by David Drake
“That's too soon,” said Dieter, her fingers tugging a lock of hair over one ear while her mind worked. “Even if—”
“forty-eight hours, Senator,” Hammer interrupted. “This is a violation of your bond. And I promise you, I'll have the support of all the other commanders of units contracted to Placidan service. Forty-eight hours, or we'll withdraw from combat and you won't have a front line.”
“You can't—” Dieter began. Then all muscles froze, tongue and fingers among them, as her mind considered the implications of what the colonel had just told her.
“I have no concern over being able to win my case at the Bonding Authority hearing on Earth,” Hammer continued softly. “But I'm quite certain that the present Placidan government won't be there to contest it.”
Dieter smiled without humor. “Seventy-two hours,” she said as if repeating the figure.
“I've shifted the Regiment across continents in less time, Senator,” Hammer said.
“Yes,” said Dieter calmly. “Well, there are political consequences to any action, and I'd rather explain myself to my constituents than to an army of occupation. I'll take care of it.”
She broke the circuit.
“I wouldn't mind getting to know that lady,” said Hammer, mostly to himself, as he folded the visiplate back into the counter.
“That takes care of your concerns, then?” he added sharply, looking up at Jolober.
“Yes, sir, it does,” said Jolober, who had the feeling he had drifted into a plane where dreams could be happy.
“Ah, about Captain Hoffritz …” Hammer said. His eyes slipped, but he snapped them back to meet Jolober's despite the embarrassment of being about to ask a favor.
“He's not combat-fit right now, Colonel,” Jolober said, warming as authority flooded back to fill his mind. “He'll do as well in our care for the next few days as he would in yours. After that, and assuming that no one wants to press charges—”
“Understood,” said Hammer, nodding. “I'll deal with the victim and General Claire.”
“—then some accommodation can probably be arranged with the courts.”
“It's been a pleasure dealing with a professional of your caliber, Commandant,” Hammer said as he shook Jolober's hand. He spoke without emphasis, but nobody meeting his cool blue eyes could have imagined that Hammer would have bothered to lie about it.
“It's started to rain,” observed Major Steuben as he muscled the door open.
“It's permitted to,” Hammer said. “We've been wet be—”
“A jeep to the front of the building,” Jolober ordered with his ring finger crooked. He straightened and said, “Ah, Colonel? Unless you'd like to be picked up by one of your own vehicles?”
“Nobody knows I'm here,” said Hammer from the doorway. “I don't want van Zuyle to think I'm second-guessing him—I'm not, I'm just handling the part that's mine to handle.”
He paused before adding with an ironic smile, “In any case, we're four hours from exploiting the salient Hoffritz's company formed when they took the junction at Kettering.”
A jeep with two patrolmen, stunners ready, scraped to a halt outside. The team was primed for a situation like the one in the alley less than an hour before.
“Taxi service only, boys,” Jolober called to the patrolmen. “Carry these gentlemen to their courier ship, please.”
The jeep was spinning away in the drizzle before Jolober had closed and locked the door again. It didn't occur to him that it mattered whether or not the troops bivouacked around Paradise Port knew immediately what Hammer had just arranged.
And it didn't occur to him, as he bounced his chair up the stairs calling, “Vicki! We've won!” that he should feel any emotion except joy.
“Vicki!” he repeated as he opened the bedroom door. They'd have to leave Placida unless he could get Vicki released from the blanket order on Dolls—but he hadn't expected to keep his job anyway, not after he went over the head of the whole Placidan government
“Vi—”
She'd left a light on, one of the point sources in the ceiling. It was a shock, but not nearly as bad a shock as Jolober would have gotten if he'd slid onto the bed in the dark.
“Who?” his tongue asked while his mind couldn't think of anything to say, could only move his chair to the bedside and palm the hydraulics to lower him into a sitting position.
Her right hand and forearm were undamaged. She flexed her fingers and the keen plastic blade shot from her fist, then collapsed again into a baton. She let it roll onto the bedclothes.
“He couldn't force me to kill you,” Vicki said. “He was very surprised, very ….”
Jolober thought she might be smiling, but he couldn't be sure since she no longer had lips. The plastic edges of the knife Vicki took as she dressed him were not sharp enough for finesse, but she had not attempted surgical delicacy.
Vicki had destroyed herself from toes to her once-perfect face. All she had left was one eye with which to watch Jolober, and the parts of her body which she couldn't reach unaided. She had six ribs to a side, broader and flatter than those of a human's skeleton. After she laid open the ribs, she had dissected the skin and flesh of the left side farther.
Jolober had always assumed—when he let himself think about it—that her breasts were sponge implants. He'd been wrong. On the bedspread lay a wad of yellowish fat streaked with blood vessels. He didn't have a background that would tell him whether or not it was human normal, but it certainly was biological.
It was a tribute to Vicki's toughness that she had remained alive as long as she had.
Instinct turned Jolober's hand to the side so that he vomited away from the bed. He clasped Vicki's right hand with both of his, keeping his eyes closed so that he could imagine that everything was as it had been minutes before when he was triumphantly happy. His left wrist brushed the knife that should have remained an inert baton in any hands but his. He snatched up the weapon, feeling the blade flow out—
As it had when Vicki held it, turned it on herself.
“We are one, my Horace,” she whispered, her hand squeezing his.
It was the last time she spoke, but Jolober couldn't be sure of that because his mind had shifted out of the present into a cosmos limited to the sense of touch: body-warm plastic in his left hand, and flesh cooling slowly in his right.
He sat in his separate cosmos for almost an hour, until the emergency call on his mastoid implant threw him back into an existence where his life had purpose.
“All units!” cried a voice on the panic push. “The—”
The blast of static which drowned the voice lasted only a fraction of a second before the implant's logic circuits shut the unit down to keep the white noise from driving Jolober mad. The implant would be disabled as long as the jamming continued—but jamming of this intensity would block even the most sophisticated equipment in the Slammers’ tanks.
Which were probably carrying out the jamming.
Jolober's hand slipped the knife away without thinking—with fiery determination not to think—as his stump kicked the chair into life and he glided toward the alley stairs. He was still dressed, still mounted in his saddle, and that was as much as he was willing to know about his immediate surroundings.
The stairs rang. The thrust of his fans was a fitful gust on the metal treads each time he bounced on his way to the ground.
The voice could have been Feldman at the gate; she was the most likely source anyway. At the moment, Jolober had an emergency.
In a matter of minutes, it could be a disaster instead.
It was raining, a nasty drizzle which distorted the invitations capering on the building fronts. The street was empty except for a pair of patrol jeeps, bubbles in the night beneath canopies that would stop most of the droplets.
Even this weather shouldn't have kept soldiers from scurrying from one establishment to another, hoping to change their luck when they changed location. Overhanging facades ought to have been c
rowded with morose troopers, waiting for a lull—or someone drunk or angry enough to lead an exodus toward another empty destination.
The emptiness would have worried Jolober if he didn't have much better reasons for concern. The vehicles sliding down the street from the gate were unlighted, but there was no mistaking the roar of a tank.
Someone in the China Doll heard and understood the sound also, because the armored door squealed down across the archway even as Jolober's chair lifted him in that direction at high thrust.
He braked in a spray. The water-slicked pavement didn't affect his control, since the chair depended on thrust rather than friction—but being able to stop didn't give him any ideas about how he should proceed.
One of the patrol jeeps swung in front of the tank with a courage and panache which made Jolober proud of his men. The patrolman on the passenger side had ripped the canopy away to stand waving a yellow light-wand with furious determination.
The tank did not slow. It shifted direction just enough to strike the jeep a glancing blow instead of center-punching it. That didn't spare the vehicle; its light frame crumpled like tissue before it resisted enough to spin across the pavement at twice the velocity of the slowly advancing tank. The slight adjustment in angle did save the patrolmen, who were thrown clear instead of being ground between concrete and the steel skirts.
The tank's scarred turret made it identifiable in the light of the building fronts. Jolober crooked his finger and shouted, “Commandant to Corporal Days. For the Lord's sake, trooper, don't get your unit disbanded for mutiny! Colonel Hammer's already gotten Red Ike ordered off-planet!”
There was no burp from his mastoid as Central retransmitted the message a microsecond behind the original. Only then did Jolober recall that the Slammers had jammed his communications.
Not the Slammers alone. The two vehicles behind the tank were squat armored personnel carriers, each capable of hauling an infantry section with all its equipment. Nobody had bothered to paint out the fender markings of the Division Legere.
Rain stung Jolober's eyes as he hopped the last five meters to the sealed facade of the China Doll. Arrything could be covered, could be settled, except murder—and killing Red Ike would be a murder of which the Bonding Authority would have to take cognizance.
“Let me in!” Jolober shouted to the door. The armor was so thick that it didn't ring when he pounded it. “Let me—”
Normally the sound of a mortar firing was audible for a kilometer, a hollow shoomp! like a firecracker going off in an oil drum. Jolober hadn't heard the launch from beyond the perimeter because of the nearby roar of drive fans.
When the round went off on the roof of the China Doll, the charge streamed tendrils of white fire down as far as the pavement, where they pocked the concrete. The snakepit coruscance of blue sparks lighting the roof a moment later was the battery pack of Red Ike's aircar shorting through the new paths the mortar shell had burned in the car's circuitry.
The mercs were playing for keeps. They hadn't come to destroy the China Doll and leave its owner to rebuild somewhere else.
The lead tank swung in the street with the cautious delicacy of an elephant wearing a hoopskirt. Its driving lights blazed on, silhouetting the port commandant against the steel door. Jolober held out his palm in prohibition, knowing that if he could delay events even a minute, Red Ike would escape through his tunnel.
Everything else within the China Doll was a chattel which could be compensated with money.
There was a red flash and a roar from the stern of the tank, then an explosion muffled by a meter of concrete and volcanic rock. Buildings shuddered like sails in a squall; the front of the port offices cracked as its fabric was placed under a flexing strain that concrete was never meant to resist
The rocket-assisted penetrators carried by the Slammers’ tanks were intended to shatter bunkers of any thickness imaginable in the field. Red Ike's bolthole was now a long cavity filled with chunks and dust of the material intended to protect it.
The tanks had very good detection equipment, and combat troops live to become veterans by observing their surroundings. Quite clearly, the tunnel had not escaped notice when Tad Hoffritz led his company down the street to hoo-rah Paradise Port.
“Wait!” Jolober shouted, because there's always a chance until there's no chance at all.
“Get out of the way, Commandant!” boomed the tank's public address system, loudly enough to seem an echo of the penetrator's earth-shock.
“Colonel Hammer has—” Jolober shouted.
“We'd as soon not hurt you,” the speakers roared as the turret squealed ten degrees on its gimbals. The main gun's bore was a 20cm tube aligned perfectly with Jolober's eyes.
They couldn't hear him; they wouldn't listen if they could; and anyway, the troopers involved in this weren't interested in contract law. They wanted justice, and to them that didn't mean a ticket off-planet for Red Ike.
The tribarrel in the tank's cupola fired a single shot. The bolt of directed energy struck the descending arch just in front of Jolober and gouged the plastic away in fire and black smoke. Bits of the covering continued to burn, and the underlying concrete added an odor of hot lime to the plastic and the ozone of the bolt's track through the air.
Jolober's miniature vehicle thrust him away in a flat arc, out of the door alcove and sideways in the street as a powergun fired from a port concealed in the China Doll's facade. The tank's main gun demolished the front wall with a single round.
The street echoed with the thunderclap of cold air filling the track seared through it by the energy bolt. The pistol shot an instant earlier could almost have been proleptic reflection, confused in memory with the sun-bright cyan glare of the tank cannon—and, by being confused, forgotten.
Horace Jolober understood the situation too well to mistake its events. The shot meant Red Ike was still in the China Doll, trapped there and desperate enough to issue his Droids lethal weapons that must have been difficult even for him to smuggle into Paradise Port.
Desperate and foolish, because the pistol bolt had only flicked dust from the tank's iridium turret. Jolober had warned Red Ike that combat troops played by a different rulebook. The message just hadn't been received until it was too late ….
Jolober swung into the three-meter alley beside the China Doll. There was neither an opening here nor ornamentation, just the blank concrete wall of a fortress.
Which wouldn't hold for thirty seconds if the combat team out front chose to assault it.
The tank had fired at the building front, not the door. The main gun could have blasted a hole in the armor, but that wouldn't have been a large enough entrance for the infantry now deploying behind the armored flanks of the APCs.
The concrete wall shattered like a bomb when it tried to absorb the point-blank energy of the 20cm gun. The cavity the shot left was big enough to pass a jeep with a careful driver. Infantrymen in battle armor, hunched over their weapons, dived into the China Doll. The interior lit with cyan flashes as they shot everything that moved.
The exterior lighting had gone out, but flames clawed their way up the thermoplastic facade. The fire threw a red light onto the street in which shadows of smoke capered like demons. Drips traced blazing lines through the air as they fell to spatter troops waiting their turn for a chance to kill.
The assault didn't require a full infantry platoon, but few operations have failed because the attackers had too many troops.
Jolober had seen the equivalent too often to doubt how it was going to go this time. He didn't have long; very possibly he didn't have long enough.
Standing parallel to the sheer sidewall, Jolober ran his fans up full power, then clamped the plenum chamber into a tight nozzle and lifted. His left hand paddled against the wall three times. That gave him balance and the suggestion of added thrust to help his screaming fans carry out a task for which they hadn't been designed.
When his palm touched the coping, Jolober used the contact
to center him, and rotated onto the flat roof of the China Doll.
Sparks spat peevishly from the corpse of the aircar. The vehicle's frame was a twisted wire sculpture from which most of the sheathing material had burned away, but occasionally the breeze brought oxygen to a scrap that was still combustible.
The penthouse that held Ike's office and living quarters was a squat box beyond the aircar. The mortar shell had detonated just as the alien started to run for his vehicle. He'd gotten back inside as the incendiary compound sprayed the roof, but bouncing fragments left black trails across the plush blue floor of the office.
The door was a section of wall broad enough to have passed the aircar. Red Ike hadn't bothered to close it when he fled to his elevator and the tunnel exit. Jolober, skimming again on ground effect, slid into the office shouting, “Ike! This—”
Red Ike burst from the elevator cage as the door rotated open. He had a pistol and eyes as wide as a madman's as he swung the weapon toward the hulking figure in his office.
Jolober reacted as the adrenaline pumping through his body had primed him to do. The arm with which he swatted at the pistol was long enough that his fingers touched the barrel, strong enough that the touch hurled the gun across the room despite Red Ike's deathgrip on the butt.
Red Ike screamed.
An explosion in the elevator shaft wedged the elevator doors as they began to close and burped orange flame against the far wall.
Jolober didn't know how the assault team proposed to get to the roof, but neither did he intend to wait around to learn. He wrapped both arms around the stocky alien and shouted, “Shut up and hold still if you want to get out of here alive!”
Red Ike froze, either because he understood the warning—or because at last he recognized Horace Jolober and panicked to realize that the port commandant had already disarmed him.
Jolober lifted the alien and turned his chair. It glided toward the door at gathering speed, logy with the double burden.
There was another blast from the office. The assault team had cleared the elevator shaft with a cratering charge whose directed blast sprayed the room with the bits and vapors that remained of the cage. Grenades would be next, then grappling hooks and more grenades just before—
