“Now’s our chance to get down to Nawadji, sergeant.”
“I agree, but best you come to the ground level.”
“Why? What’s up?”
“You’ll see.”
Michael raced down the stairs two at a time. He burst out of the stairwell, skidding to a halt. He didn’t need Shinoda to tell him what had happened. One sniff did that. The air was thick with the metallic smell of fresh blood, the floor and walls drenched. “Oh, no,” he said at the awful sight.
Shinoda was crouched beside a body; it lay on its back with arms outstretched. It did not look right to Michael. An instant later he had worked out why. The head had vanished, and Michael reeled back before turning to spew up the contents of his stomach, heaving and retching until there was nothing left to bring up.
“Who was it?” he asked, wiping the bile from his lips.
“Corporal Bavalek. He was bringing us coffee.” Shinoda waved a hand at the shattered remnants of mugs, the brown of coffee splashed across the crimson horror spreading slowly across the floor. “I think a sheet of plasglass took him out. He never had a chance, poor bastard.”
“Go get the team ready to move. And see if Delabi can think of somebody who can get us on one of those barges.”
“I’ll get one of the guys to take care—”
“I’ll take care of it!” Michael’s voice slashed through the air. “Just do it, Sergeant Shinoda.”
Shinoda looked at him for a moment, then nodded. “We’ll be by the front door,” she said.
“I’ll be as fast as I can,” he said, already stripping off his combat fatigues down to his shorts. After a brief search, the best Michael could find was an old plasfiber box. “I’m sorry I couldn’t find something better, Corporal Bavalek,” he said as he struggled to maneuver the corpse into the box, its mass awkward and slippery.
Finally the body was in the box. Michael went to find Bavalek’s head. When he did, he wished he hadn’t. It lay against a toppled desk. Eyes wide open stared accusingly up at him, and the mouth was slightly open in surprise. Struggling to keep his stomach under control, Michael picked up the grisly object with bloodied hands and placed it with the body. He closed the lid. The relief was overwhelming.
“We’ll come back for you and do this properly, I promise,” Michael whispered before losing control of his stomach again, his body convulsing as spasm after spasm wracked his body.
Michael went to clean up.
Twenty minutes later, they were on their way to Nawadji, the air full of the sound of sirens overlaid with the thunderous roar of lifters shuttling emergency crews to the disaster site, with police and DocSec bots racing past. Not one paid the slightest attention to the dust-caked group of marines running hard through the debris-littered street. On they ran. Michael forced the pace. He wanted the pain from burning muscles to flush the guilt of Bavalek’s death out of his mind.
Not that it did.
• • •
Delabi trotted back to where Michael and the rest waited tucked out of sight down a narrow alley.
“One of my cousins is waiting down by the wharf,” she said. “He’s not happy but says he’ll put us in touch with someone who can help us out.”
“Can we trust him? Michael asked.
“Not really,” Delabi said. “But he likes money, and the slimy bastard’s always been a greedy little crapstick. Besides, I said we’d come tear his balls off and stuff them down his throat if he messed with us.” She smiled, a smile of feral savagery. “I think he believed me.”
“I would,” Shinoda whispered.
“Any DocSec around?” Michael asked.
“None. We should go, sir. Before he loses his nerve.”
“Lead on.”
Michael followed Delabi. The street ran down to a wall of razor wire that secured the wharf. Inside, cranes maneuvered massive loads off low-loaders and onto waiting barges. The few men around paid them no attention. Delabi turned right at the wire. A hundred meters on, a solitary figure waited outside a gate. His head swung from side to side.
“He looks nervous,” Michael said.
“He should be,” Delabi said. “He told me DocSec took five men away last week for smuggling booze and weed to the marines at Paarl.”
“So why’s he doing this?” Michael asked, pointing to the security holocams perched atop the wire. “The holovid records will show him waiting for us.”
“Easy. We pay him, he pays off wharf security, and everybody’s happy. This is nothing new. It’s been going on forever.”
Delabi’s cousin did not wait for them. He waved at them to follow, then went in through the gate. He stopped only when screened by a wall of cargo containers.
“This is—” Delabi started to say.
“No names,” the cousin snapped, cutting Delabi off, still doing his head-on-a-stick routine. “Just call me … Max will do.”
“Fine, Max,” Michael said. “Which barge?”
“The Merrioneth Star. Barry Ho is the captain. They’re just finishing loading and will be sailing inside an hour.”
“How much?”
“Forty grand.”
Michael glanced at Delabi and Shinoda. They both nodded.
“Okay,” he said.
“Pay me now,” Max said, “then wait here while I go make sure Captain Ho’s ready for you.”
“You little fuck,” Michael hissed. His hand shot out and took Max by the throat. He squeezed so hard that Max could not break the death grip on his windpipe. Michael pushed Max away, sending him backward, tripping over his own feet and falling to the ground.
“Hey,” Max protested, massaging his throat. “What are you doing? You can piss off. There’s no way I’m doing business with you assholes,” he added, starting to his feet.
Michael kicked him in the crotch, and again Max fell back with a soft scream. He folded his body into a ball, hands between his legs, whimpering. “Get him up,” Michael ordered.
Kleber and Mallory obliged, dragging Max, wild-eyed with fear, to his feet. “I don’t have time to play games, Max, so here’s the deal. Take us to this Captain Ho, and then—”
Max must have been dredging down deep to find the last dregs of defiance. “Fuck you!” he snarled. “Why would I do that?”
This time Kleber did the honors, planting a fist in Max’s gut. The blow doubled Max over and drove the air out of his lungs with an explosive whoof.
“Now, Max,” Michael said when the man had recovered, “you’re wasting my time. Just do what I say or I’ll cut your weaselly throat and drop you in the river. You know what? I think that’s what we’ll do anyway. I’m sure Captain Ho will talk to us anyway, so thanks for that.”
Terror flared in Max’s eyes. “No, no, no,” he gabbled. “You’ve got to believe me. He won’t talk to you. We’ve had way too much trouble with DocSec.”
Michael nodded. “I can understand that,” he said, “so I’ll trust you. But if you mess with me, I will kill you. Do you understand?”
Max nodded in furious agreement.
“Good. Well, what the fuck are you waiting for? Let’s go!”
• • •
Captain Ho was a small, dumpy man dressed in faded blue overalls and a battered cap. His nut-brown face was deeply lined and sported a precisely trimmed goatee. He stared at Michael from blue eyes as hard as pebbles. “You don’t want much,” he said at last. He looked unimpressed by the motley crew arranged in front of him.
“Yes or no?” Michael said.
“Thirty grand, you said?”
“Ten now, twenty when we get to Ahenkro Junction.”
“Fifteen and fifteen.”
“Deal. When do we leave?”
“Hey, what about me?” Max said, his voice thick with complaint. “I should be paid something. It’s only fair.”
“Mind if we bring this piece of crap along with us?” Michael asked.
“As long as I don’t have to listen to him,” Ho replied, a look of utter contempt on
his face.
“Oh, come on, Barry,” Max said; his voice was now an aggrieved whine. “How long have we been friends?”
Ho stared at Max like he was something he’d just scraped off his shoe. “You’ve never been any friend of mine,” he said. He turned back to Michael. “I’ll get you some duct tape and cable ties. You can leave the little fuck here when you’re done. I’ll stash him in the power room.”
“Where will you put us?” Michael asked.
Ho thought about that for a moment. “I’ve got just the place,” he said.
“Sergeant, can you take care of this,” Michael said, hooking a thumb at Max, “while I go with the captain?”
“My pleasure, sir.”
Michael followed Ho aft, out of the barge’s bridge and down a ladder to the cargo deck, a flat metal deck covered in massive shapes under chromaflaged netting.
Ho lifted the netting. “Here you go,” he said. “No better place for you to stay out of sight.”
Michael shook his head. He was stunned by the awesome mass of armored ceramsteel in front of him. He looked closer. “I’d say that this is an Aqaba main battle tank.”
“You’d be right,” Ho said, “and I’ve got five more of them onboard. Anyway, get your lot inside this one; we’ll be getting under way shortly. And don’t come out unless I tell you to. We’ll have an escort, and they’re a nosy bunch.”
“An escort?”
“The NRA occasionally has a go at the barges. Sank two a few days ago, so now we have a couple of patrol boats to keep an eye on things.”
“Got it.”
“There’s just one more thing,” Ho said. “Where’s my money?”
• • •
Michael stared around the inside of the tank, which was dimly lit by the soft glow of emergency lights. This one was the manned version, designed to control a squadron of unmanned Aqabas. By Fed standards, it was crude, and because it did not use AIs, it carried a crew of five where the Feds would have managed with one.
Crude or not, it was an impressive machine. Michael would never forget how they had looked advancing toward his position during the Hammers’ abortive attempt to take the NRA’s Branxton base. The Aqabas had been a terrifying sight. An autoloaded 95-millimeter hypervelocity gun backed up by missile pods and defensive lasers made sure of that. At that point an idea popped into his mind, fully formed and ready to go.
But was it feasible? he wondered.
“Hey,” he said to Sergeant Shinoda, “you ever operate one of these things?”
“Me? Hell, no. First time I’ve ever seen one up close.”
“I have, sir,” Mallory called out from one of the drone tank controller’s positions. “I was in a logistics battalion attached to a marine armored division.”
“Easy to drive?”
“Far as I remember. I think there’s a simulator which shows you how everything works.”
“And how do you start it up?”
“Let me see. The panel to your left … yes, that one. Lift the safety flap, put the switch to the first position, and that fires up the fuel cells. One more click brings the auxiliary fusion plant online. Flicking the switch all the way brings up the main propulsion plant.”
“What?” Michael said, unconvinced. “It’s that easy?”
“It is … well, once you’ve inputted the right authorization code, of course.”
“I knew there had to be a catch,” Michael said, the disappointment bitter.
Mallory stared at him. “Are you thinking of using this thing, sir?”
Michael nodded. “I was,” he said, “but without the authorization code, it’s just a big useless lump of ceramsteel.”
“It is, but in my day, tanks straight out of the factory,” Mallory said, looking around, “which this one almost certainly is, all had the same factory code.”
“Which was?”
“Ah, now let me see …” Michael felt as if he were about to explode. “I think it was ‘system’ … Yeah, it was.”
“‘System’?” Michael hissed. “The code is s-y-s-t-e-m? You got to be shitting me.”
“I am not, sir,” Mallory said a touch defensively.
“Well, there’s only one way to find out.”
“Let’s do it, sir.”
So they did, and Michael found out that no, Trooper Mallory was not shitting him. “Well I’ll be damned,” he whispered as the cramped crew compartment came alive in a coruscating display of colored status lights and holovid panels. “Is this thing armed?”
“Wait one,” Mallory said. Her fingers flew over one of the panels. “It is. It has full loads: 95-millimeter projectiles, machine gun rounds, missiles, decoys, smoke grenades, chaff dispensers, everything.”
“That’s standard operating procedure for heavy weapons systems being shipped into a combat zone,” Shinoda said. “It means they can go straight into action if needed.”
An evil smile crossed Michael’s face. “Well, things are looking up,” he said. He looked around. “Anyone fancy being a Hammer tank commander?”
• • •
Mallory had been dead right, Michael realized. Driving the Aqaba was simplicity itself. Once set to auto, the weapons systems pretty much took care of themselves once the target priorities had been set. “Let’s take five,” he said. “Somebody open a hatch; this place smells like a brothel.”
“You would know,” a voice said in a stage whisper, provoking an outbreak of laughter.
“Yeah, yeah,” Michael said.
Kleber pushed open the hatch; he peered out.
“Anything worth looking at?” Michael asked.
“Nothing.”
“Back to work then, folks. We’ll keep at it for another hour, then decide what to do with our newfound skills.”
• • •
“There’s too much we don’t know, sir,” Shinoda said. “You’ll have to go talk with the captain.”
Michael grimaced. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to.”
“I know. He won’t be happy; that’s for sure.”
“Maybe he will be if I give him what’s left on my card.”
“DocSec will come after him. You do know that?”
“I do.” Michael sighed. “Let me see what he says.” He slipped through Aqaba’s hatch and wriggled his way out from under the netting. He paused to make sure there were no patrol boats in sight, then adjusted his chromaflage cape and made his way to the bridge.
Captain Ho spun around in his chair when Michael appeared. The man did not look happy to see him. “Kraa damn it,” he snapped, “I thought I told you to stay put. The Hammers are like flies on shit out there. They have surveillance all over this river.”
“I know, and I’m sorry, but we need to talk. Besides, this cape is too good for any Hammer holovid.”
Ho’s eyes narrowed. “I thought there was something odd about you,” he said. “You’re not a Hammer, are you?”
For a moment Michael toyed with the idea of lying, then decided the truth might pay better dividends. In any case, Ho had them by the balls; for all Michael knew, he already had DocSec waiting for them on the wharf at Ahenkro Junction. “No,” Michael said. “I’m a Fed.”
“I knew it.” Ho paused. “See this?” he went on, pointing to a red button on the arm of his chair only a few centimeters from the tips of his fingers.
Michael nodded.
“That’s the hijack alarm. If I push it, it locks down. Unless I release it inside five seconds, the sky falls in on your head. You might kill me, but you won’t get to the button in time, I can guarantee that.”
Michael sighed. “Nobody’s going to kill anybody,” he said, “so spare me the threats. I’m here to talk to you, that’s all. If you can’t give me what I ask, we’ll go over the side where and when you tell us to, and you’ll never see us again.”
The tension was palpable, Captain Ho’s body radiating mistrust. “I can listen,” he said eventually, his finger not moving one millimeter. “What do
you want?”
“One of my guys was a Hammer tanker, so this is what we thought we’d do …”
“Kraa!” Ho hissed through pursed lips when Michael had finished. “That’s a big ask.”
“It’s important. You must know that.”
“I was a planetary defense officer once.” Ho looked away. “I spent most of my time on oceangoing missile defense platforms, so I never saw combat against the NRA, though I knew plenty of people who did. Some were friends of mine. Quite a few of them are dead now …”
Michael’s spirits sank.
“… killed in action, so there’s no way I’d do anything to help the NRA …”
Michael’s spirits fell through the floor and kept on going.
“… but on the other hand, a lot more have been killed over the years by DocSec, so I don’t owe them any loyalty either, and I hate all that Word of Kraa bullshit. No, I owe all my loyalty to myself, not to anything or anybody else. Just me. This might be my home,” he said, waving a hand around the bridge, “but I don’t own the Merrioneth Star, and I don’t have any family here. Ten years ago my whore of a wife buggered off with a DocSec major, and my kids had the gumption to get the hell out of the Hammer Worlds the first chance they could.”
Michael had been biting his lip to keep from interrupting. Would the damn man cooperate or not? Ho seemed to have stopped, so Michael took his chance. “Does that mean you’ll help us?” he asked.
“Depends on how much you’ve got left on that card of yours.”
“A bit over fifteen grand. If you want it, it’s all yours.”
Another wave of the hand. “It’ll be the end of this, you know,” Ho said.
“Your call. But you need to make a decision soon. It won’t be long before we reach the Ahenkro Junction wharf.”
Ho nodded. “I know,” he said. The seconds dragged past before Ho spoke again. “One condition.”
“Name it.”
“I need to be on my way downriver before you make any move. If I’m alongside when the shit hits the fan, I’m dead meat.”
“How much lead time do you need?”
“An hour.”
“Okay, but it all depends on how the unloading works. Tell me how the Hammers do that.”
“Well, first …”
The Final Battle Page 24