Crisis

by David Drake

  The Headhunters had their own damned ward. English could have stayed out of there, if he were smarter than a piece of AI. But he’d been electro-research so long that, he thought more like his Delta Associate than like a man.

  Or so he told himself, as he used his office’s clout to browbeat his way past the orderlies and into the Headhunters’ ward. He couldn’t imagine what Sawyer’s excuse was for taking on all this additional punishment–or so he pretended.

  But he did know. They’d lost their TA and the Haig’s Intel officer, and as far as they were concerned, they had some payback to do.

  Big guys in full combat gear who had clearly just come through refit call look a little scary if you’re in the lifesaving part of the war business. English’s hardsuit was patched with shiny resurfaced places and inset with new, unburned electronic modules whose housings were smoked where the old ones had fried. His helmet didn’t say his name on it, yet, since it was brand-new and he’d just ported his files and his ER micros into it wholesale.

  He couldn’t decide what was better: having his Delta One Associate running happily in a brand-new housing, or not having his name on his helmet. Next to the pharmakit slung at his waist was his kinetic pistol. It was the only piece of equipment he had that didn’t need a retrofit after this particular Saturday afternoon.

  A woman doctor came out of nowhere and planted herself between English and Sawyer, and the oxy tent in which Kowacs was lying, greased, patched, and hooked up to some serious life-support.

  English was still testing his helmet, so he had it on visor down. He ran a WINTEL warning video display across the front where she could see it: WARNING: INTELLlGENCE SOURCES AND METHODS.

  She gestured angrily at him, her mouth working. Somehow, he didn’t want to hear what she had to say, so he wasn’t taking audio. He put out a gloved hand, took her by the shoulder, and moved her out of his way.

  What right did she have to be up here giving him a hard time when Manning and Cleary were MIA?

  You got real quirky when things went this bad, this long. “Sawyer, you want to stay here and deal with her?”

  She wasn’t going away. She was right back there in front of him. seventy kilos of ministering angel. He tried to tell himself that she was Kowacs’s angel, so he shouldn’t shoot her.

  “Sir–Toby, if you’re goin’, go.”

  “Right.”

  He looked back once and saw the huge form of his ER lieutenant looming, in full kit (including ELVIS pack), over the woman, hands on his hips, apparently listening to whatever she was saying.

  English’s gloved hand was shaking when he puIled the tent seal open. He was taking full audio, so he heard the warning beeper that said he’d disturbed something. Damn, he didn’t want to hurt Kowacs’s chances. ...

  The man under all that medication wasn’t looking any too conscious. English went off line, flipped up his visor, and said, “Nick, I need that communicator you had–the black one. Nick, where is it? Can you hear me?”

  Those painfully swollen eyelids quivered, as if eyes were roving under them. Kowacs moved his fingers, and a sound came from the 121st’s major that English would never forget.

  Animal pain that escapes despite your best intentions isn’t anything to be ashamed of, but Kowacs was trying to talk, not telegraph agony.

  English leaned close. He could smell pus already, and burned soldier, and shit and worse. He wanted to close his eyes but he couldn’t. He was coaxing, “Come on, Nick, remember the black box?” when Sawyer’s voice in his com said, “I got it, Toby. Let him be. She says you’re bringing germs he can’t fight.”

  Great. What’s a little more guilt? English got out of there, trying not to “touch anything, you dolt,” the way the lady doctor ordered.

  She slapped the black communicator down into his open hand as if she couldn’t care less what she had there.

  All war toys were the same to some of these folks, who cleaned up afterward.

  “Is he going to be all right, Doctor?” English asked.

  “That,” said the woman with a face full of lines, “depends on your definition of ‘all right.’ Fit to fight, perhaps? I’m not sure. Maybe someday. But not all right, I don’t think. Not ever. Let’s hope we don’t have to replace that much of you, sonny, in the near future: these Headhunters have about exhausted our store of kamikaze replacement parts.”

  “Are you threatening me?” he said very softly, through his bullhorn, as he polarized his faceplate flat black.

  “No ... Captain. I’m warning you. We’re low on plasma, synthetic skin, and replacement organs–unless a few more of your friends here die and those haven’t been microwaved so badly that their livers are medium well done. So don’t bring us any more strays, all right? In case you need us. Do ... you ... copy ... Captain?”

  “Go fuck yourself,” English suggested, waving a hand at her dismissively that, in other circumstances, might have lashed across her face.

  “Sir, if you don’t mind me saying so, you asked for that.”

  “And that’s not all we’re going to ask for,” English said on the way out of there. They were up near the Intel decks. “Let’s see if we can find out where this com box was tuned to send Nick’s transmissions.”

  “Oh, man. You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Take a look at it.”

  As they spoke, they were moving through the halls. Staffers up here didn’t often see full-kit ground-pounders, but ER went where it wanted. This was the first time Toby English realized how much clout his SERPA ticket could deliver.

  Sure, he could see Padova, anytime, and no regular Marine could do that. But his SERPA clout had them in the depths of the war room before he knew it. This was where TA should have been. If Cleary had stayed here, everything would have been okay. They’d have gotten to Nick’s Headhunters anyhow. ...

  And then, finally, he admitted to himself that maybe there wouldn’t have been any live Headhunters to go to, if Cleary and Manning hadn’t gone in with their close-support weapons, and he nearly bumped into a console because he couldn’t see straight for a minute.

  MIA. Shit.

  Sawyer was taking off his helmet. English stopped him. The war room was a wonder if you hadn’t spent all that time on an electro-research station. Still, it was the best in the Fleet. And it was humming.

  They stood around for a full five minutes before anybody bothered to ask them what they were doing there.

  Then English said, “Friend of mine had this. We want to know how come, and who’s receiving from it. SERPA requests immediate TS/SCI/RD response.”

  That moved asses. You had to learn the alphabet to succeed in this man‘s Fleet.

  Somebody came back with a mini-message chip. “Here you are, sir. In your encoding. One copy only.” Pale eyes tried to look past English’s faceplate. No way, buddy: you’re not going to know a damned thing about who I am or what I want; you couldn’t get cleared for it if you lived to be a hundred. Eat your heart out.

  On his dual-com, English said, “How about we go sit in the officers’ lounge and see what happens when we send somebody a message on this?”

  Sawyer said, “If it’s the somebody I think you mean, do you want to see him in the officers’ lounge?”

  “Nope. But I want it clear where I was, at least some of the time tonight. After all, Saturday night, middle of a war–anything can happen.”

  * * *

  Talking about killing Grant from ISA wasn’t something you did with your gear up and running. There were too many ways to reconstitute wiped memory. And Eight Ball Command, Grant’s outfit, knew every trick in the book. They wrote the book.

  So the bar was a nice, loud, safe place to be, full of white noise and transients and neon. English cuddled up under a blinking beer logo that was putting out enough buzz to defeat any possible recording device except an AI-assisted lip-reader. He only talked when he had his beer mug to his lips.

  They worked out what they wanted to do, and
how. It didn’t take long. After aII, the two of them were experienced murderers, trained by Eight BaII Command and equipped for assassination of enemy infiltrators by the Interservice Support Activity.

  Sawyer needed a shave. So did English. His eyes were bleary and his fingers stubbornly refused to find anything on that communicator that would tell him more than if you pushed TALK and talked, maybe something got sent somewhere. To somebody. The chip from the war room hadn’t told him to whom, or where.

  “We ought to take it back to the Ninety-second’s tech bay and open it up before we–”

  “Here, Sawyer. Feel it,” English suggested.

  The com box was little, oblong, black as sin, and cold as hell. “You know APOT when you see it. This thing could be talking to the other end of the universe–but it’s not. It’s talking to someplace on the Haig. Otherwise, how would TA have gotten Kowacs’s distress call?”

  They were going to kill Grant, this time. But first they had to flush him. “You try,” English suggested.

  “Okay, sir.” Sawyer’s pupils were tiny black dots, despite the low light in here. “Ninety-second ER, Lieutenant Sawyer speaking. Request meet. Repeat, request one-on-one. Haig secure; request on-site. Sawyer out.”

  If English had had to hand/eye print his way into some secure facility right now, he’d never have gotten past an AI screener looking for psychotic chemistries. He knew it. He just wasn’t willing to do anything about it. Neither was Sawyer.

  But they were smart enough to try making Grant come to them. After all, SERPA commandos had permission to jump echelon when they needed to.

  The communicator didn’t light up, answer, or do any damn thing except stay cold.

  But along about closing time, somebody came in, looked around, and left without ordering anything.

  “See that?” Sawyer said.

  “Yep.” Unconsciously, English checked the kinetic pistol on his hip.

  “I told you,” Sawyer said, drunk and sick at heart, sounding whiny, “they’re not fools enough to give us a shot at the pig-bastard.”

  English had been to the bathroom twice, and nobody’d slithered out from under a urinal to fix a meeting.

  “Let’s go,” he said, and got up.

  If Grant wasn’t going to come to him here, then they’d do it the hard way.

  But as soon as they’d left the bar, two guys out of uniform closed in on them from either side, saying, “You’re ER, right?”

  “We’re it,” English affirmed. ”What’s it to you?”

  “You’ve got a special mission briefing in twenty minutes on the Intel deck.”

  Bingo. “Why am I not surprised?” he said.

  Sawyer said, “Redhorse isn’t in any shape to deploy for at least forty-eight hours.”

  The two guys were clean-shaven, friendly looking, and unconcerned. “If you’ll come with us . . .”

  At least they didn’t try disarming English. He wasn’t in any mood for that.

  Sawyer kept giving him looks. Their helmets were slung on their hips. English knew what Sawyer was thinking: they were throwing their lives away, trying this now, this way, on the Observer’s terms.

  But Grant had cost them way too much.

  English had almost convinced himself that Grant wouldn’t dare face them when they got to the Intel deck. Their escort stopped at an unmarked office door: “Here you go, sirs.”

  English, for one, didn’t feel much like a “sir” right then. Behind the door, Grant was waiting, sitting at a desk with his home-world haircut and that cat-and-mouse smile.

  The Observer still had his tweaky red cord on his wrist. English knew that if he let Grant start talking, he was lost. Sawyer was already having second thoughts. Cold-blooded was lots harder than hot-blooded, and they’d had time to cool down.

  Grant said, “I’ve got a mission for you boys that–”

  English’s kinetic pistol somehow leaped into his hand of its own accord. He never remembered making the decision. He never remembered sighting down its barrel.

  He sure as hell never recalled squeezing the trigger gently, so gently, shooting one-handed at the big man in the suit behind the desk.

  But then he remembered everything that happened in a rush: the men from the corridor outside pouring in, Sawyer’s face, full of anguish and remorse, and Jay Padova’s security people.

  He saw a series of floors and walls and gun butts and fists.

  And then he saw a psychiatric counselor who told him, “You know, your timing was terrible, Captain English. The fighting has stopped.”

  He didn’t know what that meant. He was too tired to care. He couldn’t sleep for the MIAs in his dreams.

  And nobody would let him see Sawyer. If he didn’t want to talk to Sawyer so badly, he probably wouldn’t have minded talking to so many guys he didn’t want to talk to, including Grant.

  And that was strange, because he was sure he’d shot Grant dead.

  But the big home-world spook came into English’s electro-restraint cell, sat down on the other side of the clear partition, and said, “If you’re decompressed, Captain, maybe we can have a little talk. We still need you, and I’m willing to pretend this didn’t happen if you are.”

  “You’re the one with the fucking hole in you,” English said hoarsely. The big spook was too stiff when he moved not to be taped and stitched. One thing English knew by sight was a wounded man.

  Forget this? His MIAs? Kowacs with that APOT communicator in his hand? How?

  “English, I keep trying to teach you that I’m not your enemy.”

  “So, I’m a slow learner. Court-martial me. Let’s pretend, like you said, that I believe you.”

  “Okay,” said Grant, as smoothly as a newsreader giving a sanitized report of the Alliance’s latest “victory.” “SERPA wants you back in the field. So do I. But it’s going to take some doing this time, asshole.”

  “I don’t care if I ever go back out. Didn’t you get my message? I want to get some sleep, except I can’t because some of my people are MIA. ... Never mind. Fuck you. Go train another fool to use this freaky-ass gear. It makes you crazy. Or haven’t you noticed?”

  “We know. As I said, we’re in a tight spot. Sawyer’s agreed to take this deal. Why don’t you?”

  “What’s the deal?”

  “Back into combat, friend, no harm done. Nothing in your jacket. No questions asked or answered. Same venue. If you really want to shoot a human enemy, I may have the right person for you, in a little while. But right now, I’m considering this a misunderstanding between us, personally, and nothing to do with service records.”

  “Right, I’ve been in this hole for–” How long? He didn’t know. Maybe not too long, if they needed him to put the 92nd back in the field. “–long enough to be missed, anyway, and nothing happened. Spooks.” He shook his head.

  “Is that a yes, English?”

  “I dunno. How’s Kowacs?”

  “Yes or no, cowboy. We won’t ask again. If I have to replace you, you’re dogmeat. Come out of this, and you and I will go after the problem together. As I said, I’m willing to consider this whole episode just a misunderstanding.”

  Grant was one tough bastard, English thought grudgingly. “I thought the fighting had stopped.”

  “I can’t talk to you until and unless you give me the answer I want to hear, Captain.”

  “You got it,” said English with a deep sigh. It would be good to be able to move around freely. He missed Sawyer. He even missed his Delta Associate. But this was so weird, his hackles were up. “I got to tell you, I’m going to find my MlAs.”

  “I hope so, English. Now, if you want to ask me questions, I’ll answer them.”

  Damn, you couldn’t even screw up bad enough to get out of this fucking war. He didn’t get it. But of course he did: the 92nd was too valuable to lose. It was nothing personal, as Grant said.

  All of which made English not much more than nothing, himself. Next time he went hunting humans, he�
��d do better. But then he’d be hunting his MIAs.

  Somewhere, Cleary and Manning were alive, he told himself. And so whatever he did to get to them had to be worth it. Nobody else would try to find them until there weren’t any higher priorities.

  He looked at the man he’d tried to kill and saw nothing but relief in Grant’s clear, intelligent eyes. Then the mission briefing started, and Toby English realized that this was for real.

  He was getting out of jail free, just like the card in his wallet said he could do. For the duration of the war, at least; he was too valuable to lose.

  When he walked back into the Marine tech bay, he knew he’d only been in solitary for around forty-eight hours. He waved offhandedly to the non-coms working on their gear, and headed for his APOT suit.

  In the helmet, hanging upside down on its hook, was a black communicator. Just like the one Kowacs had had. Maybe the same one Kowacs had had.

  But this time he knew what to do with it.

  Sawyer came up behind him and said, “Hey, sir. Nice rest, huh?”

  He turned around and grinned at Sawyer bleakly. “Not really. Get staff together. I’ll want to brief in forty minutes.”

  “Phew,” said Sawyer. “Yes, sir.”

  English tried to assess Sawyer’s damages as the lieutenant walked away. You couldn’t see anything wrong in his lieutenant’s walk or the set of his shoulders. It was all in the look of his eyes.

  But everything was wrong in wartime, or else you wouldn’t be out here fighting electro-intelligences in the first place.

  Cleary, honey ... Manning. This one’s for you.

  Lo! Long we linger ... and languish in lassitude,

  vowed to vigilance ... in viewing the victory

  of erstwhile invaders ... who, ending enmity,

  forbade us to foray, ... fearless in friendship,

  to blast to oblivion ... bare-skinned betrayers.

  Solemn our study ... of swarms of swift ships

  stalking silently, ... streaks across star screens,

  while we watch, world-bound ... like wilt-whiskered weaklings,