Kill Ratio

by David Drake

  Yates screamed “Kill!” and leaped with all his strength, his instincts telling him that his one-G muscles would permit him to go over the van and blast the men behind it from an unexpected direction.

  His left thigh, seared by the near miss, cramped again. Yates' chest hit the edge of the vehicle's roof hard enough to knock the gun from his hands and the breath from his lungs.

  God, he hurt.

  If he'd had the strength, Sam Yates would have clung to the roof that had clotheslined him. Dangling there like Absalom caught in the tree was a marginally worse position than the other options available at the moment: sprawling on the sidewalk; or even half in, half out of the back of the van. He squeezed as hard as he could on the slick metal just to prove that he still could control his body against the forces of gravity and momentum.

  He couldn't. Burned, battered, and breathless, Yates fell backward onto the sidewalk. The pull of lunar gravity was so slight that he wondered if the men in orange suits had already killed him.

  What in hell were they fighting about anyway?

  God, he hurt.

  There had been no sound in Yates' world for several seconds. He didn't notice his loss until the screams and traffic noise - but particularly the screams - flooded his consciousness again and prompted him to roll to all fours.

  Yates bounded to his feet and collided with the wall because the muscles in his left thigh cramped and his vision on that side was fuzzy, maybe sweat and maybe something a lot worse.

  There still wasn't much pain, just enough to warn him that he was in trouble and that the trouble was going to get a lot worse as soon as he stopped to think about it. That wouldn't be for a while. He lurched forward again, throwing the heavy plasma discharger out in his right hand to balance the fact that the opposite leg couldn't take a full stride. Like an undersized bullet in a musket barrel - and equally intent on slaughter - Yates ricocheted down the passage.

  The plasma fired in his direction had missed him, but the square meter of wall paneling that burned and melted a few inches away had transferred some of the energy to his left side.

  Yates stumbled along in a reek of scorched hair, his own and the smoldering trousers of what had been a very good wool suit. Metal vaporized by the near miss had recondensed on whatever solid surface it touched first. The security man's left cheek and forehead were black with aluminum which had been deposited there in microscopic granules.

  There were red cracks across the black that coated his fast-swelling ear. It felt as if each nerve were being bathed in acid. He was really going to hurt in the morning if he survived the night.

  It wasn't noise that had deafened him but a blow to the head. He couldn't remember what had hit him - the sidewalk when he fell, or some large chunk blasted from the ceiling by one of the shots . . . ?

  He could remember the back of the plasma discharger punching him in the solar plexus when the gun's muzzle slammed into the roof edge. That meant the weapon was probably inside the vehicle - how many shots had he fired? How many shots did it hold? - and retrieving it was Yates' first priority.

  Then he could wonder why nobody'd finished him off while he lay helpless.

  There were emergency hooters both up and down the corridor. They might become a problem in a matter of seconds. With luck - and the reasoning part of Yates' mind knew he'd been damn lucky this far - the uniformed patrols might be kept away from the source of the trouble by the widely scattered destruction wrought by the plasma bolts.

  Yates was pretty sure he didn't want to explain this one to the proper authorities if he could possibly help it. He was real sure he didn't want to be disarmed and talking to anybody until he knew what had happened to the two or three surviving men with orange coveralls and plasma dischargers.

  Two survivors. As Yates crawled into the van he put his hand on what had been the face of the third gunman. The side panel had stopped enough of the plasma to keep the remainder from dismembering the fellow, but his coveralls from the waist up had not survived the fireball.

  Neither had the flesh on the left side of his head. His right hand held a needle stunner while his left gripped a drug injector whose two ends were coded red and green.

  The soldier, who at the moment worked in Entry division of UN Headquarters Security, shifted his supporting hand and leaned farther into the back of the vehicle to grab his own weapon. Its barrel glowed like a dull beacon against the front panel.

  The smoldering bedspread that had covered the head of the woman Yates sprawled across had become disarrayed.

  God in heaven, she was Ella Bradley.

  Yates snatched up the plasma discharger one handed and swung himself around the van gun fast with a lethal grace he thought he'd lost when his misjudged leap had crashed him back to reality. Nobody was hiding behind the vehicle, but the door that somebody'd blasted open with a jet of plasma showed where they'd gone. The latch and a soup-plate sized disk of the door panel had vaporized, but the rest had swung closed again.

  Yates snatched it open. At the motion, a gunman waiting at the top of the stairs triggered a bolt of eye-searing plasma.

  The door led up to a suit room. The bearded Afrikaner and his surviving partner were about to escape across the lunar surface, and there was no way in hell they could be pursued directly.

  The inner air lock door could not be opened until the outer one was closed, and that wouldn't happen until somebody went to the Central mechanical control room and shut this one. By that time the pair would have reentered the colony by any damn place they chose - and disappeared.

  The security man staggered back, blinking and prickly again from the blast down the stairwell. He didn't return the fire. Neither side could hit the other now without being suicidally exposed first - and Sam Yates, for one, was damn glad of an excuse to disengage.

  Yates dropped the plasma weapon on the sidewalk and staggered to the back of the van. His left hand brushed along the side panel for support and guidance, until the tears cleared from his stinging eyes.

  God! that last bolt had been close. If he'd been a half-step quicker jumping through the open door . . .

  A man running away from the destruction downrange stumbled into Yates and clung to him with both hands. “What's happening?” he babbled in French. “What is all this happening?”

  “A terrible accident,” the security man gasped in the same language. The stranger's grip loosened as the fellow looked into the van, but Yates held his arm and did not let him shy away.

  “Very terrible,” the big American continued as his free hand pried the drug injector from the grip of the corpse. The plastic tube was slick and an iridescent blur as Yates' eyes struggled to clear. “Tell me, sir, is the green end of this up or down?”

  “My God,” gasped the stranger.

  “Up or down, fuckhead?” Yates screamed.

  “It's down!” the French speaker whined as he tried to jerk free, then a shove from Yates' opening hand boosted him a dozen meters down the sidewalk and off in a shambling run.

  The security man leaned over and tripped the injector with the antidote side cradled in the cup of Bradley's throat.

  There were more emergency hooters now. Some of them were too close to ignore, but he had to ignore them anyway. His pain was localizing, which was better than being swaddled in general, incapacitating agony.

  Of course, most of the individual parts of his body still hurt.

  Bradley lunged into a sitting position and clawed for his eyes, a stroke that failed only because Yates hadn't been able to unwrap the bedspread completely while the woman lay as a dead weight. “Watch it!” he cried, backing away more hastily than his bruised ribs willingly allowed.

  The slashing attack was a memory of what she had been doing at the last moment of consciousness. Bradley's eyes cleared, swept her surroundings, and froze in a stare out the back of the van in an attempt to not have seen the corpse which sprawled half across her.

  “Quick,” said Yates, looking back over his s
houlder to see if uniformed patrolmen were part of the crowd scurrying in opposing directions. Anyone more than a couple of meters away was a blur through the welling tears, but the flashing blue lights were still at some distance.

  Bradley scrambled out of the vehicle with the spread still trailing from one heel. She did not look back, but from the way she held her right hand to the side, fingers splayed, Yates was pretty sure she'd set it down - as he had - on the corpse's not-face.

  “Where are we?” she asked in a voice so controlled that the security man could barely hear her over the tumult. “Are ...” She looked around, and he couldn't be certain from the way her voice trailed off that she'd ever had the rest of the sentence in mind.

  “Your apartment, fast,” said Yates, starting to take her elbow and then drawing back. He didn't want to push her if he didn't have the strength to pick her up and carry her if she balked. Right at the moment he wasn't sure he could even walk the fifty meters or so around the corner unaided.

  His suit was a wreck, but the dress she wore had come through as well as the garb of passersby who'd flopped to cover on the concrete. The garment was fawn colored, covering her from shoulders to ankles, but the skirt bloomed away without resistance from the long strides she took.

  They shoved past a trio of women gaping into the corridor from the mouth of the residential passage. God only knew what that group or other spectators thought about the chaos. Yates doubted that anyone but him - and the other two gunmen - had a connected idea of what had happened.

  Hell, he wasn't real clear on it himself. It had been more like being rocketed at night than any other experience he could recall.

  “Here,” said Bradley, tugging him by the elbow toward the unlatched door he was about to stumble past. There was a whiff of perfume in her hair, a clean smell among so many other odors at the moment.

  She'd been dressed for dinner, and that reminded him that he was hungry, extremely hungry.

  He was also, he realized to his own amazement, as horny as he'd ever been in his life.

  Chapter 12 - BRADLEY'S APARTMENT

  Ella Bradley hurt from the stunner darts, pinprick punctures on her back from which networks of shocked nerves pulsed so that her torso felt like a tooth with an air-sensitive cavity.

  And her throat hurt too - down in the hollow where drugs had been injected she could feel a raised soreness. As if that weren't enough, she'd pulled a complement of muscles that now chorused angrily: in her thighs, from kicking at her abductors; in her arms, from struggling; across her stomach from she didn't know what.

  She wanted, once the door was closed on the nightmare from which she'd just awakened, to collapse on her couch - safe.

  But the couch faced the door, and the door's security circuits were fried so that she couldn't electronically lock out the world. And if she could have, Supervisor Yates was in here with her, leaning against that door, his left side singed, his clothes ruined, looking like some New York bag lady after a sex change. ...

  Yates' left ear was blackened like a Cajun steak. He was keeping the weight off his left leg. Through what was left of the fabric, as she approached him wordlessly, Ella could see the raw, wet burns.

  Sam Yates needed a doctor. She ought to call one. She would, as soon as she pulled herself together. Right now there were more pressing matters, like getting Yates away from the door so that she could throw the auxiliary dead bolt.

  “Please, Supervisor, sit down,” she said, as if this were some damned interview, her voice naturally lowering because it always did when what she had to say was important.

  She was acutely aware that she sounded foolishly formal, perhaps even addled.

  She might be addled, for all she knew. Everything hurt and she'd been drugged. . . .

  “Yeah, all right, “ said the big security man. “It's your furniture.”

  What was left of it. She didn't remember the struggle being so protracted as to have trashed her front room this way: everything small or fragile seemed to have been crushed or toppled. The tan couch facing the door, however, was nearly untouched - sprinkled with a bit of debris.

  Until Yates limped over and sank into it with a difficulty he couldn't quite hide. Then the charred wool from his suit and the charred flakes of epidermal flesh smeared across the twill.

  Ella Bradley closed her eyes, threw the manual dead bolt, and leaned her forehead against the door. “What the hell happened back there, Supervisor? And why? Do you know?” she asked without turning.

  “My part, or yours?” The man's voice had a whispery quality - or pain added it. “I was doin' my job - nothin' more than your basic corridor firefight with plasma weapons—and then I looked down and the blanket I was lyin' on had you under it.”

  He couldn't be serious. She turned with a rebuke on her lips and saw the pale face, the sheen of sweat there. And something else. In the middle of all this pain and confusion, Yates' keen eyes were intrusive, possessive, almost proprietary.

  “I guess I ought to thank you,” she said and took a step forward.

  “Maybe later, when I'm feelin' better,” he replied with strained machismo.

  She suddenly recalled coming up out of her drugged stupor and launching an attack at him. She said, “They broke in here and wrecked the place, doped me, then - “ And stopped, realizing he knew all that. When she'd gone for his throat, he'd still had the antidote injector in his hand.

  And then she realized she had no way of knowing that he hadn't been part of the attack on her all along. He'd been coming here to pick her up for their dinner date. Maybe it was all planned. To gain her confidence. To make her . . . what? She crossed her arms, halting in midstride halfway to him, the barred door at her back.

  “Yeah,” he was saying, “I was there, remember? And I don't know about you, but I don't really want to explain all that - what I know's less than what I don't - to anybody. Mind if we just keep this between us, until we find out what's going on?”

  “Keep it between us?” she repeated, now pressing her folded arms against her ribs. “If I'm not mistaken, there are a number of dead men littering that corridor, not to mention a wrecked truck and - “ Suddenly, the hand she'd put on the seared-away face of one of the casualties tingled. She pulled it from her side and examined it.

  Then she sank down on the carpet, still halfway between the man and the door. He was a stranger. Just because he was Security didn't mean he was on her side. And there was definitely a side that wasn't hers in this. Or else none of that would have happened. “They had Afrikaner accents,” she muttered, still looking at her hand.

  “I thought so,” he said, and shifted position with an audible intake of breath.

  She looked up quickly, but he wasn't coming at her, just smearing her couch with black char, gooey serum, and a little pink, sticky blood.

  She couldn't imagine someone willfully taking that much punishment. So maybe he wasn't part of the enemy. But what he was asking made no sense: “How do you propose we hide what happened out there?”

  He shrugged and a grunt came out of him. Very slowly and carefully he sat up, put his right elbow on his right knee for support, and leaned toward her. Every vein in his neck and on his forehead stook out in bold relief as he replied: “We can't hide what happened, but we can obscure our participation - maybe. Get me? I wasn't there, you weren't there?”

  “Someone,” she said archly, her fingers digging in the rug's pile, “tried to kidnap me. You're asking me not to report it?”

  “You reported it to me, if anyone asks. Otherwise, who you going to go to? Yesilkov?”

  That struck home. “I'm a UN Mission functionary. I have recourse - “

  “Unless you know who did this, and why, I don't think going to the UN Secretariat with it is any kind of good idea. They'll just come back to us, to the Directorate of Security, in any case. And what I'm saying is, I don't want to spend the next couple days, or weeks, explaining how come I was shootin' up that corridor with experimental weapons,
and why. Not when I can't say why, except that you were in that damned blanket - which I didn't know when all hell broke loose out there - and that one of those guys in the orange suits resembled the fellow who was sharing your dining table at the Moulin Rouge the night we met, the night -”

  “I remember. The same man, the one with the beard.” Again she hugged herself, barely aware of him now, nearly numb with confusion. What did he want with her, that man with the Afrikaner accent and his friends? She'd never done anything in South, Africa to make the counterrevolutionaries aware of her. And why now, when the whole lunar colony was half paralyzed with fear and confusion over the virus? Were the two things related? Did someone think there was a serum against the virus, and that her UN group had access to it? Or think there was some plot of which she was a part? There had to be a reason for the attempted abduction - a reason men would die trying to capture her.

  “You got some water or something?” Yates asked.

  “Yes, surely. Or tea, coffee - real coffee. Or beer or wine.”

  '' Real coffee? Great.” He sat back too fast and winced.

  She got to her feet, grateful for something mechanical and domestic, something normal, to do. “Black or white?”

  “Black,” she heard as she sidled past him, stepping over debris from her overturned table, into the pullman kitchen.

  In there, where nothing had been disturbed, she started making coffee. “You know,” she called out, “you're going to have to see a doctor. How are you going to explain those burns? That - “

  From right behind her he answered, “Line of duty. I'm security, remember.”

  She started, whirled in place. “Don't sneak up on me. I - “

  “Sorry.” He backed up. “Mind if I look around, see if I can figure what they were after?”