by David Drake
“Set your helmets to receive,” Lordling ordered. “Now!”
Copies of the display Lordling had summoned echoed on the visors of his team, then vanished. The men could recall it from their helmets’ data storage if needed.
“Yazov,” Lordling continued, “take four men and jump off in thirty seconds. Leg it into position. Don’t start shooting until I give the signal from the other side. And don’t forget, they may be getting reinforcements so you need to watch your back. Clear?”
“Worry about your end, Herne,” Yazov said. “I’ll take care of mine. Harlow, Coyne . . . Hatton, I suppose.” He didn’t bother naming his nephew to the team he would lead. “Execute—now!”
The five men stepped off the truck’s tailboard at the edge of a glade. The trees were forty meters high and waved brilliant streamers into the air to attract winged pollinators. The team quickly melted into the manicured shadows among the trunks.
The firetruck made a sharp turn in order to curve around the firefight. It growled out of sight.
Using hand signals, Yazov sent Harlow and Coyne out on the flanks. He didn’t especially trust Hatton, an engine-room crewman, but he supposed the fellow would be all right if they kept an eye on him.
The fire team moved through the glade in line abreast, with a five-meter interval between troopers. Birds twittered invisibly, but the only sign of human beings was a woman’s shoe caught in a branch high overhead. It looked badly weathered.
The estate was enormous, and the people working in it were concentrated in a relatively few nodes. With all that was going on, there shouldn’t be many strollers out, either.
On the far side of the glade was a narrow path. It appeared to be made of brick laid in a herringbone pattern, but it had a rubbery resilience underfoot. They trotted across it.
The path was bordered by waist-high clumps of pink and magenta flowers, interspersed with saw-edged grasses that shot tufts up six or seven meters tall. Yazov had fought in vegetation like that before. He couldn’t imagine anybody having the stuff around if he employed gardeners—or owned a flamethrower.
“Yase, the shooting’s died down,” Josie called. “What do you think that’s because?”
Yazov signaled his nephew angrily to shut up. The kid was good, no question; but he hadn’t lived long enough to have good sense. Well, that was why Josh Paetz had sent his bastard brother Yazov along with Josie.
They’d come to a two-meter hedge growing along a low stone curb. Yazov signaled Josie to watch their backs: they didn’t need a squad of locals jumping them from behind. The rest of the team flattened behind the curb and peered through the scaly lower branches of the hedge.
They were looking into a rectangular garden, fifty meters by one hundred. Walkways from corner to corner and down the long axis met at a stone fountain of four stacked bowls in the middle. Each quadrant had at its center a tree sculpted into a slim green spindle. The trees and stone benches scattered among artistically ragged plantings made it impossible to see everything within the garden from one point, and perhaps even from four points.
Yazov’s team was arrayed on a long side of the garden. Within the rectangle and facing in the same direction along the parallel hedge on the far side were eighteen or twenty Doormann security personnel.
The guards had a three-wheeler. They’d parked the vehicle so that a large marble urn gave it a modicum of protection, but no one was crewing the pintle-mounted tribarrel at the moment. Instead, several Telarians crouched behind the trike, muttering over a casualty sprawled in a bed of variegated flowers.
The hedge had sere yellow scars where powergun bolts had pocked it. Portions of the foliage still smoldered. The large scallop which outgoing bolts from the tribarrel had cut was twenty meters from the trike’s present position.
Other guards lay tensely prone, well back from the hedge so as not to draw fire. The fighting certainly wasn’t over, but no one was shooting at the moment.
The hedge was thorny and impenetrable, at least to anything short of a bulldozer or some minutes’ work with a cutting bar. There were arched bowers at each corner, however, giving access to the garden. The terrain on Yazov’s side of the barrier was flat, with regular beds of knee-high flowers. They didn’t provide any cover, but they were decent concealment.
Yazov keyed his commo helmet. “Harlow and Coyne, opposite corners,” he ordered. “Wait for it. Paetz and I’ll drive them to you. Hatton, watch our back. Paetz, take the crew around the tribarrel when you get the signal. Nobody get early or we’ll get somebody killed. Move out.”
The end men scuttled into position. Both of them carried 2-cm weapons. At this range and these conditions, Yazov would as soon they had submachine guns, but they were pros. They’d manage.
Hatton faced around with an obvious air of relief. Josie thrust his left hand into the hedge to broaden his viewpoint. Yazov was ready to snap an order, but the younger man was merely eager, not rabid.
Nothing to do now but wait for the signal.
“Yase, why aren’t they shooting?” Josie said over the spread-band radio net. “Why’re they just sitting there?”
“They’re waiting for something,” Yazov explained. “And don’t ask me what it is because I don’t know.”
What Yazov did know was that “it,” whatever it was, was nothing he wanted to be around to see. He took four fresh magazines out of their pouches and set them by his left hand, behind the stone curb.
“It would be nice if you got your thumbs out of your ass, Herne,” he mouthed, but the thought wasn’t even a whisper.
“Go,” said the command channel, and Yazov’s trigger finger had blasted the head off a Telarian security man before his ears caught the whop! whop! whop! of powerguns firing from Lordling’s side of the double ambush.
Yazov swung to the next target, a guard lying prone who lifted her head to look at the comrade who’d died a few meters from her. Yazov’s bolt converted her startled expression into a cyan flash.
One of the Telarians ministering to the casualty leaped to his feet; his two fellows tried to flatten when the shooting started. All three of them were down now, their limbs thrashing in their death throes. Josie had taken them out in three aimed bursts, though the separation between trigger-pulls was scarcely more than the normal cyclic delay of his submachine gun.
Coyne and Harlow both fired, but Yazov couldn’t see their targets through his narrow niche in the hedge. A guard scrambled toward the tribarrel. Josie shot him in the cheek, ear, and temple. The victim’s cap flew off and he plowed a furrow through ankle-high flowers with his face.
Yazov dropped his weapon, braced his left hand on the curb, and tugged a fragmentation cluster from its belt carrier. Simultaneous pressure from thumb and fingertips released and armed the weapon. Yazov gave the thumb-switch another poke to change the setting from Time to Air Burst, then lofted the bomb high over the hedge. A third squeeze on the thumb toggle would have set the fuse to Contact.
A guard, either wild with terror or trusting in his body armor, jumped up in a crouch behind the fountain. He held his submachine gun at waist height.
Harlow and Coyne shot him simultaneously in the torso. The ceramic breastplate shattered like a bomb under the paired 2-cm bolts. The guard’s body did a back-flip, flinging his unfired weapon through the spray of the fountain.
The fragmentation cluster popped into three separate bomblets. They burst in red flashes two or three meters above the soil of the garden. Guards leaped up like a covey of birds rising. Five of them died in instantaneous gunfire from the waiting mercenaries.
A surviving guard waved his pistol from a clump of low-growing evergreens. Yazov shot the arm off and, as the screaming Telarian lurched upright, finished the job and the 2-cm weapon’s five-round magazine.
Yazov stripped in a fresh clip. Coyne and Harlow stood in plain sight in the archways, raking the guards who cowered among the low plantings. Most of the Telarians were dead already, but the muscle spasms of a behe
aded corpse were enough to draw a bolt for insurance.
Josie Paetz got to his feet, wild-eyed with enthusiasm. His submachine gun’s iridium barrel glowed white.
“Wait!” Yazov ordered. He was still kneeling. He aimed his powergun at the gnarled base of the hedge plant. Six or eight stems twisted from the sprawling roots.
Yazov fired twice. The plant lifted on a blast of cyan plasma. The soil was moist enough to erupt into a cavity also. Splinters and microshards of terra cotta sprayed out in a circle.
The shrub’s fragments fell into the garden, still tangled by thorns and interwoven branches. Josie Paetz leaped through the gap without hesitation, dragging branches with him further into the killing zone.
Yazov reloaded and followed more circumspectly, brushing grit off his faceshield. His mouth smiled, but the expression had nothing to do with what was going on in his mind. “Hatton, you can come on through,” he said, “but keep your eyes on the back-trail.”
The whole team was in the garden. Coyne stood at the tri-barrel; Harlow checked the mechanism of the Telarian submachine gun in his left hand while he held the shimmering barrel of his 2-cm weapon safely off to the side.
Insects buzzed among the flowers. The firefight had done surprisingly little damage to the plantings, though the stench of the shooting and its results weighted the air worse than the miasma of any swamp.
A guard with no obvious injuries lay spread-eagled near the line Yazov followed across the garden. Blue flowers lapped her cheeks and neck.
Yazov swung his weapon one-handed, like a huge pistol. He fired into her back as he passed. Vaporized fluids turned bit of rib bone into shrapnel. The guard’s head and heels lifted waist-high, then flopped again. The point-blank charge had virtually severed the body at its thickest point.
Better safe than sorry.
Yazov knelt at the far hedge. “Coming through!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs. There hadn’t been any radio communication with Slade. “Coming through! Coming through!”
His own team was in position. Yazov held the powergun out at arm’s length and fired into the root-stem juncture of a plant beyond the one he crouched behind. Powergun bolts had little penetration; the twisted branches and foliage of the hedge provided almost as much protection as a steel wall could have done.
The shrubbery blew apart as before. Splinters blazed, but the raggedly severed ends of the stems themselves were too green to do more than smolder.
There were still occasional shots in the near distance. With luck, that meant Lordling’s team was policing up its area too.
“Coming through!” Yazov shouted again. Coyne seemed to think the tribarrel was operable, because he now crouched in the sidecar saddle with his hands on the weapon’s double grips.
“Come on then, curse you!” cried a voice too cracked for Yazov to identify the speaker. “And we’re bloody glad to see you!”
Yazov risked a glance outward. This side of the garden faced a gray stone building. The facade was shattered by powergun bolts. A limousine and half a dozen emergency vehicles burned in front of the structure, a van of some sort burned around to the right side, and the lower floor of the building itself burned like the box of a wood stove.
The flames had driven Doormann security personnel out of the building. The bodies of at least a dozen guards lay in a straggling windrow where submachine-gun fire had laid them.
Ned Slade dangled Lissea Doormann from the cavity that had been a window on the second floor. She pushed off from the wall so that she landed in the drive, well clear of the black smoke gushing from the doorway. Slade jumped after her. It took him a moment to rise again to a crouch.
Yazov led his men through the hedge. Lordling’s team appeared from the woods behind the shattered structure. The firetruck snorted along behind them as Westerbeke steered it between the well-spaced boles.
Lissea helped Slade stand. His commo helmet was skewed sideways. A powergun bolt had grazed it, melting the outer sheathing and shattering the ceramic core. Slade reached down to grab the ammo pouch of a fallen guard. Lissea pulled him upright again. As the rescue team closed in on the couple from both directions, she kissed Slade full on the lips.
“Water!” Ned croaked. “Gimme—”
Three mercenaries thrust their condensing canteens at him. Herne Lordling tried to push the nipple of his canteen between Lissea’s lips, like a clumsy father feeding a newborn. She snatched the canteen out of his hands and drank greedily on her own.
“Hey, Harlow,” Coyne called. He was astride the driver’s saddle of the captured trike, which he’d maneuvered out through the hedge despite the curb. “Come drive this thing and I’ll work the tribarrel.”
“Have you got transportation?” Lissea asked Yazov.
The skin was peeling over her right cheekbone, and the brows and eyelashes were scorched away. Ned didn’t remember how that had happened. It might have been a hostile bolt striking almost too close, but Lissea’s own weapon could have done it when a guard lunged unexpectedly up the blazing staircase. The Telarian had grappled Ned from behind and was pushing him toward the window. Lissea leaned close to be sure of her target and fired one round.
“Like hell you’ll get me on that!” Harlow said. “If I wanted to die, I’d eat my gun.”
“We’ve got a truck,” Lordling said. “Westerbeke’s coming in it.” He looked drawn. Three of the two-magazine pouches of his bandolier were empty, and the submachine gun he carried now wasn’t the weapon he’d had when he left the Swift.
“Chicken!” Coyne gibed. “Okay Hatton, you drive. And don’t give me any lip!”
Hatton looked uncomfortable, but in the midst of a firefight, the big gunman was too high on the pecking order for a ship’s crewman to object. Hatton took over the trike’s steering chores as Coyne settled behind the tribarrel on the sidecar.
The firetruck pulled up beside the burning building. The troops climbed aboard. Men moved deliberately, as though they had walked forty klicks and knew that the day’s work was not yet over.
“Here’s a helmet, ma’am,” Raff said to Lissea. “It was Ingried’s. He bought it back there.”
The Racontid had four mutually opposable fingers on each hand. He gestured toward the woods with two of them while the other pair gripped the commo helmet he was offering to Lissea.
“He have any kin?” Ned wondered aloud.
“Get aboard now or we’ll be telling yours that we left you behind,” Herne Lordling snapped.
“We’ve been lucky,” said Yazov. “We’ve been bloody lucky.”
The firetruck pulled out. Lissea and Herne were in the cab; Westerbeke drove. Ned hugged his chest close to the chromed vertical rail at the side of the tailboard. If he let himself dangle at arm’s length, the first serious turn would send him flying from the vehicle.
Hatton started off leading the firetruck in normal escort fashion, then realized that Westerbeke would be choosing the course. The three-wheeler pulled onto the grassed shoulder to let the bigger vehicle accelerate past.
Coyne waved cheerfully. Ned wasn’t sure the trike would even be able to follow on its small wheels if Westerbeke headed through soft terrain, but he didn’t have enough energy to worry about that now.
Ned felt cold. His stomach was threatening to vomit up the water he’d drunk moments before. If his commo helmet worked, he could have listened to the chatter among the rest of the team, but he didn’t have even that.
Raff, Yazov, and Paetz were on the tailboard with him. The Racontid looked at Ned’s submachine gun, then lifted the weapon between paired fingers to stare at it muzzle-on.
Ned looked also. The iridium barrel had sublimed under heavy use until the bore was almost twice its normal diameter.
Ned grimaced and reached for the equipment pouch that should have carried two spare barrels and a barrel spanner. He wasn’t wearing the pouch. His present gear was what he’d taken from the limousine’s crew. Doormann Trading Company had never dreamed its guards w
ould shoot a barrel out.
Raff grinned with a mouthful of square vegetarian teeth. He offered Ned the 2-cm weapon and bandolier which he wore slung beside his own rocket gun. “Better, yes?” he said.
“Better,” Ned agreed. “Ingried’s?”
He dropped the burned-out submachine gun onto the tailboard beside him.
“Ingried’s,” the Racontid confirmed.
The weight of the 2-cm weapon reassured Ned. When he draped the bandolier over his shoulder, it clacked against the pair of submachine gun magazines in the left side-pocket of his tunic. He thought the magazines must be empty or nearly so, but he didn’t guess they were doing any harm where they were.
When the terrain rolled, Ned caught glimpses of the gun towers on the perimeter wall. The team was nearing its goal. Westerbeke had been keeping to the roads, perhaps in consideration of the men on the three-wheeler.
The firetruck approached a replica of a Greek temple on the crest of a barely perceptible knoll. The reliefs on the triangular pediment were painted in primary colors, with red and blue predominating. The stone of the structure itself was stained a creamy off-white.
Civilians stood on the temple porch, staring at the vehicles and the gang aboard them. The Telarians didn’t appreciate that the mercenaries were really exactly what they looked like, a band of heavily armed pirates, murderous and as deadly as so many live grenades.
Coyne stood on his footboards and doffed his helmet to the watching civilians. Ned looked back sourly at him, wondering how the fellow could have the mental or physical energy left to clown.
A civilian shouted to the man next to her and pointed. She was looking at something in the distance.
The trike exploded in a jet of cyan brighter than the sun. The thunderclap of a 20-cm bolt from a tank’s main gun shook even the heavy firetruck.