Grimmer Than Hell

by David Drake

  He looked out over his company. "Ah, I have been ordered to, ah, emphasize to you that the high command considers Khalian prisoners to be a first priority of all the Target landings, this one included."

  He cleared his throat. "Any questions before I turn you over to your platoon leaders?"

  "You mean you want us to bring in weasels alive, Cap'n?" Dodd blurted in amazement.

  Beside Dodd sat Sergeant Bradley, who acted as Kowacs' field first—company headquarters, headed by the Table of Organization 'First Sergeant,' was back on Port Tau Ceti, forwarding supplies, mail, and replacements to the company. Bradley was a man of middle height; his flesh was drawn so tightly over his bones that the pink keloid, replacing his hair since a too-near plasma burst, did not appear unusual.

  Now he turned to Dodd, lifted the junior non-com's chin between his thumb and forefinger, and said very distinctly, "Did he say that, dickhead?"

  "No, Sergeant," Dodd whispered.

  Bradley faced front with the disdain of a fisherman releasing an undersized catch.

  "Any other—"

  "Sir?" said Atwater crisply. His arm was lifted but only the index finger was raised, a compromise between courtesy and honor. "Will there be some feints to draw off Khalian forces in the area before we go in?"

  Kowacs nodded, but that was a comment on the cogency of the question, not a response to it.

  "There's concern," he said carefully, "that when the Khalians realize that we've landed on their homeworld, their first reaction will be to execute their slaves. Therefore—"

  He paused, too clearly aware of the Marines he was leading. This would be a suicide mission if the general invasion timing were off by an hour, maybe even by a few minutes.

  "Therefore," Kowacs continued, "a ground-attack ship will go in ahead of us to prep the defenses. We—the assault component—will follow at a three-second interval. No other Alliance forces will be committed to Target until we're on the ground."

  "Fuckin' A," somebody repeated in a whisper that echoed throughout the bay.

  * * *

  Commodore Herennis stood as stiff as if a weasel were buggering him in Kowacs' tiny office—a cubicle separated from the landing bay by walls of film which blurred light and sound into a semblance of privacy. Anger wasn't the only emotion holding Grand Admiral Forberry's military secretary rigid—but it was one of the emotions.

  "I told you," said Kowacs from the room's only chair—Herennis had refused it, and there wasn't floor space for both men to stand—"that while I didn't care to leave my men just now, I would of course obey a direct order to report to you on the flagship."

  He was holding his combat knife toward the striplight in the ceiling; its wire edge was too fine for his eyes to focus on it, no matter how hard he squinted.

  "You knew I couldn't formally give an order like that!" Herennis snapped.

  Kowacs looked up at the smartly-uniformed staff officer—his social, military, and (no doubt) intellectual superior.

  "Yes, Commodore," said the Marine captain softly. "I suppose I did. Now, if you care to state your business, I'll take care of it the best way I can."

  "Yes, I . . . ," Herennis said. His body quivered as embarrassment replaced anger as his ruling emotion. "Here is the, the chip that was discussed."

  The hologram would take up only a corner of the data capacity in the Marines' helmets, nestled among the sensors and recorders that let the high command look over each man's shoulder after the action.

  From a safe distance.

  Kowacs set his knife on the fold-down desk that doubled as a keypad when he chose to power up his computer terminal. He took the holochip from the commodore and inserted it into the bulkhead projector. The unit was balky; he had to jiggle the handset several times before there was a hum and a face appeared in the air near the filmy opposite wall.

  "That's the boy?" Kowacs said. "Well, I'll have it downloaded into the men's helmets before we go in."

  The Honorable Thomas Forberry wasn't a boy, not really. His image looked to be mid-forties, and that was at least five years back. Blue eyes, a ruddy complexion—dark blond hair with curls as perfect as an angel's tits.

  For all its pampering, the face was hard and competent. Young Thomas hadn't followed his father into the Fleet, but he ran the family's business concerns, and the Forberrys would have been rich even without the opportunities a grand admiral has of profitably anticipating economic changes.

  Used to run the family business.

  "Ah, five years could. . . ." Kowacs began, letting his voice trail off because he didn't choose to emphasize the changes five years as a weasel slave could make in a man—even if he survived.

  "Yes, he's aware—" Herennis said, then caught himself. "Ah, I'm aware of that. I'm, ah, not expecting. . . . I know you must think—"

  Kowacs waved his hand to cut off the staff officer's words, his embarrassment.

  "Look, Commodore," he said gently. "Nobody in my outfit's got a problem about releasing Khalian prisoners. If it takes something, whatever, personal to give the high command the balls to cut the orders—okay, that's what it takes. Tell your friend not to worry about it."

  "Thank you, Captain," Herennis said, sounding as if he meant it. He wasn't done speaking, but he met the Marine's eyes before he went on with, "The unofficial reward, ah, I've promised you is considerable in money terms. But I want you to realize that neither I nor—anyone else—believes that money can recompense the risk you and your men are running."

  "Commodore . . . ," Kowacs said. His hand was reaching for the leather-wrapped hilt of his knife, but he restrained the motion because Herennis might have misunderstood. "I lost my family in the Gravely Incident."

  "I'm sor—" but the Marine's hand moved very sharply to chop off the interruption.

  "About half my team could tell you their own version of the same story."

  Kowacs saw the doubt in his visitor's eyes and smiled. "Yeah, that high a percentage. Not in the Marines in general, and sure as hell not in the whole Fleet. But you check the stats on the reaction companies, not just mine, and see what you find."

  Herennis nodded and touched his tongue to his lips.

  "Besides that," Kowacs went on with the same tight, worn smile—a smile like the hilt of the knife his hand was, after all, caressing, "we're the ones that hit dirt first after the raids. We've seen everything the weasels can do to human beings. Do you understand?"

  Herennis nodded again. He was staring at Kowacs as if the Marine were a cobra on the other side of a pane of glass.

  Kowacs shut off the holo projector. "You're right, Commodore," he said. "None of my team does this for the money, yours or the regular five-percent danger allowance.

  "But you couldn't pay us not to take this mission, either."

  * * *

  The Bonnie Parker's thunderous vibration was bad enough on any insertion, but this time they were going down in daylight. The bay was brightly illuminated, so you could look at the faces of the Marines beside you—blank with fear that was physical and instinctive.

  Or you could watch the landing vessel's wiring and structural panels quiver centimeters under the stress—far beyond their designed limits—and wonder whether this time the old girl was going to come apart with no help from the weasel defense batteries at all.

  A shock lifted all the Marines squatting on the deck.

  Kowacs, gripping a stanchion with one hand and his rifle with the other, swore; but the word caught in his throat and it wasn't a missile, just the shock wave of the ground-attack ship that had plunged down ahead of them in a shallow dive that would carry it clear of the landing zone—

  If its ordnance had taken out the missile batteries as planned.

  Kowacs wanted to piss. He did what he had learned to do in the moments before hitting hot LZs in the past.

  Pissed down his trouser leg.

  Three plasma bolts hit the Bonnie Parker with the soggy impact of medicine balls against the hull. The ship rocked
. The magnetic screens spread the bursts of charged particles, but the bay lights went off momentarily and the center bank stayed dark even after the rest had flickered into life again.

  "About now—" said Corporal Sienkiewicz, two meters tall and beside Kowacs in the bay because so far as the Table of Organization was concerned, she was his clerk.

  Kowacs and Bradley could file their own data. There was no one in the company they thought could do a better job of covering their asses in a firefight.

  Sienkiewicz' timing was flawless, as usual. The Bonnie Parker's five-g braking drove the squatting Marines hard against the deck plates.

  Automatic weapons, unaffected by the screens, played against the hull like sleet. The landing vessel's own suppression clusters deployed with a whoompwhoompwhoompwhoomp noticeable over the general stress and racket only by those who knew it was coming.

  The Bonnie Parker was small for a starship but impressive by comparison with most other engines of human transportation. She slowed to a halt, then lurched upward minusculely before her artificial intelligence pilot caught her and brought her to hover. The landing bay doors began to lift on both sides of the hull while the last bomblets of the suppression clusters were still exploding with the snarl and glare of a titanic arclight.

  "Get 'em!" Kowacs roared needlessly over his helmet's clear channel as he and the rest of the company leaped under the rising doors in two lines, one to either side of the landing vessel.

  Thrust vectored from the Bonnie Parker's lift engines punched their legs, spilling some of the Marines on the roof's smooth surface. Normally the vessel would have grounded, but the weight of a starship was almost certain to collapse a pad intended for surface-effect trucks. The old girl's power supply would allow her to hover all day.

  Unless the weasels managed to shoot her down, in which case she'd crumple the building on top of the Marines she'd just delivered.

  Well, nobody in the One-Twenty-first was likely to die of ulcers from worry.

  There were half a dozen dead Khalians sprawled on the part of the roof Kowacs could see. Their teeth were bared, and all of them clutched the weapons they'd been firing at the landing vessel when the suppression clusters had flayed everything living into bloody ruin.

  There was a sharp bang and a scream. Halfway down the line on Kowacs' side of the vessel, Corporal Dodd up-ended. One of his feet was high and the other was missing, blown off by the bomblet unexploded until he'd managed to step on it.

  "Watch the—" one of the platoon leaders called on the command channel.

  At least one plasma gun on the perimeter had survived the ground attack ship. The weasel crew turned their weapon inward and ripped a three-round burst into the Bonnie Parker and the deploying Marines.

  One bolt hit the waist-high roof coping—Intelligence was right; the polyborate shattered like a bomb, gouging a two-meter scallop from the building. Kowacs was pushed backwards by the blast, and half a dozen of the Marines near him went down.

  The other bolts skimmed the coping and diffused against the landing vessel's screen with whip-lash cracks and a coruscance that threw hard shadows across the roof. Kowacs' faceshield saved his eyes, but ozone burned the back of his throat and he wasn't sure that anyone could hear him order, "Delta Six, get that f—"

  Before anyone in Heavy Weapons, Delta Platoon, could respond to the order with their tripod-mounted guns, Corporal Sienkiewicz leaned over the coping and triggered her own shoulder-carried plasma weapon.

  The weapon was a meter-long tube holding a three-round magazine of miniature thermonuclear devices. The deuterium pellets were set off and directed by a laser array, part of the ammunition and consumed by the blast it contained.

  The crack of the out-going plasma jet was sharp and loud even to ears stunned by the bolts that had struck nearby. Downrange, all the ready munitions in the guard tower blew up simultaneously. The blast across the dull beige roofs of the slave barracks was earth-shaking.

  "Assigned positions," Kowacs ordered, looking around desperately to make sure that his troops weren't bunching, huddling. Because of the Bonnie Parker, he had only half a field of view. Maybe all the Marines who'd jumped from the port side were dead and—

  "Move it, Marines! Move it!" he shouted, finding the stairhead that was the only normal entrance on the building's roof.

  "Fire in the hole!" warned the First Platoon demo team that had laid a rectangle of strip charges near one end of the flat expanse. The nearest Marines—except the assault squad in full battle suits—hunched away. Everyone else at least turned their faces.

  "Fire in the hole!" echoed Third Platoon at the opposite side of the roof—so much for everybody being dead, not that—

  The entry charges detonated with snaps that were more jarring to the optic nerves than to the ears. Each was a strip of adhesive containing a filament of PDM explosive—which propagated at a measurable fraction of light speed. The filament charges were too minute to have significant effect even a meter or two from the strip, but the shattering force they imparted on contact was immense.

  A door-sized rectangle of the roof dropped into the building interior. Marines in battle suits, their armor protecting them against the glassy needles of polyborate shrieking and spinning from the blast, criss-crossed the opened room with fire from their automatic rifles. Their helmet sensors gave them targets—or their nervousness squeezed the triggers without targets, and either way it gave the weasels more to think about.

  Similar bursts crackled from the other end of the roof, hidden by the Bonnie Parker and attenuated by the howl of her lift engines.

  "Alpha ready!" on the command channel, First Platoon reporting. Kowacs could see the Marines poised to enter the hole they'd just blown in the roof.

  "Beta ready!" The two squads of Second Platoon under their lieutenant, detailed to rappel down the sides of the windowless building and secure the exits so that the weasels couldn't get out among the helpless slaves in a last orgy of destruction.

  "Kappa ready!" Third Platoon, whose strip charges had blown them an entrance like the one Kowacs could see First clustered around.

  "Delta ready!" Heavy Weapons, now with a tripod-mounted plasma gun on each side of the roof. One of the weapons was crashing out bolts to support the units securing the perimeter.

  "Gamma ready!" said Sergeant Bradley with a skull-faced grin at Kowacs from the stairhead where he waited with Sienkiewicz and the two remaining squads of Second Platoon.

  "All units, go!" Kowacs ordered as he jogged toward the stairhead and Bradley blew its door with the strip charges placed but not detonated until this moment.

  Three of Second's assault squad hosed the opening. Return fire or a ricochet blasted sparks from the center Marine's ceramic armor. He staggered but didn't go down, and his two fellows lurched in sequence down the stairs their bulky gear filled.

  "Ditch that!" Kowacs snarled to Sienkiewicz as she slung the plasma gun and cocked her automatic rifle.

  "It's my back," she said with a nonchalance that was no way to refuse a direct order—

  But which would do for now, because Kowacs was already hunching through the doorway, and she was right behind him. The air was bitter with residues of the explosive, but that was only spice for the stench of musk and human filth within.

  You could make a case for the company commander staying on the roof instead of ducking into a building where he'd lose contact with supporting units and the high command in orbit.

  Rank hath its privileges. For twelve years, the only privilege Kowacs had asked for was the chance to be where he had the most opportunity to kill weasels.

  The stairs were almost ladder-steep and the treads were set for the Khalians' short legs. One of the clumsily armored Marines ahead of Kowacs sprawled onto all fours in the corridor, but there were no living weasels in sight to take advantage of the situation.

  Half a dozen of them were dead, ripped by the rifle fire that caught them with no cover and no hope. One furry body still squi
rmed. Reflex or intent caused the creature to clash its teeth vainly against the boot of the leading Marine as he crushed its skull in passing.

  The area at the bottom of the short staircase was broken into a corridor with a wire-mesh cage to either side. The cage material was nothing fancier than hog-fencing—these were very short-term facilities. The one on the left was empty.

  The cage on the right had room for forty humans and held maybe half a dozen, all of them squeezed into a puling mass in one corner from fear of gunfire and the immediate future.

  The prisoners were naked except for a coating of filth so thick that their sexes were uncertain even after they crawled apart to greet the Marines. There was a drain in one corner of the cage, but many of the human slaves received here in past years had been too terrified to use it. The weasels didn't care.

  Neither did Kowacs just now.

  "Find the stairs down—" he was shouting when something plucked his arm and he spun, his rifle-stock lifting to smash the weasel away before worrying about how he'd kill it, they were death if you let 'em touch you—

  And it wasn't a Khalian but a woman with auburn hair. She'd reached through the fencing that saved her life when it absorbed the reflexive buttstroke that would have crushed her sternum and flung her backwards.

  "Bitch!" Kowacs snarled, more jarred by his mistake than by the shock through his weapon that made his hands tingle.

  "Please," the woman insisted with a throaty determination that over-rode all the levels of fear that she must be feeling. "My brother, Alton Dinneen—don't trust him. On your lives, don't trust him!"

  "Weasel bunkroom!" called one of the armored Marines who'd clumped down the corridor to the doorways beyond the cages. "Empty, though."

  "Watch for—" Kowacs said as he jogged toward them. Bradley and Sienkiewicz were to either side and a half step behind him.

  The Khalian that leaped from the 'empty' room was exactly what he'd meant to watch for.

  A marine screamed instinctively. There were four of them, all members of the assault squad burdened by their armor. The weasel had no gun, just a pair of knives in his forepaws. Their edges sparkled against the ceramic armor—and bit through the joints.