by David Drake
Nobody was in shape for this except Johann Vierziger, who wasn’t human.
“Feed—” Vierziger said.
Malaveda snatched the sub-machine gun away and replaced it with the 2-cm weapon. He tried to say, “Only three in the magazine!” but his voice was a croak, and he didn’t imagine the devil who led him didn’t have the information already.
The room was an unfinished basement, open except for concrete support pillars. It held stacks of cased weapons and ammunition, as well as crates Malaveda couldn’t identify at first glance.
Three bodies, two of them women in nightclothes, lay between the tunnel door and an elevator at the opposite end of the basement. Single-person lift and dropshafts couldn’t have serviced the heavy goods stored here. A woman’s legs wedged the cage doors.
The grenade had pretty well devoured a man holding a bell-muzzled mob gun near the doorway. Vierziger’s powergun bolts had lifted off the back of his head anyway.
Malaveda didn’t see a fourth corpse, but he knew there must be one. Vierziger had fired four times, after all.
Vierziger ran to the elevator. Malaveda reloaded the sub-machine gun as he followed. The barrel was badly burned by use. He’d have changed it for a new one if he’d been sure there was time. He wasn’t sure of anything at all.
He saw something to his left, down a cross-aisle among the goods stored on pallets. He pointed the sub-machine gun but it was a corpse lying on its back, the face blasted away by a tight quartet of powergun bolts.
Vierziger drew his pistol and fired twice to his right, down another aisle. Cyan bolts chewed the ceiling above him as he shot, blasting gravel and a spray of calcium burned from the cast concrete.
The man in ambush had clamped his sub-machine gun’s trigger as he arched backward in death. Vierziger had seen, drawn, and killed before the victim could react to the appearance of the target he’d heard running toward him.
Beside the elevator was a firedoor of mesh-reinforced vitril, displaying a concrete staircase which led to the upper floors. No one was on the stairs. Vierziger tested the door to be sure that it opened from outside the smoke tower. It did. He tugged another grenade from his pocket, armed it, and tossed it up the stairs. He slammed the door shut.
Malaveda hunched aside. Vierziger grinned horribly at him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s gas.”
The grenade bubbled open in waves of black haze that quickly filled the volume beyond the vitril. The doorseal, intended to prevent smoke from entering the stair tower, acted equally well to keep the contents of the grenade inside.
It was gas all right—KD nerve gas, which would oxidize harmless within two hours of use in an Earth-type atmosphere …and would paralyze the diaphragm muscles of anyone who breathed it or had skin contact before that time. Malaveda would have suffocated slowly and inexorably if a bullet had hit his partner’s grenade during the firefight.
Vierziger ejected the nearly empty magazine from his pistol. To reload, he had to pluck a fresh clip from a belt pouch with the thumb and index finger of the left hand which still gripped the 2-cm weapon.
The woman jamming the doors had been very beautiful. Her filmy pajamas were of a natural fabric that had flashed like guncotton when the bolts struck her, leaving only a net of ash on the body.
Malaveda faced about to guard their backtrail. He felt as if he were in a bubble, he and Vierziger together; cut off from everything he’d for twenty-six years thought was the real world.
The 2-cm gun firing spun him around again. Vierziger had blasted the lock from the emergency hatch in the elevator’s ceiling.
“Feed me!” he ordered crisply. Then, as Malaveda traded submachine gun for 2-cm weapon, Vierziger added, “Give me a leg up.”
Malaveda made a stirrup of his hands. The dangling bandolier and sub-machine gun clattered on the cage floor. Bloody hell it could have gone off! But that was only a vagrant thought as he straightened his legs and boosted Vierziger through the narrow opening.
“Come on!” Vierziger said, thrusting a hand—his left hand— down toward Malaveda. “I need you to open the doors now!”
Instead of obeying instantly, Malaveda yanked open the latches of his ceramic body armor and shrugged the clamshell away. He probably wouldn’t fit through the emergency access with it on, and he was already dizzy from the heat and confinement of exercise while wearing the armor.
He didn’t try to explain what he was doing to Vierziger. Malaveda had to concentrate on what he was doing if he was going to achieve a fraction of what his partner expected….
Re-slinging the gun and ammunition, Malaveda rose and took Vierziger’s offered hand. He jumped and the little man pulled—like a derrick. Vierziger’s physical strength was as shocking as everything else about the deadly man with the features of a child. Malaveda’s right elbow scraped the edge of the opening and the sub-machine gun’s muzzle rapped on metal, but Vierziger’s tug was precise as well as effortless.
The sergeant knelt in the litter and lubricant sludge on top of the cage, then rose to his feet. A sagging cable brushed his shoulder. He had his second wind since he’d dropped the back-and-breast armor. A moment before, he hadn’t been sure he could go on.
“Switch,” said Vierziger, offering the 2-cm weapon. The elevator shaft was vaguely illuminated from above, but most of the light streamed up through the access port.
The little man was using Malaveda as a pack train; which was perfectly appropriate under the circumstances. Now that he was sure of the sergeant’s obedience, the edge that had earlier promised, “Do this thing, or I will kill you without hesitation,” was gone from Vierziger’s voice.
Vierziger nodded to the knife he’d already thrust into the juncture of the doors closing the elevator shaft from the first floor. He placed his boot along the edge, ready to thrust the door fully open as soon as Malaveda broke the seal. The top of the cage was eighty centimeters beneath floor level, not a serious problem.
The knife was a sturdy tool with a single edge on a thick, density-enhanced blade about twenty centimeters long. It could serve for a weapon, but it was obviously intended for more general purposes than killing. Here it made a functional prybar.
Malaveda gripped the knife with his left hand, crossed his left leg over the hilt to push the other door, and aimed his 2-cm weapon at the crack. Vierziger nodded approvingly.
The sergeant levered the knife with all his strength, using the thrust of his left boot as both anchor and supplement. The doors banged open to their stops. Vierziger was through the doorway like a lethal wraith, the sub-machine gun snarling. Malaveda heaved himself over the floor ledge, feeling like a hippo in comparison to his partner’s grace.
But he got there without stumbling. The torso of a startled man in a business suit vanished in the huge flash of a 2-cm bolt, though Malaveda wasn’t really conscious of pulling the trigger.
According to the plans and 3-D holograms with which the squad prepared for the raid, the apartment building’s foyer faced the street through a wall of clear vitril. No longer. Armored shutters with firing slits had slammed down moments after the shooting started.
Vitril now covered the floor like a field of diamonds. Powergun bolts had shattered the former expanse into bits ranging from pebbles to dust. It was rough, but it didn’t have dangerous edges.
A trooper in light-scattering Frisian battle dress lay under the crystalline debris. Malaveda couldn’t tell which of the squad it had been, because an explosive bullet had decapitated him/her.
Three men and a woman crouched by the slits, shooting outward or preparing to when the pair of Frisians appeared behind them. All four of them were dead by the time Malaveda stepped into the foyer. Vierziger had shot them in the back of the head. The purple-haired man on the left of the position was on the floor. His three companions were slumping in various stages of the same motion, like a slow-motion image of a single event.
The armored shield glowed in several places where it had absorbed plasma en
ergy, but all those strikes had been on the outer face. Vierziger hadn’t wasted a bolt.
A dozen more people of both sexes tumbled out the stairwell door. Despite being in various stages of undress, they were slicker-looking types than the shooters had been. Malaveda had killed the first of them. The woman behind that victim was shrieking, “The basement’s full of gas!” when the 2-cm bolt sprayed her with the remains of her companion.
A tremendous blast shook the building. The shock wave down the stair tower projected the last would-be escapee into the foyer like the cork from a champagne bottle.
Nothing the snatch squad had on hand would have packed that wallop, and there hadn’t been time enough for support to arrive. The residents themselves had planned to blow the place from the top down to cover their tunnel escape route.
The foyer lights flicked off, then on again but with a yellowish hue. The system had shifted to emergency power. The building was a fortress. It could have held out for hours against almost anything but what had arrived—the devil in the shape of a new recruit.
A woman knocked to the floor drew a pistol from the sleeve of a garment apparently too diaphanous to hide anything. Vierziger shot her hand off. Chips of vitril, now pulverized, erupted in the cyan jolts as the flimsy target vaporized at the first round of the burst.
Malaveda noticed movement and swung. A man threw down a carbine as though it were as hot as the white, glowing muzzle of Vierziger’s sub-machine gun. “No!” he screamed. His eyes were closed.
“No,” agreed Vierziger, touching Malaveda’s hand on the forestock. He lifted the 2-cm weapon to a safe angle.
The armored shutters rang under multiple powergun bolts. A thirty-centimeter splotch went from gray to red to bright orange. The survivors of the squad were concentrating their fire, but the armor remained proof against small arms.
“That’s the, the s-s-switch,” said a small man whose beige suit would have paid Malaveda’s salary for a year. He pointed to a short baton. The man the sergeant shot had flung it onto the vitril in his dying convulsions. “To set off the bombs.”
Vierziger nodded to Malaveda. Malaveda scooped up the device, careful not to touch the red contact points.
A grenade went off outside. The concussion lifted dust from the foyer floor without affecting the armor.
“Now,” said Vierziger. “We’ll need the controls to raise those doors. And we’ll need a white flag, because our colleagues don’t seem ready to accept my radioed assurance that we’ve captured the position.”
He gestured to a man wearing a tunic that glittered as if diamond studded. “Your shirt will do, I think.”
“The controls are here, right here, mister!” a woman whispered, tugging Malaveda’s sleeve to get his attention. “Right here!”
She pointed to what looked like a trash chute in the wall between elevator and stairs. The cover plate was lifted to display a keyboard.
“Besides,” Vierziger continued, smiling at the captive stripping before him, “I’d like a better look at your pecs, handsome.”
He laughed. It was the most terrifying sound Malaveda had ever heard in his life.
Mahgreb
“I’m looking for a piss-ant named Barbour!” roared the stocky man who slammed open the double doors of the officers’ canteen. “Lieutenant Robert Barbour? He thinks he’s lifting out of here today!”
The man’s gray hair was shaved into a skullcap. He wore his rank tabs field-fashion—on the underside of his collar, where they wouldn’t target him for a sniper. His aura of command obviated the need of formal indicia anyway.
Barbour set down the chip projector he was reading and got to his feet. The projector was loaded with an off-planet news feed, nothing Barbour cared about one way or the other. It was just a means of killing time while waiting for the boarding signal of the ship that would return him to Nieuw Friesland. Killing time and taking his mind off other things.
“I’m Barbour,” he said. His voice squeaked.
The dozen or so other officers in the canteen stared at Barbour when he stood up, then quickly looked in any direction except that of the two principals to the encounter. Conversations stopped, and the four poker players at a corner table huddled their cards between their cupped palms. The lights twinkling in enticement from the autobar looked loud.
“Do you know who I am, Lieutenant Barbour?” the stocky man demanded. When the canteen doors flapped, Barbour saw two nervous-looking aides waiting in the starport concourse. Unlike their principal, the aides wore scarlet command-staff fourragères.
Via! Barbour did know the fellow. Know of him, at any rate. Tedeschi didn’t spend a lot of time in the headquarters in Al Jain, where Barbour had worked until six days previous.
“Yes sir,” Barbour said. He restrained himself from saluting. Field regulations again. In order to encourage his command into a war zone mentality, General Tedeschi, commanding the FDF contingent on Mahgreb, had forbidden salutes. “You’re General Tedeschi. Sir.”
“You’re bloody well told I am!” Tedeschi snapped.
He looked around the canteen. From his expression, he’d just as soon have swept it with a machine gun. “You lot,” he said. “Take a walk. Now!”
The trio nearest the doors were out before the order had been fully articulated. The cardplayers left their stakes on the table, and there was hand luggage beside several of the previously occupied chairs.
Hellfire Hank Tedeschi had no manners and no patience. He successfully completed campaigns in minimal time and with minimal casualties among his own troops, because there was absolutely nothing else in the universe that mattered to him. He would cashier an officer in a heartbeat, and he was rumored to have knocked down underlings who didn’t jump fast enough to suit him.
Tedeschi believed in leading from the front. He’d killed people with his pistol, his knife, and his bare hands.
“What’s this about you deserting your post, Barbour?” Tedeschi demanded. “The job here’s not done, you know.”
The anger previously in the general’s voice had been replaced by menace. Barbour knew this was an act Tedeschi had practiced, but it wasn’t merely an act. Tedeschi was a clever man as well as a violent one. As a means of intimidation, he let people see the raw emotions bubbling from his psyche.
“I’m not deserting, sir,” Robert Barbour said. “I’ve requested a transfer to another branch of the service.”
He didn’t add, “As is my right.” That would be pouring gasoline on hot coals.
“Like hell you are,” Tedeschi said. He gestured Barbour back into the chair from which the lieutenant had risen. “Sit.”
Barbour obeyed. Instead of sitting down across from Barbour, Tedeschi put one of his boots on the circular table and leaned his forearms against the back of his knee. “The job here needs you, Barbour,” the general said. “I need you. Are you hearing me?”
“Sir …” said Barbour. He didn’t know how to continue.
Tedeschi wouldn’t have given him the opportunity to go on anyway. “Look, what’s the problem?” he demanded. “Is it me? Do you have a problem with the way I run things here?”
“Lord, no sir,” Barbour blurted. Tedeschi could have been back at Camp Able for all the effect he’d had on Barbour up till this moment. Lieutenants in the headquarters bureaucracy didn’t expect to have anything to do with commanding generals.
“Then your section CO, Wayney,” Tedeschi pressed. “Trouble with her? Tell me, boy, tell me now.”
“Sir,” Barbour said. Tedeschi was leaning forward, compressing his cocked leg and bringing his brutal, swarthy features threateningly closer to Barbour’s face. “Captain Wayney’s—she’s no problem, sir. She’s fine.”
Captain Wayney wasn’t a brilliant intelligence technician. To tell the truth, she wasn’t even a good one. But she was far too good an administrator to get in the way of an underling who was brilliant. Wayney not only handed Barbour the tough ones, she let him run with his whims. The result had be
en a series of striking triumphs for the section which Wayney headed.
“Look, I’ll make you a proposition,” Tedeschi said, leaning back a few centimeters. “You get an appointment on my personal staff. You report to nobody else, and I leave you the fuck alone. And you jump two pay grades to major. When this operation’s over, which I expect to take another six to nine months standard, you have the choice of accompanying me to my next posting—as a light colonel. Fair, Barbour?”
Barbour stared up at Tedeschi. He didn’t know how to respond. The whole thing was beyond belief.
Instead of reacting directly to the proposition, Barbour said, “Sir? Why are you doing this? There’s eighteen people in Technical Intelligence. You don’t need me.”
Half of Tedeschi’s face smiled. “Right, eighteen,” he said flatly. “All of them can do thirty percent of what you do. Two of them can do about seventy percent. That a fair assessment, Lieutenant?”
Barbour swallowed. If he’d thought about the question—which he hadn’t—he’d have figured that Hellfire Hank knew nothing about the operations of Tech Int. He was too busy running around in a combat car and biting the heads off Kairene guerrillas.
Dead wrong.
“Yes sir,” Barbour said. “Wellborn’s maybe better than that, but okay, that’s about right.”
“And not a cursed one of them can do the rest of what you do, the magic part,” Tedeschi said, his voice like a cat’s tongue, rough but caressing nonetheless. “I said six to nine months standard to finish the job.”
He slammed the heel of his right fist into his left hand, a sudden stroke and whop! that made Barbour flinch back. “I don’t need shooters, Lieutenant,” the general continued. “I got shooters up the ass, I got shooters better than me, and that’s plenty fucking good! The difference between six and nine is knowing where the bastards are to shoot. Do you see?”
“Sir,” said Barbour miserably. “I can’t do that anymore. Target people to be shot. I can’t.”