Beginnings-eARC

by David Weber

  The running man went down screaming, right leg blown off at mid-thigh, and Alfred ducked back, squirming several meters to his left while a storm of darts flayed his firing position. He waited, holding his own fire until he had a target.

  “Jacques!” He heard Allison's voice behind him.

  * * *

  Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou didn't recognize the com combination when the caller ID came up. It wasn't Allison's, but perhaps the people who had her were willing to use additional coms now that they'd made their point. He stabbed at the acceptance key, but someone else spoke before he could answer.

  “Jacques!”

  “Alley?”

  He stiffened in his chair, wondering why they'd given her the com again, terrified it was so that he could listen to her scream once more. But then he heard a sound which could never be mistaken by anyone who had heard it before and bolted to his feet as the crack and scream of pulser fire came over the circuit.

  “Jacques, it's me! Home on this com! We're in a ditch near a lodge of some kind and they're closing in on us! Hurry, Jacques!”

  “Alley!”

  There was no reply, but the connection was still open, and he heard more pulser fire. Lots of pulser fire.

  “Sergeant Brockmann! Saddle up! Move, damn it!” he shouted, flinging himself through the office door and racing for the waiting assault shuttle.

  * * *

  Alfred fired again—more to keep heads down than anything else—and started working his way farther to his left. They'd expect him to break back to the right . . . or he hoped so, anyway.

  Something tugged at him and he looked over his shoulder just in time to see Allison pulling the pulser which had once belonged to Giuseppe Ardmore out of his belt. He looked at her, and she managed a shaky smile.

  “You watch that side; I'll watch the other,” she said.

  “You know how to use one of those?”

  “Not as well as you do, but my brother's taken me to the range a time or two. Besides,” she gave him another one of those heartbreaking smiles, “I'm all the backup you've got.”

  “True.” He actually felt himself smiling back, then he shook his head. “Keep your head down. Just pop up, take a look, then duck back down—and never put your head up in the same place twice!”

  “Yes, Sir,” she said and crawled towards the other side of the ravine.

  It was absolutely insane, of course, but at that moment, as he watched her crawling towards a firing position with the pulser of her torturer in one hand, clutching his enormously too large windbreaker about her with the other, still shaking like a victim of old-fashioned palsy from the neural whip, he knew he'd never seen a more desirable woman in his life.

  Not the time, Alfred! Not the time! a voice in the back of his brain told him, and no doubt it was right, but that didn't make it untrue.

  He lifted his head just far enough to get his eyes back up above the lip of the ravine, saw something move from the corner of his eye, and waited patiently. The main lodge was flanked by half a dozen topiaries in the shapes of various species of Beowulfan wildlife, and he watched the shrubbery where that movement had vanished. A moment later, the greenery stirred again. A head poked cautiously up over it, and the immaculately groomed branches exploded in a spray of red as he put a pulser burst into them.

  * * *

  Who the hell is this guy? Tobin Manischewitz thought furiously as Emiliano Min died. The corpse thudded to the ground less than three meters from Manischewitz, and his jaw clenched. The man behind that pulse rifle had already killed Gualberto Palacios and Häkon Grigoriv. With Min added, that made eight of Manischewitz's team, and nobody had even seen the bastard yet!

  Aside from the ones he's already killed, anyway, he corrected himself.

  He was down to eight men, including himself, and he didn't like the situation one bit. It was obvious he'd been right, that this character was some sort of lone wolf, because otherwise the SWAT teams who'd been waiting for him to get the woman out of the lodge would be swarming all over their arses. That didn't mean it was going to stay that way, though. The bastard had to have a com, and he had to've used it now that he had her out in the open. The question was how quickly he could reach someone and get them to believe him . . . and how quickly they could respond once they did. And the reason that question was important was that they'd managed to pin him down in the worst place imaginable because it gave him a direct line of fire to the vehicle park. There were three air cars and the “ambulance” in that parking area . . . and they couldn't bug out when someone that good with a rifle was waiting to kill them the instant they tried to.

  God, this sucks! Somehow I don't think he'd believe me if I told him all we want to do is leave. Hell, I wouldn't believe it! Let somebody in an air car get high enough to fire down into that frigging ditch? No way.

  Their only hope was to take him out before anyone could respond to his call for help, and at least they could count on a little grit in the official gears. It wasn't as if the SBI kept a SWAT team on full-time standby, and one of the reasons they'd bought the lodge in the first place was that it was outside the jurisdiction of any metro police force. The local yokels were more game wardens than cops. It was unlikely they'd be able to get themselves together in a hurry, and even if they did, they wouldn't have the heavy weapons and training of someone like the Grendel PD or the SBI. So they still had a little time, but not much of it.

  “O'Connor, you and Schreiber cut back to the north. Get beyond his field of view, then swing across the ditch and link up with Tangevec and Mészáros. We need to rush this bastard from both directions, and we need to do it now! Zepeda, I need you, Yang, and Meakin with me. Keep your damned heads down, though!”

  Acknowledgments came back, and he made himself wait despite the desperate sense of seconds ticking away into eternity. He'd seen too many men killed by impatience, and he wasn't going to rush himself into a fatal error against somebody who could shoot the way this son-of-a-bitch could.

  * * *

  “There's more of them on this side than there were,” Allison said. “At least one more. Maybe two.”

  Her voice was weak, frayed around the edges, and he knew she was hanging onto consciousness only by sheer, dogged determination and guts.

  “They'll probably try a rush,” he told her levelly. “One or two of them will get up to charge across the open space. The others will lay down covering fire. I want you to stay right where you are until you think they're ready to come at you. Then I want you to shift to your left or your right, pop up, take your best shot, and duck back down. Don't wait to see if you hit anyone! They'll probably go to ground when they hear the darts, even if you don't hit them, and you don't stay in one place long enough for the ones laying down the covering fire to find you. Understand?”

  Allison looked over her shoulder at him, feeling the fiery concern under the icy focus of discipline and self-control. There was something else in there, too. Something that knew this was the sort of moment for which he'd been born. Something he hated. But overriding everything else was his desperate need for her to live, and she felt the strength of him flowing into her. The dark spots wavering across her vision faded, and she drew a deep breath, wondering what sort of bizarre, impossible connection let that happen.

  “I understand,” she said, and her voice was stronger, steadier than it had been a moment before.

  * * *

  “We're in position, Tobin,” Terjo O'Connor said tautly over Manischewitz' com.

  “Okay, he can only look one direction at a time,” Manischewitz replied. “On a three-count. Right?”

  “Right.”

  Manischewitz drew a deep breath and eased himself up onto one knee behind the concealment of the same topiary which had done such an inadequate job of covering Min. Not that Manischewitz had any intention of poking his head up where it could be shot off. He and Yang were going to provide covering fire for Rudi Zepeda and Lazare Meakin.

  At least fo
r the first bound, he thought grimly. Then it was going to be his turn, whether he liked it or not.

  “One,” he said over the com. “Two. Three! Go!”

  He threw himself to the side, staying low, and squeezed the trigger and his pulse rifle spat death at two hundred rounds per minute.

  * * *

  Alfred saw the first movement a split second before the covering fire began. He ducked instantly, rolling to his right, then came up with the rifle already at his shoulder, and his eyes were cold.

  Pulser darts shrieked overhead, but he had a brief flicker of time before the minds behind those rifles could recognize what their eyes had seen and redirect their fire. And in that instant, Alfred Harrington found his own target, exactly where he'd expected to see it. Lazare Meakin was still straightening, still getting his feet under him, when a three-round burst ripped through his torso. He hit the ground, trying to scream with lungs which had been blown into bloody vapor, and Alfred ducked back into the ravine just as Manischewitz and Yang swung their rifle muzzles towards him.

  Rudi Zepeda took one look at what had happened to Meakin and flung himself flat in the minuscule protection provided by a dip in the ground. He'd made no more than four or five meters towards the ravine before he hit the ground, and he dragged his own pulse rifle around, hosing blind fire in Alfred's direction.

  Ardmore's pulser whined behind him, and Alfred felt Allison's desperate determination. From the undertones rippling through their link, he doubted she'd hit anyone, but her stark determination to kill snarled through him, calling to his own killer side. And if it was different from the darkness inside him, it was no less strong.

  Movement stirred before him again, and he ripped off another quick burst. This time he hit nothing, and the return fire blasted grit and dirt into his face. One of the darts cracked past so close his head rang, and he dropped down, half-stunned, pawing frantically at his eyes. He blinked on cleansing tears, shaking his head and and praying none of them had guessed how close they'd come. His vision cleared—mostly—and he lifted his eyes above the lip of the ravine again. It was like looking through a sheet of wavy crystoplast, and he blinked again and again. Something moved, and he snapped off a quick burst at the motion even as Allison fired again—and again—behind him. He heard a shriek from one of her targets and felt vengeful satisfaction boiling through her, but he knew their enemies were gradually working their way closer to the ravine from both directions, and he prayed that none of them had grenades.

  * * *

  Tobin Manischewitz's jaw tightened as Kazimierz Mészáros reported Terjo O'Connor's death. That burst of pulser darts had sawn off O'Connor's right leg like a hypervelocity chainsaw. He bled to death in minutes, and neither Mészáros nor O'Connor's partner, Schreiber could have reached him to do anything about it even if they'd tried.

  They were down to only six men now, but they were also within no more than forty or fifty meters of the ravine.

  Only a few more minutes, he thought grimly, sending another long burst of darts screaming towards their objective as Yang dashed fifteen meters closer and flung himself back to the ground just in time. Next time, I frigging wellwill bring grenades, no matter what the mission profile says, damn it! But we're almost there. Only a few more minutes, a couple of more rushes, and we'll have them.

  * * *

  Something made Alfred look up.

  He never knew what that something was, or why. Perhaps it was only instinct, because it couldn't have been anything he'd heard. At Mach six it was upon them long before the sound of its passage, but one glance told him what it was.

  He threw himself back from this position, grabbing for Allison, dragging her down into the bottom of the ravine, and flung his body across hers as the universe came apart.

  * * *

  Tobin Manischewitz never had time to realize what was happening.

  His calculations had never factored in the possibility of an all up assault shuttle. The use of transatmospheric military craft in civilian airspace at speeds in excess of Mach two wasn't simply frowned upon; it was profoundly illegal. Assault shuttles didn't have the strident transponders of civilian emergency vehicles to warn other traffic to scatter out of their flight paths. They didn't have the ability to override air car flight computers to clear them out of the way, either. And they certainly didn't have authority to rip across civilian flight corridors in the middle of the day at better than six thousand kilometers per hour. Any hotshot military pilot foolish enough to try something like that was looking at a court-martial and serious prison time, not just demotion, reprimands, or fines.

  Manischewitz knew all of that. So did the BSC. The problem was that the BSC didn't care.

  * * *

  The assault shuttle came shrieking in far ahead of its earthshaking sonic boom, and its targeting systems had hacked a direct feed from one of the Beowulf System Defense Force's tactical satellites. The SDF almost certainly would have given it to them anyway, but there'd been no time to go through channels, and the BSC always had been an . . . unconventional organization.

  Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou occupied the gunner's station, and his dark brown eyes were chipped agate. He'd watched the vicious firefight through the satellite while the shuttle howled off the ground, accelerating so rapidly its nose and leading wing edges glowed white with heat while its crew rode the grav plates against the G forces which should have crushed them back into their flight couches. Nobody could possibly have reached his sister more rapidly than they could, but her location was over five hundred kilometers from from Camp Oswald Avery. That was seven minutes' flight—not even an assault shuttle could accelerate instantly to Mach six in atmosphere—and the satellite looking down on the location fix from the still transmitting com had frozen his heart within him. He had no idea who was with her, but the satellite's exquisitely sensitive sensors had shown him only two people in that ravine with ten closing in on them, and seven minutes was an eternity in combat.

  But somehow Allison and whoever was with her had managed to hang on. Not only to hang on, but to take steady toll of their enemies. And now, as the shuttle hurtled towards them like Juggernaut, he squeezed the trigger on the gunner's joystick.

  Two pods blasted from the shuttle's weapons bay on meticulously plotted flight paths. They accelerated away at a rate which dwarfed even the shuttle's shrieking engines, and then they blew apart . . . directly above the men closing in on that ravine. Four thousand powered flechettes blasted straight down from each of them in precisely targeted oval patterns, each a hundred meters long and forty meters across, whose inner perimeters came within twenty-five meters of both sides of the ravine. Solid clouds of dust and semi-vaporized soil exploded upward from the beaten zone, and as the assault shuttle flashed overhead, banking hard to kill velocity and reverse course, there was no living thing beneath that rising pall of death.

  * * *

  Allison Chou opened her eyes to a pastel ceiling and sunlight. Her gaze took in the bedside readouts, recognized the familiar aura of a hospital, and it was so quiet she could hear the soft, quiet beep of the heart monitor.

  She lay very still for a moment, holding her breath, then exhaled in a deep, cleansing sigh of relief as she realized she didn't hurt anywhere. She closed her eyes again, lips trembling in gratitude, and then, to her own surprise, she smiled.

  Your priorities need work, she told herself. Not hurting is wonderful, but you might want to reflect on the fact that you're still alive, too.

  A throat cleared itself, and her eyes popped open again, her head turning to the left on the pillow. Matching eyes looked back at her, and she watched them blink, saw the tears in them, and reached for her brother's hand.

  “Hi,” she said. Her voice was huskier than usual, her throat sore and raspy, and she shivered as she remembered the screams which had made it that way. Jacques must have seen the shadow in her eyes, for his hand tightened on hers as he leaned forward to kiss her forehead.

  “Hi, yourself,
” he said, and the huskiness in his voice had nothing to do with screams. He sat back a bit, lifting the back of her hand to touch his cheek, and shook his head. “Had me worried there, Alley.”

  “Me, too.” Her lips trembled again for just a moment as they shaped a smile, then her eyes narrowed. “It was Manpower, wasn't it?”

  “Yes.” Jacques lowered her hand from his cheek, holding it on the edge of her hospital bed in both of his, and cleared his throat.

  “Yes,” he repeated, “it was.”

  “What did they want?”

  “Information. They wanted me to turn over the identities of all of our people working out of the embassies and consulates in Silesia.” Jacques' mouth twisted. “I'm sure they'd have gotten around to asking for more, eventually, but that was ‘all' they asked for the first time around.”

  Allison's eyes widened. She'd guessed it had to be something like that, but surely Manpower must have realized Jacques couldn't—wouldn't—have given them that sort of information, no matter what they did to her. It would have destroyed him not to, but he would have known even better than she what Manpower would have done with that information, how many other lives it would have cost. And as she looked into his eyes, she saw the confirmation—saw his own anguished knowledge that he couldn't have done it even to save her.

  “It wouldn't have mattered,” she told him now, freeing her hand from his to stroke the side of his face. “It wouldn't have, Jacques.” She shook her head, her eyes dark. “They were going to kill me anyway in the end.”