They ran.
* * * * *
“Status?” Spears said. His blood was up, he felt like a hunter tracking dangerous prey. There was some risk, to be sure, but no doubt that he would win in the end. Whatever the cost.
“Sir, all of the exterior landcraft and aircraft have been immobilized. All engines appear to be dysfunctional, power mains knocked out.”
Spears nodded. “Good.” Of course, there were the starships inside the base, but nobody was going to use those for flitting around on the planetoid’s surface. And if Powell planned to run In the star transports, he had a big surprise coming. Spears had never bothered locking the crawlers and hoppers into his personal keycode—there wasn’t anywhere to run to on the planetoid—but the offworld vessels wouldn’t lift a centimeter unless he okayed it. No, Powell and his little band of insurrectionists weren’t going anywhere. They were bottled up In the station and while they might think they had the edge, they were also mistaken about that.
“Put us down at these coordinates,” Spears said. He rattled off the grid numbers. Without asking why, the pilot obeyed. There was a blind spot just east of the North Lock, a corridor not much wider than twenty meters that led right to the fusion plant’s heat sinks. The big aluminum and ceramic plates could be used to radiate excess warmth away from the station, did there happen to be an overload the environmental pipes couldn’t handle. A careful platoon could march along that no-cam corridor to the sinks, then duck the security scanners and go in either direction. Nobody would see them approach a lock; nobody would know company was coming until they knocked on the door.
True, the doors would all be scramble-secured and guarded, if Powell had any brains at all, but Spears had an answer for that.
Another big surprise for the mutineers.
No, there wasn’t any doubt as to the victory. The main thing now was to do it clean, by the numbers. A hundred years from now they would be teaching tactics based on scenarios that Spears created. Might as well begin dazzling the future now.
Powell looked as if he were about to try to climb a wall, Billie thought, watching the man pace. His hands shook, he was pale, sweat beaded at his hairline and on his upper lip. There were a dozen carbines side by side on a table in the room, with boxes of magazines stacked next to them. While Wilks went to talk to Powell, Billie moved toward the weapons. Whatever happened, she wasn’t going to be standing by helplessly.
A trooper with a carbine slung across his chest and held ready started to swing his weapon around as Billie approached.
“Wilks,” Billie said.
Wilks turned away from Powell. “Let her have one,” he said to the trooper.
The man didn’t even glance at Powell for confirmation. He knew who was in charge, whatever the ranks involved. He nodded.
Billie picked up a carbine, racked the action, checked it over—the gun was empty—then pulled a magazine from an open box and loaded it into the piece. She took three more hundred-round AP mags from the box and put them into her pockets, one under her belt. With four hundred shots, she could theoretically kill a whole lot of things, if they didn’t get her first. She slung the weapon over her shoulder. She felt a little better, now that she was armed.
Wilks and Powell went back and forth; it was easy to see that Powell was scared shitless. He was a man of peace, Wilks had told her, should have been a preacher or a medic and not a soldier. Civilized men didn’t make very good warriors.
Billie moved to a wall-mounted com. Told the routing computer to connect her with Mitch.
“Bueller here.”
There was no visual, Billie didn’t know if that was on purpose or not, but he obviously couldn’t see her.
“Mitch,” she said.
“Billie. You okay?”
“I’m with Wilks in the Command Center,” she said. “We’re fine.”
“I saw you escape from the crawler,” he said. “I was worried about you.”
“No problem. What are you doing there?”
“I’m going to stay in Environment Control until we are certain of a stable situation. If Spears or his troops get inside, I might be able to do some good here, shut down air or heating or lights and slow them up some. I wouldn’t do much good on the line.”
Billie nodded, realized he couldn’t see that, said, “I understand.” And she did. Wilks had told her that the APs designed for the run to the aliens” homeworld were crack marines, able to outshoot, outrun, and outfight ordinary men in virtually every combat scenario. The problem was that Mitch’s conditioning, Asimov’s Modified Laws, wouldn’t allow him to kill humans. Unless he was certain a wound wouldn’t do that, he couldn’t shoot a man, even though he could put a bullet into one virtually anywhere he chose at combat ranges. A man might bleed to death from a shattered foot, after all, and androids weren’t allowed to risk that. Except, of course, for those who had been built without the Laws inculcated into them. Which was supposed to be impossible, though Billie knew better. Most of the pirates who’d attacked them on that fucked-up mission had been such androids, able to kill.
“Listen, Mitch, when this is all over, we need to sit down and talk. I haven’t been treating you very well, I don’t understand everything about it, but I want to do better.”
“Thank you, Billie. You don’t know how glad I am to hear that.”
“No guarantees,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know what exactly is going to come of it.”
“Anything is better than nothing,” he said.
She felt uncomfortable. She was still pissed at him, but the idea of dying or of his dying didn’t feel good. Not at all. “Okay, listen, I’ve got to discom. I’ll talk to you later.”
“You be very careful,” he said. “I don’t want anything to happen to you. I—I—”
“Don’t say it, Mitch. Not yet.”
She shut the com down.
Behind her, Wilks and Powell had begun yelling at each other.
“Listen,” Wilks said, his voice hard, “get the fucking locks covered! Weld them shut, especially the cargo doors! You don’t know what kind of codebreaking gear Spears might have. He might have access to the mainframe from out there.”
“Impossible, the system is shielded, the internal modems are hardened—”
“Dammit, Powell, this man is a soldier, career military, and he suckered us once. If he gets inside and starts blasting, a lot of people are going to die. You didn’t know about the second hopper, did you?”
Powell’s jaw was set tight, his lips thinned and white, but he shook his head. “No.”
“You can tape it that he’s got something else up his sleeve. We’re self-sufficient here, all he’s got outside is field rations and gear. If we can keep him outside long enough, we win.”
Powell blew out a short breath. “All right. I’ll give the order.”
Wilks nodded. Looked at Billie. Billie didn’t know much about military matters, but it seemed as if the next move was up to Spears. She didn’t like that very much. The man was crazy. There was no telling what he was going to do. All they could do was wait.
In his C-suit, Spears led his platoon along the wall under the sinks toward the East Lock. The traitors would have lost the hopper when it veered north and would probably be expecting an attack from that quarter. True, they probably could have gone in at the North Lock as easily as the East, once the fifth column struck, but Spears was thinking about posterity now. If he could finish this without losing too many of his troops, it would look better to one viewing historical tapes. What an amazing commander, they would say. How adept.
Spears nodded to himself as he reached the hiding spot next to the East Lock. Nobody knew they were here. He had his demolitions expert set the explosive charges on the lock door itself, stressing great care, using only hand signals and helmet-to-helmet conduction, all radios were off.
The charges set, his men in readiness, Powell pulled the special transmitter from his tool belt and looked at the covered button. He had no
t expected it would ever really come to this, but no man would ever be able to say that General Thomas A.W. Spears had been caught with his pants down in this combatsit.
He flipped the button cover up with his gloved thumb and pressed the control once, hard. Grinned behind his faceplate. Powell and his little band of would-be heroes were about to have something to worry about in there.
Yes, sir, right now, the security door to the queen’s chamber would be sliding up, along with the protective covers holding twenty-five of the drones captive.
And a tiny holographic image of Spears would be standing behind the queen, waving a torch in his hand, urging her out of her chamber.
Spears chuckled, imagining the queen’s surprise. And Powell’s surprise, too.
“Dinnertime,” Spears said. “Come and get it.”
18
“Motherfucker!” a man screamed. Gunfire rattled.
In the CC, Wilks said, “Powell—?”
“It’s the guard at the queen’s chamber,” Powell said, touching controls on the monitor. The picture splashed into life in full color, the holoproj of the security cam revealing the guard firing his weapon at something offscreen.
Powell fiddled with the controls; the view shifted slightly. Revealed the open door.
“Oh, man!” Wilks said.
The guard screamed again. The man who had been so nasty to Wilks and Billie when they’d gone to see the chamber.
A spiked tail shot into sight, impaled the screaming trooper, punched through his chest as easily as a needle pierces thin cloth. The man went slack, his weapon falling. The massive ridged tail snapped like a whip and the man flew out of the frame.
“Sweet baby Jesus,” Powell said.
“He’s turned the queen loose,” Wilks said. “Spears.”
Other reports began flooding in over the opchan.
The queen had company.
“Get to the starships,” Wilks said, his face grim. “This base is contaminated. We’re all dead if we stay here.” But at least the son of a bitch’s plan was also shot. He’d play hell rounding up the monsters with the men he had left.
Five minutes after the queen and her brood were set free and encouraged to kill anything in their way, Spears nodded, and the demolitions man blew the hatch. The shaped charge was silent in the absence of air, but the metal of the lock peeled open and the oxy inside spewed out, freezing into powdery white crystals in the cold night.
“Go!”
Guards inside began firing, the ones who hadn’t been knocked sprawling by the concussion, at least. Spears’s men had the advantage of surprise, however, and only one of his troops went down before the lock was secured. They were in, the enemy was in disarray, and this mission was going as well as anybody could expect. All the feeds from his men were going into the hopper’s recorder. He would edit them later, for the sake of continuity, of course. He would look heroic enough; after all, he wasn’t an armchair commander, and the record would show him right in the thick of things.
And he wasn’t done yet, oh, no. Those who had crossed him would regret it, assuming they lived long enough for that thought.
Inside the inner lock, he motioned for his troops to open their faceplates. “Let’s move,” he said. “Keep your suits patent, they’ll probably try to mess with life support. Go to opchan six, scrambled. No point in radio silence now they know we’re here.” With that, he snapped his own faceplate shut. “Try to keep some of them alive,” he said. “Shoot low.”
Wilks ran, carbine held ready to fire, Billie and Powell right behind him. The station’s battle alarm screeched, a high-low wee-wanh that repeated itself over and over. Red lights flashed at every turning of the hallway, and men and women ran in panic, fleeing something most of them knew about but hadn’t encountered yet.
Most of the ones who’d encountered the aliens would likely be unable to flee, Wilks knew. Spears had let the goddamned things out, somehow, and they would be in a feeding frenzy, collecting every human they could get their claws on, given what he knew about them.
Billie had found a portable com and was using it.
“Mitch! Mitch, answer me! Get out of there, meet us at the ship bay! The aliens are loose! Spears is in the station! Mitch!”
If Bueller heard her, he wasn’t responding. Wilks didn’t have time to worry about it at the moment.
An alien lurched out into the hallway from an open door, turned toward the three of them, and opened those hellish jaws. Slime dripped from the teeth in long strings.
“Fuck you,” Wilks said. He popped the carbine up, found the manual front sight—no time to mess with the laser—and fired a quick burst.
The armor-piercing rounds smashed the alien’s face, shards of its hard chitin flew, acid sprayed. It fell sideways and backward, hit the wall, slid to the floor.
The blast of the caseless rounds hit Wilks’s ears like a flat slap from a heavy hand. His ears rang. Damn. Should have put his plugs in. Oh, well. If he lived long enough to worry about growing deaf in his old age, he could deal with that.
The liquid on the floor bubbled and sent up clouds of stinking smoke as it ate through the treadplate.
“Watch the blood, don’t step in it!”
They ran.
A trooper came around the corner with his weapon up. Spears was the first one to see him. He drew his pistol, brought it up and smacked his gun-hand into the waiting palm of his other hand, hit a classic isosceles stance and fired three times. The technique was called the Mozambique Double Tap, the name having to do with some ancient police action in some African country before space travel. It was a standard pistol procedure: two in the heart, one in the head, always in that order. Spears guessed that it dated from a time when body armor was sometimes hidden under regular clothing and to make certain of a kill, a backup shot was taken at an unprotected target.
The unfortunate trooper wasn’t wearing armor, so any of the three shots would have been sufficient to kill him.
As the man fell, Spears felt that sense of triumph, that rush of survival he always got whenever he killed somebody one-on-one. It brought back old memories. All the way from when he’d been a boy and had taken out his first opponent ever—
Tommy hid in the supply closet, among the brooms and vacuum cleaners and fragrant tubs of cleaneze. The granular cleaning compound made his nose itch, made him want to sneeze, but he pinched his nostrils shut so he wouldn’t.
Outside the dark closet, Jerico Axe prowled the dim hall, looking for Tommy. It was past quench-light, everybody was supposed to be asleep, the adult marines and medicos would be in bed by now, but not Jerico.
Jerico was a stupid asshole, Tommy knew, but he was a big stupid asshole and he was mean. Tommy had gotten on Jerico’s shit list, he didn’t know how, and now every time the bastard saw him out of an adult’s sight, he would proceed to kick Tommy’s ass. Not that Tommy didn’t fight back, he did, but Jerico had been decanted first, he was older, ten kilos heavier, and six months ahead of Tommy in martial arts skills. Tommy got in a few licks now and then, he’d broken the cocksucker’s nose once, but that had cost a broken arm of his own, plus two teeth had to be reimplanted and fifteen staples over his left eye.
What Tommy wished was that Jerico would take a hike along the Deep Rim and trip, bouncing all the way to the bottom where he’d rot in the hot sun and not be found until the carrion birds were finished with him.
Might as well wish for a commission while you’re at it, dickhead, he told himself. Jerico wasn’t that stupid.
Tommy sat in the closet, hoping Jerico wouldn’t think to look for him in here. He was tired, he wanted to go to bed, to get some rest before drill at dawn, but here he was having to hide to keep from getting pounded.
Bare feet slapped the floor outside the closet. Jerico had taken his boots off, but he still lumbered like a broken robot, making plenty of noise. Tommy heard the bathroom door creak as the thug went to look for him in there.
Shit. He would look in he
re, too. There was no real place to hide, unless he wanted to climb into the cleaneze bag mounted on the roller bin. Sure, if he dug down through the dirty cleaner, crouched real low and buried himself in it, Jerico wouldn’t see him.
Tommy stood, started to put one leg over the rim of the bag, then stopped. Abruptly a rage filled him, a hot anger that bubbled up through his legs and groin, flooded into his chest, swirled fluidly into his skull.
Fuck this!
It wasn’t right! He shouldn’t have to hide from dicklick Jerico Axe, just because he was bigger and stronger and better trained than Tommy. It wasn’t right.
With only the glows coming from the instrument panels of the cleaning bot parked next to the door, the room was dark, but there was just enough light for Tommy to see the baseboard scraper mounted in the bot’s accessory rack. It was a little over half a meter long, an aluminum rod nearly as thick as Tommy’s wrist, connected to a dull blade set at an angle. The bot used the tool to clean the grit from the baseboards, it looked kind of like a garden hoe somebody had bent crooked.
Tommy peeled the scraper from the bot’s rack. Hefted it. It was fairly heavy.
When Jerico opened the door, Tommy was ready.
The larger boy had time to blink, his eyes going wide, as Tommy jumped and buried the blunt corner of the blade in Jerico’s skull. Hit him just over the right eye. It made a satisfying chunk!
Jerico screamed—that was nice, too—and stumbled backward across the hall until his back smacked into the far wall. He slid down, tugged the scraper from his head, moaned as the blood poured into his eye. He looked up at Tommy, stunned, as if he couldn’t understand what had happened.
[Aliens 02] - Nightmare Asylum Page 13