Yazdi patted Michael on the shoulder. “Right. Stick to the plan and we’ll be fine. Let’s do it!”
Climbing out of the truck, she turned the corner and walked briskly into the Barkersville police station. Michael waited the minute Yazdi had asked for before he followed her in, nerves jangling and hands wet with sweat. He pushed through a grubby plasglass door and into the reception area. The place could have been any police station on a thousand worlds. Old and tired, it smelled of defeat and beaten-down people. The bare concrete room, its walls broken by pin boards papered with drooping and tattered notices, was dominated by a single counter behind which stood Yazdi with an evil smile on her face, a finger to her lips. Waving him on, she turned and went through a door Michael assumed must lead to the back of the station.
He followed, swallowing hard as he stepped over the body of a middle-aged police sergeant facedown on the plascrete floor, a thin dribble of blood slowly winding its way out from underneath his body, stun-gun holster empty.
Michael had guessed right. Beyond the door was a corridor that ran clear through to the back of the station. Yazdi had not wasted any time. Two policemen manning radios—a worn sign above the door said this was the incident control room—were slumped forward on their desks, and the only sound was the desultory chatter from bored officers out on patrol. Yazdi was moving quietly back down the corridor, checking each office as she went.
“Gotcha,” Michael heard her mutter as she ducked into one of the last rooms on the left before a cross-corridor. He followed her in. The room was small, with a shelf on one wall holding a single multichannel holocam recorder, the machine laughably antique to look at.
“We’ll come back when we’re done,” she whispered. “Prefer not to have any holovid of what we’ve been up to.”
Michael could only nod. He could not speak; his stomach was heaving in protest. He felt awful. If he showed it, Yazdi either did not care or had better things to think about. She waved him to check right while she looked left. Heart in mouth, knife held tight in a hand slippery with sweat, he moved silently down the corridor, checking each of the offices in turn.
Empty. Empty. Empty.
Then his heart sank. The last one was occupied. Taking a deep breath to steel himself, he walked straight in. The man behind the desk, a youngish officer, looked up in baffled surprise. A small engraved sign on the desk read DETECTIVE SERGEANT H. K. KALKOV.
Michael moved around the desk and extended his right arm as if to shake hands with Kalkov. Taken completely by surprise, the man sat unmoving, mouth slightly open. Michael stepped in close. With no fuss or bother, he slipped the knife in his left hand under the man’s ribs and up into his heart. With a soft whoooof, the air rushed out of Detective Sergeant Kalkov’s lungs. His eyes bulged and then rolled up into his head, and he slumped back in his chair, head falling back, mouth open in surprise. Michael tried not to look. Quickly, he relieved Kalkov of his stun gun and small handheld radio before spinning on his heel and running from the room. The man’s face was seared into his memory now, and Michael knew with sickening certainty that it was something he would never be able to forget.
The rest of the corridor was still clear as Michael rejoined Yazdi. “Five more minutes, no more,” she whispered.
Michael nodded. He did not want to think about what he had done, what he probably would have to do again. Then all doubt vanished. A black jumpsuited DocSec trooper appeared, his back toward them as he turned to lock his office. Michael beat Yazdi to the trooper, his hand pulling the man’s head to one side, his knife slicing up deep into the throat. It was too easy. The man twitched for a second, then dropped to lie crumpled awkwardly on the floor. It was messy; there was blood everywhere, a pool spreading fast, red-black and thick, the air filling with a sickly copper smell.
Stepping away, Michael felt ill, his self-control crumbling under waves of nausea. He forced his body back under control, stepping back to take the trooper’s weapon, a compact machine pistol worn in a thigh holster, and two spare magazines.
They moved on. More offices and then a corridor leading on to the cells. Yazdi shook her head. They were running out of time. It would have been good to find the armory wide open, but even provincial Hammer policemen were not that slack. She circled her finger. With a brief detour to grab the holocam recorder, they were through and out of the reception area. Yazdi stopped only for a second to take a pair of battered binoculars off a low shelf, and they were back on the street, walking sedately back to the truck. There was not a soul in sight.
Safely around the corner, Michael almost made it to the truck before he lost control of his stomach. In a spectacular series of gut-wrenching heaves, he dumped every gram of food he had eaten in the last few hours onto the pavement.
Yazdi grabbed him and hustled him into the truck. “Time for that later,” she whispered. Seconds later, they were on their way, just another old truck passing through a quiet country town.
Pale and shaking, skin clammy with ice-cold sweat, Michael was still in shock when Yazdi finally got the truck’s antique holovid to work. She found a news channel, and they listened as a stunned commentator described the awful scene that had greeted the early arrivals for the day shift at the Barkersville police station. The local police commander came on and in a voice that was equal parts shock, horror, and bafflement admitted that they had no idea who might have caused the carnage. He could not comment further. Because one of their troopers had been killed, the matter was being handed over to DocSec for investigation.
“Got away clean,” Yazdi said laconically. She flicked off the holovid.
Michael grunted. There had been nothing clean about it at all. He was ashamed to admit it, but he had enjoyed knifing the DocSec trooper. The fierce burst of exhilaration exploding through his body as the knife went home had been pure ecstasy. But not the rest. They were ordinary coppers, with wives, kids, dogs, houses, mortgages, all that sort of stuff. He felt soiled by the sheer brutality of what he and Yazdi had done.
Michael got out of the truck and walked a little deeper into the woods in which they were hiding. He needed to be alone. He needed to get away from Yazdi. The realization that a large part of Yazdi was an utterly ruthless, totally amoral killing machine had come as a huge shock. He never had thought of her that way. Up to then, she had been only another marine, another green uniform, another reliable NCO. Yes, they needed guns, but did those guns have to come at the cost of five lives?
The life of one DocSec trooper would have been enough, surely.
Ten minutes later he made his way back. Yazdi looked at him sympathetically. “I know it’s not easy, but they are the fucking Hammer. So tuck it away, sir, and let’s start thinking about what comes next.”
Michael nodded. Yazdi was probably right. Christ, she had better be, though he knew he would never be able to tuck it away.
Saturday, December 18, 2399, UD
Outside Kraneveldt Planetary Defense Force Base, Commitment
With a screech of ancient brakes, Yazdi stopped the truck safely under the cover of a thick stand of trees, its nose rammed firmly into a clump of bushes.
“This’ll do,” Yazdi declared after a good look around. “I’ll cut some branches to screen us from the track.”
“Okay. I’ll take a look at the base.” Michael climbed stiffly out of the truck. It had been a long and tense drive up from Barkersville, but surprisingly, they had not been stopped once. A small convoy of DocSec trucks that had ignored them completely while racing south had been the only evidence of a response to their attack on the Barkersville police station.
According to Michael’s neuronics, they were on the far side of a small rise overlooking Kraneveldt Planetary Defense Force Base. He stood for a moment to enjoy a rare sense of peace, the last rays of a slowly setting sun warm on his back, the western sky a lurid mass of gold and scarlet slashes shot haphazardly across a blue sky deepening slowly to black. He had left the stolen police handheld in the truck; it was qu
iet now except for an occasional laconic report. However hard the Hammers were looking for what they were calling the Barkersville terrorist gang, they were not looking anywhere near Kraneveldt. Until they kicked the Hammers again, Michael reckoned, he and Yazdi were safe.
Crawling up to the crest of the rise, he turned his attention to the Hammer base. The place was enormous, an ugly mass of ceramcrete that sprawled out across the shallow valley in front of them, orange floodlights coming on all across the huge Hammer base to mark the end of another interminably long Commitment day. Nothing moved; the base was quiet to the point of being dead. Weekends were weekends, Michael thought, even for those godless Hammer sons of bitches.
He settled down to have a long hard look at what he thought might be their next target.
The flight lines lay beyond the clutter of hangars and plascrete buildings of all sizes that infested the airbase. There, two long rows of aircraft were tucked away from the weather under open-sided plasteel-roofed hangars that stretched down one side of the runway. Most were ground attack aircraft, together with a squadron of air superiority fighters. Michael dismissed them as of no interest. He was confident he could fly a lander; Hammer planetary defense aircraft were an entirely different matter. Toward the far right-hand end of the runway was a small collection of dark gray lumps parked out in the open, seven of them in all. Aha, Michael thought.
Hoping to find an easy way in, he studied the base’s defenses at length. In the end, he gave up. The Hammer knew how to build fences, that was for sure. He rolled onto his back and handed the glasses back to Yazdi.
“You have a look. I can’t see any obvious way in.”
Taking the binoculars, Yazdi looked long and hard before shaking her head. “Nor me. We’d need an assault lander to get through.”
Michael nodded. “So, if we’re going to get in . . .”
“It’s through the front gate.”
“Thought you might say that. Let me have another look.”
In the fading light, Michael studied the landers with interest. The binoculars Yazdi had stolen were not much good, but they were enough for him to see that at least two were ground attack landers. Judging by the slight flare in their after hulls, they were Hammer Space Dynamics LGA-44’s; Fed intelligence had codenamed them Lanyards. Introduced into front-line service just in time for the Third Hammer War, the Lanyards had been the backbone of Hammer ground attack forces ever since; even now they were regarded with respect by the FedWorld military. The Lanyard might be crudely engineered by Fed standards, but it was simple, tough, reliable, and heavily armored.
Michael grunted in satisfaction. The Lanyards, with their massive blunt noses and brooding bulk, might be obsolescent, but they were all business. They were brutally capable machines, and Michael was happy to see them. He handed the binoculars to Yazdi. “Give me a moment, Corp. I want to look at something.” Closing his eyes, he started to look through everything the TECHINT knowledge base in his neuronics could tell him about the Lanyard ground attack lander.
He had an idea.
Saturday, December 18, 2399, UD
Outside the city of McNair, Commitment
Four little flybots that had been thrown out hours earlier from a fast-moving Fed embassy people mover sat unmoving in a rock-littered field.
At last, with infinite care, one of the flybots, lying upside down against a large tree stump, got to work. First, a tiny wand barely a centimeter long emerged from a belly port, the tip a microvid camera no bigger than a pinhead. Moments later, a second wand appeared, this one tipped with a tiny radio frequency sensor. After a short pause, the two sensors began an excruciatingly careful scan of the area. Then, for good measure, they repeated the entire process one more time, the onboard AI programmed to make absolutely sure that nothing remotely man-made was watching. There was another short delay before the flybot, happy now that the coast was clear, began the painful process of getting itself right side up. Extending its rotor blades, it slowly levered itself first onto its side and then, with the tiniest of pushes, onto its belly, the two sensor wands snapping back below its skin as it did.
There was another long pause before two more wands emerged to carry out another painfully careful scan to make sure nothing had changed. Reassured, the flybot bent the tips of its lower rotors down until they touched the ground and, lifting itself up, crawled the meter or so it needed to be clear of the tree stump for takeoff.
A final check was followed by another pause as it signaled to its brothers that the coast was clear. Then, without warning, the rotors ran up to speed, and the flybot was up off the ground. Accelerating hard, its rotors bit deep into the late morning air, driving the bot low across the broken ground before it climbed steeply to track southeast at a steady 120 kph. Seconds later, it was followed by its three partners.
The little flybots had a rendezvous with the survivors from the Ishaq to make.
Sunday, December 19, 2399, UD
Kraneveldt Planetary Defense Force Base, Commitment
If Saturday had been quiet, Sunday was even quieter. So far, only four cars and a pickup had passed them in almost an hour.
Michael began to worry. The eastern sky was lightening by the minute; the plan he and Yazdi had worked out depended on their getting inside the base well before the day shift arrived. Michael did not want some smart-ass pointing out that truck and driver did not belong together.
Binoculars trained down the long stretch of empty road, Yazdi stiffened beside him. “Might have something here. Stand by.”
It was something: a gray Planetary Defense Force truck, heavily loaded judging by the labored way it managed the gentle slope up toward them. Beyond the truck, the road stretched away empty into the distance.
Yazdi scanned the vehicle carefully. “Perfect. Driver’s alone. No passenger. Road’s clear both ways. Let’s do it.”
The truck ground its way up the slight slope toward them. At the last minute, Yazdi stepped out into the road, waving her arms frantically. The driver took the bait, bringing the truck to a stop with a screech of overworked brakes. While Yazdi ran around the truck to the driver’s side, Michael ripped open the door and climbed up into the cab, one hand lunging for the distracted driver’s throat, the other grinding his pistol into the terrified man’s ribs. Michael did not hesitate, dragging the man bodily across the cab and out onto the verge, throwing him into the low scrub that bordered the road. Standing back he looked down. This was no man. He was more a boy, a skinny boy trembling in shock, eyes frantically hunting for help, hands up to keep Michael back.
“What do you want?” the boy stammered, voice trembling with shock. “Please don’t hurt me. Please.”
Michael ignored him. The plan called for a quick shot to the head to make sure no blood got onto the driver’s gray fatigues, but all of a sudden Michael knew he could not—would not—do it. It would be cold-blooded murder.
“What the fuck’s going on?” Yazdi hissed. “Why haven’t—”
Michael’s hand went up to stop her. “Pull the truck off the road while I tie him up, Corp. Then we’ll hide him in the back. That way they’ll find him eventually.”
“Hey! That’s not the—”
Michael turned on her. “That’s a fucking order, Corporal,” he whispered fiercely, “so do it. Now!”
For one heart-stopping moment, Michael thought Yazdi was going to call his bluff, her hand starting down to the gun in her pocket. But she did not. She stopped, nodded slowly, and went to move the truck.
Michael squinted into the lights that flooded the security post, the peak of his stolen cap pulled well down over his face. Heart pounding, he struggled to keep control as he handed his identity card and the card containing the truck’s movement order out the window.
He had every right to be nervous. His plan for getting into the base was so riddled with flaws that it was barely a plan at all. It was more a series of gambles, with his and Yazdi’s lives at stake. And the biggest gamble of all was that a
stolen identity card would be enough to get them into Kraneveldt.
Michael did not care. He had rolled the dice so many times in the past few months, why not do it again? If it did not work out, the fallback plan was simple: They would shoot their way in or die in the attempt.
Michael was relieved to see that the young lance corporal on the security gate looked like a sack of shit. He stood, swaying gently, as he studied the movement order Michael had shoved under his nose; the identity card he ignored. Black bags under reddened eyes spoke volumes about the young man’s lack of sleep. The stupid jerk probably had done back-to-back shifts to give one of his mates a decent long weekend. Well, that act of generosity was one this particular lance corporal would live to regret.
The lance corporal yawned as he waved the movement order and the stolen identity card under a scanner. Satisfied that both were genuine and passing up the opportunity to use what looked like a serious biometric scanner to confirm Michael’s identity, he handed them back.
“Know where to go?” The man obviously did not care.
Michael nodded. He had no idea but was not going to admit it.
Thankfully, the lance corporal told him anyway. “First right, keep going. On your way.”
The boom went up, and the crash bollards sank into the road. Michael eased the truck forward, desperately fighting not to stall the damn thing and trying not to look down at Yazdi. She was jammed down into the footwell on the passenger’s side, mostly—but not completely—concealed by a casually thrown jacket.
The Battle of the Hammer Worlds Page 18