Grimmer Than Hell

by David Drake

  "Everybody's aboard," prompted Sergeant Bradley, stating what the green bar in Kowacs' visor display already told him.

  "Grant isn't aboard," Kowacs said, finger-checking the grenades which hung from his equipment belt.

  "I don't get this," complained a Marine to no one in particular. "We can't ride all the way from Port Tau Ceti packed in like canned meat. Can we?"

  "Fuck Grant," said Sienkiewicz.

  The eighteen members of Weapons Platoon carried the tubes, tripods and ammunition of their belt-loaded plasma weapons. Their rigid hardsuits of black ceramic stood out from the remaining, lightly-equipped Marines like raisins in a pound cake.

  Kowacs saw Grant's image coming across the hangar floor with long strides. The civilian wore fatigues, but he carried what looked like a briefcase. His commo helmet was non-standard.

  Grant's pistol hung muzzle-up in a harness beneath his left armpit.

  "Right," said Kowacs. "Six to all team leaders—" his helmet's AI switched him automatically from the private channel he shared with Bradley and Sie to the general command frequency "—administer the gas antidote to your teams, then dose yourselves."

  Grant entered the module. The hatches closed.

  There was barely enough room for equipment and the ninety-three personnel aboard the spherical vessel; if the Headhunters' line establishment had been at full Table of Organization strength, Kowacs would have had to cut some people from the operation.

  What the Marine who'd complained didn't understand—what Kowacs didn't understand, though he accepted it—was that the Headhunters weren't traveling through space, not even sponge space, on this operation. They were using the Dirac Sea underlying the universe, all universes and all times, to create congruity between a top-secret hangar in Port Tau Ceti and the Syndicate base they were about to attack.

  At least that's what they were doing if the notion worked. The closer Kowacs came to the event, the less likely it seemed that the notion could work.

  "Hold still, sir," said Bradley, the administrative head of the team to which Kowacs belonged operationally. He jerked the tab on the front of the major's blouse.

  The integral injector pricked Kowacs as it filled his bloodstream with chemicals. The drug would provide a temporary antidote to the contact anesthetic sprayed from bottles which every third Headhunter carried for this operation.

  The chime announced two minutes.

  Grant turned his briefcase sideways and extended its legs. When he opened the lid to expose the keyboard and display, the case became a diaphragm-high workstation. Despite the crowding in the bay, the Marines gave the civilian plenty of room.

  A Third Platoon team leader pulled his own tab. He collapsed jerking as reaction to the drug sent him into anaphylactic shock.

  Lieutenant al-Habib, the platoon commander, pushed toward the casualty, swearing in a combination of concern and fear. Everybody was supposed to have been reaction-tested before now; and testing was a platoon responsibility.

  Kowacs' eyes narrowed, but he said nothing. If he and al-Habib both survived the operation, al-Habib was out of the Headhunters.

  If.

  The warning chimed one minute. The holographic displays vanished, leaving the bulkheads bare for the moment before the hold's lighting flickered and went off. Grant's face was lit from below by his workstation, making him look the demon Kowacs was sure he really was.

  The lights came on again, but they were red.

  Kowacs opaqued his visor. He figured he could keep his expression neutral, but he didn't want to bother any of his people if by chance they correctly read the terror behind their major's eyes.

  The module drifted. It was more than weightlessness. Kowacs had the horrible feeling that he was rushing somewhere but had neither control nor even sensory input, as though his vehicle were skidding on ice in pitch darkness. He heard some of his troops screaming, and he didn't blame them.

  The world switched back with the abruptness of a crystal forming in a supersaturated solution. The lights became normal; holograms covered the bulkheads again.

  The holograms didn't show the hangar. They didn't show anything at all, just a gray blur without even a spark to pick it out.

  Grant was talking angrily, but his helmet contained his words. His big, capable fingers rapped a code into the keyboard. The gray blur shifted slowly through violet to a green like that of translucent pond scum. Though the color changed, it remained featureless.

  "What's hap'nin to us?" somebody demanded sharply. "What's—"

  Sergeant Bradley's knife poised point-first in front of the panicked Marine's right eyeball. The blade wouldn't penetrate her visor, but its shock value was sufficient to chop her voice off . . . and if she'd taken time to reflect, she would have known that the edge could be through her windpipe before she got out the next syllable.

  "Hey, Grant," Kowacs called.

  Grant continued talking to someone on the other side of his communications link. His anger was obvious even though his words were inaudible.

  Kowacs raised his visor and leaned across the workstation from the opposite side, putting his face where the civilian couldn't ignore him.

  Grant's fist clenched. Kowacs grabbed his wrist and squeezed.

  For a moment the two powerful men struggled, as motionless as neighboring mountains. Sienkiewicz moved just out of the range of Kowacs' direct vision, but Kowacs didn't need help.

  The civilian relaxed. His mouth formed a command, and the shield of silence dropped away from his helmet. "What the fuck do you want?" he snarled.

  "Where are we?" Kowacs whispered. Everyone in the module was watching them, but only the nearest Marines could hear the leaders over the hiss of nervous breathing. He shook his hand, trying to get feeling back into it.

  "There's nothing wrong," Grant said. "We're not where we're programmed to be—or when we're programmed to be—but there's nothing wrong. If they can't straighten it out, we'll just return when the seventeen minutes are up."

  We hope, Kowacs' mind added, but that wasn't something even for a whisper.

  "Right," he said aloud. "I'm going to calm everybody down; but Eight-Ball Command pays, understand?"

  Grant probably didn't understand . . . yet.

  Kowacs didn't key the helmet intercom, opting for the more personal touch of his direct voice.

  "All right, Marines," he bellowed. "We're on R&R for the next fifteen minutes or so, courtesy of the Special Projects Bureau. But you all know the Fleet—what we get's one room and no sandy beaches."

  Sienkiewicz laughed loudly.

  "Hey," called al-Habib, "you can keep your sand if you find me a cathouse!"

  Kowacs grinned broadly at the lieutenant whose quick understanding had just reinstated him in the Headhunters. "Naw, Jamal," he said. "When you join the Marines, you get fucked over—but you don't get laid."

  This time the laughter was general. The holographic light bathing the walls shifted slowly back to gray.

  Kowacs lifted his helmet to scratch his close-cropped scalp.

  "Okay, now listen up," he resumed in a tone of command. "This is a good time for you all to go over your missions again by teams. The delay doesn't mean that we're off the hook. Even Special Projects—"

  Kowacs waved toward Grant, bent over his workstation. "—and Eight-Ball Command are going to get things right eventually. I want us sharp when the times comes. Understood?"

  "Yes sir!" came from a dozen throats, and no more eyes filled with incipient panic.

  "Then get to it!" ordered Sergeant Bradley.

  Helmet-projected maps began to bloom in the midst of three-Marine clusters, teams going over the routes they expected to take through the hostile base.

  Kowacs leaned toward Grant again. He expected the civilian to be visibly angry at being made a laughingstock to defuse tension, but there was no expression on the big man's face.

  Which proved that Grant was a smart bastard as well as a bastard; and that wasn't news to Kowacs. />
  "I'm in contact with echelon," Grant said. "Everything is proceeding normally."

  "Except we're not where we're supposed to be," Kowacs said. Bradley and Sienkiewicz were close behind him—everything was close in the module's hold—but they were facing outward, watching the company for their major.

  "They've refined the parameters," Grant said. "We should be able to turn around at the end of seventeen minutes and go in immediately, without docking."

  "Fine," said Kowacs without expression. "That's almost as good as having the shit work right the first time."

  "Just have your troops ready to go, mister!" the civilian snapped. "Got that?"

  "You bet," said Kowacs as he straightened. "You just get us to the target; we'll take it from there."

  And they did.

  * * *

  The alarm chimed, the interior lights went red, and the intrusion module was within a cylindrical bay large enough to hold a liner—or a battleship. The trio of courier vessels docked there at present were dwarfed by the volume surrounding them.

  "Artificial gravity and standard atmosphere!" Kowacs shouted, relaying the information that other Headhunters might not think to check on their visors, as the hatches—only two fucking hatches, as though this were a bus and not an assault craft!—opened and the dozen Syndicate maintenance people visible in the bulkhead displays gaped at the module that had appeared in their midst.

  Bradley was through the hatch first because he had the shotgun and it was the close targets who were dangerous—though none of the Syndicate personnel, all of them human, seemed to be armed. The woman a hundred meters away, running for a courier vessel, was probably the biggest problem because she'd been smart enough to react.

  Kowacs shot her. He was second through the hatch because the 121st was his company, not Sie's, however much the corporal might want to put her body out there first when the action was going to start.

  The target flopped on the walkway with her limbs flailing. There were dots of blood on the back of her tunic, and a great splash of scarlet and lung tissue blown by the keyholing bullets onto the walkway where she thrashed.

  Taking prisoners had to wait until there were enough Headhunters out of the module to secure the area.

  Bradley ran for the corridor marked D on the maps from Eight-Ball Command and 6 in yellow on the girdered lintel. Kowacs followed his field first toward what was the transient wing of the base according to data sucked from the prisoner's brain. The major fired a short burst into a glazed office, shattering the clear panels and sending the staff to cover behind banks of short-circuiting equipment.

  As usual, Corporal Sienkiewicz carried the considerable weight of a shoulder-fired plasma weapon in addition to her regular gear. She lighted the bay with a round of plasma into the nose turret of both courier vessels on her side of the intrusion module.

  The dazzle and crack! of the miniature fusion explosions forced their reality onto the huge room. One of the turrets simply slagged down, but ammunition detonated in the other. Balls of ionized gas bubbled through the vessel's open hatches.

  The navigational computer of that boat wasn't going to be much help to the spooks back at Port Tau Ceti, but the raiders couldn't risk somebody arming the turrets before teams detailed for vessels in dock got aboard the couriers.

  Coming back without the desired information was better than not coming back. Even Grant, monitoring all the teams from the belly of the module, would agree with that.

  Bradley carried a bottle of stun gas. It was a volatile liquid intended for contact application, though the fumes would do the job if they had to. The sergeant directed the bottle's nozzle into the office Kowacs had shot up, angling the fine jet so that it sprayed the terrified personnel hiding behind their bullet-riddled equipment.

  Pickup teams would secure the prisoners later, though they'd be stacked like cordwood beneath Headhunter boots during extraction. Provided casualties didn't clear too much of the module's hold.

  The corridor formed a Y. Bradley followed the left branch, as planned.

  There were rooms on both sides. The third door down quivered as though in indecision. Kowacs riddled it. He was switching to a fresh magazine when the fat man in garish silks and ribbons tumbled out into the corridor, still clutching his pistol.

  He'd have been a good one to capture—if that had been an option compatible with Kowacs staying alive.

  Belt-fed plasma weapons fired short bursts from the docking bay. Timmes' platoon was taking an active definition of perimeter security. Light reflecting down the corridor angles threw momentary harsh shadows.

  The docking bay was out of Kowacs' direct sight. He could have viewed the module by switching his visor to remote images, just as he could follow the progress of any of his Marines either visually or by a digital read-out.

  He didn't bother. The Headhunters were too experienced to need their major looking over their shoulders—

  And anyway, their major had enough on his own plate.

  An emergency barrier began to slide across the corridor twenty meters ahead.

  "Down!" Kowacs shouted as his left hand snatched a grenade from his equipment belt. He flung the bomb sidearm as he flattened.

  A pair of security men in helmets and uniforms ran from a cross-corridor just beyond the sliding barrier. They leveled sub-machine guns. Bradley sent an arc of stun gas in their direction, but the bottle didn't have quite enough range and Kowacs, sliding on his right shoulder, couldn't twist his assault rifle on-target fast enough to—

  The anti-tank grenade struck the barrier, clung for an instant, and went off with a deafening crash. The barrier bulged inward, jamming in its track. The shaped-charge warhead blew a two-centimeter hole through the metal and cleared the corridor beyond with a spray of fragments and molten steel.

  The shockwave skidded Kowacs back a meter from the blast area. The frangible casing powdered harmlessly, as it was intended to do, and commo helmets saved the Headhunters' hearing.

  "Go!" Kowacs cried.

  Sienkiewicz was already on her feet and past the barrier, the near limit of the station's transient accommodations. The corporal paused beside the first door to make sure Bradley was ready with his stun gas, then smashed the panel open with her boot.

  Bradley sprayed the interior with his nozzle set on mist. The gas glowed like a fluorescent rainbow in the flicker of distant plasma discharges.

  Another team sprinted past Kowacs and broke left at the cross-corridor. Automatic fire blasted.

  The team leader spun and fell. His Number Two dropped her bottle of gas and dragged the leader beyond the corner of the main corridor, across from Kowacs.

  The Number Three, under cover also, started to lean out to return fire with his automatic rifle. Kowacs waved him back, then whipped a cluster of fragmentation grenades around the corner with a motion that exposed none of his body.

  The cluster rebounded as a unit from the far wall of the cross-corridor, separated into its component sections with a triple pop, and detonated in a white sleet of flame and glass shrapnel.

  Kowacs dived into the corridor in the shadow of the blast. Bradley was beside him and Sie covered their backs, facing the opposite direction in case company tried to intervene down the other leg of the cross-corridor.

  There were three uniformed Syndicate personnel in the corridor, two sprawled on their faces and a third staggering toward safety as a barrier ten meters away slid to seal the hall. Kowacs and Bradley both fired.

  The security man flung his arms out and lurched forward. His back was splotched with slits from the airfoil charge of Bradley's shotgun; there were three neat holes between his shoulders—Kowacs' aiming point.

  The barrier ground to a halt. The security man's body might not have been enough to stall out the motor, but his helmet was. There was just about enough room for a man to squeeze through the opening between the barrier and its jamb.

  Somebody on the far side of the barrier fired. The bullets ricocheted thro
ugh the gap, howling like banshees and all the more dangerous for the way they buzzsawed after deforming on the corridor wall.

  "Cover me!" screamed the other team's Number Two. She bolted past Kowacs and Bradley, snatching up her bottle of gas as she ran.

  Kowacs poured the remainder of his rifle's magazine through the opening. Bradley unhooked a grenade cluster. His shotgun's pattern was too wide to get much of the charge through the opening at that range, and the airfoils wouldn't ricochet effectively anyway.

  A bullet zinged past the running Headhunter, close enough to pluck a pouch of ammo from her belt and half-spin her, but she reached the dead zone behind the barrier without injury. She fumbled with her bottle of gas. Bradley's arm went back with a grenade cluster.

  "D—" Kowacs shouted, but he didn't finish the "Don't" because there wasn't much chance the sergeant would miss the risky throw—and anyway, Bradley was going to do what he pleased in a firefight, whether Nick Kowacs thought it was a good idea or not.

  The grenade cluster arced through the narrow slot and burst with a triple flash waist-high above the corridor floor. At the blast, the Number Two poked her gas bottle into the opening and began to spray a mist of anesthetic into the other side of the barrier.

  The firing slackened. A woman in the bright, loose clothing favored by Syndicate bigwigs slumped across the opening and lay still. A pistol slipped from her hand.

  Unexpectedly, the Headhunter dropped her gas bottle and collapsed also.

  The fucking seventeen-minute delay. The gas antidote was wearing off!

  "Headhunter Six to all personnel," Kowacs said as he lurched to his feet and another Syndicate bullet whanged through the slot. "Stop using gas! The antidote's—"

  Sienkiewicz fired the last round from her plasma weapon through the opening. The wall thirty meters down the corridor bloomed in a sun-hot fireball as the jet of directed plasma sublimed the metal-and-ceramic structure into vapor in a microsecond.

  "—wearing off!" Kowacs completed as he hit the slot a step ahead of Bradley, who'd been that much slower getting to his feet, and two steps before Sie, who rocked back with the violence of the bolt she'd unleashed.