by David Weber
He hesitated for not more than a second or two. His jaws tightened with decision.
Here. Now.
Victor hefted the flechette gun in his hands. Except for one of the Scrags, Victor had the only flechette gun in the party. Everyone else was armed with pulse rifles. As casually as he could manage, he looked over his shoulder and studied the soldiers and the Scrags following him. Quickly, easily—an officer doing a last inspection of his troops before he led them into combat. He spotted the Scrag holding the other flechette gun and fixed her location in his mind.
“Citizen Sergeant Fallon and I will take the point,” he said. His voice sounded very harsh, ringing in his own ears. The other three soldiers in the SS detachment, hearing the announcement, seemed to relax a bit. Or so, at least, Victor hoped.
Fallon cleared his throat. “If you’ll pardon me saying so, sir, I think—”
Whatever he thought went with him. Victor leveled the flechette gun and fired. He had already set the weapon at maximum aperture. At that point-blank range—the muzzle was almost touching Fallon when Victor pulled the trigger—the volley of 3mm darts literally cut him in half. The citizen sergeant’s legs, still connected by the pelvis and lower abdomen, flopped to the ground. Fallon’s upper body did a grotesque reverse flip, spraying blood all over. The Scrags standing near him were spewed with gobbets of shredded intestine.
The butt of the gun came up to Victor’s shoulder quickly and easily. He took out Citizen Corporal Garches next. Other than Fallon, she was the only combat veteran in the Peep detachment. The other two were simply typical SS guards.
A burst of flechettes shredded Garches. Victor’s aim moved on, quickly. The Scrag holding the other flechette gun came under his sights. The woman was standing paralyzed. She seemed completely in shock. One of her hands, in fact, had left the gun and was wiping pieces of Fallon from her face. An instant later, her face was disintegrated, along with the rest of her body above the sternum.
SS next. Quick! He swung the flechette gun back and took out the two remaining members of Fallon’s squad with a single shot. They never did more than gape before Victor erased them from existence.
Victor had never been in combat, but he had always taken his training seriously. He had never stinted on the officially mandated hours spent on the firing range and the sim combat tanks. Indeed, he had routinely exceeded them—much to the amusement of other SS officers.
Dimly, he heard the Scrags shouting. He ignored the sounds. Some part of his mind recognized that the genetic “supermen” were beginning to react, beginning to raise their own weapons, beginning—
No matter. Victor stepped into their very midst, firing again and again. In close quarters, a flechette gun was the most murderous weapon imaginable. The weapon didn’t kill people so much as it ripped them apart. In seconds, the underground cavern was transformed into a scene from Hell. Confusion and chaos, blood and brains and flesh spattering everywhere, the beams from wildly swinging hand lanterns illuminating the area like strobe lights.
Abstractly, Victor understood his advantage—had planned for it. Despite his lack of actual combat experience, he had trained for this. Had spent hours, in fact, thinking through this very exercise and quietly practicing it in the sim tanks over the past two days. He expected what was happening, where the Scrags were still half-paralyzed with shock.
Or, even where they weren’t paralyzed, they had so much adrenaline unexpectedly pumping into them that their motions were too jerky, too violent. When they managed to get off shots, they missed their target—or hit one of their own. Shrieks and shouts turned the nightmare scene into pure bedlam. The noise, added to the bizarrely flickering light beams, added to the gruesome splatter of wet human tissue flying everywhere, was enough to overwhelm any mind that wasn’t braced for it.
Victor ignored it all. Like a methodical maniac, he just kept stepping into them. Almost in their faces, surrounded by their jerky bodies. Twice knocking rifle barrels aside to get a clear shot himself. He expected to die, in the instant, but he ignored that certainty also.
He ignored everything, except the need to slay his enemies. Ignored, even, the plan which he and Kevin Usher had agreed upon. Victor Cachat was supposed to spray the Scrags with a single burst of automatic fire. Just enough to scatter them and confuse them, so that the Ballroom would have easy pickings while Victor made his escape.
It was insane to do otherwise. If the Scrags were not trained soldiers, still and all they were genetically conditioned warriors with superb reflexes and the arrogance to match their DNA. Suicide to stand your ground, lad, Kevin had told him. Just scatter them and race off. See to the girl. The Ballroom will take care of the rest.
But Victor Cachat was the armed fist of the Revolution, not a torturer. A champion of the downtrodden, not an assassin lurking in ambush. So he thought of himself, and so he was.
The boy inside the man rebelled, the man demanded the uniform he had thought to wear. Say what they would, think what they would.
Officer of the Revolution.Sneer and be damned.
Victor waded into the mob of Scrags, firing relentlessly, using the modern flechette gun in close quarters like a rampaging Norseman might have used an ax. Again and again and again, just as he had trained for in the years since he marched out of the slums to fight for his own. He made no attempt to take cover, no attempt to evade counterfire. Never realizing, even, that the sheer fury of his charge was his greatest protection.
But Victor was no longer thinking of tactics. Like a berserk, he would meet his enemies naked. The Red Terror against the White Terror, standing on the open field of battle. As he had been promised.
He would make it so. Sneer and be damned!
The shots went true and true and true and true. The boy from the mongrel warrens hammered supermen into pulp; the young man betrayed wreaked a war god’s terrible vengeance; and the officer of the Revolution found its truth in his own betrayal.
Sneer and be damned!
Jeremy
“Crazy kid!” hissed Jeremy. He and the others had been following Victor and his would-be executioners. They were now hidden in the shadows toward the rear of the chamber. Jeremy sensed his Ballroom comrades raising their own pulse rifles. They were aiming at the mob of shrieking Scrags swirling in the center of the vault. But there was no way to fire without hitting Victor himself. He was right in the midst of the Scrags.
What was left of them, anyway. Half the Scrags were down already, ripped to shreds by Cachat’s murderous madness.
Murderous, yes, and mad besides. But Jeremy X had been accused of the same, often enough. And there were times, the truth be told, when he thought the accusation was dead on the money.
Such a time was now.
“Hold your fire!” he shouted to his comrades.
With the agility of the acrobat he had been brought into the world to be, Jeremy sprang over the rubble and landed lightly on his feet. Then, bounding forward like an imp, he hefted the handguns which were his favored weapons. One in each hand, as befitted his version of the court jester, gleefully calling out the battlecry of the Ballroom.
“Shall we dance?”
The Scrags who had managed to survive Cachat’s fire just had time to spot the capering fool, before they were cut down. Court jester or no, Jeremy X was also, in all likelihood, the deadliest pistoleer alive. The shots came like a master pianist’s fingers, racing through the finale of a concerto with a touch as light and unerring as it was thunderous. The sound was all darts flying and striking. There were no screams, no groans, no hisses of pain. Each shot was instantly fatal, and the shots lasted not more than seconds.
Not one of the Scrags managed so much as a single shot at Jeremy. The only moment of real danger for him came at the very end, as the last Scrag fell to the ground. His body one way, his head another. Jeremy’s shot had severed the neck completely.
Jeremy found himself looking down the barrel of Cachat’s flechette gun. Jeremy was the last thing st
ill standing in the chamber, and the young SS officer had naturally brought the deadly weapon to bear on him.
A tense moment, that. Cachat’s young face looked like the face of a ghost. Pale, taut, emotionless. Even his eyes seemed empty.
But the moment passed, the gun barrel swung aside, and Jeremy gave silent thanks to training.
By the time Jeremy’s comrades made their way into the chamber, it was all over. Stillness and silence. Slowly, Victor Cachat lowered the flechette gun. More slowly yet, as if in a daze, he began to examine his own body. Astonished, it seemed, to find himself alive.
“And well you should be,” muttered Jeremy. The lanterns dropped by the dying Scrags cast haphazard light here and there. He swiveled his head, examining the corpses scattered all over the chamber. The ancient stone floor was a charnelhouse of blood and ruin. Carrying their own lanterns, the Ballroom spread out and began moving slowly through the human wreckage, searching for survivors.
They found one still alive. His last sight was the tongue of his executioner.
Then, silence again.
Jeremy caught motion in the corner of his eye. He turned, raising a pistol, but lowered it at once. With his uncanny reflexes, of mind as much as body, he recognized the motion. A captain and a master of the martial arts, advancing slowly into the light.
The silence was broken, by a scream out of darkness.
“Daddy!”
Motion anew, a girl’s blurring feet. Racing across a field of carnage as if it were a meadow; skipping through havoc as easily as they would have skipped through grass.
“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”
“It’s an odd sort of place, this universe of ours,” mused Jeremy. He smiled at the comrade at his side. “Don’t you think?”
Donald X was cut from more solemn cloth, as befitted such a thick creature. F-67d-8455-2/5 he had been, once, bred for a life of heavy labor. “I dunno,” he grunted, surveying the scene with stolid satisfaction.
“Master Tye! Master Tye!”
“Seems just about right to me.”
Daughter struck father like a guided missile. Jeremy winced. “Good thing he’s a gold medalist. Else that’s a takedown for sure.”
His eyes moved to a young man, standing alone in a lake of blood. The flechette gun was held limply in his hands. There was nothing in that face now but innocence, wondering.
“Odd,” insisted Jeremy. “Galahad’s not supposed to be a torturer.”
Rafe
The first thing he recognized, as he faded back in, was a voice. Everything else was meaningless. Some part of him understood that his eyes were open. But the part of him that saw did not.
There was only the voice.
Your plan worked perfectly, Rafe. Beautiful! They’ll make you a Hero of the Revolution. In private, of course. Just like they did with me.
Oddly, the first concrete bit of information that returned was the name. He felt a trickle of emotion re-entering a field of blankness. He hated being called “Rafe.” He would not even tolerate Raphael.
Everyone knows that! There was less of anger in the thought than sullenness. The pout of an aggrieved boy.
Yeah, it was damned near as perfect an operation as I’ve ever seen—and I’ll make sure to include that in my own supplemental report to Gironde’s.
The name “Gironde” registered also. Gironde was a citizen major in the SS detachment on Terra. One of his own subordinates. Not close, though; not one of his inner sanctum. An “ops ape,” Gironde was; not his kind at all.
You’ll be glad to know that the Ballroom’s sweep of the Loop seems to have damned near wiped out the Scrags completely. Lord, that was a stroke of genius on your part!
The word “Lord” was not supposed to be used. He remembered that. And remembered, also, that it was his responsibility to see to it that it wasn’t.
Between the confusion caused by the rally at Soldier Field— all those people crowding through the streets and alleys—and their own efforts to catch the girl, the Scrags all came out of their hideyholes. Well… No doubt there’s a few left. Not many.
The next sound he recognized as laughter. No, more like a dry chuckle. Very dry. Very cold. Then, more sounds. Someone, he understood vaguely, had pushed back a chair and risen from it.
Oh, yeah. You’re a genius, Rafe. Just like you planned, the Ballroom wiped out the Scrags in one day. And the girl’s safe, of course, so you got us out of that mess. Can you imagine? The nerve of those Manpower bastards! Trying to set us up as the patsy, figuring everybody would believe anything about Peeps now that Parnell’s arriving.
That was the sound of a man pacing, he realized. And then, suddenly, understood that he was seeing the man. His optic nerves had been working all along, but something in his brain must have suddenly switched on. He had been looking sightlessly. Now he was seeing.
He arrives today, you know. Just after the Mesan assassination squad gets arrested by the Sollies we tipped off. You tipped off, I should say. Credit where credit is due.
Another harsh, dry laugh. He remembered that laugh. Remembered how much he detested it. Remembered, even, how much he detested the man who laughed in that manner.
But he couldn’t remember the man’s name. Odd. Irritating.
Like a bird, his mind fluttered in that direction. Irritation was an emotion. He was beginning to remember emotions too.
The man who laughed—very big, he was, especially standing in the center of a room looking down at him—laughed again. When he spoke, the words came like actual words instead of thoughts.
“Of course, there isn’t the horde of newscasters waiting at the dock for him that everyone expected. Plenty of them still, needless to say. But half of the Sollie casters are in the Loop, covering what they’re already calling the Second Valentine’s Day Massacre. Good move, Rafe! Everything about your plan was brilliant.”
Usher. That was the man’s name.
He remembered how much he detested that grin. More, even, than the man’s way of laughing.
“Yeah, brilliant. And after the final masterstroke, which—” The man glanced at the door. “—should be coming any moment now, you’ll go down in history as one of the great ops of all time.”
He had been drugged, he suddenly realized. And with that realization came another. He knew the drug itself. He couldn’t remember its technical name, although he knew that it was called the “zombie drug.” It was so easy to use as an aerosol. He remembered thinking that his office had grown a bit muggy, and that he’d intended to speak sharply to the maintenance people. Highly illegal, that drug. As much because it left no traces in a dead body as because of its effects. It broke down extremely rapidly in the absence of oxygenated blood.
There was a knock on the door. Very rapid, very urgent. He heard another voice, speaking through the door. Very rapidly, very urgently.
“Now! They’re about to blow the entrance!” Footsteps, scampering away.
Again, that hated grin.
“Well, there it is, Rafe. Time for you to put the capstone on your career. Just like you foresaw, Manpower saved its real pros for the attack on the embassy. Here they are, raring to go. ’Course, we got Bergren out already, so they’re walking into a massacre. Just like you planned.”
An instant later, he was being lifted like a doll by huge and powerful hands. Now that he was on his feet, he could see the Marines lining the far wall. All of them in battle armor, with pulse rifles ready to hand.
“Such a damn pity that you insisted on leading the ambush yourself, instead of leaving it to the professional soldiers. But you always were a field man at heart. Weren’t you, Rafe?”
He was being propelled to the door. Usher was forcing something into his hand. A gun, he realized. He tried to remember how to use it.
That effort jarred loose his first clear thought.
“Don’t call me Rafe!”
The building was suddenly shaken by a loud explosion and then, a split-second later, by the s
ound of debris smashing against walls. The shock jarred loose more memories.
This was exactly how I planned it. Except—
Usher was opening the door with one hand, while he shifted his grip onto—
Durkheim! My name’s Durkheim! Citizen General Durkheim!
He heard Manpower’s professionals pouring into the embassy’s great vestibule. He could see the vestibule through the opening door.
There’s not supposed to be anybody here, except Bergren and a squad of Marines. Newbie recruits.
The huge hand holding him by the scruff of the neck tightened. He could sense the powerful muscles tensing, ready to hurl him into the room beyond.
“Don’t call me Rafe!”
“Hero of the Revolution! Posthumous, of course.”
He was sailing into the vestibule. He landed on his feet and stumbled. He stared at the Manpower professionals swinging their pulse rifles. Call them mercenary goons if you would, they were still trained soldiers. Ex-commandos. Hair-trigger reactions.
He was still trying to remember how to use the gun when the hailstorm of darts disintegrated him.
Thereafter
The admiral and the ambassador
Sitting behind his desk, Admiral Edwin Young glared up at the captain standing at attention in front of it.
“You’re dead meat, Zilwicki,” the admiral snarled. He waved the chip in his hand. “You see this? It’s my report to the Judge Advocate General’s office.”
Young laid the chip down, with a delicate and precise motion. The gesture exuded grim satisfaction. “Dead—stinking—meat. You’ll be lucky if you just get cashiered. I estimate a ten-year sentence, myself.”
Standing at the window with his hands clasped behind his back, Ambassador Hendricks added his own growling words.
“By your insubordinate and irresponsible behavior, Captain Zilwicki, you have managed to half-wreck what should have been our greatest propaganda triumph in the Solarian League ever.” Glumly, the ambassador stared down at the teeming streets and passageways over a mile beneath his vantage point. “Of course, it’ll blow over eventually. And Parnell will be giving his testimony to the Sollie Human Rights Commission for months. But still—”