The Fleet05 Total War

by David Drake (ed)

  Kowacs shot her. He was second through the hatch because the 121st was his company, not Sie’s, however much the corporal might want to put her body out there first when the action was going to start.

  The target flopped on the walkway with her limbs flailing. There were dots of blood on the back of her tunic, and a great splash of scarlet and lung tissue blown by the keyholing bullets onto the walkway where she thrashed.

  Taking prisoners had to wait until there were enough Headhunters out of the module to secure the area.

  Bradley ran for the corridor marked D on the maps from Eight Ball Command and 6 in yellow on the girdered lintel. Kowacs followed his field first toward what was the transient wing of the base according to data sucked from the prisoner’s brain. The major fired a short burst into a glazed office, shattering the clear panels and sending the staff to cover behind banks of short-circuiting equipment.

  As usual, Corporal Sienkiewicz carried the considerable weight of a shoulder-fired plasma weapon in addition to her regular gear. She lighted the bay with a round of plasma into the nose turret of both courier vessels on her side of the intrusion module.

  The dazzle and crack! of the miniature fusion explosions forced their reality onto the huge room. One of the turrets simply slagged down, but ammunition detonated in the other. Balls of ionized gas bubbled through the vessel’s open hatches.

  The navigational computer of that boat wasn’t going to be much help to the spooks back at Port Tau Ceti, but the raiders couldn’t risk somebody arming the turrets before teams detailed for vessels in dock got aboard the couriers.

  Coming back without the desired information was better than not coming back. Even Grant, monitoring all the teams from the belly of the module, would agree with that.

  Bradley carried a bottle of stun gas. It was a volatile liquid intended for contact application, though the fumes would do the job if they had to. The sergeant directed the bottle’s nozzle into the office Kowacs had shot up, angling the fine jet so that it sprayed the terrified personnel hiding behind their bullet-riddled equipment.

  Pickup teams would secure the prisoners later, though they’d be stacked like cordwood beneath Headhunter boots during extraction. Provided casualties didn’t clear too much of the module’s hold.

  The corridor formed a Y. Bradley followed the left branch, as planned.

  There were rooms on both sides. The third door down quivered as though in indecision. Kowacs riddled it. He was switching to a fresh magazine when the fat man in garish silks and ribbons tumbled out into the corridor, still clutching his pistol.

  He’d have been a good one to capture—if that had been an option compatible with Kowacs staying alive.

  Belt-fed plasma weapons fired short bursts from the docking bay. Timmes’s platoon was taking an active definition of perimeter security. Light reflecting down the corridor angles threw momentary harsh shadows.

  The docking bay was out of Kowacs’s direct sight. He could have viewed the module by switching his visor to remote images, just as he could follow the progress of any of his Marines either visually or by a digital readout.

  He didn’t bother. The Headhunters were too experienced to need their major looking over their shoulders—

  And anyway, their major had enough on his own plate.

  An emergency barrier began to slide across the corridor twenty meters ahead.

  “Down!” Kowacs shouted as his left hand snatched a grenade from his equipment belt. He flung the bomb side-arm as he flattened.

  A pair of security men in helmets and uniforms ran from a cross-corridor just beyond the sliding barrier. They leveled sub-machine guns. Bradley sent an arc of stun gas in their direction, but the bottle didn’t have quite enough range and Kowacs, sliding on his right shoulder, couldn’t twist his assault rifle on target fast enough to—

  The antitank grenade struck the barrier, clung for an instant, and went off with a deafening crash. The barrier bulged inward, jamming in its track. The shaped-charge warhead blew a two-centimeter hole through the metal and cleared the corridor beyond with a spray of fragments and molten steel.

  The shock wave skidded Kowacs back a meter from the blast area. The frangible casing powdered harmlessly, as it was intended to do, and com helmets saved the Headhunters’ hearing.

  “Go!” Kowacs cried.

  Sienkiewicz was already on her feet and past the barrier, the near limit of the station’s transient accommodations. The corporal paused beside the first door to make sure Bradley was ready with his stun gas, then smashed the panel open with her boot.

  Bradley sprayed the interior with his nozzle set on mist. The gas glowed like a fluorescent rainbow in the flicker of distant plasma discharges.

  Another team sprinted past Kowacs and broke left at the cross-corridor. Automatic fire blasted.

  The team leader spun and fell. His number two dropped her bottle of gas and dragged the leader beyond the corner of the main corridor, across from Kowacs.

  The number three, under cover also, started to lean out to return fire with his automatic rifle. Kowacs waved him back, then whipped a cluster of fragmentation grenades around the corner with a motion that exposed none of his body.

  The cluster rebounded as a unit from the far wall of the cross-corridor, separated into its component sections with a triple pop, and detonated in a white sleet of flame and glass shrapnel.

  Kowacs dived into the corridor in the shadow of the blast. Bradley was beside him and Sie covered their backs, facing the opposite direction in case company tried to intervene down the other leg of the cross-corridor.

  There were three uniformed Syndicate personnel in the corridor, two sprawled on their faces and a third staggering toward safety as a barrier ten meters away slid to seal the hall. Kowacs and Bradley both fired.

  The security man flung his arms out and lurched forward. His back was splotched with slits from the airfoil charge of Bradley’s shotgun; there were three neat holes between his shoulders—Kowacs’s aiming point.

  The barrier ground to a halt. The security man’s body might not have been enough to stall out the motor, but his helmet was. There was just about enough room for a man to squeeze through the opening between the barrier and its jamb.

  Somebody on the far side of the barrier fired. The bullets ricocheted through the gap, howling like banshees and all the more dangerous for the way they buzzsawed after deforming on the corridor wall.

  “Cover me!” screamed the other team’s number two. She bolted past Kowacs and Bradley, snatching up her bottle of gas as she ran.

  Kowacs poured the remainder of his rifle’s magazine through the opening. Bradley unhooked a grenade cluster. His shotgun’s pattern was too wide to get much of the charge through the opening at that range, and the airfoils wouldn’t ricochet effectively anyway.

  A bullet zinged past the running Headhunter, close enough to pluck a pouch of ammo from her belt and half spin her, but she reached the dead zone behind the barrier without injury. She fumbled with her bottle of gas. Bradley’s arm went back with a grenade cluster.

  “D—” Kowacs shouted, but he didn’t finish the “Don’t” because there wasn’t much chance the sergeant would miss the risky throw—and anyway, Bradley was going to do what he pleased in a firefight, whether Nick Kowacs thought it was a good idea or not.

  The grenade cluster arced through the narrow slot and burst with a triple flash waist-high above the corridor floor. At the blast, the number two poked her gas bottle into the opening and began to spray a mist of anesthetic into the other side of the barrier.

  The firing slackened. A woman in the bright, loose clothing favored by Syndicate bigwigs slumped across the opening and lay still. A pistol slipped from her hand.

  Unexpectedly, the Headhunter dropped her gas bottle and collapsed also.

  The fucking seventeen-minute delay. The gas anti
dote was wearing off!

  “Headhunter Six to all personnel,” Kowacs said as he lurched to his feet and another Syndicate bullet whanged through the slot. “Stop using gas! The antidote’s—”

  Sienkiewicz fired the last round from her plasma weapon through the opening. The wall thirty meters down the corridor bloomed in a sun-hot fireball as the jet of directed plasma sublimed the metal-and-ceramic structure into vapor in a microsecond.

  “—wearing off!” Kowacs completed as he hit the slot a step ahead of Bradley, who’d been that much slower getting to his feet, and two steps before Sie, who rocked back with the violence of the bolt she’d unleashed.

  The major went through sideways. His equipment belt hooked on the edge of the barrier anyway, twisted but didn’t hold him.

  The corridor dead-ended. The four rooms on the left side were glowing slag from the plasma charge. A security man knelt in an open doorway across from where the bolt had hit. He’d dropped his rifle and was pawing at his eyes, possibly blinded already and certainly dead when Kowacs walked a one-handed burst across his chest.

  The shooters didn’t know anything worth carrying back to Tau Ceti.

  The end door on the right side was open a centimeter when Kowacs saw it, slamming shut an instant thereafter. He hit its latch bootheel-first, springing fasteners that were intended for privacy rather than security.

  The interior lights were on. There were two people inside, and a coffin-sized outline taped to the back wall of the room. The people were a man and a woman, both young, and they were starting to lock down the helmets of their atmosphere suits.

  The man’s gauntleted hand reached for the sub-machine gun across the bed beside him. Kowacs fired, but Bradley fired also and at point-blank range the rifle bullets were lost in the plate-sized crater the shotgun blew in the target’s chest.

  The back wall exploded outward. The outline had been drawn with adhesive-backed explosive strips, and the vaguely familiar woman detonated it as she finished fastening her helmet.

  The other side of the wall was hard vacuum.

  The rush of atmosphere sucked the woman with it, clear of the Headhunter’s guns. Loose papers, bedding, and the helmet from the corpse sailed after her.

  The mask of Kowacs’s emergency air supply slapped over his nose and mouth, enough to save his life but not adequate for him to go chasing somebody in a proper suit. The suit’s maneuvering jets would carry the woman to a regular airlock, when the raiders left and it was safe to come back.

  The room lights dimmed as the atmosphere that scattered them into a useful ambience roared through the huge hole. Kowacs reached for the male corpse, lost his balance, and staggered toward death until Sie’s huge hand clamped the slack of his equipment belt.

  “Let’s go!” she shouted, her voice attenuated to a comfortable level by the AI controlling Kowacs’s headphones. “We’re timing out!”

  “Help me with the body!” Kowacs ordered as the three of them fought their way back into the corridor. The wind was less overmastering but still intense.

  “We don’t need dead guys!” Bradley shouted, but he’d grabbed the other leg of the body, clumsy in its bulky suit.

  “I got it,” said Sienkiewicz, lifting the corpse away from both men. She slammed it through the gap at the barrier in what was half a shove, half a throw.

  “We need this one,” Kowacs wheezed.

  The corridor was empty except for Syndicate corpses. Headhunter pickup teams had gathered the casualties as well as the loot and headed back to the module. It’d be close, but Kowacs’s team would make it with ten seconds to spare, a lifetime. ...

  “We need this deader . . .” he continued as they pounded down the hallway against the lessening wind-rush. Sie had the body. “Because he’s wearing ... ensign’s insignia ... on his collar.”

  The module was in sight. A man stood in the open hatch, Grant, and goddamn if he didn’t have his arm outstretched to help jerk the latecomers aboard.

  “Fleet ensign’s insignia!” Kowacs gasped.

  * * *

  The receptionist looked concerned, and not just by the fact that Major Kowacs carried a full load of weapons and equipment into her sanctum.

  Or as much of his weapons and equipment as he hadn’t fired off during the raid.

  The escort, rising and falling on the balls of his feet at the open door of these third-tier offices, was evidently worried. “Come this way, please, sir,” the youngster said. Then, “He’s been waiting for you.”

  “I been waiting for a hot shower,” Kowacs rasped. Powder smoke, ozone, and stun gas had worked over his throat like so many skinning knives. “I’m still fucking waiting.”

  The escort hopped ahead of Kowacs like a tall, perfectly groomed leprechaun. Kowacs could barely walk.

  The adrenaline had worn off. He’d seen the preliminary casualty report—with three bodies not recovered. There was a ten-centimeter burn on the inside of his left wrist where he must have laid the glowing barrel of his assault rifle, though goddamn if he could remember doing that.

  There were bruises and prickles of glass shrapnel all over Nick Kowacs’s body, but a spook named Grant insisted on debriefing him at once, with your full equipment, mister.

  The door flashed SPECIAL PROJECTS/TEITELBAUM an instant before it opened.

  “Where the hell have you been?” snarled Grant.

  His briefcase lay open on the desk. A gossamer filament connected the workstation to the office’s hologram projector. Fuzzy images of battle and confusion danced in the air while the portrait of Admiral Teitelbaum glared down sternly.

  “I had to check out my people,” Kowacs said as he leaned his blackened rifle against one of the leather-covered chairs. He lifted one, then the other of the crossed bandoliers of ammunition over his head and laid them on the seat cushion.

  “I said at once,” the civilian snapped. “You’ve got platoon leaders to baby-sit, don’t you?”

  “I guess,” said Kowacs. He unlatched his equipment belt. It swung in his hands, shockingly heavy with its weight of pistol and grenades. He tossed it onto the bandoliers.

  God, he felt weak. ...

  Grant grimaced. “All right, give me your helmet.”

  Kowacs had forgotten he was wearing a com helmet. He slid it off carefully. The room’s filtered air chilled the sweat on the Marine’s scalp.

  The civilian reversed the helmet, then touched the brow panel with an electronic key. Kowacs knew about the keys but he’d never seen one used before.

  Line Marines weren’t authorized to remove the recording chips from their helmets. That was the job of the Second-Guess Brigade, the rear-echelon mothers who decided how well or badly the people at the sharp end had behaved. ...

  Grant muttered to his workstation. The ghost images shut down. He put the chip from Kowacs’s helmet directly into the hologram reader. His own weapon and shoulder harness hung over the back of his chair.

  “Didn’t your equipment echo everything from our helmets?” Kowacs asked.

  He remained standing. He wasn’t sure he wanted to sit down. He wasn’t sure of much of anything.

  “Did a piss-poor job of it, yeah,” the civilian grunted. “Just enough to give me a hint of what I need.”

  He scrolled forward, reeling across the seventeen-minute operation at times-ten speed. Images projected from Kowacs’s viewpoint jerked and capered and died. “Too much hash from the—”

  There was a bright flash in the air above the desk. “—fucking plasma discharges. You know”—Grant met the Marine’s eyes in a fierce glare—“it was bughouse crazy to use a plasma weapon in a finger corridor. What if the whole outer bulkhead blew out?”

  “It didn’t,” said Kowacs. “You got complaints about the way the job got done, then you send somebody else the next time.”

  Grant paused the projection. Th
e image was red with muzzle flashes and bright orange with pulmonary blood spraying through the mouth of the man in the tattered spacesuit.

  “Smart to bring back the body,” Grant said in a neutral voice. “Too bad you didn’t capture him alive.”

  “Too bad your system didn’t work the first time so we could’ve kept using the stun gas,” Kowacs replied flatly. The parade of images was a nightmare come twice.

  Grant expanded the view of the dying man’s face. “We’ve got a hard make on him,” he said. “There was enough residual brain-wave activity to nail him down, besides all the regular ID he was carrying. Name’s Haley G. Stocker, Ensign ... and he disappeared on a scouting mission.”

  “A Syndicate spy?” Kowacs said.

  “That’s what the smart money’s betting,” the civilian agreed.

  He backed up the image minusculely. The blood vanished like a fountain failing, the aristocratic lips shrank from an O of disbelieving horror into the sneer the ensign bore an instant before the bullets struck.

  “Only thing is,” Grant continued, “Ensign Stocker disappeared thirty-five years ago.”

  He looked at Kowacs and raised an eyebrow, as if he were expecting the Marine to come up with an explanation.

  “Bullshit,” said Kowacs. “He’s only about twenty. He was.”

  “Close,” the civilian agreed. “Twenty and a half standard years when you shot him, the lab says.”

  He let the projector run forward. The spy, the boy, hemorrhaged and died again before his mind could accept what was happening.

  “I don’t get it,” said Nick Kowacs. He heard a persistent buzzing, but it came from his mind rather than the equipment.

  Grant looked ... tired wasn’t the right word, lonely wasn’t the right word, but ... Grant had paid a price during the operation too—

  Or he’d never have been talking to a line Marine this way.

  “It looks like we still don’t have all the bugs out of the APOT intrusion system,” Grant said. “The best we can figure now, the second pass was early. Thirty-five years early.”