You had to stabilize them some way. They were well trained; they were good soldiers. They were working with the data they had, and it was the data that was fucked up. Shit, it was the damned space-time that was fucked up.
English had never cared about physics, except for the sort necessary for dealing with foot pounds per second and quantifying your bang per buck. He didn’t now. But whenever he shot that APOT, he saw weird stuff: he saw trees instead of concrete, he saw big bugs, he saw what looked like munching dinosaurs. He saw everything but the fire zone he was scrambling through, on his knees, toward the low concrete administration building, where Grant was holding forth from the roof.
Finally, Sawyer rejoined his circuit and overrode the yelling and cursing and pleas for orders with his dual-com: “Okay, sir, we’ve got the glitch fixed. We’ll get human target blips. But we gotta be careful; no way to tell when the Bonaventure militia’s going to show up. Associate’s got equipment-related targeting data, but—”
A blast of conventional firepower pulverized the corner of a building to English’s right. They were pushed back and down by the concussive blast and showered with bits of hydrastone.
When his faceplate cleared, English was already talking to the 92nd. “You’ve got targeting, Redhorse. Repeat, equipment recalibration complete. Fire at will. Remember, you’ve got stun settings. These are human, repeat, human shooters. Take prisoners if you can but not at excessive risk. Watch for Bonaventure militiamen. Repeat, possibility of friendly fire.”
Bucknell’s voice came right back. “Beta Two here. What about the rifles? I keep seein’ shit that’s not there when I fire. Any—” Bucknell’s transmission ended abruptly.
A flash blossomed from the general direction that English’s display grid placed Beta.
Sawyer was yelling into his dual com. “Nellie? Hey, Nellie! Come back, damn you.”
English reached out to touch his lieutenant. When Sawyer turned his helmeted head, English went to purple com. “Look at your grid, Sawyer.” Beta wasn’t reading on the grid at all, not any of them. “Let’s go join Grant at the command station. Better view than from here.” Nice and ambiguous, in case the purple band was monitored, after all.
Sawyer’s head was still turned English’s way. He motioned to the shouldered hard case that Sawyer was carrying. The lieutenant nodded and got the weapon out.
English thumbed his APOT onto stun and stepped out into the rubble-strewn street, oblivious to the crap showering him and the phase effects screwing up his electronics every time someone from the 92nd discharged an APOT rifle.
He was going to get one prisoner, like he was supposed to. Then he was going to go shoot Grant, and damn the recording capabilities of his suit. They were probably perfect, like its armor’s protective capabilities were better than anything he’d ever encountered. Had to give Eight Ball Command one point for getting something right.
Too bad armor hadn’t been enough to keep Beta on his display grid. Too bad Fleet Intel had gotten its signals screwed up one more time and put them down to fight Khalians on a purported indig world where the enemies weren’t Weasels at all, but human collaborators of some kind. Too bad the Associate system was pisspoor at detecting targets when those targets weren’t what it had been preset for. Too bad everything went wrong with this mission all the way down the line. He’d told the civilian observer at the outset that it was bad luck to change gear just before a drop.
He got a fix on a muzzle flash in some rubble and dropped to one knee before Delta One could tell him to hit the deck. He was squeezing his APOT’s trigger at the gun emplacement before the damned thing put up its targeting blip, because it had to compare the shooter with its template for nonfriendly and nonmarine humans and make a determination.
English didn’t. He had to shoot whatever was shooting at him. This he did, on his stun setting, teeth gritted. The damned world shook under him; the sky beyond his visor turned noontime blue, and birds winged across a marsh where buildings ought to have been; there was no gun emplacement, no shooter, just a pretty scene that wasn’t there.
English held his finger on the trigger and sprayed what looked like cattails, because he knew that was where the shooter had been.
When he finally stopped firing, the world switched back to the one his mind knew he inhabited. He slapped at his suit’s climate control because otherwise the sweat rolling down into his eyes was going to blind him.
In front of him the gun emplacement was a particulated heap, as if it had melted or frozen. A little mushroomy wisp of greasy smoke was rising from it. “Crap, I know I set it for stun,” he muttered.
“Maybe you did,” came Sawyer’s voice. “I was on the same target. Sorry.”
“It’s them that’re sorry.” There wasn’t enough mass left there to bother checking for a survivor.
“If you don’t mind me saying so, sir,” said Sawyer, slipping the APOT rifle onto his shoulder after unslinging his plasma gun, “we ought not to both be shooting these APOTs in such close proximity.”
“For the record? Yeah, I just figured that out. Unless the stun setting flat doesn’t work, like the rest of this junk. The hell with this. Somebody’ll get prisoners.” He pointed to the roof where Grant was hunkered down. “Let’s go take care of our other problem.”
Sawyer ran with him. They dodged what they could of the conventional fire. They jumped some frozen bodies, some half-melted ones, and they jumped what looked like the remains of Beta. If remains was what you could call a couple of bits of twisted armor and a half a scanner.
As they approached the intersection beyond which the administration building’s blown doors loomed, English realized that there was less chatter in his ears.
There was also, he noted as he flipped his helmet to visual only for a what-you-see scan, less munitions flash—almost none. And the sky was looking like it should, for the most part: dirty, predawn, smoky light.
At his signal, Sawyer called for another head count and status report.
As English scuttled with his lieutenant across the empty street to the administration building, nobody shot at them. Almost absently, he calculated the results of the head count. Alpha had seven uniformed human hostiles who’d surrendered. Beta was absent and unaccounted for. Gamma had met up with Bonaventure and was executing a building-to-building sweep. Epsilon had secured one shipwright’s bay and was certain the ships there were brand new, not in for refit.
“Don’t sweep that area yourselves,” English told them. “Wait for reinforcements.” He and Sawyer went through the rest of the roster and detailed two other three-teams to assist Epsilon in sweeping the ship bay and the ships themselves.
The remaining units were ambulatory, having sustained only minor injuries so far, but bitchy as hell and saying their stun settings were killing the enemy.
The news didn’t surprise English, coming as he and Sawyer darted to the blown doors and began making their way up the administration building’s exterior stairs. “You got prisoners, Redhorse, bring them in to Admin, 23A; the rest of you have your cleanup orders.” Groans and complaints came over the all-com.
But what happened next did surprise English, and Sawyer as well.
A shadow fell over them. A big, ominous shadow of pitch black in the lightening sky above. Both men crouched on the catwalk stairway. They were clear targets for air support. They’d been so close to winning this thing, English was plain shocked. Somebody had let a Khalian ship get up and running. But that couldn’t be. They would have seen it, wouldn’t they? Was the Associate system so stupid that it would blind and deafen them to anything as deadly as a whole spacecraft lifting off?
There’d been all those weird effects, though—moments when English was seeing and hearing and acquiring data that had nothing to do with who was shooting at him and from where ...
“Holy mother, it’s the Haig!” Sawyer said in disbelief.
English sank down on a stair and flipped up his faceplate. He didn’t trust the visor display not to shock him. It sure looked like the Haig’s belly. He squinted for ID numbers and got them. Something in him seemed to unravel. He couldn’t do what he wanted to do on the roof, not with the Haig overhead, acquiring minutely accurate photo-returns of everything below.
English rubbed his face with a gloved hand; it felt numb. He slapped down his visor and said to Sawyer, “Well, that’s that.”
Sawyer knew exactly what he meant. “Another time, another place.”
“I guess,” said English doubtfully, feeling the adrenaline he wasn’t going to be able to use start messing with his motor control. A shiver racked him; his head hurt worse. He said, “Well go up anyway, and see whether that bastard thinks we’ve secured his goddam area for him.”
“Yeah, well ... We won this one, anyhow.”
“That’s what you call what happened here?”
Sawyer didn’t answer. English got his legs under him, which wasn’t all that easy in his private adrenaline aftermath, and they climbed wordlessly, listening to all-com confirm that resistance was nil, to someone whoop occasionally when he took a prisoner and could come directly in, skipping the nasty and often dangerous cleanup phase.
On the roof, under the shadow of the destroyer as if she were his personal umbrella, sat Grant, cross-legged in a semicircle of electronic black boxes.
Grant was wearing one of the new hard suits; he wasn’t wearing a helmet. An Associate-type helmet lay discarded by his side.
He stood up when English and Sawyer approached. “Nice job, Captain, Lieutenant,” he said.
English thought, I could still shoot him. His gloved hand shifted from his APOT rifle to the kinetic pistol on his hip. “You know, I don’t know what you mean. This stuff don’t work worth squat. The stun settings are a joke, and if you were down there in the thick of it, you’d know that strange stuff happens when two or more men discharge these APOTs in close—”
“Later. I’ll take your report later, Captain. Now your job is to make sure that every piece of this equipment is accounted for. And I want to see every prisoner, personally. Put them together and then call me.” His gaze flickered above his head, and then back to English. “Too bad about your lost men, but that’s what this job is all about.”
“Tell that to Nellie’s widow and kids, when she finds out we’re testin’ X-class equipment without proper briefing.”
“Now, how would she—or any civilian—find out something like that?” the civilian observer wanted to know.
English’s hand cramped on his pistol butt. And froze there. It wasn’t worth it. If he shot Grant, Sawyer would have to shoot him, or be a part of something that wasn’t his doing.
“Aw, you know word just leaks out, sir,” said Sawyer through his faceplate’s speaker grille, and it sounded so raw and so threatening that English’s head swung to look at his lieutenant.
Sawyer had that plasma rifle in his hands. It was trained on Grant, unwavering.
English mentally kicked himself. Nellie had been one of Sawyer’s recon pets. English should have realized that, as bad as he felt, Sawyer would feel worse.
He never made a conscious decision to intervene; he hardly heard his asshole Associate program telling him that “target is misacquired! Do not fire. Repeat: target is friendly. Do not fire!” in the dual-com. He simply stepped in and slapped the plasma rifle’s muzzle upward.
Then he grabbed the gun and twisted it from Sawyer’s unresisting grip as he said, on purple-com, “Come on, man. This pig-bastard isn’t worth any more of our lives.”
In his helmet’s silence, English could hear Sawyer’s labored breathing. Then the recon specialist said, “Maybe not today.”
Grant’s voice was coming in on English’s audio band, telling him that there wouldn’t be any problem about this. He, Grant, knew how wired men could get in this kind of action.
“Just take those helmets off, boys, so we can all relax and talk about this until your men are formed up.”
There were orders, and there were orders. English and Sawyer turned to go back down the stairs as if they’d planned it.
Grant’s hand came down on English’s shoulder and spun him around—fast, hard, and professionally. The plasma rifle was out of his grip and in Grant’s hands before English knew what was happening.
And Grant said, holding the rifle, “You’re dismissed, gentlemen. I want prisoner review in fifteen minutes, right where you’re standing.”
There was no way around following your orders in this man’s corps.
When the 92nd Marine Reaction Unit had brought all its prisoners together, there were nineteen all told. They marched them up to the administration building’s roof, and Grant stood there looking at the bunch of sorry humans in unfamiliar uniforms who Sawyer and some of his recon boys had already started interrogating.
Sawyer was on Grant’s far side, detailing what little he’d learned. These were humans who had been staffing this shipyard, and in general this world, for the Khalians for nobody would say how long. The prisoners didn’t act like conscripts. To them, the Alliance was the enemy, which made them less than cooperative, and was one of the reasons that the 92nd had been able to take so few alive: these men were suicide commando types.
“They admit to shooting their own people, women and children first,” Sawyer told Grant, “rather than let us take them.”
Grant nodded and took a step forward. He still had Sawyer’s plasma rifle slung over his shoulder, and then it was in his hands in a shooting grip.
Everybody was bareheaded, and English saw comprehension dawn in Sawyer’s eyes just as he himself realized what Grant was going to do.
There was just enough room to do it, too, without endangering any of the 92nd who were guarding the prisoners.
The four plasma charges that Grant fired, squinting, into the prisoners were so bright that the prisoners seemed to be enveloped in green-white light as they died.
The marines all turned their heads away, anyhow. So did the man doing the shooting. You didn’t watch a plasma burn without a polarizing visor between you and it, not if you wanted to use your eyes for much of anything for a while after.
When Grant lowered it, the weapon was sputtering and empty. The slag it had left where the human prisoners had been wasn’t pretty, but neither was the thought of humans collaborating with Weasels against their own kind.
Blinking, Grant tossed the rifle toward Sawyer, who caught it reflectively before it hit him in the chest, one gloved hand on the hot barrel and one on the stock.
“Thanks, Sawyer,” said Grant. Sawyer didn’t answer. The Redhorse guards were staring. The civilian observer turned to English and said, “Don’t forget: all this equipment has to be turned in once you’re back on the destroyer. All of it accounted for. Anything you lost in combat better be well documented. And keep in mind what you saw here today. We really don’t want any wild rumors spreading of what this system can and can’t do.”
“Yes, sir,” said English through clenched teeth.
“Dismissed, mister,” replied Grant, and from above their heads, the sound of a lander coming to pick the Observer off the roof began to grow loud in the predawn air.
Given the circumstances, English decided to take away the point he’d given Eight Ball Command for the quality of the new hard suits. That made the Bull’s-Eye vertical insertion a zero-sum game, since English never gave Redhorse points for winning when winning got his marines dead.
CHILDREN from three races hurry out of a MicBurald. Each is happily eating a different form of soy. Overhead the sign reads:
50 TRILLION SOLD WHEN WE LOST COUNT.
“Ready to eat in just eleven nanoseconds,” a voice promises.
Fade and bring it up as:
The silvery form of Hawk Talon’s
brain ship and trusted companion swoops toward the distant peaks. The jagged terrain spins dizzily as the viewer is given a ship’s-eye view of the approaching mountain. As they get closer, explosions and flashes can be seen.
Cannons roaring, Derv guides their ship in over the mountainside, knocking a Khalian slave ship from the air. Below, a dark mob is closing in on the last Khalian fortress on the planet.
Inside the ship, the Fleet captain watches the battle as he dons his combat suit.
“Who do I shoot?” the brain ship sounds worried. Below, thousands of former slaves and Khalians are fighting. Dozens of races are represented. It is hard to tell friend from foe.
Striking a noble pose, Talon surveys the chaos.
“The bad guys,” he replies while slapping a clip into his plasma rifle.
“Which ones are the bad guys?” the Derv asks her valiant captain.
“Only the Weasels,” Talon explains, preparing to dive out of the airlock and join the battle. “No real sentient will fight for the Khalia.”
MOST OF THE Headhunters were experienced enough to know that the Bonnie Parker’d been hit—that bone-jarring clang! wasn’t just reentry turbulence.
“Instead of coming in on the deck—” Kowacs said, continuing with his briefing. Barely identifiable holographic images wavered in front of his helmet and the helmets of his troops, poised at the cargo bay doors, “—the Jeffersonian militia we’re supposed to bail out managed to drop straight down into the middle of their objective, a Weasel air-defense installation.”
The Bonnie Parker was still under control. Not that there was a damn thing the 121st Marine Reaction Company in her belly could do if she weren’t. The Headhunters crouched in two back-to-back lines, ready to do their jobs as soon as their ship touched down and her long doors opened.
As it was, there wasn’t half enough time for Kowacs to tell his troops exactly what their job was.
There wasn’t half enough information, either.
The Fleet Book Three: Break Through Page 31