Kill Ratio

by David Drake

  The three Afrikaners in the back of the car jounced against the flimsy metal sides while they tried to steady with their feet the barricades and toolboxes that crowded them. It gave them something to do and to think about, instead of glancing through the window forward or staring at the set faces of their companions.

  “The next one,'' said van Rooyan sharply. “Here, here!''

  Steeks chopped the throttle instead of easing it down. Loose metal and men's shoulders rocked against the front panel as the drive motors acted as highly efficient electromagnetic brakes.

  “Shit for brains!” snarled Jantze, but the curse was directed at the rear door as he lurched to throw it open.

  Jantze jumped down, then tried to take both a barricade and one of the toolboxes simultaneously. Travelers on the slideway glanced at the utility van as they rolled by it, but the vehicle and the men in orange coveralls were merely an incident of passage. The Afrikaners ignored the passing onlookers by rigidly concentrating on their task.

  They had turned into a narrow passage with no slideways. It gave pedestrians access to residential apartments to either side. The van's width almost blocked it. Van Rooyan stood on his seat to look back over the vehicle. When his fellow utility employee had set the telescoping barricade against both walls of the passageway, van Rooyan said to the driver, “All right, now - quickly!” as if Steeks needed any encouragement to load the motors.

  Jantze stared sternly at passersby over the waist-high barricade, ready to stop anyone who tried to enter the corridor during the next few minutes. The toolbox beside his right foot was closed, but unlatched against need.

  Steeks stopped again just beyond the door numbered 15. They could not be sure that Bradley was inside, but the chances seemed good since this was both her home and her business address in bureau records. If necessary van Rooyan would move the vehicle ahead to the thoroughfare while van Zell waited in the apartment with Steeks and Trimen.

  For the moment, though, Trimen slid past the van to give another barricade and toolbox to van Rooyan. The utility crewman scurried toward the unblocked end of the passage, ready to halt pedestrians just as Jantze did. Steeks remained behind the controls, but he stood so that he could peer at his companions in the rear.

  “All right,” said Trimen when he saw both barricades were in position. Van Zell pressed the door bell.

  “Yes?” said a woman's voice from the speaker below the lens in the center of the door panel.

  It was too much to expect that Bradley would open the door at once, but van Zell had hoped for that anyway. “Bureau of Utilities, goodlady,” he lied. “There's been a methane leak from one of our waste recovery lines and we need to check all the suites in this corridor.”

  “I - “ said the speaker. The door did not open. Trimen twitched the device he held ready in his hand, looking at his partner in concern equal to that of the woman inside the apartment. “I'm sure there's no gas leak here.”

  “Goodlady -”

  “I'm sorry, you'll have to go away,” said the voice with a rising inflection. “I'm very - “

  Van Zell nodded to Trimen, who slapped his flat device against the latch plate.

  “- busy.”

  Trimen threw the switch. The lock crasher, fed by a cable to the van's main power supply, sent a surge of high-frequency current through the door's electronic lock. The circuits fried, and the bolt retracted as its electromagnet ceased to force it against spring tension.

  Piet van Zell hit the panel with his shoulder, a pry bar ready in his hands in case Bradley had shot a mechanical bolt as well. The door sprang open, and the woman at the telephone across the room turned and screamed as the pair of Afrikaners burst in.

  Van Zell grappled with the woman one-handed, and stabbed the pry bar against the wall phone with the other. The phone's cover cracked slightly, not enough to damage the internal workings - had she completed dialing? - and the woman flung him back with unexpected strength, though she did not break his grip on her wrist.

  She was the customer who had been seated across from him in Le Moulin Rouge. The Bureau of Utilities uniform was no disguise if she had glimpsed his face through the door lens.

  “Help, you fool!” van Zell snarled in Afrikaans to his partner, who was trying to get the drug injector out of the pocket of his coveralls.

  Still screaming, the woman thrashed her arm again, forcing van Zell to drop his pry bar and grab her with both hands. Anger flashed him a momentary impulse to strike her with the ridged titanium bar, but he had a personal interest in learning what she knew about the test here at Headquarters Colony. Anyway, his mass and her own efforts had pulled the woman away from the telephone.

  Trimen seized Bradley by the other arm. She kicked him in the crotch with a fashionable shoe. Her high, wedge soles must have been as solid as they looked, because the Afrikaner folded like an accordian with a high-pitched scream of his own.

  “Steeks, dammit!” van Zell shouted as he twisted instinctively to avoid being crippled the same way. Bradley struck at his head with the hand Trimen had released, then clawed through his long hair in an attempt to tear his ear.

  Van Zell kicked sideways at her ankles, hitting her but unable to make her fall. She was at least as strong as he was, thanks to the time he had spent in zero-G.

  “Steeks!”

  Bradley broke away, reaching for the phone pad again. Steeks fired his needle gun in a long burst from the doorway, pattering tiny darts across the sofa, the wall, and in three dimples on the back of Bradley's dress.

  The woman fell onto her back when her legs splayed and her arms began to thrash uncontrollably. Van Zell grabbed one wrist while his partner flopped across the other, his face contorted with the nausea he was trying to deny.

  Trimen had not lost the injector when he was kicked. He lifted it toward Bradley's throat while she called him a bastard, her throat muscles far enough from the needle impacts to remain unparalyzed by the high frequency current that leaked into her nerves.

  A stunner could kill if the victim's heart gave out or a needle lodged in a major ganglion. Still, van Zell could not fault his fellow's judgment in shooting instead of jumping into a free-for-all in which the advantage had been entirely to the intended victim.

  Bradley went limp as Trimen injected chemical muscle relaxant into her carotid. The other side of the injector would bring her around as quickly in the suit room in which they planned to interrogate her under a battery of additional drugs - before disposing of her as the courier from Sky Devon had managed to eliminate himself.

  “All right, all right,” said Steeks, who snatched the sofa open into a bed and ripped the spread from it. “Cover her with this.”

  “Shut up, will you?” van Zell muttered, but he was already straightening the woman's limbs so that he and Steeks could roll her in the bedspread while Trimen managed with difficulty to stand. He was cursing under his breath, but they could not be sure whether it was at his pain or at the woman who had kicked him.

  Van Zell lifted their victim's torso and shuffled to the door. Steeks took her cloth-bundled legs while grumbling nervously, “I have to drive! Hurry, get her in!”

  They folded the woman into the back of the van as if she were no more than the roll of bedding she now resembled.

  “Come on!” van Zell called to Jantze at the barricade as Trimen and Steeks clambered aboard the vehicle.

  There was someone arguing with Jantze. That didn't matter now . . . except that when the utility crewman turned, van Zell and the powerful man beyond the barricade met each other's eyes. The man looked vaguely familiar to the bearded Afrikaner.

  “Drive!” shouted van Zell as he reached down to open the toolbox still in the back of the van.

  Chapter 11 - MODIFIED PROGRAM

  Duncan, Duncan, you are under arrest, sang Sam Yates' mind a little more tunefully than his lips whistled as he sauntered down the sidewalk. He generally whistled something when he was walking alone, and “Been on the Job Too Long
” was a staple of his good moods.

  And Duncan shot a hole in Brady's chest!

  He wasn't riding the slideway because he was early, bad form for a first date; and he was doing his damnedest not to walk at full stride, bounding like an idiot and working up a sweat in his best suit at the wrong time of the evening.

  Brady, Brady don't you know you done wrong?

  Damn but it felt good to be happy again.

  You bust into my bar when the game—

  There was a barricade closing one of the residential passages - MM-NN 12. And it was the passage down which Yates had to go.

  “Sorry, sir,” said the craggy-featured utility worker behind the barrier. He raised a hand - only a gesture, not a threat to push the equally-large security man. The utility worker's voice was harsh with unexplained worry, and he would not meet Yates' eyes, as if that would prevent him from being seen clearly.

  Yates took the ID card from his inside breast pocket. He didn't feel anything he'd have called concern, but he sure as hell didn't want Ella steaming in her apartment while he cooled his heels in the corridor for some dick-head reason.

  “What seems to be the problem?” he demanded, a little more forcefully than he had intended. An orange van was parked in the passageway while two more crewmen wrestled a tarp or something into the back, but Yates was sure there was room for him to slip past without smearing his good suit.

  “Look buddy, I don't care who you are,” insisted the man behind the barricade. “There's a gas leak and we gotta keep everybody out for just a few” - he looked over his shoulder at the van and his fellows - “just a few - “

  One of the utility crewmen slid toward the front of the vehicle, while the other turned and called, “Come on!” to the man at the barricade.

  The man who spoke was the bearded Afrikaner from Le Moulin Rouge. That restaurant hadn't catered to flunkies who wore orange coveralls during work hours.

  Yates lunged straight at the telescoping barricade because it appeared flimsy. It wasn't, but the aluminum panels buckled enough under the impact of his hip to spring the ends free.

  “Hold it!” Yates bellowed at the van, and “Hold it!” grunted the utility worker whose legs were tangled with Yates and the barricade as they sprawled.

  The security man thrashed himself clear, using one-G muscles to shed his limbs of encumbrances like a dog shaking water from its fur. The van was accelerating, but he thought he could catch up in a sprint. The worker who had tried to stop him was no problem unless the guy had a weapon, a needle stunner or a—

  The man in orange was dragging a plasma discharger from his toolbox.

  Yates hadn't deliberately looked back at the man he'd pushed down, another Afrikaner - and maybe that meant something - but his conscious mind was spinning with more data than he could process while his body was controlled by old instincts.

  You think you forget, but you never do. If you're lucky, you stay out of situations that trigger memories of jungles and bamboo thickets and bananas planted in rows that give lines of fire in six directions. . . .

  The plasma discharger was the length of a man's forearm, with pistol grips at the front and back of the frame and a stock folded against the right side. The barrel was short and fat, covered with a dull black finish like the rest of the metal surfaces, so that the whole weapon seemed to have been stamped from light alloys.

  The barrel weighed almost three kilograms. It was a polished forging of tungsten, the only metal refractory enough to survive the jet of plasma from the miniature fusion blasts that powered the weapon.

  Sam Yates' mind wondered what an Afrikaner exile was doing with a special-applications weapon that wasn't in general use in any army he'd heard of. All his body cared was that his hands gripped the frame before the other guy could aim the discharger, and that Yates' adrenaline and muscles-still up to Earth standard - could rip the weapon away.

  The two men were sitting with their legs splayed and the metal barricade booming as they struggled on it. When Yates got control of the discharger, his torso flopped back and he sprawled full length in the passage.

  The Afrikaner grabbed the toolbox to use it as a sharp-cornered club. Yates aimed the plasma discharger at the center of the orange-clad chest and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened except that the toolbox swung toward Yates' face.

  He'd fired a similar weapon once in training, but that was twenty years ago and an experimental model anyway. Rumor was they blew up as often as they didn't - and there was just enough truth to those rumors that the brass wasn't willing even to test plasma dischargers under the dust and moisture of field conditions.

  Nothing about that experience helped Yates figure out this particular weapon, even if it were U.S.-manufactured . . . but infantry weapons share some basic characteristics, including simplicity of operation. Yates' instinct thumbed the slide switch above the trigger guard, and the weapon recoiled in his hands.

  The Afrikaner blew apart in a sunburst.

  There was recoil because the plasma spurting through the tungsten muzzle had mass, and it was moving at just below the velocity of light. The Afrikaner exploded because his chest converted the directed energy into enough heat to boil a swimming pool.

  His torso did not boil. It flashed away as a ball of live steam.

  Yates twisted to a prone position facing down the passageway and looking for another target, his eyes dazzled by afterimages of his own shot. The passage reflected a thousand copies of the one light source that would seem bright in his half-blinded condition: another bolt of plasma, fired by one of the remaining “utility crewmen.”

  Three meters of aluminum paneling burned beside the security man. The core of glass sponge inside the wall shattered like a bomb going off.

  Yates fired back, using the violet pulse in his retinas as an aiming point because he couldn't see anything else.

  “Cartridges” for the plasma discharger were spherical arrays of microlasers aimed at the equally tiny bead of deuterium at their center. There was only one gap in the sphere of lasers, a hole aligned precisely with the tungsten bore of the weapon.

  When the lasers tripped, they turned the bead of deuterium into a fusion bomb - and directed its energy down the barrel as a plasma for the microsecond before they were consumed.

  The tungsten glowed and some of its inner surface burned away. Targets downrange, with no barrier of coherent light to protect them from the momentary pulse, exploded and burned.

  The fellow who had fired at Yates spun when the security man's bolt hit him. His arm was still held by the friend who had been swinging him aboard the utility vehicle, but the limb was no longer connected to his torso, because his shoulders had been vaporized by the blast.

  The van had paused to pick up the worker manning the barricade at the far end of the passage. Now the vehicle accelerated again.

  Sam Yates wasn't office staff any more, and he'd never had the street experience that ingrains in a true policeman the need to preserve and protect. Part of him was rightly terrified that somebody was going to step out of an intervening doorway or that a burst of plasma was going to miss its intended target and fry a civilian in the busy corridors to either end of the passageway.

  That part of him couldn't override the instincts honed in too many firefights he'd survived because nobody on the other side had.

  Yates fired again at the back of the orange van as it turned out of the corridor. A fireball of dissociated sheet metal hung at the end of the passage as the rest of the vehicle whined away under all the torque its motors could supply.

  Yates dived low out of the mouth of the passage, hitting the sidewalk awkwardly because his shoe had slipped in residues of the man he'd killed here. The bolt of plasma from the van was high anyway, lighting the corridor like a strobe as ceiling panels vaporized fifty meters away.

  There were at least a hundred citizens visible up and down the corridor. Two of them were Latins who'd been bounced from the van's fender, agains
t a jewelry shop's window, and back to the sidewalk in a torrent of screaming abuse. The hiss-crack of the plasma discharge overhead flattened both as their terms of reference changed from accident to firefight.

  The van was halted only forty meters down the corridor, point-blank to plasma weapons that could rip from the Moon to the Earth's atmosphere if anybody wanted to try. You can miss a target right at the end of your gun barrel if the target's shooting back, though, and neither Yates nor the man crouching beside the vehicle hit what they aimed at as they blasted again simultaneously.

  The sidewalk in front of Yates exploded in a blinding gout, crushed and bonded lunar slag converted to molten glass by the jet of plasma. The man in orange coveralls ducked from a discharge close enough to make his hair and beard fray out from the induced electrial potential, but it was a wall far down from the corridor that blew up in a ball of crackling rainbows.

  Another bolt silhouetted the van as someone behind it fired into the wall.

  Yates' optic nerves were already flooded with dancing afterimages and complementary colors, so for a moment he did not realize that the effect was real and not a retinal mirage. Then the man with whom he was exchanging shots ducked behind the van, where his partner must also be hidden.

  Yates aimed, waited an instant, then jumped up and charged the vehicle behind the glowing muzzle of his plasma discharger.

  Citizens in either direction were bunching on the slide-ways. Those who realized what was causing the noise and eye-searing light turned in panic, some of them running against the flow of the pavement and knocking over pedestrians still in stupefied wonder at the unusual commotion. A car on the opposite sidewalk rolled past, bumping along the corridor walls after its driver and passengers had bailed out.

  The Bureau of Utilities van was wreathed in a bitter haze, but it was not really afire and there was no fuel supply to explode into a real disaster. Yates' bolt as the vehicle turned had vaporzied a torso-sized oval in the rear side panel, but the instantaneous energy transfer that made the plasma so devastating also prevented a shot from achieving any real penetration. Paint had blistered away from the opposite panel, but the thin aluminum there had not melted.