Kill Station

by Diane Duane; Peter Morwood

  "None better," Evan said. "But I also know which parts of nationalism to reject. The hate, the fear. One can be Welsh, or Japanese, without having to waste tune servicing the old grudges and killing the old enemies, economic or otherwise. You, however, seem to prefer your nationalism whole and entire, with the useless old hates and prides retained."

  "Why not?" said the voice, and its coolness was beginning to ebb away. "We have always been best, known that we were best; our craftsmanship has ruled the world for centuries now. But what are we?

  Less than a house, less than a power, in something now much less than a country.''

  "First among equals, surely."

  "Who would be first among such equals?" The voice was full of scorn. "Nations of shopkeepers, races of power brokers and peasants who think themselves as good as everyone else. An etiolated world. Better to see them about their old business, squabbling and scrambling for power. It suited them better. And us."

  "So you think," Evan said. "For all your proud words, though, you still won't fight. You're afraid. And your honor is lost to you. But you've fooled yourself into not even missing it."

  "You have no knowledge of these matters.''

  "I have the only knowledge that matters. I went into your place, and ransacked it, when I had evidence of the murders your people were doing. I left those of your peo-SPACE COPS 233

  pie who contested me lying in their blood. I took back the captive you took from me. I ripped two of your ships apart with my bare hands. I am the 'etiolated world', the pale imitation, the new order, everything you most hate and fear.

  And you sit inside, protected by your guns, and don't dare confront me to find out whether your words are true." Evan let his scorn show in his voice now. "You are not worth as much as the least of the poor fools I killed today, who had given their word they'd fight for you—and died doing it, died believing in the vision that you showed them—and won't fight for. You are despicable, and if you were here before me, I would take your sword from you, and break it in front of your eyes."

  "You would try," said the soft voice.

  "Ask the men I killed today," said Evan, "how I tried."

  There was a long, long pause.

  "And when I kill you," said the voice, "what will you have gained?"

  "When we fight," Evan said, "we'll both find where the real strength lies."

  "If you know this much about me," said the voice, "you know how I am armed."

  "I know what you wear, and what weapons come with it. How you're armed is another matter."

  "Even if you should by some bizarre chance kill me," said Takawabara, "my people will not stop fighting. And I will not tell them to. They will destroy your precious station yet, and with it your all your nervous mock alliances."

  "We can take care of your people," Evan said, quite calmly, more calmly than he had a right to be perhaps, since he had no idea how the station security people were doing. But this was not a time to betray any uncertainty. "Nothing is left, now, but this ship. And the man hiding inside it, behind the big gun.''

  He paused, a bit out of breath. Thank you, debating society, he thought; thank you, Classics 101. And thank 234 SPACE COPS

  you, Evelyn Wood. His speed-reading course had been one of the best things ever to happen to him, next to the ability to declaim the phone book and make it sound good. A trained voice with a Welsh accent had its uses.

  "Well?" Evan said. "Is the Blue Dragon man enough to take on the Red? Or are you going to shoot me, and make my partner hunt you down? A man with honor rather differently shaped from yours," Evan added. "He would hunt you down and trick you to your death, and afterwards he would feel sorry about it."

  A long, long pause.

  "Officer Glyndower," said the voice, "I will be out shortly."

  He did not keep Evan waiting long.

  He came out of an airlock that had its own elevator, and magnetic locks for the boots, so that he ascended into view, like a stage magician or an aspiring god with a new pedestal. The suit was dead black, and it gleamed in the light reflected from HighLands. The faired-in hump on the back was huge.

  For all Evan knew, there was a nuke in there that was twice as big as the one he had carried in the service. At least he won't be using it in close combat, Evan thought. Must make sure he doesn 't try to lob it at the station, if that's what it is. But heaven only knows what else he might have in there. There were certainly two slug cannons in the arms—the Krupp specialty—and paired tuned beamers, and a flamethrower, perhaps two. There were also the missiles; eight in the arm packs, two heatseekers in the backpack hi the normal configuration. Not that they were much use on a man. But on a space station . . .

  Evan checked his own specs, and looked at what he knew the other man's to be, and sighed. / teased him into this. What am I going to do now? Hit him with a stick?

  And for evidence's sake, I really should try to avoid killing him. Maybe now I can taunt him into turning himself in.

  And maybe pigs will fly. . , .

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  Tactically, it was a nasty situation. Mostly preventive, the hardest kind to manage. Keep the enemy from using the long range weapons, make him concentrate on the short range ... on you. Always easier said than done.

  And Joss had his hands full elsewhere, and was in no position to clean up any spills, as it were. No, Evan my lad, he thought, this one you save or screw over by your own self.

  Evan checked his specs again. He was low on maneuvering fuel, but that couldn't be helped at this point.

  / much doubt I'll have to chase this lad all over the place, anyway, he thought. He turned all his alert systems on, gave himself a slight boost of jet towards Takawabara, and for the moment just listened to what the audio outputs of the alert system had to say to him.

  They were picking up a disturbing hum of power from the other man's suit, much higher than would be accounted for by the suit's basic power rating. No surprise there, Evan thought. The head of the company can damned well afford to put a few extras in his custom job. But what sucks power like that? And what needs that kind of power plant to run it?

  There seemed to be no point in speculating. The thing now was to close in, try a few initial moves to feel the other combatant out, and see what his weaknesses were.

  If any, said some tremulous, traitor part of Evan's mind. That suit looked meaner than most—but then, it had been engineered to. Most of the design that went into a given suit had nothing to do with weapon engineering; it was psychological. It was more cost-effective, after all, to get an enemy to run away at the sight of you. It saved ammunition, and lives. Takawabara's suit had been designed to provoke the runaway response with a vengeance. The blackness of it, the blankness of the helm, missing even the slight facial-shape cues that Evan's had; the huge bulk of the forearm and leg fairings—you were meant to see a giant, looking at it; a monster, an ogre that would twist your head off and crunch it up like an hors d'oeuvre. Next

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  to it, Evan felt rather like a midget, like David going up against Goliath.

  He smiled slightly. The smile was a useful one.

  He was closer, about fifty meters away now. That blank helm studied him. One arm moved slightly, a gesture that swept off to one side.

  Something small and dark leapt from the arm fairing. Evan reacted without thinking, waking up his arm cannon, which he had gratefully reloaded with slugs as soon as they had left the pressure-sensitive environment of Wil-lans. The reaction of his own firing slowed his own forward movement, which was just as well, as his slugs met the mini-missile halfway and exploded it.

  His helm polarized and depolarized, sparing him the flash without bothering him with the details. But the scream of his audio alarms told him that two more missiles were coming at him while the first one was in the act of exploding. His helm was dark, but Evan wasn't blind. Tactical projection on the inside helm surface gave him heads-up display, the tracks of the incoming missiles, on
e from each side. He brought both arms up, and fired the slug cannons again, in a broad pattern, the way a hunter lets a pattern of shot take down several birds at once. Both missiles exploded.

  Then a blast of heat went past his left leg, and Evan cut in every jet he had, and moved sideways in a hurry, firing some slugs as well to help the process alone. The alert system screamed in his ears of massive energy output; head-up display showed him a line of light streaking past him, broader than any normal laser beam. His helm depolarized in time to show him Takawabara turning again to follow him. Evan pointed straight up over his head, fired another burst to knock himself downward, and the braided laser went by over his head.

  "Take that sword," Takawabara said, "if you can."

  He stepped up off his pedestal, floating free, and fired again. It's impossible, Evan thought. He can't possibly be carrying the onboard computer power necessary to get the

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  damn thing to braid! For the lasing crystals had to have their structure agitated by precisely tuned and fired radiation outputs, and the firing of the output radiation was managed by a modulation algorithm that assessed the lasing crystals' shifting energy states millisecond by millisecond. Such delicate control could only be managed by a computer with huge processing speed, and gigs and gigs of memory. There was no way to fit any such thing onto a chip, or even a pack, portable enough to fit into a suit.

  Evan's mouth was dry. He did his best to ignore it, and thought, Bloody hell with this; time to get cranky. He picked one of his optional heatseekers, killed the heat-seeking option, pointed his left arm at Takawabara, and fired. And fired a second, and a third, and then pointed his other arm at the man's own lifting right arm, adjusted his stream to minimum, and fired a long burst, about four breaths' worth.

  Takawabara's left arm pointed, fired the braided laser again, taking out the first missile, the second. The third was a close miss, and it almost took off the end of the right arm, which Evan had driven back by sheer pressure of slugs ramming into it. He smiled slightly. That was all it would take: one small mistake.

  The man was heavily armed, yes, but possibly for that very reason, he was somewhat slow with the tricks well known to someone with a suit with fewer options.

  Then the world spilled sideways as slugs began pounding into Evan's armor, tumbling him over and over.

  Gyros groaned as his suit strained to find its own stability again, and Evan's inertia! tracking systems went crazy as the hail of slugs rammed into him harder than any lead would have done. Exhausted uranium, he thought, somewhat admiringly, even as he spun and wobbled out of control, and fought to stop himself. Very nice. A bit pricy, though.

  He tried firing his jets to take him out of the stream. They were very low, too slow to do much good. At the same time, his alert system began screaming in his ear again, about another burst of energy being used. A differ-338 SPACE COPS

  ent sound from the pre-laser scream, this: more of a series of spaced howls. Evan swallowed, keyed another of the heatseekers loose, turned its heat sensitivity down, told it to watch for chemical output as well, and turned it loose.

  The missile went, and for several long, long moments there was no response. Evan was still tumbling in a hail of slugs from Takawabara's guns. The braided laser raked by him, missing again. On purpose? Evan thought. Or is he just too mad to shoot straight?

  Then the missile found its target. Evan saw the initial impact, twisted his face away, not trusting even the polarization of the helm (though he ordered it as black as it would go), and made himself into a small tight ball. The flash like a sun flare came a second later, and then the shock wave. They were still close enough to Earth for the vacuum to be not nearly complete, and every free molecule in the area went rushing out in a common shock wave as the low-yield pressured nuke that Takawabara had fired went off. About a kiloton, Evan thought, with some professional interest, as the horrible storm of slugs stopped suddenly.

  We 'II see how well his armor takes it. For himself, he just hung on, doubled over his knees and holding onto them, as the mushroom expanded out and out. His heads-up showed him the spread as a vague bloom of rose-colored fog; not very hot, but potentially quite destructive, had it hit anything physical. Evan as he watched, the fireball was collapsing in on itself. Wonder how his radiation shielding is? Evan thought. He was going to check his own dosimeter pretty carefully when he got home.

  There was no use trying to sneak up on baddies hi the middle of the night if you glowed in the dark. But if Lu-cretia was hoping for a quiet end to all this, it's blown now. Half the station has to be hanging out the windows at this point, wondering what's happening—

  —and then something hit him hard, in the back, that his heads-up display had not shown him. Evan uncurled in shock, gasping for air for a moment, briefly unsure that this armor hadn't cracked in back.

  Unlikely as it seemed,

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  he was being grappled. What kind of jets has that man got? Evan wondered, as he felt Takawabara's arms around his, pinning him, and realized that the nuke's output must have blinded his close-in detection for the moment. Something else to talk to the mechanics about— he thought, as he struggled. In gravity he would have pitched his enemy over his head, but there was no way to do that here; no leverage. The other had more jets than he did, more fuel in any case, so trying to confuse Takawabara-'s gyros was out of the question. Got to get turned, he thought, desper- . ately wriggling, straining any way he could; got to face him— For without facing him, there was no telling where that damned braided laser was pointed. And at this range, the man couldn't possibly miss.

  Neither can I, Evan thought, and turned his attention downward. Every suit had an Achilles heel, literally. No one had yet been able to convince the suit manufacturers that feet needed much in the way of armoring, and to the cognoscenti of suit warfare, it was the preferred target, a great place to shoot people and give them something else to think about.

  The problem was that Evan was still being grappled from behind, by someone in a suit with perhaps twice the crush and tear ratings that his had. And the pressure was building up. Maybe I shouldn't have bragged so much about tearing his ships up with my bare hands, Evan thought, as he did the only thing he could against the increasing pressure. He flexed everything he had outward; arms, legs. Then all at once he stopped struggling—

  A foot kicked forward from behind him, in reaction. The man had too little zero-gee experience, didn't know how to handle himself. Right, Evan thought, and pointed his left-hand slugfirer at that foot, narrowed the stream, and fired at the foot full-speed. Slugs—not exhausted uranium, but they would do—tore down in a stream of almost-solid metal, at about 500 kph. Someone might as well have grabbed Takawabara by the foot and pulled him oif Evan's back; at any rate he let go, pushed hard down by the stream of slug fire, unable to react with jets just yet.

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  And this was the bad moment, for the minute he recovered himself at all, he would certainly fire. Evan turned hard, grabbed whatever he could catch—one arm—hauled Takawabara up by it, and made it his business to keep that arm pointed away from him. Damn it all, anyway, he thought, it's still impossible. He can't be firing that thing— From the wrist of the flailing arm, it went off in front of his nose, and his helm blacked; the wash of heat was palpable, and it made Evan shudder with the strangeness of being able to feel any heat at all through his suit in space. Doesn't matter, he thought, kicking Takawabara in the stomach to buy himself a moment, and some motion; he's firing it anyway—

  It went off again. Evan was getting annoyed, not so much by his own situation, of holding a tiger by the tail and not daring to let go, but by the sheer impossibility of it all. He kicked Takawabara's other arm out of the way, hard enough to break something inside the armor, he hoped. He kicked it again, and again, and set them both spinning. It's just not fair, him and his fancy suit and all, and breaking the rules in ways that don't even make sense
-Then he had the idea.

  And at the same time, Takawabara's other flailing hand reached out and clamped onto the front pack that Evan was wearing, and started to rip it off.

  Oh, no, you don't! Evan thought, and grabbed at the other arm. Two-handed they grappled, and the situation was not a good one for Evan. Slugs came tearing out of the arm that didn't have the braided laser, and rattled and howled against Evan's breastplate and helm. He gasped for breath, unable to hear himself think, if thinking had made any noise, and praying silently that the chest and helm wouldn't give at such close range. They weren't really designed for such impacts. But they seemed to be holding for the moment.

  Something kicked him in the shins. He ignored the pain

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  and concentrated on keeping the front pack on, forcing his hand between Takawabara's clutching fingers and the woven fabric of the bag. It was Kevlon, theoretically un-tearable, but no one seemed to have told Takawabara's suit-makers about this. The stuff was ripping. He must have a hint of what's in there; Evan thought, in a rush of angry pleasure. And if he's reacting this way, then I must be right!

  Abruptly he let go the man's hand, instead shoving his own into what remained of the bag and managing to grab two of Joss's little black boxes. Now there was only one problem; to keep that damned laser off his case for a few seconds, just a few-He was still hanging onto the other arm, the one with the laser. It fired another time or two into the emptiness, but Evan was almost past being scared of it now. As long as it doesn 't hit me from behind— He flipped himself end-for-end, kicked away Takawabara's other wildly waving arm, and positioned himself with some care; then he kicked Takawabara's helm hard, twice, once more for good luck. He shoved away from the man and kicked his jets in one last time, heading toward the ship.

  Only the slightest result—the gauges in his heads-up display—showed the fuel gauges to his jets empty. He threw an anxious glance back at Takawabara. The man was moving slightly, whether from Evan's kick or under his own power was hard to tell. Evan didn't waste time wondering. Not even the best-cushioned helm could protect well against heavy close-up "mechanical" impacts like that. Evan had had some internal bracing added to his own, so that he had mostly to deal with noise rather than impact. Takawabara's armor, though, seemed to have been built on the concept that no one would ever get close enough to do anything so crude or low-tech as to merely strike. Its bracing was not what it might have been.