to tell sometimes.
“You can claim it back at the bunker,” I said. “Just give me your name and I’ll make sure it’s available.”
“I’m not giving you my name, Fed,” she said.
“Mrs Schmidt,” Doctor Olson said, “Go. I can look after myself.”
As if to prove the point she worked a pump action of the shotgun. I now had a Magnum in my free hand. It was pointing right at her head.
“I know how to use a gun too,” I said. “And I’m way better armored. Put away the shotgun, Doctor Olson. We don’t need any heroics here. You just need to answer a few questions and maybe, just maybe, we’ll let you go on your way.”
The granny was already hobbling toward the door. The boys kept staring at me. I would have winked at them but they wouldn’t have seen it through the flaming skull hologram over my helmet.
It was time for me to play the villain. Even more than usual. “Doctor Olsen, we can do this two ways. You can come with me quietly or I can drag you out of here by your hair. I don’t really mind which.”
Her jaw dropped. I guess I sounded convincing. I usually do when I’m making threats.
“You wouldn’t dare,” she said. “I’m a citizen.”
“Doctor Olsen, I am a Federal Stormtrooper. And you are on our Most Wanted list.”
She glared at me and then bowed her head in defeat. “Okay, I’ll go with you. I am going to be reporting this to my Congresswoman.”
“Report it to whoever you like, Doctor,” I said. “You’re coming with me and you’re going to answer some hard questions.”
Chapter Seven
After she pulled on her coat, I put the shotgun against her back and made sure everybody saw me doing it, and then I prodded her toward the door. A few minutes later we were on the roof. A transport drone hovered there.
“In,” I said and I pushed her up the ramp. I followed her into the transport drone and it took off, smoothly into the air above the city. I slung the gun over my shoulder.
She glared at me and said, “Was that really necessary?”
She spoke Standard Anglish with a faint accent. Like a lot of the educated folk on Faith she could if she wanted to.
“The message said it was urgent. You’re an intelligence asset of the Federal Government. I was hoping that doing this way would avert suspicion.”
“You terrified a room full of innocent people.”
“It’s my job,” I said
.
“You enjoy this, don’t you?”
“I do what needs to be done.”
“I’d heard you stormtroopers were bad, I hadn’t realized you were this bad.”
“You said this matter was urgent. Would you care to share it with me?”
Doctor Olsen was high up in the Jihad. She was also listed as a Federal intelligence asset. In any case she had provided us with usable intel in the past. Covert deemed her possibly reliable. That’s about as good as it gets.
Her shoulders slumped. Her face went pale. She looked suddenly frightened.
“This doesn’t look good,” I said.
“It’s Ulrich,” she said. “He’s got something. Something powerful. Something he plans to use against the kaffirs.”
“That’s interesting,” I said. “But you could have just phoned that in via the usual channels. There was no need for me to stage my little play act back there.”
“Whatever it is, he’s planning to use it tonight.”
This was more like it. “How do you know that?” I asked.
“I was summoned to a meeting of the Executive Council this evening,” she said.
“That sounds exciting,” I said. “Will there be tea and sandwiches?”
“You don’t understand, it was a full meeting of the executive Council. That never happens. Not since you Feds arrived anyway. We don’t want to be scooped up in the one spot.”
“Go on,” I said.
“It has to be something terrible. Ulrich was laughing. He only ever does that when he’s planning something really evil.”
“He’s a real charmer,” I said. Ulrich was top of our Most Wanted list, the Jihad’s chief enforcer. A grade A psychopath. He liked to make examples out of the people he deemed to be his enemies over realtime video feeds. There was not much left by the time he’d finished using his chainsaw on them. “So you think he is going to be there,” I said.
“Yes.”
There was a bounty of several million dollars on Ulrich’s head. Not that I would get my hands on it. It’s just that the government only puts bounties that size on the heads of really really bad people. “You say this meeting was called for tonight.”
She nodded her head.
“I’m going to have to call this in,” I told her. There was no need to tell her that it had already been done. Dave had already uploaded everything to Orbital. No doubt Command would be going over it. That was confirmed by an incoming call.
“She’s going to have to tell you where to go,” the Colonel said. “Get her to lead you there. If it’s as urgent as she says, you’re going to have to go in on your own.”
“No backup,” I said. “That will be fun.”
I did a quick inventory. I had my Magnum and the old lady’s as well as Doctor Olson’s shotgun. I ought to be able to handle a few militiamen even without my reaper.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked.
“I like to talk to myself. Got a problem with that?”
“Are you suffering from Blitz syndrome?”
“That’s not the sort of question you should ask a stormtrooper,” I said.
“I want to know the answer. I’m the one stuck in a transport drone with you.”
“You needn’t worry too much about that,” I said. “You’re going to have to tell me where to go to get to your meeting.”
“The old district four warehouse, near the spaceport. There are access tunnels beneath it.”
The carrier drone banked. When I called up the video feed on my HUD, I could see huge domes appearing beneath us covered in the signs of haulage and shipping companies. There were the ruins of many factories too. Before things broke down into civil war Sternheim had been the industrial capital of Faith.
“The tunnels lead to the old fallout shelter,” she continued. “It dates back to the Assimilation.”
“You think they will be escaping through the tunnels?”
She looked annoyed at my obtuseness. She shook her head. “The militia stores things in the bunkers down there. Things that they need to be really secure. It’s very deep and it can be sealed. No leakage.”
I saw where she was going with this. It would be difficult to track something in such a bunker. I could just picture the sort of place she meant. A lot of them had been built in a lot of places across the galaxy during the Assimilation. People got scared very easily back then.
“Which warehouse?” I asked.
“Agnew and Lesko,” she said. The carrier drone tilted again as it adjusted its course. It seemed that our local maps were up to date.
Two minutes later we began an urgent descent toward the warehouse. The carrier drone set down in the massive truck park. Sensors indicated that there were no immediate threats in the vicinity. There were few security cameras. There were no militiamen present. Either they had already scattered or they simply did not want to attract attention to this place.
I could see the lights of the spaceport about a click away. I was already doing calculations in my head. This bunker contained a new weapon. It was located very close to the spaceport. It didn’t take much thinking to put two and two together and come up with terrorist outrage.
Doctor Olson came out of the doorway. Her long protective coat looked good on her as it reflected the arc light. A scarf hid her face.
“Step in front of me,” I said.
“Why?”
“One, so you can show me where to go. Two, so I can put a gun against your back.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“Of course, I trust you,” I said. “But if any of your friends see us I want to think that you are my prisoner and are you doing this under duress.”
“That’s thoughtful of you,” she said. There was an acid note in her voice.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll kick in a few doors as well.”
“You enjoy that, don’t you?”
“It’s why I signed up for this job.”
I called up threat assessment on an HUD insert. It was coming from Orbital’s sensors but they should be able to pick up anything obvious. Danger was refreshingly absent. The fact that the place was so close to the spaceport might have accounted for that. It was probably the most heavily secured facility on the planet.
“Excellent industrial architecture,” I said. It was true. The warehouses were big and brutal, concrete domes covered in shimmering bioluminescent lights. Adverts flickered across them. They shouted out the names of companies and products and political slogans.
“Are you trying to make conversation?” she asked.
“Just an observation,” I said.
“I didn’t know stormtroopers talked when they were nervous.”
“We don’t get nervous. We have had our fear centers removed.”
“There’s no such thing as a fear center.”
“The bastards lied to me.”
She stopped in front of the door to the office in the side of the warehouse. “Go ahead, knock yourself out,” she said, stepping aside and indicating the door with her hand.
I could not resist an invitation like that. I kicked the door in. I prodded the shotgun in through the open space just in case. There was nobody there. There was a desk and three terminals and a bunch of paperwork. On the wall was a calendar showing a tall, beautiful girl in a swimsuit. She looked a lot like the Doctor. I filed that thought.
“I don’t see the Nazis in Chief,” I said. “Doctor Olsen, if you would be so kind.”
I put a threatening edge into my voice just in case anybody was listening. She stepped inside and looked around. “Through the back.”
I kicked in another door. Once I started I just could not stop myself. There was just something about it. Another larger office lay behind. There were family pictures on the desk. Three cute little Nazis with a lovely Aryan mother. There was no calendar here, just a tastefully done portrait of a snow-covered landscape. It was always snow in this place. They were obsessed with it.
Doctor O
lsen moved behind the desk, pushed a filing cabinet to one side and fumbled around for something. Something clicked. A moment later a hidden door slid open revealing a flight of stairs going down. I had to admit this was starting to feel like a trap.
Chapter Eight
“These used to be for surface evacuation. A lot of people still use them. They were supposed to be blocked off.” She went to the head of the stairs and looked down. “You still want me to go in front?”
“Indeed.”
“You intend to use me as a human shield then?”
“You have a dark and cynical view of human nature, Doctor,” I said.
“We can have a tactical team on the ground in 15 minutes,” the Colonel said over the Grid. “If you think you need backup.”
I reckoned I could hold off the militia for fifteen minutes if I needed to. It wasn’t like I hadn’t done it before and I was better armed this time around.
We proceeded down the stairs. I released Dave from his silo on my back. He hovered over my shoulder. “Want me to scout, Stormtrooper 13?” he asked discreetly over the private channel. I gave him the go ahead. Technically releasing him broke the terms of the Accord but I was feeling the need for more intel.
A couple of heartbeats later, he was down the stairs and out of sight. An insert in my HUD showed me what he was seeing. A whole bunch of sensor reading scrawled across the bottom of the display. There were traces that people had been here just recently. I was fairly sure that if he switched to infrared he might actually catch the shadows of footprints left from body heat. I told him to do it and there were the ghost traces.
“How many would be coming to your little resistance meeting?” I asked.
“Full Council, at least eight. Plus bodyguards.”
We proceeded down another rampway. Static hissed in my earpiece.
“Dave, are you still in contact with Orbital?” I asked.
“Only just, Stormtrooper 13,” Dave replied. “This seems to be some sort of interference down here.”
“There seems to be some sort of interference down here,” I said to the good doctor.