The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  “Very well, then, Sir. I suggest that you let me contact her AID, Santu, directly over a radio link.”

  Spencer had been thinking more of searching the city for her, watching the spots she’d be likely to go. On the other hand, København was a larger town than he expected. Still, radio seemed awfully risky. “Won’t it be more dangerous to contact her that way than face to face? I mean, if you were concerned with StarMetal tracking a call to an orbiting ship, won’t they be watching radio traffic in the city?”

  “I would prefer to forego the contact altogether, but if we must go through with it, I believe this to be the safest way to go. Certainly safer and faster than loitering around the StarMetal building watching for her to show up. I will work at low power, sending a millisecond burst, and will manipulate the signal in such a way as to make it appear to be coming from a greater distance. If they see through my subterfuge, we should still be far enough away to be shielded somewhat by other local low-power signals. There are risks in the method, but I believe it to be the safest means of contacting her quickly.”

  “All right, let’s do it.”

  “Very well then, find someplace quiet where I can work for a minute without being disturbed,” the AID said. “And I certainly hope this is worth the risk.”

  ###

  Suss walked up and down in the park, trying to watch every approach to it at once. Suddenly there was a familiar and unwelcome click inside her ear. Santu had switched on her mastoid earpiece by remote control. It was bad enough, Suss thought, to have machines hooked up to your head—but then for other machines to be able to control them . . .

  “Incoming priority call,” Santu announced via the mastoid implant. “Captain Spencer is calling.”

  Damn! This was not the moment for nursemaiding Spencer. Not when she was waiting for contact in a city she presumed to be hostile. “Hold him off, Santu,” she muttered into her throat mike. “Tell him to not to worry about me. Just have him sit tight on the ship, and I’ll return as soon as I can.”

  “Captain Spencer’s not on the ship. He’s in the city. From what his AID told me, he’s got some new information you need to know immediately—and it’s too sensitive to transmit over radio. For what it’s worth, his AID concurs that the info is very hot, and we need it. Captain Spencer wants to see you now, face to face.”

  “Dammit. All right. Send a microburst back, and advise him to join my rendezvous with our local friend. Don’t transmit actual locales—use the code groups. You fed the agent contact procedures to his AID before we left the ship, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then his AID should have the referents for the meet without our having to broadcast it. Do it.”

  Hell. A double-meet with two amateurs. How much messier could this get?

  ###

  Sisley walked through the park at as smooth and steady a pace as she could manage. Fear surged through her veins. Was she doing it right? Was there some procedure she had forgotten? Would the Kona Tatsu agent recognize her from their elderly file photo?

  From out of nowhere, a small, slight woman appeared ahead of her on the path, looked at her and smiled. “Sisley! What a surprise to see you! How has your mother been?”

  With a heartfelt sense of relief and a smile that was utterly sincere, Sisley stepped forward and embraced a complete stranger. “It’s been so long,” Sisley said. “And I have so much—so much—to tell you.”

  The small, dark-haired woman smiled up at her and slid her arm through Sisley’s. “Then let’s walk,” she said.

  The two of them moved through the park, and neither spotted the autocop silently hovering far overhead. The cop could have moved in then—but a great deal could be learned with a long-distance mike.

  ***

  Suss listened to Sisley and was scared. Mannerling had tracked StarMetal’s purchases from the inside, and found some very disturbing things. It wasn’t the frantic, random buy-up that Suss had been able to trace from the outside, but something for more alarming, proceeding under the cover of random-seeming buying.

  Behind a screen of low-ball buys that seemed to be fraudulent, forced on the sellers, was a pattern of buys made for very high prices indeed.

  Suss felt very cold, walking through that green, sunlit park. Every purchase in the high-price tier had some sort of military component. If StarMetal bought an asteroid, it was an asteroid with plasma cutters installed—cutters that could be converted to weapons by simply pointing them out away from the asteroid. If they bought up a surplus spacecraft, it was jump adaptable, or just happened to be carrying a cargo of shock rifles or body armor when it changed hands.

  There seemed to be no question that they were trying to create a military potential, in contravention of every law and tradition in the Pact. Yet Daltgeld and StarMetal had let the Navy in with open arms. They should have been nervous about the sudden arrival of the task force. Or was it that they didn’t give a damn about the Navy, that four ships wouldn’t make any difference anyway?

  Suss tried to think as she watched the horizon for Spencer. “Mannerling,” she asked, “what’s the scuttlebutt around here about the Navy showing up unannounced? The bigwigs at all concerned?”

  Sisley Mannerling shrugged noncommittally. “Not so far as I can tell. I used to deal with Chairman Jameson directly, but I haven’t actually seen him face to face in months. I think he’s taken ill. The other higher-ups seem baffled as much as anything. I don’t think they are quite sure what Jameson is up to, either. They seem nervous about the buying spree, but the naval visit didn’t bother them.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser.” Could this guy Jameson be making the play all by himself? It was a hell of a lot for one man to take on. But Suss didn’t have time to worry about that. She looked up and saw Spencer coming toward them, about a hundred meters away. “Listen,” she said to Sisley. “That guy over there is another friend of mine. He’s one of us, and cleared for the whole operation. He supposed to have some hot data for me as well. He’s a little new to fieldwork, so if he’s a trifle nervous, don’t let it alarm you. We’re just going to be three friends walking in the park, okay?”

  Sisley nodded and happened to glance up at that moment. “Fine with me,” she said in a poor imitation of a calm voice. “But what are you going to tell that thing?”

  Suss looked up and swore. An autocop, right overhead. How the hell could she have missed it? Easily, if it was trying to hide from the two of them. All it had to do was hover behind their heads. Suss recognized this model as a specialized surveillance unit, especially designed for silent operation.

  Suddenly its stunner arm snapped out. It dove for Spencer.

  Time seemed to drop into slow motion. Suss saw Spencer look up, saw him spot it.

  Saw him spot it just as it fired at him from point blank range.

  The cop fired a flurry of stun needles into Spencer. Suss drew her weapon, but Spencer fired his repulsor before she had a chance. He fired into the cop, tearing a gaping hole in its carapace. It wobbled once, then flipped over.

  Only then did Suss think to wonder why the stun gun hadn’t affected Spencer. There was a perfect thicket of stun needles sprouting from his chest. The body armor, of course. Suss ran over to him.

  Suss had to grant that they taught a man how to be cool in the Pact military. Spencer just stood there, waiting for them, calm as could be, using the butt of his repulsor to break the ends of the needles off. Smart, probably. It would be tricky to move quickly with a pin cushion full of tranquilizer on his chest.

  Suss holstered her own gun and jogged up to him, letting Sisley catch up behind her.

  “The damn thing was watching us,” she said without preamble. No time for the social niceties just at the moment. “But it attacked you as soon as you showed up.”

  “Probably had my Pact Military ID photo to work by,” he said. “And it didn’t want you to hear my information. Is that our local contact?” he asked, nodding as Sisley.

 
“Complete with blown cover,” Suss said bitterly. “Sisley Mannerling, Captain Allison Spencer. But right now we have to get out of here. All of our plastic pal’s friends are going to come calling real soon. We’ve got to move.”

  Spencer nodded. “Yeah, but which way? Mannerling?”

  Mannerling pointed toward a long, low collection of building on a rise of land, a few hundred meters outside the park. “That way,” she said. “Toward the shopping zone. Maybe we can get lost in the crowd.”

  “Fine,” Suss said. She looked around the park. A few people were looking at them from a distance away, but fortunately no one seemed to have been close enough to really see what had happened. Suss approved of cities with lots of wide open spaces. “We walk toward there. No running, no panic, just regular people out to browse the shops. Do both of you—”

  “Boss, I’m getting a police transmission,” Santu announced.

  “Tell us about it, Santu.”

  “I’ve picked up a series of encrypted bursts on the automated police bands. I can’t decode them—yet, anyway—but I can track them physically by the relay patterns. Twenty cops at least on way here.”

  “Lovely,” Suss said. “We’ve got lots of company on the way. Let’s walk quickly.”

  ###

  For what it was worth, the shopping zone was much closer than it had looked. Suss would take whatever scrap of luck she could. And a crowded mall, with dozens of entrances and throngs of leisurely shoppers cluttering up the place, was ideal for getting lost in. It was even an old-fashioned covered mall, with the roof serving to keep out both the weather and any attempt at aerial surveillance. Suss wanted to see what the cops were doing, and Mannerling led them upstairs to an enclosed view lounge that overlooked the park.

  “The best thing we can do is loiter here long enough for the opposition to arrive at the crash,” Suss said. “Wait until they’re concentrating there, and then move out of the vicinity. And keep it calm,” she said again, not happy to be nursemaiding two amateurs.

  “Here they come,” Spencer announced. Suss watched, wishing that she could risk using her binoculars. But she dare not risk even that. They couldn’t draw attention to themselves.

  The autocops on Daltgeld were strange-looking things, about two-and-a-half meters tall with long, slender, featureless bodies surmounted by spherical sensor-heads and ending at the bottom in wide hoverskirts. They resembled nothing so much as enormous chess pawns. There were more than enough of them out there for a whole game right now. She counted at least thirty autocops hovering around their wrecked brother.

  There did not seem to be any rhyme or reason to the cops’ behavior. Suss decided they had been set on random patrol but instructed to remain inside a restricted area. The sight of thirty cops, all busily trying to search a hundred-meter-square area for criminals while trying not to ram each other would have been funny in other circumstances. But not now.

  There was something malevolent in the abrupt movements of those oversized chess pieces. Usually autocops moved carefully, slowly, for fear of making a mistake. Normally, they were programmed to assume it was better to let a bad guy get away by being too cautious, rather than gun down innocent grandmothers by being too forceful.

  Not today. These cops were on hair-trigger mode, flitting about like angry hornets, responding with ferocious aggression to any hint of movement. The local equivalent of a squirrel happened to wander too near the wrecked cop—and four cops blasted it to a smallish smear of red pulp.

  “Stand by,” Santu announced through the mastoid. “Coded orders coming in. I can’t read what they are, but the cops are being told what to do.”

  Suss watched as the cops reacted to their instructions as abruptly as a switch being thrown. They formed up into a tight circle with the crash point at its center, and then began to move outward from that point. They fanned out across the landscape in perfect formation, a widening circle of autocops.

  “They aren’t scanning or doing any search work as they move,” Spencer said quietly. “I don’t get it.”

  But it looked purposeful. And Suss knew who they were looking for. It was definitely time to get moving. Suss turned and led the others out of the observation lounge back down into the shopping arcade proper, into a huge concourse lined with shops of all sizes. “Sisley,” Suss said to Mannerling, “this is your town. Where the hell do we go?”

  There was still time, Suss told herself. Time to think, time to work on the problem of escape carefully. She figured it would take the cops a good long while to track them in here, following normal autocop procedure.

  Sisley opened her mouth to speak—and was silenced by a thundering roar behind them.

  There was a sudden burst of light in the concourse. A hundred meters down the corridor, a huge section of the roof collapsed and a squad of autocops dove down into the mall, weapons at the ready. Suss swore silently to herself. They weren’t wielding stunners this time, but heavy-duty repulsors. That has used them to blow the roof open. Body armor would be useless against those.

  How the hell did they decide to search here so fast? And what madman was ordering autocops to blast through masonry that way?

  The cops spread out into a skirmish line and advanced down the esplanade, moving toward the three fugitives, herding all the frightened shoppers ahead of them.

  There was another explosion at the opposite end of the mall segment, and another squad of cops dove through the roof into the concourse. They too set up a skirmish line and began to advance toward the cops on the far end. Spencer, Suss and Mannerling were boxed in between the two lines.

  The calm shopper’s paradise of a moment before was transformed into a madhouse. The air was filled with dust and smoke. The screams and shouts of the panicked shoppers echoed clamorously down the esplanade, their cries half-drowned out by the hissing roar of autocop hoverjets.

  “Oh my God,” Mannerling said. “We’re trapped.”

  “No!” Spencer said. “They’re still searching, trying to flush us from the crowd. If they had us spotted precisely, they wouldn’t act this way. They know we’re here, but they don’t know where exactly. Otherwise they would have dropped right on top of us, rather than blockading in the whole corridor.”

  “Are there any underground exits?” Suss asked.

  “I’ve never shopped in this zone before!” Mannerling said in a quavering voice. “I don’t know. There ought to be. Down. Just find any staircase or droptube or elevator and take it down.”

  Suss cursed silently. Mannerling was getting near her breaking point. She ducked into the first store she found and charged through it. Spencer followed behind, dragging Mannerling along with him, ignoring the shouts and cries of the clerks and customers. An employee exit. Maybe one that would lead to a down staircase. There had to be one.

  She spotted a door at the far end of the store. She kicked it open—and they found themselves in a storeroom with no door besides the one they had come through. Maybe at the back? She ran to the far end of the room—and found herself up against a blank wallboard.

  Suss cursed herself, the mall architect, their luck, and the damned autocops. She pulled a shaped charge from the utility vest under her blouse. She pulled the cover strip off the adhesive backing and slapped the charge on the wall a meter off the ground. There was a timer knob on the charge packet. She set the thing for minimum delay, five seconds, punched in the plunger, and backed off, herding Spencer and Sisley out of the way.

  If either of them had been expecting a deafening roar, he or she would have been disappointed. The charge was directionalized, expending virtually all its force against the wall. It gave off a subdued and dignified whump and filled the storage room with a cloud of powdered wall.

  The explosion left behind a neat round hole in the wall, about a half-meter in diameter. Suss bent over and went through it, urging Mannerling and Spencer to follow. Suss peered back through the hole at the storeroom. So far, no sign of pursuit—the invasion of the autocops had a
larmed everyone so much that a few strangers running into the back room weren’t that noticeable.

  She turned and led the others through the room they had blasted into. It was another storeroom, the mirror image of the one they had just departed, the back of a toy store by the looks of the merchandise.

  They came to the far end of the storeroom. Spencer got ahead of her and threw open the door. Suss had expected to come in on a little boutique like the one on the far side of the wall, but this place was huge, a cavernous showplace full of children’s dreams stacked to the far-off ceiling. Mannerling and Spencer hurried through the aisles, Suss watching the rear. So far the turmoil of the autocop attack hadn’t spread this far. The shoppers here calmly wandered through the merchandise, and children raced around happily.

  Weird, that all here was calm and quiet fifty meters from all that chaos. That wasn’t going to last, Suss thought. Sooner or later, the cops would be after them.

  Suddenly there was a deafening crash behind them. Cops, Suss realized. Enlarging the hole she had made through the wall between the storerooms. And they had gotten here too fast for it to be a random search.

  By the sound of it, they were bumping up against the wall between the storeroom and the main showroom. As if they weren’t using their eyes, but were using radio-sense instead.

  Radio-sense. Good Lord, that meant the cops were tracking them, homing in on a signal. But how?

  Spencer got it first. “Oh my God,” he said. “My body armor.” He stopped dead in his tracks in the middle of the stuffed toy section and began peeling off his jacket.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Mannerling demanded.