Kris Longknife Audacious

by Mike Shepherd

  A Marine specialist behind DeVar sighted his rocket launcher on the roof. He seemed to pull the trigger the same second that the auto-gun selected him for death.

  The rocket hit the roof, but missed to the right of the auto-gun, taking down two riflemen. A second rocket spec got the gun that got his pal.

  For a second the fire fight seemed almost silent as only the usual rifle fire broke the evening’s silence.

  Then a second auto-gun opened up. Its first target was the remaining rocket man and he went down hard.

  Hand grenades were hopeless at this distance. Even the 20-mm grenade launchers were hard-pressed to reach the height of the Gallery roof.

  The snipers took the gunner under fire, but the auto-gun was looking for them, too.

  Just about the time it started looking to DeVar that he and his men would need a miracle to cross this killing ground, the pain in his legs hit him like a runaway truck. A sheen of red covered his vision and he had to put his head down.

  The battle would have to go on without him.

  53

  Kris knew she had to get that auto-gun.

  “Jack, you still got a grenade?”

  “Just one frag.”

  “Aim for the gun. Boys, give him cover.”

  She and the boys laid down cover fire. Jack lobbed the grenade.

  The grenade took out the gunner, but another stepped into his place and the auto-gun kept ripping holes in the ranks of the armored Marines.

  Kris felt inside her bra and pulled out the bomb hidden there.

  “Cover me,” Kris called.

  “That can’t be what I think it is,” one of the boys said.

  “Cover her,” Jack ordered gruffly, and let off a blast of pistol fire.

  Kris fired three rounds herself, dropped the pistol, rolled right to the other side of her concrete protection, and half stood to lob her bomb.

  The other side of the antenna support took a pounding. But quickly the fire worked its way toward her. Kris ducked back down before any caught her.

  And her booby bomb sailed past the auto-gun to explode on the next one in line.

  Unfortunately, it was not in operation.

  But it was fully loaded.

  The bomb’s explosion started a fire, which burned for a fraction of a minute before it began baking off ammo. Undirected 20-mm rounds took off for the stars, or shot off for the river.

  One took the head off the guy manning the operational auto-gun. Another took the back out of the man who stood to take the dead gunner’s place.

  Terrified shooters fell back on the stairwell, trying to get out of reach of the mad nondirectional slaughter.

  Then two rounds took off the door to the stairwell and exploded inside.

  The next guy to seek safety leapt off the roof, trying to reach a tall elm.

  He did manage to catch a limb. But not one that would hold him. On the way to the ground he caught another limb, but it was no stronger. He hit the balustrade of the rear porch and lay there, his back at a horribly odd angle.

  There was a sudden rush for the stairs.

  Kris gritted her teeth on the temptation to let them run, and joined Jack in shooting them down.

  If they got off the roof in one piece, surely Grant von Schrader had sergeants waiting to rally them, beat them back into fire teams.

  Behind Kris, one of her young shooters threw up.

  When they had the roof to themselves, Kris holstered her automatic, but kept the long rifle at the ready. It was a commercial version of the M-6, probably made on New Jerusalem. She noticed it had been modified for fully automatic fire.

  Interesting.

  Jack stood, rifle in hand, and waved to the Marines below.

  Many were up, trotting for the back porch of the Gallery.

  Many were up, but way too many of them were still down.

  The static on net saved Kris from having to ask who was among those down. She trotted for the stairwell, blackened and blocked by bodies.

  Given a choice of following that route down or finding another, she turned to Jack and they headed back the way they’d came.

  On the way they put a solid burst into each of the auto-guns they passed. They would trouble Marines no more.

  This was not going the way Grant von Schrader planned.

  “We’ve lost the roof,” Colonel Müller reported. His words were as dismal as the cold, bare concrete walls of his command center in the sub-basement. “Again, the militia folded like cards.”

  “Why couldn’t your sergeants hold them?” Grant shot back.

  “Because we did not have enough time to train them to have a backbone,” the colonel shot right back.

  Grant nodded. “We both knew we needed more time.”

  “Have we killed enough of the sheep?”

  That was the only real question left this evening. The objective tonight had been the total decapitation of Eden’s business and government. Grant had promised the wastrel side of the old families that they would inherit. They had lapped up his words.

  They were cheap promises. In a month, hardheaded business men from Greenfeld would arrive, making their way into the business of this world. In a year, 90 percent of it would be owned by Greenfeld. And the workforce would hum with the efficiency that only a strong fist could produce.

  That had been this morning’s dream.

  What was left tonight?

  “Colonel, prepare to withdraw to the north as we planned. I’m going up to the rotunda to see how many more of the sheep we can slaughter. Then I will meet you at the north rally point with your sergeants.”

  Colonel Müller glanced at his watch. “You have ten minutes. A second more and you will find no one there.”

  “As I would expect of you,” Grant said.

  He headed for the stairs. With luck, he just might get himself a Longknife in the next ten minutes.

  Kris dropped down the stairs, Jack and two Marines right behind her. Six very scared but very obedient teens tagged along behind them.

  “You know, Jack, just once I’d like to end one of these dustups with a Peterwald puke to talk to. To really talk to. You know what I mean,” Kris said over her shoulder.

  “Sure you’d want to hear what he’d say?” Jack asked. “Sure your Grampa Ray would want that?”

  Kris wasn’t all that sure she cared what Grampa Ray wanted. He’d sent her into this mess with not one word of warning. Not one suggestion of what to look for. Several colorful and obscene suggestions came to her of what Grampa Ray could do.

  Course, him being king, some of them might be treason.

  Kris kept her own counsel.

  They came to the third floor. The balcony here gave a view of the main floor below. But to actually get a shot into something down there meant showing way too much of Kris’s precious skin.

  She headed down another level.

  The second floor had the disadvantage of being covered with the bodies left from the earlier phase of the shoot-out. The teenagers blanched, but followed Kris as she led them out, gingerly low, walking past the bodies of dead friends.

  The main floor looked like a slaughterhouse. And one in special need of cleaning. Probably qualified for one of the labors of Hercules.

  Bodies were piled up. Some where they fell. Others were piled in front of people who used them to absorb bullets instead of themselves.

  Sculptures had been upended because their bases afforded better cover. The shattered statues had been pushed around to afford protection to the people who cowered behind them.

  Here or there another hand grenade flew. A rifle barked. Automatics spat. Beneath the staccato of battle, the whimpers and cries of wounded humanity filled in the lower octaves.

  And over it all was the stench of blood and death.

  Kris blinked away the general picture and focused on those that mattered to her.

  There was Penny. Her orange dress now covered with the red of fresh blood, the brown of dried blood. But the lie
utenant was still waving orders and reaching under her dress to toss a grenade to one Marine, or a magazine to another.

  Fire at the moment was desultory. Whether because ammo was running low or people on both sides had grown reluctant to risk exposure, was not clear.

  Kris noticed two Marines that had acquired rifles. Probably ones that fell from the hands of inexperienced casualties on the second-floor balcony. They fired sparingly.

  Kris retrieved a bandolier from one dead shooter and tossed it over the rail. For a second the fire slackened. Then one gun went to full automatic, covering the trooper retrieving the spare ammo. A moment later, the second rifle was back on line, snapping off bursts.

  Kris tossed a second bandolier. It landed close to the other Marine. In a minute, he was back going rapid fire.

  At the rotunda, the fire seemed to slacken off in the face of the newly energized resistance.

  Kris reached the end of the balcony and risked a glance over just as the figure of Grant von Schrader dogtrotted up to the edge of the rotunda.

  “What are you guys, asleep,” he shouted. “You want your mamas? Did we rob a bunch of cradles? There they are. Shoot them. You got grenades left. Throw them.”

  Kris drew a bead on him. And she would have put a full five-round burst into him if he hadn’t picked that moment to duck behind that bronze representation of Landing Day.

  She would have loved to have a long talk with him, but because of his lip, the fire was growing hot again.

  Kris decided today was no day for talking.

  She reached into her bra and drew out the last of her booby bombs. She considered several places to toss the thing, then grinned.

  She punched it for a four-second fuse and lofted it straight for the center of the bronze statuary.

  It sailed through the air, ignored by most below, but watched by Kris. It plopped down right in the dead center of the statues, bouncing off one, then landing at the foot of the five great founding fathers of Garden City. They stood there, backs to each other, staring out at the land they had come so far for.

  And when the explosion came, bronze feet and torsos and arms were converted to even more ancient bronzes: daggers, spears, and swords.

  The gunners around the rotunda just kind of went to pieces.

  “Good God,” Jack muttered.

  “Have mercy on them,” Kris added, as Tommy did so many times before. “I will not,” she said for herself.

  A second explosion hardly made its point with the echo of the first one still hammering Kris’s ears. But a moment later, its source became clear.

  The familiar sound of M-6s on single shot, the hallmark of good Marines, swept the rotunda, only seconds before the Marines themselves in full-body armor and battle rattle swept into view.

  Many still dripped riverwater or mud. But they were the cavalry, here at the rescue. They had no bugles, no proud streamers, but man, were they beautiful.

  There were scattered cheers from Kris’s side of the great hall. Hands shot up in the rotunda.

  Not everyone’s. Someone got off a shot at the leading Marine. That one died.

  That was all it took to get any reluctant hands up.

  Silence—lovely, empty silence—filled the hall.

  Broken only by the moans and whimpers of those for whom peace had come too late.

  54

  Gunnery Sergeant Brown stayed under the white dinosaur while the glass settled from the huge explosion in the rotunda. Only when the deadly glass shards finished tinkling off the cars did he risk rolling out and carefully looking around.

  Darkness was back, though his eyes would hold the memory of that flash of bright light for a while to come. There was sporadic fire for a few moments. Some dude was always late getting the word. But it wasn’t long before even they woke up—or died—and silence broke out in all its glory.

  And the quiet stretched and grew and Gunny knew that it was good. Anything was better than the unshirted hell they’d been in for…he glanced at his watch.

  Only the last thirty minutes!

  That was impossible. He raised his watch to his ear. It was still ticking. A fine old windup watch handed down from father to son for more times than Gunny wanted to think about.

  It still ticked and insisted his eternity in hell had been little more than half an hour.

  He shook his head.

  As the quiet stretched into something that was almost a delicious peace, Gunny glanced over his shoulder. In the distance he could just make out the revolving lights of dozens of emergency services vehicles.

  Why weren’t the ambulances moving?

  He turned back to look for his fastest runner, someone he could send back there to get the lead out of that bunch…

  And spotted dark figures skulking out of the north wing of the Gallery.

  Not being an officer, Gunny might not know all the important stuff. But he knew the stink of rats leaving a sinking ship. Especially the stink of rats leaving a ship they had done their best to hole.

  A slight change of plans here.

  Gunny caught a runner’s eye, but sent her off to bring back the sniper team on the south end. Then he motioned to his own fire teams in the center to start their movement north.

  The northern sniper team was led by Corporal Donovan. She never needed to be told where the action was. She and her partner were already up and doing a slow, low walk from car to car, headed north.

  But Gunny needn’t have worried about his rats getting away.

  They didn’t go all that far, maybe fifty yards, before they stopped at a tree surrounded by stone flower pots.

  Half a dozen faced out. Four or five talked among themselves in the center.

  If that wasn’t a well-organized rally point, Gunny hadn’t spent twenty years in the Corps.

  And they waited.

  That was what professional troops were supposed to do, wait to see if anyone detached or just lost showed up at the rally.

  But after that last explosion and fire, the place was pretty quiet.

  Gunny sure would have been tempted to keep the bugout boogie going.

  But that looked to be an officer doing the look-around from the center, so good NCOs were waiting, just like they should.

  Which gave Gunny’s team time to catch up, overtake, and pass them. Gunny spotted several good ambush sites and smiled.

  When that bunch of rats moved north again, it would be right into his waiting arms.

  As the seconds flew and Gunny’s Marines set up their kill zones, he watched the one he took for the senior NCO exchange words with the guy who had to be the senior officer.

  Gunny heard not a word, but he knew the drill.

  “Sir, we should move on. We can’t afford to lose a second.”

  But the officer only glanced at his watch. Who was he waiting for? Gunny would bet money the officer knew personally the one who was holding them up—likely had served under him as a junior officer.

  Maybe, another time, waiting would have served a purpose. Today, Gunny was prepared to make sure it didn’t.

  And Gunny made up his mind.

  He signaled to the crew in sight of him. Sleepy darts.

  And they passed it along.

  Sleepy darts were a risk, but Gunny was one of the many NCOs who were getting sick and tired of Greenfeld pukes doing this or killing that and no one living to tell the tale.

  The officers might be happy not having to face the hard truth about the undeclared war they were in, but all the dancing around the truth made an honest fighting man just want to puke.

  This call was Gunny’s to make, and he was making it.

  These rats were beaten; he could see it in the hunch of their shoulders. They were walking into an ambush put in place by good Marines.

  These dudes were going to wake up with a roaring headache tomorrow morning, and they were going to sing, sing, sing.

  And kings and captains could just bite themselves if they didn’t like what a sweating, cursi
ng Gunny Sergeant had done to them.

  The enemy officer took a final glance at his watch. A final glance at the Gallery. Nothing moved out of it.

  He signaled to his troops and a scout pair led off, quickly followed by others as the outer guards of the rally point folded themselves into a traveling column.

  It was a beautiful work of art that Gunny was fully qualified to appreciate…unlike much of the crap hanging in the now-smoking building.

  But they were moving right into his ambush. His work of art.

  Gunnery Sergeant Brown grinned and drew a sight picture on the officer. He and his Marines were artists in their own right.

  Come and see the art we do.

  55

  Who said the only sight more sickening than a battle won is the sight of a battle you lost?

  At the moment, Kris’s addled brain refused to cough up the answer to that question. And she had better uses for Nelly.

  “Are you still jammed? Can you get out a call for medical services?”

  “I am sorry, Kris, but yes, I am still jammed.”

  Kris shook her head. The jammer had clearly lost, but either was keeping it on for pure evilness or forgetfulness.

  Or maybe they hadn’t given the battle up for lost.

  That was not a comforting thought.

  Marines in battle gear now moved purposefully into the rotunda to disarm and secure the prisoners. “Captain DeVar, what’s your situation?” Kris called from the second-floor balcony.

  One Marine looked up. “Ah, I’m Lieutenant Troy, ma’am. I think I’m in command, ah, Your Highness.”

  Told Kris a lot about the company of embassy Marines.

  “Lieutenant, secure your prisoners, set up a defensive perimeter here for the hall, then send armored detachments to check out the rooms in this place. They may find civilians who managed to stay lost through the shoot. They may find shooters trying to get away.”

  “Ah, ma’am, I’m not sure I’ve got enough troops to tackle all that. And do you have any medical aid? We could sure use more out back.”

  That told Kris all she needed to know about her company.

  She nodded, thinking through what mattered most and shortening her list of priorities. “Lieutenant, secure your prisoners and the perimeter of the great hall against a counterattack. I’ll get us medical aid.”