Grimmer Than Hell

by David Drake

  Stripped, the noncom looked as thin as a flayed weasel. He was missing one toe, a plasma burst a decade before had left half his scalp hairless and pink, and much of the body between those two points bore one or another form of scarring.

  "No problem," Kowacs said—and there wasn't, but it was nice to know that there was always going to be somebody to watch his back. It kept you alive in this line of work; and more important, it kept you as sane as you could be. "Captain English heads up the Ninety-Second. This—" shifting his gaze to the taller officer—"is First Sergeant Bradley."

  "Toby," said English, shaking with Bradley—both of them with hands wet from the shower. "Not 'captain' yet anyway, though maybe after this last one . . ."

  "Hey!" said Bradley with enough enthusiasm to ignore the fact that English was obviously distracted. "You guys did a hell of a job on the port! Nothin' left but rubble and cinders. Say, they got you looking for that weasel commando that shot up Post Bessemer two nights ago?"

  "Ah," said English. "No, we're about to lift. As a matter of fact—"

  Bradley didn't need the glance Kowacs gave him. "Sorry, sir," he said as he ducked back into the shower facility. "Damn good to meet you!"

  English spent a moment marshaling his thoughts after Bradley had left the two officers alone again—if alone was the right word for men standing beside one of the main roads crisscrossing the huge base.

  Base Thomas Forberry—named to commemorate symbolically the hundreds of thousands of civilians whom the Khalia had murdered—had been woodland and farms gone to brush when the Fleet landed to retake Bethesda less than a month before. Now it had a hundred kilometers of perimeter fence with bunkers and guard towers; a nearby spaceport and naval dockyard ten times bigger than the port that had served the planet before the Khalian invasion; buildings to house more people than there were indigenous humans in the portion of the planet now under the Fourth District Military Government installed here at Base Forberry—

  And seven thousand five hundred hectares of mud—the inescapable result of any military construction project save those undertaken in deserts, ice caps, or vacuum.

  "Ah," said Kowacs—he'd have helped English say what he needed to if he'd had the faintest notion of what it was. "Bradley was right. I don't think—" he paused; but it was true, so he said it, "anybody could've done a better job on the port than you guys did. You'll get your second star for sure."

  "Had a lotta help from the indigs," English said, letting his eyes slant away toward the horizon. "They got us through the perimeter, you know?"

  "No shit?" said Kowacs. He hadn't heard anything about that.

  He was vaguely aware that he was standing stark naked beside the road. Some of the admin types who'd landed when the shooting pretty much stopped might take that badly, but modesty wasn't a useful virtue among troops who spent most of their time either in the field or packed into the strait confines of a landing vessel.

  "I guess . . ." said Toby English with a diffidence that must have been as unusual to him as it would have been in the man to whom he was speaking. "That what your sergeant said was the straight goods? Nothing left at the port?"

  "Oh, look, man, I'm sorry," said Kowacs who finally thought he knew what was bothering the other officer. "Look, we recovered two of your people. But the third one, the suit transponder still worked but there was half the tail of a destroyer melted across him. Nothing we could do, but we tried."

  "Thanks," said English with a smile that was genuine but too brief for that to have been the real problem. "Dead's dead. Don't mean nothin'."

  "Yeah," said Kowacs, agreeing with the meaning rather the words. "We've all sent home eighty kilos of sand with a warning to the family not to open the coffin."

  "Ah," English continued, looking away again. "I guess you'd've checked if there was any bunkers under the Terminal Building? I thought there might've been."

  "No bunkers," Kowacs said, keeping the frown off his forehead but not quite out of his voice.

  "That was downwind of one of the destroyers that cooked off," he continued carefully. "The fission triggers of her torpedo warheads, they burned instead of blowing. But it was hot enough that our suits are still in there—" he pointed toward the plastic dome of the decontamination building, "and they thought we ought to shower off pretty good ourselves."

  English smiled falsely. "Yeah," he said. "Look, lift-off was twenty minutes ago, and—"

  Kowacs put a hand on the other Marine's arm to stop him. As gently as he could, he said, "There were a lot of bodies inside, but only indigs and weasels. No Marine equipment. What happened out there?"

  English shrugged and said, "Don't matter a lot. I told you, the indigs got us through the perimeter. I think most of 'em got out again before things started to pop, but—the On-the-Spot agent running the unit, Milius . . . She was keeping the weasels occupied inside the Terminal Building."

  He met Kowacs' gaze with clear, pale eyes of his own. "She had balls, that one."

  "Trouble with sticking your neck out . . ." said Kowacs softly, looking toward a distance much farther in time than the horizon on which his eyes were fixed. "Is sooner or later, somebody chops it off."

  "Don't I know it," English agreed bitterly. His voice and expression changed, became milder. "Don't we all. Look, I gotta run."

  He paused, then added, "Hey. If it can't be the Ninety-Second gets those weasel hold-outs, I hope it's you guys."

  "I hope it's us lifts-off tomorrow," Kowacs called to the taller officer's back; but English was already busy talking to a truck driver, bumming a ride to the spaceport and a no-doubt-pissed naval officer.

  The Ninety-Second was one of the half-companies shoe-horned into Fleet combat units instead of being carried in a purpose-built landing craft the way the Headhunters were. People whose proper business was starships generally didn't have much use for the ground-specialty Marines . . . but at least the destroyer Haig hadn't lifted off while the Ninety-Second's commander did his personal business.

  Most of Kowacs' marines were done showering and had filed back into the changing room. They'd have to don the same sweaty uniforms they'd worn for six hours under their hard suits while searching the shattered port, but the shower had raised their spirits.

  Bradley was still waiting behind the canvas. So was Sienkiewicz, who looked as tough when naked as she did with her clothes on—and who was just as tough as she looked.

  The twenty nozzles down either side of the canvas enclosure were still roaring happily, spewing out water that had been brought twenty kilometers through huge plastic aqueducts. The drains that were supposed to carry it away were less satisfactory. At least half the water spilled out of the enclosure and found its own way slowly toward the lowest point in Base Forberry.

  In an unusual twist of justice, that point was the parade ground surrounded by base headquarters and the offices of the military government, located in a valley where they couldn't be sniped at by the few Khalia still alive on Bethesda.

  "Everything copacetic, sir?" Bradley asked with a smile to suggest that he hadn't been listening through the canvas while the officers talked.

  "No problem," Kowacs grunted. And there wasn't, not one you could do anything about. Couldn't help the dead, like English had said. "Let's get back to barracks and find fresh uniforms."

  "Ah—we were wondering about that, sir," the field first sergeant said. "The trucks are still pretty hot, even after we hosed 'em off."

  Kowacs shrugged as he strode toward the changing room. "It's that or walk," he said. "I'll get 'em into a drydock over at the naval base as soon as I can, but Marine ground equipment is pretty low priority over there.

  "And this place—" he waved toward the closed chamber in which robot arms were scrubbing the hard suits, "isn't big enough to hold trucks."

  Sienkiewicz laughed in a throaty, pleasant—feminine—voice. "What's the matter, sarge?" she asked Bradley. "You expect a little low-level radiation to kill us?"

  All thre
e of them laughed, but there was no humor in the sound.

  * * *

  The summons set off the bell and red flasher at either end of the barracks: it was a Priority One call. Marines threw down their mid-afternoon tasks and jumped to arms even before they heard the specifics of the message.

  There was only one thing on Bethesda now that could justify a Priority One call to the Headhunters. A single Khalian unit, an infiltration commando, hadn't died in heroically useless defense with the hundreds of thousands of other Khalia. The hit-and-run attacks of that surviving handful of weasels had been making things damned hot for the invasion forces.

  The problem was beyond the equipment and experience of the Alliance troops that made up the bulk of the ground elements involved in Bethesda's recovery.

  But it was made to order for the 121st Marine Reaction Company.

  Kowacs slid on his helmet. "Go ahead," he said as his hands fumbled with the shirt he'd hung over the back of the chair he was sitting on. The information would be dumped into the unit's data bank, but he liked to get his orders directly as well. It made him feel that he was involved in a human process, not just an electronic game.

  Of course it would be the computer which decided whether they made the strike by truck or loaded onto the Bonnie Parker to drop straight onto the weasels, trading longer preparation time for faster transit to the target area. Computers were great for that sort of computation, but humans—

  "Captain Kowacs," said the synthesized voice of an artificial intelligence. "You are directed to report to District Governor, Admiral the Honorable Saburo Takami, immediately."

  "Huh?"

  "A vehicle has been dispatched for you. It will arrive in one-point-five minutes. That is all."

  "Aye, aye," Kowacs said dazedly, not that the electronic secretary would have given a damn even if it hadn't broken the connection already. Priority fucking One.

  He'd set it up so that all Priority One calls were slaved through the barracks loudspeakers. Everybody was staring at Kowacs as he stomped toward the door, sealing his shirt front while his hands were full of the equipment belt which he hadn't had time to sling on properly yet.

  "Daniello," he called to his senior lieutenant, "hold the men in readiness."

  Nobody bothered to ask what they were to be ready for.

  Corporal Sienkiewicz was already waiting outside with bandoliers of ammunition and two unloaded assault rifles. She handed a set to her commanding officer.

  Because of the weasel raids, the military government was still treating the Fourth District as a combat zone. Personnel leaving Controlled Areas—bases and defense points—were ordered to carry weapons at all times, though the weapons were to be unloaded except on approved combat operations.

  And Sienkiewicz was right: there was no telling what Kowacs was going to hear from Admiral Takami, or how fast the District Governor would expect him to respond.

  It was just that Kowacs didn't like to have a gun around when he talked to administrative types. It turned his thoughts in the wrong directions.

  The jeep was strack and expensive, running on vectored thrust instead of the air cushion that would have been perfectly satisfactory on the plastic roadways of the base. The vehicle arrived within seconds of the time the AI had given Kowacs; and the driver—an enlisted man—had a voice almost as superciliously toneless as that of the machine when he said, "My orders are to transport one only to District Headquarters."

  "Then your orders were wrong," said Kowacs as he and Sienkiewicz got into the jeep. He hadn't intended her to come, and he didn't need a bodyguard at District Headquarters—the sort of guarding that the big corporal could do, at any rate.

  But neither was some flunky going to tell him he couldn't bring an aide along if he wanted to.

  The jeep sagged under the weight of a big man and a very big woman. Cursing under his breath, the driver lowered the surface-effect skirts and pulled back into traffic on the air cushion's greater support.

  Base Thomas Forberry was loud with vehicles, construction work, and the frequent roar of starships landing or lifting off from the nearby port. During lulls in the other racket, Kowacs could hear the thumping of plasma cannon from the perimeter. Some officers of the units on guard duty were "clearing their front of areas of potential concealment."

  Blasting clumps of trees a kilometer away wouldn't prevent the infiltration attacks the surviving Khalia were making; but it did a little to help the boredom of guard duty in a quiet sector.

  The civilian detention facility lay along one side of the road. Scores of wan indigs stared out at the traffic, careful not to come too close to the electrified razor ribbon that encircled the prison camp. The military government had already started rounding up Bethesdans who were reported to have collaborated with the Khalia. They'd be held here until they'd been cleared—or they were handed over to the civilian authorities for trial.

  When the Fleet got around to setting up a civilian administration.

  "Poor bastards," Kowacs muttered, looking away from the bleak hopelessness of the internees as the jeep crawled past at the speed of the trucks choking the base's main north-south boulevard.

  Sienkiewicz shrugged. "They live in the same barracks as us," she said. "They eat the same rations. They sit on their butts all the time without a goddam thing to do, just like we do."

  Kowacs met her eyes.

  "So tell me where their problem is?" she concluded.

  "Same place ours is," Kowacs agreed without much caring whether the driver could hear him also. "And we're going there now."

  * * *

  The parade square in the center of Base Forberry had been covered with plastic sheeting as soon as the three-story Base HQ and the District Government building were finished—and before crews had completed the structures on the other two sides of the square. Tracked machinery had chewed up half the sheeting and covered the remainder with mud of a biliously purple color.

  It was the same color as the silt which had seeped into Admiral Takami's office when storm winds flexed the seams of the pre-fab building.

  Kowacs saluted as carefully as he could, but he'd never been much of a hand at Mickey Mouse nonsense. The District Governor frowned—then scowled like a thunder-cloud when he noticed the Marine was eyeing the purple stain along the edge of the outer wall.

  The other naval officer in the room, a commander with good looks and only a hint of paunch, smiled at Kowacs indulgently.

  "Well, Kowacs," Admiral Takami said, "Sitterson here tells me we need you in this district. I'm not going to argue with my security chief. What's a government for if not security, eh?"

  "Ah?" Kowacs said. He couldn't understand what the governor meant.

  He prayed that he didn't understand what the governor meant.

  "What the governor means," said Commander Sitterson in a voice as smoothly attractive as his physical appearance, "is that the ground contingents are all well and good for large-scale operations, but we need a real strike force. The governor has had the 121st transferred from Naval command to the Fourth District government."

  Well, Kowacs had never believed God listened to a marine's prayers.

  "Well, I'll leave you men to get on with it," Takami said dismissively. "I have a great deal of work myself."

  As Kowacs followed the security chief out of the office, he heard the governor snarling into the microphone embedded in his desk. He was demanding a work crew with mops and scrub brushes.

  "I thought you'd rather hear about your reassignment from the governor rather than from me directly," Sitterson said in the anteroom. "Not a bad old bird, Takami. Won't get in the way of our carrying out our job. Did you keep the car?"

  "No sir," Kowacs said. He was trying to grasp what had just happened to him and his unit. He couldn't.

  "No matter," Sitterson said, though his frown belied his words. "We'll walk. It's just across the square."

  He frowned again as he noticed that Sienkiewicz, carrying both rifles, fol
lowed them out of the building.

  "My clerk," Kowacs said flatly.

  "Yes, that reminds me," Sitterson replied. "I'll want one of your men on duty at all times in my outer office. I have living quarters in the building, you know. I can't be too careful."

  Kowacs' skin burned as anger drove blood to its surface. "Ah, sir," he said. "We're a Marine Reaction Company."

  "Well, I want men who can react, don't I?" Sitterson retorted.

  Kowacs said nothing further.

  Security Headquarters was kitty-corner from the government building, a hundred meters away; but Kowacs had never thought Sitterson needed the vehicle for any reason but status. It was a windowless single-story structure, three times as long as it was wide—a module rather than a pre-fab. The door was at one end; Sitterson buzzed for admittance instead of touching the latch himself.

  The door opened to reveal an aisle running half the building's length. There were four closed doors to the left and eight barred cells on the right. The individual civilians in five of the cells leaned with their arms against their sides and their foreheads resting against the back wall.

  It was an extremely painful position. The petty officer who'd opened the door had a long shock rod with which to prod any of the prisoners who sagged or touched the wall with a hand.

  "Interrogation rooms," Sitterson said, gesturing toward the closed doors. He chuckled and added with a nod toward the cells, "I like my visitors to see that we mean business, here. This is the only entrance to the building."

  "What have they done?" Kowacs asked in a neutral voice.

  "That's what we're here to find out, aren't we?" Sitterson replied with a broad grin.

  One of the women in the holding cells was sobbing, on the verge of collapse. Kowacs lengthened his stride, drawing the security chief a little more quickly with him to the door at the far end of the aisle.

  They weren't quite quick enough into the office beyond. As Sienkiewicz shut the door behind them, Kowacs heard the reptilian giggle of the shock rod loosing its fluctuating current. The woman screamed despairingly.