Grimmer Than Hell

by David Drake

  The major went through sideways. His equipment belt hooked on the edge of the barrier anyway, twisted but didn't hold him.

  The corridor dead ended. The four rooms on the left side were glowing slag from the plasma charge. A security man knelt in an open doorway across from where the bolt had hit. He'd dropped his rifle and was pawing at his eyes, possibly blinded already and certainly dead when Kowacs walked a one-handed burst across his chest.

  The shooters didn't know anything worth carrying back to Tau Ceti.

  The end door on the right side was a centimeter open when Kowacs saw it, slamming shut an instant thereafter. He hit its latch bootheel-first, springing fasteners that were intended for privacy rather than security.

  The interior lights were on. There were two people inside, and a coffin-sized outline taped to the back wall of the room. The people were a man and a woman, both young, and they were starting to lock down the helmets of their atmosphere suits.

  The man's gauntleted hand reached for the sub-machine gun across the bed beside him. Kowacs fired, but Bradley fired also and at point-blank range the rifle bullets were lost in the plate-sized crater the shotgun blew in the target's chest.

  The back wall exploded outward. The outline had been drawn with adhesive-backed explosive strips, and the vaguely-familiar woman detonated it as she finished fastening her helmet.

  The other side of the wall was hard vacuum.

  The rush of atmosphere sucked the woman with it, clear of the Headhunters' guns. Loose papers, bedding, and the helmet from the corpse sailed after her.

  The mask of Kowacs' emergency air supply slapped over his nose and mouth, enough to save his life but not adequate for him to go chasing somebody in a proper suit. The suit's maneuvering jets would carry the woman to a regular airlock when the raiders left and it was safe to come back.

  The room lights dimmed as the atmosphere that scattered them into a useful ambiance roared through the huge hole. Kowacs reached for the male corpse, lost his balance and staggered toward death until Sie's huge hand clamped the slack of his equipment belt.

  "Let's go!" she shouted, her voice attenuated to a comfortable level by the AI controlling Kowacs' headphones. "We're timing out!"

  "Help me with the body!" Kowacs ordered as the three of them fought their way back into the corridor. The wind was less overmastering but still intense.

  "We don't need dead guys!" Bradley shouted, but he'd grabbed the other leg of the body, clumsy in its bulky suit.

  "I got it," said Sienkiewicz, lifting the corpse away from both men. She slammed it through the gap at the barrier in what was half a shove, half a throw.

  "We need this one," Kowacs wheezed.

  The corridor was empty except for Syndicate corpses. Headhunter pickup teams had gathered the casualties as well as the loot and headed back to the module. It'd be close, but Kowacs' team would make it with ten seconds to spare, a lifetime. . . .

  "We need this deader . . . ," he continued as they pounded down the hallway against the lessening wind-rush. Sie had the body. "Because he's wearing . . . ensign's insignia . . . on his collar."

  The module was in sight. A man stood in the open hatch, Grant, and goddam if he didn't have his arm outstretched to help jerk the latecomers aboard.

  "Fleet ensign's insignia!" Kowacs gasped.

  * * *

  The receptionist looked concerned, and not just by the fact that Major Kowacs carried a full load of weapons and equipment into her sanctum.

  Or as much of his weapons and equipment as he hadn't fired off during the raid.

  The escort, rising and falling on the balls of his feet at the open door of these third-tier offices, was evidently worried. "Come this way, please, sir," the youngster said. Then, "He's been waiting for you."

  "I been waiting for a hot shower," Kowacs rasped. Powdersmoke, ozone, and stun gas had worked over his throat like so many skinning knives. "I'm still fucking waiting."

  The escort hopped ahead of Kowacs like a tall, perfectly-groomed leprechaun. Kowacs could barely walk.

  The adrenaline had worn off. He seen the preliminary casualty report—with three bodies not recovered. There was a ten-centimeter burn on the inside of his left wrist where he must have laid the glowing barrel of his assault rifle, though goddam if he could remember doing that.

  There were bruises and prickles of glass shrapnel all over Nick Kowacs' body, but a spook named Grant insisted on debriefing him at once, with your full equipment, mister.

  The door flashed special projects/teitelbaum an instant before it opened.

  "Where the hell have you been?" snarled Grant.

  His briefcase lay open on the desk. A gossamer filament connected the workstation to the office's hologram projector. Fuzzy images of battle and confusion danced in the air while the portrait of Admiral Teitelbaum glared down sternly.

  "I had to check out my people," Kowacs said as he leaned his blackened rifle against one of the leather-covered chairs. He lifted one, then the other of the crossed bandoliers of ammunition over his head and laid them on the seat cushion.

  "I said at once," the civilian snapped. "You've got platoon leaders to baby-sit, don't you?"

  "I guess," said Kowacs. He unlatched his equipment belt. It swung in his hands, shockingly heavy with its weight of pistol and grenades. He tossed it onto the bandoliers.

  God, he felt weak. . . .

  Grant grimaced. "All right, give me your helmet."

  Kowacs had forgotten he was wearing a commo helmet. He slid it off carefully. The room's filtered air chilled the sweat on the Marine's scalp.

  The civilian reversed the helmet, then touched the brow panel with an electronic key. Kowacs knew about the keys but he'd never seen one used before.

  Line Marines weren't authorized to remove the recording chips from their helmets. That was the job of the Second-Guess Brigade, the rear-echelon mothers who decided how well or badly the people at the sharp end had behaved.

  Grant muttered to his workstation. The ghost images shut down. He put the chip from Kowacs' helmet directly into the hologram reader. His own weapon and shoulder harness hung over the back of his chair.

  "Didn't your equipment echo everything from our helmets?" Kowacs asked.

  He remained standing. He wasn't sure he wanted to sit down. He wasn't sure of much of anything.

  "Did a piss-poor job of it, yeah," the civilian grunted. "Just enough to give me a hint of what I need."

  He scrolled forward, reeling across the seventeen-minute operation at times-ten speed. Images projected from Kowacs viewpoint jerked and capered and died. "Too much hash from the—"

  There was a bright flash in the air above the desk.

  "—fucking plasma discharges. You know—" Grant met the Marine's eyes in a fierce glare, "—it was bughouse crazy to use a plasma weapon in a finger corridor. What if the whole outer bulkhead blew out?"

  "It didn't," said Kowacs. "You got complaints about the way the job got done, then you send somebody else the next time."

  Grant paused the projection. The image was red with muzzle flashes and bright with pulmonary blood spraying through the mouth of the man in the tattered spacesuit.

  "Smart to bring back the body," Grant said in a neutral voice. "Too bad you didn't capture him alive."

  "Too bad your system didn't work the first time so we could've kept using the stun gas," Kowacs replied flatly. The parade of images was a nightmare come twice.

  Grant expanded the view of the dying man's face. "We've got a hard make on him," he said. "There was enough residual brain-wave activity to nail him down, besides all the regular ID he was carrying. Name's Haley G. Stocker, Ensign . . . and he disappeared on a scouting mission."

  "A Syndicate spy?" Kowacs said.

  "That's what the smart money's betting," the civilian agreed.

  He backed up the image minusculy. The blood vanished like a fountain failing, the aristocratic lips shrank from an O of disbelieving horror into the sneer the e
nsign bore an instant before the bullets struck.

  "Only thing is," Grant continued, "Ensign Stocker disappeared thirty-five years ago."

  He looked at Kowacs and raised an eyebrow, as if he were expecting the Marine to come up with an explanation.

  "Bullshit," said Kowacs. "He's only about twenty. He was."

  "Close," the civilian agreed. "Twenty and a half standard years when you shot him, the lab says."

  He let the projector run forward. The spy, the boy, hemorrhaged and died again before his mind could accept what was happening.

  "I don't get it," said Nick Kowacs. He heard a persistent buzzing, but it came from his mind rather than the equipment.

  Grant looked . . . tired wasn't the right word, lonely wasn't the right word, but. . . . Grant had paid a price during the operation too—

  Or he'd never have been talking to a line Marine this way.

  "It looks like we still don't have all the bugs out of the A-Pot intrusion system," Grant said. "The best we can figure now, the second pass was early. Thirty-five years early."

  He spoke to the voice control of the holographic reader. The image paused, then expanded.

  The face of the woman who'd escaped was slightly distorted by the faceshield of her helmet, and she was considerably younger—

  But the features were beyond doubt the same as those lowering down from the portrait of Vice-Admiral Teitelbaum on the wall behind.

  MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

  A Story of The Fleet

  Nick Kowacs laughed to imagine it, him sitting at a booth in the Red Shift Lounge and saying to Toby English, "That last mission, the one that was supposed to be a milk run? Let me tell you what really went down!"

  * * *

  "Come on, come on, come on," begged the Logistics Officer, a naval lieutenant. "Your lot was supposed to be in the air thirty minutes ago, and I got three more convoys behind it!"

  "Keep your shirt on, sailor," said Sergeant Bradley. "We'll be ready to move out as soon as Major Kowacs gets this last set of voice orders--"

  Bradley nodded toward the blacked-out limousine which looked like a pearl in a muckheap as it idled in a yard of giant excavating machinery. The limousine was waiting for the Headhunters when they pulled into the depot. Bradley didn't know what the major was hearing inside the vehicle, but he doubted it was anything as straightforward as verbal orders.

  "That's faster than you'll have your equipment airborne even if you get on with your job," he concluded.

  Bradley acted as first sergeant for the field element of the 121st Marine Reaction Company, Headhunters, while the real first sergeant was back with the base unit on Port Tau Ceti. Bradley knew that before the lieutenant could punish him for insubordination, the complaint would have to go up the naval chain of command and come back down the marine side of the Fleet bureaucracy . . . which it might manage to do, a couple of lifetimes later.

  As if in answer to Bradley's gibe, drivers started the engines of the paired air-cushion transporters which cradled a self-contained excavator on the lowboy between them. The yard had been scoured by earlier movements by heavy equipment, but the soil of Khalia was stony. As the transporters' drive fans wound up, they shot pebbles beneath the skirts to whang against the sides of other vehicles.

  One stone hit a Khalian wearing maroon coveralls. He was one of thousands of Weasels hired to do scut work in the wake of the Fleet's huge logistics build-up on what had been the enemy home planet—when the Khalians were the enemy. The victim yelped and dropped to the ground.

  Sergeant Bradley spit into the dust. If the Weasel was dead, then the universe was a better place by that much.

  Drivers fired up the engines of the remainder of the vehicles the 121st was to escort. Four lowboys carried 3-meter outside-diameter casing sections. The final piece of digging equipment was a heavy-lift crane to position the excavator initially, then feed casing down the shaft behind the excavator as it burned and burrowed toward the heart of the planet.

  All of the transporters were ground effect. The noise of their intakes and the pressurized air wailing out beneath their skirts was deafening. The lieutenant shouted, but Bradley could barely hear his, "You won't be laughing if the planetwrecker you're sitting on top of goes off because you were late to the site!"

  Corporal Sienkiewicz, Kowacs' clerk/bodyguard, was female and almost two meters tall. This yard full of outsized equipment was the first place Bradley remembered Sie looking as though she were in scale with her surroundings. Now she bent close to the Logistics Officer and said, "We won't be doing anything, el-tee. It's you guys a hundred klicks away who'll have time to watch the crust crack open and the core spill out."

  The Syndicate had mined Khalia. If the planet exploded at the crucial moment when Syndicate warships swept in to attack, the defenders would lose the communications and logistics base they needed to win.

  But most of the Weasels in the universe would be gone as well. . . .

  The door of the limousine opened. Bradley keyed the general-frequency override in his commo helmet and ordered, "Five-six to all Headhunter elements. Mount up, troops, it's time to go play marine." His voice was hoarse.

  As Bradley spoke, his fingers checked combat gear with feather-light touches. His shotgun was slung muzzle-up for boarding the vehicle. The weapon's chamber was empty, but he would charge it from the box magazine as soon as the trucks were airborne.

  Bandoliers of shotgun ammo crossed his back-and-breast armor. From each bandolier hung a container of ring-airfoil grenades which Bradley could launch from around the shotgun's barrel for long range and a high-explosive wallop.

  Hand-flung grenade clusters were stuffed into the cargo pockets of either pant's-leg. Some gas grenades; some explosive, some incendiary, some to generate fluorescent smoke for marking. You never knew what you were going to need. You only knew that you were going to need more of something than you carried. . . .

  A portable medicomp to diagnose, dispense drugs, and patch the screaming wounded. If you could reach them. If they weren't out there in the darkness being tortured by one Khalian while the rest of a Weasel platoon waited in ambush; and you still had to go, because she was your Marine and it didn't matter, you had to bring back whatever the Weasels had left of her.

  Sergeant Bradley lifted the rim of his commo helmet with one hand and knuckled the pink scar tissue that covered his scalp. He didn't carry a fighting knife, but a powered metal-cutter dangled from his left hip where it balanced his canteen. He'd killed seven Weasels with the cutting bar one night.

  Bradley was twenty-eight standard years old. His eyes were the age of the planet's molten core.

  "Come on, Top," Sienkiewicz said, putting her big hand over the tension-mottled fingers with which the field first gripped his helmet. Major Kowacs sprinted toward them as the limousine accelerated out of the equipment yard. "We got a taxi to catch."

  "Right," said Bradley in a husky voice. "Right, we gotta do that."

  He prayed that the Headhunters would be redeployed fast to some planet where there weren't thousands of Weasels running around in Fleet uniforms. . . .

  * * *

  Sergeant Custis, a squad leader with three years service in the Headhunters, pulled Kowacs aboard the truck while Sie and Bradley hooked themselves onto seats on the opposite side of the vehicle's center spine.

  "Cap'n?" said Custis as his head swung close to his commanding officer's helmet. "Is it true the Weasels are going to blow up their whole planet if we don't deactivate the mines first? Ah, I mean, Major?"

  Kowacs grimaced. One of the problems with latrine rumors was that they were only half right.

  He checked to see that the flat box was secured firmly to his equipment belt. He'd clipped it there as soon as he received the device in the limousine.

  Another problem with latrine rumors was that they were half right.

  "Don't sweat it, Buck," Corporal Sienkiewicz offered from the bench seat on which she sat with her back against Custis' bac
k. "It's gonna be a milk run this time."

  The lead truck was out of the gate with 1st Platoon aboard. A lowboy followed the Marines; the truck with Weapons Platoon and Kowacs' command team lifted into the number three slot.

  There was enough cross-wind to make the vehicles skittish. At least that prevented the gritty yellow dust which the fans lifted from coating everybody behind the leaders.

  The Marine transporters had enough direct lift capacity to fly rather than skimming over a cushion of air the way the mining equipment had to do, but for this mission Kowacs had told the drivers to stay on the deck. After all, the Headhunters were supposed to be escorting the excavating machinery . . . or something.

  "Six to all Headhunter elements," Kowacs said, letting the artificial intelligence in his helmet cut through the conversations buzzing through the company. Everybody was nervous. "Here's all the poop I know."

  But not quite everything he was afraid of. He instinctively touched the special communicator attached to his belt. . . .

  "A presumably hostile fleet is approaching Khalia," Kowacs resumed aloud.

  "Weasels!" a nearby Marine snarled. The AI blocked radio chatter, but it couldn't prevent people from interrupting with unaided voice.

  "The enemy is human," Kowacs said firmly. "Any of you replacements doubt that, just talk to a veteran. This outfit has met them before."

  That ought to shut up the troops who were convinced the Khalians had broken their surrender terms. Kowacs' words told the Headhunter veterans they knew better, so they'd hold to the CO's line as a matter of status. And no replacement, even a Marine with years of service, would dare doubt the word of a full-fledged Headhunter.

  It was only Nick Kowacs who still had to fear that the incoming warships were crewed by Khalians like the hundreds of millions of other bloodthirsty Weasels all around him on this planet. He looked around him.

  The fast-moving convoy was three klicks out of the Fleet Logistics Base Ladybird—one of hundreds of depots which had sprung up within hours of the successful invasion of Khalia. The countryside was a wasteland.