Into the Light

by David Weber

* * *

  “GO!” WILSON COMMED over the squadnet.

  Sergeant James Ramirez kicked in the door, his muscles augmented by the Heinlein suit. Two members of the Prophet’s Sword had been hiding behind the door, and they went flying down the corridor along with it. Before they came to rest, Ramirez’ shoulder mount fired, and both of the militiamen disintegrated—literally—as they were hit with a three-round burst of point-blank railgun fire that could have taken out a legacy armored personnel carrier.

  Private Sekiguchi Kokan, Ramirez’ “wing,” leapfrogged him to lead the way as the platoon charged into the palace’s front hall. The scope was overwhelming—a massive, open space with a huge staircase leading up to the next level, and hallways that ran off in a number of directions.

  A scream came from one of the side hallways, then a group of militiamen charged them. The squad turned, nearly as one, to meet the attack as the militiamen ran towards them, yelling at the tops of their lungs.

  “Fire!” Wilson ordered, and the ten troopers’ combined fire cut the militia down. In fact, the torrent of railgun fire pretty much vaporized them, he thought with a grimace.

  “That was weird,” Ramirez said. “None of them fired at us.”

  “Maybe they saw the video from when we landed,” Corporal Patel said. “Maybe they were trying to get close enough they might penetrate the suits before they fired.”

  Wilson shook his head. Now that Ramirez mentioned it, the attack had been strange. He scanned the massive entryway, searching for additional enemy forces, as he replayed the assault in his head. As he went through it, he realized that some of the Pakistanis had been looking behind them—not at the troopers they were charging. It was almost as if they were running from something, not into—

  One of his soldiers fired a burst as a figure materialized in the corridor the militiamen had come from, and he spun to face the new threat.

  A woman—the red-haired vampire from Abu Bakr’s team—stood in the hallway. A massive cloud of dust billowed behind her, rising from where the rounds had reduced a swathe of wall to gravel, but she appeared unharmed as she frowned at the man who’d fired at her.

  “Do I look like any of them?” she asked with a sigh.

  “Uh, sorry, Ma’am,” Corporal Andersson said. He turned towards Wilson and added, “Sorry, Sir. She just kind of materialized there, and it spooked me.”

  “Next time, make sure you ID your target before pulling the trigger,” Wilson growled. The soldier nodded, and he turned to the redhead. “Sorry about that, Susan,” he said. “He meant well.”

  “If you say so, Rob,” she replied a tad sourly—justifiably so, in Wilson’s opinion. “Good thing I’m not a breather anymore, though.”

  “Shit,” one of the troopers said at the revelation. A couple of the others were more colorful.

  “I may be fine,” she continued, “but Abu Bakr isn’t. There was an … accident, and he’s pretty badly broken up. He needs medical assistance and immediate evacuation.”

  “That won’t be a problem. Our medic’s right here with us. Just take us to him.”

  “Follow me.” The vampire started back the way she’d come, but then turned back to Andersson. “And don’t shoot me again, or you’ll make me angry. And you won’t like me when I’m angry.”

  Her tone sent a shiver down Wilson’s back; he was glad it hadn’t been directed at him.

  “Uh…” Andersson said, obviously even more taken aback. “Yes, Ma’am. I will be careful, Ma’am.”

  She turned and raced down the hallway, clearly unworried about the possibility of running into any additional militiamen, and Wilson shook his head as he charged after her. He knew the militiamen’s rifles weren’t going to bother her—she had, after all, just survived a burst of railgun fire at close range—but he hoped to hell she didn’t lead them into an ambush that might cost him some of his people.

  She led them into a stairwell and down several flights of stairs, then yanked open a door. The thunder of gunfire filled the stairwell as she flung it wide—clearly, a pitched battle was underway in the hallway beyond it—and she charged forward to join the fray. It took Wilson a second to realize that the “battle” was between a company of militiamen and Jill, who appeared to be trying to keep them from entering a doorway. A number of the men shot at the vampire, but hit their comrades as often as not.

  “What do we do?” Ramirez asked. “We can’t shoot into that, but we have to help them!”

  Wilson seriously doubted they needed assistance, but he was too much of a gentleman to leave the women to fight at those odds.

  “Draw swords, and charge!” he yelled.

  The alloy sword blade snapped out and down on his right arm as he ran forward to join the melee. As fast as Susan was, though, there was only a little bit of hallway available for his troopers to fight in as she dodged back and forth, attacking nearly the entire rear rank simultaneously. Blood flew from a number of the militia troops as she flitted between them, moving almost too quickly to see. It was a slaughter.

  “Screw this,” Wilson muttered. He’d seen enough death for one day.

  He retracted the blade as he ran down one edge of the hallway. Reaching the scrum, he leaned in, grabbed one of the Pakistanis, and threw him back over his head.

  “Disarm him and send him on his way,” he ordered over the com as the yelling militiaman landed.

  Ramirez joined him, and they waded into the melee, throwing people out of it. Wilson triggered his rear view as he grabbed the next man. The militiamen seemed delighted to be out of the fight and sprinted away from the PU troopers as soon as they were released.

  The battle was over in a few seconds, with nearly half the militiamen bleeding out on the floor. The vampire they’d just “rescued” frowned as she saw the last of the militiamen running away down the hallway past Wilson’s troops.

  “Probably should have killed them all,” she noted.

  “I don’t think they’ll stop running until they reach Afghanistan,” Wilson said, “and we need to get Abu Bakr and get out of here. There’s already going to be hell to pay.”

  “You saw the broadcast?”

  “Yeah, right up to when Cecilia ripped out Ghilzai’s heart. I don’t think that’s going to play well. Where is she, anyway?”

  Jill shrugged. “I don’t know. We argued and she ran off. You’re right, though, we need to get Abu Bakr to a hospital.” She motioned at the doorway. “He’s in there.”

  “Santos!” Wilson called.

  “On it!” the company medic, Sergeant Sophia Santos, said as she pushed past and entered the room.

  Wilson followed her in and found the room he’d seen on TV, complete with Ghilzai lying face-first on the floor at the far end.

  The floor drain was doing box office business, a corner of his brain reflected, and he was glad his helmet protected him from the stench.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Santos asked as she knelt next to Abu Bakr. “I don’t see any visible injuries.”

  “Chest trauma,” Susan said, kneeling next to the medic. “He was punched, really hard, in the chest. I know his ribs are broken, and there are probably internal injuries.”

  Santos looked up to Wilson as she readied an injector. “His vital signs are really low,” she said. “I may be able to keep him alive, barely, but we’ll need to fly directly to the closest hospital.” She pushed the injector into Abu Bakr’s chest and pressed the button. Medical nanites flooded his chest cavity. She repositioned the injector and triggered it again, then pulled off her pack and hauled out the collapsible stretcher. She had it set up and Abu Bakr ready to transport in under a minute.

  “Andersson, help Santos with the litter,” Wilson directed. “Everyone else, let’s go!”

  “Why don’t you let us lead?” Susan asked. “We know the way and we can handle any opposition. Especially Cecilia. If she’s still running around here, you might not enjoy meeting her without us.”

  Wilson nodded.

/>   “Go ahead,” he said. It burned him, a little, that his brand-new combat suits had to play second fiddle to women who were—essentially—unarmed, but he was damned sure he wouldn’t want to take one on, even with a squad of Heinlein-suited troopers. In fact, he was pretty sure all of them together wouldn’t be enough to kill Cecilia if she showed back up. For the moment, he decided to just concentrate on how happy he was to have the other two on his side. Cecilia would have to be brought in at some point, he knew … but that was for another day, and would—hopefully—be someone else’s problem.

  Although the stairwell wasn’t built for the passage of a stretcher, his squad managed. Having the suits certainly made it easier. Within a couple of minutes, they were back in the courtyard and loading into the assault shuttle. He surveyed the courtyard as he called back the other platoons. If there was any of the militia left, they’d decided not to challenge the PU troops any further.

  Wilson didn’t blame them. Between the shuttles’ combination of passive and active defenses, they’d been able to land unscathed, and then control the battlespace—against all comers—in the middle of the enemy’s capital. He could see a number of fires burning outside the compound—it was obvious the Pakistanis had tried to reinforce the installation—but forces in the air and on the walls had completely denied them the ability to do so. He chuckled as he realized the Shongairi could have had access to the same equipment his troops were using. If they’d bothered to design and deploy it, they could have wiped humanity out; there might even have been something in their tech base to deal with vampires. He dwelt on the possibility for a couple of moments and decided he’d have to pass that thought on to Dvorak when they returned, since it appeared they might need something along those lines.

  “Sir!” Santos called on the squad net as the last of his troops raced towards the shuttle. “Abu Bakr wants to talk to you.”

  Wilson squeezed through the crowded bay to where Abu Bakr’s stretcher had been secured.

  “I told him he needed to rest,” Santos said, “but he said he needed to talk to you first.”

  Abu Bakr turned his head and looked up at Wilson. “Did you—” He coughed, and red spittle wet his lips. “Did you find her?” he asked.

  “Who?” Wilson asked. “Cecilia?”

  Abu Bakr’s head moved in a minute nod.

  “No, sorry, she got away, and I’m not going to stay here looking for her,” Wilson said. “She can find her own way home. This mission is fucked up enough as it is. We killed the one person we weren’t supposed to, and we’ve wiped out a large chunk of the capital’s downtown area. I’m not losing any of my people looking for that crazy bitch. I’m already going to get reamed for this when we get home—and none of it was my fault.”

  Abu Bakr gave another small nod, then turned away from Wilson. The Project Heinlein audio pickups were just good enough for the colonel to hear him mutter, “We never should have brought her.”

  . V .

  PRESIDENTIAL BRIEFING ROOM, SPACE PLATFORM BASTION,

  L5 LAGRANGE POINT

  Man, did Sharon have a point, Dave Dvorak thought as he walked into the briefing room with his phone in his left hand and a coffee mug in his right. I swear I didn’t expect the gig to last this long!

  It was true. He knew it was true, and it cut absolutely no ice with his loving wife. Her response was that if he hadn’t realized what was going to happen, then he’d probably been the only surviving human dumb enough not to. Of course, a lot of her protests were pro forma these days. She could hardly let him get away with it unscathed, but with all three kids off and launched on careers of their own, and her own hectic schedule as the United States of America’s representative on the revamped and restored USO’s board of governors—now the Planetary United Service Support Organizations—she was hardly in a position to give him too much grief.

  Not that it stopped her for a moment. And not that he really would have wanted it to, for that matter. But still.…

  He genuinely hadn’t envisioned becoming Secretary of State to the entire flipping planet. For that matter, he’d fondly imagined that once the planet had been unified, it wouldn’t need a Secretary of State. True, it wasn’t entirely unified just yet, even after closing in on two decades of effort, which was rather the point of the current meeting. But surely once the deed was done, once there were no more diplomatic deals to negotiate, the Planetary Union wouldn’t need a top diplomat anymore. So he could go home again, right?

  Not on your life. He’d forgotten Judson Howell’s habit of thinking in terms of the larger picture, which was why—in the moments when he wasn’t pissing on forest fires like the one in Naya Islamabad—he was immersed in the study of the Hegemony’s notions of “foreign policy.” Not so much against the day when humanity once again had to confront the Hegemony, although that was important, too, but because Howell fully intended for humanity to mount its own interstellar expansion. And unlike the Hegemony, he intended to offer alliances and assistance to other pre-interstellar species which might find themselves in the Hegemony’s sights and choose to stand against it at the human race’s side. Which meant that one Dave Dvorak got to write the instruction manual for humanity’s eventual first contact teams.

  Oh joy, oh joy.

  Although, if pressed—in fact, without any pressing at all—he would have admitted that he would far rather have been working on that instruction manual than heading for the current meeting. He should’ve put his foot down and overruled the mission planners, and he’d known it, damn it. But had he? Of course not! And because he hadn’t, the whole—

  He chopped that thought off—again—and nodded to Bill Taylor, one of Howell’s Presidential Security Detachment agents.

  “Morning, Bill,” he said.

  The Secret Service still protected the President of the United States, but the PSD had responsibility for the Planetary Union’s chief executive, and Taylor had obviously arrived to secure the briefing room before any of the official attendees arrived. It was unlikely, to say the least, that space orcs might have infiltrated it, but as Joyce Eckerd, the head of Dvorak’s own security team was fond of saying whenever he complained, “You never know … Sir.”

  It was amazing how much like his third-grade teacher that little pause made her sound, despite her pronounced Boston accent. She even had the same way of looking at him with her eyebrows at half-cock, too. Unfair, that’s what it was.

  “Good morning, Sir,” Taylor replied. “Early again, I see.”

  “What I get for having my office right down the corridor.” Dvorak shrugged. “I assume the others are inbound?”

  “Yes, Sir. In fact—”

  Taylor broke off as the briefing room door slid open once more and Jessica Tallman walked through it. Like Dvorak himself, the onetime State Secretary of Administration and then Secretary of Federal Management had followed her boss into the executive suite of the Planetary Union. For that matter, so had Fabienne Lewis, Patrick O’Sullivan, and Kacey Zukowski. The other members of his PU cabinet were drawn from other member states, chosen both for ability—which was uniformly high—and to make sure no one thought the PU was simply the U.S.A. under a new label. The U.S.—for that matter, the State of North Carolina—was still more heavily represented than any other Planetary Union member state, but given who’d organized it and who’d been elected its first president, most of the planet was prepared to live with that.

  Not all of it, of course. Human beings were still human beings. There were times that was irritating as hell, but taking everything together, Dvorak found it immensely reassuring.

  “Good morning, Jessica,” he said.

  “What’s good about it?” the normally affable Secretary of Management half-snarled. “Do you have any idea—?”

  She chopped herself off with a visible effort, then inhaled deeply.

  “Sorry, Dave. If anybody on the platform has ‘any idea’ about this crap, it’s you. And Kacey and Pat, of course. So let’s try this agai
n. Good morning, Dave.”

  She smiled a bit wanly and held out her hand. Dvorak set his coffee mug on the conference table with the caution its contents deserved in order to shake hands, then chuckled. She cocked her head at him, and he shrugged.

  “I’m jest a boy from th’ mountains, Ma’am, but I kinda ’spect you’ins ain’t gonna be th’ only b’ar with a sore tooth this here mornin’.”

  “God, I hate that hillbilly impersonation of yours,” she said with an unwilling smile. “The only thing worse is when you start punning.”

  “Don’t challenge me to trot out the big puns,” he warned, and she raised both hands in quick surrender.

  “No more! I’ll be good!”

  He smiled, and the two of them settled into their accustomed places at the conference table, chatting with each other while the meeting’s other attendees trickled in.

  Secretary of Health Doctor Charles Musset, a stocky New Zealander who’d been one of his nation’s best thoracic surgeons, was the next to arrive. He joined their conversation, and then Dvorak looked up as Secretary of Housing Cao Ming, the fine-boned Chinese who was the youngest of President Howell’s cabinet secretaries by several years, walked into the briefing room in earnest conversation with Secretary of Transportation Lyadov Denis Yermolayevich. Cao was the sole survivor of her family, which had died with the rest of Chengdu’s fourteen million inhabitants when the local Party leadership obeyed the injunction for a simultaneous mass uprising against the invaders. Her father, a senior Party official in Sichuan Province, had been instrumental in making that happen … which was why Cao Ming was as virulently anti-Communist as it was possible for a human being to be. She was also one of the founders of the Republic of Sichaun, one of the four successor states which had rebuilt themselves out of the ruins of Earth’s most populous country. They didn’t represent the totality of China—there were still half a dozen splinter “republics,” including one whose Party leadership had survived and which considered itself the sole legitimate successor to the People’s Republic of China—but they accounted for over eighty percent of China’s total land area. All four of them together had perhaps twenty percent of the People’s Republic of China’s pre-invasion population, and all of them were just about as anti-Party as she was. It was rather difficult to blame them, when the Party-inspired uprising had gotten somewhere in the near neighborhood of 520 million Chinese killed in less than half an hour.