An Honorable Defense Book 1 Crisis of Empire

by David : Thomas, T Thomas Drake

  At the center of which was a blonde. She was trying to stand erect, but one hand was clawed into her flat belly. The other held a Schlicter rail gun, similar in design to Patty’s repulsor—but a single-shot. It would accelerate a 100-gram pellet of uranium, jacketed in glass and suspended in teflon, at 3,500 meters per second. Tear a hole in a girl about two feet across. Through body armor.

  Patty had a clear shot at the weapon. She could take it right out of the woman’s hand, and the hand off right up to the neck. Not a neat solution.

  “Friends-no-fire,” Patty called. She clacked her own gun flat down on the flagstones—but kept a hand on it. That left her face, spine, and shooting hand exposed.

  The woman spent ten seconds trying to raise the Schlicter above the level of her own hips, then gave up. The weapon thudded on the carpeting. She sagged onto the cue-form sofa and hugged her knees.

  “Turn it off . . . off,” she cried.

  The subsonics were even beginning to get to Patty, and she wasn’t at the sound system’s focal point. She told her AID to shut it down. It was like a fog lifting in the room. The blonde intruder relaxed, stopped rocking and moaning, but didn’t uncurl.

  Patty walked over, toed the gun away, and waved Bertingas in from the front door.

  “Know her?”

  “Never had the pleasure,” he said. “She does look familiar.”

  Patty studied the face: high and pointed cheekbones; straight nose with fully arched nostrils; a mouth more carefully painted than a Noh actor’s; big gray eyes with the clearest whites she had ever seen—agate and alabaster; brows curved and shaped like the mud fenders on an antique Rolls; high forehead with not a line on it; hair layered and puffed and tinted in the fashionable semolina-and-sequoia shades.

  It was a perfectly forgettable face. A thousand of them looked at Patty every day from the Freevid screens and holozines.

  “That gun is Central Fleet issue,” Patty observed. “The AID she’s toting looks like it could open up and run Gemini Base. But she’s not any kind of trained agent, not by my guess.”

  “Do you always talk about people in the third person while in their presence?” the woman asked. The voice was low, cultured, and had a slight hesitation, a catch, that Patty knew any man would find irresistible.

  “Only when they’ve been shooting at me.”

  “I have never—”

  “You were tryin’.”

  “Now, now, Firkin,” Bertingas said, just about waving a finger in her face. “There may be extenuating circumstances. We can’t know all the details.”

  “Exactly,” the woman said. “Dire circumstances.” She straightened herself on the sofa, but not enough to flatten the curves of her body, from Bertingas’ perspective. The room curved around her, as that damned cue-sense furniture always seemed to do with the most beautiful woman in sight.

  “I came to Counselor Bertingas,” she said, “because I have reason to suspect the Haiken Maru are looking for him, too.”

  “You’re a little late,” Patty said dryly.

  “Yes, the air crash, I heard about that. Terrible thing. The H.M. tried something a little less spectacular on me this morning. When I landed at the City Port, they rigged a bagbot to throw a restraining web and snatch me right off the exit ramp.”

  “Oh, my dear!” from Bertingas. “How ever did you manage to avoid that?”

  The blonde’s cool eyes tore themselves off the man and flicked over to her discarded Schlicter. “I had to damage the machine.”

  “Why, exactly, were they snatching you?” Patty asked. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

  “I’m Mora Koskiusko.”

  At last! Something ugly about the woman.

  “I’m the daughter of Admiral Johan Koskiusko, of Gemini Base. The Haiken Maru were trying to kidnap me in order to have a hold on him.”

  “Now, why would they want—?” Bertingas started to ask.

  “The H.M. corporate organization is moving for the Secretariat, of course,” Koskiusko answered him. “Throughout the clusters they are aligning military support—by negotiation or force. And my father is loyal to the Pact.”

  “After the kidnapping, why didn’t you go to the Central Fleet office in Meyerbeer?” Patty asked.

  “I don’t trust Malcolm Thwaite. Not completely.”

  “Huh! So you came here, right off?”

  “Yes, I knew that at least one other person on this planet was on the same—”

  “How did you manage to get in?” Bertingas asked.

  “Well, your home system, it wasn’t—”

  “That AID of hers,” Patty observed, “could convince your security system it was talking to the main net at Government Block, sell it twenty thousand shares of Pinkney Bendo, and then open it like—Jesus!”

  The shock went up her right side like a bad muscle cramp.

  “Sorry for the tase, Boss,” her own AID said calmly, “but we have visitors in the garden, and you do tend to ramble on.”

  “How many?”

  “Platoon strength from the tramp of little feet. Tell the homeowner he’s not going to like what they’re doing to his Pachysandra nipponica.”

  “All right. Everybody down on the floor.”

  Bertingas and Koskiusko slid down on the carpet. Patty saw the woman reach sideways and pick up her Schlicter. Patty let her. Bertingas had his hands over the back of his neck—not a very useful position—but his head was up and his eyes watchful.

  “Open up the place,” she told her AID.

  The carpeting in front of the window wall flipped back along the lines Patty had cut that morning. The Manjack she’d concealed there erected itself and swiveled its 240-millimeter repulsor coil toward the glass. From deep in the couch cushions, two HV directors popped up and pointed at the window. Two more of the little demons lifted from behind other furniture and aimed their discharge antennae at the other entrances to the room. At the AID’s command, the window opaquing dilated.

  “Just like Custer,” Patty said under her breath, seeing the massed shapes in the garden. It was the splintering of wood, from behind her, that ignited the battle. She took aim with her own gun, told the AID to open fire, and shot at the window. Her service pistol accelerated a stream of aluminum-skirted glass beads in a repulsion coil. An energy pulse vaporized the metal into a slick of plasma, and the coil accelerated the beads to supersonic speeds. The window disappeared in a shower of sharp fragments.

  Her shot was answered by a flurry of return fire, the whip-whip-whap of supersonic beads and the crackle of blue lightning from the creepers in the garden. She threw herself on the floor behind the couch and counted three.

  Pfeet! Pfeet! Pfeet! The Manjack picked its targets and eliminated them. Its weapon was not particularly fast, but who needed to hosepipe a thousand projectiles a minute when one, cybernetically placed, would do the job? The Manjack could afford to ignore the incoming beads that caromed off or splintered upon its titanite tripod and spindle.

  Mora Koskiusko, flat on her belly, was using the Schlicter two-handed, feet splayed behind her to take up the recoil. That was going to rip hell out of her nylons, especially at the knees. Still, she was doing a nice professional job on the intruders: single shots there, no blind firing.

  The little HVs were laying down a high-voltage suppression field. Anything one-point-five meters above the floor got fried. It wasn’t doing the apartment’s plush decor any good, but the baddies were hanging back in the foyer and in the kitchen hallway. Bertingas finally had his head down.

  Patty figured they could hold the room for, oh, another thirty seconds or so. Then what?

  The what was a dragon. The heavily armored aircar came screaming down into the terrace garden. Titanium slats feathered its ducts. Quartz glass ten centimeters thick shielded the driver. Everywhere else it was angles and planes of cold-rolled steel, layered with ceramics and resins—except for its turret, where the business end of a plasma exciter poked through.

  The we
apon was a standard of space warfare. Deep in its reaction chamber, an enfilade of lasers would excite a deuterium pellet to fusion heat; electromagnets would channel the expanding ball of plasma out through the discharge port. It was, in effect, a unidirectional fusion bomb. Aimed into the room.

  Patty didn’t think, not on any conscious level. Pulling a sonic grenade from her sleeve sheath, and keeping her ass below the level of the HVs’ continuing discharge, she crawled forward. Crossing the line of broken shards where the window used to be, she emerged from the dark cave of Bertingas’ lounge into bright sunlight and straightened.

  Step, step, step, and she had one foot on the forward lip of the aircar’s metal-mesh skirting. Her knees slipped on the flat steel of the forward deflector. Her hand found a grip somewhere on the exposed ductwork. She climbed. The turret depressed, its horrible mouth trying to get an angle on her, but Patty was too close and too low. With her free hand she pushed the grenade into the locking ring around the ball joint. No time—nor clear space—to jump free. She flattened herself against the dragon’s warm steel skin, almost tasting the metal through her cheek.

  The turret made a violent jerk, as if trying to dislodge her packet. The car rose with a howling cry, as if trying to withdraw. Then her shaped charge went off, destroying the turret mechanism, fanning the air above her with pieces of metal. Patty knew the interior of the car would reflect and amplify the shock of the explosion and all its harmonics. It tended to shred Human tissues.

  Set on some land of delay, the ruptured plasma gun went off. Its plume of ionized gas lashed out above Patty’s head, tearing out part of the apartment wall and an old apple tree planted in the garden.

  The car was still rising—and moving backward under the combined force of her grenade and its own plasma discharge. It was falling away from the garden and sliding, sloppily airborne, faster and faster, down the terraced face of Satellite Villas IV.

  Patty hung onto its steel flank and prayed.

  Chapter 7

  Taddeuz Bertingas: SOMETHING REALLY DIFFERENT

  Bertingas watched white motes dance against a red sky and waited for his eyes to clear. The after-image of the tank-thing’s one shot was still doing a rolling boil against his retinas.

  How much energy had there been in that white plasma burst? How much radiation? Maybe his vision wasn’t ever going to come back. Did he even have retinas now—or were his optic nerves just telling him a story?

  “Mora?”

  “Yes, Counselor?”

  “Can you see?”

  “Of course I—oh! You were looking at that dragon when it fired. Here, let me help you.”

  A hand caught him under the elbow and raised him, turned him, pushed gently. He sat on what was left of the couch, put his head back and watched the motes reorient themselves against the motion. He spread his fingers on the cushion beside him and felt long rips in the material. The surface was seeded with grit and slivers of syncrete.

  “How are your eyes?”

  “Getting better.” And they were. The brightness of the images was fading. Still, too much light was coming into the room, even with the window blown out, and the background was going from red to blue. Were his corneas playing some kind of refraction trick?

  In a minute more, he saw an outline, a jagged curve at the edge of vision. He turned his head. The south wall of the apartment was missing, letting in the blue sky. It was very quiet, except for the scrape of Mora’s shoes as she moved around what was left of the room. Somewhere, water trickled from broken pipes.

  Bertingas looked down at his sleeve and saw more white motes. The dark material was flecked with pieces of the syncrete wall and fluffy spots of ash, some of them from burn holes in his tunic. He figured this uniform—which had been fresh and new that morning—was now a total write-off.

  He lifted his newly functioning eyes and looked for Mora. She was poking one-handed—her other still holding the Schlicter—around the butt end of the Manjack while it auto-tracked a random pattern out over the garden. After a second she found its manual circuits and shut it down. The muzzle wobbled once and depressed itself.

  Maybe four hours ago, Ms. Mora Koskiusko had been dressed for a day of shopping in the arcades of Meyerbeer. Bertingas remembered her summer frock of staggered polysilks. Now she was barely covered in gaudy rags with large areas of burn-through—although the colorful bodystocking she wore seemed to have kept most of it from reaching the skin. Bertingas didn’t mind the primitif effect, but she was going to catch a lot of stares if they went out on the streets.

  Was there something in his closets—perhaps something Gina had left? All women were about the same size, weren’t they? But then, did he even have a closet anymore? No, the other side of that wall . . .

  Bertingas shook his head and stood up.

  “How soon do you think,” Mora asked, “before they try again?”

  “Who? The Haiken Maru? They probably think we’re dead in all this. Emergency Services, however, has undoubtedly received calls about the blast and the crash of that—‘dragon.’ We should be seeing the first med crews in about three minutes.”

  “We don’t want to be here then.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing, they’re going to want you to fill out the long form on this mess. That’s going to take time. For another, the H.M. almost surely have a tap into the Emergency Net, and as soon as they start sending in reports—”

  “We’re marked,” he finished.

  “So we disappear. Now.”

  “What about Firkin? Did you see—?”

  “She went over the wall with the dragon. Very brave performance, but I doubt anyone could have survived that blast, plus whatever happens when a machine like that augers in sideways. No, really—we must leave this place, and quickly.”

  “You can’t go out, not like that.”

  She looked down at herself, for the first time apparently, then at him.

  “You haven’t seen the back of your uniform, have you, Counselor?” A smile curled her lips. “Think hard. Don’t your, um, nether regions feel a trifle breezy?”

  “Well, ah, yes.” That was why he’d kept turning to face her.

  “We could borrow from our friends here.” She pointed to the half-dozen bodies—all apparently Human—that were sprawled from the sill of his lounge window out onto the terrace. Those covered by an angle of wall had not been burned in the blast.

  Between them, he and Mora found complete outfits. It was dole clothing: drab, monochrome fabrics with cheap plastic closers. Mora took a wrapshirt off a man who’d been headshot; it was a clean kill—one she may have made herself. Bertingas had to take a jacket-and-dickie combination that settled a thumb-sized hole over his sternum. They managed to find two corpses which hadn’t voided themselves and so ruined their trousers.

  Oddly, for all the cheapness of the clothing, every man had a good pair of black leather boots; Tad and Mora could take their pick. The garments themselves, while worn, were uniformly fresh-washed. The bodies beneath were in fit shape and fairly hygienic.

  “What do you make of all this?” Bertingas said.

  Mora toed one set of naked white buttocks, as if testing the now-flaccid muscles.

  “I’d say they were soldiers, dressed to look poor.”

  “Mercenaries?”

  “Of course. None of our Fleet Joeys would go into a battle like this—without armor, comm sets, and proper weapons.”

  “What happened here wasn’t meant to be a battle,” Bertingas pointed out. “It wouldn’t have been, if Firkin hadn’t rigged that Manjack . . . This was just supposed to be a simple kidnapping.”

  “Anytime you take along a dragon,” Mora observed, “you’re expecting a battle.”

  “Oh.”

  “Now. Shall we go?”

  As they walked out the front entrance onto the garden path, the first of the sirens was in the air.

  They quickened their steps in time with the warbling beat.r />
  Where to go? Tad’s AID held the addresses and partial dossiers of the two recruiting contacts Selwin Praise had given him. That was the business of the moment. And, from the dedicated way the Haiken Maru had been trying to kill him, it looked like the sooner Tad had a medium-size army at his back, the longer he was going to live.

  He did have doubts about taking Mora Koskiusko with him, though. She might indeed be the admiral’s daughter, although her equipment and weapons—a repulsor with which she seemed to be expert and an AID that had impressed even Firkin—hinted at a less delicate upbringing. Which made her . . . What?

  Either another Haiken Maru heavy—despite her story about surviving a snatch job on the landing ramp, which could simply be window dressing. Or another Kona Tatsu agent, possibly working covertly for Halan Follard, possibly not.

  Maybe, just maybe, admirals’ delicate daughters did go shopping with classified hardware and a 100-gram bead slinger under their arms.

  “Look,” he said, as they crossed at street level to the monorail stop. “I have some business to attend to. It could be roughhouse, but most likely it will merely be boring. You probably have something more interesting to do, some social engagements, or—”

  She stopped walking, turned toward him. Her shoulders sagged. The cheap, mannish clothing made her seem younger, more waiflike, more helpless. Perhaps, too, it was the smudges of dust on her pretty face.

  “It’s not that I don’t want you along,” he said quickly, “but this is Department business, and—”

  “I have no one else to go to.”

  “No friends in the city? Or—”

  “I kept my address book on a side file of the Naval Net. Captain Thwaite has extraordinary access. Any of my friends will be known—and watched. Anyway, I don’t want what happened at your apartment to be happening to them. They wouldn’t be as—so well prepared to receive visitors.”