by David Drake
Malaveda hadn’t seen the fucker move!
Vierziger slipped the pistol back into a cut-away holster that rode high on his right hip. It wasn’t an issue rig, and it looked like it ought to be uncomfortable for driving; though he’d driven all right too.
He sat down again and smiled faintly at Malaveda. “Just a rat,” he said. “Jumping onto the manhole cover back there. Where you have humans, you have rats.”
Malaveda nodded in the direction of the pistol, now out of sight again. “Where the hell did you learn to do that?” he asked.
Vierziger shrugged. “Practice,” he said. His face was unlined. He looked like a choirboy in this soft illumination, street lights shimmering from the damp brick walls of the alley. “And I had a—talent for it, I suppose you’d say.”
“Bloody hell,” Malaveda said.
A slow-moving car went by, the first traffic since the MP jeep took its pre-dawn station in the alley. The vehicle’s windows were polarized opaque. They reflected the knife-edged whiteness of the hood-center headlight.
Malaveda didn’t want to speak, but he heard himself say, “Could you teach somebody to do that? To—draw that way?”
“It’s just practice, Sergeant,” Vierziger said.
He looked at his companion again. Malaveda couldn’t have explained what was different about the newbie’s expression, but this time it didn’t make him shiver to see it.
“It isn’t hard to shoot people, you know,” Vierziger said. “The hard part is knowing which ones. They don’t always come with labels.”
He smiled. Malaveda wasn’t sure if the statement was meant for a joke. He smiled back.
The artificial intelligence in Malaveda’s commo helmet projected a sudden emptiness through the earphones. The non-sound was the absence of the static which would otherwise have crackled when somebody opened the push but didn’t speak.
“We’re going in,” a radioed voice whispered; Lieutenant Hartlepool or the squad leader, Sergeant-Commander Brankins. You couldn’t tell in a brief spread-band transmission.
Malaveda threw the sub-machine gun to his shoulder again. Vierziger flicked him a side-glance and smiled faintly, but he didn’t otherwise move.
Malaveda hadn’t heard how they’d located Soisson. Chances were the tech boys had swept the low-rent district till they picked up the signature of the electronics in the powergun Soisson ran with. The deserter might have sold the weapon or traded it for something more concealable, but even so it was a link in the chain that would lead back to him.
Whoever had the sub-machine gun would be bent outta shape when a squad of armed men rousted him at this hour. Watching the back door wasn’t necessarily going to be a tea party, but Malaveda was just as glad not to be in the snatch team.
All hell broke loose.
The initial gunfire was from the front of the apartment building. Malaveda couldn’t see who was shooting, but the hisscrack! of powerguns and reflected cyan light quivered over and around the structure.
It didn’t sound like a raid, it sounded like war.
The back door opened halfway. A man peered through the crack.
Malaveda aimed his sub-machine gun. The holographic sight picture stuttered around the man. “Come out with your hands up!” he shouted.
The man started to duck back inside. Vierziger blew his head off in a flash of saturated blue.
The quality of light reflected from a third-floor window above the doorway changed. Malaveda noted the event subliminally, but his brain hadn’t processed it into somebody just slid opaque blinds open behind the polarized pane in order to see me/shoot me when Vierziger fired again. The window shattered. The 2-cm round smacked a belt of powergun ammo slung around the man aiming a sub-machine gun. Hundreds of charged disks gang-fired, touched off by the 2-cm bolt. The blast must have cleared the room.
Soisson had made contact either with fifth columnists set up by the Front, or with a criminal gang that might as well be a government for the weapons in its arsenal. Either way, the snatch squad had walked right into a hornet’s nest.
Malaveda ripped out half his magazine with no better target than the whole rear of the building. He hadn’t expected things to blow up this way. It had spooked him.
Vierziger fired at another of the top range of windows. He must have seen something or he had the devil’s own luck, because there was a man behind the disintegrated pane. The fellow had been pointing a shoulder weapon.
He’d been wearing body armor too, but that didn’t help him against the energy a 2-cm bolt packed. The body hurtled backward, propelled by the shock of its colloid structure suddenly vaporizing. The victim’s sleeves were burning.
The sub-machine gun recoiled against Malaveda’s shoulder. That and the quivering gaps across his field of view, his visor blacking out the cyan dazzle to save his eyesight, combined to focus him on the job at hand. It’s not like this is my first firefight.
The back door was still ajar. The first victim’s feet stuck out of it. Malaveda sensed motion within the building. He aimed, squeezed. His three-round burst lighted the torso of a gunman. Vierziger center-punched the fellow with a bolt at the same instant, then fired again.
The second round was apparently to clear the magazine. The delicate-featured killer turned his weapon up with his left hand and stripped a fresh five-round clip through the loading gate. The gun’s iridium muzzle glowed from the amount of plasma energy it had been channeling downrange.
Malaveda’s commo helmet spluttered with clicks and hisses, sign of a lot of panicked activity that wasn’t addressed to him. The people at the front of the apartment building—the survivors of the snatch team—were calling for serious backup.
The hostiles inside must know that, and know besides that when a platoon of combat cars—or even tanks—arrived, it was all over for them. They had to break out fast, before the FDF came down with both boots.
When Malaveda was sure his partner had reloaded, he emptied the sub-machine gun into two windows chosen at random on the top floor. He thumbed the release button and reached down to his belt pouch for a fresh magazine.
Sirens and screams clawed what had been the night’s stillness, punctuated with the slapping discharges of powerguns. A blast too loud for a grenade shook the opposite side of the apartment. Windows facing the alley shattered. Shards of the panes snowed onto the sidewalk.
Vierziger—
Malaveda’s mind flashed with a montage of his partner in various stages of what had happened next.
First Vierziger’s left hand lifted his 2-cm weapon up toward his shoulder, the girlishly perfect fingers of his right hand curving to the grip. Then Vierziger faced the back of the alley, the shoulder weapon out to his side and the pistol, again the pistol, pointing.
Three shots, strobe-light quick, winking on the face of the man lifting the manhole cover from beneath. Cratering the flesh, rupturing the skull itself with the pressure of gasified nerve tissue. The eyes blanking, the sub-machine gun dropping back into the utility passage converted to an underground escape route; the cover clanking down, catching the dead man’s fingers for a moment before gravity tugged them loose.
Vierziger holstered the pistol. He bent, switched on the jeep’s drive fans, and hopped out beside the vehicle. “Come on!” he ordered. “Watch our back.”
“What?” Malaveda said. He jumped clear of the jeep. He felt as though he was partnered with a ticking bomb. He didn’t understand what was happening, but he was afraid not to obey the newbie absolutely.
Vierziger revved the fans to full lift and reached for the steering yoke. The bottom half-meter of a second-floor window across the street blew outward, shattered by the muzzle blast of a machine gun firing explosive bullets.
Distortion through the window pane caused the gunner to aim his initial burst high. Chunks blew off the facades of the buildings to either side, hiding the alley mouth for an instant in a cloak of brick dust. Other projectiles burst in vivid red florets on the walls and among
the garbage well behind the jeep.
The gunner didn’t get a chance to correct his aim.
Surrounded by the blam!blam!blam! of projectiles and whizzing bits of casings mixed with brick chips, Malaveda spun and aimed. He walked a line of cyan flashes across ten centimeters of wall, up the transom, and into the window—
As Vierziger reholstered his glowing pistol. He’d drawn and fired twice in an eyeblink. His bolts had punched the gunner in the face, one to either side of the nose. The barrel of the machine gun tilted up and vanished as the gunner slumped.
“Watch our back!” Vierziger repeated. He slammed the jeep’s control yoke forward. The little vehicle skittered ahead. It held its alignment but slid slightly to the right when it emerged from the alley and met a breeze down the main boulevard.
The manhole cover hadn’t budged since Vierziger shot the man who’d lifted it. Malaveda kept the steel disk at the corner of his eyes as his conscious mind followed what his partner was doing.
Vierziger’s holster was metal or a temperature-stable plastic, because it didn’t melt or burn from contact with the pistol’s glowing iridium muzzle. Judging from the way he’d drawn it both times that speed was an absolute essential, the richly decorated handgun was Vierziger’s weapon of choice.
He nonetheless handled the heavy 2-cm powergun with an ease that belied his slight frame, as well as with flawless accuracy; and it was with the shoulder weapon presented that he waited now.
The jeep was too light to be stable without a man aboard. Its flexible skirts hopped on irregularities in the pavement, spilling air from the plenum chamber.
Vierziger fired twice as the vehicle bobbled its way toward the building. His first bolt ignited the interior of a room whose window had shivered away in the bomb blast. Malaveda hadn’t seen a human target, but Vierziger probably had, and the baby-faced killer had hit everything he’d aimed at this night.
The flare of cyan plasma filled the enclosed space momentarily. An instant later everything flammable, including the paint, was a mass of orange flame. The transom belched a great fireball when something, munitions or an accelerant, added its energy to the inferno.
Vierziger’s second shot was into the window from which the machine gun had fired. Malaveda hadn’t noticed additional movement there until the bolt hit the muzzle of the automatic weapon just lifting back over the transom to fire. Plasma converted fifteen centimeters of the gun’s steel barrel to gas. The superheated metal erupted in a red secondary flame as it mixed with air.
How had Vierziger hit a target so small at thirty meters, with an off-hand shot?
The jeep crashed into the half-open doorway at 50 kph. That was fast enough to crunch the front of the vehicle pretty thoroughly, though without doing serious damage to the building. The jeep’s plastic frame fractured in a series of angry clicks.
Vierziger fired the remaining three 2-cm rounds into the wreckage. He picked his spots, blowing open a pair of fuel cells with each squeeze of the trigger.
The hydrocarbon fuel normally realized its energy in a cold process using an ion-exchange membrane. Now it blazed outward, enveloping the jeep in fire hot enough to involve the body panels and upholstery as well. The mushroom of flame rose roof high. It barred the building’s rear street door as effectively as the presence of a tank could have done.
And that freed Vierziger and his partner for other activities.
Malaveda thought he saw the manhole cover move. He fired, rattling the disk in its coaming as the powergun bolts blew divots off the top of the steel.
Vierziger stripped in a fresh clip, then tossed Malaveda his bandolier of 2-cm ammo. “Follow me, swap guns and load when I tell you!” he ordered. “Now!”
The newbie had no business giving a non-com orders, but the present situation ignored what the Table of Organization might say. “Yessir!” Malaveda shouted.
Vierziger wasn’t wearing body armor; he’d claimed it would interfere with his driving. Now he reached left-handed into one of his tunic’s front bellows pockets and drew out a red-banded grenade that he had no business carrying.
He struck the safety cap off against the side of the building with casual ease. Malaveda had seen troopers trying to arm a grenade that way, proving how macho they were. He’d never seen anybody succeed so perfectly, and with such little concern, as Vierziger did now.
Vierziger’s right hand was on the 2-cm weapon’s pistol grip, holding it like a massive handgun. He fired point-blank into the edge of the manhole cover. Sub-machine gun bolts made the steel disk stutter. The heavier charge flipped it like a tiddlywink. Vierziger tossed the grenade into the opening, put his back against the alley wall, and fired another bolt down the hole to disconcert anybody who might have the notion of throwing the grenade back up.
The lid hit the pavement a meter from the hole, spinning on edge with a nervous clang-g-g-g until the grenade went off beneath. It was a bunker buster. It atomized a mist of fuel through the air ten cubic meters of tunnel, then detonated the mixture in a blast that ruptured the pavement all the way to the mouth of the alley. Vierziger, poised with his knees flexed, rode out the ripple of concrete, but the unexpected jolt knocked Malaveda down.
Vierziger jumped into the pillar of gray smoke gushing from the manhole. “Follow me!” he shouted as be disappeared underground.
Malaveda followed. It didn’t occur to him not to.
There was a ladder. Malaveda climbed down it, facing outward; clumsy because of the sub-machine gun in his right hand and the bandolier of 2-cm ammo swinging from his left. The helmet slapped filters over Malaveda’s nose as he stepped into the noxious efflux from the grenade explosion. Four rungs down, he switched his visor to thermal imaging.
In thermal mode, the helmet converted temperature gradients to shapes. Malaveda hopped forward to keep from stepping on the pair of bodies scrunched at the base of the ladder. Another corpse lay on its back a few meters down the tunnel.
Vierziger moved ahead of Malaveda. The atmosphere swirled with blast residues which showed as pastels on the helmet visor.
The tunnel was purpose-built as an escape route, not a converted sewer main. It was round with a two-meter cross-section. The walls were monocrystal filament wound on a resin core. The matrix shattered when the fuel-air explosion flexed it beyond its resilient capacity. Swathes of monocrystal hung down like ancient cobwebs, but the structure hadn’t collapsed as yet.
Vierziger fired his heavy shoulder weapon. Shock waves down the tunnel made Malaveda stagger, even though he was behind the shooter. Hot vortices spun off to both sides of the ionized track, expanding until they filled the cylindrical space.
The tunnel dead-ended at the ladder up into the alley. The lid on the alley end had locking dogs to avoid the risk of discovery by a utility crew. Either would-be escapees had undogged the lid, or the heavy jolt of plasma had flexed the disk enough to spring the bolts.
Vierziger broke into a run. The 2-cm weapon was butted against his shoulder. He fired twice more. Each jet of plasma heated the air like a mulling iron thrust into a beaker of wine.
“Feed me!” he screamed, still running, thrusting the shoulder weapon out behind him. Malaveda grabbed the gun by the forestock, too close to the glowing iridium muzzle, but he didn’t drop it.
He slapped the receiver of the sub-machine gun into Vierziger’s hand. Vierziger holstered the pistol that was pointing again as if by magic and presented the automatic weapon. He hadn’t slowed.
Malaveda stumped along behind the killer. Sweat broke out all over his body. The filters kept his lungs free of ozone and the poisons streaming from empty cases which spun from the powergun’s ejection port. His eyes burned and patches of bare skin prickled.
A corpse sprawled as a mass of indigo and purple in the midst of the tunnel’s cool gray. The man had been partly dismembered by a bolt that struck at collarbone level. His right arm, tangled with a gun sling, hung by a few fleshless tendons; the spine was all that connected the head and tors
o.
Steep concrete steps led up from the other end of the tunnel. There was a handrail. Two bodies were tangled in it as they sprawled down the steps.
The armored door at the upper landing was open into the tunnel. Light flooded the passage. The panel started to swing shut. Vierziger triggered a burst at the doorway, perhaps hoping to ricochet a bolt into whoever was operating the powered mechanism.
Malaveda stopped and switched his visor to straight optics. He braced himself against the wall to aim the reloaded shoulder weapon past his partner. He was panting, drawing gasps of poisoned air through his mouth. Ozone burned the back of his throat.
He fired. Vierziger hunched at the base of the stairs, the submachine gun’s muzzle questing back for the unexpected shooter. The door’s upper hinge blew away in a cyan flash. The plating glowed white/yellow/red in circles concentric with the point of impact.
Malaveda ignored his partner’s gun. The door sagged, kinking the lower hinge and freezing the panel half-open. Tears blurred Malaveda’s eyes, and the sight picture danced wildly. He fired anyway and hit the lower hinge squarely. The door toppled onto the concrete landing like a dropped safe.
Vierziger was already up the stairs. Malaveda followed. He could no more have made that pair of shots during a training exercise than he could have ripped the door loose with his bare hands.
In the newbie’s company, Malaveda was operating at well above what he would have guessed his best day could be. He didn’t know whether the cause was emulation or a justifiable concern for what Vierziger might do to him if he screwed up.
The steps were slippery with body fluids. Malaveda grabbed the left rail; the 2-cm bandolier clanged against the tubing.
Vierziger tossed a grenade left-handed ahead of him. It was an assault bomb with a contact fuze. The blast was instantaneous, but the glass shrapnel was safe beyond a two-meter radius. Vierziger was through the haze-veiled doorway while the echoes still sounded.
The sub-machine gun snarled out four separate bursts with only a heartbeat between them. Malaveda caromed off the transom as he followed his partner. He wasn’t in shape for this. His body armor felt as though he were wearing a well-stoked oven.