The Weapon

by Michael Z. Williamson

  We had a brief meeting with the exercise evaluators, who explained what we needed to know: comms would assess damage from photos of any area we attacked, and for safety reasons, we had to preface our activities over the commo systems with the phrase, "Exercise Transmission." They said a bunch of other stuff, too, but it wasn't important, so we didn't listen. We took the credchit ("bank card") they gave us, converted the amount of the budget to cash and returned it. They had no need to know what we were buying.

  We got a car with most of it, along with enough parts to rig up six satchels of improvised explosive simulators and a couple of "missiles." I acquired a black-market weapon. (Sales are all registered, but for a small premium of 50%, one may buy a new pistol not far from the spaceport. They come in by the shipload, as they do anywhere the local rulers utter magic incantations to keep them out. Never let your religious beliefs get in the way of the law of supply and demand.) It was a decent one: an H&K A6 with two spare forty-round magazines. Our point here was to show that we used only locally procured assets. We expressed that we'd be ready for the exercise, and got a good day's sleep. That night, we hit the clubs and picked a few IDs from people's pockets. It doesn't take long to decode the PIN numbers from them and change a photo, and most people would assume they'd left the wallet somewhere and not panic. We did return one "lost" one to a sergeant who might notice his £500 missing, but the others were all low amounts. We'd return them after the fact. Deni wanted to keep the cash as our bonus. I said no.

  We did nothing to them that Friday daytime. Why would we start off by being predictable? We waited until after normal duty hours, when everyone was getting ready for the weekend.

  We had no trouble getting on base. We didn't expect to. Frank got hired two days before as a restaurant delivery driver and drove through the gate in his company shirt and hat, iridescent logo on the side of the vehicle, with a cheery wave to the gate guards. Tyler and I went under the fence at a remote part of the perimeter around noon, crawled through the brambles until we hit the perimeter road about "Six o'clock," then changed, cleaned up with wipes and became joggers with day packs. We crossed from there to the inner part of the base across the flight line, spending a few seconds pretending to be lovers for the benefit of a passing patrol. She's not a bad kisser, if awkwardly short for my taste. The car floated by, occupants grinning, and we smiled back. In another few moments we were near the central power plant. It had been a long day already, and we hadn't even got to work yet.

  Shutting down a reactor is easy. Warming them up is hard. Our attack was obvious. We changed behind a loading ramp into uniforms bought at a surplus store, with me as a corporal, Tyler as a lance. There was an extra guard detail outside the plant, but no warnings of attack had come over the net yet, so they weren't really worried. The four of them were joking and goofing. We walked up with our packs and joined them.

  "Hey, fellas," I said in my best Skye accent. "Worrup?"

  One of them, a corporal, replied, "Norra bluhdy thing, mate. C'I 'elp ya?" (Okay, I'll use standard words from now on, because the accents were atrocious).

  "Oh, we're just here to see Frank," I said. "He told me you blokes were stuck with your thumbs up your arses for the duration."

  "Too bloody right we are," he agreed. "There's supposed to be five wannabe aggressors from the Freehold Embassy coming in," he said, eyes rolling in exaggerated disgust. "As if they're gonna wind up 'ere."

  As he talked, I pulled bulbs of Loma Cola out of my pack. "Well, until you can have a beer, then," I said as I handed them over.

  "Why! That's decent of you, chap!" he said. They passed them around, opened them and tipped the bulbs to us. We started to walk past. "Oh! You need to sign in," he said.

  "No problem," I agreed. There was a roster tacked to the window with a scanner next to it, and we both swiped our cards and signed fake names. I signed mine with a sloppy, "U. R. Fuct," and as I expected, they didn't even check. Had they done so, I would have shrugged it off as a joke. Tyler signed too, and we headed inside.

  We had no hassle at all. We nodded at a couple of techs while talking animatedly about power distribution, and they all assumed we belonged there. We had an unobstructed trip up the ladders and catwalks to the control room. That was the only place we had any challenge at all. We hid in the scaffolding at one side and changed shirts. They'd think four of us were here, when they figured it out at all.

  The NCOIC was a burly, grizzled old sergeant. He cracked the door and looked as us suspiciously. I started with, "Evening, Sergeant. Leftenant Windle," as I flipped open my stolen ID pack to another card, "and this is Leftenant Rogers," I added, pointing at Tyler. "We've had an exercise warning and we thought we'd give you an 'eads up. Those bloody infiltrators are inside the fence already."

  He checked the ID briefly. "Why didn't you call, Leftenant?" he asked.

  A reasonable question deserves a reasonable answer. "They may have things tapped. Why let the buggers know we're going to pin them to the wall, eh?" I replied, and he chortled.

  "Well, thanks, Leftenant," he said.

  "No worries," I agreed. "Any chance of a gander at the plant while we're 'ere?" I asked.

  "We really shouldn't at the moment," he said. "But give me a moment to clear it with the command post and I think we can, sir." He turned to his phone.

  "I don't think that's necessary, Sergeant," I said. He turned to stare down the muzzle of the H&K.

  "Bloody hell!" he replied as we pushed into the room. He recovered fast, and jumped for a warning button. So I shot him.

  All we had were gooey simulation bullets, but they do hurt and he flinched. Before he recovered, Tyler was past me and pretzeled him to the ground. I didn't even see her snap on binders, but he was wearing them when she stepped back. His assistant was running toward me from the far side, and I had time to aim. I shot him in the belly and the balls and he didn't even put up a fight for some reason.

  The sergeant had welts on his temple and neck and polymer stains on his shirt. I called it a kill and made a note into my comm as Tyler sprayed anesthetic down their throats. Couldn't have them yelling, after all.

  This is why the FMF requires all soldiers to be armed at all times. A response is so much more effective if you actually have the tools to do something about the crisis.

  We taped a note to the main monitor console that read, "This console has been destroyed by explosives. If you are reading this, you tripped another one as you came through the door. Please kiss your backside and consider yourself dead. NOTE: dead people do not call the command post to report that fact. Dead people do nothing but sit and bitch."

  Tyler rigged a stun grenade on the door as our note suggested, and killed the troops' access to the comnet while I looked over the controls. They were similar enough to the consoles I trained on at Jefferson District Power Systems, and I killed the fuel flow and shut down the containment field.

  Now we had to hurry. The guards outside would figure out from the lights going off all around that something was wrong, and just might make the connection to those two friendly people in mufti. They'd be hard to argue with, especially after the Sparkle (a popular hallucinogen in the Freehold) that I'd laced the colas with kicked in. We changed shirts back to enlisted people, exited the control room, dropped down ladders, mostly avoiding the panicking crew, and headed for the front door.

  We had one brief encounter that I used to spread further chaos. A corporal yelled at me, "What the hell happened to the controls?"

  So I replied, "The controls are fine! I think we lost a bloody fuel feed on the second stage!" as we ran past. That would keep them busy looking in the wrong place.

  We came out the front, sprinted across the street and through a parking lot to Hangar 1, and headed inside through the gathering crowd outside.

  "What's going on?" and variations of it were all we heard. Tyler yelled, "Power fluctuation! We've got to get everything shut down before it comes back up, to prevent a surge and another failure!"
It was pure BS, of course. Modern equipment is all protected against that, with delays on startup and comm lines to the power source. But it was believable to the ignorant, anyone who did know better would assume we were new troops who had our wires crossed and would be straightened out shortly, and it wouldn't hurt to do what we said, so they wouldn't be stopping us.

  We ran down the corridor with our padded footsteps echoing off the sere walls, and tossed a couple of notices into the machine shop, the photo lab, and even into the hangar bay proper, under the nose of a Lionheart close-support vertol. They all read, "This is a 1 kilogram charge. Everything in a 30 meter radius must be run through the games comm to determine damage." We'd taken the offered transponders that simulated it directly to the comm, but added a few improvs so they wouldn't know how many charges we had. Yes, that information was supposed to be confidential to the referees, but let's be honest, they'd talk.

  From there, we turned right into the front hallway, paused in the men's restroom (yes, segregated restrooms), to change into civvies again, and went out through the main doors (locked after hours, but you can always exit) and ran across another street, confident that we'd not been followed.

  * * *

  While we were doing this, Frank was having a ball.

  He came zipping in and delivered a sandwich just before we took out the lights. As he left, he made use of the panic to run through the parking aprons around the hangars and drop "bombs" into the beds of a few trucks. They had triggers for both time and motion, and would start flashing a strobe and transponder to let people know they existed. He went right back out and grabbed another order, and came back to do it again. He made several runs that night. No one ever made the connection between the delivery truck and the bombs.

  The power was out on his second run, and he was held at the gate for several minutes. He was just about to blow the gate and see what he could accomplish when they waved him through. This time, he detoured out to the end of the flightline, skipped past the warning lights and gates that blocked the road, and launched a home built "missile" at an incoming transport. A radio signal alerted the computer, and Landing Control was informed that the entire craft and occupants were casualties. He headed out and grabbed another order.

  These pizzas were for the growing number of people in the Command Post and the surrounding offices. He had to stop and be searched four times, but his order was confirmed and delivered. They did not let him inside, but took it from him at the door at the top of the stairs to the basement. He made sure to tell them it was a special order and to be careful. On the way out, he left a couple of "mines" on the road. He had a quick meeting with Deni and Sergeant Coonce and swapped intel, then made yet another run. It was a busy night for him, and he made nearly £50 in tips.

  * * *

  Deni was being more down to earth. Specifically, she was crawling through mud at the edge of the base. The mud, the bugs, and the weeds, thorns and toxic plants were familiar, barring minor variations in planetary ecology. She managed to plant "charges" at the base of the fuel tanks, on the cryogenic fluid building, in one of the engine test cells (a flashbang which they wouldn't find for weeks. It was a souvenir for them), and around the edges of base housing. She then set up at the far end of the flightline from Frank, and caught a craft that was departing, with a laser designator. That caused the base security forces to respond in two different directions. Rather than stay around to admire her handiwork, she headed for the base comm center to raise more hell.

  * * *

  Sergeant Coonce was less subtle. He simply drove through the west gate. With no ID. At high speed. It took his pursuers some time to realize that he was ignoring all traffic niceties like signs, lights and roads. Then he led the security patrols around the base at a merry rate, crossed the flightline several times and caused several aborted launches while the computer calculated casualties for him. He turfed a few yards in base housing, ran through parking lots and across the parade field, and even crashed through the tennis courts. Since he didn't care about the car's survival, he was hard to predict. A large number of troops were busy chasing him at the moment Frank and Deni "brought down" the transports. Those troops scattered in several directions in a disorganized response, which left him to lose the last two pursuers, drive to the base hospital and wreak havoc there before adding to the carnage near operations. He drove and ran around planting "bombs" anywhere that looked interesting, and even got into the fire station after they were called out. He used a spare crew truck and rescue gear as cover to go back into the power station and bring it down a second time.

  * * *

  Back to us: Across the street from Hangar One was the headquarters building. The command post was in the basement, triple locked and ID required to enter. That was the obvious target, but we weren't falling for the obvious. Several other people in civvies were running in from all angles (that's one reason to choose after standard hours for an attack), and no one questioned us. Even our packs went unnoticed—others had comms, water bottles, and other accessories.

  I turned and ran upstairs, avoiding the cameras and logs on the elevators. Tyler kept going through the building, out the other side and on to create more mayhem in the barracks area on her way to the control tower. My goal was an office on the third floor. It was easy to see, as this building had an emergency generator and it had kicked in already, so there was adequate light. I pulled a lock coder out of my ruck, which was bouncing in time to my steps, and managed to have it ready as I arrived at the door in question. I stuck it in the lock, told it to go, and hoped it worked. I could kick the door open, but that would make the rest of the op tougher.

  The lock clicked, and I walked in. It was dark inside, and I let it stay that way. I retrieved the coder and closed the door, which bore a sign that read, "Brigadier Peter McAran, Wing Commander." I slipped behind a couch. It was a nice office—plush and nicely appointed, as they say. Real wood desk, leather chair, clean-smelling carpet with the wing logo stitched into it. I would be comfortable here, for as long as it took. Windows on only one wall, I noted with approval.

  If I was correct, I wouldn't be waiting long. I was correct. Or rather, our intel had been.

  Barely two segs had gone by before there were steps from the elevator, shuffling and rustling outside, and the door opened. "Come in, Ladies, Gentlemen," I heard the brigadier say. "I'll be right with you."

  I waited just a moment while listening for my cue. That was it: They were all in the sitting area in front of me. I braced my feet, kicked the couch, and sent it tumbling into the legs of his escort. I stood, took aim, and began firing as I moved sideways. There were seven of them. Two of them were the Brigadier's security detail.

  My weapon coughed twice, and yelps and shrieks rewarded me. In a second, I had the brigadier by the throat, kicked his feet from under him, and shackled him before he could put up much of a struggle. "You two are dead, so sit down and don't move," I ordered his security goons.

  One dedicated bright boy didn't believe me and tried to stand, so I shot him in the forehead. His eyes unfocused and he went down. The other decided to take me seriously. I shackled them by their hands, back to back, and stuffed them against the wall. I now had their pistols, too.

  Turning back, I said, "Good evening, Brigadier. I hope you don't mind if I join your tête-á-tête for the evening?" in syrupy tones.

  "I apparently don't have a choice, do I, sir?" he replied.

  "Not really," I said. "And please don't call me 'sir.' My parents are married."

  He actually chuckled at that. Good. The others were looking absolutely murderous up to that point.

  I heaved him into his swivel chair, pulled him away from the desk and lashed his bound hands to the bar in back. While I did that, another genius made a break for it. I swung my hands up, calmly took aim as he clutched at the doorplate, and caught him in the neck. He went down.

  "Everyone lie face down, arms and legs spread," I ordered. The goat dance during survival t
raining now made sense. I was alone against seven, well, four now, and would have to deal with it.

  First I shackled their hands. Then I hobbled their feet so they could walk only in a shuffle. Then I searched them. Apparently, that was not regarded as proper.

  Perhaps it was because I used FMF, that is to say, "real" rules. I searched them. I clutched crotches, ran fingers through hair, pulled off belts and shoes and tossed them into a heap, emptied out pockets. I was quick, thorough and professional. The only voiced complaints came when I searched the sole woman present, a Major Josephine Hardy, Base Public Affairs Officer. Predictably, the complaints came from the men.

  "Is it really necessary to paw the lady, mister whatever-the-bloody-hell-your-name-is?" Colonel Popejoy, Air Base Group Commander asked.

  "I'm not 'pawing the lady,'" I replied reasonably as I stuck a hand up her skirt. Lace panties, thigh stockings, no weapons. "I'm 'searching the major for anything that might be a threat,'" I explained as I ran hands around the waistband then clutched at her chest. "If I were to say, 'nice tits,' or, 'padded bra, what a shame,' that would indicate pawing. But since what I'm going to say is, 'I have no problem with the bra, Major, and don't find any weapons, but the stockings might be used to strangle me, so I'm going to have to have them,' it's just a search."

  She replied with a faint flush of embarrassment, but gamely recovered with, "I don't normally do that without an introduction and dinner first, but I don't suppose I have a choice, do I?"

  "No, lady," I replied. I snicked them with a knife and peeled them open to her ankles, then ripped the tattered remains off. Being a professional, I did not waste time sneaking a peak at her daintier regions. I had three other hostages to watch, and three non-corpses who might get up and walk. I pondered wooden stakes. Maybe you think I overreacted, but by sliding gently back and forth, one can slip stockings off the legs. Even shackled, a good yank to each would tear them loose and yield the equivalent of two meter-long elastic ropes.