by John Ringo
Sar Gremian does not speak.
He stares blankly into the datacam, saying nothing at all for seventy point zero-three seconds. I am familiar with the homily “one’s life flashes before one’s eyes” at the approach of death. This appears to be a case of one’s career flashing before one’s eyes. I wait.
“I’ll get back to you,” he finally says.
The transmission terminates. I monitor outgoing communications from the president’s temporary office and detect a call to a private comm-unit registered to Vittori Santorini. The transmission is encrypted with a code I cannot break. The call lasts for three minutes, thirteen point two seconds. Sar Gremian calls me back.
“You can’t chase the missing Hellbores?”
“I can attempt aerial reconnaissance with a remote drone. The rebels destroyed the last three drones I launched. I have only one drone left on board and four more stored in depot.”
“Launch the drone, goddammit! Find out where those Hellbores are!”
“Drone launched. No visual contact. Faint IR trail detected. Several motorized vehicles have crossed Haggertown Valley and entered Skeleton Cut. Drone in pursuit. No motion detected. No visual contact. IR trails diverge into three branch canyons. No visual contact. IR trails branch again, into five feeder canyons. Unable to determine which heat signatures were produced by trucks and which were left by mobile Hellbore platforms. Decreasing altitude to check for tire and tread marks. Insufficient light to detect patterns in the dust overlay of stone canyon floor. Regaining altitude. No visual contact.” I hesitate as the IR trails vanish. “IR trails lost. Theorizing. Likeliest explanation is underground concealment. The canyons in this region are riddled with undercuts and caves. Suggest infantry squadrons as optimal search-and-destroy method.”
“Infantry? We don’t have any infantry.”
“Artillery crews would suffice as an acceptable substitute. Federal police units would also serve.”
“Send in the police? Against mobile Hellbores? Are you out of your mind?”
I consider this possibility. “Analyzing heuristics. Resartus Protocols have not engaged.”
“What? What the hell does that mean?”
“I am not insane.”
Sar Gremian stares into the camera. “How immensely reassuring. You can’t find three stolen nuclear weapons platforms or a convoy of multi-ton trucks, but you’re not insane. Is there some other task you can waste time on while looking for the stolen guns?”
“I can keep talking to you.”
This is, perhaps, not the most politic thing I might have said. Sar Gremian’s reply is a snarl that twists his mouth in a particularly unattractive manner. “Find the fucking Hellbores, machine! I don’t give a damn what it takes. Blow holes through every rockface in the Damisi Mountains, if you have to, but find them. Is that clear enough for you?”
“I cannot blow holes in the canyon walls without increasing the amount of hard radiation already contaminating the Haggertown Valley farms and the towns of Haggertown and Gersham. Without the crops in these farms, Jefferson faces widespread food shortages. This conflicts with my primary mission.”
Sar Gremian’s response is both pithy and unhelpful. He terminates the transmission and places another coded call to Vittori Santorini. This call lasts eight minutes, nineteen seconds. Sar Gremian calls me back. “Go to your depot. We’ll send the P-Squads out there. That’ll keep somebody busy earning their pay.”
The veiled threat to my future level of financial support registers clearly in my threat-assessment processors. It is the last clear and fully aware thought I entertain before standing down from Battle Reflex Alert. I feel the loss of analytical power as I back out through the carnage I have wrought atop Barran Bluff. I successfully extricate myself from the rubble, noting the unhappy look on Captain Lokkis’ face as he receives a transmission from Sar Gremian. The man who engineered the downfall of the Hancock family does not appear to relish pursuit of an enemy in possession of high-tech weaponry concealed in a maze of canyons in the middle of the night.
This is not my immediate concern. I limp toward my maintenance depot, registering the damage in pain sensors across my prow and forward turret and track mounts. I move at a crawling pace of barely one kilometer per hour, trying to save further serious damage to my track linkages. It is a long way home. And the only thing I have to look forward to, when I reach it, is the dubious care to be rendered by a functionally illiterate technician who was drunk during our last conversation.
Misery has become my constant companion.
IV
At the one-hundred meter mark, Kafari flashed the commence-attack signal.
Three Hellbores snarled from the darkness. Nineveh’s training barracks, officers’ quarters, and noncom barracks vanished into white-hot, triple fireballs. Debris shot skyward, arcing up and out in graceful parabolas. The smashed pieces of Nineveh’s entire command structure were still falling when Red Wolf leaned through his open window and fired a shoulder-launched rocket at the fence between them and their objective.
The warhead detonated just above the ground. A spectacular flash obliterated a five-meter swath of fence. Red Wolf ducked back into the truck as bits of semimolten debris rained down onto their transport. Kafari put her foot down and roared forward. She charged the gap at full speed and plunged through the smoking wreckage, then skidded into the open plaza beyond. The prison lay dead ahead. Other teams were converging on the rendezvous point. She skidded them to a halt right on target. Kafari and Red Wolf, facemasks and hoods firmly in place, bailed out of the truck while the squads in back tumbled over the tailgate.
Kafari’s team was the first to reach the detention center’s door. She could see officers inside, silhouetted against the interior lights as they peered out at the destruction, too stunned to realize they, too, were under attack. Red Wolf slapped a shaped charge against the sophisticated electronics that kept the door locked. He jammed in fuses and scrambled back. Half the door blew off. Red Wolf kicked down what was left.
Kafari signaled her fire teams to drop into a low crouch, a posture that afforded less target space for the enemy’s guns, then motioned them forward. They dove through the demolished wreckage of the door, rolling into a room full of smoke. The biochem mask lowered visibility to nearly nothing. Kafari couldn’t tell where her team members were and couldn’t see the enemy at all. Gunfire barked in the smoke-filled room. Somebody was shooting blind, taking wild shots through the murk.
A bullet whined past Kafari’s ear and embedded itself in the wall behind her. She tracked the muzzle flash and returned fire, shooting through a reception counter to reach the gunman beyond. She threw herself into a sideways roll, away from anyone shooting back at her and heard a sharp, masculine scream above the staccato chatter of other guns. Movement behind her brought Kafari around, ready to defend against fire from the rear. She recognized Anish by the command helmet he wore.
“What the goddamned hell are you doing here?” he roared at her.
She took down a guard to Anish’s right, nailing him, center of mass. “Saving your goddamned backside! Get to work, soldier!”
“Secure the cell blocks,” Anish shouted into his command-comm. “Don’t give ’em time to slaughter the prisoners. Blow doors if you have to, but get in there!”
Kafari’s forward fire team made short work of the door that separated the public reception area from the private offices and cell blocks beyond. A concussion shook the room as they blew that door, as well. The smoke that bellied up concealed their movements as they scuttled through. Kafari motioned her second team through and motioned Anish and his teams forward, as well, in deference to Anish’s desire to keep her in the realm of the living. Red Wolf stayed glued to her back, shooting at anything wearing a POPPA uniform and covering their rear from potential attack if anyone still outside developed a hankering to protest what was happening in here.
They moved out on the heels of Anish’s last team, following them into a long c
orridor with offices — whole suites of offices — branching off from it. The teams ahead of her were hard-pressed to sweep for potential ambushes in those rooms while attempting to reach the cell blocks before a massacre could ensue. Kafari and Red Wolf moved at a crouch, keeping their heads below the level of the windows set into various doors and moving cautiously from one doorway to the next.
They were halfway down the corridor when gunfire erupted, cutting them off from Anish’s rear-most fire teams. Kafari ate the floor — then found herself under Red Wolf. He tackled her and sent them skidding into another office, out of the line of fire. Kafari cursed as they fetched up hard against somebody’s desk. For one brain-rattled moment, she was in a Klameth Canyon basement, again, with the Deng shooting at them through the stairs and Abe Lendan’s bodyguard tackling and sliding with him into the wall. No wonder the president had yelled — being body-slammed hurt.
Kafari shook her head to clear it, then twisted around, trying to see where the shots were coming from. Muzzle flashes from an office farther along the corridor gave her the location. The placard on the door said Commandant’s Office.
Kafari crawled forward on elbows and knees. Red Wolf checked her, interposing himself between her and the door. “No way, sir,” he muttered. “Use the radio and keep your damn-fool head down.”
Kafari ground her teeth and spat into her command-comm. “Alpha One to Beta One, we are pinned. Repeat, pinned. We are taking fire from the commandant’s office. Might be a useful bird if he knows how to sing.”
“Roger. Stay put.”
Seven seconds later, a barrage of covering fire erupted in the corridor. Live rounds created a grey canopy at waist height, forcing the occupant or occupants of the commandant’s office to duck for their lives. Red Wolf slid through the open doorway of their shelter, motioning Kafari to stay where she was, and eased forward under that canopy. Kafari was nearly bouncing with frustration when she remembered that she wore a command helmet. Swearing at her own greenhorn stupidity, she fumbled with exterior controls until the video system came online, giving her thumbnail views from each of the button-size, fish-eye cameras on her field team’s helmets.
She zeroed in on Red Wolf’s signal and watched, distracted and fascinated by the eerie sensation, as “they” crawled forward under covering fire. Red Wolf reached the commandant’s open doorway, while one of Anish’s team members approached from the other side. They crawled through together, peeling left and right as they slid into the room. Kafari could see boots under the desk ahead of Red Wolf.
Whoever was doing the shooting, he or she didn’t like the hail of live rounds tearing into the office. The person was shooting wildly, reaching up with one hand to fire in the general direction of the hall, while staying behind the interposing desk. Within seconds, with the pistol shot dry, an empty magazine bounced onto the floor and slid toward Red Wolf. An instant later, their quarry started swearing a blue streak.
“He’s fumbled the reload!” Kafari shouted.
Red Wolf hurled himself forward and skidded around the end of the desk. The gunman was still trying to ram the magazine home when Red Wolf took him off at the knees. He screamed and went down. Blood soaked into his trousers from a pair of nicely shattered kneecaps.
Red Wolf searched him for weapons. “He’s clean, sir.”
Kafari crossed the corridor at a run and reached the other office without drawing any more fire. Their prisoner was, indeed, the commandant of Nineveh Base.
“You’ll fry for this!” he snarled. Hatred and pain had twisted his face into a malevolent mask.
Red Wolf gave him a cold laugh. “I’m so scared, you got me pissing in my boots.” He ripped a wire loose from the computer console and twisted the commandant’s wrists behind him. “He’s all yours, sir,” Red Wolf said, giving Kafari a salute.
She beckoned Anish’s fire team in from the hall. “Get him outta here,” she said, dropping her voice into its lowest registers and putting a Port Town swagger into it. “Put him in my truck. I wanna chat with this som-bitch.”
“Aye-aye, sir!”
They hoisted Nineveh’s commandant and carried him out, ignoring the string of invectives ripping loose. Kafari and Red Wolf scrambled after the rest of the penetration team, which had leapfrogged ahead to reach the cell blocks. They found Anish Balin at the cell block’s control console, using the master computer to unlock rank after rank of prison doors. Several uniformed officers were down, both in the control room and in the corridor between the cells, sprawled obscenely in pools of their own blood. Dazed prisoners were stumbling past, some of them so badly injured, they couldn’t walk without help. A few had to be carried.
One man’s face had been nearly obliterated by savage beatings. The wreckage was purple-black, a face made of squashed plums. The ghastly, swollen bruises and crusted blood had nearly closed both eyes. It looked like there was broken bone, under the bruises. The coffee-toned skin of his hands, ears, and neck had turned a shade more grey than brown. His clothing was ripped, revealing more bruises. He’d actually staggered past before Kafari realized who he was. She turned sharply, queasy from the shock, and strode after him. Speaking in a low whisper, she asked, “Do Asali bees still have stingers?”
He slewed around, squinting through crusted, swollen eyes, unable to see her face through the biochem mask and command helmet. “I’d hate to get caught in a swarm,” he said cautiously, the words slurred and drunken as he struggled to move muscles too stiff and battered to shape the sounds. Even so, those few words confirmed his identity. Dinny Ghamal swayed on his feet and sweat broke out across his battered face. “Asali bees can get mean,” he added, waiting for her response.
“Oh, yes,” Kafari agreed. “It’s a good idea to have a bolt-hole handy, if you run Asali bees. Cheese rooms work pretty well.”
She saw realization spread itself across his ruined face, tugging at the edges of his eyes and battered mouth. Then Dinny grippped her free hand — the one without a gun in it — with both of his own. Crusted blood around his eyes softened and ran red.
“You came back for us,” he choked out. “They told us you were dead. Showed us pictures of your aircar, wrecked and full of bullet holes. But you came back, just for us…”
Kafari started to answer, intending to say, “Of course I came back for you” when sudden understanding flashed through her. He was speaking literally. He thought she’d come back from the dead. The amount of pain required to reduce Dinny Ghamal to such a state turned Kafari’s hatred into ice-filled rage.
“There’s an old saying,” Kafari told him, “that our ancestors brought out from Terra. There is nothing as dangerous as a strong man’s ghost.”
Dinny’s fingers tightened against hers as a rush of emotions — far too complex to take in while a battle raged around them — blazed in his eyes. Kafari pulled a backup gun from her gear and handed it to him. “Where’s your mother? And your wife?”
“Second floor. With the little ones.” He stood up straighter as he pointed the way to the nearest stairwell.
Kafari called for backup. “Alpha Team, form up and move out! Second floor! They’ve shifted the wounded and the kids!”
She was already running for the stairs, gun in hand. Red Wolf was right behind her. Dinny struggled along in her wake. Kafari took the steps two at a time, just ahead of Alpha Team’s front runners. When they reached the second floor landing, Kafari flattened herself against the wall while Red Wolf kicked the door in.
Nobody shot at them.
Red Wolf went through first, leaving Dinny and Kafari as rear guard. They’d emerged into a long corridor that paralleled the line of cell blocks one floor below. This floor clearly served as infirmary — but not for healing purposes. The beds and examination tables all had straps. Thick, unbreakable ones. Most had dark stains that no one had bothered to clean up.
She heard voices farther down the corridor, women’s voices, shrill with panic. By the time Kafari and Dinny reached the source of the
screams, the noisemakers had fallen silent. Red Wolf stood guard over six women prisoners, two in P-Squad uniforms, the other four in white lab coats. Alpha Team was kicking down more doors. Prisoners were stumbling, even crawling, out of detention cells. Most of them bore the marks of torture, with physical injuries that made Dinny’s beating look mild. Kafari’s cold rage froze into jagged ice. Mere retribution didn’t come close to the hell she intended to inflict on those responsible for this.
There was a sudden explosion of curses farther down the corridor. Then one of her lieutenants came running. “Sir! Begging the commander’s presence, sir!”
Kafari exchanged glances with Dinny and Red Wolf, then headed down the long corridor. Dinny followed, leaving Red Wolf to stand guard over the prisoners. The sickening bloodstains on the floor grew worse with every step. Most of Alpha Team was already headed back, assisting badly injured men and women out of rooms Kafari couldn’t look at too closely, for fear of vomiting inside her helmet. When she reached the end of the corridor, the remainder of Alpha Team stepped aside.
She peered into a fairly large room. A single glance told Kafari that this chamber had once been used as a surgery. Her second glance faltered as the jumble of odd shapes piled along the floor took on a sudden, sickening pattern. Kafari couldn’t tell how many people had been jammed into this one charnel-house room. Her throat worked in convulsive reflex. She clamped her jaws together and held the nausea between her teeth. She forced herself to look, but couldn’t quite control the way her gaze skittered from one image to another. The floor was thick with dark, congealed blood. There was no sign of the Hancock family’s children in that pile. Kafari could see only adult-sized hands and feet sticking out like jackstraws. They had clearly been dead for hours. They’d died hard. Much too hard.
“What’s behind that?” Kafari choked out, pointing to a half-buried door on the far wall.
“We’ll find out, sir.”
