The Fleet05 Total War

by David Drake (ed)

  The laser cutter shrieked as it bit into an interior bulkhead again.

  “Is this an Eight Ball Command job?” asked Lieutenant Timmes of Weapons Platoon.

  “Yes, it is,” Kowacs said flatly.

  He looked around the crowd of hard faces and the blank visages of Marines who had opaqued their helmet visors. “If anybody’s got a problem with that, the transfer offer still stands.”

  “No problem,” said Timmes. “Just wanted to know.”

  “Them bastards,” said a sharp-featured trooper named Fleur. “You never know what they’re playing at.”

  Kowacs suspected Fleur had been a disciplinary enlistment—volunteer for a reaction company or face a court-martial—but Kowacs had no complaint to make of the Marine. He didn’t guess any of the Headhunters, himself included, were good civilian material.

  “You don’t know what anybody who’s got any real authority is playing at,” Kowacs said. He was restating the argument by which he’d more-or-less convinced himself. “It’s just that people like you and me at the sharp end, we don’t see the regular sort, the admirals and sector commandants. The boys in Interservice Support Activity, they may be bastards but they’re willing to put themselves on the line.”

  “Gotta give ’em credit for that,” chuckled Bradley.

  The laser cutter had stopped. The sergeant removed his helmet to knuckle the bare scar tissue of his scalp.

  “I don’t gotta give ’em a fuckin’ thing but a quick round if I get one in my sights,” muttered Fleur.

  Kowacs opened his mouth to react, because you weren’t supposed to shoot putative friendlies and you never talked about it, neither before nor after.

  Before he could speak, Sergeant Bradley changed the subject loudly by asking, “D’ye mean we don’t gotta wear those fucking APOT hardsuits that the Redhorse had all the trouble with on Bull’s-Eye?”

  Kowacs looked at his field first. Bradley gave Kowacs a half wink; Bradley and Corporal Sienkiewicz would straighten out Fleur, but it didn’t have to be now and in public.

  A man in a white lab coat entered the hold and began making his way through the listening Marines. For a moment he was anonymous, like the noses in the hull and the other intruders who’d been focused on their technical agenda.

  “I don’t know,” the newly promoted major said. “I’ll have to—”

  The big technician in the comer of Kowacs’s eyes suddenly sharpened into an identified personality: the man in the lab coat was Grant.

  “Fuckin’ A,” Sienkiewicz muttered as she drew herself alert.

  “I’ll take over now, Kowacs,” the spook said with as much assurance as if the Headhunters had been his unit, not Nick Kowacs’s.

  Grant wore a throat mike and a wireless receiver in his right ear, though he had no helmet to damp out the ambient noise if the laser started cutting again.

  He stared around the assembled Marines for a moment, then looked directly at Kowacs’s bodyguard and said, “No, Corporal, for this one you’ll be using the same stone-axe simple equipment you’re used to. If you tried to open an APOT field inside an existing field—the intrusion module . . .”

  He smiled at the big woman. “You wouldn’t like what happened. And I wouldn’t like that it screwed up the operation.”

  Grant met the glares and blank globes of the waiting Headhunters again. “For those of you who don’t know,” he said, “my name’s Grant and you all work for me. You’ll take orders through your regular CO here”—he jerked his left thumb in Kowacs’s direction without bothering to look around—“but those orders come from me. Is that clear?”

  Beside the civilian, Kowacs nodded his head. His eyes held no expression.

  “And since you work for me . . .” Grant resumed as he reached beneath his lab coat, “I’ve got a little job for one of you. Private Fleur—”

  Grant’s hand came out with a pistol.

  “Catch.”

  Grant tossed the weapon to Fleur. It was a full-sized, dual-feed service pistol, Fleet issue and deadly as the jaws of a shark.

  The Marines nearest to Fleur ducked away as if Grant had thrown a grenade. Kowacs, Bradley, and Sienkiewicz were up on the balls of their feet, ready to react because they’d have to react; they were responsible for the unit and for one another.

  “Private Fleur,” Grant said, “I’m afraid for my life. There’s somebody planning to kill me. So I want you to clean my gun here and make sure it’s in perfect working order for when I’m attacked.”

  Nobody spoke. Other Marines eased as far away from Fleur as they could. Even without combat gear, the Headhunters packed the hold. English’s 92nd MRC was a demicompany half the size of the 121st. ...

  Fleur stared at the civilian, but his hands slid over the pistol in familiar fashion. He unlatched one magazine, then the other, and slammed them home again.

  “Careful,” added Grant as he grinned. “There’s one up the spout.”

  “I . . .” said Fleur.

  If Fleur’s trigger finger tightened, Kowacs would get between the private and Grant ... but he’d have to be quick, since Sie would be going for him and Bradley was a tossup, Kowacs or Grant or Fleur, the only thing sure being that the sergeant would do something besides try to save his own hide.

  “My cleaning kit’s back at the billet,” Fleur said. He swallowed. “Sir.”

  “Then you’d better return the gun, boy,” said Grant. “Hadn’t you?”

  Fleur grimaced. For a moment he looked as though he were going to toss the weapon; then he stepped forward and presented the pistol butt-first to its owner. Fleur’s hand was dwarfed by that of the civilian.

  The laser started cutting again. Grant aimed his pistol at the open hatch. Marines ducked, though nobody was in the direct line of fire.

  Grant pulled the trigger. The flashcrack and the answering crack of the explosive bullet detonating somewhere out in the hangar removed any possibility that the weapon had been doctored to make it harmless.

  The cutter shut down. Technicians shouted in surprise, but nobody stuck his head in through the hatch.

  Grant put the pistol away under his lab coat. “All right, Fleur,” he said. “You’re relieved. Go back to your quarters and pack your kit. Your orders are waiting for you there.” Kowacs felt exhausted, drained. Sienkiewicz gripped his shoulder for the contact they both needed.

  “Your new assignment’s on an intra-system tug,” Grant added. Then, as harshly as the pistol shot of a moment before, “Get moving, mister!”

  Fleur stumbled out of the hold—and the Headhunters. A few of the Marines flicked a glance at his back; but only a glance.

  Grant exhaled heavily.

  “Right,” he said. “This is going to be a piece of cake, troops. The bastards won’t know what hit them. There’s just one thing I want to emphasize before your major here gets on with his briefing.”

  He grinned around the bay. Sphincter muscles tightened.

  “The module will be on-site for seventeen minutes,” Grant went on. “That’s not eighteen minutes, it’s not seventeen minutes, one second. Anybody who isn’t aboard on time spends the rest of his life in Syndicate hands.

  “You see,” the smiling civilian concluded, “I couldn’t change the extraction parameters. Even if I wanted to.”

  * * *

  An electronic chime warned that the Headhunters were three minutes from insertion.

  The hatches were still open. The intrusion module’s bulkheads were hidden by images, but the hologram was not a simulation this time. The present view was of the hangar in which the vehicle had been constructed and the twelve sealed black towers surrounding the module at the points of a compass rose. The towers would presumably launch the module ... somehow.

  “Everybody’s aboard,” prompted Sergeant Bradley, stating what the green bar in Kowacs’s visor dis
play already told him.

  “Grant isn’t aboard,” Kowacs said, finger-checking the grenades that hung from his equipment belt.

  “I don’t get this,” complained a Marine to no one in particular. “We can’t ride all the way from Port Tau Ceti packed in like canned meat. Can we?”

  “Fuck Grant,” said Sienkiewicz.

  The eighteen members of Weapons Platoon carried the tubes, tripods, and ammunition of their belt-loaded plasma weapons. Their rigid hardsuits of black ceramic stood out from the remaining lightly equipped Marines like raisins in a pound cake.

  Kowacs saw Grant’s image coming across the hangar floor with long strides. The civilian wore fatigues, but he carried what looked like a briefcase. His com helmet was nonstandard.

  Grant’s pistol hung muzzle-up in a harness beneath his left armpit.

  “Right,” said Kowacs. “Six to all team leaders”—his helmet’s AI switched him automatically from the private channel he shared with Bradley and Sie to the general command frequency—“administer the gas antidote to your teams, then dose yourselves.”

  Grant entered the module. The hatches closed.

  There was barely enough room for equipment and the ninety-three personnel aboard the spherical vessel; if the Headhunters’ line establishment had been at full Table of Organization strength, Kowacs would have had to cut some people from the operation.

  What the Marine who’d complained didn’t understand—what Kowacs didn’t understand, though he accepted it—was that the Headhunters weren’t traveling through space, not even sponge space, on this operation. They were using the Dirac Sea underlying the universe, all universes and all times, to create congruity between a top-secret hangar in Port Tau Ceti and the Syndicate base they were about to attack.

  At least that’s what they were doing if the notion worked. The closer Kowacs came to the event, the less likely it seemed that the notion could work.

  “Hold still, sir,” said Bradley, the administrative head of the team to which Kowacs belonged operationally. He jerked the tab on the front of the major’s blouse.

  The integral injector pricked Kowacs as it filled his bloodstream with chemicals. The drug would provide a temporary antidote to the contact anesthetic sprayed from bottles that every third Headhunter carried for this operation.

  The chime announced two minutes.

  Grant turned his briefcase sideways and extended its legs. When he opened the lid to expose the keyboard and display, the case became a diaphragm-high workstation. Despite the crowding in the bay, the Marines gave the civilian plenty of room.

  A Third Platoon team leader pulled his own tab. He collapsed jerking as reaction to the drug sent him into anaphylactic shock.

  Lieutenant al-Habib, the platoon commander, pushed toward the casualty, swearing in a combination of concern and fear. Everybody was supposed to have been reaction-tested before now; and testing was a platoon responsibility.

  Kowacs’s eyes narrowed, but he said nothing. If he and al-Habib both survived the operation, al-Habib was out of the Headhunters.

  If.

  The warning chimed one minute. The holographic displays vanished, leaving the bulkheads bare for the moment before the hold’s lighting flickered and went off. Grant’s face was lit from below by his workstation, making him look the demon Kowacs was sure he really was.

  The lights came on again, but they were red.

  Kowacs opaqued his visor. He figured he could keep his expression neutral, but he didn’t want to bother any of his people if by chance they correctly read the terror behind their major’s eyes.

  The module drifted. It was more than weightlessness. Kowacs had the horrible feeling that he was rushing somewhere but had neither control nor even sensory input, as though his vehicle were skidding on ice in pitch-darkness. He heard some of his troops screaming, and he didn’t blame them.

  The world switched back with the abruptness of a crystal forming in a supersaturated solution. The lights became normal; holograms covered the bulkheads again.

  The holograms didn’t show the hangar. They didn’t show anything at all, just a gray blur without even a spark to pick it out.

  Grant was talking angrily, but his helmet contained his words. His big, capable fingers rapped a code into the keyboard. The gray blur shifted slowly through violet to a green like that of translucent pond scum. Though the color changed, it remained featureless.

  “What’s hap’nin to us?” somebody demanded sharply. “What’s—”

  Sergeant Bradley’s knife poised point-first in front of the panicked Marine’s right eyeball. The blade wouldn’t penetrate her visor, but its shock value was sufficient to chop her voice off ... and if she’d take time to reflect, she would have known that the edge could be through her windpipe before she got out the next syllable.

  “Hey, Grant,” Kowacs called.

  Grant continued talking to someone on the other side of his communications link. His anger was obvious even though his words were inaudible.

  Kowacs raised his visor and leaned across the workstation from the opposite side, putting his face where the civilian couldn’t ignore him.

  Grant’s fist clenched. Kowacs grabbed his wrist and squeezed.

  For a moment the two powerful men struggled, as motionless as neighboring mountains. Sienkiewicz moved just out of the range of Kowacs’s direct vision, but Kowacs didn’t need help.

  The civilian relaxed. His mouth formed a command, and the shield of silence dropped away from his helmet. “What the fuck do you want?” he snarled.

  “Where are we?” Kowacs whispered. Everyone in the module was watching them, but only the nearest Marines could hear the leaders over the hiss of nervous breathing. Grant shook his hand, trying to get feeling back into it.

  “There’s nothing wrong,” Grant said. “We’re not where we’re programmed to be—or when we’re programmed to be—but there’s nothing wrong. If they can’t straighten it out, we’ll just return when the seventeen minutes are up.”

  We hope, Kowacs’s mind added, but that wasn’t something even for a whisper.

  ”Right,” he said aloud. “I’m going to calm everybody down; but Eight Ball Command pays, understand?”

  Grant probably didn’t understand ... yet.

  Kowacs didn’t key the helmet intercom, opting for the more personal touch of his direct voice.

  “All right, Marines,” he bellowed. “We’re on R&R for the next fifteen minutes or so, courtesy of the Special Projects Bureau. But you all know the Fleet—what we get’s one room and no sandy beaches.”

  Siekiewicz laughed loudly.

  “Hey,” called al-Habib, “you can keep your sand if you find me a cathouse!”

  Kowacs grinned broadly at the lieutenant whose quick understanding had just reinstated him in the Headhunters. “Naw, Jamal,” he said. “When you join the Marines, you get fucked over—but you don’t get laid.”

  This time the laughter was general. The holographic light bathing the walls shifted slowly back to gray.

  Kowacs lifted his helmet to scratch his close-cropped scalp.

  “Okay, now listen up,” he resumed in a tone of command. “This is a good time for you all to go over your missions again by teams. The delay doesn’t mean that we’re off the hook. Even Special Projects—”

  Kowacs waved toward Grant, bent over his workstation. “—and Eight Ball Command are going to get things right eventually. I want us sharp when the time comes. Understood?”

  “Yes sir!” from a dozen throats, and no more eyes filled with incipient panic.

  “Then get to it!” ordered Sergeant Bradley. Helmet-projected maps began to bloom in the midst of three-Marine clusters, teams going over the routes they expected to take through the hostile base.

  Kowacs leaned toward Grant again. He expected the civilian to be visibly angry at b
eing made a laughingstock to defuse tension, but there was no expression on the big man’s face.

  Which proved that Grant was a smart bastard as well as a bastard; and that wasn’t news to Kowacs.

  “I’m in contact with echelon,” Grant said. “Everything is proceeding normally.”

  “Except we’re not where we’re supposed to be,” Kowacs said. Bradley and Sienkiewicz were close behind him—everything was close in the module’s hold—but they were facing outward, watching the company for their major.

  “They’ve refined the parameters,” Grant said. “We should be able to turn it around at the end of seventeen minutes and go in immediately, without docking.”

  “Fine,” said Kowacs without expression. “That’s almost as good as having the shit work right the first time.”

  “Just have your troops ready to go, mister!” the civilian snapped. “Got that?”

  “You bet,” said Kowacs as he straightened. “You just get us to the target; we’ll take it from there.”

  And they did.

  * * *

  The alarm chimed, the interior lights went red, and the intrusion module was within a cylindrical bay large enough to hold a liner—or a battleship. The trio of courier vessels docked there at present were dwarfed by the volume surrounding them.

  “Artificial gravity and standard atmosphere!” Kowacs shouted, relaying the information that other Headhunters might not think to check on their visors, as the hatches—only two fucking hatches, as though this were a bus and not an assault craft!—opened and the dozen Syndicate maintenance people visible in the bulkhead displays gaped at the module that had appeared in their midst.

  Bradley was through the hatch first because he had the shotgun and it was the close targets who were dangerous—though none of the Syndicate personnel, all of them human, seemed to be armed. The woman a hundred meters away, running for a courier vessel, was probably the biggest problem because she’d been smart enough to react.