by David Drake
He smiled wanly at Carron. “Some of the men—men from the ship’s crew—didn’t choose to be involved further. They’ll stay low in their hotel room until the business is done. The combat personnel are where they need to be also. And I’m here, because the potential need for a command post is greater than the risk.”
Tadziki’s hand gripped the hatch coaming so hard that the veins stood out. His skin blotched white and red because the tense muscles cut off their own blood supply.
“I wouldn’t be much good to Herne and the others,” he said harshly toward Landfall City. “I’m a fat old man, and I could never hit anybody far enough away that his blood didn’t splash me.”
Carron looked at Tadziki and swallowed. “Yes,” he said. “Well, I think I’ll stay here too.”
Dockyard machinery screamed like lost souls.
The limousine was parked in front of the building. It was unattended because both the security personnel from the vehicle were escorting Ned.
There were two similar cars whose driver/bodyguards were still present. Most of the board members would have come to the meeting via underground tramlines from their private residences within the estate rather than being driven.
The guards opened both doors of the limo’s passenger compartment deferentially. The Telarian noble paused and said to Ned, “Did you really want to speak to me, or . . .”
Ned nodded. “Could we drive slowly around the estate for a moment?” he asked. “Back trails?”
“Yes, of course,” Lucas said. He gestured to the man holding his door, the driver. “Go on, then.”
Lucas looked drawn. People on the stone-flagged patio fronting the spire watched the tableau sidelong. The armed, uniformed attendants in front of the building were the only ones who felt they could openly stare at the folk who rode in limousines; and that only while Lucas and Ned stepped through the weapons detector that covered the entranceway.
Ned and Lucas got into the car from opposite sides. As soon as the doors thunked closed, Ned retrieved the needle stunner he’d hidden between the seat cushions during the ride from the spaceport. His body concealed what he was doing from his companion.
“Master Lucas,” he said, “I don’t like what’s going to happen now—”
“You know this is none of my doing!” Lucas burst out. “I—I’ll leave home, I won’t stay on Telaria even, not after this. But it’s already done, Slade. There’s nothing I can do now!”
The guards closed themselves into the front with the same solid shocks as those the rear doors had made. Ned’s view forward ignored the guards. The limousine pulled away silently, heading down a curving drive.
“I know that, Lucas,” Ned said. “That’s why I wanted you out of the building. You’re not the only innocent person, I realize, but you’re the only one I know personally.”
“I don’t understand,” the Telarian said. He frowned as he tried to fit the mercenary’s statement into a knowledge base which had no category for it.
Secondary trails within the estate were only wide enough for one car at a time, so there were pull-overs every half kilometer or so. The limo approached one of them. A bank of red and white flowers grew on the left side, with a bower of trees with long flexible tendrils in place of leaves on the right. There were no other persons or vehicles in sight.
“Just a moment,” said Ned. He reached forward with his left index finger and touched the switch controlling the armored window between the front and rear compartments.
The driver started slightly at the sound. The guard broke off a comment about the soccer final and twisted to face the men in back. “Yes sir?” he said to Lucas.
“Would you please park here a moment?” Ned said.
Lucas nodded. “Yes, do that,” he said. He looked disconcerted. “There’s an intercom, you know,” he added as the limousine pulled beneath the trees.
Ned shot the guard, then the driver, in the back of the neck with his stunner. The weapon clicked as its barrel coil snapped tiny needles out by electromagnetic repulsion.
The guard went into spastic convulsions while the fluctuating current passed between the opposite poles of the needle in his spine. The driver arched his back and became comatose. His foot slipped off the brake, but the limousine’s mass held the vehicle steady against the idling motors.
Lucas screamed and slapped the door latch. Ned grabbed Lucas around the neck left-handed but didn’t squeeze.
“Wait!” Ned shouted. “They’ll be all right! Don’t make me hurt you.”
The door was ajar. Ned slid sideways, pushing Lucas ahead of him from the vehicle. He continued to hold the Telarian for fear the fool would try to run and he’d have to shoot him down. Needle stunners could do permanent nerve damage or even cause death through syncope. If Ned had wanted that, he’d have left the boy in the boardroom with his relatives.
“What are you doing?” Lucas gasped. “You can’t get out of here, you know that! Am I a hostage?”
Ned opened the driver’s door with the little finger of his right hand. The driver fell to the pavement in catatonic rigidity. His submachine gun and that of his fellow still stood muzzle-up in their boots on the central console.
“You’re not a hostage,” Ned said. At any moment, somebody might drive up and he’d have to kill them. “Look, this car has an autopilot, doesn’t it? Program it to drive to the family chapel.”
“But—”
“Now, curse you, now!” Ned said. He thrust Lucas’ head and torso within the driver’s compartment. He was bigger than the Telarian and stronger for his size, but it was the sheer violence of Ned’s will that dominated Lucas utterly. The presence of the submachine guns within millimeters of Lucas’ hands was no danger.
The Telarian called up a map on the dashboard screen. He touched a point on it without bothering to check the index of coordinates. The mechanism chimed obediently.
The guard thrashed again, then subsided. He’d lost control of his sphincter muscles, voiding his bladder and bowels. Lucas stared at the man in obvious terror.
Lucas withdrew from the car. “You can’t get off-planet in your ship,” he said to Ned. “The port defenses will destroy it before you’re a thousand meters high. And even if you got to Dell, it’s too late for Lissea—you heard my father!”
“Listen to me,” Ned said. “If you’re smart, you’ll just lie low here for the next while. I don’t care what you do, I don’t care if you raise an alarm—it won’t change anything now. But for your own sake, don’t go back to the spire.”
Ned got into the limo. He dropped the stunner into his pocket—waste not, want not—and charged one of the submachine guns. He looked again at Lucas, still standing frozen above the uniformed driver. “You’ve been as decent as you know how, Doormann,” Ned said. “I wish it didn’t have to happen this way.”
He engaged the autopilot. The dash beeped at him chidingly: the rear door was open.
Ned crushed his boot down on the throttle pedal. The limousine’s metal tires sang, chewing divots from the rubberized road material as they accelerated the heavy vehicle. Inertia slammed the door shut.
Ned lifted his foot and let the car drive itself as he checked the other submachine gun. Lucas stood in the center of the road, staring after the limousine until a curve took the vehicle out of sight.
Platt muttered to himself as he opened the laboratory door. He forgot to squint as he stepped inside, so the sudden harsh illumination slapped his eyes. The fog of fortified wine in his brain ignited in a fireball that made him curse desperately.
After a time, Platt regained enough composure to pick his way through the ranks of equipment with his eyes slitted. There was an unfamiliar humming in the big room, but he couldn’t identify the source. Anyway, it might have been the wine.
The capsule squatted on the platform at the end of the lab, as ugly as an egg after hatching. Pareto, the night man, claimed there was a corpse in the thing when they found it, but Platt didn’t watch the news himself m
uch.
He didn’t trust that bastard Pareto, either. Pareto kept asking for the lousy ten thalers he’d loaned Platt last . . . last—whenever it was.
Platt lurched into one of the mirror stands. It was anchored to the floor. Instead of toppling over, the stand threw the attendant back with the start of a bad bruise. He cursed again, rubbing himself and thinking about the unfairness of life.
The black concave mirror whined shrilly, then slowly returned to synchrony with the others.
Platt touched the door of the capsule, then leaped away. He thought he’d received an electric shock. When he rubbed his fingertips together, he realized that the feeling was simply high-frequency vibration.
Gingerly, he gripped the edge of the door and slammed it with all his strength. Air compressing within the ovoid prevented the clang! from being as violent as Platt would have liked.
The humming was louder. It appeared to be coming from around the capsule, rather than from the capsule itself. The attendant turned away and started for the door.
Red light bathed the room. Platt glanced over his shoulder, suddenly afraid to face fully around.
The capsule was glowing. Atoms within its structure were coming into sequence with their selves of seventy years before. The meld was not absolute, but as more and more points achieved unity, they dragged neighboring atoms into self-alignment also. Closing the front of the ovoid started the mass down a one-way road to critical perfection.
The capsule was fire-orange, then yellow. As the blaze verged into white, all trace of physical structure was lost within the radiance.
Platt tried to run. His uniform seared brown and the hair on the back of his head burst into flame. The hum was a roar and the fires of Hell were loose.
All the lights in the laboratory shattered, but their absence was unnoticeable. Platt threw himself behind a massive computer console, unable to hear his own screams. The soundproofing cones in the walls and ceiling sublimed and drifted as black cobwebs in fierce air currents.
Matter attempting to fill the same space as its own earlier/later self became the energy that alone could escape from the catastrophic paradox. Laboratory equipment shattered. Metals and plastics began to burn in temperatures beyond those achieved in the carbon-iron cycle of a dying sun.
Devouring radiance ionized the whole contents of the laboratory into plasma. A spear of light sprang up the long axis of what had been the capsule, piercing the armored ceiling above like an oxygen lance through tissue.
The humans on the floor above didn’t have time to scream, nor did those on the floor above them; but the fire screamed like a god of destruction.
A switch on the dashboard could lock the tracks of the mobile crane into linked plates fifty centimeters long to lower the equipment’s ground pressure on yielding surfaces. For this concrete roadway Westerbeke, who was driving, left the tracks at maximum flexibility. They sang at high frequency, giving the impression that the 80-tonne crane was moving much faster than its actual forty kilometers per hour.
A car that had been trapped behind the crane for some time managed to get into the center lane. It passed with its horn hooting angrily. Josie Paetz leaned out of the crane operator’s cab and screamed, “Fuck you! Just fuck you!” to the vehicle.
Yazov drew him back. The boy had kept his guns hidden, so there was no harm done. “Let him be, Jose,” Yazov said. “We’ll have something real to do soon enough.”
“Amen to that,” Deke Warson said. His fingertips caressed a submachine gun beneath the tarp beside him on the crane’s back deck. The big construction vehicle was taller than the other traffic, but guards on the wall surrounding the Doormann Estate could still look down on it. For the moment, the guards had nothing better to do.
Raff and Herne Lordling were in the driver’s cab with Westerbeke. The rest of the mercenary crew rode on the back of the vehicle. They wore ponchos to conceal their battledress, body armor, and slung weapons.
The team was in position: the crane had been driving along the innermost lane of the highway paralleling the walled estate for the past five kilometers. Until the signal, the merce naries could only gaze at the wall and the twenty-meter band of wired and mined wasteland protecting the Doormann family’s privacy. Occasionally a blue-uniformed guard watched idly from the wall.
Every half kilometer stood another tower mounting a huge anti-starship weapon.
“When are we—” Josie Paetz said.
Something within the estate flashed brightly enough to be seen in the full sunlight.
“Got it!” Josie Paetz screamed, ripping off his poncho. Yazov clutched him. A moment later, Lordling ordered through the commo helmets, “Don’t anybody move! We’ve got to get closer to the gun tower before we move!”
“Then get fucking moving,” Deke Warson whispered through clenched teeth. Toll looked at him, but Deke was just letting off a touch of the pressure building in the instants before insertion.
When the column of light bloomed within the estate, the crane was nearly midway between a pair of the towers mounting 25-cm weapons. As the treads whined forward, the tower behind the mercenaries dropped out of sight because of the wall’s curvature.
A pair of company guards, visible from the waist up, stood on the firing step of the wall outside the approaching tower. They were four meters above the road surface and across the buffer strip. The light from within the estate had broadened into a ball of iridescent rose-petals. The guards, a man and a woman, must have heard a sound inaudible over the singing chatter of the crane’s treads, because they turned.
Westerbeke slipped the right-hand set of steering clutches but kept full power to the left track. The crane squealed and executed a right turn, heading directly toward the gun tower.
Westerbeke locked the track plates when he felt soil shift under the crane’s weight. A series of antipersonnel mines went off harmlessly beneath the treads, whacking like a string of firecrackers. Dirt and black smoke flew out.
The guards on the wall spun back at the sound of the mines and the clanging treads. At least six of the mercenaries fired simultaneously, blowing the guards’ heads and torsos apart in cyan fury.
An antivehicle mine containing at least ten kilos of high explosive went off under the left-hand tread. The track broke and the forward road wheel flew skyward. The men on the rear deck had to grab for handholds when the cab lifted, but Westerbeke kept the crane grinding onward.
The drive sprockets were at the rear. The vehicle held a nearly straight line, though one broken end of the track remained where it was on the ground. The wheels rode off it. Festoons of razor ribbon and vines streamed back from the running gear.
The huge powergun started to depress. The weapon couldn’t be aimed low enough to bear on a vehicle already at the base of the tower, and the next gun position in either direction was out of sight. A guard ran from the building, tugging at his holster. Both Warson and Josie Paetz shot the fellow before his hand was fully around the butt of his pistol. The body, headless and eviscerated by the bolts, spun off the firing step like the others.
The crane hit two more big mines, both on the right. The vehicle tilted sideways, then settled back upright on its shattered road-wheels. Westerbeke disengaged the drive train.
Yazov clutched in the crane itself. The vehicle had come close enough that the end of its boom already projected above the wall. Yazov lowered the boom until it—a massive square-section girder—rested on the masonry. He shouted after his nephew, but Paetz was already racing up the boom ahead of the rest of the mercenaries.
The armored hatch in the side of the gun tower was open. A woman in blue was trying to tug it closed. Paetz fired toward the gap as he ran along the girder. His submachine gun put two bolts of the three-round burst into her head.
Paetz jumped to the parapet, then caromed within the tower structure as part of the same motion. A man crouched at a console with a microphone in one hand and a pistol in the other. Paetz fired, and Toll Warson fired his
2-cm weapon from the boom. The Telarian guard’s right arm flew from his torso.
Warson’s shot singed the hair from the back of Paetz’ neck, but it probably saved the younger man’s life as well. Even head shots with the submachine gun’s lighter bolts might not have been instantly fatal.
A circular metal staircase with an open railing of tubes led up to the gunhouse. A guard hesitated on it, halfway through the opening to the upper chamber.
Paetz emptied the rest of the submachine gun’s magazine into the man, igniting his clothing and blowing chunks of the stairway into dazzling sparks. The Telarian slipped down the treads, howling mindlessly and dragging a pink trail of intestine.
The room stank of ozone and burned meat. Paetz ejected the empty magazine and slapped a fresh one home in the well. Toll Warson swept past, aiming his powergun upward but letting his brother lead. Deke carried a submachine gun, and the lighter weapon would be quicker to swing onto targets from uncertain directions. They leaped the dying guard and pounded up the stairs.
There was no one in the gun chamber. Identical chairs and consoles sat right and left of the gun’s breech and loading mechanism. They and the weapon rotated together with the floor of the chamber.
Screens above either console provided a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama from the gun tower. Fine orange crosshatching covered the portion of the display showing the estate proper. Lockouts within the control system prevented the gun crew from accidentally aiming their weapon toward the area they were defending.
“We’re clear here!” Toll Warson shouted down into the lower chamber. “We’ll take care of the rest!”
Deke’s miniature toolkit lay on the barbette floor beside him. He’d already removed the plate covering the front of one console.
The screen above Deke showed the spouting geyser of plasma which was devouring the estate’s central tower, but he ignored it. He had work to do.
