The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  “Goddamned amateurs!” Suss fumed. “They should have taken cover before they blew the door. They just stood there, begging us to kill them.” There was something near hysteria in her voice. “They could have used gas, or called for backup, or something.” She seemed genuinely offended at their ineptitude.

  Strange, Spencer thought, to be a KT agent who hated death and violence so much. “Maybe they’re dead, but they’ve still got friends on the way,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of here. Santu! How long to download all the data?”

  “Maybe another thirty seconds,” the AID replied. “Stand by to unplug me, somebody.”

  Spencer winced. Thirty seconds! Probably half the time they had before more guards showed up. They couldn’t wait around that long, not in what was suddenly a combat situation.

  Spencer thought fast. He had hoped to have a little time to look over the material they found, at least a little, but they would have to leave here not knowing if they had what they needed. Too bad, Spencer decided. They weren’t getting the chance to look for anything more. So: work on the assumption that Destin was a good lead, and that Santu would download everything they needed. Therefore, getting Santu out of here was the most important thing.

  Okay, great. But how to get the AID—and if possible, the rest of them—out of here? Should they all make a break for it together, or split up? Four people escaping together, two of them civilians? Unmanageable, to say the least. Sisley was good, she had some training, but she was not a combat soldier. And Dostchem was, after all an alien. Spencer had no idea how Capuchins responded in combat roles. He certainly wasn’t going to risk the mission finding out.

  If the civilians were liabilities who endangered the mission, strictly military logic said he ought to leave them on their own, and go with Suss himself, thus concentrating all of the group’s military training on the task of protecting their prize. Cold-blooded, logical, sensible—but he couldn’t do it. Spencer knew he didn’t have it in himself to leave Dostchem and Sisley unprotected.

  Damn it! He had to stop dithering. The clock was running, and running fast. It almost didn’t matter what orders he gave his people, as long has he gave them some orders and got them moving.

  Protect his people. There. That was enough of a guide for him. “Suss! The second you can, unplug Santu and make a run for it on your own. I’ll take charge of the civilians—you get the data back to the ship, no matter what happens. No speeches about protecting the rest of us. Nothing else matters unless we can track down Destin—and that recording is our only chance of doing it. Sisley, Dostchem, the two of you come with me.”

  He walked forward toward the blasted door and stepped over the ruined corpses. He looked back to see if Sisley and Dostchem were coming. The two of them were just standing there, still in shock, clearly unwilling to leave Suss alone.

  He turned and called back to them, “Come on! We don’t have any time. Suss will probably be safer than we are.”

  Spencer urged the others to hurry with an impatient hand gesture. At the same moment he turned and looked at Suss. She returned his gaze, with eyes too full of fear and love and courage. Their eyes locked. He suddenly realized that she was the last person in all the worlds of the Pact that he would wish to be separated from, the last woman that he would want to leave alone in time of danger.

  But this was not a time or place that allowed such sentiments. The enemy was closing, he might never see her again, and there was too much for him to say. “Good luck,” he said in a strangely hoarse whisper, and left it at that.

  “Go!” she said, her eyes saying everything but go.

  There was no time. He turned and led his party away.

  No point in subtlety or stealth now. The dead guards had to have been wearing some sort of sensors or mikes. Even if they hadn’t reported before they attacked, the building’s command center would have noticed it when their radios transmitted the sound of a gun battle and then went dead.

  If the cops knew Spencer’s team was here, it was high time to confuse the issue. They were just outside Sisley’s office, in a cavernously large workroom, with rows and columns of desks stretching out before them. The one huge room took up the entire floor of the building, except for the closed-off area that included Sisley’s office.

  Spencer pulled a stun grenade from his belt and threw it to the far end of the outer office. It exploded with an earsplitting blast that almost knocked the three of them over. The grenade threw a perfect blizzard of papers into the air, spewing some poor sod’s meticulously kept files over half the office, and setting most of them on fire as well. Two more alarm bells began hooting, raising a hellish racket even as the big room filled with the smell of burning paper.

  That ought to confuse them a bit, Spencer thought—and delay them while they fight the fire. He spotted a red door marked emergency exit on the wall to the left and fired his repulsor at it, wrecking the door, blasting it open and setting off the exit alarm as well. Then he turned right and led his team toward the opposite wall at a dogtrot, looking for a similar red door there. Good, there it was. As he had hoped, there were emergency exits on both sides of the building. “Dostchem,” he said as they got to the door. “Get past the door alarm without setting it off.”

  But Capuchins think faster than humans, and Dostchem already had the appropriate tools out. Spencer was relieved to see she wasn’t giving up. He had been afraid that the well-known fatalist streak common to Capuchins would make her throw in the towel. Instead, she went to work at the door, and had them through it in seconds.

  Spencer ushered the others through ahead of him, and felt a tiny twinge of relief as the door shut behind them. Now the fire, the blasted door on the opposite side of the room, even the dead guards themselves could serve as diversions, keeping the guards from looking toward the one place no alarms had been set off. Maybe they were going to make it.

  Suss wished for eyes growing out of the back of her head as she moved out into the outer office area. She was there fast enough to see Spencer’s party head down the emergency stairs, but she did not dare call to them. She patted her hip pouch. Santu was there, safely packed away. God willing the AID had captured the data they would need to find Captain Destin—and some answers. That would make all this worthwhile, if anything could.

  Now all she had to do was get the hell out of here—preferably by another route than Spencer’s, if he was going to serve as any sort of diversion for her. But how?

  She had barely begun to consider the question when the alarm bells rang. She dove down behind a desk as two security cops rushed out of the shot-up stairwell and rushed across the huge room, ignoring the fire Spencer had started, heading straight for the stairs Spencer had taken. They hurried down the stairs at the double, clearly men who knew where they were going and what they were after.

  Suss felt a sick feeling at the pit of her stomach. Her friends were caught, trapped, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing she could do about it.

  Nothing, except to take advantage of their sacrifice by escaping. She hunkered down behind the desk and checked the time. Two minutes. She would give them two minutes to focus their attention completely on Spencer’s capture, and then she would move out, using the other stairs.

  It was going to be a long two minutes.

  ###

  Spencer led Sisley and Dostchem down the emergency stairs, planning to get out of the stairs ten or fifteen floors below, leaving the hue and cry safely above and behind them.

  They had only gotten six floors down when the cops appeared.

  This time the cops did it right, those above popping out of the doorway on the floor above just as the cops waiting on the stairwell below came into view. There were too many of them for Spencer to have any hope in a fight, and all of them were taking good advantage of cover, all heavily armed and wearing enough body armor that one repulsor wouldn’t have a chance of getting them all.

  Besides which, there were now twenty heavy-duty repulsors pointe
d straight at the three intruders.

  Spencer said nothing. He just dropped his weapon, raised his arms over his head and waited for them to swarm in and arrest the three of them.

  Three? Even as the cops rushed in to grab him, Spencer suddenly noticed that Dostchem wasn’t there anymore. How the hell had she gotten—and then he knew, and forced himself not to look up as the cops slipped the cuffs on him and started stripping his gear off.

  Capuchins were a lot more arboreal than humans, after all, and the overhanging shadows of the gloomy stairwell could hide a lot. Spencer trussed him up so he couldn’t walk, then flipped him over on his back onto a waiting stretcher to carry him away, completely immobilized. As he was carried back down the stairs to whatever the hell they were going to do to him, he spied a lump of shadow wedged in below the underside of the stairs above, and felt glad she had gotten away.

  Spencer told himself that he should have been mad that Dostchem hadn’t stayed with them, but what was the use in all three of them being tortured to death?

  He blinked. Torture? He was surprised at the thought, and then realized he had known that all along. StarMetal was playing this for keeps. Torture. Pain. Death.

  For the first time that night, fear, real fear, swept over him. He felt his trussed-up hand reaching for a ghostly feel-good button.

  ###

  The sun was coming up. Tarwa Chu led her weary first-watch bridge crew down from the simulator to the operations bridge. There was something most disconcerting in moving from one room to its identical twin, moving from a place where a shadowy, unreal Duncan was controlled to the duplicate compartment that sailed the real ship.

  The fog of exhaustion played into it as well, no doubt, but Tarwa felt as if she were sailing between alternate worlds. They had spent the entire night sailing a whole fleet of Duncans out of port—crashing some of them, sinking a few, twice ramming lesser vessels. At last the bridge crew had gotten the hang of the procedure, and successfully conned the huge craft out of port and into open water, where she could safely boost to orbit.

  After each run, failed or successful, Tarwa had pressed the reset button, and the computer-driven images and sounds of the world outside the Duncan had melted away. A shattered harbor full of ruined ships, the pier aflame, or a triumphant lifting into space on a column of fire would vanish, flicker to nothingness.

  Nothing is, but what is not, Tarwa told herself, and wondered where the words came from. Now came the last run, the only one that mattered. She watched as the bridge crew relieved the last watchstanders, settled into their stations, checked their boards and got ready.

  In five minutes, they were ready. Tarwa sat down in the command chair, not even noticing at first that she felt no awe about sitting in the holy spot. Then she realized where she was, and what she had done, and decided that perhaps that was the real purpose of the simulator—to do everything—even die—over and over again, until it became routine, and all the needless emotions that got in the way of the job were gone. After wrecking the ship a few times, it hardly seemed to matter what seat she sat in. She punched the intercom button. “All hands,” she said, “prepare to cast off.”

  ###

  “This is gonna be something,” the young guard said cheerfully. “I ain’t never rid on one of the big exec’s elevators before.”

  Spencer, trussed, tied, and blindfolded, lay on his stretcher, listening to his captors. As best he could tell, there were only two of them now, the rest having returned to their other duties once the captives were rendered helpless.

  “Don’t look so happy about it,” his older partner warned. “I’ve never heard of anyone in Security going up to Jameson’s office. All hell’s breaking loose around here—or else the chain of command is so screwed up we had to take orders from the machines. Do you want to be standing right there when they’re looking for a fall guy? I’d just as soon be home drinking a cool one when they decide who to blame for this mess. None of this is normal procedure. They’re going crazy up there. Things ain’t right.”

  The older one seemed about to say something more when the elevator’s door chime sounded. “C’mon,” the older voice said. “Here it comes. Let’s get these bozos up to Jameson right now before anything else can happen.”

  Bound, gagged and blinded, Spencer felt himself being picked up with all the care and caution that might be given a bag of potatoes. They dumped him inside the elevator. Then he heard Sisley being dumped alongside him.

  But he seemed to be able to sense more than that. Perhaps because his eyes were useless, his ears were straining for every possible noise. And he heard, or thought he heard, a tiny rustling noise, like padded feet moving over a carpeted floor, coming from behind him, in the direction they had come from.

  Then the elevator doors shut, and he felt an increase in weight as it lifted toward the top of the building.

  What did Chairman Jameson want with them?

  ###

  “Hard aport, dammit!” Tarwa Chu snapped. “Forward starboard thrusters and aft port thrusters, ten percent power.” She tried to clear her throat. Shouting her commands to engineering was making her hoarse.

  What thumb-fingered idiot was on duty down there, anyway? She shook her head and forced herself to unclench her fists. Things were not going well.

  The simulator hadn’t taken this situation into account. The real-life fly-by-wire system simply wasn’t up to the job of sailing the Duncan, with the result that they had been forced to shut down the automatics and run the thrusters manually, which in turn meant shouting into a mike to the main engineering center to order maneuvering, hoping the ninnyhammers down there managed to punch the right button at the right time.

  It was no way to negotiate a busy harbor. But two more kilometers, and they’d have reached open water. All they had to do was—Dammit, they were drifting off their bearing again! “Engineering! Hard aport! Turn to port! That current’s still turning us!”

  She felt the sweat running down her spine, and kept her eyes glued to the instruments.

  ###

  Suss checked the time and made sure her feet were still tucked in under the desk. They had both gone to sleep on her, and she was not looking forward to what they would feel like once she could move and restore circulation.

  Her two minutes were up, and long gone, but there was very little she could do about that. Not with a fire-fighting team on the far side of the room, quelling the last of Spencer’s little diversionary blaze. Not with a herd of security types removing their dead comrades and generally milling about Sisley’s office. She was pinned down here, forced to hide, forced to pray they wouldn’t search too hard.

  Suss blinked, and noticed a gleam of light coming in the window, glaring in her eyes. Good God, the sun was up. How had the night ended so soon?

  There was a sudden buzzing in her ears as her mastoid implant switched itself on. “Relaying from Dostchem,” Santu announced simply. “Greetings, Suss,” the Capuchin’s voice whispered in her ear. “Santu informs me that you have not escaped from the outer office area. Are you equipped with a protective breathing apparatus?”

  “Yes,” Suss subvocalized, wondering what the hell Dostchem was up to.

  “Excellent. I assume that you do not dare move enough to put the mask on while the security men are about. They will be diverted in a few moments. When they are, put on the mask and proceed toward the stairwell Captain Spencer fired at. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Suss answered. How the hell had Dostchem tapped into a commlink with Santu? Never mind, didn’t matter. It shouldn’t come as a shock. After all, Dostchem was an instrument maker. Just be glad she had put her skills to good use.

  There was a sudden deepening in the air conditioner’s hum. Suss looked up in time to see a stream of thick white smoke pouring out of the overhead ventilators. And where the hell had Dostchem come up with crowd gas?

  Suss held her breath and listened as the security men cried out, started to cough and wheeze, and beg
an to drop, rendered unconscious by the powerful gas. Suss clamped her lips shut as she reached into her backpack for the breathing mask. She didn’t want to inhale so much as a molecule of that stuff. Her fingers found the mask and pulled it from the pack. She pulled it on and opened the valve on the air supply. She glanced around, and saw the big room fading away into a milky fog.

  Time to get moving. She got to her feet, and nearly collapsed as her legs, still full of pins and needles and refusing to cooperate. She kept herself crouched low and made her way toward the stairs.

  “Head upwards, not down,” said the Capuchin’s voice in her head. “Proceed up three flights and wait for me there.”

  Suss slipped through the ruins of the shot-up door, turned, and ran up the stairs, feeling like a damn fool. No good could come out of listening to voices in her head. Just ask Joan of Arc. Look what happened to her.

  ###

  The elevator stopped, and Spencer felt himself being lifted up again.

  The stretcher bearers carried him a short distance, and then stopped abruptly. “Damn, Larry, what the hell is—” The younger guard’s voice sounded shocked, confused.

  “Shuddup, Ty. I told you we didn’t want to come up here. We don’t see anything, we don’t say anything.”

  “Where the hell is Jameson?”

  “Right here, gentlemen!” a third voice announced from some distance away.

  “Oh my God!” Spencer felt the stretcher buck a bit as the younger guard jumped in startlement. “I’m—I’m sorry, Sir. I didn’t see you there.”