The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  Now then, was the moment. If Spencer could reach Jameson, there might still be hope. “Sir, it won’t be you in charge. You know that. The helmet is controlling you right now. You’re its prisoner as much as we are.”

  He hesitated for a moment. Jameson was looking at him, a strange look on his face, his eyes, twin lamps of his imprisoned soul, staring out through his tortured face.

  Maybe, Spencer thought, maybe I’m reaching him. He went on in gentler, less urgent tones. “What’s happening to you, happened to me not so long ago. Not with any such helmet as that, but with a perfectly ordinary numb-rig. I’m not proud of it, but it happened. I know what it’s like. I’d be dead by now if a friend hadn’t come along.”

  Strange to think of the nameless KT man as his friend, but what else to call the man who saved his life?

  “I could find you half-dozen pleasure palaces and feel-good houses tonight, right in this city. Every one of them could sell you the torture you’re feeling right now. Ultimate pleasure, and then bottomless despair, and then pleasure again, until there’s nothing left of you that can feel anything anymore. That helmet is lying to you when it tells you how strong you are. Leave it on, and it will kill you. Believe me, Sir, I know.”

  Jameson looked at Spencer, as if he were searching for something important in the young officer’s face. Jameson worked his face for a long moment, trying to say something, but unable to speak. “Take—take helm’ off?” he managed at last. He seemed to be exploring the strange idea, considering its consequences.

  “Take it off?” he asked again, this time a bit more strongly. He was silent for a minute or two, thinking, fighting with the demons in his brain.

  “Yes,” he said at last, his voice suddenly clearer and stronger. “Yes. I—I can take it off, whenever I like; after all, it’s just a helmet, a shiny hat. I just like to wear it, that’s all.”

  His face brightened for a moment, then darkened suddenly, shrouded in a cloud of feel-good paranoia. “But why should I take it off, and lose my power? It’s my hat, and I want to wear it—wear it.” His voice faded again.

  Spencer watched eagerly. It was almost as if he could see two spirits battling for the old man’s soul. Jameson’s own mind strove against the helmet’s tyranny. “But, but, you know, I do believe I will remove it, just to show you,” Jameson said at last, and a wild, hopeful smile suddenly danced across his ravaged face.

  Jameson lifted two age-spotted hands to his head and wrapped them gently around the helmet. He pulled the thing away from his head, and there was a slight sucking sound as it lifted away from his scalp. Spencer felt his stomach turn over, and he heard Sisley on the couch next to him as she cried out in shock and horror.

  The top of Jameson’s head looked like so much raw meat, red and glossy with slime, covered with swollen sores, wet with the ooze from a thousand pinprick wounds that had never healed.

  The metallic parasites on Jameson’s body, on the chair, the ones moving back and forth across the room all froze in their tracks the moment he moved the helmet from his head. More unmoving parasites glittered on Jameson’s skull—but they had to share the ground with their less disciplined organic brethren. Head lice, or some ghastly Daltgeld equivalent, writhed and twisted everywhere on that tortured head, protesting their sudden exposure. The helmet stopped its slow, rhythmic motion the moment it was off its victim’s head.

  Jameson’s mad smile began to fade the moment the helmet lifted, his face suddenly contorted with agony, and his skin one again turned ashen grey.

  The helmet must be able to block the pain, somehow, Spencer thought. Without it in place, Jameson could feel the pain of his wounds and sores. “You see,” Jameson said, through a voice suddenly high and piping with pain and fear. “You see, I don’t need the helmet at all. I showed you.”

  With that, the old man clapped the helmet back down on his head, and breathed a sigh of grateful relief. The helm started its pulsing again, and the parasites again began to move. “Nevertheless,” he said, “I must admit that it is a comfort to wear it. A most remarkable sensation. What a pity I can’t let you try the experience.”

  Spencer turned his head away in disgust, and Sisley turned her head to lean over the side of the couch and be quietly sick.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Pickup

  Ensign Shoemaker watched his scopes carefully, trusting them more than his visual gear. He didn’t know this city, and landmarks weren’t going to mean much to him. This was a job he desperately wanted to do right; it wasn’t very often that an ensign was called upon to rescue a captain. He’d joined the Navy for the chance to be a hero. Now, at last, it looked as if his chance had arrived.

  The homing signal was growing stronger. He turned his course a bit toward the east and zeroed in on it. His comm panel started to buzz angrily again and he shut down the alarm, not for the first time. The captain’s gig Malcolm was playing merry hell with the local traffic control laws.

  Sod the laws, Shoemaker told himself. Naval authority took precedence. He checked his belly screens again. He ought to be right over—there! There was the captain’s woman, Suss, standing in the middle of a vacant lot, waving her arms at him, and some sort of damn monkey alien alongside her. Was the monkey the other passenger he was to carry? Strange. Very strange. Since when did the Navy need help from aliens?

  He shifted the Malcolm to hover mode and eased her down onto the lot. He punched the open hatch button and began his post-landing checks.

  He never got past the first item.

  ***

  Suss watched the gig arrive with rising impatience. The pilot was too damn cautious for her tastes. She was already sprinting for its touch-down point before the gig had settled on her landing jacks, and she was diving through the hatch before it was fully open. Dostchem followed, albeit a bit more slowly, clearly uneager to return to the StarMetal Building.

  Suss scrambled up into the gig’s flight cabin, jumped into the co-pilot’s station and strapped herself in. Before the startled Ensign Shoemaker could respond, she reached over and threw a switch that shifted control of the Malcolm to the co-pilot. She checked behind her, saw that Dostchem was aboard, and boosted again before she sealed the hatch. The Malcolm was on the ground less than ten seconds.

  “Dostchem! Get up here. Give me a vector off Spencer’s tracetab.”

  The startled pilot had recovered enough to start sputtering in indignation. “You have no right to take over this—”

  “Shut up,” Suss said brusquely.

  She had enough on her mind without having to soothe the egos of snot-nosed kids. Weapons. As a matter of course, she had familiarized herself with the Malcolm’s controls and armament when she had first come aboard the Duncan. That was standard operating procedure for the KT: Know everything you can about the tools you might conceivably need to use. But there was a world of difference between studying specs, schematics, and control layouts and using the real tools.

  Well, it had better not be too big a world.

  Heavy repulsors, medium plasma cannon, hunter-seeker missiles. All powered up, ready for excitement. Good. Give the kid credit for getting that much right.

  Radar. Nothing showing a threat at the moment, but that was bound to change. Never mind. If they moved fast enough they’d be all right.

  Suss had punched the Malcolm into a straight-up vertical launch on her hoverjets. Fifteen seconds of that had put them a half-klick up in the air. Not much of a climbing speed for a real fighter, but not bad for a hovercraft.

  Suss judged they were high enough and switched in the rear jets. The gig surged forward, and Suss slewed her nose about until the Malcolm was pointed straight at the StarMetal pyramid. The gig leapt across the sky.

  ###

  Jameson sat there, eyes clouded and vague, a slight tremor in his hands as they sat on the arms of the powerchair. The effort of removing the helmet, even briefly, had sapped all his energy.

  But that would not last, Spencer knew. Jameso
n was not quite sucked dry just yet. In a few minutes he would recover enough to move, to talk, even to think again, after a fashion. But his soul was utterly lost, enslaved to the thing he wore. He was a puppet on a string, pulled this way and that by the merciless whim of the helmet.

  Spencer had changed his mind a half-dozen times, and still was not sure if the thing was alive or a machine. But whatever it was, there was something about it, something almost palpable. It was the adversary, it was the essence of anti-life, anti-thought made corporate and real. It was the relentless machine opponent of all living sentience.

  It was a parasite. And one that had ridden its current host almost to destruction.

  A horrifying thought blossomed in Spencer’s skull. This parasite had caused two healthy new host-bodies to be brought before it. He thought again of that ancient, insectoid hero, even the name of its species lost to time. It had acted aright.

  Better suicide than Jameson’s fate. Spencer prayed that he would have the chance, and the courage, to do what the insectoid had done.

  But not yet. Their own situation was desperate, even hopeless, but perhaps they could still accomplish something for others. They might be able to kill Jameson, for example, and leave the helmet without a host.

  Spencer struggled against his bonds once again. No chance. There wasn’t even a knot to work on.

  He looked down at his feet. They were held not by rope, but by what looked like a thick, seamless strip of milky-grey plastic, wrapped in a figure-eight around his ankles, the two ends melted perfectly together. Spencer recognized the material, and knew that he could never hope to break free of it without tools. Maybe he could chew through the bonds on Sisley’s wrists in a week, but they had minutes, not days. Forget it.

  “Any bright ideas?” he asked Sisley in a quiet voice, trying to make light of it all.

  She shook her head, and seemed to be holding back a sob. Spencer realized with a shock that, as bad as things were for him, they had to be infinitely worse for Sisley. Spencer had years of military training and discipline, years to get used to the idea that he might die unpleasantly. Less than a day ago, Sisley Mannerling had been a stately matron with a steady, respectable job, with a harmless undercover assignment that added the spice of excitement to her life and provided a bit of extra income. Now she had been chased; shot at; spent a sleepless night being brutalized, captured, stripped of clothing, rank, and dignity; and left alone with a stranger and a madman.

  Her Kona Tatsu training must have been some help, but she was no professional. She was unprepared for what they now faced. Her shame, her fear, her humiliation must be deep. Spencer felt guilty for not thinking how bad this would be for her.

  Jameson picked that moment to stir, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the helmet chose that moment to rouse its host. His eyes cleared and focused, and he seemed about to say something.

  Then the wall exploded.

  A hideous flash of light illuminated the room, like a too-close lightning strike, and the sound of a thousand thunderclaps blasted the room. The room was suddenly furnace-hot, and the air was gaspingly rich in ozone and smoke. The viewscreen behind Jameson blacked out with the smoky sizzle of burning electronics, and a huge, glowing wound appeared in the middle of the screen. It widened rapidly, melting its way through the outer wall and the plastics of the screen, until clear honest daylight was stabbing through a fist-sized hole in the wall.

  With a warrior’s reflexes, Spencer took cover behind the couch before his conscious mind even registered that something happened. He looked up and realized that Sisley hadn’t moved, was staring at the hole in the wall, too stunned to react. He lunged back up onto the couch and butted her with his head, urging her down on the floor. She dropped alongside him. Spencer’s mind was racing.

  He recognized the sound and the look of a plasma cannon’s work. And who but the Navy had plasma weapons? Suss. Somehow, impossibly, it had to be Suss. Another burst of plasma fire blasted at the wall, on a lower setting this time, working to slice a hole in the wall.

  Spencer pulled his head down. Friendly fire could kill you just as dead as the enemy’s. As if to prove his point, some wrecked component of the wall screen chose that moment to explode, sending white-hot fragments blasting across the room, setting fires in a half-dozen supposedly fireproof pieces of furniture and carpeting. Anything will burn if you get it hot enough.

  Jameson—or the helmet using Jameson’s voice—suddenly shouted, crying out a hideous, inhuman scream of anger no human throat should have been able to form, shrieking out the helmet’s rage. That alien war cry from a human was somehow more shocking than the plasma gun blasting into the room.

  A jerky puppet on an alien string, Jameson reached into a recess of the powerchair and pulled out a repulsor. Moving awkwardly, even spasmodically, Jameson pulled the trigger and waved his arm wildly in a hopeless attempt at aiming the weapon as he squeezed the trigger. The helmet, Spencer realized, was trying to control Jameson’s body directly, perhaps for the first time. And it wasn’t very good at it.

  Spencer’s reflexes rolled him out of the way, but the repulsor traced its deadly line of fire across the floor and into Sisley, ripping into her lovely body, slicing her neatly in half across the waist, the dragon’s teeth of the repulsor beads turning living, breathing flesh into an obscene mass of exploding gore and splashing blood. The repulsor slashed widely around the room, blasting apart the surviving wall screens, ripping into hidden power conduits.

  Huge power-shorts arced the room into darkness.

  The stuttering bull-roar of the plasma cannon opened up again; the room turned sun bright with the actinic glare of the fusion flame. A thin tongue of precisely controlled sunfire sliced at the wall. The plasma tongue pulsed as the cannon’s blast chamber recycled to fire again. The gunner must be running the cannon at maximum speed and lowest power, Spencer thought. A very tricky control problem.

  Suss. It had to Suss. Who else would be that good with a plasma weapon?

  The plasma jet had cut open a meter-wide circle in the wall. A few weakened bits of concrete, left where the cannon was between pulses, held the plug in place. Suss, either impatient with her progress or not wishing to risk vaporizing the interior of the room, opened up on the plug with repulsors, slamming the slab of wall back into the room. Sunlight streamed into the room.

  And the powerchair moved, negotiating the littered chaos of the room at speed. Jameson, still wielding his hand gun, was screaming again, his arm struggling to control the weapon. A huge pair of disguised blast doors snapped open in the far wall of the room. The chair shot through the twin doors, which slammed shut as abruptly as they had opened. Spencer heard the whirling hum of a high-speed elevator behind the doors and knew that the chairman was already a hundred floors below, heading for a private bomb shelter far underground.

  Hurtling into the room through the hole in the wall, Suss did a perfect regulation dive and roll into the room and came to rest on her feet, back to the wall, crouched down to provide a smaller target. In one hand she held a repulsor, in the other a hand laser.

  Spencer had never seen a lovelier sight in his life.

  “Status!” she snapped, all business.

  “Sisley’s dead,” Spencer said, struggling up to his feet. “The opposition’s escaped, and if there are automatic weapons in this room, they haven’t shown themselves. Probably trouble on the way in about thirty seconds, but we’re alone right now.”

  Suss holstered her repulsor and came over to Spencer. “Pull your feet as far apart as you can.” Spencer strained against the bonds holding his ankles, and Suss fired a slicing laser beam between Spencer’s feet, cutting through the plastic bond material. The plastic fell apart, sloughing from Spencer’s ankles, as soon as its integrity was broken.

  Suss spun Spencer around roughly and cut through his wrist bonds the same way. “We go,” she said. “I think we’ve got company headed our way from the outside, too.”

  Spencer
rubbed at his wrists for a moment, surveyed the wreckage of the room, and spotted his AID under the shattered remains of a coffee table. He scooped it up and made ready to go before he thought of Sisley. He turned and looked at her, staring straight up at the ceiling, staring dead eyes looking up out of a death-pale face, her rich chestnut hair streaming out in all directions, a trickle of blood coming from her open mouth.

  Sick at heart and deeply ashamed to be alive when Sisley had been killed, he turned and made for the hole cut in the wall. Suss, he noticed, had not concerned herself with Sisley at all, once she heard the word dead.

  Suss grabbed cushions off one of the couches and slapped them over the lip of the glowing hole in the wall. She gestured for Spencer to scoot through the hole. The cushions were already smoldering. Spencer boosted himself up into the hole, to see the gig hovering no more than a meter or two away from the building, her hatch lined up with the hole.

  It must have been near impossible to hold station. Spencer could see a nervous ensign—Shuman? Shoemaker?—something like that, handling the controls. He got the best purchase he could and vaulted, bare-ass naked, into the gig, skinning his knee and bruising his dignity on the lip of the hatch.

  Suss landed literally on top of him and pivoted, pulling something off her belt and tossing it back through the hatch.

  “Go!” she shouted, and the ensign needed no further urging. He gunned the gig engines hard and swung it away from the building as the hatch closed. Suss was already in the co-pilot’s seat before Spencer could pick himself up. “Taking weapons control,” she announced. “We have company.”

  There was a hugely loud explosion behind them, and the gig was peppered with bits of concrete. Spencer looked forward to the cockpit. He found a monitor displaying the rearward view and saw the top of the StarMetal pyramid ablaze. Suss had been able to do something for Sisley after all. A Viking funeral. Better her body was burned in the clean flames than to have it left behind as an ugly bit of butchery.