by David Drake
Tovera stepped back on the landing, her face expressionless. She looked at the portion of the explosive still in her hand and threw it onto the concrete.
“I’ll go first,” Adele said, trotting up the steps. Working in the stacks of a major library was good training for a starship’s companionways—or for this.
“No, mistress,” Tovera said. She gripped the sub-machine gun in both hands.
“Yes, Tovera,” Adele said. “Remember your place!”
Rene had started the door groaning open, but Woetjans speeded the process by reaching past Adele to grab the edge of the panel. The bosun tugged. She’d slung a sub-machine gun, but she couldn’t have used it without removing her gauntlets. Apparently she’d decided her armored hands were to be her weapon of choice for this business.
Adele took her left hand out of her pocket and slipped through the portal. The interior was pleasantly cool after the ion-baked courtyard, though it’d probably seem dank if she had to spend long in it. Beyond was a corridor whose walls, floor and ceiling were concrete, splotched frequently with rust leaching from the reinforcing rods.
Adele turned right and strode toward Command Center Barbonnet, the post controlling this facet of the rampart. Her fingers itched to take out her data unit, but she had no need of it. She’d memorized not only the floor plan of this sector but also that of the one to the immediate south; until they’d reached Conyers orbit, Daniel hadn’t been certain about where he’d land within Fort Douaumont.
Adele’s entourage strode or stomped along behind her. Tovera and Rene were side by side. Adele risked a quick glance over her shoulder. The pair were glaring at one another, though they jerked their eyes ahead again when they realized she was watching them.
Woetjans was a step ahead of Barnes and Dasi. They’d taken their gauntlets off so that they could use their weapons, though the guns looked like toys in the hands of big men wearing rigging suits. Despite the weight and sweaty bulk of their gear, they matched Adele’s quick pace.
To the left were short staircases up to a gallery. From it opened embrasures in the outer face, intended for automatic impellers or small plasma cannon. From the records she had available Adele hadn’t been able to tell how many weapons were mounted. It wouldn’t matter if things went as they should, but—
A weedy young man stepped into the corridor. He saw the group of strangers and started to duck back up the stairs from which he’d come.
“Hold it right there, soldier!” Adele called in her most sneeringly upper-class Blythe accent. “Don’t you bother to salute here on Conyers?”
It’d be better if she weren’t wearing ill-sorted, oil-soaked utilities, but you use what you have. Tone and audacity would get her some way; she hoped they would get her far enough.
The man—soldier? civilian technician?—stopped, then slowly returned to the corridor. He started to salute, then fully absorbed the motley group of strangers and lowered his arm. “Mistress?” he said doubtfully.
“I’m Colonel Adele Mundy of the Fifth Bureau,” Adele said sharply. I say most things sharply, I suppose. “I’m here to investigate corruption in the government of the Bagarian Cluster. I expect answers and I expect them now.”
She paused. The local’s mouth dropped at the mention of the Fifth Bureau, Guarantor Porra’s personal enforcement organization. His face went pale and he began to pant.
“Who’s the officer in charge of Command Center Barbonnet?” Adele snapped. She’d be perfectly happy if the fellow hyperventilated and fainted, but there was also the risk that he’d run off in a screaming panic. It’d be easy to shoot him down—as Tovera, who’d been a member of the Fifth Bureau, would certainly do—but the sub-machine gun’s chatter risked giving the alarm also.
“What?” the fellow said. “Who?”
He swallowed. “Sir!” he chirped. “That’s Captain Cleggs, but I don’t think he’ll be there so it’ll be Chief Belmont. Sir!”
“All right, come along with us,” Adele said with a nod. “Corporal Barnes, take the fellow in charge but don’t hurt him unless he tries to warn the traitors.”
She strode down the corridor. The command post was on the other side of a pair of right-angle turns, intended as blast traps in case the fortifications were penetrated. A glance to the side showed her the local—what ever was his name?—following obediently, behind Woetjans and just ahead of Barnes and Dasi.
The door to the post hinged inward; it was halfway open. No one was on guard in the corridor, but a soldier in the outer section was seated so that he could watch through the gap.
He got up when saw Adele approaching. “Yes?” he called. He gripped the barrel of the sub-machine gun leaning against his chair and cradled it in his arms.
“I’m Colonel Mundy—” Adele said.
The soldier saw the armed group behind her. He slammed the steel door with his foot as he groped for the charging handle of his sub-machine gun.
Adele shoved against the door, jouncing it off the jamb but recoiling herself; the soldier outweighed her considerably. Woetjans stepped past and slammed her shoulder into the panel. The door flew open, bouncing the soldier into the partition separating the guard room from command center beyond. Another soldier was reaching for her sub-machine gun. The first man shot Woetjans in the chest.
Adele fired, hitting the shooter at the hairline. He lurched against the partition, then sprawled sideways. She took the pistol from her smoldering pocket and shot him twice more through the base of the skull as she entered the outer office.
The second soldier screamed and dropped her sub-machine gun. Tovera killed her anyway, a three-shot burst at the top of the breastbone which destroyed all the major blood vessels connected to the heart.
“Don’t hurt the equipment!” Adele shouted as she pulled open the door of the inner office.
An overweight woman in rumpled khakis sat at a U-shaped console with her back to the left-hand wall. Three younger male clerks in utilities had been at smaller electronic desks which faced hers. They’d started to get up when the door flew open, but the nearest threw his hands in the air and cried, “I surrender! I surrender!”
The woman in khaki snarled, “You bastards!” and opened a drawer in the right-hand pillar of her console. Adele shot her through the right eye; the bone behind the sockets was thin. She didn’t trust the ceramic pellets of her pocket pistol to penetrate the solid portions of the cranial vault.
The woman’s legs spasmed, throwing her out of her integral chair. She lay on the floor, thrashing and battering her head against the concrete wall. She’d voided her bladder and bowels when she died.
Adele stepped over the body, setting her pistol on top of the console. She needed both hands to bring up her data unit, and the gun barrel glowing from the quick sequence of shots would melt into the synthetic fabric of her tunic if she dropped it back in her pocket.
A sub-machine gun slammed the three captured clerks against the back wall and pinned them there for the length of the burst. Fifty rounds pulped their chests, splashing the room with osmium ricochets and powdered concrete.
“Tovera!” Adele screamed, but of course the shooter wasn’t Tovera, a sociopath but also a craftsman of slaughter. Tovera would never have wasted a full magazine like that when precise three-round bursts would do the job as well.
Barnes stood in the doorway, reaching for a reload from the pouch hanging from his hard suit. The barrel of his sub-machine gun was white-hot. The dusty gray air shimmered with ozone and aluminum ionized from the projectiles’ driving bands.
Tovera grabbed Barnes’ weapon by the receiver. When he wouldn’t let go, she cracked his knuckles with the butt of her own sub-machine gun and jerked it away.
“Help Dasi with Woetjans!” Tovera said. “Quick! Do you want her to die?”
Barnes’ mouth dropped open. He turned and slipped back into the outer office, moving as easily as if he weren’t wearing the rigging suit.
“Mistress?” said Tovera. “He was
upset. He’s a good man.”
Adele nodded as she synched her personal data unit with the console. She needed secure communications with the transport as well as to be able to access both Fort Douaumont’s systems, so she couldn’t simply use the console.
She wondered if the bosun was still alive. The hard suit wouldn’t stop projectiles, but being shot in the chest wasn’t necessarily fatal. As Adele knew.
Tovera returned to the outer office; Rene sat at the end desk and began shuffling through the display. At the moment, Adele was too busy to check what he was doing.
The boy looked greenish and his face was set. That might simply be in reaction to the smell. Smells, rather. The dry sharpness of lime laced with ions could only tinge the effluvium of bodies ripped apart while alive.
Adele found the controls quickly enough. First she changed the password and authentication sequence for all five batteries to a pair of eight-character strings of her own choosing. Next she switched the input option so that the password and authentication had to be entered through her personal data unit in order to be valid. Only when that background was in place did she shift the batteries to director fire so that they couldn’t be controlled by the battery officer.
Adele leaned back and closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. Her wands twitched, using Fort Douaumont’s own systems to open communications with the Skye Defender. As she did so, Rene rose from his desk and started for the door.
“Cazelet?” she said. Her eyes were watering from the dust, and the back of her throat was raw. The sound came out as a croak.
“I found a Medicomp in the next bay,” Rene said in a harsh voice. His eyes were watering; tears streaked his cheeks. “Maybe if we get the Chief to it. . . . The riggers and me, I mean. You’ll be all right with Tovera.”
Adele nodded curtly. “Yes,” she said, “I will.”
Had Tovera really feared that she’d punish Barnes for killing someone who perhaps didn’t need to be killed? That was a matter between Barnes and those who visited him in the night.
Adele focused on her display again and connected with the transport.
* * *
“Captain, this is Signals,” said Daniel’s commo helmet as he stood in the transport’s forward entry bay. It was Adele’s voice, but she sounded odd. Well, goodness knows what sort of rigmarole she’d had to go through to send the signal. “The artillery positions are neutralized. That’s the missiles too, I mean. And there hasn’t been an alarm yet, but there may be at any moment. Over.”
“Roger, Signals,” Daniel said. As he spoke, he pointed his finger across the bay toward Michael Sayer, the engineer’s mate at the hatch controls—he was a Sissie, of course—and chopped it down in a short arc while nodding to the hatch. “Break. Ladouceur, this is Squadron Six. Come down now and land in Grand Harbor according to plan. Nothing fancy, Mister Liu, just bring her down. Over.”
The hatch dogs withdrew like a bell chorus. Pumps whined, building pressure in the hydraulic jacks that forced the ramp down. Chatterjee hadn’t seen Daniel gesture to Sayer. He looked up, startled; at Daniel’s calm nod, he spoke into the mike flexed to his epaulet.
“Roger, Six,” Lieutenant Liu replied from the cruiser. “We’re approaching the window. We’ll begin our descent in ninety seconds. Ladouceur out.”
Daniel didn’t remark, but if it’d been him at the cruiser’s command console he’d have started his descent immediately and recalculated the details on the way down. He grinned. That, of course, was why Liu was in orbit now instead of being here where serious work was in progress.
The Ladouceur’s plasma cannon could’ve come in handy, but using them would require the cruiser to hover close to Fort Douaumont. Lieutenant Liu’s shiphandling ranged from good to better than good; certainly he was skilled enough to hold the cruiser in a safe hover under normal circumstances.
The kicker was the definition of “normal.” Being shot at had become normal—or at least not abnormal—for Daniel and his Sissies; that wasn’t true for Liu. Daniel couldn’t risk learning that an impeller slug clanging from the hull made the fellow throw up his hands and send the cruiser plunging into the ground.
The air roiling in as the hatch lowered was hot and stank of ozone. Daniel slitted his eyes reflexively. He was opening up the ship earlier than he normally would’ve done following a landing on dry ground, but he hadn’t considered that it might be a problem. He realized he was wrong when he heard shouts of fear and anger from the platoon of Skye infantry waiting in the bay with him and forty armed spacers.
“Admiral!” Chatterjee said. “What’s happened? Are we on fire?”
“It’s all right!” Daniel said. “The ground’s hot from the exhaust, but it isn’t dangerous. We probably don’t have much time before an alarm goes off, so we need to cross to the headquarters building as soon as the ramp’s down.”
Which would be another minute or more. The boarding hatch weighed twenty tons, far too great a mass to fling around without regard for inertia.
“Admiral, I don’t know that we can!” Chatterjee said. “We’re not trained for this! Please, cannot we wait till it’s cooler, a few minutes at least?”
Daniel thought, his face blank. He should’ve realized that what spacers took more or less for granted might be impossible to soldiers who weren’t familiar with the searing violence of a starship’s landing. On the other hand, the reasons for getting into the Alliance HQ as quickly as possible were valid regardless of how unpleasant the process was. Hot, curling ozone wasn’t lethal at the concentrations outside, but the automatic impellers which might start firing at any moment would be.
“Right,” he said. “I’ll take my spacers in now, and you’ll follow as soon as you’re able to. But don’t waste time, Colonel, please don’t waste time.”
Chatterjee bent over his mike and gave a series of orders. Daniel didn’t really care what the colonel was saying, though he realized with a smile that Adele would’ve been coupled into the Bagarian net as a matter of course.
His smile faded. I hope you’re all right, my friend, he thought.
The ramp thumped down. “Spacers with me!” Daniel said. The hold’s PA system boomed his voice out from speakers in the upper molding. Cory wasn’t Adele, but he was doing bloody well. “We’re not attacking, we’re simply marching to our new billets. Until I say different or they shoot at us!”
“Aw, Six, we gotta march?” Kris Dehaes called, her voice an alto as cracked as a crow’s. “You know we’re no good at that!”
“Pipe down, Dehaes!” ordered Sun, leading the contingent because Woetjans was off with Adele. “If we keep cool and listen to Six, it’ll go just fine.”
Well, I don’t know about that, thought Daniel, but he stepped off on his left foot. As expected, the spacers clumped down the ramp with him. They looked more like a mob rushing for the jakes between innings than a military unit.
What he hadn’t expected was that Colonel Chatterjee would still be at his side. The Bagarian’d tied a kerchief over the lower half of his face and seemed to have squeezed his eyes shut. Maybe he was squinting, but it didn’t look that way.
Chatterjee touched Daniel’s arm, for balance or maybe just to be guided. “I told Major Zaring to bring the men along ASAP,” he said, his words making the kerchief puff and flap. “I’m going with you, Admiral!”
Dust and stray ions eddied in the heat shimmering from the ground. The air felt hotter with each step down the ramp, and by the third stride onto the concrete Daniel was thinking that he should’ve worn something heavier than the soft-soled spacer’s boots he had on.
He grinned, wondering if the dry heat was going to make his lips crack. And here he’d been mentally chiding the pongoes for not being up to crossing this little bit of hot ground. . . .
Daniel stepped from the pad onto bare earth. It wasn’t so bad, now. They were farther from the thrusters, there’d been a little longer for the whole courtyard to cool, and dirt didn’t store heat as well
as reinforced concrete. Even so, the bare skin of his face and hands felt crisp.
The main entrance to the headquarters building had monumental double doors, armored and now closed. They were reached by a ramp instead of a flight of steps; Daniel wondered if dignitaries expected to be driven in. Walking at a measured pace—he didn’t want his assault force to look like an assault force—he started up the slope.
The door valves were decorated in low relief with scenes of happy laborers, farming on the left panel and assembling machinery on an assembly line to the right. Despite the embellishments, the doors were a very real barrier. Sun carried a satchel of explosives, but the upper hinges were ten feet above the door sill.
Daniel supposed they could form a human pyramid to allow someone to climb high enough to place a wad of explosive there, but that presupposed that the Alliance garrison would sit on its collective hands during the preparations. That didn’t seem the most likely scenario.
A pedestrian door opened inward from the left panel. A head wearing a bicorn hat full of gold braid peered out.
“You!” the Alliance official called angrily. “Whoever’s in charge of this shambles, get over here now.”
“Daniel!” Adele’s voice snapped on his commo helmet through a 50-hertz hum. “Claim to be the political officer accompanying the battalion from Maintenon. The man in the door has cluster-command major’s insignia, though I don’t know his name.”
The officers of a real Maintenon battalion wouldn’t know the fellow’s name either, Daniel thought, but of course it wouldn’t bother them. It wouldn’t bother anybody but Adele, to whom information was life. And thank heavens she’s with me!
“I suppose that’s me, then, Major,” said Daniel, who’d reached the apron before the door alcove. The stone facing was pleasantly cool through his thin soles. “I’m Commissioner Leary, the battalion’s political officer. Colonel Chatterjee here will handle the purely military decisions, but he defers to me in, shall we say, intra-Alliance matters.”
He stepped through the doorway. It was designed like the hatch of a starship, and the valve in which it was set was as thick as a starship’s hull plating.
