Kris Longknife

by Mike Shepherd

  Those deaths, however, involved a lot of screaming in agony.

  Those screams bothered Megan, but she had other problems at the moment. “Ah, Longknife 2 here, crew, before you send another batch of rockets downrange, give me a heads up. I lost some nanos in your fun and games.”

  “Sorry about that,” came from the LT. “We’ll keep you in the loop next time.”

  Clearly, there was going to be a next time. In the tunnel, the Marines continued to advance as engineers and rockets knocked out autocannons from the overhead. They also dug out claymores and gas canisters from the walls.

  Ahead of them, the tunnel began to fill with smoke and rubble. The humans were all in armored spacesuits, so the air quality did not bother them. However, the lowered visibility was not greeted with enthusiasm. Megan had to thicken up the shell of the scout and repeater nanos to keep positive observation of the rail path ahead of them.

  Meanwhile, the Iteeche set about building another sandbagged position, exactly like the one the Marines had just destroyed.

  The troops came to the curve in the tunnel. They continued blowing up Iteeche threats. However, about halfway through the turn, a Marine sniper took up a position tight against the wall. He squeezed off two rounds before fire drove him back from his position.

  Ammunition seemed to be no problem with the Iteeche, so now, a lot of bullets flew at and around the humans. The bullets ricocheted of walls and pinged off armor.

  The advancing teams withdrew behind the vehicle’s shield. It was time to rethink the situation.

  The protection on the armored train reoriented itself. Now the right end extended forward, and the left end bent back. It effectively created a thirty-degree angle with the right wall of the tunnel. With the shield at the angle of ricochet, any bullet hitting it would not only face armor effectively twice as thick, but also hit it at the perfect angle to bounce it off.

  Again, the sniper advanced. This time, into the tight angle in front. A small hole formed in the armor plate, right next to the tunnel wall, and the sniper leveled his gun.

  One shot. Two shots. Three shots. The protective armor in front of the train showed dents, but only temporarily. Immediately, the dent flattened out. Meanwhile, from the other side of the plate came the sound of bullets ricocheting off the armor, then the left wall, then whining as the badly deformed round wobbled back the way it came.

  The fire didn’t last long as the sniper responded to fusillades with single shots. With a final noisy volley, the din from downrange ceased.

  “No target up,” the sniper reported on net.

  The train began to advance again, this time at a crawl. Now, the rockets fired to knock out the autocannons and dig out the problems in the walls were from the two rocket launchers on the train.

  The fog in front of them got thicker and thicker. Tests showed that some of the cloudy gases had Sarin in its deadly combination.

  Again, for the Marines, that was no problem. They had no skin exposed. However, that didn’t turn out to be the situation for the Iteeche soldiers defending the new position outside of the station.

  At least two of them were seen to struggle and fall over their parapet. Several bolted for the station and only got a few steps. Closer examination showed that the Iteeche had breathing masks, but their uniforms provided no protection against skin contact with the droplets of deadly gas now floating in the air.

  “How do we run a decontamination for our own people when we force our way into the station?” the LT asked on net.

  You could hear the crickets in the silence.

  “Longknife 1 here. We don’t. If we find some showers, use them. If we don’t, that’s their problem. They’re the ones that set out the damn gas.”

  Megan remembered that Kris Longknife had once tried to have a friendly, family talk with Grampa Alex, only to have him gas several floors below his penthouse to kill her if she didn’t give up the uninvited intrusion.

  The admiral did not like Sarin gas.

  With no further fire from the station, the pace of their advance picked up. Now the fight was more Megan’s than anyone else’s.

  Indeed, if Megan could get to the primary target, they might very well not have to fight their way through all the corridors of this labyrinth.

  25

  With poison gas swelling all around her, Megan concentrated with Lily on reestablishing communications with the nanos she already had in the fortress. That and reinforcing them. They needed to get the guy before he made his escape.

  The hill above the redoubt had been lazed hard and heavy. Exits that way were rather thick with molten stone.

  A maglev train pulled out from a side track. It didn’t get very far before a human rocket wrecked the thing.

  If the planetary overlord intended to escape, his options were rapidly evaporating.

  Rather than mess with the thick metal hatch and the door that was welded shut, the nanos found a weakness in the wall that they could exploit faster. Soon, there was a hole barely a quarter of a micrometer wide. Nanos streamed down it and through the steel reinforced concrete to begin spreading out inside the fortress.

  It took Megan a minute, but soon she could report, “I’m back in contact with the command drones I sent through. They’ve established contact with the nanos that got left behind when they sealed the fortress. The first seven levels of the redoubt have been mapped. There’s a lot of nothing up there. I’ve got the reinforcements that I’m sending in looking for some place below the level of the train. I’m guessing this guy has jumped in the deepest hole available here and pulled the mountain over the top of him.”

  “That is a good guess,” came in Kris’s voice.

  “I’m having Lily put together some more command drones. I want to keep an eye on the other side of this wall. Oh, yeah, I most certainly do.”

  “A problem?” the major immediately asked.

  “Yep. A problem. Someone is walking a large satchel toward the door. I think they need a brain aneurysm,” Megan said, and sent fifty or so nanos up the Iteeche’s beak.

  The nanos included anything that was close at hand. Several of the nanos were transport nanos hauling eater nanos. Suddenly, teeth designed to break down rocks and stones were chomping on someone’s nasal passages.

  Blood began to trickle from his nose. He just had time to pause in his tracks and touch one finger to his beak before blood began to gush. He dropped his satchel and began running back the way he’d come.

  “Lily, cease the attack.”

  “Done, Megan.”

  Still, no more than a dozen steps farther and the big Iteeche fell, sliding along the floor, smearing his blood in a trail behind him. Someone ran out to try to help him.

  “Longknife 1 here. Leave that one alone. Medics aren’t targets,” Kris ordered.

  “Yes, Megan,” Captain Sung half-shouted.

  “If he takes off running for the satchel, he’s a target again,” Megan said.

  This was a good thing, because after a moment, the bleeding Iteeche went into convulsions and bled out. Someone, likely an officer, started bellowing for the lifesaver to get the bomb to the door and pull the tab.

  “Kill him,” Megan ordered Lily.

  This fellow didn’t make it as far as the other guy. He spotted the first hint of blood flowing from his beak, turned, and raced back toward the sandbagged barricade where the officers huddled.

  Said officer now was waving a sidearm at the poor fellow. The guy refused to turn around and the officer shot him down, then ordered another Iteeche soldier, at gunpoint, to start walking toward the explosives and the door.

  “Megan, I think that officer just won himself a death warrant,” Kris said.

  “Do it,” Megan ordered Lily.

  The soldier was backing up slowly, his hands up, keeping his eyes on the threatening officer. He paused to point as the first trickle of blood trickling down his superior’s beak.

  The officer checked and stared, all four eyes wide, a
t the blood on his finger.

  He threw down his weapon and fled. With the sandbags in place, Megan missed when he went down. However, a scout quickly furnished a picture of the scene.

  The officer was down, begging for someone to help him as he crawled, blood streaming from his beak.

  No one paused to help him. His soldiers were busy throwing down their guns and running away from their position. Some tried to race down the tunnel. Others threw themselves against the doors that were welded shut.

  Finally, several of them raced off to a series of business offices well to the side of things. There, they barricaded themselves in and sat huddled together, as non-threatening as a seven- or eight-foot tall Iteeche could be.

  “You know, you have to wonder how stupid an officer can be,” Kris Longknife said on net. “We’re drilling tiny holes to keep that witch’s brew of poison out of the bunker’s main air supply. That idiot seemed hell bent on blowing the fortress wide open to that junk.”

  “No accounting for smarts,” Jack answered.

  “I’m taking control of all the possible avenues from there to here,” Megan said. “I want to stop the next stupid senior officer just as dead as this one.”

  “Don’t go developing a sour attitude toward superior officers, cousin,” Kris said.

  “How could I possibly do that, being a Longknife and all?” Megan answered back, her voice all saccharin and high fructose corn syrup.

  While the command drones conducted a search of all nine floors identified in the bunker, Megan took charge of the search above, beside, and below the train station.

  Above them, she found a pair of Iteeche pushing a four-wheeled cart full of what sure looked like explosives. Behind them was an officer, his sidearm out.

  He had on a gas mask. However, it didn’t take Lily long to infiltrate his breather. When he developed a nose bleed, he ripped the mask off, glared at the blood in it, then bolted for the nearest door out.

  He didn’t make it.

  However, the two privates did.

  Lily took care to figure out where the detonator was, disabled it, and posted observers in the room to make sure no one chose to do mischief here again.

  Below the station were only service and maintenance tunnels. The eating nanos went to work on the hinges of those doors and locks. Soon, they were too sabotaged to open.

  Nanos also went down the track to make sure a train from the next bunker couldn’t surprise them. The ships in orbit were looking for any evidence that a train was shooting air out ahead of itself or sucking air back in behind it.

  None showed. Still, Megan wanted to know it herself.

  Meanwhile, Lily was devoting at least half of her attention to the search for the next level or levels down.

  There were no stairs. There was no elevator that went down from the station’s floor.

  Neither Megan nor Lily believed that to be true. The simple fact that they had not found any of the fifty important targets that they had on their list certainly seemed to prove that.

  It was the analysis of carpet wear and dirt that finally identified a trail that led to a panel that opened to an elevator.

  That led them one floor down to a rather large storage area. It was no surprise that the storage flood had no exit except the elevator down to it.

  This time it took a more meticulous search effort. Since the floor was concrete, the nanos went over the walls, looking for any crack. It took fifteen minutes, but they found a section of concrete on the opposite wall that was designed to swing aside.

  Now the nanos found an escalator that led down a floor.

  And trouble.

  This floor was as large as the storage area above.

  A fire sprinkler system was filling the air with a fine, but heavy mist.

  This would be death to nanos.

  “Well, I guess we should have known this was coming,” Kris Longknife drawled on net.

  26

  “This was not unexpected,” Nelly said, now on net. “Lily, you know what you need to do.”

  “You bet, Mom,” Megan’s computer said, as cheerful as any daughter given a chance to show off in front of her mother.

  The nanos, most of which measured only a dozen or so nanometers in size, began to coalesce into larger and larger blobs until they were hovering in the air; they became a collection of small rotary wing craft. As they reached a complete state, they’d guide themselves out into the large expanse of misty but empty space. The first one wove its way erratically across the befogged room.

  When nothing shot at it, the next few used a straighter line, but still zigged and zagged to reach the far bulkhead.

  Still, no shots were fired.

  The helicopter form, however, proved to be just right for the moist conditions. Water formed on the rotors and was quickly slung off by the whirl of the blades. None of the tiny choppers failed to make the crossing. Once there, several of them converted to smaller craft and aimed their sensors at the wall.

  It took a while, but it slowly became clear, the access port was not on that wall.

  The bastard had changed his practice.

  The flying sensors on the far side began to work their way back along the two side walls. Meanwhile, on a hunch, Megan converted the last batch of nanos to glide down the escalator into smaller searchers and sent them out to scout along both sides of the wall with the escalator.

  Ten meters off to Megan’s right, she found what she was looking for.

  Nanos quickly infiltrated the cracks to find an elevator with buttons ready to push. Even one to open the door.

  Megan had learned long ago that if you walked too close to Kris Longknife’s shadow, someone was likely out to kill you. While the Marine LT and one of his squads was eager to head down, Megan held up a cautious hand.

  “Give me a minute to check this out.”

  She was glad she did.

  Two minutes of searching and she discovered what she expected to find.

  “This is Longknife 2. I’ve got an elevator that looks ready to go, but I’ve also found explosives rigged to the buttons. I’m sending out a nano to see how you really get the door open and moving.”

  Behind her, eager Marines took a step back. Several took several steps back and sat down on the elevator risers, taking a load off. Smart jarheads.

  Before too long, Megan found what she was looking for. In the back wall was a panel superbly hidden that only opened when the right fingerprint was placed in just the right spot. Megan’s nanos managed to simulate that finger, and the panel opened.

  A moment later, so did the elevator door.

  The troops were up on their feet immediately, but again Megan waved them back.

  “I don’t think we should ride that elevator ourselves. Let me get some scouts out first.”

  The dive into the elevator shaft turned out to be a very long dive, indeed. The shaft sank a good hundred meters deeper into the mountain before it came to a door. The shaft went deeper, and there were three more doors below the first one.

  Lily had the nanos begin to explore everything behind all the doors.

  The first door opened into a guard room. Dozens of heavily armed men stood ready while many more lounged about playing games, gambling, sleeping, or enjoying the comforts of some very willing Iteeche females.

  Lily and Megan left some killer nanos around but sent more scouts lower.

  The next floor was full of pale-skinned male and female Iteeche, many at communication terminals, talking, listening, taking messages, and sending them down a pneumatic tube to the next lower level. There were a few alert guards watching the elevator doors as well as the bureaucrats, but much fewer than on the floor above.

  On the third floor down, there were a few comm stations as well as a desk where the messages from the second floor were analyzed and passed along. However, most of the space was taken up by luxurious quarters for 40 of the major political figures on Megan’s hit list. Them and their bevy of lovely girls.
/>   Away from the elevator, there were 40 luxurious apartments. There was even a restaurant for fine dining.

  There would be no suffering or deprivations for these guys during this little war.

  Of guards, there were only four. Apparently, the rank that had its privileges didn’t want the guards too informed about those privileges. There was no access except the elevator to this and the fourth floor. Those armored elevator doors had controls that locked them shut.

  Those with rank and privileges did not want to be disturbed.

  No surprise. The bottom floor proved to be spacious to the point of palatial.

  Here was the Planetary Overlord with ten of his closest hench-Iteeche. Oh, and three or four girls for every one of them.

  Of guards, there was only one. He was a massive Iteeche. You could tell by the color of his robes that he had been in service to the overlord since he was a child. There had been several attempts to suborn the guard. All had ended badly for those who tried it. This was shown by proudly displaying stripes on his sleeve.

  That guard had the one machine pistol on the floor. The only automatic swung from the hips of the overlord. Beyond those two, the rest were at their mercy.

  Of course, now all of them were at Megan’s mercy.

  “Longknife 2 here. Longknife 1, I need some advice.”

  “I’m listening,” came back, soft as a mother’s kiss.

  “I can take out the number one target. I can take out all fifty-one of the fifty-two major targets, or I can take out any mix of that number. I feel that the final decision is way above my paygrade.”

  “It is, but how would you do it if the hot potato was in your lap?”

  “Clearly, the Overlord must die and deserves to die. Probably, all the men on that bottom floor also deserve a death sentence. There are a few women that seem older. I can’t tell if they are sex toys or confidants. I’m divided between sparing them and including them in the execution.”

  Megan paused, but Kris did not comment so she went on. “As for the third floor, many of them strike me as high-level clan functionaries. However, I don’t know which of them have ambition and would be delighted to take a vacuum at the top as a God-given invitation to grab for the purple.”